We have a theme week going, ”Boyoboy! Week” featuring kid gangs of Golden Age comics. Today we have the longest running of all, the Little Wise Guys from Daredevil Comics.

The group of youngsters first appeared in 1942, and lasted until publisher Lev Gleason closed his comic book line in 1956. This war-themed story is from Daredevil Comics #29 (1944), and Daredevil doesn’t appear until page 10 of the 16-page story. Oh, the ignominy —  the title character upstaged by a bunch of street kids!

The story features a torture scene, and off-camera more tortures and murders are alluded to. The cover, signed by Charles Biro, does not represent a scene in the book, but it is one of those covers sure to attract attention on the newsstand.

Drawn by Carl Hubbell, one of Biro’s regular artists, with script credited to editor Biro.

More Daredevil! First without the Little Wise Guys, and then one with them. Click on the pictures to go to the posts.

We’re beginning another theme week, “Boyoboy! Week,” where we’ll see some of the kid gangs of the Golden Age. I’ve got posts featuring Boy Commandos, the Newsboy Legion, and the Little Wise Guys following up today’s posting of a Boy Heroes strip from Harvey Comics' All-New Comics. A group I won’t be showing is Young Allies, because that bunch included Toro and Bucky, two superhero sidekicks. Our kid gangs are strictly from the streets, and while they might be heroes, they aren’t super.

The Boy Heroes were created by Louis Cazeneuve. The group mainly operated in Europe during the war years, making eight appearances in All-New. To begin this adventure in Transylvania they seem confident, boasting as they motor along, “Boy, we sure took care of them dratted Nazis back in Rumania, eh, kids?”

“Sure, we did! Dey’re duck soup!”

But of course the boys soon end up in the soup, and being in Transylvania they are fighting, of all things, a werewolf. I assume the idea behind having young boys behind enemy lines fighting Nazis was to feed into the fantasy of the young readers back home that even those too young to enlist could accomplish heroics during the war. In real life American kids were urged to collect scrap and buy savings stamps to aid in the war effort, but in the comics they could do what they really wanted to do — kick butt!

I’ve shown this story before back in the early days of this blog, but I’ve re-scanned the pages. Art attributed to Louis Cazeneuve, from All-New Comics #10 (1944):

Sam Hill, Private Eye was a short-lived series from Archie Comics. Sam, a bow-tie wearing keyhole-peeper, was a smartass, wise-cracking, two-fisted private eye in the tradition of the time. Sam had the advantage of being drawn by Harry Lucey, who was one of Archie’s top artists. He showed with this series he could draw more than teenage hijinks. He could draw just as sexy and as action-packed as the genre required.

This story, “The Double Trouble Caper,” is from Sam Hill #1 (1950).

In 2011 I showed another story starring Sam Hill. Click the cover pic to see it.

DC Comics’s loss of writer Joshua Hale Fialkov, before his tenure with the company ever truly started, becomes even more unfortunate. In I, Vampire Vol. 2: Rise of the Vampires, Fialkov writes not only vampire Andrew Bennett but also two of DC’s more troubled properties, Justice League Dark and Stormwatch, and handles them all with alacrity, proving the versatility the writer would have brought to the Green Lantern titles.

Fialkov, with artist Andrea Sorrentino, continue to offer an I, Vampire series that’s frightening and compelling — but also in this second volume, more so than in the first, wryly funny. I, Vampire is a can’t miss book; though cancelled, readers should still do themselves a favor and pick this one up.

[Review contains spoilers]

Rise of the Vampires starts roughly, with issues #7-8 interspersed with the same from Justice League Dark in a four-part crossover. Only the broad strokes of these issues are really important; scenes of the Justice League Dark and Bat-family fighting vampires are mostly just filler, and there’s a subplot where John Constantine and Deadman try to resurrect the deceased Bennett that ultimately comes to nothing. For four issues, what’s mainly important is just the end, where Bennett is reborn with souped-up magical powers, leading in to the rest of the book.

The crossover’s difficulties are hardly on I, Vampire’s end. Sorrentino’s work is always lovely to see, and here his gritty depictions of the Bat-family are just as good as the engraved look he gives to the flashback to the origin of the vampires. Fialkov offers nicely subtle moments in the grudging transition of Mary, Queen of Blood, from foe to friend. But Justice League Dark artists Admira Wijaya and Daniel Sampere have too clear a style in contrast to Sorrentino’s shadows, plus painterly coloring that clashes with the I, Vampire issues. Dark writer Peter Milligan still depicts his team as relatively impotent, their powers either depleted or misfunctioning, such that they mostly falter around until Bennett returns and the crossover ends.

I, Vampire grows scores better once Fialkov enters the second four-part arc, in which Bennett establishes a colony of vampires under his rule out in the Utah desert. I rather wish we’d been able to see more of the day to day life in Bennett’s enclave; Fialkov picks up with Bennett just before Mary, true to form, challenges him again for control of the other vampires, and then the two have to join forces again to fight the vampire hunter Van Helsings and their zombie vampire hunters.

This four-part story is many things — the fruition and collapse of Bennett’s idyllic vision for the vampires, an insight into the vampire’s struggle with the Van Helsings over time, a Stormwatch guest-shot — but it’ll probably be remembered best as “the zombie story.” There’s significant horror here, but Fialkov has some fun with how taken aback the vampires are, ironically, to have to fight equally undead enemies. Things get truly, monstrously wild when the vampires become zombies themselves (as Bennett calls them “zombie vampire vampire-hunters”), and that’s just before Apollo, Midnighter, and Jack Hawksmoor teleport on the scene.

At this point Bennett’s plan to broker peace (or unending, self-contained war) between the vampires and the Van Helsings has gone horribly wrong. Best here is Bennett’s voice, via Fialkov; for a title in which early critics feared emotional, sparkling vampires, Bennett’s narration is amusingly dry and sarcastic. “This is not going well for me,” he deadpans. “Let’s get all the vampires in the world — or, y'know, most of them, in one place and let me be their messiah. What could go wrong?” Mary, Bennett’s cohorts Prof. Troughton and Tig, and the Stormwatch crew are equally nonplussed; despite that things get downright bloody (especially when Bennett begins ripping the Van Helsings’s leader limb from limb), there’s a humor underlying this book that’s entertaining and balances the more absurd moments (see again “zombie vampire vampire-hunters”).

The emotional complexity of I, Vampire is also on display in Rise. Troughton and the Van Helsings' leader’s discussion of empirical moral relativism at the beginning of I, Vampire #10 is interesting enough (in what other comic do you find discussions of objective and subjective morality?), but more so when it gets to I, Vampire’s key pervading question — how can Bennett and Mary love each other, as they obviously do, and yet still so often be plotting to kill one another? It’s for this reason that Mary’s turns in the book — with Cain, then with Bennett and the League, then against Bennett, then with him against the Van Helsings — are so interesting, and why I wish we’d seen more of Bennett and Mary in relative peace in Utah before the crisis unfolded. The reader — and perhaps the characters — can’t quite understand how the two can live as a couple one moment and try to kill each other the next, and it makes for more compelling reading than the usual superhero versus villain.

Purposefully or not, Fialkov seems to be taking Bennett through an evolution of self on a trade-by-trade basis. Last time, Bennett died at the end of the book, returning here as a kind of super-vampire, changing from scourge of the vampires to their “messiah.” Rise of the Vampires ends much the same way, with Bennett having magically cured all the vampires, but at the same time taking their evil into himself and becoming the worst of the worst. If there were to be more volumes of I, Vampire, and the next few also ended with Bennett transforming, it might suggest it becoming predictable, but we should have such problems; unfortunately the next collection marks I, Vampire’s last.

Despite an errant crossover, I, Vampire: Rise of the Vampires is just as good as the previous volume, Tainted Love, and I look forward with both anticipation and dismay to the final book. More’s the pity, again, that Joshua Hale Fialkov has left DC, though I’m counting the days to Jeff Lemire and Andrea Sorrentino’s Green Arrow. Hopefully Sorrentino will have some way to draw marauding hordes in Green Arrow just the same as in I, Vampire; the third panel in issue #12, where Troughton and Tig are overrun by a score of zombie-vampires with scythes and pitchforks, is especially striking.

[Includes original covers, sketches and covers by Andrea Sorrentino and a sketch by Ryan Sook]

Next week is a James Robinson week here on Collected Editions, with reviews of Justice League: Rise of Eclipso and Earth 2: The Gathering. See you then!

[Review by Doug Glassman, who Tumblrs at Hell Yeah '80s Marvel!]

After spending a few reviews discussing comiXology and how the Internet has affected comics, I feel like I’ve left webcomics in the lurch. The webcomic spectrum is as vast as the print comic spectrum, from one-panel gag cartoons to multi-chapter epics. I don’t read as many of the more complex webcomics as I’d like to for the sole reason that I keep forgetting to check up on them when the pace slows.

So naturally, after all of this ruminating, I decided to go out and buy the first volume of webcomic Axe Cop in print. To paraphrase Homer Simpson in The Simpsons Movie, “I can’t believe you’re paying to get something you see on the Internet for free!” However, there’s one excellent reason to buy the printed version of Axe Cop: it contains numerous annotations from artist Ethan Nicolle explaining the thought process behind the comic. Considering the process by which the book is made, this can be very enlightening.

Axe Cop is the creation of brothers Ethan Nicolle and his much, much younger brother Malachai, who was five years old when he began “writing” the comic. It’s a journal, essentially, of Malachai’s playtime ideas and fantasies. In the introduction to the “Moon Warriors” arc, Ethan explains that the two create stories while playing together, whether in person or over the phone; as a result, many of the characters come in pairs or are brothers themselves. As Malachai grows up, you can see how different hobbies and life events change his view of the world, often to hilarious effect. For instance, God and Satan start appearing just as he would have started Sunday School, while later episodes take a distinct scatological bent as he discovers poop humor.

Many of the characters are influenced by the creators’ own likes and dislikes. The range of references is incredibly broad due to the generation gap between the brothers (Ethan is old enough to be Malachai’s father). The “Ten-Ben Matanga,” for instance, comes from Malachai’s love of Ben 10. At the same time, the Moon Warriors resemble the main characters of Double Dragon, one of Ethan’s favorite games. There’s some interesting subtext when it comes to how the comic treats women: namely, there are barely any. The women who do appear are mostly mothers or babies, with the main exception being The Best Fairy Ever. As the book goes on, you can also detect an interesting baby subtext; while Ethan doesn’t mention it, I wonder if Malachai gained a baby sister during Axe Cop’s inception.

The book alternates between longer chapters and shorter “Ask Axe Cop” half-page or one-page gags. According to Ethan, the continuity between the two types of strip isn’t entirely solid, but characters do migrate from one to the other. The “Ask Axe Cop” strips are amongst the funniest parts, with my personal favorite being Axe Cop’s “Prayer for the Sharks.” You can watch Axe Cop’s descent into madness throughout these strips. While the main stories feature him as a fairly straightforward protagonist, the “Ask Axe Cop” stories paint him as utterly psychotic, albeit with a softer side when it comes to killing mermaids.

For me, however, what really sells it is the art. Nicolle’s black and white artwork is really beautifully done; Dark Horse’s printing process granted the pages a wonderful crispness. Ethan also uses the art to playfully make fun of the stories he’s been forced to draw, with characters pointing out inconsistencies or plot holes away from the narrator’s interference. The apex of the artwork comes during the “Ultimate Battle” arc, in which the main story alternates with the near-wordless tale of Baby Man tracking down dinner ingredients. It plays out like a Die Hard film (according to Ethan, this was intentional), with elements like a man in a baby suit and eggs with legs portrayed with grim seriousness. If you’re curious, the brothers did in fact put up one strip written by Ethan and drawn by Malachai, with somewhat messy results.

When I first heard about Axe Cop, I thought it might be a gimmick, and that Ethan Nicolle was just making up the part about Malachai writing it to get better press. But there’s a certain bizarre logic that separates Axe Cop from surreal and absurd humor created by adults. For instance, I personally dislike Tim and Eric Awesome Show, Great Job because it feels like it’s lazily written by stoners and for stoners. In contrast, plot elements in Axe Cop -- like that getting splashed with swordfish blood gives you a swordfish head -- make a certain kind of sense, if you consider that a kindergartener came up with it.

Since the comic’s introduction a few years ago, Axe Cop has gone from an online quirk into a fully-merchandized brand. With full-color original mini-series from Dark Horse, two animated adaptations, and even a Munchkin expansion (which I’ve played -- it’s hysterical), Ethan mentions numerous times in the trade his concern that Malachai’s creativity might get exhausted too quickly, but I hope the series goes on as long as it possibly can. After a long, painful week, I need some good absurdism.

Forbidden Worlds, ACG's companion to Adventures Into the Unknown, ended its run at #34 (1954), the last issue before the Comics Code kicked in. It was replaced for three issues with Young Heroes, a more Code-friendly book, numbers 35-37. But Young Heroes didn't last, and Forbidden Worlds came back with an issue dated about a year after #34, continuing the numbering from #35. Confused? Comic books used to change their names but not their numbering (trying to get around a postal regulation for second-class mailing permits), but sometimes they were caught and had to re-number. That may be what happened with Forbidden Worlds

Okay, that's our comic book history lesson for today. Within the pages of FW #34 are a couple of stories that show a change in direction for ACG’s supernatural titles to fit into the new Code, and a last blast from their pre-Code past. The newer-styled story is “Day of Reckoning!” which is science fiction with art attributed by the Grand Comics Database to Paul Gustavson, and the catchy-titled “My Fanged and Fiendish Darling” is a werewolf story, common in ACG’s titles until the Code. It's drawn by Emil Gershwin.

“Fanged and Fiendish” is very odd. A married woman and single man share a secret; they are both able to sit at home and send their “wolf-beings” into the night to rip and tear innocent passers-by. No credible reason is given for Karen taking up such a lycanthropic lifestyle except that she is “...so lonely that maybe even terror is welcome!” It’s a crazy plot, but that wasn’t uncommon for ACG.

The Grand Comics Database gives Ken Bald credit for the cover.