Hot on the heels of the Sinestro Corps War (which, let me amend, I absolutely adored reading the second time around), new Green Lantern Corps writer Peter Tomasi and artist Patrick Gleason deliver a weird and wild story in Ring Quest--one where, I'd venture, Gleason draws career-defining work. After the momentous events of the Sinestro Corps War, Green Lantern Corps: Ring Quest does offer the characters some downtime, but it's also suspenseful, revealing -- and bloody.

Following the Sinestro Corps War, no one would blame either of the Green Lantern titles for taking a more character-driven breather. Indeed, Ring Quest does start rather slowly, with two issues that consist of a lot of Lanterns Guy Gardner and Kyle Rayner contemplating their navels, enough so that I began to worry the entire collection might be this soft. Instead, Ring Quest is a roller coaster right that moves slowly up the hill and then rockets toward the finish, in a way that makes the slow start that much more valuable.

Tomasi presents both Guy and Kyle at a crossroads -- Kyle with no ties left on Earth, and Guy spurned once again by his once-lost love Ice. I'm not a bit fan of the transition to Oa for either of these characters. It pained me to see Guy seemingly reverting to the old immature Guy around Ice, and I'm not sure I agree that these characters wouldn't get along especially as much as Guy has matured. Kyle, on the other hand, has always been an earthbound character, with a fully-realized home and career during the Ron Marz days; it's hard to picture him, too, moving to Oa. Still, Guy and Kyle as neighbors on Oa has an almost sitcom-like appeal; I like their friendship, and that drives me to continue with this title.

But the calm in Ring Quest, to be sure, swiftly gives way to a raucous alien bloodbath. Our ten (count 'em, ten) main characters travel to what turns out to be the homeworld of the infamous Black Mercy plant, orbited by decaying carcases from a hundred different worlds, at which point said planet tries to eat them alive. Gleason's artwork is violent to say the least, building on some of the far-out deaths he drew in the Sinestro Corps War, similar in many ways to the cartoony violence of artist Doug Mahnke. This sci-fi violence, if you like that sort of thing, goes a long way toward modernizing Green Lantern Corps, bringing this vestiage of the 1980s firmly into the twenty-first century. Hardly can I myself believe that Green Lantern Corps is one of my favorite titles; fans of Dead Space and other sci-fi/horror hybrids would find much to like here, too.

Gleason's art, of course, works hand-in-hand with Tomasi's first independent Green Lantern arc, and I was especially impressed with how Tomasi defines and differentiates the ten different Lanterns in this story. Over twenty-five issues, we've learned a lot about Vath, Kol, Natu, and the others, and Tomasi continues to make us care about each of them. The ability for Lanterns to kill now with their rings adds an interesting wrinkle, and I was riveted when the Lanterns debated whether to kill the "Mother Mercy" plant; we've learned so much about these characters that the reader knows where each is coming from and why they believe what they do about the controversy.

If I had one concern in all this, it's the continued use of the Sinestro Corps and the fabled emotional spectrum, even after the end of the Sinestro Corps War series. This story could undoubtably have been told even without the villain Mongul finding a Sinestro Corps ring in the beginning; does Mongul -- like the Cyborg Superman, Amon Sur, and others -- really need to be a Sinestro corpsman? It begins to feel like the Green Lanterns face the same threat in every story, and I wonder if this will get old; I'm doubly concerned where the Green Lantern titles will go, and whether Geoff Johns will stick around, after the vaunted Blackest Night story ends. The Green Lantern titles have more than a right to their own hype after the Sinestro Corps War, but I fear sometimes whether they can live up to it.

[Contains full covers.]

We continue our Green Lantern jaunt with Green Lantern: Secret Origin, coming up next. Stay tuned!

Number 457


Spacemen Against the Supernatural


Except for a roster of artists, the American Comics Group was a one-man office: editor/writer Richard E. Hughes, using pseudonyms like Shane O'Shea, Bob Standish, Zev Zimmer, Lafcadio Lee, and the "author" of this story, Kurato Osaki. It seems only fitting that Hughes used pen-names since Hughes wasn't his real name, which is said to have been Leo Rosenbaum.

This is one of those stories you just have to read to believe that it came from someone's brain. The best character in "Spacemen Against the Supernatural" is the villain. On the first page we see that Nazi scientist Hans Ehrlich has invented a modern rack for torture, an improvement on the gas ovens to kill millions (the word "Jews" unused but understood), and finally we find he was a big part of the V2 rocket program. Yet he's a secondary character. The main character is a typical Hughes doofus.

Hughes was big on hyperbole and not against stretching whatever point it was he was making, so he gives dialogue to the "writer," and artist, Whitney. Whitney "says" for this story he drew in two separate styles. Of course he didn't draw in separate styles, just his usual Ogden Whitney style, which is characterized by solid pencilling and composition, and very precise inking.

All we'd need in this outrageously off-the-wall plot is Herbie and his lollipops and it would be a perfect story.

The Fortress of Fortitude blog shows an even more zany Hughes/Whitney story, "Reggie Rides a Rocket."

Midnight Mystery was an ACG title that lasted 7 issues, and this is the only one I own. This is issue #2, dated March-April 1961.

Before Y: The Last Man or Fables, but naturally after Sandman, one Vertigo series that really caught my attention was Sandman Mystery Theatre. I have to use the phrase "really caught my attention" loosely because, in truth, for a long time I'd only read Sandman Mystery Theatre: The Tarantula and the Sandman/Mystery Theatre crossover Sandman Midnight Theatre. The wonder of trade paperbacks, however, has recently brought us a number of new Sandman Mystery Theatre collections, and so I've picked up the series again with The Face and The Brute.

Unfortunately, I'll say right off that I didn't like The Face and The Brute near as much as The Tarantula. The difficulty is quite specifically in the art; whereas in Tarantula Guy Davis's drew clean, distict, moody lines that perfectly set the 1930s tone of the series, in Face and the Brute, artists John Watkiss and R. G. Taylor each bring more abstract, shadowy scenes to the work. While these styles work for the scare-factor, they render the minor characters nearly indistinguishable from one another. Sandman Mystery Theatre is a blast as a whodunit, but this joy is lost when one can neither tell one member of the Tong Society from the other in the first story, nor Arthur Reisling from his henchmen in the second.

Still, in and of itself, Sandman Mystery Theatre remains something of a wonder among mature superhero comics. It is indeed a superhero comic -- a man in a costume patrols the city and saves lives -- and is even perhaps more a superhero comic than what you'd traditionally find from Vertigo. It's additionally a mystery superhero comic, and I'm hard-pressed to think of another DC Comics that's so specifically ground in both mystery and superheroics, outside the occasional Batman comic. It's a revisionist comic of the type we see more and more now (Identity Crisis, Batman RIP) where old DC Comics stories are reintegrated into continuity, something seen far less when the original Sandman Mystery Theatre isssues first came out. And we can't underestimate the place Sandman Mystery Theatre had in connection to Starman, JSA, and indeed the modern Justice Society and Golden Age revival.

I was struck at the end of Face and The Brute by how little we still know about the protagonist, the Sandman Wesley Dodds. Perhaps because the tropes here are so familiar (mysterious billionare becomes superhero by night), writer Matt Wagner wastes little time delving into the hows and wherefores of Wesley's transformation to the Sandman; indeed the Sandman is nearly a specter in these stories, appearing from the shadows simply to knock the story in this or that direction, his plans intuited mainly by reading between the lines of Wesley's dialogue.

Wesley Dodds himself also remains mostly vague, likely by Wagner's intention. The dim sense we get of Wesley's predilections -- for hand-to-hand combat, for example -- hold only small grains of truth in favor of Wesley's quest to stop the villain du jour. Wesley vertiably (it must be said) sleeps through much of this collection, despite that he appears as the Sandman, only coming to life when he realizes that his slowness to action nearly had dire consequences for his burgeoning love interest/partner Dian Belmont (it is Dian's eyes, in truth, through whom we really see most of the story). It's only at this point that Wesley reveals his feelings for Dian and steps more fully into the story; I imagine it's in the next trade where Wesley Dodds finally more fully comes in to the light.

Sandman Mystery Theatre: The Face and The Brute is in my estimation not the high point of the series; it is, however, a relatively enjoyable next chapter of Sandman Mystery Theatre, enough to make it fairly likely I'll pick up the next volume before too long.

[Contains full covers.]

On now to finish out the all-new Atom, and we'll see where we go from there.

Number 456


Horrors of war


The scariest part of this horror story isn't the ending, it's the beginning. For me, that is. Cowardly Ronald Hamly gets drafted. Getting drafted scared me 42 years ago when the same thing happened to me. Denial is not just a river in Egypt, as the old saying goes, it was the way of life of a college student who didn't think getting kicked out of college would earn him a uniform. It wasn't the first, nor the last time, I would be very, very wrong.

Obviously I lived through my Army experience, but poor Ronald didn't. You'll see how he met his fate in this tale from Eerie Publications' Terror Tales #7 (actually #1) from 1969.

Number 455


"Dey say it's hanuted!"


Emmanuel "Mac" Raboy was a top cartoonist, drawing Captain Marvel Jr. and Green Lama. He drew the Flash Gordon Sunday strips from 1946 until he died in 1967. At Fawcett he worked with Jack Binder, who ran a shop that provided artwork for comics. I talked with Jack in 1970 and he told me that "Raboy was talented, just slow." Apparently a perfectionist, he was also temperamental and could tear up a job he didn't like. Another story I heard about Raboy many years ago is that he moonlighted drawing comics while in the Navy during World War II. He had very little space on ship to draw, so drew his comic book pages the same size as the printed page. That looks like what happened with "The Punching Polties" from Master Comics #40, July 1943.

There's no telling why the speech balloon was changed on page 9, panel 3, to a crude paste-up misspelling "haunted" as "hanuted." You've got to wonder where in the production phase this happened, but it might have been done by poltergeists.

Number 454


Heeee-Haw!


After an absence of several months Jack Bradbury returns to Pappy's. "Bucky Burro" is from the September, 1949 Spunky, Junior Cowboy #3, a solo book by Bradbury.

"Bucky" looks like a story for an animated cartoon short. Funny characters, funny gags, great cartooning. In the words of the Gershwin song, who could ask for anything more?

...so I'll give you more, a Spunky 3-page short from the same issue.

[Contains spoilers for All-New Atom: Small Wonder]

It's a shame that the third and fourth volumes of All-New Atom were such an improvement over the second volume, only to have this be the last volume of the series. Outgoing writer Gail Simone gives a fitting send-off to the newest Atom Ryan Choi in Small Wonder; incoming writer Rick Remender makes some seemingly unnecessary changes to Ryan Choi's backstory (changes that might make more sense, perhaps, had the series not been cancelled) but ultimately offers a tenable enough Atom story to make it a shame that the party had to end.

Gail Simone finishes out Ryan Choi's story with three issues (don't let the copyright page fool you, kids -- issue #20 is in here, too) that are perhaps some of the best of the series so far. Ryan finally accepts a date with fellow professor Dr. Zuel, also the villain Giganta, and then must defend her both from Wonder Woman and an alien invader. These issues are classic All-New Atom (and perhaps, classic Simone): hilarious (note the trademark Atom goes go entirely to Romeo and Juliet during the date), full of Ryan Choi's endearing wistfulness, and brimming with weird size-changing science fiction. Simone also plays the unlikely pair of the Atom and Wonder Woman off each other perfectly, foreshadowing some of the warrior ethos she's brought to the current Wonder Woman series.

In Rick Remender's five-issue story, he subsequently challenges some of the main aspects of the Atom that Simone set down. The biggest revelation here is that, contrary to what the audience has believed for twenty issues, Ray Palmer never did correspond with Ryan Choi; it was the villain Chronos (or his paramour, Lady Chronos) instead. At the same time, even as Simone clears Ray Palmer of causing the strange doings in Ivy Town with his size-changing belt, placing the blame on Chronos, Remender reverses this and makes it Ray's fault once again. The result is a darker and less hopeful Atom where good is bad and bad is good; this works, of sorts, for Remender's story, but the changes unavoidably cast a pall on Simone's good ending.

Remender's story is in-and-of-itself, however, fairly riveting. Remender's story, like Simone's, has a healthy dose of size-changing weirdness; in addition, it involves a time travel mystery that kept my attention glued to the page. Unfortunately, for lack of space or editorial fiat, I didn't necessarily feel that Remender really answered all the questions he raised, as far as which villain worked for whom or the nature of their ultimate plan. Remender's Atom story, as I mentioned, is considerably darker than most of Simone's (as artist Pat Olliffe art has more of a horror-movie tone than Mike Norton's), but at the same time, Simone ends the story with Ryan Choi leaving the Atom identity behind for teaching while Remender indicates Ryan might keep the Atom mantle. Though I liked Simone's stories more, I can't help but be happier with Remender's conclusion.

[Contains full covers]

And thus, All-New Atom ends, following Checkmate and Shadowpact as post-Infinite Crisis series finales. From what I've heard, Ray Palmer is supposed to show up in James Robinson's new Justice League series, but here's hoping we see Ryan Choi again in the DCU somewhere soon -- he's a character I've really enjoyed reading.