You Got the Right Stuff, Richie.

In this crappy economic climate, I find it soothing to think back to a more fruitful era, like the 1980s. It seemed possible that we could all someday sleep on a pile of money, since even children like Richie Rich were ridiculously wealthy. Computers were going to solve all of our problems. Soon a pill would be developed to provide us with all our dietary needs. And we could be sure that a certain pop group's star would never stop rising.

Yes, I'm talking about the New Kids on the Block.

But, like a Hypercolor t-shirt, NKOTB did not age so well.

Except Jon. Lookin' fine, Jon. Lookin' eerily similar, in fact.

Anyway, at one point in this magical era, the New Kids on the Block, who were pretty wealthy themselves, met the richest kid around, Richie Rich.

.

Both Richie and the Kids have pretty sweet lives, so this was the crisis for the issue. The New Kids on the Block are lost in Richie's giant, luxorious mansion. What's next? A harrowing issue where Richie has too much ice cream and the New Kids have to help him eat it?

Yup.

Anyway, the gist of the story is that it's Richie's birthday and he wants to go see the New Kids in concert. (Me too, Richie. But the reunion tour isn't coming to Halifax.)  Richie's Dad decides to play a trick on him, and tell him the tickets were sold old, but surprise Richie with having the New Kids play at his party.

It's a "party to end all parties," which is a bit of a tragic title in retrospect, since some of the members of NKOTB almost snorted their way to the big party in the sky.

But at this point, the New Kids are just down to earth Boston boys. They arrive at Richie's place for the birthday party and lose their shit over the size of Richie's mansion. And I have to stress again, that these guys are not doing bad for themselves either. Richie is RICH!

The New Kids are a little slow, which is probably realistic, and can't figure out how to get in.

I'm going to assume that all the punning is also realistic.

From here, they just keep running into crazy crap all over the Rich residence. It's run-of-the-mill rich people's stuff—the Elephant Man's bones and whatnot—until they find one room that holds a fully functioning circus, made entirely of robots.

Weird. Why would the Rich family have these? Secret military weapons? Do they run a nightmare factory? The look on that clown's face is truly terrifying.

I think this is the kind of dark shit that lead to Donnie Wahlberg's role in the Sixth Sense. Remember?

Yeesh.

Luckily, just when things are getting dire, Donnie locates a room-finding computer. Good on ya, Donnie. You'll survive when the rest of the Kids perish. 

But the computer can't decipher their thick Bostonian accents and their rap-influenced dialect. Remember, computers were very literal in the 80s. You were like, "What up, computer?" and they were like, "2.65 meters above me is the ceiling, human."

So the computer sends them to the weather room!

Richie eventually finds the Kids by taking off the removable roof to the mansion and air-lifting them out by helicopter. Clearly using resources where they're needed. So, NKOTB make it to the party.

Well, sure. It's easy to say friendship is more important than money when you're crazy rich. That's the NKOTB manager, Maurice Starr, providing that little platitude by the way.

This moral is slightly cheapened by the ad on the next page.

I hope NKOTB's friendship costs less than $2.99 per minute these days. I'm not sure I can afford that.

This week's haul: Johnathan beat me to a StarCraft Preview Inside joke.

A bit of a light week for me. Here's some of what I bought this week:

Captain America #50

There is a Marcos Martin back-up in this comic that I would have gladly paid $3.99 for on its own. It's a stunning summarization of Captain America's complete story from origin to present. The design is so incredible that it would make Saul Bass cry beautiful, stylish tears.

And the main story is typically awesome as every issue of this series is awesome. Luke Ross and share the art duties. And there's also a two-page Hembeck comic at the back! That's a lot of comic for four bucks!

Uncanny X-Men #510

Every woman has the exact same frigging face!

Wolverine Weapon X #2

Jason Aaron is killing this thing! This comic is giving me everything I want out of a Wolverine comic: unchecked machismo, wit, and claws being poked through bad guys. And also: a gun that shoots bullets filled with cancer.

I loved Aaron's three issue run on Wolverine last year, so I am really happy to see him back writing everyone's favourite grouchy Canadian mutant.

Tiny Titans #16

At free comic book day this year a mom with two young kids was excitedly telling me how much her kids love Tiny Titans, and how she discovered that she enjoyed reading them as much as they did! She told me how gleeful the kids were when they were introduced to the Teeny Tiny Titans. Listening to her rave about this series reassured me that this comic is doing what it is supposed to be doing. Although I have loved it from issue #1, I was worried that it might be more of an adorable inside joke for adult nerds than something that kids would find funny. It's definitely not the case: kids love Tiny Titans. It's very exciting.

The second trade collection of Tiny Titans also came out this week. It makes a great gift for your favourite kid!

Mysterius #5

Johnathan already mentioned it, but I'll go ahead and say it again: Starcraft Preview Inside?! Come on. As if that is worth putting an ugly logo in the middle of a beautiful cover for. Who on Earth is going to buy a comic because it has a preview of another comic in it?  Much less the fifth issue of a series! Best case scenario: they pick up this comic, read the preview, and put it back on the shelf. Argh! So lame.

This series is awesome, by the way, as I keep saying. Everyone should buy every issue of Mysterius.

Johnny Hiro

I bought all the issues of this comic but I also bought this new trade collection of it because:

a) I love this comic. It is hilarious and awesome;

b) This book is beautiful!

The tag for Johnny Hiro is Half Asian, All Hero. That's right: Johnny Hiro was using the Hiro/Hero pun years before Heroes was ever on the air. It is a very funny and action-packed comic written and drawn by Fred Chao. Hiro is a young  man living in New York City and struggling to get by as a busboy. He lives with his Japanese girlfriend, Mayumi, who is a fantastic character with somewhat limited English.

It's, I guess, similar to Scott Pilgrim in that it combines romance and humour with insane crazy action sequences really well. Except with Johnny Hiro, you might actually want to hang out and be friends with the characters. I highly recommend buying this book. It's cheap!

G-Man: Learning to Fly

I definitely approve of Image's decision to release Chris Giarusso's original creation comic, G-Man, in this digest format for kids. We all love Mini Marvels, and this is just as hilarious and adorable. And you don't have to read Marvel cross-over events to get all the jokes!

John Buys **THOUGHTS ON STARCRAFT PREVIEW INSIDE**Comics

Supergirl No. 41

Hey, check out that cover - that’s fantastic! Who drew that… Joshua Middleton, hey? Way to go Joshua! Astonishingly, this cover seems to depict a short woman in a costume fighting a teenager with questionable fashion sense! Supergirl looks like someone who hasn’t stopped growing yet rather than someone who has had multiple rounds of cosmetic enhancement! Hooray, it’s revolutionary! Also: really pretty. This is one of my favourite covers in a long while.

So, as per last issue, Superwoman is Major Lucy Lane but how that came about isn’t really explored. Is it the costume? Is it wacky super-science? Is it some other theory that I’ll stick in the comments? The “Next Issue” blurb promises “Questions and Answers” so we’ll just have to wait and see. As with a lot of DC storylines recently I was kind of leery of this whole Vast Government Conspiracy Against The Super-heroes plot that’s going on in the Superman Family books right now. I mean, that’s a horse that’s been dead since somewhere between Legends and Millennium, and it’s been beaten quite a lot since then, right? Once more, though, my fears have proven groundless. I keep steeling myself for terrible comic-bookery and DC keeps producing decent reads. Heck, Sterling Gates managed to make me feel sympathetic toward both Major and General Lane this issue, and they’re both complete dicks. Even Cat Grant is showing signs of increased humanity, possibly.

Of course, there’s the issue of a storyline entitled “Who is Superwoman?” leaving you not exactly knowing the answer to the question of who Superwoman is but I suppose that there’s nothing in that title that promises a definitive answer to that. Just wait until they publish “At the End of this Story, You Will Conclusively Know the Identity of Superwoman” - then I’ll be watching them like a hawk.

Final Crisis Aftermath: Dance No.1 (of 6)

Okay, here goes. So far, the Final Crisis Aftermath series are starting well: Run is an interesting exploration into the super-villain as self-centred douchebag rather than megalomaniac or insane person, while Escape might just be the right flavour of whacked-out craziness to be a good read (and is evidently based on an idea that Jack Kirby had about a super-hero version of The Prisoner, so the similarities are more apt than I had thought). I know that a first issue is not a series, but I’m actually cautiously optimistic about the whole thing - DC is redeeming itself somewhat for all of the really terrible stuff in the year between 52 and Final Crisis. And the Super Young Team are interesting characters, so that’s another bonus. I’ve read some fairly valid critique of them as reflecting a Western “look at the wacky Japanese” superficiality but… well, if super-heroes were an actual part of day-to-day life I don’t know that there wouldn’t be a group of trendy super-powered dilettantes with crazy-ass names and costumes swanning around the Japanese club scene. I guess I’ll reserve judgment until I see how the rest of Japan makes out. Bah blah blah - let’s read the comic.

Hey, not bad! The theme of Dance seems to be super-hero-as-celebrity vs. super-hero-as-hero, with the Super Young Team being in a transitional state between the two. They were famous for no particular reason before Final Crisis and then they helped to save the world during Final Crisis and now they have a big ol’ contract with endorsement deals and a satellite headquarters and a trophy room full of things that they’ve never seen before. It looks like we’re going to see some compare-and-contrast with Japan’s last big super-team, Big Science Action, as well as a look at some of the after-effects of all that Final Crisis craziness (which is good, because I am really unclear on what those might be). All this plus an unfortunately-themed metahuman antagonist!

As with the other Aftermath series, this was a fine set-up issue. We’ll have to wait and see whether the next five can follow its lead and form a cohesive whole. Cautious Optimism: ON.

Battle for the Cowl No.3

Batman Jones! The kid who was named after Batman and thus became a huge Batman fanboy! Did I miss some earlier return of Batman Jones or did someone set out to dig up the most obscure character ever? Either way: fun revival.

Other than Batman Jones, this was a decent end to the cowl-battlin’ adventures of the Batman Family. We got a new Batman (though I’m not quite certain who that Robin at the end is), we got some setup for future plotlines (and I guess that Homicidal Batman was Jason Todd after all, oops) and we got the Squire sassing Damien a lot. Sadly, unless I managed to miss an issue, we did not get Alfred dressed in commando gear or a crazy-looking Two-Face Batman. Maybe these things are going to happen in the future? But then why stick it on the teaser for the series?

I am going to put Gigantic Disaster in Gotham City on the list of way-overused story elements. Seriously, that town’s been blown up and burned down often enough that there shouldn’t be two stones left on top of one another, let alone lots of vintage Gothic architecture all over the place. Man, given the fact that this is all happening in Comic Book Time, they should still be rebuilding from No Man’s Land. Let’s have Batman versus Criminals for a while instead of Gotham City versus Explosions. Please?

Mysterius the Unfathomable No. 5.

This issue contains: an incredibly creepy cult leader, a trip to Burning Man (well, Blazing Man), super-cool flashbacks and a dramatic reveal. And girls in bikinis, if you like that sort of thing. Man, I would definitely buy a comic based on the early adventures of Mysterius, particularly if they feature lots of crazy magic globe-trotting. Of course now I have to go back and look for things in prior issues of Mysterius, thanks to that dramatic reveal. Curse you, Parker! I’m a busy man, and a lazy one! Your clever writing has inconvenienced me slightly for the last time!

The other special aspect of this issue is a preview for a tepid-looking Starcraft comic, along with a little notice of such slapped just under the title. I know that there’s probably one of these on every Wildstorm book this month, but bleah. Seriously, are many readers of Mysterius the Unfathomable likely to pick up a Starcraft comic based on this preview (assuming that they aren’t also Starcraft fans, I guess)? It’s not like it’s terribly clear what’s going on if you don’t already know the plot, after all. Likewise, is a rabid Starcraft fan going to snatch up issue 5 of some series about a magician just to see what a Firebat looks like in a comic book? Bah, I say.

The Complete Dracula No.1 - This is nice! A pretty darn faithful adaptation of Dracula into comic book form. They tacked the short story "Dracula's Guest" onto the front as a prologue, so at first I, who have never read said story, thought that they were making up new stuff. I like Dracula, so I'll be picking up the rest of these, I think, if only to see how they draw Van Helsing and the bat-Dracula and such. Everything is looking pretty great so far, particularly Harker, Renfield and Dracula himself, who is doing that cool thing where he looks like complete shit at the beginning of the book and gets more presentable as time goes on. And on the cover he looks like Vincent Price!

Invincible No. 61 - This is just as nice-looking as it always was, and it's as fun to read, but as my friend Brad observed, things have changed on the Invincible scene in the last 20 issues or so. Maybe it's just that I read a lot of the earlier stuff in trade form but it seems like the amount of plot per issue is on the wane and the number of characters on the decrease (often violently). Ah well, it's still a good time.

Stephen Colbert’s Tek Jansen No.5 (of 5) - All done. A decent enough series, and I don’t get enough Stephen Colbert in my day-to-day life, but I’m not sure that Tek Jansen on paper measures up to a Tek Jansen voiced by Colbert himself. The main story, wherein Tek fights to stop a war that he is responsible for starting, wraps up nicely in this issue and my favourite lil’ guy Meangarr gets his chance to shine, but as usual I liked the stand-alone tale on the flip side best. Plus: great covers.

Caped No.2 - Augh! My eyes! This was a bit of a jarring experience, I must say. Issue one of this comic introduced Jimmy Lohman, an aspiring reporter who ends up as the personal assistant to a superhero named Edge. There was a neat look at the extensive support structure behind the average super-hero, with budgets and paperwork and crazy crap like that, and I was looking forward to the rest of the series. The storytelling’s gone way downhill with this one, however - it’s like they abandoned any desire to explore the world that they have established and so the story is just whizzing by without a whole lot of context. The story feels about three times as fast and one-third as interesting as it should be. Bah.

The Brave and the Bold No.23 - Eh. This was an okay comic. The problem with The Brave and the Bold is that the first story arc was fantastic and that since then it has been merely all right - it’s suffering by comparison. The specific problem with this issue is that I haven’t been paying attention to Justice Society (for no good reason) and so my knowledge of Magog ends at Kingdom Come. Ah well - there was some word a while back that the Impact characters or the Milestone characters or both were going to be introduced in this one, which might just be worth checking out. Otherwise… my interest has dwindled.

Loki is cool with me.

Now that the role has been cast in the upcoming movie, I would like to put forward an argument that Thor's villainous brother Loki, the God of Mischief, isn't all that bad.

Take this early apperance in Journey Into Mystery #88, for example. Loki comes down to Earth and starts "terrorizing" humanity by...

...turning everything into candy and ice cream.

And...

...diffusing Soviet nuclear bombs.

In fact, the only remotely frightening thing that he does is turn a bunch of people into blank white versions of themselves:

But even that isn't so bad because he has no intention of leaving them that way:

I ask you, wouldn't you rather have this guy around than the one who hurls a giant hammer around and makes lightning strike everything?

It's The End, The End Of The Century: The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen Returns!

In the final weeks before the release of League of Extraordinary Gentlemen Volume III: Century Book One (whew!), I thought I’d look back at the previous LOEG books, ‘cause, you know…any excuse to read that stuff again. Contextually, though, it turns out it made a lot of sense, as the series keeps changing and evolving, so a look at its development might provide proper context for where it is now/where it’s heading. So, this time around, I’m going to examine what’s come before, and then have a look at what’s going on now, with LOEG Vol. III (which is actually the fourth LOEG project, but more on that in a bit).

Alan Moore and Kevin O’Neill kicked off this series in 1999 (ten years ago? Seriously? Jeez!) under the DC/Wildstorm imprint America’s Best Comics, a Moore-created label that he would eventually abandon because of his, shall we say, fractious relationship with parent publisher DC. The initial six-issue miniseries was a fairly high-concept adventure tale that introduced Moore and O’Neill’s Victorian-era covert military unit, comprised of famous literary heroes like Mina Murray (heroine of Bram Stoker’s Dracula), Allan Quartermain (star of H. Rider Haggard’s King Solomon’s Mines), Captain Nemo, Dr. Jekyll/Mr. Hyde, and the Invisible Man. The first LOEG series is a pretty straightforward three-act adventure—the team is assembled, they go on a mission to thwart Fu Manchu, and they eventually regroup to take down their true nemesis, Professor James Moriarty (who is also their employer, the mysterious spymaster “M”). The inaugural volume quickly establishes that the League’s adventures take place in an alternate universe where all fantastical fiction of the era resides side-by-side—look for allusions to Edgar Allan Poe, Charles Dickens, Edgar Rice Burroughs, H.P. Lovecraft, and literally hundreds of other authors and their works. To truly appreciate the scope of what Moore and O’Neill have done, be sure to check out Jess Nevins’ remarkable annotations of all the LOEG books (or buy the old-fashioned book versions of same, available now from Monkeybrain Press).

LOEG Vol. II picks up almost immediately after the conclusion of the first miniseries, although it’s constructed very differently—the framework of its plot is built around an existing narrative, namely H.G. Wells’ War of the Worlds. When the Martian tripods launch their assault, the League is there behind the scenes, participating in the campaign against the invaders and inevitably helping to destroy them (although the League as we know it is pretty much undone in the process). Moore and O’Neill are careful not to interfere with the events in Wells’ novel, but they do find all sorts of cool ways to integrate those events into the League’s larger fictional world. New characters, like Wells’ Dr. Moreau, are introduced, and not all the heroes from the first series survive.

With the third book, Black Dossier, the original intent was for Moore and O’Neill to create a sort of sourcebook for the fictional universe the League inhabits, but the creators got a bit more ambitious; the Dossier of the book’s title forms the basis of the sourcebook, detailing several centuries of the League’s different incarnations and adventures. However, this is contained within a framing sequence set in the 1950s, where the two surviving heroes of the first series steal the Dossier from British Intelligence, and are relentlessly pursued by James Bond, Emma Peel, and Bulldog Drummond. The Dossier excerpts are mostly told in prose, and include an unfinished Shakespeare play, a P.G. Wodehouse-style short story where Jeeves and Wooster meet Cthulhu, a Kerouac pastiche, and a Tijuana Bible inspired by Orwell’s 1984. There’s even a 3D section at the end (glasses included!), and a flexi-disc original song recording was planned but was abandoned during a long and ugly fight with parent company DC. The Black Dossier tried the patience of a lot of fans with its extended prose sequences, but if you can make time for them, it’s worth it. Among some of the fascinating details Moore and O’Neill reveal about their universe: Prospero, hero of The Tempest, was the first agent of the Crown to be codenamed 007, Dean Moriarty of On The Road was a distant relative of Professor Moriarty, and the England of the LOEG world went to war in 1939 not with Adolf Hitler but Adenoid Hynkel, Charlie Chaplin’s character in The Little Dictator. Granted, it would definitely have been cool to see the League take on their German and French counterparts, but we’ll have to settle for the abridged recaps in the chapter titled The Sincerest Form of Flattery.

Which brings us, finally, to the latest LOEG adventure, Century. The first of three 80-page volumes—stand-alone adventures that comprise a larger story spanning 100 years—Book One takes place in 1910. The current incarnation of the League, which includes a now-immortal Mina Murray and Allan Quatermain, gentleman thief A.J. Raffles, and gender-bending, ageless adventurer Orlando, acts upon the ominous visions of their psychic teammate Thomas Carnacki, who has seen that a sect of mystics may have engineered events to bring about the end of the world. Also, a plague of Jack the Ripper-style slayings besets the East End of London, and the rebellious daughter of former League member Captain Nemo finally inherits her position as the Captain of the dreaded Nautilus.

This newest LOEG series runs the risk of alienating readers drawn to the initial high-concept of the earlier books, as the cast of characters grows increasingly obscure. That shouldn’t be seen as a deterrent, however; Century has plenty of humour, violence, and portents of a dark future to satisfy fans. The apocalyptic plot conceived by the Crowley-like mystic Oliver Haddo and his sect probably won’t truly bear fruit until the end of the series, which will take place in the present day, making that portion of the story a bit unsatisfying (for now, anyway). In the meantime, though, Moore’s depiction of his heroes bickering like the world’s weirdest dysfunctional family is hilarious, and his gift for using song in his narrative, used to great effect in V For Vendetta and Top Ten, is on full display here—much of Book One’s plot is told in the form of Threepenny Opera, incorporating lyrics and characters from Mack the Knife and Jenny Diver. Kevin O’Neill’s artwork here is the tightest it’s been in a while, packed with obscure detail (is that the fertility idol from Raiders of the Lost Ark in one panel?) and terrific character detail. The dockside siege of London by the Nautilus’ pirate crew is particularly exciting, and pretty gory to boot. The text piece at the end, which ties together several fictional narratives and characters involving the moon, has lots of surprise cameos as well, like Stardust the Super-Wizard (last seen in Fantagraphics’ amazing collection of Fletcher Hanks comics, I Shall Destroy All The Civilized Planets!). New publisher Top Shelf has put together an appealing square-bound format for this book, and I can’t wait to see what the always-reliable publisher has planned for the inevitable collected edition. The new, extended format of this series will hopefully tide people over in the wait between volumes, but as long as Century doesn’t take 100 years to finish, I’ll be happy to wait.
 

Archie Sunday: Saturday In the Park

This week's Archie Sunday comic starts with a little post-modern breaking of the fourth wall:

Alright, Archie. I'll bite. Why are you in the fountain?

Like all good things, this series of events was set in motion by Riverdale's most eligable bachelor, Dilton Doiley.

As an aside, I can't decide if I like Archie's short-sleeve turtleneck and flat-front khakis, or Dilton's urban trench and pinstripes better. Anyway, here's your plot set-up:

I like that Dilton uses the term 'bob.' I do not like that Archie is being a douche. Dilton gives him the tickets, but not without laying some voodoo on Archie:

The Infamous Dilton Curse!!! Man I love that little guy.

Archie rushes to Veronica's place with his fancy tickets. He shows her his most impressive sexual predator face:

Unfortunately for Archie, this romantic evening is about to get crowded:

Archie and Veronica arrive at the concert (which is also a wacky costume party, apparently) and Archie gets the bad news that tonight is the night when two become six:

It seems that Veronica is friends with members of the rock group Chicago.

Just as I always suspected, the members of Chicago are disgusting pervs.

Archie is not having any of this, but Veronica seems to be into the idea of the evening leading to a sexy situation involving herself, Archie, and Chicago. And what Veronica wants, Veronica gets. Minus Archie.

Oh stuff it, Archie. It's not Dilton's fault you are dating a nasty freak.