Justify Your Continued Existence, or, Captain America Ain't Exactly a Trendsetter

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It's soon to be the first day of the rest of Captain America's some more life, apparently, so we're having a special edition of Justify Your Existence in which we take a look at some of the many, many ways that comic book folks have cheated death over the years. This is a very small sample, of course - I managed to think up something like fifty possibilities ranging from Superman to Little Mermaid over the course of half an hour. Really, the question isn't whether a comic book character is going to come back but when.

Hellhound

If you're not familiar with Hellhound, don't worry. He was a chump with a pretty decent costume who had an ongoing rivalry with Catwoman - your standard martial artist type, plus some big dogs. He eventually showed up at the beginning of the very long "War Games" arc that ran through the Bat-family comics a few years ago, acting as a bodyguard to one of Gotham's innumerable crime bosses:

He's a pretty tough-looking bodyguard, that's for sure. To bad tough didn't turn out to count for much amongst the shipping crates of Gotham Docks or wherever this meeting took place, as the eternal truth of the Gotham underworld held true: get more than two guys with any degree of power together and there will be a shoot-out, or maybe a freeze-out or a mud-out or some sort of violent guessing game. Poor Hellhound just wasn't up to the challenge and ended up sprawled behind a crate full of bootleg Ken dolls. Hell, the first time I read this issue I wasn't paying too much attention and thought that he was Catman - an ignoble end indeed for a dog-villain.

Just a couple of years later, though, in the highly-entertaining Villains United:

Well well, what have we here? Were reports of Hellhound's death greatly exagarrated? Nope, turns out that Calculator sold the franchise to some other chump. Well, I'm sure that he'll have a long and storied career, right? Maybe have some fights with Mr Bones or Bouncing Boy? Let's check out what I'm half certain is his very next appearance, in Salvation Run:

Eviscerated...

Oh no!

Yep, he was used as a contingency plan and fed to lizard-lions by the Body Doubles, a team of fashionista assassins who haven't changed their clothes in at least five years. And then this guy's cousin and some dog-looking guy showed up in Blue Beetle:

Don't worry, I hadn't heard of a title fight either. Evidently, it's what happens when a super-villain kicks off and two or more guys want to fill his shoes for some reason. This is now imprinted on my brain - every time some R-grade bad guy gets shot in the head I'm going to picture seven guys meeting up outside of a bar in Toledo, all wearing their best Crazy Quilt or Planet Master outfits. Evidently, an established name is way more valuable than people not immediately picturing you getting eaten by evolutionarily-unlikely alien beasts when they meet you.

HELLHOUND:

Means of death: back alley brawl; distraction.

Means of revival: Replaced by a series of chumps.

Verdict: NOT APPROVED

Black Adam

Black Adam, as integral to the DCU as he has been for the last decade or so, debuted in 1945 as a one-shot villain, an old student of the wizard Shazam who had turned to the bad and been banished to deepest space for his temerity. He showed up in Marvel Family No. 1 and took on the whole darned bunch of 'em, until he was finally outsmarted by the cunning of Uncle Dudley, who fooled him into saying Shazam and turning back into his 5000 year-old alter-ego, Teth-Adam:

And we all know what happens when someone who is very old stops being under a magic spell or unfreezes or is cured of vampirism or the like: instant ageing! Poor old Teth-Adam, who had spent the last 5000 years flying through space and was understandably a bit pissed off, wrinkled up and turned to dust, which must have been very pleasant for the preadolescent members of the Marvel Family (i.e., all of them) to watch.

So Black Adam was no more. Too bad, as he was a super-distinctive looking character. Look at that widow's peak, surely one of the wonders of the age! And between his eyebrows, ears, nose and chin, his features were so exaggeratedly evil that I'd be surprised if he could have gone into any field other than that of the super-villain. Seriously, I might call the police if I saw him buying a lotto ticket.

Flash forward to 1974 or 75, to the DC-published Shazam! No. 28. Bily Batson and Uncle Dudley have been on an extended road trip across the USA, chasing Dr Sivana as he wreaks havoc in city after city. Finally, he fires up his trusty reincarnation machine...

 

 

 

And brings back Teth-Adam! This time around the same old trick will not work again on ol' Tethy, no sir. Thanks to Sivana's machine, Black Adam will have to wait a long, long time before he has to worry about crumbling to dust unexpectedly if he accidently says hello to his neighbour Shazam Johnson. Plus, the machine somehow manages to give him a swanky new hat, which might be a built-in feature. You know, in case someone wasn't satisfied with merely being raised from the dead and needed some material inducement to stick around and hang out with a dwarfen science-tyrant.

The best part is that he not only smashes Sivana's machine so that is can never be used to return him to dust but he also steals the wee doctor's plan. I have never seen the little guy so upset. Good job, Black Adam!

BLACK ADAM

Mode of death: the old "make 'em so old they turn to dust" manouvre.

Means of revival: tiny megalomaniac and his Reincarnation Machine (bonus points for now being immune to original mode of death; more points for making Sivana sad).

Verdict: JOHN APPROVED

Alfred

It's true! Way back in Detective Comics No. 328 they killed off Alfred "bestest butler" Pennyworth. See, Batman and Robin were fighting some goons in a construction site (as they are wont to do) and Alfred drove up on a motorcycle (as he was very occasionally wont to do), and:

Alfred was duely buried, the Alfred Foundation was started in his honour and Aunt Harriet moved in with the boys before the Butlercycle had even cooled off. And this is how things stayed for the next thirty issues, until (reportedly) the appearance of Alfred on the Batman TV show necessitated that he be brought back in the comics as well. How'd they fix a man who had been smushed under a boulder, you ask? Well:

They called in Brandon Crawford! Brandon Crawford, a man who describes himself as "a radical individualist, always experimenting, always finding new laws of nature and science - laws which orthodox scientists do not yet admit". Yes, Brandon Crawford, the man who discovered that dogs have no sense of irony! The radical individualist who refused to wear a tie to the Tycho Brahe roast!

 

 

 

 

Frankly, if I was a barely-alive butler lying in a refrigerated tomb without having been embalmed and this guy found me? I'd be resigning my mostly-dead ass to being rubbed with essential oils and then shoved into an orgone accumulator for a couple of hours. What I'm saying is: what happens next does not surprise me.

 

 

 

Crawford throws Alfred (still reeking of rose-hips and bitter almonds) into a cellular regeneration machine and throws the switch. Evidently, this bathes the whole damn room in whatever energy the thing uses, because it's not only "Corpsey" Pennyworth that gets a jolt. Brandon Crawford lapses into unconsciousness, wishing all the while that he had discovered the "radiation shielding is good" law of science.

Alfred, meanwhile, is indeed revived - score one for radical individualism, I guess - but in horrifically lumpy form:

Following this, Alfred-as-the Outsider bedeviled the Dynamic Duo with Grasshopper Men and booby traps and all manner of tomfoolery (oh, and he turned Crawford into an Alfred doppleganger and put him back in the crypt, so as to fool the Bat). It isn't until issue numba 356 that Batman and Robin managed to track him down, and that only after Robin had been turned into a coffin. In the ensuing fight:

That darn regeneration machine! Alfred could have learned a thing or two from Black Adam, I swear. Smash the machine after you are fully regenerated, guys, because those things usually work in reverse.

 

  

 

 

Sure enough, a second dose of those crazy rays de-lumps Mr Pennyworth and everyone gets to go home and be sarcatic at each other about how Batman doesn't eat. Incidently, if you, like me, are sad whenever you get to the part of Dark Knight Returns where Alfred dies, just imagine that this all happens again afterward. It's very cathartic!

ALFRED

Mode of death: Smushed by a boulder whilst motorcycling for justice.

Means of revival: Turned into a lumpy telekinetic monster by a radical individualist/got popular on the teevee.

Verdict: JOHN APPROVED

Good afternoon, folks.

John Buys Comics, Wants Nachos.

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 The Brave and the Bold No. 24

Aha! This is why I have kept buying this comic! Aside from glimpses of Icon and the Shield in a couple of places over the last month or so I haven’t seen any of this integration of the Milestone and Red Circle characters into the DCU and this is going to be one of the places I watch. Because it’s easy. 

When I heard about the merging of worlds I started reading some books from the Milestone and Impact lines – both imprints had their heydays during the least John Buys Comics portion of the Nineties – but haven’t really gotten a sense of either of them yet. Not too big a deal in the case of Impact, as it looks like they’re going back to the original Red Circle characters and re-re-re-reinventing them as new to the DCU, but it’s kind of tough to judge how well they’re handling the Homage characters without actually knowing anything about them. Luckily, this issue teams up Black Lightning and Static and has them teaming up against Holocaust, and I have read enough to get a sense of them. 

I don’t know whether Static was given all kinds of supporting cast drama and secret turmoil and so forth in his own comic but I reckon that it’s likely. Doesn’t really matter here, though, in what is essentially one big fire-and-lightning-drenched fight scene with father-and-son-esque moments between electrically-powered black super-heroes. Static cracks wise Spider-Man-style whilst cracking heads. Easy. Meanwhile, Holocaust is a colossal ass, jibing with what I’ve read in my Blood Syndicate researches. 

Of course, that brings me around to the subject of race, which is a bit of a given when talking about Milestone characters, who were created as and by members of minority groups specifically because the comics industry tends not to adequately represent them in either. Given DC’s recent track record re: Vixen looking about as black as me after a week in the sun (note: I am very not black), how did they do? Eh. Not bad. They still seem to be scared of giving anyone a skin tone darker than “really good tan” but at least Static and Black Lightning’s facial features don’t look like they were lifted from Whitey McCaucasianoid wholesale. Holocaust, on the other hand, sports a biker ‘stache that makes him look like he just emerged from a Midwestern trailer park. Call it a C for minimal effort. 

It’s a standard comic when you get right down to it: hero, hero, villain, teamup, fight, nachos. It *is* successful in its mission to place the city of Dakota in relation to the rest of the DCU. I’ll do some more reading and get back to you on how well they manage the rest of the Milestone merge. 

DC Comics House Ads 

Just a quick look at the house ads for the Red Circle comics. First: hooray for good house ads. This isn’t quite up to the quality of the ads from the late Eighties – the Golden Age of house ads, as far as I’m concerned – but they are engaging, what with their faux newspaper article aesthetic. Rachelle keeps making fun of me for being excited about these comics, but I grew up reading Archie Comics and 60s/70s Red Circle stuff and by damn, I have a lot of affection for ‘em. I was kind of hoping that they’d be treated a bit like the characters in The Twelve – heroes out of time from a simpler age, a Silver Age version of what the Justice Society is, kinda. Instead, it looks like they’re introducing them as new heroes, kind of like when the Charlton guys got absorbed into the DCU after the Crisis. 

So who have we got? 1) The Hangman, cast as some sort of eternal vengeance spirit or regular guy posing as the same instead of a regular guy who was the Comet’s brother. No loss there, and I like the costume – I never could resist that style of jacket.

2) Inferno. I have no idea. They’ve either used a really obscure guy that I’ve ever heard of or renamed someone else. Regardless, he seems to be a villain or antihero sort, which is interesting, as the one-shot is out in August, meaning that for one month, DC will be publishing two comic books featuring fire-themed, mustachioed villains.

3) The Web. In the Sixties, the Web was a Batman-style vigilante who was known as “the Henpecked Hero” because his wife gave him a hard time about being a middle-aged crimefighter. In the Nineties, the Impact Web was a SHIELD-ish organization concerned with policing superhumans. *This* Web is a guy in an atrocious costume who advertises for clients via the Internet. His personality looks to be somewhere between Booster Gold and Crackerjack from Astro City. Aside from the terrible costume (and maybe that’s on purpose, I don’t know) this could be pretty good.

4) The Shield. The Shield, always and forever, is a strong guy in a Stars-and-Stripes union suit. This one is wearing a “profoundly experimental suit based on nanotechnology”. I like that “profoundly” in there. 

Verdict: cautious optimism. 

Invincible No. 63 – Let me tell you a story. Wait, some context first. My girlfriend isn’t a comics person. She is a reading person and an art-loving person, so she will read things that I recommend based on her tastes. That said, it’s pretty unlikely that she’ll ever start buying dozens of comics per week like me. She does, however, get me to show her what I buy each week so she can look at the art and occasionally make fun of me for reading something with such lovingly-rendered boobies. She’s also a doctor and is going to be a pathologist someday, meaning that she has performed autopsies. Okay, so this week I was showing her my comics and this one came up and she made a little grossed-out noise. This is a gory-ass comic, folks. If you’re kind of upset about how bloody Green Lantern is getting, avoid this one. Good news is, it looks like they’re going to be getting back into more of that juicy Invincible plot per issue soon, hooray! 

Action Comics Annual No. 12 – Was I complaining about how there aren’t annuals any more recently? It’s true, I miss those crazy guys. Mostly, I miss the opportunity that it gives the creative team to turn away from the ongoing story for an issue and tell an imaginary tale or highlight a minor character or, as here, tell an origin story. This issue is the tale of how Thara Ak-Var and Christopher Kent became Nightwing and Flamebird, reverse respectively. Nothing too fancy, but it fills in all of the missing parts of their story and some of the untold particulars of Kandor’s society to boot. Good times. 

Final Crisis Aftermath: Dance No. 2 – Issue 2 is holding up to Issue 1’s promises: the Super Young Team, dissatisfied with the remoteness of their satellite headquarters, are moved to a building in what I assume to be Las Vegas but is called “Las Vulgar” throughout. There are a couple of interesting encounters with super-villains – interestingly, this comic seems to be doing the “tour the corners of the DCU” thing that I was hoping that Red Robin would – but the emerging plot is that Something Happened to Japan during Final Crisis and a mysterious group doesn’t want either the Team or the world to find out. Also: Most Excellent Super Bat’s constant pseudo-profundities on “Twitteratti” remain amusing, as does Shy Crazy Lolita Canary’s focused drunkenness.

Groom Lake No. 4 - Karl Baur and the aliens have escaped from Groom Lake! Lotsa air-planing and sexual tension here. Not so much plot, but every series needs an action issue now and again. Next issue looks to have a lot of the excellent giant robot Barada-2, so count me in.

Mysterius the Unfathomable No. 6 - Well, out of six issues, there have been intrusive ads in the middle of two covers. At least this "North 40" book looks reasonably interesting. As for Mysterius? Let's just say that I own the series and I'll likely be buying the trade. If you have any interest in a well-plotted story with great art and lots of ladies with big bums and you haven't been getting this as it's bcome out, well, you should do the same.

Life is happening. Maybe more reviews later if it's not too demanding. Good night!

The Return of Captain America!

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Marvel went to the press this week with the most obvious shocking comic-related announcement of the year: Captain America is returning...from the grave!

We would like to offer some ideas about how Ed Brubaker, Marvel and Co. could go about bringing Steve Rogers back from the dead. Dave has included some helpful illustrations so as to make the powers at Marvel realize how awesome these ideas are.

POSSIBILITY #1: CAPTAIN AMERICA'S COFFIN WAS SHOT INTO SPACE AND LANDED ON THE GENESIS PLANET

POSSIBILITY #2: SHARON DREAMED THE WHOLE THING

POSSIBILITY #3: CAPTAIN AMERICA IS AWOKEN BY AN ENCHANTED KISS FROM WINTER SOLDIER

POSSIBILITY #4: CAPTAIN AMERICA IS AWOKEN BY AN ENCHANTED KISS FROM IRON MAN

 

I'm pulling for possibility #3!

Miss Fury is Awesome

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Miss Fury was a serialized superhero comic strip that ran throughout the 1940s. Not only did it star a female superhero, but it was created, written, and drawn by a woman. June Tarpe Mills, using the pen name Tarpe Mills to conceal her gender, debuted her character, Black Fury, in 1941. Like all good superheroes, Black Fury was a bored wealthy socialite (Marla Drake). She happened to have a panther skin that was brought back from Africa for her as a gift, and thus her life of costumed crimefighting was born.

The serials were eventually collected into a very short-lived comic book series by Timely Comics (you might know them as Marvel Comics).The first three issues of the comic were thankfully reprinted in a book by Pure Imagination Publishing which isn't the easiest thing to find, but can be purchased from their website. I was given this book as a gift a couple of years ago, and I can tell you that it is awesome.

Not only does Mills hold her own writing and drawing adventure comics for men in a man's world, she totally throws down some of the craziest shit I have ever seen in comics. Stone cold badass craziness.

But you don't have to take my word for it.

MAIDS SLAPPING NURSES

 WOMEN BEING BRANDED WITH 
SWASTIKAS

THAT'S RIGHT—WOMEN BEING BRANDED 
WITH SWASTIKAS

MEN PUNCHING NURSES

CATS VERSUS MEN

MEN VERSUS CATS

MEN IN PANTHER SUITS BEATING WOMEN 
IN PANTHER SUITS

 

CATS BEING TURNED INTO BOMBS

In conclusion, this collection of comics is definitely worth hunting down. As you can see, the art is awesome. And these panels are just a taste of what goes down. I mean, half of the story takes place in Brazil! I didn't even get into that!

Ultimatum? I Just Met 'Um!

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     I can’t seem to figure out the specific appeal of Ultimatum, other than that it maybe appeals to folks who want to see all their favourite Marvel characters die awful, horrible deaths that would make the producers of the Saw films look away in disgust. Wasp eaten alive by the Blob for some reason? Check. Dr. Strange’s head popped like a grape by Dormammu? Check. Giant-Man blown to bits by suicide bomber Madroxes? Check. Also, with its rampant lateness (thanks again, Jeph Loeb), it is now responsible for making the usually clockwork-like Ultimate Spider-Man run several weeks behind due to its involvement. Worst of all, with the Ultimate line relaunching as Ultimate Comics or some such nonsense in a few months, I’m getting the feeling that all of the death and destruction will be magically undone by the end of it, rendering the entire series even more pointless.


    However, despite Ultimatum’s best efforts to drag it down, the letter U is on a bit of a hot streak lately. There are a surprising number of quality titles beginning with the 21st letter of the alphabet lately. Vertigo’s Unwritten, by Mike Carey and Peter Gross, is off to a strong start, and may be well on its way to being the line’s next big hit. The $1 first issue helped, but the fact that it’s a well-executed series with a solid premise (a guy whose dad penned a Harry Potter-style fantasy series starring him may be, in reality, a fictional construct) certainly doesn’t hurt. There’s also The Unknown, from Boom! Studios, written by Mark Waid and drawn by Minck Oosterveer, a four-part mini about a terminally ill detective and her new hired muscle, which is also off to a great start. The second Umbrella Academy miniseries recently wrapped up, continuing to mine a terrific vein of superhero sci-fi weirdness that brings to mind Grant Morrison’s Doom Patrol.


    My favourite of all these, though, doesn’t actually begin with U, but it does feature prominently in the title—The Great Unknown is a five-part miniseries from Duncan Rouleau (the writer/artist behind the recent Metal Men mini from DC), published by Image. It stars a slacker doofus named Zach Feld who lives with his parents and gets drunk all the time, despite being a visionary genius inventor. The problem is, every time Zach has a great new idea, someone just barely beats him to the patent office with it. Is he perpetually too late, or is someone stealing the ideas right out of his head? The mystery unfolds further in flashbacks to an experiment from Zach’s college days, while he follows various clues and avoids the televised intervention his family is trying to stage with him for a reality TV show. Rouleau’s eccentric narrative and tripped-out art style may be off-putting at first, but it’s a pretty rewarding read, filled with oddball humour and conspiratorial mystery.


    I am most certainly feeling the love for the letter U these days, even if it does make for a confusing Wednesday at the ol’ comic shop—these books, for whatever reason, often ship the same week! Good day to U and yours.