Mike Sterling's Progressive Ruin
Putting the bomp in the bomp-bah-bomp-bah-bomp since 1969
Or “Happy 1978,” as the case may be:
Oh, hey, don’t forget I’m still looking for your comic industry predictions for 2014…I don’t mind some gag predictions, but try to give me at least one serious one, too. Remember, limit three per person, please!
Anyway, this week’s comics, and SPOILERS AHEAD:
In fact, and I’ve noted this before, the Superman line of books seem to be undergoing a mini-rebirth lately, more entertaining, more engaging. It’s like Superman comics are allowed to tell Superman stories again, instead of presenting a parade of creative teams trying to make top-down editorial mandates somehow work in a narrative. Even marketing ploys like Superman/Wonder Woman and Superman/Batman have turned out to be, surprise, pretty good reads.
I’m even beginning to learn to live without Superman’s trunks. But still, that collar is terrible, and has to go.
Which was a shame, too, since I’ve generally been following most the Aquaman comics over the last thirty years, beginning with this series and lasting up until the beginning of the most recent pre-New 52 iteration, where I finally decided that, like Flash and Legion of Super-Heroes, I’d read pretty much all the Aquaman I ever needed to read.
With this new issue, Jeff Parker is on board as writer, and having enjoyed pretty much everything Mr. Parker has written before, that was enough incentive to dip into the Aquaman pool once again. There’s plenty of underwater monster-fightin’ action, and it’s fun, and thankfully continuity-light, so if you haven’t read the series prior to this point, no worries, you can jump right in. This is pretty close to the kind of Aquaman comic I’ve been wanting over the last few years, and I hope it’s rewarded with enough sales and readership to encourage DC to persue similar strategies with other properties of theirs.
It’s not that I want this series to end…I enjoy all of Mignola’s horror work, but I am curious as to how he sticks the landing on any of his long-term projects. I believe it’s been said that he has an ending forHellboy in mind, and though Hellboy in Hell is the Hellboy series for the time being, I don’t know that this is also the last series. B.P.R.D. is a series that could probably benefit from an ending, wrapping up some of these plotlines and supporting characters and such and starting afresh, since I don’t see too many new readers jumping into the storyline at this point. Abe Sapien just started, though I could see this becoming Abe Sapien and the B.P.R.D. at some point, which would nicely replace the ongoing continuity-heavy B.P.R.D. as long as I’m telling publishers who don’t care what I think what to do.
Anyway, Baltimore. It’s good, and it does look like we’re getting our final battle with this vampire. I’m sure whatever direction this series continues in after this climactic moment will be just as creepily entertaining, and I look forward to it.
Most of the book is about introducing a new character to the mix, and it seems the next issue will have her at the same school the titular spectral Sherlocks were themselves murdered. Thus I expect, now that we’ve got the introductions out of the way, I’ll be fully on board once the plot is in motion.
1. Don’t read the other predictions before entering your own.
2. Don’t criticize other people’s predictions.
3. Don’t predict any real person’s death.
4. (NEW!) LIMIT OF THREE PREDICTIONS PER PERSON, PLEASE!
Sorry, gang, I need to streamline the process a bit so I don’t spend the entirety of 2015 responding to all of the 2014 predictions. Speaking of which…I’ll be going over your 2013 forecasts starting next week, so consider yourself warned.
Anyway, I always enjoy seeing what you have to say, so please, drop your ideas in my little ol’ comments section here, and I’ll sit on ’em ’til next year and see how everyone did then. Thanks, pals!
So I’ve joked around the shop a handful of times that if I were in charge of Swamp Thing comics, it would totally be just Swamp Thing time-traveling every issue, visiting important characters and events through the DC Universe’s history. (In other words, sorta like the Veitch issues in the middle of this page, but more like this series, just with a muck-encrusted mockery of a man as the lead.)
One of the covers I suggested for this theoretical run (Swamp Thing Adventures in Time and Space, if I may) would have been a take-off on this classic Chaykin cover from 1983:
Well, this Christmas, in secret collusion, Employee Timmy bade Employee Aaron to create this illustration as a gift for me:
A few days back, a gentleman popped by the shop with a small handful of undergrounds…a couple copies each of Zap #9 and #10, three San Francisco Comic Book #5s, one or two other items. Some of them weren’t in great shape, but I always have demand for undergrounds, Zaps in particular, so I was willing to dole out a small bit of money even for the somewhat water-damaged copies. …Some of which, by the way, I was able to turn around and sell later that afternoon.
Anyway, after purchasing the comics from this person, he tells us that he has a few hundred more comics of similar vintage back home if we were interested. “Why sure!” we replied, and a day or two later the rest of his collection was in our possession.
And when he said he had a few hundred more, we didn’t realize that a couple hundred of those would be more copies of San Francisco Comic Book #5:
There were other Zaps in the collection…again, multiple copies of them, in varying conditions, mostly from the middle of the run. There were various other undergrounds, plus a bunch of more mainstream comics from the ’80s and very early ’90s that filled out the boxes, generally fairly common stuff in worn condition, thrown into the deal after we paid actual money for the stuff we could use. Nothing terribly exciting, save for a beat copy of an issue of Infinity Gauntlet that we gave to a customer gratis so he could complete his run and read the series.
Not quite on the scale of the immense collection of undergrounds we acquired a few years back (that we’re still going through, when we find the time), but it’s always nice to recover books like these from wherever they were being hidden, and getting them into the hands of more people who can appreciate them.
So I was looking for something else on the eBay the other day (the Man of Steel prequel comic, if you’re wondering) when this particular item caught my eye:
I’ve only done one read-through, following a couple of different branches here and there when it was pretty obvious when a decision was going to lead to an unfortunate ending.
AN ASIDE just in case you don’t know about this kind of book…it presents a narrative in which you are asked at certain points to make a decision about where the narrative should go. You are then directed to another page in the book which continues the narrative until you either reach another branching decision point or an ending. The decisions are usually in the format of “If you decide to go into the dark, foreboding cave to investigate the growling sound, turn to page 57. If you decide to run the hell in the other direction like a sensible person, turn to page 99.”
In the narrative line I followed, Superman ends up going with Lex Luthor to fight it out on another planet with a red sun, nullifying Superman’s powers so that they can engage as physical equals. If he didn’t do so, the missiles Luthor has aimed at Metropolis would activate, destroying the city. At various points you are given options to knock out Luthor (which sets off the missiles, automatically activating when Luthor is disabled), or even to straight up let Luthor get killed (very unSupermanly, resulting in an appropriately bad ending for Supes).
As you can see on that cover, there are other villains that turn up along the way, such as the Toyman and the Phantom Zone villains (General Zod and Faora, of course, but also the fabulously-named Kru-El). The book helpfully includes a couple of pages of villain fact-files, which you are invited to turn to when the villain(s) first pop up in whatever narrative thread you’re following.
“FORTRESS FACT FILE #3 – FAORA HU-UL: This female Phantom Zone villainess is crazy! Her hatred of all mankind makes her the most dangerous of all the Phantom Zone foes! Do not approach Faora without a weapon, or you will have no chance of surviving!”
Well, sure, why not.
Hold on, only reading one line of narrative before writing this post doesn’t seem right. Let me go through again and see what happens. Be right back.
[TEMPUS FUGIT]
Okay, so this time Superman encounters a nine-foot-tall yellow monster wreaking havoc, and one thing leads to another, the monster tells Supes that he came to Earth to ask Superman for help, but the oxygen-rich atmosphere disoriented him and made him act all crazy ‘n’ such. He wants Superman to go back to his planet, but (turning to page 24) Superman decides to take him back to the Fortress of Solitude to run him through his super lie-detector to make sure it isn’t some kind of trap. Once there, the monster notices the Fortress Zoo and asks to see it. (Turning to page 34) Superman agrees, but while in the zoo, the dreaded Bravado Beast, who hates the color yellow, breaks free of its pen and charges at the monster, breaking cages and freeing other creatures in the process. The rampage continues into Superman’s Kryptonite storage room, which exposes some of the deadly rocks:
“‘Help me!” Superman shouts to the creature.
“‘I can’t!” the creature replies in terror. ‘The Bravado Beast has me in its clutches — and it won’t let go!”
“‘Then this,’ Superman gasps, ‘is…’
“THE END”
I’m a lousy Superman, it seems. Also, you can see the Bravado Beast itself in this article about Superman’s zoo.
One more point about this book…on the very first story page, Superman is referred to as “Earth’s Mightiest Mortal,” which I’m pretty sure was solely Captain Marvel’s tagline. That Superman, always horning in on Billy Batson’s action.
Perhaps you remember all the way back to Monday, when I was discussing the Superman Vs. Mongul trade paperback and its lamentable omission of the concluding chapter for a three-part Superman story from DC Comics Presents (which I confirmed, by the way, once I had the book in my hands on Tuesday while breaking down the latest Diamond shipment). Well, whilst perusing the Grand Comics Database to see if those stories had ever been reprinted under one cover (well, in color, anyway), I discovered the existence of this item:
There is a minor caveat, in that the reprintings of parts two and three omit the second page of each story, in that they were pages of exposition reminding readers what had occurred in the previous chapter(s). Here’s the second page of the third issue as an example:
But despite the loss of a couple of pages of Starlin art, it’s nice to know that the (mostly-)entire story from DC Comics Presents #27-#29 was collected together at some point in its own little package. But man, it would be worth owning for the cover alone. Just look at that thing.
EDIT 12/19: Bob has more to say about the production issues of this particular item in this post right here!
All I can figure is that they wanted to get all the issues out prior to Christmas, for some reason. Oh, and each issue has two covers, too, in case any retailers felt like taking away even more rack space from any other series that month, which, well, maybe I’ve answered my own question about why this happened.
Part of this demand is driven by the fact that comic fans just plain like Harley Quinn. She’s also one of those characters popular with our lady customers, who have been the primary source of those back issue sales. It was a fairly easy decision for me to order big numbers on that new Harley Quinn #0…and apparently not big enough, since I did end up selling out. Luckily it’s available for reorder, with my restock due on Wednesday, along with that #1 on which I also ordered even more copies.
The one thing that occurred to me to add to that discussion way after it was over was, again, that online response doesn’t always correspond to in-store sales behavior. DC’s New 52 may be the current online punching bag, maybe even deservedly so in some cases, but that doesn’t preclude the possibility that certain DC titles may be sales successes and enjoyed by fans.
All that being said…I read that #0 (where the majority of the book is single page gags drawn by an army of artists), and it was silly and fun, and maybe a little too heavy on the self-referential gags, but I realize that’s a feature, not a bug. Solicitations for future issues seem promising, and the creative team (as long as it holds) will certainly do good work, so I’m hoping this series will slake that Harley desire our customers have.
I expected some grumbling about the current costume design versus her classic look, but surprisingly that hasn’t been an issue. Also, in case you’re wondering, Suicide Squad, where she also appears, hasn’t been tearing up the racks, so it’s not like every Harley appearance = Big Sales. However, that recent Injustice: Gods Among Us annual featuring Harley vs. Lobo sure did well, much better than the actual Injustice title has been selling.
Of course, I haven’t seen the actual book yet, so maybe that was a typo in the solicitation information for Superman Vs. Mongul. If that turns out to be the case, well….
