Yes, I used the word “elements” intentionally.

filed under Categories firestorm 7 Comments

So I finally picked up for myself that Firestorm The Nuclear Man trade paperback DC Comics released several months ago. Normally, I don’t tend to buy reprints of material I already own (my…um, dozen or so versions of House of Secrets #92 notwithstanding), but I was in the mood to read a little somethin’ archival, and Firestorm is one of my favorite superhero series, and the trade’s cover is pretty sharp-looking, and I’d like to have these stories printed on nice white paper.

It’s fun stuff, a little rough around the edges and maybe trying a little too hard to push the Spider-Man formula of “put-upon high schooler is also an awesome superhero,” but still an entertaining read that has aged reasonably well. With a new Firestorm series heading our way this week, it’s nice to look back at where the character began.

For instance, I’d forgotten just how callous Ronnie Raymond (one half of Firestorm’s alter egos) was to Professor Martin Stein (the other half). When merged together as Firestorm, Stein was the disembodied voice who advised Ronnie, who was in control of their physical form. However, when the two would split apart into their civilian identities, Stein wouldn’t remember his time as part of Firestorm, attributing his time-loss to blackouts and such. And, of course, this leads to all kinds of personal and professional problems for Stein, which Ronnie just kind of brushes off with an “ah, well…it sure is great to be a superhero!”

I know this is eventually resolved…in the second Firestorm series from the 1980s, Stein is aware of his dual life, but…I don’t recall exactly when or how this is resolved. It used to be I had these comics pretty much memorized, but it’s finally to the point where it’s been so long since I’ve last read them, they’re almost like new to me again. At least, in terms of specific plot points, since, as I described, I remember general things about the series and characters. Anyway, I thought that was a neat twist for a superhero…not just having two different people squeezed together to form one hero, but by having one of them not remember his superhero life, and the other not have enough of sense of responsibility to realize what he’s doing to his “partner.”

The other aspect of this series that I enjoy is the reversal of the typical “jock versus nerd” conflict, where Raymond (a member of the school’s basketball team) is constantly harassed by Cliff Carmichael, the school brain. I’ve written about Cliff before, and…man, I kinda miss that particular conflict. I seem to recall a time or two where Cliff and Ronnie actually, if briefly, get along, which was a nice touch, adding a little extra dimension to the typical high-school rivalry proceedings. But, like I said in that previous post, Cliff ends up becoming a supervillain or something and it always struck me as an unsatisfying closure to what was a (relatively-speaking) normal adversarial relationship.

But, back to specifically discussing this trade paperback: it also includes a story intended for the original series but never published, save for the copyright-establishing-but-not-intended-for-general-distribution Cancelled Comic Cavalcade. Or, as the trade’s back cover would have it:


Sigh.

Anyway, the story is presented in black and white, and features plot elements that, if my aging and increasingly unreliable memory serves me, were repurposed into the Firestorm back-ups that ran in Flash. (Some of the back-ups are reprinted in this book as well, but not the ones I’m thinking of, it seems.)

Also, the “next issue” blurb at the end of the sorta-unpublished issue #6 promises the appearance of “The Reptile Man.” I was going to say the Reptile Man never did appear, but a quick Googling pulls up this Firestorm Fan Page, which (along with a couple of Al Milgrom’s pages for #7) links to an audio interview with Firestorm cocreator Gerry Conway and states the Reptile Man eventually became Batman villain Killer Croc. Huh. (Also, I would have sworn on a copy of DC Comics’ The Bible treasury edition that Killer Croc predated Firestorm…but nope, first appeared in ’83.)

So that’s a lot of words just to say “I like Firestorm,” but hey, I do. And I’m hoping I’ll enjoy this new series as well. And with any luck we’ll see more Firestorm paperbacks…I think some of Pat Broderick’s best work was on those early issues of Firestorm’s 1980s revival, and I’d like to see that art on paper that isn’t thirty-year-old decaying newsprint, for the sake of my forty-two-year-old decaying eyesight.

And then there was the time sarcastic time-traveling Clark Kent got put in his place.

filed under Categories pal plugging, superman, swamp thing 6 Comments

from DC Comics Presents #26 (May 1984) by Mark Evanier, Irv Novick & Dennis Jensen


• • •

In other news:

  • That Chris Sims, he’s got more free comics for you to read: The Hard Ones, with cowriter Chad Bowers and artist Rusty Shackles, is available right here for free download!

  • It’s not often I see Swamp Thing on Yahoo’s front page:


    …but hey, there he is.

    It’s a story celebrating both Heather Locklear’s 50th birthday, as well as her…colorful film career. It refers to her part in 1989’s Return of the Swamp Thing as “her first awful film role,” and I can only assume that was a typo, and they actually meant “awe-inspiring.”

Artsy things pals are doing.

filed under Categories pal plugging, sir-links-a-lot 2 Comments

 

No, seriously, you need at LEAST three copies.

filed under Categories fakeapstylebook, question time, self-promotion 12 Comments

So, yeah, sorry about that post yesterday. I really meant to keep it short, honest, but, you know, get me talking about Swamp Thing, and look what happens. But at least I do it here, where you all have avenues of escape, and not at the store, where I could possibly corner some poor bastard and discuss Patchwork Man continuity for half an hour.

I answered a couple of questions in yesterday’s comments already, but let me address a couple more here today:

Dwayne the Canoe Guy asks:

“I saw today that Tamga.com is selling a discount subscription to Swamp Thing and recently featured Justice League. Tanga normally discounts boardgames & novelty electronics. Does this discounting indicate that DC is desperate?”

I’d say the fact that DC restarted all their books with new #1s was already a pretty good sign of desperation. But no, offering cheap subscriptions to comics on a discount deal site sounds more like loss-leading promotion than “oh dear God someone please buy our comics.” It’s just another venue to hawk their wares, rather than just pushing their offerings through the usual places.

eee-gah wants to know, in response to my slightly snarky comment about blood ‘n’ guts in DC’s superhero books:

“Has anyone ever complained to you at the shop about the level of gore in a random DC book?”

No, not really “complained” as such. The few people who have noted it usually do so with a sense of…bemusement. Like, “oh, look what DC did THIS time.” But I haven’t had any angry parents stomp into the store and gripe that their precious Little Billy picked up a copy of Teen Titans: Risk – A Call to Arms #1 and was offended by all the violence therein. But I have had a parent complain about Lesbian Batwoman, so I guess I know where the lines are drawn in our neighborhood.

Also…it’s been a while since this happened, but I always like to mention that one mother who complained that the Spider-Man comics her son was reading were “too sexy.” Specifically, the Steve Ditko Spider-Man comics her son was reading in reprints. That’s probably the one and only time that particular complaint was leveled at Ditko’s Spidey.

• • •

Okay, so you’ve read Fake AP Stylebook, you’ve bought your mandatory three copies per household of the Fake AP Stylebook book Write More Good, and maybe some of you are following our lonely, lonely Twitter feed The Content Farm. Now, The Bureau Chiefs bring you…Fake Pew Research, featuring improbable statistics for an intractable society.

Anyway, as pal Dave L. so accurately puts it, it’s just another goofy thing we’re doing to make each other laugh, and hopefully it’ll make some of you laugh too.

I really didn’t mean for this Swamp Thing post to go on for this long.

filed under Categories swamp thing 11 Comments

Note: post contains spoilers for the ending of Brightest Day, in case you haven’t read it yet.

So to the surprise of absolutely no one, I have a Google alert set up for any occurrences of the phrase “Swamp Thing” that should come along. And, in my feed reader one day, I happened to spot a tantalizing excerpt from an article entitled “Should I pick up the Relaunch Issue 1 of Swamp Thing?” but when I clicked to read the whole thing, it had already been deleted.

However, thanks to the wonders of the Google Cache, I managed to recover it (pardon the highlighted words…those are the search terms I used to track down this article):


I realize the new Swamp Thing #1 has already come and gone, but a second print is on the way, so if this person passed the first time, maybe he has a second chance. I also realize this person is an…Enthusiastic Capitalizer of Words, but, you know, me too, so Who Am I to Judge?

Let’s try to answer this person’s query:

First off, my friend, Swamp Thing’s status as a White Lantern is likely limited to just the Brightest Day series itself, along with tie-ins books such as the Green Arrow issues you mentioned. If you are looking for “The Further Adventures of White Lantern Swamp Thing,” that’s likely not to happen. The Brightest Day/White Lantern stuff was the method by which Swamp Thing was reintroduced to the current DC Universe, and not intended as an ongoing part of the character.

…I mean, as far as I can determine. You can never tell if, one day, someone at DC decides we need to see “The Return of White Lantern Swamp Thing!” and lo, there he is, fighting Dex-Starr or whatever. But it doesn’t seem likely.

Next you say that you hate “horror films and comics.” Unfortunately, if that’s the case then Swamp Thing may not be your cup of tea, as it’s definitely headed in a horror direction. However, as the series is being published as part of DC’s standard superhero universe, the blood and gore and eviscerations will probably be kept to a minimum, if that’s the concern. (They tend to save that for the more traditional superhero series.) It will still be a horror book, however, with weird monsters and creepiness and suspense and all that jazz, so if that’s not your thing, well…it’s not your thing, I guess.

Swamp Thing himself is not an evil creature who goes around killing people and being scary…I mean, not usually. He’s certainly not evil. Sometimes he kills people, but usually only if they have it comin’…you know, like Wolverine.

The comparison between Godzilla and Swamp Thing as “forces of nature” is an interesting one, as Godzilla is sometimes considered an allegory for atomic weaponry and warfare, and Swamp Thing can been seen as…the environment rising up against those who did it wrong, I guess? I mean, that’s not all Swamp Thing was (especially at the beginning), but that was part of it. Also, noted Swamp Thing scribe Alan Moore once drew Godzilla and it was awesome.

But while Swamp Thing is a force of nature “you don’t screw with,” he usually doesn’t go looking for things to avenge…mostly he just wants to live in peace, but (and it’d be a boring comic if he didn’t do this once in a while) is willing to open up a can of whupass when necessary.

A significant amount of the multiple previous series have also involved a great deal of introspection, pondering the nature of existence, the evils that men do, that sort of thing, so it isn’t just monsters punching monsters.

What I guess I’m trying to say is that the Swamp Thing series encompasses a lot of styles and genres, mostly seen through a horror filter. And a lot of the time, that filter isn’t necessarily “look how scary this is…BOO! Gotcha!” but “let’s look at this thing a little differently than what you’re used to” – which, for a lot of superhero fans, was used to disturbing fashion on DC’s established characters, caped and otherwise. And for those fans, this is part of the big deal of getting Swamp Thing back into play in the regular DC Universe…an opportunity for that filter to be turned on superheroes again.

Which brings us to your last point, about the series being a “reboot.” It’s not so much a reboot, as Swamp Thing’s past history still seemed to have happened. But it is a reboot of the character’s status quo. Lemme ‘splain.

When Swamp Thing was first introduced in the 1970s, the premise was that Dr. Alec Holland, a biochemist, was caught in an explosion where his body was doused with his bio-restorative formula (designed to accelerate plant growth)…and when he dove aflame into the swamp, that formula mixed with the plant life there turned Holland into that muck-encrusted mockery of a man we all know and love. Holland was a human trapped in the body of a monster.

In the 1980s, Alan Moore explained that, no, Holland actually died in the explosion, and what arose was plant life, infected by the formula, that somehow absorbed a copy of Holland’s memories, and wasn’t Holland himself. And then there was a bunch of “Swamp Thing is the latest in a long line of Earth Elementals” stuff, where it’s established that the Earth Elementals always took their mental templates from other beings, without actually being them.

And now, in Brightest Day, we had the elemental force of Swamp Thing running amuck, possessed by the Black Lantern power. The solution from the White Lantern was to bring the long-dead Holland back to life, and use him to reestablish his personality in Swamp Thing.

So here’s the reboot part…it seems like, in this new series, we’re going to be back to the “Holland is still alive trapped in a monstrous body” status for Swamp Thing. But, as the series starts, Holland and Swamp Thing are still two separate beings (which is a bit weird, because it sure looked to me like the two were reintegrated at the end of Brightest Day…I’m assuming an explanation is forthcoming).

Those last three paragraphs are pretty much all you need to know about Swamp Thing before getting into this new series. You said you don’t like horror, so I don’t know why you’re even considering picking up a title that is traditionally a horror comic…but this new series is off to a good start. Scott Snyder and Yanick Paquette are doing a great job, from the one issue I’ve seen, and if you want an off-kilter look at the DC Universe, it appears that this series may be following in the previous Swamp Thing series’ footsteps in this regard as well.

In conclusion…yes, you should buy this comic. It’s a good’un, and if you don’t like horror now, maybe it’ll change your mind. Plus, the more readers this book has, the more likely it will continue to be published, which will make me happy. You want me to be happy, don’t you?

…So, who was surprised by my ultimate answer to this fella?

…Anyone still reading? Hello?

You may now refer to me as “The Ever-Lovin’ Gray-Haired Mike.”

filed under Categories sir-links-a-lot, the thing, this week's comics 5 Comments

The fact that there isn’t an ongoing Thing solo series with this exact title and logo:


…is a sad indication of our failure as a culture. How could a comic titled The Ever-Lovin’ Blue-Eyed Thing not sell like gangbusters?

Also, said theoretical The Ever-Lovin’ Blue-Eyed Thing logo would require that pic of the Thing in a circle just to the left of it at all times.

image from Marvel Two-in-One Annual #1 (1976)

• • •

In other news:

  • I never got around to reviewing my picks from last week’s New DC #1 haul, but thankfully pal Dorian did. Dor points out something about Mr. Terrific’s name that…I hadn’t really considered. Hmm.

    In case you were wondering: I picked up Batwoman, Frankenstein: Agent of S.H.A.D.E., Green Lantern, Red Lanterns, and Demon Knights. Will be back for second issues on all these. Tried Mr. Terrific, but didn’t do anything for me, sadly.

  • Tony Isabella presents six-part behind-the-scenes look at an Ant-Man story he did with Steve Ditko, beginning with the introduction here and the first page of the story (including original Ditko pencils!) here.

    Also, at the end of this post, Mr. Isabella expands on a comment he left here, lamenting the lack of a creator credit for Jack Kirby in the new Omac series. I hadn’t noticed that lack of a credit, so shame on me for that. Another person noted that Kirby did get a credit in Demon Knights, so hopefully the same will pop up soon in Omac.

  • Bully, the Post-Flashpoint Little Stuffed Bull with an All-New Costume and Origin, details all those other changes made to the DC Universe you might have missed.

I am delicately resting my chin on the edges of several backing boards…no comics were harmed.

filed under Categories retailing 10 Comments


Photo taken by Employee Aaron’s wife Kempo late last Tuesday night, after I’d finished breaking down the comic order and pulling for the comic savers. I was one pooped funnybook peddler.

About that sign: this pic was taken from behind the counter, and employees kept stacking stuff that wasn’t tired comic shop managers on top of those back issue boxes. Of course, the sign has been torn a time or two, almost solely by me as I keep moving boxes around from the other side of the counter and forgetting that sign is taped up there. And when I posed for that pic, I forgot the sign had come loose again…but it matched pretty much how I felt, so I let it be.

I shared this image with pal Andrew earlier today, and he sent this back to me:


Yeah, that’s about right.

Also, in the upper left side of the photo, right there next to the doorway?


I know, it’s hard to see…but that’s totally a Scarlet Spider cut-out that I’ve had posted on the store wall since whenever that Scarlet Spider business was originally happening. In fact, there was a store move in the middle of that period of time…it was on the wall in the old store, I took it down when we moved, and I put it up in the new store. …Because it makes me laugh, that’s why.