Category: comics

I’m still reading my way through old Legion of Super-Heroes issues and having a lot of fun with it.

I even went on Comixology and bought the tie-in Action/Superman issues for the big Superboy story. I’ll admit that it was just about as disappointing as I’d expected it to be, though there were some fun bits in it. The plot was obviously tossed together to reconcile Legion continuity with the (then) new status quo with Superman, and doesn’t really make any logical sense. (Then again, a lot of stuff in superhero comics doesn’t make much logical sense.) But it’s good to have finally read it, after seeing it referenced so often over the years.

I’m continuing to enjoy the trip down memory lane provided by the house ads, letters columns, and “Meanwhile” columns in these comics. (You don’t get any of that in the Comixology versions, so that’s one reason why it’s still cool to read the dead-tree back issues.) I just passed the point where DC was pushing Millennium and its umpteen crossover issues. I didn’t read Millennium when it came out, and I’ve never been tempted to pick up the back issues, but now I’m kind of curious. It doesn’t seem to be available on Comixology, and the collected edition isn’t currently in print (but it’s available used on Amazon). It seems to be one of those series that had a lot of hype, but it fizzled out pretty quickly. Maybe if I see it in somebody’s dollar box at a con, I’ll pick it up.

Meanwhile, I just picked up the second printing of the Rebirth Special, unfortunately now $5.99 instead of the original $2.99. I already read the digital version, but wanted to pick up a hard copy. I have a few of the recent “Rebirth” issues, but haven’t read any of them yet. Reaction to Rebirth seems to be mixed:

So overall, where is DC standing?  In a fog trying to get the comics closer to the tone and feel of 10 years ago, but still clinging to recent continuity.  Can they have their cake and eat it, too?

— from A Fix-Up, Not a Reboot: One Month into DC’s Rebirth

That article also mentions what I’d consider a nightmare scenario, though I admit it’s not entirely unlikely at this point: a “Justice League Vs. Watchmen” series. (Seriously, just leave Watchmen alone, please! It’s a great book and it should stand alone.)

I’d say that DC continuity at this point is so confusing that I’m best off just cherry-picking the stuff that gets good critical reaction, after it’s been published, in trade form or on Comixology, when it’s on sale. That’s what I’ve been doing with the New 52 stuff. I’ve read some of Snyder’s Batman, and some other stuff, and enjoyed it, but I really never wanted to get too caught up in the overall continuity.

Well, I got the news today that NYCC tickets are going on sale this Wednesday, at noon. It’s going to be “first come, first served,” so I guess I need to get in there early or miss out. With this year’s “fan verification” thing, I thought maybe they’d do something more interesting, but I guess not. You just need to click the link at the right time, and hope for the best.

San Diego always does their ticket sales on a Saturday, so I can just stay home and try to get tickets. Since NYCC is doing it on a weekday, I need to decide if I want to try for tickets on my phone or maybe bring my laptop to Starbucks at lunch time. (I’m pretty sure I won’t be able to get to the ticket site on my work PC, since we do some pretty serious web filtering on our network.) Or I guess I could take a vacation day, though that seems like going a bit too far.

I actually would like to go to NYCC this year, since I haven’t been to a big con in a few years. The last one was SDCC in 2012. And I’m starting to get more interested in what’s going on in comics right now, with Civil War II, DC’s Rebirth, and stuff like that. So I think it would be a lot of fun.

Quite some time ago, my brother Pat bought a big stack of Legion of Super-Heroes comics on eBay. Pat wasn’t a big comics fan, but occasionally he’d get the urge to read some goofy superhero comics, and he bought these on a lark. He bought a large chunk of the Paul Levitz run from the mid to late eighties. Specifically, the “Baxter paper” (aka volume 3) Legion book that started in 1984. (Remember when we used to all know the name brand of the paper that certain comics were printed on? No? Well, you’re not as old as I am, then.)

At some point, the comics got passed along to me. I had read a lot of earlier Levitz/Giffen Legion comics, including some of the earlier v. 3 issues. So there was some overlap with stuff that was already in my collection. But I’d stopped buying the Legion book in 1985 or 1986, and didn’t follow it regularly while I was in college. I left Pat’s Legion books sitting in a corner of my apartment gathering dust for quite a while. Eventually, I took them and cross-checked them against stuff I already owned, and eliminated the dups, selling those off on eBay. Then, I put the remaining issues at the bottom of my “to be read” stack, where they’ve been ever since.

Well, I finally decided to attack that pile of Legion comics today, and I’m glad I did. It’s bringing back a lot of memories. First, I’m glad to say that these books hold up pretty well, if you go into them with an open mind. Yes, some of the character names are goofy. (“Starfinger,” for instance.) And yes, the look of some of the characters is very 80s. But it’s all part of the charm. Paul Levitz manages to write stories with these characters that treat them with respect, and treat their history with respect, without it all becoming unintentionally funny. (Well, maybe it would be to some people, but not me.) The tone is just right.

The mid to late 80s were a really exciting time in comics. There are house ads for Watchmen and Batman: Year One in the back of these issues. Comic book sales were transitioning from primarily newsstand distribution to primarily direct sales (comic shop) distribution. Printing quality and technology were getting better and better. It’s fun to dip back into this era.

The Legion has gone through a ton of reboots and revisions over the years. I’ve read parts of various new versions, with mixed results, and the original Levitz run remains my favorite. I haven’t yet gotten to the storyline where they try to reconcile Superman’s revised post-Crisis continuity with Legion continuity, and I’m a little worried that it might really derail things. (But, hey, all good things must come to an end.)

Levitz came back for a new run, starting in 2010, and I also recently read the start of that run. Once I finish with the 1980’s stuff, I think I’ll go back and pick up the rest of the recent Levitz run. It’s pretty good, and you can tell that Levitz is enjoying himself. (Given Levitz’ previous position as President/Publisher at DC, I’m pretty sure he’s not doing this new freelance work for the paycheck. Rather, he’s doing it out of love.)

I’m reading a comic from 2010 and saw an ad for these. (More info here.)

I’m so disappointed. I’ve totally missed my chance to eat Flash Cakes and Green Lantern Glo-Balls. I wasn’t reading any regular monthly books in 2010, or really following comic news much, so I missed these entirely.

It’s probably for the best. Hostess cupcakes aren’t good for you and they have a lot of calories, right?

Convergence by Jeff King
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Hmm, this one definitely has a lot of flaws, but I had fun reading it. It’s a giant multiverse-spanning event comic, where the main heroes are… some folks from the New 52 Earth-Two comic, I think? So maybe you’d really like this if you’d read that comic, and had some emotional investment in those characters. Personally, I had no clue, so I wasn’t as invested in the fate of these characters as I could have been.

One of things that made me curious about this, initially, is that I saw Mike Grell’s Warlord on the cover of one of the issues. It turns out that Warlord (and his supporting characters) play a surprisingly large role in this book. (I’ve really got a soft spot in my heart for Warlord, since I read his comic when I was a D&D-obsessed teenager, and Warlord was the perfect character for a suburban NJ teenage D&D nut.)

The art on this book is good, but very busy. Lots of two-page spreads with dozens of characters hitting each other. But that’s what you expect from a book like this. The book was originally released weekly, so it’s “art by committee.” Good, but in a generic way. (With some Andy Kubert art in one issue that stands out as better than the rest, in my opinion.)

So, if you’re looking for a big, splashy, event book, here it is. It’s fun to read, reasonably well-written, and reasonably well-drawn.

View all my reviews

I’ve been reading a lot of comic books lately. (I’ve noticed that I go through phases with my reading; sometimes it’s a lot of comics, sometimes mystery novels, sometimes New Yorker articles, and so on. Right now it’s comics. But I digress.)

Marvel and Comixology ran a promotion a few years ago where they gave away a whole bunch of #1 issues, and I snagged about 200 individual issues from that. I’ve dipped into them occasionally, but recently I’ve been reading a lot of them. (For a while, it was hard to keep track of which of these I’d read and which I hadn’t, but I’m now using the new “archive” feature in Comixology to remove the ones I’ve read from my library.) Most recently, I read quite a few X-Men issues. It’s a weird experience, just reading a bunch of #1 issues from various X-Men series and mini-series, outside of any particular context. My main takeaway from that is that X-Men continuity is so convoluted that there’s really no point in paying attention to it at all. You really need to not think about it, and just take any individual story on its own merits.

This article about Brian Bendis’ All-New X-Men title is a great example of how insane it is to try to make sense of X-Men continuity. This is the series where Bendis brought the original young X-Men from the past into the present, where they (apparently) coexist with their present-day selves. (My head hurts.)

DC isn’t much better, of course. I recently read the new Rebirth Special, and, while it’s pretty well done, I think it would be impenetrable to someone who hasn’t followed DC continuity for years. I also recently read Ambush Bug: Year None, which (though it’s almost a decade old now) works surprisingly well as a companion to the Rebirth Special. (And makes almost as much sense as some of DC’s and Marvel’s recent output…)

I also have a few issues of Convergence in my reading pile, which was one of last year’s big “event” comics from DC. I picked them up on a whim, and they’ve just sat in the pile for the last year. I may move them to the top of the pile, since I seem to be in the right mood for this kind of story right now. If they’re any good, I suppose I’ll pick up the trade so I can read the rest of the story.

And I also intend on reading Grant Morrison’s Multiversity at some point, but I think that one’s going to be a doozy, so I’m not in any hurry to pick that up.

I will also admit to being curious about Civil War II. I picked up issues zero and one at the comics shop, and I’ll probably read them soon. I don’t know if I’ll convince myself to pick up the remaining issues as they come out, but if it’s good, I’ll at least pick up the trade when it’s released.

Whew. I can already see the point, two or three months from now, where I get tired of reading about guys in spandex hitting each other and switch back to reading Agatha Christie novels or something like that.

When I was a kid, the thought that, someday, plot developments in Marvel and DC comics would be discussed in the New York Times would have seemed completely ludicrous. Yet here we are. Not only do we have a Times article discussing two comic books that were released just yesterday, but it’s also giving away major plot points that I’d rather not have known until I had a chance to read the comics in question.

Reddit’s /r/comicbooks is trying not to give anything away to anyone that hasn’t read the books yet. I’m used to being careful on Reddit (and CBR and Newsarama and Bleeding Cool and so on), but do I really need to avoid reading the NY Times right after a big Marvel or DC event comic comes out? (And apparently I need to avoid the WSJ too!)

I wasn’t planning on picking up the new Captain America series anyway, so I’m not really bothered by the spoiler on that one. In fact, it’s made me even less likely to pick it up, so I’m kind of glad about that.

But I was actually planning on picking up Rebirth. I still will, of course. I’m not sure if I’m really in favor of the particular plot development in question, but it’s interesting enough that I’d like to read the book. (Note that I mentioned the plot point here without actually spoiling it…)