I did this before.

Halfway through this book, it started to feel awfully familiar, and so I committed the sin we all do these days: I googled myself.

And so I found that I covered this book with a mouthful of a title, Astro City: The Dark Age, Vol. 1: Brothers & Other Strangers , in my Book-a-Day run back in 2010, where I was not entirely positive .

I’ll try to say different things about this superheroes-done-right comic this time out, though I find that I’m less and less in sympathy with the idea of doing superheroes right every year. Kurt Busiek is a skillful writer who knows superhero universes inside and out, and Brent Eric Anderson is a great artist with superb page layouts and great action. But why do they waste those obvious talents on this third-hand tripe?

Now, it’s reductive and wrong to turn Astro City into a game of who-is-this-really? — The First Family is not actually the Fantastic Four, the Apollo Eleven are only vaguely X-Men-ish, and the Honor Guard are neither the JLA nor the Avengers — but they’re all generic and dull in their own ways, all standard superhero furniture under new names and with costumes designed with far too much care to look authentic to the era Busiek and Anderson want to religiously recreate.

The whole point of Astro City is to validate and nurture the nostalgic identification far too many comics fans have with the childish entertainments of their youth (or, even more these days, other people’s youth), by creating a unified, not-as-embarrassing version of those stories to be loved. If it didn’t rhyme with the real comic-book 1970s — if it didn’t make comic readers want to play this “who is this really” game — then it would have failed at what it set out to do. Even worse, this is explicitly the story about the era when “normal people” lost faith in superheroes — which they were totally wrong to do, since superheroes are by definition better and smarter than normal people, and thus the natural lords of all creation — and how mopey they were for a while until they just let the Ubermenschen do whatever they want again. (This is barely subtext: it’s right there on the surface.)

I’ve never read the second half of the Dark Age story: I probably never will. But, from the hints here, I think there’s some Reaganite bullshit “morning in America” where we all let superheroes be awesome and perfect again coming for the climax of that story. I’m sure Busiek and Anderson made it plausible. I don’t want to know.

Everything I said eight years ago is still true: this is a world ostensibly about normal people, but where only superheroes matter. Only what superheroes does affect anything. Only superheroes change the world. Everything important has a super-person behind it, every time. Everyone else are just sheep, usually with a wrong-headed view of things and always three steps behind.

There are no Astro City stories about Joe Schlabotnik, who helped foil the Counter-Earth invasion of the Solarians. Katie Random did not give vital aid to the Superior Heroes when Lord Evilocity brought hell to earth. Astro City is about what being a mere human is like in a world where mere humans don’t matter. All human beings do is run away, hide, and get in the way. Oh, and get killed — probably in vast numbers. Let’s not forget that.

If real superbeings actually existed in our world, we would all be on the side of whatever draconian Registration Act was proposed: they’re violent, uncontrolled, compulsive law-breakers who destroy nearly everything they touch. Their only positive feature is that the “villains” are even worse. All superhero universes are crapsack universes; we just like to ignore that because we focus on the aristocrats. Astro City pretends otherwise, but it really shows how horrible a life in such a universe must be.

Reposted from The Antick Musings of G.B.H. Hornswoggler, Gent.

Look, I don’t think I can describe it better than I did a couple of weeks ago when this book entered my house, so let me quote myself:

Twenty years or so ago, everything in corporate comics had to be an event. (Not all that different from now, then!) The Vertigo “line” at DC was actually a bunch of entirely separate comics with a rough shared audience and stance, but they had to have a big Event in their annuals (which they also had to have) in 1993. It was called The Children’s Crusade, and there were bookend standalone comics that the various individual comics’ annuals slotted in between, more or less. It was not the most successful experiment. After a couple of decades, though, someone at DC realized they had a couple of issues written or co-written by [Neil] Gaiman that were sitting uncollected and not making them any money. So they commissioned a new team (Toby Litt and Peter Gross) to create a new middle, and then put out the end product as a book with a new Gaiman introduction. I can’t imagine it all comes together well, but I’m fascinated to see just how jury-rigged and bizarre it is.

This book is the result. It starts out with The Children’s Crusade #1, a comic written by Neil Gaiman, pencilled by Chris Bachalo, inked by Mike Barreiro, and colored by Daniel Vozzo in 1993. The middle was created in about 2014-15, and was written by Toby Litt (and, in smaller letters for no stated reason, Rachel Pollack), drawn by Peter Gross (and, in smaller letters, Al Davidson), and colored by Jeanne McGee. The end is 1994’s second issue of The Children’s Crusade, possibly somewhat altered to appear here, written by Gaiman, Alisa Kwitney, Jamie Delano and Toby Litt; drawn by Peter Snejberg and Peter Gross; and colored by Daniel Vozzo and Jeanne McGee. Explaining all of the above, in a more positive and optimistic light, is a new introduction by Gaiman

OK. The good news is that Vozzo and McGee colored the whole thing between the two of them, giving it some visual consistency that way. The third section, though, does see-saw back and forth between the Snejberg pages and the Gross pages, which look very different. And that third section does contain rather more plot and action — as Gaiman notes in that introduction — than it’s really able to hold together.

First it was an interesting idea that didn’t quite come together. Then it was an opportunity to salvage that idea into a book that could continue to make money for DC Comics, and, maybe, for the contributors. That got us Free Country: A Tale of the Children’s Crusade in 2015.

(And the cynic in me wonders if this came to being then largely because Karen Berger left DC and Vertigo in 2013, leaving the Powers That Be to cast around for easy ways to keep exploiting the properties she’d midwifed over a long career there.)

Someone noticed that all of the Vertigo comics of that era had child characters — Tefe, the daughter of Swamp Thing; Maxine, the then-budding goddess and daughter of Animal Man; Dorothy Spinner, an actual full member of Doom Patrol; Suzy, the young Black Orchid; Tim Hunter, whose series Books of Magic had not actually gotten started yet; and, representing Sandman, the two Dead Boy Detectives, Charles Rowland and Edwin Paine.

Well, I say “all.” Gaiman said “all” in his introduction. I trusted him, but then I checked.

That list of Vertigo titles ignores Hellblazer, then Vertigo’s second-biggest seller. And Shade the Changing Man, another strong title that was subsumed into the Vertigo launch earlier in 1993. And Kid Eternity, one of the initial launch titles. I’ll ignore the 1993 and 1994 Vertigo mini-series like Enigma and Sebastian O, since those wouldn’t make sense in a crossover. And Sandman Mystery Theater was set fifty-plus years earlier…but it crossed over with other titles at the time and later.

So not so much “all” as “all of the creators DC could cajole or demand to do it.”

Anyway, the story was that first all of the children from one small English village disappeared, and then, at an increasing rate, children all over the world. We the readers quickly learn that they were spirited away to an other-dimensional land called Free Country, ruled by a cabal that seem like they should all be familiar from other stories but aren’t, quite. There, the children will live forever in childlike splendor, never to grow up. We are given to believe that this may not entirely be a good thing, and that there may be sinister hidden reasons behind this plot.

The Dead Boy Detectives were hired to investigate the initial disappearance, and the other five main characters (Tefe, Maxine, Dorothy, Suzy, and Tim) were the special super children who had to be lured to the place the other kids went to make the secret plot — for there always much be a secret plot — work. The first issue sets it all up and sends the DBDs out looking, the middle replaces all of those issues where the individual kids made their ways to Free Country (and, in some cases, left again), and the last issue gets the DBDs to Free Country to finish up everything eventually after many more very plotty pages.

It’s still pretty much a mess here, even with all of the extraneous middle from all of the other annuals left out. And it’s annoying that most of the “special” kids are girls, but that none of the girls are allowed to be active or particularly heroic. Instead, the boys save them, as always — how boring.

Free Country has some nice bits, and it’s a fun time capsule of the very early days of Vertigo, when it was the oddball corner of the DC Universe. But it does not hold together all that well as a story, lurching around almost randomly among the too many things it’s trying to keep track of. But it made some money for DC at the time and then again in 2015, which I have to imagine was the whole point of the thing.

Reposted from The Antick Musings of G.B.H. Hornswoggler, Gent.

I’ve stopped reading the letter columns entirely at this point. Sorry, Ryan and Erica, but they don’t make much sense in a collection to begin with, and I don’t really care to see lots of stories about your young fans, cute though they may be. For what it’s worth, I do glance at the pictures to see various people’s cute daughters dressed up in homemade Squirrel Girl costumes, and I love that that is a thing that happens in the world.

But I’m here for the stories, so I’ll focus on that. I hope you understand.

Here in the fourth volume — under the run-on title The Unbeatable Squirrel Girl, Vol. 4: I Kissed a Squirrel and I Liked It — I started to realize that this is more obviously an all-ages comic than I’d pigeonholed it as. (Marvel has been running so hard in the opposite direction for so long — making everything grimmer and grittier and darker and so much more the kind of “adult” that appeals to grumpy twentysomething men — that I assume they’ve entirely forgotten that children, and particularly girls, even exist.) But writer Ryan North and artist Erica Henderson have snuck a girl-positive, female-centric comic into a quirky little corner of the Marvel Universe, and hooray to them for that.

(See my posts on the first three volumes, if you care — one and two and three .)

I realized that because this is the collection of stories all about the love life of Doreen Green, our titular Squirrel Girl. No, she doesn’t meet someone who she falls in love with — though the reverse is true, mostly because she’s polite and pleasant in ways that person is not used to — but she does decide to start dating in the middle of this run of issues, mostly because she’s never done it before and thinks dating is something a college girl should do at least a little.

Her love life is shown in an entirely all-ages-appropriate way, pitched in a tone even those elementary school girls in hand-made costumes will understand and enjoy. She has the obligatory montage of bad dates, which is amusing but much like every other obligatory montage of bad dates. And there’s the aforementioned person who falls in love with her because she apologizes for things and doesn’t immediately turn to punching as a solution to conflict, unlike every other human being in the Marvel Universe. (Which provides a lesson to those girls, who may have similar people in their lives who need to be told firmly that she is not interested in them.)

Doreen does somewhat damage her series title in this volume, taking a dive in a fight. I admit, it’s for a very good reason, but, still, it tends to make “unbeatable” less true. On the other hand, the whole point of this version of Squirrel Girl is that she’s Unbeatable because she’s not someone who turns to fighting as a first resort. Sure, her motto is “eat nuts and kick butts,” and every costumed person in the MU is quite fond of punching, but she’s about as pacifist as it’s possible for a human being in a costume in Marvel NYC, always looking for another solution to every problem.

North and Henderson also continue to teach random computer-science concepts to their audience, which, again, makes more sense the more you realize that audience is largely young girls.

Kissed a Squirrel is really just a specific case of the general rule: everything becomes more like itself as it goes on, focusing down on the central, intrinsic elements and pushing aside the less important stuff. I suspect at some point Unbeatable Squirrel Girl will speciate enough that I’m not longer a good reader for it, and I’ll stop reading it then. But we’re not to that point yet: this may be mostly for smart girls and their parents, but there’s still room for the rest of us. I hope it stays that way for a good long time.

Reposted from The Antick Musings of G.B.H. Hornswoggler, Gent.

Punk is one of the greatest impulses of humanity: that “oh, fuck it” sense of just getting out there and doing the thing even if you don’t know how. Making noise or art or both, getting out there in public and maybe making a fool of yourself and definitely not caring.

(Maybe I admire it since it’s so opposite to who I am, but that’s a different point.)

Tank Girl is one of the great punk comics — probably the greatest. (I’m trying to think of other examples — early Flaming Carrot is the other major one for me, but Tank Girl mainlined punk attitude in the story as well as embodying it in the style.)

Jamie Hewlett wanted to make some comics. He had a chance to get them published. And he had a random character — well, really, just a name — that amused him. So he drew some damn comics, and dragged his friend in Alan Martin to do the lettering and (eventually) most of the writing. That is punk.

Tank Girl, Vol. 1 reprints that first burst of stories, which originally appeared mostly in Deadline magazine in the late ’80s and turned into a book around 1990. This particular edition is from Titan Books, from 2002, so it has historical introductions from both Hewlett and Martin — but it has been, in its turn, superseded by a newer “remastered” edition from 2009.

These stories have very little continuity: each one is what Hewlett (or, maybe, later on, Martin) wanted to do that particular month, and, from their accounts, the stories were mostly started and completed at great speed right at deadline time. So they start from the same point, with a heroine who is a loud, raucous, hard-drinking soldier (??) in a mildly apocalyptic version of the Australian outback, and then head off in whatever direction for the five or eight or twelve pages they had that issue at high speed, only to crash at the end. Details accumulate, like Tank Girl’s sapient kangaroo boyfriend Booga and her counterparts/friends Jet Girl and Sub Girl, but stories don’t lead from one to the next or connect directly.

Tank Girl is punk. Each story is a separate three-minute single. You’re not getting some prog-rock arty-farty rock opera here. If you’re not comfortable with that, Tank Girl is not the comic for you.

I love the energy and enthusiasm and raw power of these early stories, even if I have to squint to read some of the lettering before Martin took over. (And even if the first few stories tend to flail around semi-randomly before stopping at the end of their page count.) I see that various folks including either Hewlett or Martin kept doing Tank Girl stories after I stopped paying attention — I think I drifted away around the time of the horrifically bad movie — so I might have to catch up, to see what punk did when it grew up this time.

Reposted from The Antick Musings of G.B.H. Hornswoggler, Gent.