This made me very happy. For those who don’t know, the GLI were originally the Great Lakes Avengers, an unlicensed, Milwaukee-based ripoff of Earth’s Mightiest Heroes who first appeared during John Byrne’s run on WEST COAST AVENGERS.
Featuring loser characters like Big Bertha, Doorman, Flatman, and Mr. Immortal, the GLA went on to ride the coattails of the Thunderbolts when the Avengers were presumed dead, appearing in the pages of DEADPOOL as the Lighting Rods. Dan Slott resurrected the gang for a four-issue miniseries in the wake of the AVENGERS: DISASSEMBLED crossover, appropriately titled GLA: MISASSEMBLED. By that series’ end, most of the team’s surviving members realized they were mutants, and the GLX (or, Great Lakes X-Men) were born. A GLX HOLIDAY SPECIAL followed, and then an appearance in CABLE/DEADPOOL during CIVIL WAR which saw the group sign up for Tony Stark’s Fifty States Initiative. Which, I believe, brings us up to speed with this extra-sized, extra-awesome one-shot. In the first story, drawn by Nelson (that guy’s gotta get a first name, pronto), Deadpool teams up with the newly-retitled Great Lakes Initiative to get to the bottom of a mysterious Inebriation Wave that has left most of Earth’s heroes drunk. This story felt a bit on the routine side, but it sets up the rest of this super-fun issue, which sees Deadpool refusing to leave the GLI’s cool new HQ, while Squirrel Girl breaks into Thunderbolts Mountain to try and talk some sense into her ex-boyfriend, Speedball (now the gritty hero known as Penance). Slott hilariously deflates CIVIL WAR and its fallout here as SG pokes holes in all of Penance’s post-CW motivations, and we are also introduced to the former Speedball’s updated sidekick—Niels, the Bouncing Cat, is now P-Cat, the Penitent Puss. Also, Deadpool and Big Bertha go on a date. Throw in a fun parody of the SOPRANOS finale, some great art by Kieron Dwyer, and guest villains like AIM and Dr. Doom, and you’ve got the perfect antidote to Marvel’s summer of Endangered World War Initiative Annihilation.
MARTHA WASHINGTON DIES
Okay, so this is probably the best thing Frank Miller has written in over a decade, but it still pretty much sucks. Martha Washington—the heroine from Miller and artist Dave Gibbons’ excellent GIVE ME LIBERTY mini—is now one hundred years old, and serving as the spiritual leader for some generic group of freedom fighters. She talks about when she went into space, says some inspiring words, and then dies, turning into fireworks and rallying the next generation to run into battle one last time. There. I just save you five minutes of your life and a couple of bucks to boot. To add insult to injury, there is an ad at the back for THE LIFE AND TIMES OF MARTHA WASHINGTON, an omnibus edition featuring the original miniseries and its sequels…and, presumably, this flimsy excuse for a story as well. If this had appeared as an extra in that forthcoming volume—you know, a cool little epilogue or something—it might have read a lot better than it did as a one-shot. Dave Gibbons lends his usual professional polish to the artwork, but it’s not enough to save it. At least there’s no gratuitous T and A here, and when’s the last time you could say that about a Frank Miller comic?
NEW AVENGERS
Okay, so Elektra turned out to be a Skrull, so now everyone’s pointing fingers at each other and saying that they could all be Skrulls in disguise. Whatever is being built up to here—next summer’s big crossover event, most likely—I’m already not liking it. It’s suspiciously similar to DC’s MILLENNIUM event in 1988, where we learned that Manhunter agents were walking among the DCU for years, often as brainwashed sleeper agents like Lana Lang and Commissioner Gordon. Also, it offers Marvel countless other ripoff opportunites, from paranoid classics like John Carpenter’s remake of THE THING to more timely favourites like Sci-Fi’s BATTLESTAR GALACTICA. And there’s always the quick continuity fixes the shape-changing Skrull solution offers: Iron Man’s acting like an asshole these days? Well, that’s ‘cause he was replaced by a Skrull years ago. Elektra should have stayed dead when Frank Miller killed her? She did, but a Skrull has been posing as her for decades. Captain America has been shot? No way, man, it was a Skrull who took the bullet! Most importantly, though, this issue shows us that Doctor Strange can’t use his magical powers to stop a light plane from falling out of the air, much less use his Cloak of Levitation to save himself from the crashing of said plane because, as he says, “My cloak won’t work under these conditions!” “Sorceror Supreme”, indeed. The fact that this character’s usage in NEW AVENGERS prevented us from getting another Brian K. Vaughan/Marcos Martin DOCTOR STRANGE miniseries makes me really, really upset. I bet Bendis and Quesada are Skrulls. That’s the only possible explanation.
FOURTH WORLD OMNIBUS, DEVIL DINOSAUR H/C
Man, is it ever a good time to be a Jack Kirby fan. Consigned to oblivion (or, at the very least, cheap looking black and white reprints) for far too long, the King of Comics has sent Marvel and DC into reprint overdrive lately. I’m not talking about his massive 1960s output at Marvel, of course—that stuff is always available in any number of formats—but his bizarre post-Marvel career which saw him defect to DC where he created his masterpiece, the Fourth World Saga, among other things…only to return to Marvel a few years later to take the reins of CAPTAIN AMERICA while launching few new books (and masterminding Marvel’s comic spin-off of 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY—his tabloid-sized adaptation of Kubrick’s film is absolutely essential). Over at DC, the KAMANDI Archive editions are running along smoothly, with two volumes available and probably about two more in the works. JIMMY OLSEN has been available in two paperback editions for a few years now, and CHALLENGERS OF THE UNKNOWN is offered in two Archives or one big, fat Showcase paperback. And now, Kirby’s Magnum Opus—the Fourth World saga, which spanned JIMMY OLSEN as well as NEW GODS, MISTER MIRACLE, and FOREVER PEOPLE—is being released in four hardcover volumes collectively titled JACK KIRBY’S FOURTH WORLD OMNIBUS.
The first of these books dropped a few weeks back, and a second one is due in August (Volume 3 hits later this year, and the final book will likely arrive in 2008). Not only is this a gorgeously designed prestige reprint for this important and influential work, but the stories have been arranged in the order they were released. This allows modern readers a chance to see Kirby’s epic unfold the way fans did when these much-misunderstood titles were first released. It even has a cool new intro by Grant Morrison! Let’s keep our fingers crossed for some form of OMAC or DEMON reprints next.Meanwhile, Marvel’s got most of Kirby’s 1970s material back in stores. His CAPTAIN AMERICA run is available in three trade paperbacks (one of which includes his tabloid-sized CAPTAIN AMERICA’S BICENTENNIAL BATTLES special), and two books contain his BLACK PANTHER storyline. THE ETERNALS was released a year or two back in a massive hardcover to coincide with Neil Gaiman’s new miniseries, and last week gave us the complete DEVIL DINOSAUR hardcover.
Still no word on MACHINE MAN (seems like the time to do that would have been during the character’s usage in NEXTWAVE, but whatever—I’m sure it’s in the works), and Marvel no longer has the rights to 2001, so who knows if that stuff will ever resurface (I certainly hope so—Kirby’s pseudo-sequel/anthology ongoing series is totally baffling, but shows the passion he had for the film’s evolutionary theme). Kirby’s1980s work is being collected as well—this week, Image released a SILVER STAR hardcover, and a DESTROYER DUCK collection is coming at some point. The new issue of TOYFARE unveiled unpainted prototypes of DC Direct action figures based on NEW GODS, closely modeled after Kirby’s artwork (I nearly barfed with joy when I saw these—can’t wait to see the finished products in April of next year). It seems that Kirby’s legacy is being acknowledged and celebrated all over the place these days, as it should be.So, why then, is DC killing off the New Gods? Hinted at in the pages of DC’s weekly COUNTDOWN series (the less-than-stellar follow-up to last year’s surprisingly decent 52), Jim Starlin is writing and drawing an eight-part series called THE DEATH OF THE NEW GODS whose plot should be fairly self-explanatory. Granted, these characters have been misused all over the place, and a lot of the themes and ideas Kirby introduced have been misunderstood and misrepresented many times over. But really, can’t you say that about pretty much every comics character who has been handled by more than one creator? Did John Broome and Gil Kane envision Green Lantern as a mass murderer? Did Stan Lee and Kirby see Iron Man becoming a tin-plated fascist? Probably not, but you don’t see anyone closing the doors on those character’s usage anytime soon.
Kirby intended the Fourth World Saga to be a complete story with a beginning, middle, and an end—a novel concept for comics in 1971, to be sure. Obviously, DC didn’t want the series to have a conclusion—even though they cancelled the titles early on, DC has made lots of use of the characters. Not only have they appeared in all kinds of later series (like the 1988 COSMIC ODYSSEY, and its subsequent Starlin-penned NEW GODS relaunch), but they’ve made their way into other media as well; Darkseid and his Elite formed a large portion of the 1980s SUPER POWERS toy line, and the Fourth World mythos played a major part in both the SUPERMAN and JUSTICE LEAGUE animated series from Warner Brothers. Kirby himself even returned to try and finish his epic a few times—first, in a new story published at the end of a series of early Eighties reprints of NEW GODS, which saw Orion die at Darkseid’s hand (obviously, this didn’t take), and later, in the HUNGER DOGS graphic novel, where the “lowlies” of Apokolips finally overthrew their cruel master (even this was undone in record time, since Darkseid was set up on Earth’s moon and plotting to re-conquer his world in a Kirby SUPER POWERS miniseries a few months later). Of all these scenarios, my probable favourite appeared in a deleted scene from Mark Waid and Alex Ross’s KINGDOME COME miniseries, which was thankfully restored for all the various collected editions that followed; we are told that, as prophesied, Orion and Darkseid met for one final battle in the firepits of Apokolips, and Orion destroyed his evil father once and for all. Unfortunately, the soul-crushed masses of Apokolips were in no shape to rule their own world, so Orion took the place of his father, eventually becoming a despotic ruler not much better than the one he replaced.
Where was I going with this again? Oh yeah—the point was, even Kirby was unable to end his series to his own satisfaction, and he tried to do it twice! The possible best conclusion to the saga is in an Elseworlds alternate future story. And the characters and mythology Kirby created in 1971 still resonate with possibility, as seen in Grant Morrison’s recent MISTER MIRACLE miniseries and on the excellent JUSTICE LEAGUE UNLIMITED cartoon. So really, putting an end to the NEW GODS saga now just seems like a big waste of time and energy, since it will likely be undone by another creator in a few years. I mean no offense to Jim Starlin with this—I’m sure he’s going in with the best intentions and everything, but c’mon; you’re messing with The King here.
…AND THE REST
It’s looking more and more like the best summer crossover of 2007 snuck under the radar, as the “Sinestro Corps War” storyline continues in GREEN LANTERN #21. Not a lot happens here, but that’s okay since things started off big in the SINESTRO CORPS special. Suffice it to say that the Green Lantern Corps appears to be well and truly screwed, and the three-issue hiatus Ivan Reis took has made his already-stellar work even better. GL is possibly the most dependable mainstream monthly DC produces, and it somehow keeps improving …MADMAN ATOMIC COMICS #3 continues with the trippy fun as Frank and his comic book idol, Mr. Excitement, wander through Frank’s subconscious in the styles of practically every famous comic artist under the sun. Maybe a bit self-indulgent on Allred’s part, but isn’t that the reason to do a creator-owned comic—to indulge your every favourite whim?…That whole “Superman is halting humanity’s progress, so Arion, Lord of Atlantis has to kill him” storyline is still going on in SUPERMAN #664. It doesn’t look like it’s going anywhere interesting, and it’s taking its sweet time getting there too, while Pacheco’s art continues to get weirder and uglier. What the hell happened to this guy?…NEXUS #99 might actually be a better introduction to the character and his universe than the Free Comic Book Day issue, which is weird, but there you go. Nexus’s lady Sundra is expecting their first child, and an army of crazy alien assassins wants to make sure the baby isn’t born. This is an exciting meld of SF and superheroics, with the amazing art of Steve Rude to make it go down even more smoothly…STEPHEN COLBERT’S TEK JANSEN #1 didn’t seem as funny to me as it should have been—I thought the novelty of his spacefaring, blowhard alter ego wore thin pretty early on, but my girlfriend Hillary loved it. Maybe it’s a better read for what my boss, Calum, calls “civilians”, and not us hardened comic book cynics. Still, though, why was this thing so damn late?
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