DC Retroactive: The 1990s

When the DC Retroactive comics were announced, I was pretty excited. It sure did sound like a great idea to reunite creators to tell “one last story” within the framework they provided for a given era. Then they started rolling out at $5 a pop. It’s certainly a reasonable price, since each of these books is both a new 20 plus page story with a bonus reprint from the creators’ original run. I thought I would be grabbing some of the 70s and 80s era comics, but I wound up having a hard time justifying spending the $5 to get a new story and a reprint of something I already had kicking around in the collection.   So I thought the only one I would wind up with was the 90s Batman, which I had been very eagerly awaiting, given my love for Grant and Breyfogle Batman stories. 

But I wound up with four of the 90s books and I really enjoyed them! Full disclosure: I loved these comics because they brought back a little smidgen of what comics were like when I first started reading them. DC had a great idea here.

Without further ado...

DC Retroactive: Batman 1990s

So as I mentioned, this was the one book I was really looking forward to out of the bunch. It’s kind of funny that Alan Grant’s story almost crammed too much into the twenty some-odd pages. Overall, I don’t think we were treated to Grant’s best work here. There was some painful dialogue and heavyhanded narration. But you know what? I didn’t even really care. Norm Breyfogle was awesome as he always is. He got to do a lot of his signature Bat details here, from the cape to the nightvision eyes to Batman’s acrobatic kick from the ceiling. I really hope that DC would be able to convince these two guys for a miniseries, like they recently got one of the 90s’ other most celebrated Bat teams to do (Doug Moench and Kelly Jones). 

The reprint: Detective Comics #613, 1990. It’s an issue called “Trash.” It’s a stronger effort from the writer, and while Breyfogle is still great here, we can see how much he has improved with time. This story plus the new one? Easily worth the $5.

DC Retroactive: Superman 1990s

I mentioned that the story seemed just slightly off in the Batman comic. Well, this one felt completely ripped out of the early 90s run by Louise Simonson and John Bogdanove! It kind of made me wonder if it was really a lost script. Superman has the mullet, the cloned Lex Luthor is pissed off, everyone is talking about Doomsday, yep, everything is perfect here. The story features the return of Cruiser, a big bad monster who can burrow through anything. It causes a lot of destruction throughout Metropolis and even burns Supes’ hair off (though strangely, not his costume).

The reprint: Superman: The Man of Steel #12, 1992. Here’s another reason why this Superman Retroactive was so successful in my eyes. The reprint perfectly dovetailed with the new story. In this older story we see a previous appearance of Cruiser. It might be beneficial to read this story and then move onto the next one.

DC Retoractive: Green Lantern 1990s

Ah, Kyle Rayner. You were the first Green Lantern I knew about when I started reading comics. I know a lot of people didn’t like you. But I always thought your costume was really cool and I liked that you were “the Last Green Lantern.” Now everything has been retconned. Hal is back, the Corps is back, and though you still exist, you’re nothing compared to what you used to be. That makes me kind of sad. But hey, DC got Ron Marz and Darryl Banks back together to tell one more story!

Simple story here: Kyle is on guard duty at the JLA satellite and Effigy shows up to wreak havoc. So this comic really gets you right back into all of the details, such as Kyle’s always entertaining narration, his inventions with the ring, and Effigy’s never ending rage. Once again, this could have been a “lost issue” of the original Marz run. 

Reprint: Green Lantern #78, 1996. This was a nice “who I am” issue. This is why I was lamenting the fact that Kyle isn’t very important anymore. He was such a well fleshed out character, and because of the strange cyclical nature of comics he’s now been pushed out of the way for Hal Jordan to come back. It’s just a shame. Maybe DC can start a good trade paperback run of the 90s Green Lantern now? I really hope that sales of these Retroactive books are able to get DC thinking about more collections to put out.  How long have people been clamoring for Grant and Breyfogle Batman trades?

DC Retroactive: Justice League America 1990s.

“Together again for the last time (we hope!)--Keith Giffen, J.M. DeMatteis, Kevin Maguire.”

That should pretty much be enough said on the subject. The Justice League comics these guys put out were so, so good. It was pretty daring, doing what they did. Taking the biggest team of costumed heroes on the planet and turning their story into a humor book and a soap opera while keeping just enough of the classic superhero action. 

This might have been the best of the Retroactive books that I read. It’s just hard to beat the great scripts that Giffen and DeMatteis put together, where everything is so witty and carefully orchestrated. And then there is Kevin Maguire, who is really one of the most talented people who has ever drawn comics. Nobody can beat him on making these characters seem real.

The story: the Injustice Gang is up to no good, as usual. A Godzilla-sized parademon destroys a lot of stuff, and everything is cleaned up by the end. Again, pretty simple, but just enough to make everyone happy and remember a bygone era of Justice League history. Great comic.

The reprint: Justice League of America #6, 1992. When I started reading this, I hadn’t realized its significance as the last comic the three guys made before moving on to other projects. That gave it some context for me. It’s an issue that is really just catching up with all of the characters. Although I haven’t read probably half of the stories they did together, I imagine this comic was a nice bow tie to the Giffen/DeMatteis/Maguire days.

So overall, I am so glad that DC put together this line of books. Who knows, maybe now I will track down some of the 80s and 70s Retroactives as well. I’ve already found the ones that mean the most to me though. As DC gets ready to move into a brand new era this week, it was really nice to see them spending time looking back on the past. Thanks for the memories...

Justice League: The Nail

I’d like to do a series of posts on DC’s Elseworlds imprint, which sadly has been a thing of the past for some time now. It was a great excuse to just make some fun comics. Top-tier writers and artists set loose with the DC characters and given free rein to put them into whatever kind of new settings they wanted? Sign me up.

The Elseworlds title discussed here came out in 1998, right when I started ravenously collecting X-Men titles. Justice League comics were outside of my radar at that point. The connection here is that after wrapping up this Justice League work, Alan Davis (the double-duty writer and artist on The Nail) took over the writing of the X-Men comics and drew X-Men on a monthly basis. Back then I honestly didn’t like Davis’ style, much preferring the work of Adam Kubert on Uncanny, but wow, with time did my opinion of Davis change. I really love his work now, and I made it a priority to seek out some more of it...the first thing I found was Justice League: The Nail.

In this story, the Justice League exists and looks much the same as it did in, I would say, the post-Crisis DC Comics of the late 80’s. But the Elseworlds spin is that this is a world without Superman. The story is titled after a nail that pops a tire on Jonathan Kent’s truck as that little space pod crashes in a field near Smallville. We’re led to believe that this is the trip that would take the Kents to find a baby Kal-El, but because of the change of one small part of the plot, this never happens.

The Justice League is feared. There’s an anti-metahuman agenda that is largely spread by Lex Luthor, the mayor of Metropolis (he’s still the super-smart rich guy in this version too). The media always seems to be there to capture the perfect shot of a bad guy getting beaten to a pulp. Batman is caught in the act of killing the Joker, which sure does sound like some harsh justice. What the cameras and microphones don’t catch is that the Joker just killed Batgirl and Robin after wreaking havoc throughout Arkham Asylum with some mysterious Kryptonian technology.

It just wouldn’t be nice to give away too much of the story here. Alan Davis definitely packs in a lot of plot in these 150 or so pages, which were originally published as three prestige format comics and later collected into trade paperback. Pretty much any DC character you can think of is at least seen in this book in a panel or two. That’s some Crisis-like ambition on Mr. Davis’ part! I definitely enjoyed The Nail, but I felt that the whole thing was wrapped up far too quickly. This could have used a “Chapter Four of Three” for sure. The reveals and the twists come pretty quickly in the last 25 pages. Minor spoilers: we knew from page one that Kal-El did land on earth, so it shouldn’t be too surprising that he eventually shows up. It just would have been nice to see him do a little bit more, but as the final pages mention, this isn’t the end of a story but the beginning of a new one. You can bet that I’ll be on the lookout for Justice League: Another Nail, the 2004 sequel Davis worked on, soon.

In what might become a regular new feature of these reviews, I have some little snippet observations:

I really loved the way that Davis drew the Flash. He was still muscular but kind of skinny. It makes sense that Barry Allen wouldn’t be quite as ripped as most of the other superheroes.

In the “slight disappointment” department, the New Gods characters are all shown and a war starts up, presumably related to all the goings-on back on earth. But after starting, the rest of this conflict isn’t shown. I figured there would be a New Gods/ earth smashup of sorts (I expected Darkseid to be behind some of it) but it all proved to be an afterthought. I guess I would have liked to help Alan Davis out with the plot for this thing, just a little. By cutting out those essentially space-wasting New Gods scenes he could have dedicated a few more pages to padding out the ending better.

Another thing that I think is a bit of an Alan Davis trademark is that sometimes when a character is wearing a mask with the “white eyes” he draws the pupils so you can get a better sense of the character’s emotion. I know that other artists do this too, but for some reason I always get slightly distracted when Davis does it.

Let’s have a round of applause for Mark Farmer, the inker on this fine publication. He’s Davis’ right hand man, and this is a very good thing.

This was a wonderful plot-based superhero story. Look elsewhere if you want to really dive into characterization. A lot of what draws you into the superheroes in this story is what they do. Martian Manhunter is seen doing his “watching TV” routine. Davis painstakingly shows how the Atom gets into a villain’s laboratory. The Nail is an action story told on a grand scale.

If you happen to come across this book in trade paperback format and are slightly interested in, you might as well just snag it. The Nail is an older DC trade and isn’t in print currently. In summary, you really can’t go wrong with the artwork of Alan Davis, and his storytelling, while overly grandiose, is still engaging.