This is the first in a series of hardcover books reprinting Alan Moore’s seminal run on the title. Amazingly, Moore also wrote Watchmen, which is coming to movie screens in just a couple weeks now! Coincidence, surely. I have to confess to never having read any of Moore’s Swamp Thing until now. And in some ways I’m glad I waited, because it’s always great to find a great comic that you’ve never read before even when it’s 25 years old. The book reprints Saga #20-27, and features a bunch of very cool bits. The coolest is the way Moore completely transforms the hero by revealing Swamp Thing to not be the transformed body of Alec Holland, but the transferred consciousness — meaning there is no chance Swamp Thing can ever become human again. This throws the series’ very premise into doubt and runs counter to the conventions that ruled comic book storytelling and character motivation for the previous, say, two decades. That opens the door for this book to go somewhere completely different, and made for a tremendously interesting read. That not much is immediately done with it is OK — we know there’s more volumes to come. But there’s also a lot of craft in this book, from Moore and artists Stephen Bissette and John Totleben. For one, everything is deliberate and with purpose — every caption and every panel seems to have been thought through rather well and there’s little if any fat in the story telling. The things that for me didn’t work quite as well were the introduction of various DC Universe characters. The Justice League cameo was strange and thankfully short. The appearance of The Demon, however, was more annoying and seemed more gratuitous. Maybe some of that is every horror/mature reader series DC launched in these pre-Vertigo days seemed to have The Demon show up. (Even Neil Gaiman’s Sandman had both the Justice League and The Demon show up in its early issues.) Plus, the only Demon comics I’ve ever read that I liked were the first few by Jack Kirby. Pretty much everything since has seemed contrived or just plain silly, so that part fell short. These are minor complaints, however, since the overall experience of reading the book is a very pleasurable and intimate one. It’s also a good reminder of what you can do with a comic book when you’ve got a writer with a vision and they’re left largely to their own devices — no crossovers, no mega events, no storytelling by committee. As a latecomer to these stories, I think I like them more than I would have had I read them 10 or 20 years ago. Grade: A-
Tag: DC
I was visiting flea markets again this past weekend and came across a good deal on this classic issue of Detective Comics.
Was there ever a better time to be a Batman fan that the early 1970s? You had Denny O’Neil and Neal Adams doing their classic thing. And then there was this issue, the first edited and written by Archie Goodwin and featuring art by Jim Aparo and the first installment of “Manhunter” with art from then-newcomer Walt Simonson.
The lead story is a solid Batman detective story in which the Caped Crusader stumbles across and foils an elaborate criminal blackmail plan revolving around a mysterious artifact in a Gotham museum. (I’d like to know how often the Gotham museum cliche has been used in Batman stories over the years – I’d guess it’s in the top five.) But this is a solid, complete story told in a mere 12 pages. Aparo is one of those workman-like artists who never got the acclaim that guys like Adams or Simonson did, but he should have. Looking at the quality of both his storytelling and his illustrations, this is top-notch stuff. There’s even a stellar “silent” action sequence on page 2, in which Batman dispatches a group of rooftop thieves in an economical and compelling eight-panel layout. And Aparo still was a top-notch Batman artist more than 16 years later, when I first started reading his work on such seminal 1980s Batman stories as “10 Nights of the Beast,” “A Death in the Family” and “A Lonely Place of Dying.”
The backup story is known as a tried and true classic. I have a trade collecting the Goodwin-Simonson “Manhunter” stories, and they are definitive of the best comics of this era. Simonson remains one of my all-time favorite comics artists, mostly for his work on Thor, X-Factor, Star Wars and even Marvel’s old Battlestar Galactica series, (which I believe gave him his first credits as a writer). Seeing these stories from early in his career, it’s remarkable to see how consistent his distinctive art style has been, even as he improved his storytelling and drawing abilities in quite significant ways over the years.
Even more interesting is the letters page in this issue, in which Goodwin introduces himself as the successor to Julie Schwartz and outlines his plans for reviving Detective. (At the time, the book’s sales were slumping and the series was being published bimonthly! I don’t know how long this lasted, but I’m sure the quality of issues like this one helped turn that around.)
The weakest point of the whole package is, surprisingly, the cover. It looks like Aparo to me, but the illustration is poorly composed and completely overwhelmed by a design that overemphasizes the logo and trade dress. Even so, with regular comics today about to reach en masse the $3.99 price mark, this comic was a tremendously entertaining bargain, even at the princely sum (in 1973) of 20 cents.
In an interview with IESB, writer-director David Goyer says all the DC Comics adaptations he’s working on — including “Supermax/Green Arrow” and “The Flash” — are treading water while the studio decides the best way to handle such movies:
“A lot of the DC movies at Warner Brothers are all on hold while the figure out, they’re going to come up with some new plan, methodology, things like that so everything has just been pressed pause on at the moment. It was the double header of both Iron Man and The Dark Knight coming out, so more than ever I think they’ve realized, I think DC was responsible for 15% of Warner Brother’s revenue this year, something crazy like that, so they realized that comic books, it’s become a new genre, one of the most successful genres.”
It’s gratifying to see the success of “Dark Knight” linked back to DC, but I still think this is the wrong approach for Warners to take. Developing big strategic plans like that is difficult, time consuming and tends to create more problems than it solves — if a plan agreeable to all parties is even worked out. They have to not be afraid to pull the trigger and risk making mistakes. Marvel’s already gone through that phase — “Daredevil,” “Elektra,” “Fantastic Four,” “Hulk” — and have come out on the other side better for it. I really wish that, especially with the likes of “Green Arrow” and “Flash,” that the studio would hire an up-and-coming director with a good take on the material, give him anywhere between $80 million and $100 million to make the pic, and then get out of the way.
Deadlines and holiday travel have limited posting this week, bur here’s a few tidbits that I came across:
* I haven’t seen if the trailer for “X-Men Origins: Wolverine” that’s supposed to be running before “The Day the Earth Stood Still” has been made available online yet. But Hugh Jackman’s all over the place, having been named the host for this year’s Oscars telecast.
* Looking at the newspaper ads for Clint Eastwood’s “Gran Torino,” I spotted a name in the credits familiar to comics readers of the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s: Jenette Kahn. An exec producer on the film, Kahn was publisher and/or editor in chief of DC Comics for something like 25 years.
* No fewer than four comic book movies made the cut for the Oscar’s visual effects semifinals: “The Dark Knight,” “Hellboy II: The Golden Army,” “Iron Man” and “The Incredible Hulk.” That list of 15 contenders will be pared down to seven for the famous VFX bakeoff in January, with the top three from that event getting actual nominations.
* And Bettie Page, queen of 1950s pinup girls and inspiration for countless comic artists, has died at age 85.
The strange case of the “Justice League” movie gets even stranger.
Dark Horizons posted recently that director George Miller, of “Mad Max” and “Happy Feet” fame, had told a Sydney TV show that he was off the “Justice League” movie. But when I went looking for the original item on that site, nothing came up. Now, it’s come out that some of Miller’s reps have contacted Coming Soon.net and said Miller never appeared on the show and there’s no truth to his being off the movie.
Even with Miller still on the project, things don’t look good for this project with constant delays, and casting controversies galore making it less likely every day that it will see the light of day unless something big happens to push it forward.
And without some kind of progress or encouraging plans, it’s only going to get worse. Now, not having read a script or having any idea how this movie is envisioned, it’s impossible to say whether it’s any good or not. It may be absolutely terrific. But the public perception remains that DC/WB don’t know how to make a good superhero movie that isn’t a Batman flick.
The same problem doesn’t afflict Marvel Studios, where their string of successes (and even the less than successful pics they’ve made) and ability to turn characters like Blade and Iron Man into hits gives folks confidence that we’ll see their schedule roll out on time with “Iron Man 2,” “Thor” and “Captain America” all leading up to “Avengers” in 2011.
That’s also a strategy that works for fans, because it’s how the comics were done — with each character being established in his or her own title before the big team up. Right now, confidence is low that WB can make characters like Wonder Woman, Green Lantern or Flash work on the big screen, making fans even less likely to think a Justice League movie with all of them will do justice to the characters.
On the other hand, putting “Justice League” on hold may not be the best idea if WB can’t find a way to get these characters to the screen any other way. If fans have to wait too much longer for more DC movies, there’s always a danger that the interest in superhero movies could cool and they may never get their shot. And in that case, nobody wins.