Faster than a DC Bullet: Project Crisis!, Part LXXII: Convergence: Flashpoint, Book 1

Comic trade paperback, n.pag.
Published 2015 (contents: 2015)
Borrowed from the library
Read July 2017

Convergence: Flashpoint, Book 1

Writers: Dan Jurgens, Greg Rucka, Frank Tieri, Alisa Kwitney, and Gail Simone

Art: Lee Weeks, Dan Jurgens & Norm Rapmund, Cully Hamner, Vicente Cifuentes, Rick Leonardi & Mark Pennington, and Jan Duursema & Dan Parsons
Colorists: Brad Anderson, Dave McCaig, Monica Kubina, Steve Buccellato, and Wes Dzioba
Lettering: Sal Cipriano, Tom Napolitano, Corey Breen, Nick J. Napolitano, Dezi Sienty, and Carlos M. Mangual

The Flashpoint volumes of Convergence strike me as distinct from the earlier ones. Almost all of the characters in the Crisis, Infinite Earths, and Zero Hour volumes continued to exist after the points where they were plucked from for these tales: the Earth-One Legion had many more adventures, so did the Justice Society, so did Aquaman and Kyle Rayner. Those stories mostly revisited old status quos that the characters had moved on from. But Convergence: Flashpoint picks its characters from around the time of Flashpoint: this is, from around the time they ceased to exist. After Flashpoint, the Superman we'd been following in DC Comics since 1985 was gone, so was Renee Montoya, so was Stephanie Brown, so was Nightwing and Oracle. DC brought them back in different forms, but these characters just stopped, without endings.

So Convergence: Flashpoint is different, in that many of its stories seek to give closure to characters whose stories never received it. How did Clark Kent's marriage to Lois Lane turn out? Did Barbara Gordon and Dick Grayson get over there will-they-won't-they thing? How did Stephanie Brown's tenure as Batgirl go? What ever came of Renee's weird relationship with Harvey Dent, the man who had outed her?

All of these questions (with the added complication that the characters spent a year in a domed Gotham) are answered in Convergence: Flashpoint. Unlike with some volumes of Convergence, these are character versions I'm familiar with: I know the post-Crisis, married Superman; I know Nightwing and Oracle from reading all of Birds of Prey; I know Renee Montoya from Gotham Central and 52. So these stories carried a lot more weight than the ones in, say, Infinite Earths or Zero Hour. Plus, in many cases, the writers in this volume worked on these characters themselves. Dan Jurgens wrote and drew the post-Crisis Superman a lot in the 1990s, Greg Rucka didn't create Renee but he may as well have, and Gail Simone defined Oracle in what's still the best Birds of Prey run.

All of this is to say that as exercises in nostalgia and loose ends, these stories mostly worked for me. The Superman tale, where Lois ends up giving birth to a super-baby, is a heartwarming one of how Superman stands for light against darkness. I liked that Rucka used the Convergence framework to have "our" Harvey Dent confront a version of himself who never became Two-Face in a city-to-city fight unlike any other in the series so far. I actually haven't read a lot of Stephanie Brown Batgirl stories, but this seemed a fitting and cute way of tying up her adventures, with her finally finding an identity of her own. And though I never was a Babs/Dick shipper, letting them both get married and be badasses one last time is a nice final story. There's some great art, too; both Lee Weeks and the Dan Jurgens/Norm Rapmund team draw a stunningly heroic Superman; and I was delighted to see Jan Duursema (who I know from decades of Star Wars comics for Dark Horse) doing her thing in the DC universe.

The book's not perfect. I've complained before that the rules for city battles are different in each story, and the ones in the Stephanie Brown story are in particular difficult to reconcile with other volumes-- Stephanie finds out she's Gotham's champion from watching tv (did Telos send them a news bulletin?) among other weirdnesses, and in the Nightwing/Oracle story, Telos has enforcer robots that appear in none other of the thirty-five Convergence battles I've read thus far. Also, I've never read the pre-Flashpoint Justice League, but Frank Tieri's take on it doesn't make me want to. They're obnoxious "strong female character" types, and they don't exactly acquit themselves well here.

The title has a double meaning. These are the versions of the characters from the time of Flashpoint, but in all of the stories, they're fighting Gotham from the "Flashpoint" universe. This actually worked surprisingly well, especially in the first story, where Jurgens extracts some pathos from having the Flashpoint Kal-El ("Subject One") meet the Earth-Zero Lois Lane, and having the Flashpoint Thomas Wayne (who realizes these characters come from the same world as the Flash he met) get to talk to Superman about the kind of man his son became. Wayne's sadness that his universe didn't vanish in a flash is a nice touch.

Next Week: Nothing! This feature goes on temporary hiatus as I transition between states and jobs. Once I get reliable access to an interlibrary loan service again, though, things will pick back up with Convergence: Flashpoint, Book 2 on some future Wednesday. I had hoped to get through all of Convergence before the hiatus, but it was not to be.

Review: The Children's Crusade by Neil Gaiman et al.

Last year, I read DC's long-time-coming collection of the 1990s Vertigo crossover The Children's Crusade. At the time, I remarked that it actually made me more likely to want to pick up the original issues, not less, as the collection replaced the middle five of the seven issues with newly written content, to provide a smoother reading experience. So what was the original like, if it seemingly necessitated such a reworking?

The answer is that it's actually not that bad. I mean, these stories don't cohere tremendously, or seem to have much of a point, but I'd argue that's no different from many of DC's 1990s annual crossovers, like Eclipso: The Darkness Within, Armageddon 2001, or Bloodlines. Though, I suppose DC hasn't collected any of those, so maybe that tells us something. In my comments here I'll focus on the issues not collected in Free Country collection, as I covered the bookends pretty well in my original review.

In the first bookend, The Children's Crusade #1, we learn that children are disappearing, spirited away to a mysterious realm known as Free Country, and that five special children are being targeted next: the children principal characters in five Vertigo ongoings of the early 1990s (Suzy from Black Orchid, Maxine from Animal Man, Tefé from Swamp Thing, Dorothy from Doom Patrol, and Tim from The Books of Magic). Edwin and Charles, the dead boy detectives, set out to find and protect these five children. You might expect that these stories would be pretty formulaic, with an agent of Free Country coming and taking each character in turn, but they're actually reasonably distinct from each other.

The Black Orchid story, for example, inserts an agent of Free Country into the history of the series, showing that the mini-Black Orchid known as Suzy has actually met Junkin Buckley repeatedly before, and that he was responsible for some of her decisions in earlier issues (unbeknownst to the readers at the time). Then he returns for Suzy one last time, recruiting her to Free Country. On the other hand, the Animal Man story is mostly part of the ongoing events of that series (somewhat confusingly; there are lots of characters who are never clearly introduced to the new reader), but at the very end, when Maxine ends up in a tight spot, Jack Rabbit convinces her to escape with him to Free Country. (And to leave a clone of herself behind, an occurrence that would be expanded upon in The Children's Crusade #2. I don't know if this ended up playing into the events of the Animal Man ongoing.)

At this point, I figured each annual would end with a child recruited into Free Country, ready to play their part in the big crossover, so I was surprised when in the Swamp Thing tale, Tefé goes to Free Country on page 8, and most of the issue (they're all about 58 pages long) concerns her adventures in Free Country with Maxine, and ends with her leaving Free Country, clearing up a point that confused me in the Free Country collection. The way Free Country is depicted here doesn't really line up with what we see in the bookends, but then again, much of it seems to be an illusion created for the benefit of Tefé and Maxine.

The Doom Patrol story is a lot like the Swamp Thing one, showing both Dorothy's recruitment and the events that drive her back home, only of all of these, this one made the least sense to someone not reading the relevant ongoing. Like, why does Dorothy normally hang out with feral children who live in the woods?

Finally, the Books of Magic story shakes things up again, but in a way that's baffling: it has two parallel stories, one about Tim being kidnapped into a mystery realm by a mystery assassin, none of which is ever explained, and one about the Free Country agent sent to recruit him wandering London, which was actually pretty cute. I guess maybe the kidnap plot is a set-up for something that happens in Tim's ongoing series? But I don't even get how he escapes, he just does.

In my review of the collected edition, I complained that in the middle chapter, the dead boy detectives just pointlessly turn up too late to help Maxine and that's about it, but in the original it's actually worse. Their quest having been set up in the first bookend, they don't even appear in the first two middle chapters-- then in the third, they claim they got to both recruitments a moment too late even though we never saw them. It's a little goofy, and of course they fail to accomplish anything in the chapters in which they do appear-- but such, I suppose, is the very nature of the crossover, whose design requires they can't make it to Free Country until the final issue. Amusingly, we see Tim travel into Free Country in both the Books of Magic issue and in The Children's Crusade #2, and the dead boy detectives are shown to be there in the second instance, when they clearly weren't in the first!

The final part isn't really rendered any more enjoyable by reading the middle issues. Some parts of it make more sense because we've seen them dramatized, but other ones make less sense, because the collection fleshed them out. It's still kind of a disappointment, because the dead boy detectives are set up as the main characters, yet Tim Hunter saves the day-- and it's still a disappointment even if you focus on Tim because he doesn't actually do anything, he saves it by accident! Still, Gaiman and his co-writers on the final issue provide some good jokes at least. Actually, they're probably the best part.

So, overall, this is a weird story, and not one I can particularly recommend-- you probably really are better off reading the Free Country collection with its new middle chapter. The original issues are much more part of their ongoing series than they are parts of The Children's Crusade, as they almost all read just fine without the bookends, but not vice versa.

The Children's Crusade originally appeared in The Children's Crusade #1-2, Black Orchid Annual #1, Animal Man Annual vol. 1 #1, Swamp Thing Annual vol. 2 #7, Doom Patrol Annual #2, and Arcana: The Books of Magic Annual #1 (Dec. 1993–Jan. 1994). The story was written by Neil Gaiman, Dick Foreman, Jamie Delano, Nancy A. Collins, Rachel Pollack, John Ney Rieber, and Alisa Kwitney. It was illustrated by Chris Bachalo, Mike Barreiro, Gary Amaro, Jason Minor, Charlie Adlard, Phillip Hester, Bruce McCorkindale, Russell Braun, Tom Sutton, Rafael Kayanan, Mark Buckingham, Dennis Cramer, Kim DeMulder, Mark Wheatley, Peter Gross, and Peter Snejbjerg. Colors were provided by Daniel Vozzo, George Freeman, Tatjana Wood, and Suart Chaifetz, and the issues were lettered by John Costanza, Clem Robins, Tim Harkins, John Workman, and Richard Starkings. The crossover was edited by Stuart Moore, Tom Peyer, and Tom Stathis.

Faster than a DC Bullet: The Sandman Spin-Offs, Part XXXI: Free Country: A Tale of the Children's Crusade

Comic hardcover, n.pag.
Published 2015 (contents: 1993-2015)
Borrowed from the library
Read March 2016

Free Country: A Tale of the Children's Crusade

Writers: Neil Gaiman, Toby Litt, Rachel Pollack, Alisa Kwitney & Jamie Delano

Artists: Chris Bachalo, Mike Barreiro, Peter Gross, Al Davison & Peter Snejbjerg
Colorists: Daniel Vozzo & Jeanne McGee

Letterers: John Costanza & Todd Klein

It's probably impossible to discuss this book without discussing its means of production. Though it would be interesting to discuss it as a purely standalone book, its strange genesis will always influence anything you can write about. The Children's Crusade was a 1993-94 "annual" crossover, by which I mean a crossover through annuals of ongoing series (like Eclipso: The Darkness Within or Armageddon 2001), not a crossover that took place annually. It was Vertigo's first and last attempt at such a thing, spanning Black Orchid, The Books of Magic, Swamp Thing, Animal Man, and Doom Patrol. In addition to those five issues, it was bookended by issues featuring Charles Rowland and Edwin Paine, the so-called "Dead Boy Detectives" from The Sandman, which were (mostly) written by Neil Gaiman. The crossover has never been collected, I guess because the middle parts didn't make a lot of sense on their own, and didn't connect into the last issue in the way they were supposed to. But because printing Neil Gaiman is like printing money, DC has finally collected the bookends he wrote, commissioning a new middle chapter by writer Toby Litt and artist Peter Gross to bridge the gap between the two Gaiman-penned issues, covering all the ground needed to get you from The Children's Crusade issue #1 to issue #2. Litt and Gross also add extra pages to the closing issue, I guess to clarify or expand rushed aspects of it.

I actually meant to scan a different sequence of panels on the facing page, but I messed up and I'm too lazy to redo it, so this'll have to do.
from The Children's Crusade #1 (script by Neil Gaiman, art by Chris Bachalo & Mike Barreiro)

The opening issue is Neil Gaiman at his most typical and his best, aided by Chris Bachalo and Mark Barreiro on art. Charles and Edwin, the two boarding-school ghosts who eluded Death in Season of Mists, have set up a detective agency, finally answering a long-standing point of bafflement for me. Their first case is brought to them by a girl whose brother has vanished, along with every other child in their village, plus a huge number of children the world over. In typical Gaiman fashion, though, their investigations (such as they are; they're delightfully poor detectives) are interspersed with tales of lost or missing children from throughout history: a chronicle of the Children's Crusade, a boy telling the Victorian poet Robert Browning about the Pied Piper's visit to the town of St. Cecile, and a very grim story of how a group of children trapped in a pit managed to escape.

Faster than a DC Bullet: The Sandman Spin-Offs, Part VIII: The Dreaming: Beyond the Shores of Night

Comic trade paperback, 208 pages
Published 1998 (contents: 1996-97)
Borrowed from the library
Read July 2011

The Dreaming: Beyond the Shores of Night

Writers: Terry LaBan, Peter Hogan, Alisa Kwitney
Artists: Peter Snejbjerg, Steve Parkhouse, Michael Zulli, Dick Giordano
Colorist & Separator: Daniel Vozzo
Letterers: Todd Klein, Steve Parkhouse, Annie Parkhouse

The Dreaming was the second of the three ongoings to spin out of The Sandman (the others being Sandman Mystery Theatre and Lucifer). Unlike the other two, it's largely uncollected; there are only two trades, which collect a scattered seventeen issues of the sixty-issue series. Maybe this is because it had a sort of anthology format, moving between different characters and concepts from the Dreaming, the realm ruled over by Gaiman's character-- there's not really an ongoing character narrative.

This first volume collects three different stories, the first of which is Terry LaBan and Peter Snejbjerg's "The Goldie Factor." This concerns a couple of my favorite characters from the Dreaming, Cain and Abel, the brothers were one is an eternal murderer and the other is an eternal victim. They set off after Abel's pet gargoyle, Goldie, who is being misled by "the Great Tempto," the snake from the Garden of Eden. Gaiman's Eve, Matthew the Raven, and Lucien also appear. It's a decent quest story, mostly worth it for the way that LaBan nails the personalities of all the different Sandman characters; I like the interplay between the feuding brothers especially. On the other hand, LaBan and Snejbjerg's Dreaming feels too much like a pedestrian fantasy world, not a place you might inadvertently wander into on the fringes of consciousness.

The second story is Peter Hogan and Steve Parkhouse's "The Lost Boy," is about an architect from 1956 who wanders into 1996 and finds a world he doesn't understand. Unfortunately, the man-out-of-time story has been done better than here, and though I think the architect is supposed to be a likeable average guy, he's more just boring. This undercuts an ending which I think would have been sweet had it been written better. The best part of this over-long story (it is by no means a four-issue concept) is the return of Mad Hettie, the vagrant who popped up from time to time in both The Sandman and Death. I honestly never paid a lot of attention to her before, but amidst these dull characters, she delights with her matter-of-fact weirdness, as she speaks plainly about mystical happenings to humans and fairies alike. I really liked Steve Parkhouse's artwork, though.

Last is Alisa Kwitney and Michael Zulli's short "His Brother's Keeper," which follows up on a mention of Cain and Abel's brother Seth from "The Goldie Factor," but then tells a story that has nothing to do with that concept at all. Baffling and dull.

Faster than a DC Bullet: The Sandman Spin-Offs, Part VII: Destiny: A Chronicle of Deaths Foretold

Comic trade paperback, n.pag.
Published 2000 (contents: 1997)
Borrowed from the library
Read July 2011

Destiny: A Chronicle of Deaths Foretold

Writer: Alisa Kwitney
Artists: Kent Williams, Michael Zulli, Scott Hampton, Rebecca Guay
Color Artist: Sherilyn Van Valkenburgh
Letterer: Todd Klein

As with WitchCraft and the Triple Goddess, I doubt anyone was clamoring for a Destiny spin-off, but he is one of the Endless, and he's the easiest for DC to do as it will with, for he predates Neil Gaiman. Curiously, this book follows the same format as WitchCraft: there's a frame story by one artist, and then three substories, each illustrated by a different artist, ranging through time. Our story opens in the far future year of 2009, when bubonic plague has devastated the Earth and a strange man, one John Ryder, shows up at the house of Ruth Knight, one of five survivors in a rural village. He brings with him The Book of Destiny, an 1899 publication reconstructing the meaning of the Destiny Scroll, a page torn from the Book of Destiny. It connects the four comings of bubonic plague to Destiny of the Endless and the mysterious John Ryder himself.

I liked this a lot at first. The art in the frame story (I don't know which of the four artists was responsible, unfortunately) is angular and moody, perfect for this postapocalyptic world, and Kwitney's writing is powerful enough to match. The relationship between Ruth and John is very well done, too-- it's complicated, as each wants something out of each other. The first flashback story is great, too, about the wife of the emperor at the fall of Byzantium and her illegitimate child (who turns out to be John Ryder), who becomes the pawn of Destiny, carrying the plague. But after this, the flashback stories get muddy. What is John Ryder trying to accomplish in 1348 or 1665? It's not quite clear. And thematically, I never figured out what the book was trying to do, either. It wants to be about destiny and Destiny, but there's a lot about plagues in it, and that never really links together. I guess those who die of the plague are destined to die? But so what-- according to the mythos here, everyone has an inescapable destiny, so the plague stuff feels like too much. And as for that ending... I just didn't get it.

Despite my comment at the beginning, I think there's definitely possibility in a story about Destiny, as in all the Endless. The inescapability of Fate has been the basis of many a tale. Destiny looks cool, sounds cool, and even gets in a good joke here, to my surprise. But this story isn't it; it never coheres into saying or doing anything in particular.