Review: All-Star Comics 80-Page Giant

In 1999, All-Star Comics had two momentary revivals. All Star Comics vol. 2 was part of the Justice Society Returns! storyline, so I'll cover it when I get to that, but there was also the All-Star Comics 80-Page Giant. Like most of the 1990s/2000s 80-page giants, it contains several original short tales on a central topic. I meant to read it with All-Star Squadron, as the latest All-Star ongoing, but ended up not getting it until later and thus read it after Infinity, Inc. I wish I had read it with All-Star Squadron, though, because despite not being published until over a decade later, it really feels like it ties in with Roy Thomas's work on that series.

Partially the reason for that is obvious. One of the stories in here is explicitly an All-Star Squadron tale, and Roy Thomas writes it. I haven't got to Young All-Stars yet, but I understand it takes the All-Star Squadron story from April 1942 up to June; "Thunderstruck" reads like it could thus be the very next issue after Young All-Stars #31, picking up on June 27, 1942 with the adventures of Green Lantern, Doctor Fate, Firebrand, and the Shining Knight; there's even appearance by those perennial All-Star Squadron favorites, FDR and Churchill. It's a fun story that reignites the oft-deferred romance between Firebrand and the Shining Knight. (I know many threads from Thomas's 1940s series were picked up in the present day in later JSA revivals, so I hope I will see what become of these two.)

script by Roy Thomas, art by Kevin Sharpe & J. Baumgartner

But outside of that explicit All-Star Squadron branding, several of the other, stories feel more like tributes to the Thomas version of the JSA rather than the Golden Age itself. "The Way of the Amazon" by Eric Luke, Chris Jones, and Keith Champagne is billed as a Wonder Woman tale. While Crisis on Infinite Earths wrote the Earth-Two Wonder Woman out of history, and Roy Thomas's work on Infinity, Inc., Young All-Stars, and Secret Origins substituted Miss America and Fury into her place in history, John Byrne's run on Wonder Woman in the late 1990s later featured Diana's mother, Queen Hippolyta, traveling back in time to the 1940s and acting as Wonder Woman during World War II, giving a different/new explanation of who took the Earth-Two Wonder Woman's role in so many Golden Age stories. Set in June 1943, "The Way of the Amazon" folds that retcon in with Thomas's All-Star Squadron milieu, featuring Hippolyta hanging out with the Phantom Lady and Liberty Belle in the Perisphere. It's another fun story, as the trio of women take down a Nazi air fortress and discover the original Red Tornado.

script by Eric Luke, art by Chris Jones & Keith Champagne

The other stories here don't draw as heavily on Roy Thomas retcons, but many still feel like they could have slotted in as issues of All-Star Squadron had the series made it further than April 1942. The Sandman, Wonder Woman, and Hawkman team up in "Waking Nightmare" (November 1942); the Atom has to be steered into pacifism by the rest of the JSA in "Steam Engine" (December 1942); Starman has to talk the Spectre into believing in hope again in "P.O.V.—a Fable" (January 1945). Of these one, my favorite was "Steam Engine," a charming tale of how the Atom lets the way bigger people mock him get him down-- no surprise that it comes from the pen of Mark Waid. The story of "Waking Nightmare" was hard to understand, to be honest, but the evocative art of Dennis Cowan and John Floyd makes up for it. (They draw the wrong Sandman costume, as continuity pedants love to note, but the gasmask one is way better than the yellow-and-purple one, so who cares?) On the other hand, I found "P.O.V." pretty unconvincing; why was it Starman who needed to help the Spectre regain his connection to humanity? Why would seeing someone in an internment camp make a paper airplane even help? (If the Spectre really feels so bad, why wouldn't he just close the camp himself?)

script by John Ostrander, art by Dennis Cowan & John Floyd

Just two stories seem to go outside of the All-Star Squadron-verse. "The 90-Minute Man" by Tom Peyer, Peter Pachoumis, and Wade Von Grawbadger is a pre-war, straight Hourman tale, where the guy who has superpowers last only sixty minutes has to figure out how to take down someone with one-and-a-half times the duration! I've read a lot of stories with Hourman in them, but this is probably the first where I've actually got something out of his gimmick. There's just one of these not set during the Golden Age, "The Ropes" by David Goyer & James Robinson, David Ross, and Andrew Hennessy, where the Jack Knight Starman spars with Wildcat and talks courage. It's okay. (It's the only one of these stories to be collected, in The Starman Omnibus, Volume Five. I feel like it probably reads better in that context than this one.)

script by Joe Kelly, art by Duncan Rouleau & Aaron Sowd

Overall, it seems like 1999 was the time of JSA revivals. It was the year after Hippolyta was retconned into the JSA, and the year that we got The Justice Society Returns!, the debut of the Geoff Johns Stargirl, and the return of a JSA ongoing comic. It will be some time before I get to all that, but All-Star Comics 80-Page Giant is a good tribute to the ongoing vitality of DC's original superheroes. If anyone ever bothers to make an All-Star Squadron/Young All-Stars collection (unlikely), they could do a lot worse than chucking a few of these in at the end.

All-Star Comics 80-Page Giant was originally published in one issue (Sept. 1999). The stories were written by Mark Waid, Joe Kelly, Eric Luke, Tom Peyer, Roy Thomas, John Ostrander, and David Goyer & James Robinson; pencilled by Adam DeKraker, Duncan Rouleau, Chris Jones, Peter Pachoumis, Kevin Sharpe, Dennis Cowan, and David Ross; inked by Mark Propst, Aaron Sowd, Keith Champagne, Wade Von Grawbadger, J. Baumgartner, John Floyd, and Andrew Hennessy; lettered by Ken Lopez, Ken Bruzenak, Kurt Hathaway, Rick Parker, and John Costanza; colored by Gloria Vasquez, John Kalisz, Noelle Giddings, and Carla Feeny; and edited by Dan Raspler with Tony Bedard.

This post is the twelfth in a series about the Justice Society and Earth-Two. The next installment covers Steel, the Indestructible Man. Previous installments are listed below:

1. All Star Comics: Only Legends Live Forever (1976-79)
2. The Huntress: Origins (1977-82)
3. All-Star Squadron (1981-87)
4. Infinity, Inc.: The Generations Saga, Volume One (1983-84)
5. Infinity, Inc.: The Generations Saga, Volume Two (1984-85)
6. Showcase Presents... Power Girl (1978)
7. America vs. the Justice Society (1985)
8. Jonni Thunder, a.k.a. Thunderbolt (1985)
9. Crisis on Multiple Earths, Volume 7 (1983-85)
10. Infinity, Inc. #11-53 (1985-88) [reading order]
11. Last Days of the Justice Society of America (1986-88)
    

Joe Casey's Adventures of Superman #606: Return to Krypton II

Return to Krypton II: "Rising Son" / "Culture Shock" / "Blood and Heresy" / "Dream's End"

The Adventures of Superman vol. 1 #606 (Sept. 2002)
Superman: Return to Krypton (2004), reprinting Action Comics vol. 1 #793, Superman vol. 2 #184, Superman: The Man of Steel #128 (Sept. 2002) 

Writers: Geoff Johns, Joe Casey, Mark Schultz, and Joe Kelly
Pencils: Pascual Ferry, Duncan Rouleau, and Karl Kerschl
Inks: Cam Smith, Marlo Alquiza, and Karl Kerschl
Colors: Tanya & Rich Horie, Rob Ro & Alex Bleyaert, and Moose Baumann
Letters: Ken Lopez
Assistant Editor: Tom Palmer jr.
Editor: Eddie Berganza 

I had mixed feelings about the original Return to Krypton; my feelings about its sequel are more straightforwardly negative. It seems to me that both of these storylines threw away a potentially emotionally powerful premise in favor of a combination of empty action sequences and unnecessarily complicated continuity "fixes."

from The Adventures of Superman vol. 1 #606
(script by Joe Casey, art by Duncan Rouleau & Marlo Alquiza)

In this story, the Jor-El of the Phantom Zone duplicate of Krypton manages to travel from the Zone into the real world, seeking Superman's help in pushing back against a tide of fundamentalist Kryptonian zealots who don't like Jor-El's new enlightened age. Honestly, for a supposed utopia, Krypton seems like a giant shithole, perpetually on the verge of complete social collapse at the drop of a hat. They ally themselves with General Zod's lackies against the zealots, trying to save Jor-El's wife and baby Kal-El before it's too late. It just all seems like pointless action sequences.

Then in the end, we finally get an explanation for this Krypton. I thought when reading the original Return to Krypton that all this was intended to retcon away John Byrne's Man of Steel vision of a sterile Krypton; that story claimed Jor-El presented a lie of a sterile Krypton to Kal-El so that he wouldn't feel so sad about his dead homeworld. This story rewrites that, so that we learn that after the Imperiex War (I think), Brainiac 13 time-travelled to pre-destruction Krypton (which really was the sterile world John Bryne showed us) and tried to kill Jor-El to stop Superman from being born. He failed, but made off with Jor-El's diaries and the Eradicator Matrix (I guess this is related to one-time Superman villain "the Eradicator," a.k.a. the Cyborg Superman, but I don't know enough to know), which he used in concert to make a fake Krypton as a trap for Superman. Only since Jor-El was a weirdo, his diaries recorded not the actuality of Krypton, but his dreamed, ideal Krypton. So this Krypton is a real place, a planet in the Phantom Zone, but it is not the real Krypton. Phew.

from Action Comics vol. 1 #793
(script by Joe Kelly, art by Pascual Ferry & Cam Smith)

It's not an explanation that convinces. Why would Jor-El dream up a Krypton where the government is a fascist dictatorship that suppresses dissent with lethal force, and where psychotic fundamentalists lurk in every corner? Like, dream up an actual utopia, dude!

And why did Return II even need to retcon the retcon? This was published in Sept. 2002; exactly one year later, Superman: Birthright would begin publication, removing Byrne inventions like the birthing matrix from continuity just as the first Return seemed like it was going to. By the time Return II came out, editor Eddie Berganza had to have known those changes were coming, so I just don't even get why this story-- which retcons the retcon of a retcon-- even exists.

And if you subtract the continuity jiggery-pokery, there's nothing here worth discussing. None of the five Super title crossovers published during Joe Casey's run on Adventures were exactly great, but Return to Krypton II is definitely the worst of them.

I did like that Krypto was in it, I guess, but Superman is not always a good dog-owner.

ACCESS AN INDEX OF ALL POSTS IN THIS SERIES HERE

Joe Casey's Adventures of Superman #589: Return to Krypton

Return to Krypton: "Fathers" / "Sliding Home" / "Second Honeymoon" / "The Most Dangerous Kryptonian Game" / "Escape from Krypton"

The Adventures of Superman vol. 1 #589 (Apr. 2001)
Superman: Return to Krypton (2004), reprinting Action Comics vol. 1 #776, Superman vol. 2 #166-67, Superman: The Man of Steel #111 (Mar.-Apr. 2001) 

Story: Jeph Loeb, Joe Casey, Mark Schultz, and Joe Kelly
Pencils: Ed McGuinness, Duncan Rouleau, Doug Mahnke, and Kano
Inkers: Cam Smith, Jaime Mendoza, Marlo Alquiza, and Tom Nguyen
Colors: Tanya & Richard Horie and Rob Schwager
Lettering: Richard Starkings, Chris Eliopoulos, and Ken Lopez
Assistant Editor: Tom Palmer, Jr.
Editor: Eddie Berganza 

Joe Casey's second solo issue on Adventures of Superman isn't really a solo issue at all, because Adventures is promptly plunged into a crossover between the four ongoing Super titles, Return to Krypton, and Adventures #589 is thus part two of a four-part story. (The Return to Krypton trade also collects a one-issue prologue, Superman #166.) In this story, the sterile Krypton of John Byrne's Man of Steel reboot is revealed to be an illusion, and the "true" Krypton is something closer to the Krypton that we saw in the comics of the Silver Age; Jor-El created fake data about Krypton for Kal-El so that he wouldn't miss his home. It's a little convoluted-- retconning a retcon always is, I suppose-- and probably doesn't really track with the details of Man of Steel, which I remember really liking, though it's been over a decade since I've read it. In that story, people on Krypton no longer bore children, so baby Kal-El was sent to Earth in a "birthing matrix," and thus literally born in Kansas. Return to Krypton makes it clear that Lara bore Kal-El in her body, and then he was placed in the birthing matrix to be sent to Earth, so the story maintains some details of Man of Steel while ignoring its spirit.

from Superman vol. 2 #167
(script by Jeph Loeb, art by Ed McGuinness & Cam Smith)

Superman learns much of this from a message Jor-El left in his rocket in a crystal. Then, with the help of Professor Hamilton and John Henry Irons, he is able to use thought projection to make an image of Krypton in the Phantom Zone, into which he and Lois travel to see what the planet was "really" like before it was destroyed; the story is ambiguous about whether Clark and Lois actually traveled to Krypton of the past, or if only to a recreation of it. Clark is able to hang out with his parents briefly, but soon events get crazy: he helps Jor-El adjust Krypton's orbit so it won't be destroyed, but this drains his powers so Lara has to rescue him in a rocket, but space travel is against the law, so General Zod comes to arrest Jor-El and Lara, but they all go on the run, and Zod gets angry and deposes the Kryptonian leadership because he blames their complacency for the crisis, and then all of a sudden Jor-El has been made president in a counter-revolution. Whoa.

It's action-packed (particularly part three, Man of Steel #111), which is the big weakness of it all: I feel like this story should have had more emotional weight. This is momentous! But most of the story is spent 1) massaging the continuity to the preferred form of the 2000s writers, and 2) making things explode again and again. The human story gets lost in the middle of it all. I know this is a superhero comic, but I feel like there must have been a way to balance them better than they were.

from The Adventures of Superman vol. 1 #589
(script by Joe Casey, art by Duncan Rouleau
and Jaime Mendoza & Marlo Alquiza)

One thing I do like about these comics is their emphasis on narration. Three of the five issues use narration: the prologue is Pa Kent, while parts one and three are narrated by Lois. This keeps some emphasis on character, and I particularly liked the focus on Lois, who I think could otherwise have very easily gotten lost in the shuffle.

As for the retcons... I dunno. The Steve Mollmann criterion for judging retcons is that The new thing must be at least as interesting, if not more interesting, as the old thing being replaced. I did like Byrne's Man of Steel, especially its vision of Krypton, but I'm open to stories about other forms of Krypton being told. But based on this tale, this new old version of Krypton doesn't have more to offer, but I also believe it could. Weirdly, the story indicates Superman might actually have changed Kryptonian history (wouldn't that have wiped him from existence) and kind of hints that the Man of Steel Krypton still exists. I guess I'll see if either of these ideas are picked up in Adventures going forward.

(Incidentally, the method of the retcon here would itself be retconned! In Superman: Infinite Crisis we're told that Kal-El's backstory changed because of Superboy-Prime punching at the edge of reality, and thus not because Jor-El had been lying about the truth.)

ACCESS AN INDEX OF ALL POSTS IN THIS SERIES HERE

Faster than a DC Bullet: All-New All-Different DC, Part VIII: Blue Beetle: Road Trip

Comic trade paperback, 143 pages
Published 2007 (contents: 2006-07)
Borrowed from the library
Read February 2017

Blue Beetle: Road Trip

Writers: John Rogers & Keith Giffen

Artists: Cully Hamner, Rafael Albuquerque, Duncan Rouleau, Casey Jones
Colorist: Guy Major 
Letterers: Phil Balsman, Pat Brosseau, Jared K. Fletcher

This book is still a blast. Co-writer Keith Giffen departs halfway through the volume, but John Rogers is so good on his own you wouldn't even notice. The book opens up with a semi-flashback issue that clarifies exactly what happened to Jaime leading up to the One Year Later gap for those who didn't read Infinite Crisis (or those of us whose memories are vague). As always, some of the best bits are the jokes:

This book made me realize that I miss these versions of these characters.
from Blue Beetle vol. 8 #7 (script by John Rogers, art by Cully Hamner)

That's not the only trip into the past here, as soon Jaime and Brenda are on the road with mysterious-gruff-and-lovable mercenary the Peacemaker to find out about the history of the Blue Beetle from Danielle Garrett, granddaughter of the original Blue Beetle. The book is good about dolling out both solutions and mysteries-- everything Jaime learns about the mysterious scarab fused to his spine only leaves him with more to learn.