JSA: Strange Adventures by Kevin J. Anderson, Barry Kitson, and Gary Erskine

JSA: Strange Adventures

Collection published: 2010
Contents published: 2004-05
Acquired and read: December 2022

Writer: Kevin J. Anderson

Penciller/Breakdowns: Barry Kitson

Inker/Finishes: Gary Erskine

Letterer: Rob Leigh

I think this might be the last "continuity insert" storyline of my Justice Society reading: that is to say, the last story set entirely in the "past" of the DC Universe relative to when it was published. Like Superman vs. Wonder Woman, Steel, the Indestructible Man, All-Star Squadron, The Young All-Stars, The Crimson Avenger, The Demise of Justice, The Justice Society Returns!, and All-Star Comics 80-Page Giant, this is entirely set during World War II, fleshing out the Golden Age in a modern style—which to me has become one of my favorite types of JSA story.

Unfortunately it is not very good. It is a a long miniseries, at six 30-page issues, but less seems to happen in it than in many minis of four 20-page issues. Before I picked this up, I was reading Don McGregor's Jungle Action run, and it took me longer to read a 17-page issue of Jungle Action than a 30-page issue of this. Like, there are lots of boring fights and boring meetings; the characters have long conversations about things that aren't interesting and don't matter.

This story seems to think the Star-Spangled Kid was a JSA member for some reason.
from JSA: Strange Adventures #5

The characters themselves are fairly generic. In "continuity insert" stories like The Demise of Justice and The Justice Society Returns!, the writers and artists were able to express the depths and personality of these Golden Age characters, but there's barely any of that here. It wants to be a Johnny Thunder story, about his desire to be a writer, but this doesn't go anywhere interesting. Johnny befriends the real Golden Age science fiction writer Jack Williamson, and this could be fun and meta, but unfortunately, it makes for long boring scenes. I don't rate Kevin J. Anderson very much as a writer, so I was not surprised by any of this... I was however disappointed, because I was hopeful anyway. I did kind of think the usually excellent Barry Kitson might be able to save it, but if there's nothing interesting to draw, it doesn't matter how well you draw it.

This post is thirty-eighth in a series about the Justice Society and Earth-Two. The next installment covers JSA Classified. 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)
12. All-Star Comics 80-Page Giant (1999)
13. Steel, the Indestructible Man (1978)
14. Superman vs. Wonder Woman: An Untold Epic of World War Two (1977)
• Wonder Woman: Earth-Two (1977-78)
15. Secret Origins of the Golden Age (1986-89)
16. The Young All-Stars (1987-89)
17. Gladiator (1930) ["Man-God!" (1976)]
    
18. The Crimson Avenger: The Dark Cross Conspiracy (1981-88)
19. The Immortal Doctor Fate (1940-82)
20. Justice Society of America: The Demise of Justice (1951-91)
21. Armageddon: Inferno (1992)
22. Justice Society of America vol. 2 (1992-93)
23. The Adventures of Alan Scott--Green Lantern (1992-93)
24. Damage (1994-96)
25. The Justice Society Returns! (1999-2001)
26. Chase (1998-2002)
27. Stargirl by Geoff Johns (1999-2003)
28. The Sandman Presents: The Furies (2002)
29. JSA by Geoff Johns, Book One (1999-2000)
30. Wonder Woman: The 18th Letter: A Love Story (2000)
31. Two Thousand (2000)
32. JSA by Geoff Johns, Book Two (1999-2003)
33. Golden Age Secret Files & Origins (2001)
34. JSA by Geoff Johns, Book Three (1999-2003)
35. JSA by Geoff Johns, Book Four (2002-03)
36. JSA Presents Green Lantern (2002-08)
37. JSA #46-87 (2003-06)
    

Review: Infestation v.2 by Dan Abnett, Andy Lanning, Scott Tipton, David Tipton, Erik Burnham, Casey Maloney, Gary Erskine, Kyle Hotz, and David Messina

Comic trade paperback, 117 pages
Published 2011 (contents: 2011)
Acquired February 2013
Read October 2016

Infestation v.2

Written by Scott Tipton, David Tipton, Erik Burham, Dan Abnett, and Andy Lanning
Art by Casey Maloney, Gary Erskine, Kyle Hotz, and David Messina
Colors by Luis Antonio Delgado and Dan Brown
Letters by Chris Mowry and Robbie Robbins

In this volume, the zombie infestation spreads to two more universes, those of Star Trek and Ghostbusters. Turns out that I don't give a crap about Ghostbusters (saw the first movie when I was a kid, enjoyed it, haven't really thought about it since and don't care to, and Kyle Hotz's artwork made the characters difficult to distinguish), but Star Trek-does-zombies is just perfectly nailed by the Tiptons, Casey Maloney, and Gary Erskine. Kirk, Spock, McCoy, and two security guards end up stranded on a Federation colony that's been infested by zombies, and have to stay alive long enough to make it to their shuttle and/or send off a distress signal. It's a perfect little slice of the zombie genre infused into the Star Trek universe, down to this predictable but utterly satisfying moment:

No he's not!
from Star Trek: Infestation #1 (script by Scott Tipton & David Tipton, art by Casey Maloney & Gary Erskine)

And guess which of the five Starfleet characters end up as zombies?

Add in computers with reel-to-reel tape decks, and a comedy robot, and you basically have everything I could want out of this kind of tale. You even get Captain Kirk fighting zombie with a wrench and Doctor McCoy with a zombie-cure-serum gun.

You know, in the alternate reality where Paramount actually did make Phase II in the seventies to get some of that sweet Star Wars/Battlestar Galactica money action, this guy probably would have joined the main cast.
from Star Trek: Infestation #2 (script by Scott Tipton & David Tipton, art by Casey Maloney & Gary Erskine)

And I don't really understand what's up with the sexy vampire lady who appears in all four realities-- but when her form adapts to the Star Trek universe, it's of course in the form of a woman in a TOS miniskirt:

I guess miniskirts and go-go boots are an intrinsic property of the Star Trek universe.
from Star Trek: Infestation #2 (script by Scott Tipton & David Tipton, art by Casey Maloney & Gary Erskine)

I had thought that the finale issue would involve all the different series coming together in some way, no matter how small, to provide a final solution. Like, I didn't expect Captain Kirk, Optimus Prime, Bill Murray, and whoever the hell leads G.I.Joe to meet, but I did think all four side stories would somehow contribute to the end of the story. Well, they don't; all there is is a single shot of the four universes through a portal. Instead it's a bunch of tedious supernatural nonsense to wrap it all up, and I don't care. But at least this misbegotten mess gave me a good Star Trek zombie tale.

Next Week: Back to The Transformers universe to figure out what's been going on there, surely something More than Meets the Eye!

Faster than a DC Bullet: The Sandman Spin-Offs, Part XXXIII: Dead Boy Detectives: Schoolboy Terrors

Comic trade paperback, n.pag.
Published 2014 (contents: 2013-14)
Borrowed from the library
Read April 2016

Dead Boy Detectives, Volume 1: Schoolboy Terrors

Writer – story: Toby Litt

Penciller – layouts – story: Mark Buckingham
Inkers: Gary Erskine, Andrew Pepoy
Finishers: Russ Braun, Victor Santos
Colorist: Lee Loughridge

Letterer: Todd Klein

They've had a couple of confusingly-titled standalones to their names already,* but the Dead Boy Detectives have finally landed an ongoing series, some twenty years after the characters originally debuted in The Sandman (and almost as long since they became detectives in The Children's Crusade). I'm not sure why, but I committed to reading every Sandman spin-off years ago, so here I am!

Schoolboy Terrors contains three stories. The first, "Run Ragged," is a short tale of the two ghost boys (Edwin, d. 1910s, and Charles, d. 1990s) helping find a lost dead cat; events quickly spiral out of control and they end up enrolled in a creepy school. This is fun, if inconsequential stuff: like Jill Thompson did in her run on the characters, Toby Litt and Mark Buckingham extract a lot of humor from the two boys' interactions with girls. (Charles is obsessed, Edwin less so.)

Weirdly, after the first story sets up these girls and their claim on the Dead Boy Detectives' treehouse, they basically don't turn up again except very briefly, and then we get a whole story about the boys making a different female friend. Not sure what that's about.
from Time Warp vol. 2 #1 (art by Mark Buckingham & Victor Santos)

School turns out to be a fruitful setting for the Dead Boy Detectives (Thompson's run was also set in one), as in the title story, they end up traveling to St. Hilarion's, the very school in which both boys died, eighty years apart. They're there to protect Crystal Palace, the daughter of a performance artist who likes MMORPGs but is possibly being set up as the receptacle for demons coming through from another dimension. I like the idea of taking the boys back to the scene of their demise, but it shows up one of the fundamental difficulties of the Dead Boy Detectives premise. What happened to these boys was terrible and gruesome-- they were both killed by bullies-- but the inclination is to put them into light-hearted goofy adventures. The plot in "Schoolboy Terrors" is about kids being killed so demons can use their bodies, sure, but the writing and especially Buckingham's art emphasizes the goofiness more than anything else, and the danger is all "fantasy violence," not realistic violence. Yet the boys have this fundamental, disturbing trauma in their backstories that is difficult to reconcile with their ongoing adventures, and bringing them back to the scene of their deaths makes that disjunction hard to ignore. Neil Gaiman is actually pretty good at mixing horror with childlike whimsy, but Toby Litt is not as talented a writer (no slight to him, of course).

Review: Doctor Who: Prisoners of Time, Volume 1 by Scott & David Tipton et al.

Comic PDF eBook, 98 pages
Published 2013 (contents: 2013)
Acquired May 2014
Read December 2014

Doctor Who: Prisoners of Time, Volume 1

Written by Scott & David Tipton

Art by Simon Fraser, Lee Sullivan, Mike Collins, and Gary Erskine
Colors by Gary Caldwell, Phil Elliott, and Charlie Kirchoff
Letters by Tom B. Long

One of the things to like about the 50th anniversary of Doctor Who was how well the timing worked out. There were twelve months and eleven Doctors, which meant a number of different media celebrated by giving each Doctor in turn across the months: audios, prose, and, indeed, comics. Only it's coming from Scott & David Tipton, and though their Star Trek comics can be good, one might suspect that after Assimilation² they shouldn't be allowed anywhere near Doctor Who ever again.

Prisoners of Time isn't quite that bad, but it's not altogether good, either. Volume 1 collects stories featuring the first through fourth Doctors, which sometimes get the feel of the eras, and sometimes do not. The first Doctor one, though, has the laughably basic mistake of the Doctor being able to steer the TARDIS correctly while traveling with Ian and Barbara. (Also, Barbara and Vicki are stared at when they attend a lecture by Thomas Henry Huxley, because women are supposedly an unusual sight in a science class... but that just would not have been true in 1868, I think. Women would be outnumbered, but they wouldn't be absent-- science hadn't been professionalized yet!) The second Doctor one is a pretty solid pastiche of its era, and I liked that the third Doctor one united Sarah Jane Smith and Liz Shaw, though it didn't really do anything with that combination behind have them run around behind the Doctor. The fourth Doctor one has him fighting the Judoon, but isn't as fun as one might hope from that.

As is often the case with IDW's Doctor Who comics, the art is inconsistent. There are no individual art credits in my collected edition, but I'm going to assume that the well-drawn second and third Doctor chapters were by Lee Sullivan and Mike Collins, stalwarts of Doctor Who Magazine who know how to do Who in comic form-- I don't know why IDW waited so long to tap them! The second Doctor chapter is particularly nice, with the characters looking on-model without being overly referenced, and a lot of varied background aliens livening it up.

The first Doctor story is really let down by some awful likenesses, especially as it introduces the recurring threat through this series: an unknown enemy kidnapping the Doctor's companions. This enemy looks at pictures of the Doctor's companions, and you can barely tell which one is which! Or in some cases, I have no clue at all. Thomas Brewster might even be in there (I think), but surely the Doctor would be grateful if he was kidnapped?

Next Week: Five, Six, Seven, Eight! More Prisoners of Time!