Wonder Woman: Past Imperfect by John Byrne et al.

The Crisis on Infinite Earths removed a number of Golden Age heroes from the Golden Age: without an Earth-Two, Superman, Batman, and Wonder Woman no longer had Earth-Two counterparts who could have been around during World War II. But as I have read my way through this project, I have read a number of stories drawing on a retcon that Wonder Woman's mother, Queen Hippolyta, travelled back in time and assumed the mantle of Wonder Woman during World War II: All-Star Comics 80-Page Giant, The Justice Society Returns!, Wonder Woman: The 18th Letter, JSA: Strange Adventures, and JSA: Ragnarok have all been stories to show a time-travelling Hippolyta as part of the Justice Society.

It dawned on me while reading Strange Adventures that I had never actually read the story that established this retcon! So I did some research and discovered it happened during an arc in John Byrne's Wonder Woman run, in issues #130 to 133, with a prologue in Speed Force #1 and an epilogue in Adventure Comics 80-Page Giant #1, and then Phil Jimenez had returned to the idea during his run on Wonder Woman. All these issues are on DC Universe Infinite, so I added them to my JSA marathon... which will clearly never end. (Except that the Adventure Comics issue isn't on the service, and I didn't realize that soon enough to get hold of a hard copy, so I'll have to read that sometime later.)

from Speed Force #1

The story begins with a prelude in Speed Force, where the Golden Age Flash, Jay Garrick, narrates a story of how in 1942 he was once saved by a mysterious man who looked like his father, accompanied by a woman. This sets up the main story, where Jay sees footage of Queen Hippolyta as Wonder Woman and realizes that she was the woman—and therefore the man must be him from 1998, having traveled back in time to 1942. So Hippolyta and Jay travel back in time (as you do) and save his younger self to keep the timeline consistent... but then they accidentally become embroiled in a JSA adventure when Johnny Thunder is captured by Nazis looking to make off with his Thunderbolt. Soon they've revealed who they are, and are traveling with the JSA to Nazi-occupied Europe to rescue Johnny and his T-bolt.

John Byrne is one of the greats of comic bookdom, which makes this storyline's utter flatness all the more frustrating. Most of it is narrated retrospectively; Jay and Hippolyta leave in issue #130, and Jay comes back alone in the same issue, and then fills in everything that happened retrospectively in issues #131-33. There is just so much dialogue and narration that it feels like you are not actually experiencing the story in question but having someone summarize it for you. The dialogue is all people explaining things to each other, not actual conversations. Within Jay's flashback there are even further flashbacks with even more narration! When the story's not about Hippolyta and Jay, it cuts to what the dead Diana is doing with the Greek gods, which is all people explaining things to each other about godhood; there's a back-up strip about Artemis and Wonder Girl which is all explanations about Etrigan and Merlin. So much exposition! Byrne's art is good of course, but he smothers it.

from Wonder Woman vol. 2 #133

(The time travel is both a predestination paradox and changes the past. Jay and Hippolyta have to save the Flash so that history remains on track, but then everything else they do in the past changes it, so that when Jay returns to the present, he remembers knowing Wonder Woman when he was young even though he didn't remember this before he left.)

It feels to me like the thing that matters about this story isn't actually in it. Because it focuses on a pretty pedestrian JSA adventure, and because it's all told by Jay, the thing we don't get that we really should is Hippolyta! What does she feel about being in this time? Why does she decide to stay? Who knows! Byrne isn't interested in her as a character, he's interested in her only as a source of retroactive continuity. Mollmann's Law of Retcons, often quoted around here, is that the new version must be at least equal in interest to the previous version, if not moreso, but perhaps there should be a second one: the retcon should lead to a story, not be a continuity change for the sake of continuity. Byrne wanted to bring back the Golden Age Wonder Woman, but he forgot to tell a story to go along with it. It's four issues of nothing.

Thankfully, Phil Jimenez came back to it four years later and did tell a story. In his story, Diana is back to being Wonder Woman and on a time travel adventure when she is accidentally diverted to 1943. She bumps into her mother, but to preserve the timeline, disguises herself as the Golden Age hero Miss America. The two must work together to stop some Nazis from obtaining occult artifacts.

Unlike Byrne's story, Jimenez's actually focuses on Hippolyta as a person. Through this adventure, Diana gets to see a different side of her mother, where she's relaxed, part of a community... and friends with benefits with Wildcat! (I guess if anyone punches above his weight, it will be a championship boxer.) The ending in particular, where mother and daughter each talks about how they feel about their family, ties it all together in way that totally justifies the retcon in terms of story and that Byrne's actual story totally failed to do.

(As always, a continuity note: in All-Star Squadron, The Young All-Stars and Secret Origins, Roy Thomas established that in the post-Crisis history, what had been Wonder Woman's role in the JSA was taken by Miss America. I don't think a single writer after Roy Thomas, however, actually used this idea: she's not in The Demise of Justice, for example. Then Byrne made his retcon of the retcon, and Miss America was doomed, because anyone wanting to use Wonder Woman in a WWII-era JSA story could just use her. Diana calls her obscure in this storyline: so much for being a key member of the JSA!)

"A Stranger with My Face" originally appeared in issue #1 of Speed Force (Nov. 1997). The story was written and illustrated by John Byrne, colored by Noelle Giddings, and edited by Jason Hernandez-Rosenblatt.

Past Imperfect originally appeared in issues #130-33 of Wonder Woman vol. 2 (Feb.-May 1998). The story was written, pencilled, inked, and lettered by John Byrne; colored by Patricia Mulvihill; and edited by Paul Kupperberg.

"U-Boats & Dinosaurs" and "Her Daughter's Mother" originally appeared in issues #184-85 of Wonder Woman vol. 2 (Oct.-Nov. 2002). The story was written and pencilled by Phil Jimenez, inked by Andy Lanning (#184-85) and Larry Stucker (#185), colored by Trish Mulvihill, and edited by Eddie Berganza.

This post is forty-second in an ever-expanding series about the Justice Society and Earth-Two. The next installment covers Batman/Wildcat. Previous installments are listed below:

Review: Star Trek: Leonard McCoy, Frontier Doctor by John Byrne

Comic trade paperback, n.pag.
Published 2010 (contents: 2010)
Acquired September 2012
Read November 2018

Star Trek: Leonard McCoy, Frontier Doctor

Written and Illustrated by John Byrne

Colored by Lovern Kindzierski

Lettered by Neil Uyetake

John Byrne writing and drawing Star Trek is probably the best thing to come out of IDW's sometimes mediocre Star Trek comics. Leonard McCoy, Frontier Doctor shows what McCoy was up to as a civilian between the original series and The Motion Picture, after he left Starfleet, and also ties into Byrne's earlier minis Crew and Assignment: Earth.

from Star Trek: Leonard McCoy, Frontier Doctor #1

It's okay. Byrne knows how to draw a great story and tell a good one, but sf medical mysteries have a trap, and Byrne falls straight into it in most of the stories here, which is technononsense overriding the human or sfnal element, which happens a little too often. Still, he captures the voices of the established characters well (in addition to McCoy, Scotty, Kirk, Number One, Gary Seven, and Roberta Lincoln all appear), and I enjoyed the new ones, particularly Theela, the Andorian stowaway who joins McCoy's medical mission, and he draws great Star Trek and sf imagery. Not perfect, I guess, but I enjoyed reading it a lot.

Faster than a DC Bullet: All-New All-Different DC, Part VI: The All New Atom: My Life in Miniature

Comic trade paperback, 160 pages
Published 2007 (contents: 2006-07)
Borrowed from the library
Read January 2017

The All New Atom: My Life in Miniature

Writer: Gail Simone

Pencils: John Byrne, Eddy Barrows
Inks: Trevor Scott
Letters: Travis Lanham
Colors: Alex Bleyaert

At the end of Identity Crisis, Atom Ray Palmer vanished-- and given what had happened to him, it's hard to complain. The All New Atom follows the adventures of Ryan Choi, a young Ph.D. from Hong Kong who takes Palmer's place at Ivy University, Ivy Town, as a professor of nuclear physics. Choi was a correspondent of the Atom from a young age, and of course doesn't just take Palmer's place in the laboratory/classroom, but soon finds himself stepping into the role of the Atom.

The basic premise of this book is excellent. As an academic, I like that the book is not only set in a college town, but uses that-- Choi's best friend is another professor, and Choi is supported technologically by a group of professors who get together to play poker and complain about things. The Dean is a key character in the book. (That said, apparently the Dean of this university hires professors without campus visits!) I especially like the idea that years of wacky happenings have totally rewritten the laws of physics within Ivy Town:

It seems like someone should be doing more about the witch-burnings than they are.
from The All New Atom #4 (art by Eddy Barrows & Trevor Scott)

Also there are some good academic jokes:

This is like when my union local asked me to sign a petition supporting more STEM funding. I was like, "Where I'm standing from it seems like STEM has more than enough funding. How about some Humanties love?" I didn't try to murder anyone over it, though. Also I don't think the composition of reality was at stake.
from The All New Atom #6 (art by Eddy Barrows & Trevor Scott)

Plus John Byrne pencils most of the book, and you can almost never beat Byrne on a superhero book. Clear storytelling, good facial expressions, bold action:

Surely a car would be a faster way to travel?
Well, maybe not given the roads in some college towns.
from The All New Atom #2 (art by John Byrne & Trevor Scott)

I also liked Simone's device of placing quotations (mostly from scientists, real and fictional) juxtaposed with the dialogue, a nice comics-dependent device.

Unfortunately, the book's actually story remained too muddled for me to get into it. What exactly was at stake in the weird war between cancer and tiny people? What did the Dean and a serial killer have to do with it all? Why was there all of a sudden a threat to the President that was resolved just as quickly? Why would the Dean call in the father of a professor he's worried about-- and how on Earth could the father of a professor make him go home? I just never really got the relationships between a lot of what was going on throughout most of the book, making for a confusing and disappointing reading experience. Hopefully future volumes deliver on the strong premise of this series.

Next Week: Manhunter is back, and ready to be Unleashed!

Faster than a DC Bullet: Project Gotham, Part XXXIII: The Many Deaths of the Batman

Comic trade paperback, n.pag.
Published 1992 (contents: 1989)
Borrowed from the library
Read January 2016

The Many Deaths of the Batman

Writer: John Byrne
Penciller: Jim Aparo
Inker: Mike DeCarlo
Letterer: John Costanza
Colorist: Adrienne Roy

Year Thirteen, March
I get a weird little frisson out of comic book titles that use the character name in them, as opposed to a series prefix, like this or World Without a Superman. I don't know why; it's just neat. Anyway, this book adds support to my Jim-Starlin-and-Jim-Aparo-are-better-apart-than-together theory by pairing Aparo with John Byrne. This short book begins with a silent chapter where the Gotham City police find a dead Batman, the best efforts of a hospital can't save him, a nosy reporter's leak means the whole city quickly knows, and then a second Batman corpse turns up. John Byrne used to infuriate me with his excess verbosity on Alpha Flight, but like issue #13 of that series showed, he can do great stuff without them when he wants to. The chapter is a masterpiece of storytelling by Aparo, communicating a whole story with only a single, well-chosen word.

That said, there are times Aparo uses motion lines to excess, making one think of actors overdoing the wild gesticulating in old silent films.
from Batman vol. 1 #433

When the second issue begins, there's a ton of text and I got worried, but Byrne actually balances the word and image well throughout. The core of the story is that someone is dressing people as Batman and then killing them, often in grotesque fashion; it's actually kind of a dark 1980s take on a Silver Age story, and it works quite well, as Batman, Commissioner Gordon, and the rest of the police have to mobilize against this increasingly bizarre threat. Eventually the answers materialized and they're improbably convoluted, even for the kind of story this is imitating, but the ride up until the point was so enjoyable it was hard for me to care. This is a "typical Batman" story: no huge stakes, no deranged supervillains, and it works as a very solid example of that genre.

Holy Wall of Expository Text, Batman!
from Batman vol. 1 #435

As a side note, I read this book where it takes place, between A Death in the Family and A Lonely Place of Dying. I didn't gain anything from the experience: the Batman here doesn't show any effects of the death of Jason Todd.

Next Week: We draw nearer and nearer the end of this project with the return of Poison Ivy!

Faster than a DC Bullet: Project Crisis!, Part XI: Legends: The Collection

Comic trade paperback, 145 pages
Published 1993 (contents: 1986-87)
Borrowed from the library
Read August 2013

Legends: The Collection

Plot: John Ostrander
Script: Len Wein
Pencils: John Byrne
Inks: Karl Kesel
Letters: Steve Haynie
Colors: Tom Ziuko, Carl Gafford

I don't intend to read every post-Crisis crossover DC Comics did-- that would keep me here all night-- but I thought I might dip into a few that had ties to the Crisis in some ways. Legends was the first crossover after Crisis on Infinite Earths, and it did much to establish the new setup: among other things, Legends introduces the new Captain Marvel, disbands the Justice League Detroit, and sets the stage for the Justice League International.

The story was edited by Mike Gold-- who also edited the Mike Grell Green Arrow, Action Comics Weekly, and other great DC productions of the late 1980s-- and he provides a very thorough introduction about where he and the other creators were coming from with the story, which I wish collected editions did more of these days. (Legends seems to be a very early trade paperback-- you can tell because they feel compelled to give it a "The Collection" subtitle!) Gold opines that "Stories need to be about something... The issue of how superheroes would be treated in our society was one that intrigued both of us [Gold and Ostrander]--Paul Levitz handled it brilliantly in his 'Last Days of The Justice Society' story eight years earlier. How had our culture changed from the McCarthyesque setting of Paul's story? In the middle of the Reagan Administration, we felt not, and we wanted to experiment with this issue in Legends."

Hence, Legends sees Darkseid deciding that those pesky superheroes from Earth have stymied the goals of Apokolips too much, and that he will destroy them by destroying their place in human society. This is an interesting, even great idea, but its execution in Legends leaves much to be desired. Darkseid does a few things:

1. sends his minion Glorious Godfrey to Earth as a pundit called G. Gordon Godfrey. Godfrey makes a number of public appearances on Earth, using his gold tongue to turn the American people against superheoes-- though it's not really clear what his argument is.
2. sends a monster after Captain Marvel, and makes it look like Captain Marvel killed it. This makes Billy Batson quit being Captain Marvel, but no one else ever even mentions it, and I have a hard time imagining the American public being mad about it anyway.
3. sends another monster which destroys the Justice League Detroit.
4. sends another monster which kills a member of the Suicide Squad-- a bunch of villains!
5. turns people into robotic hellhounds or something... I didn't really understand this part of the plan.

It's not quite clear how this is meant to work, but all of a sudden public sentiment has reached the point where President Reagan has ordered all superheroes to stand down. If Darkseid had actually tricked the heroes into doing something seemingly malevolent, I could get this, but he doesn't. In fact, he mostly attacks the Earth as the heroes come to the planet's defense. There's perhaps something to be said about how the superhero myth destroys the agency of individual human beings, or about how it's a short step from superheroism to tyranny (as we see in The Superman Chronicles, Volume One, Watchmen, Superman: Red Son, and many other stories), but those arguments aren't made here.

The problem is that that makes the resolution lackluster. If one of those arguments had been made more clearly, then the ending could have see the heroes stepping up and revealing them to be untrue-- with the superheroes' examples empowering ordinary humans, for example. Instead, it just becomes a superhuman blowout, with the heroes beating up Darkseid's forces, and Glorious Godfrey defeating himself when he foolishly attempts to wear the helmet of Doctor Fate. Oh, everyone likes heroes after all suddenly! The end.

The place this does work is with a little girl that Billy befriends, who never stops believing in Captain Marvel, and shows up to confront Godfrey at the climax. That was nice, but I think it could've been exploited to show the themes of the story a bit more strongly. As it is, most of Legends is a bunch of fight scenes that don't really matter to the story, intercut with an interminable conversation between Darkseid and the Phantom Stranger, where Darkseid says, "Heroes suck" and the Phantom Stranger says, "No they don't" ad nauseam, like a poorly-done latter-day God and Satan in the Book of Job.

Thumbs up, though, to John Byrne and Karl Kesel on art. Byrne's bright, bold linework is really suited to a story about unabashed heroism-- lots of square jaws and grim determination. He obviously draws a good Superman, but I particularly loved his Captain Marvel. On the other hand, his Darkseid always seems to be squeezed into the corners of panels-- he should be dominating them!