Review: Top 10: Season Two by Zander Cannon, Gene Ha, et al.

After reading all the collected editions of Top 10, the Alan Moore-created superhero cop drama, I sought out the one uncollected Top 10 story, Season Two, which reunites the original Top 10 artistic team of Zander Cannon and Gene Ha, with Cannon taking over for Alan Moore as writer. (I also tracked down the other uncollected Top 10 stories, in America's Best Comics 64 Page Giant #1 and the confusingly titled ABC A-Z: Top 10 and Teams #1, but neither of those was interesting enough to write about.)

Before reading it, I was a little surprised by the title "Season Two," which seemed like a disavowal of the Top 10 follow-up by Paul Di Fillipo and Jerry Ordway, Beyond the Farthest Precinct, as if they were saying the Alan Moore run was "season one" and now there was this, nothing else. However, once I started reading it, I realized that the title is actual a signal of its chronological placement-- Beyond the Farthest Precinct took place five years after the original run, whereas this starts right after it, simultaneous to the events chronicled in Smax. (Which is somewhat a weak point, because Toybox was very much the heart of Top 10, and Jeff Smax one of its funner characters, and they're both off in a fantasy world.)

Season Two seems promising at first. Cannon is a better writer of these characters than Ordway was, weaving together some fun superhero concepts into a crime framework; I really liked the idea of a dealer who's not selling kids drug, but magic words along the lines of "Shazam!" This subplot was complete with a burnt out magic user trying to go straight by informing the cops, but he keeps backsliding. Another character's husband has been assuming a new superhero identity on the side-- she cries that he's not the man she married, and ends up enrolling him in a seminar to get in touch with his real alter ego. Meanwhile, a new commissioner has been installed, and he's not very happy with what he sees at Top 10. Plus he's making them all wear uniforms!

Also: Girl One, the bio-engineered cop who died in the original run, is replaced by Girl Two. I was curious where this was going to go, because in Beyond the Farthest Precinct, a new "Girl 54" was introduced, which everyone was weirdly blasé about, one of the major defects of that series. Was Cannon overwriting that, or laying the groundwork to explain it better? It's one of many things we'll never know because the story of Top 10 isn't complete, it just suddenly stops at the end of issue #4.

It is followed by Season Two Special #1, which I had thought would wrap everything up (even if abruptly), but was actually a standalone done-in-one Top 10 story tying into the events of Season Two. Confusingly, Girl Two is no longer a cop in it, but a public defender, and she's dating one of the members of the force, Pete, something the main series was moving towards. The issue begins with a "TWO WEEKS FROM NOW" caption that must refer to the special's placement with respect to the rest of Season Two; I guess these changes were where Cannon's story was headed. This story's okay-- I do like Girl Two, though the conspiracy she unravels was a bit abstruse for me.

It's all a bit disappointing. I mean, I'm sure there were good sales-related reasons for the cancellation, but to not even get through a whole limited series is kind of pathetic. Moore's original Top 10 seemed like the kind of thing that could run and run; for it to just get twelve issues, a prequel, a disappointing sequel, and a cancelled sequel is sad. Still, it was nice while it lasted. Gene Ha is always good value for money as an artist, and Daxiong shows promise with his art on the special, too. Top 10 had a great, inventive premise-- colliding the anarchic genre of the superhero with the regimented one of the police procedural-- and it's a shame that more couldn't have been done with it. If you really liked Top 10, this is worth seeking out, but be forewarned that you'll get exactly no closure on everything set up within it.

Top 10: Season Two originally appeared in Top 10: Season Two #1-4 (Dec. 2008–Mar. 2009) and Top 10: Season Two Special #1 (May 2009). The story was scripted and laid out by Zander Cannon with Kevin Cannon; penciled and inked by Gene Ha (#1-4) and Daxiong (Special #1); colored by Alex Sinclair (#1-4) and Tony Avina (#3); lettered by Todd Klein (#1-4) and Rob Leigh (Special #1); and edited by Scott Dunbier (#1-4), Scott Peterson (#1-4/Special #1), and Kristy Quinn (Special #1).

Review: Smax by Alan Moore, Zander Cannon, and Andrew Currie

Comic trade paperback, n.pag.
Published 2004 (contents: 2003-04)
Acquired and read October 2016

Smax

Writer: Alan Moore

Artist: Zander Cannon
Inkers: Andrew Currie, Richard Friend
Coloring: Ben Dimagmaliw
Lettering, Logo and Design: Todd Klein

This is the last Top 10 spin-off (at least, the last one collected in trade paperback format). This takes Top 10 cop Jeff Smax back to his home dimension, a parallel Earth governed by the rules of fantasy stories, not superhero stories, accompanied by his partner, Toybox. Unlike Top 10, which smashes superhero stories and cop dramas together, this isn't really about genre collision; it's mostly an affectionate riff on the conventions of fantasy fiction, especially the Hobbit/Lord of the Rings/Dungeons & Dragons-based quest stuff. Smax finds out that the only dragon he ever ran away from is still rampaging, and Toybox guilts him into confronting his responsibilities.

Two things I like at once: jokes at the expense of Tolkien lineages, and jokes at the expense of the socially clueless.
from Smax #2 (art by Zander Cannon & Andrew Currie)

There's no deep insight into the fantasy genre, but there are good jokes: I appreciated the "politically correct" take on fantasy races, the idea of a bureau to authorize quests, Smax's inability to read emotions and utter conviction that he is reading emotions, the tedious dwarf funeral, and the fact that dwarves play RPGs based on being in middle management. And of course, I have to love any page that has jokes based on both Victorian poetry and Homestar Runner:

To be honest, it's a pretty high references-per-panel ratio throughout. It's interesting that Moore's post-Watchmen attempts to return to genres earnestly still do so self-consciously. Having deconstructed genre, can he only perform genre via reconstruction?
from Smax #3 (art by Zander Cannon & Andrew Currie)

I do wish that Smax played a bigger role in the resolution of his own story-- the ending is probably the only part of this that didn't work for me, as Smax is outshone by Toybox, and the romance subplot is resolved in a pretty rushed way, too. This isn't as good as Moore's work on Top 10 proper, but it's an entertaining diversion with a couple of its key characters.

Review: Top 10, Book 2 by Alan Moore, Gene Ha, and Zander Cannon

Doctor Who is a strange old thing; Doctor Who spin-offs sometimes even moreso. Today, I attempt to decode the long-delayed second series of Charlotte Pollard with the help of a Lance Parkin quote I had to dig up off the Internet Archive over at Unreality SF.

And now, on to the main course:

Comic trade paperback, n.pag.
Published 2002 (contents: 2000-01) 
Acquired and read August 2016

Top 10: Collected Edition, Book 2

​

Writer: Alan Moore

Finishing Artist: Gene Ha
Layout Artist: Zander Cannon
Coloring: Alex Sinclair
Lettering: Todd Klein

This book wraps up the original twelve-issue Top 10 series by Alan Moore, Gene Ha, and Zander Cannon, and it's just as good as the first volume. My favorite part was probably what happened in the battle between the ultra-mice infecting Dust Devil's mother's apartment and the atom cats brought in by an exterminator: I laughed so hard when it was revealed their battles had triggered an multiversal crisis.

It's not all jokes, though. There's a surprisingly moving issue about a hyperspatial traffic accident that results in a collision between a tourist from Rigel and a piece in a gigantic galactic game. The two are fused together and slowly die while a couple cops can't do anything but watch.

Life is a game, but that doesn't mean it's not important: cosmic truth from a giant space chessman. Also swearing, though I'm not sure why it has to be bleeped out in a series that also deals with pedophilia and prostitution.
from Top 10 #8

The various plot threads from Book 1 are pulled together pretty comprehensively here, as we discover what links many seemingly disparate events together, and Top 10 shows their stuff in a couple devastating battles. I enjoyed the ongoing subplot about Shock-Headed Pete's racism against robots, though I guess it's easy to laugh about racism in this kind of context, where it's devoid of repercussions.

Totally dig whenever Alan Moore mocks the over-the-top nature of classic comics.
from Top 10 #12

I was a little on the fence for the first couple issues of Top 10, like I said, but once I reached the end of Book 2, I knew I wanted to keep up with the series through all its future incarnations: prequel The Forty-Niners, sequels Beyond the Farthest Precinct and Top 10: Season Two, and spin-off Smax. I like these characters and this concept, and I want to see what else can be done with them.

Review: Top 10, Book 1 by Alan Moore, Gene Ha, and Zander Cannon

Comic trade paperback, n.pag.
Published 2010 (contents: 1999-2000) 
Acquired December 2011
Read August 2016

Top 10: Collected Edition, Book 1

​

Writer: Alan Moore

Finishing Artist: Gene Ha
Layout Artist: Zander Cannon
Lettering: Todd Klein

It took me a little bit to warm up to this book. I don't know if it was me or the book. Set in a city called Neopolis where everyone has a secret identity and a superpower, this book follows the cops that patrol the city. Though there is a new-to-the-precinct viewpoint character, there are still a lot of characters to acclimate to in a pretty short span of time. There are also a lot of ongoing subplots: drug dealers, someone killing prostitutes, suspects committing suicide. But when I hit Chapter Four (there are eight issues collected here), it started to click into place.

I've just realized I should have got a scan of the Top 10 HQ, which is based on DC's Hall of Justice, which is of course based on Cincinnati's own Union Terminal.
from Top 10 #3

Probably because this is the issue where the dad of a lizard Top 10 has in custody turns up demanding the release of his son. The son is basically human sized, but his dad is a Godzilla-esque giant lizard-- except his better days are long behind him, and he's more of a careening drunk now. In Chapter Four, the precinct captain, Jetman (who was "Jetlad" during World War II) must keep Gograh under control via conversation while his subordinates try to find a way to neutralize him. It's a fun riff on some familiar tropes, and that's basically what the whole of Top 10 is, mostly on the tropes of the superhero and cop genres. You have a police sergeant who's a dog with prostheses, a phantom pervert, a telekinetic Santa Claus in October, an investigation into the death of a Norse god that leads to Odin threatening to just end the universe if the crime isn't solved, and a cop's mother whose apartment is being terrorized by ultra-mice-- the only solution to which is atom cats. The book was constantly making me smile, and often laugh.

It only escalates from here.
from Top 10 #6

But it's not all jokes: the book is funny, but it also takes its duties as a cop procedural seriously. It's just that the things these cops investigate are incredibly far-fetched. But there are still killings and murders and prostitution to investigate, and it becomes clear that a longer story is unfolding as you read these issues, one that will continue into Book 2. I quickly become interested in many of the characters, especially Jetman; Duane "Dust Devil" Bodine the techno-cowboy; viewpoint character Robyn "Toybox" Slinger, who has some kind of dad problems; her partner Jeff Smax of gruff and mysterious past; and more. Like a lot of ensemble stories, what's most fun is seeing the way these various people and personalities all bounce off each other. Alan Moore, Gene Ha, and Zander Cannon do a great job bringing them all to life, and making Top 10 greater than the sum of its parts, filling the stories with little details, amusing and great.

Even super-cops have to take public transit home at night.
from Top 10 #1

Alan Moore is arguably a master of genre more than anything else: in Watchmen and Miracleman, he used that power to blow the superhero genre apart. But here he shows that power can be used for good as well as for evil. By fusing several different pop culture genres, he creates something hugely fun and enjoyable that presents familiar ideas in unfamiliar lights.

Review: Star Trek: The Next Generation: Ghosts by Zander Cannon and Javier Aranda

Comic trade paperback, 112 pages
Published 2010 (contents: 2009-10)
Acquired March 2012
Read June 2014

Star Trek: The Next Generation: Ghosts

Written by Zander Cannon

Art by Javier Aranda
Inks by German Torres-Ruiz and Marc Rueda
Colors by John Hunt
Letters by Robbie Robbins and Neil Uyetake

Sometimes one gets tired of reading Star Trek tie-ins with endless universe-shattering events, or series continuations drained of all the charm and warmth of the source material. Which made it a shoe-in that I would purchase Ghosts, a simple standalone set during The Next Generation's fourth season. Unfortunately, though there is some good stuff, the story feels stretched at five issues. People take a long time to figure out simple things, and much of this is well-trod ground, especially two warring factions on an alien planet. Cannon does an excellent job capturing the voices of the TNG characters (except for Riker), but this story isn't particularly significant to any of these characters; there's nothing at stake, not really. But I liked the depiction of the phasing effect that causes the eponymous "Ghosts" and there are bits of it that are genuinely touching. With either some tightening or some fleshing out, this could have been a a very good story; as it is, it's a diverting way to spend an hour.

Faster than a DC Bullet: Lucifer, Part XII: Evensong

Comic trade paperback, 212 pages
Published 2007 (contents: 2002-06)
Borrowed from the library
Read March 2012

Lucifer: Evensong

Writer: Mike Carey

Artists: Peter Gross, Ryan Kelly, Jon J Muth, Zander Cannon, Dean Ormston, Aaron Alexovich

Colorists: Daniel Vozzo, Guy Major, Fiona Stephenson
Letterers: Jared K. Fletcher

The last volume of Lucifer ties up everything in the series nicely, so that it can end with no dangling loose ends. Over the course of the eleven volumes of this tale, we've seen universes begin and end, Heaven and Hell crumble, gods rise and fall, so it's nice to get a set of small-scale stories at the end, letting us breathe and reflect on what's gone by. Thankfully, it also turns out to be one of the best Lucifer collections yet.

The first story, "Fireside Tales," reunites Elaine Belloc with the boy from the Stitchglass storyline of Exodus. It's a last chance for us to see the centaur people of Lucifer's creation, as well as one the stories-within-a-story that Lucifer often delighted in. It also gives us a cute example of teen love.

"Evensong" shows us one last mission for Lucifer, as he reclaims the writ of passage that he used to make the portals to his creation. The best part of this story was the final conversation between Lucifer and Mazikeen, two complex characters with a complex relationship, finally her consummated... in their own strange way.

Any regular reader of this blog will be unsurprised to learn that I loved "The Gaudium Option," the last chance to see my favorite ex-cherub in action. Gaudium and his sister, Spera, get a chance to show they really do have what it takes when the new God, Elaine Belloc, sends them into the subbasement of the universe to shut down an afterlife that keeps on limping along. Not only do they deal with God's worst angel, Remiel (I used to like that guy), they also end up reunited with their brother, the unfallen cherub Lumen. Ah, greatness. I read an interview with Carey where he regrets that they never did a Gaudium spin-off, and it is indeed a bummer.

"Eve" is a magnificent story. What could have been a facile comedy tale-- Elaine unites all the series's female characters for a night out-- is actually oddly touching. Elaine, Jill Presto, Mazikeen, Spera, Rachel Begai, and Mona (goddess of hedgehogs) go out for drinks, and we get to see how these people have all touched one another. Elaine gives many of them one last gift-- a lover for Jill, a brother for Rachel-- and even writes herself out of her parents' lives, replacing herself with her brother, the failed half-angel who died a couple volumes ago. And then at the end, having realized that micromanaging the universe is never going to get her anywhere, she sinks into creation.

Elaine was my second-favorite character in Lucifer, and her journey here is excellent-- as is her solution to the problem of omnipotence that has plagued Lucifer throughout the series. It's a solution that Lucifer could never have taken, though, as he didn't want to rule justly, he just wanted to not be ruled. Elaine, in a sense, will always be ruled by everyone; she saves the universe at the cost of her own individuality.

The last story, "All We Need of Hell," shows Lucifer as he journeys outside of creation. He experiences his own past: his rebellion against God, and then his opening of Hell, a replaying of the events of Season of Mists from his perspective. There's a long section that uses the dialogue from Neil Gaiman's original story over again, and it's odd seeing it in the mouth of Carey's Lucifer. Gaiman's Lucifer is long-winded and prone to speeches, whereas Carey's never explained himself this well in his life. The two don't entirely fit together.

I really like the final conversation between God and Lucifer, Lucifer's final rejection of God, and then those closing pages, as Lucifer goes somewhere we can never see, having finally found what he always sought in the only way possible...

Unfortunately, this is followed by "Nirvana," a Lucifer story that was released as a standalone around the time of The Divine Comedy and take place then, too. It's noteworthy in that it gives us Lucifer's only encounter with the new Dream, but little else about it is interesting. It's one of many early Lucifer stories where he goes up against a god-like entity and wins because he's Lucifer. I wish it had been collected back then and not tacked onto the end of this volume, because it's a poor coda. Jon J Muth's beautiful art lacks much storytelling ability, too.

In his afterword to this volume, Mike Carey declares that Lucifer was supposed to be the next chapter in a saga whose previous installments were the Bible, Paradise Lost, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, and The Sandman. Placing one's self with Milton, Blake, and Gaiman is a tall order indeed, but I feel that Carey very nearly pulled it off. When actually discussing and examining the character of Lucifer and his effects on others, Lucifer was on fire; it was only when it became a fantasy hack-and-slash or a story about the universe's foremost wizard that it became uninteresting. If every story in Lucifer had been the caliber of the end of Children of Monsters, A Dalliance with the Damned, The Divine Comedy, Mansions of the Silence, "Wire, Briar, Limber Lock"/"Stitchglass Slide", "The Yahweh Dance", and this volume itself, it would have been a great series. As it was, it was an average-to-good one with occasional flashes of brilliance.

Next issue: an adventure in prose with the Man of Steel: the first comic book novel ever, George Lowther's Superman!

Faster than a DC Bullet: The Sandman Spin-Offs, Part XIV: Taller Tales

Comic trade paperback, 216 pages
Published 2003 (contents: 2000-02)
Borrowed from the library
Read August 2011

The Sandman Presents: Taller Tales

Writer: Bill Willingham
Artists: Mark Buckingham, Zander Cannon, Duncan Fegredo, Peter Gross, Niko Henrichon, Adam Hughes, Phil Jimenez, Michael Kaluta, Marc Laming, Jason Little, Shawn McManus, Linda Medley, Albert Monteys, Kevin Nowlan, Andrew Pepoys, Paul Pope, John Stokes, Daniel Torres, Bill Willingham
Colorists: Lee Loughridge, Daniel Vozzo
Letterers: John Costanza, Todd Klein

This collection brings together a disparate set of stories by Bill Willingham, who I guess is kind of a big deal because he wrote Fables or something? I don't know, I never read it. (Should I?) As Willingham himself points out, all of the stories here are about the telling of stories, but that's appropriate; this is the Dreaming, after all.

First off is "Merv Pumpkinhead, Agent of D.R.E.A.M. I've said it before, but Merv, the Dreaming's janitor, is my second-favorite Sandman character, and this story is every bit as good as you'd expect a James Bond story featuring a man with a pumpkinhead to be, dirty sex jokes and all. The idea of a world-level threat doesn't feel very Sandmanesque, but on the other hand, I thought the car that could move out of people's dreams and even become a matchbox car when need was awesome. (But why is Matthew the Raven, my favorite character, now white?)

"The Further Adventures of Danny Nod, Heroic Library Assistant" is all right. The premise is okay-- it doesn't really do anything new or interesting with the idea of wandering into different stories-- but the art sells it, as each couple pages is illustrated by someone else, Danny himself remaining the only visual constant in the story. There are fun bits. Nice to see Goldie again. (But didn't he leave the Dreaming?) "Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Dreams... But Were Afraid to Ask" takes a similar point, with a bunch of two-page vignettes all illustrated by different teams. My favorite stories were the ones explaining why dreams can be sexual (it's because Merv is a bit of a sleaze) and whether dreams have dreams (they do and it's weird).

The bulk of the book is "The Thessaliad," about Thessaly, the last of the Thessalian witches, who featured in the Sandman story "A Game of You." There's some great ideas here, such as the fact that if Thessaly just reenacts the tropes of a quest story, she'll automatically end up wherever she wants to be, and I liked the interplay with her "fetch," but sometimes the characterization was a little too straightforward, and the difficulties a little too easily escaped. The end sets up some mysteries; I hope these are solved somewhere. (There's a lot of comments about Lucifer being up to something; I guess this is a reference to the concurrent Lucifer spin-off?)