Return to the Threeboot: A Review of Supergirl and the Legion of Superheros: The Quest For Cosmic Boy

Given that in reading Mark Waid and Barry Kitson's run on the Legion of Super-Heroes, I had read five of the eight volumes of the so-called "threeboot" Legion, it seemed like the thing to do was just go ahead and read the remaining three. So here is the first of three reviews of what was done with Waid and Kitson's distinctive Legion after they left:

Comic trade paperback, 138 pages
Published 2008 (contents: 2007-08) 
Acquired and read August 2016

Supergirl and the Legion of Super-Heroes: The Quest For Cosmic Boy

​

Writer: Tony Bedard

Artists: Dennis Calero with Kevin Sharpe/Robin Riggs
Colors: Nathan Eyring
Letters: Travis Lanham, Jared K. Fletcher, Steve Wands

Cosmic Boy vanished in the final issue of the Waid/Kitson run, Dominator War, apparently taken into the future. The Quest For Cosmic Boy sees a new Legion leader, Supergirl, begin a search for him under the advice of Brainiac 5. This essentially gives us three substories, each of which is the focus of two issues or so: Star Boy, Sun Boy, and Mekt "not Lightning Lord" Ranzz go to Mekt's home planet of Winath; Supergirl, Saturn Girl, and Lightning Lad explore the Gobi Rainforest; and Timber Wolf, Shadow Lass, and Atom Girl must stop an attempted assassination on Lallor, the planet where the Legion fought a bloody battle back in Teenage Revolution.

I want to see more of this guy, but I suspect we never will.
from Supergirl and the Legion of Super-Heroes #32 (art by Dennis Calero)

Of these, the Winath one is the most successful. For most of the story, it's a fun and complicated adventure underground on the dangerous planet of Winath, especially thanks to a United Planet judiciary member who's come along to arrest Cosmic Boy if they do find him, so that Cos can attend a hearing on the genocide of the Dominators. Tenzil Kem, the judiciary officer, is Matter-Eater Lad in some other continuities, and here he's good fun, eating tons of stuff (including a finger!) but also with lie-detecting sunglasses. Unfortunately, it all fell apart at the end for me, when we learn that Mekt's people telepathically implanted the impulse to commit genocide in Cos, completely undermining the end of Dominator War, and replacing moral ambiguity with black-and-white simplicity. Mekt's Wanderers had previously had the same goals as the Legion, but somewhat more dangerous methods; now they're just evil folks. I was really disappointed in this change, and it cast a pall over the interesting story Bedard had been telling up until that point.

And no one ever mentioned him ever again. Even after he told everyone he used to be on the team.
from Supergirl and the Legion of Super-Heroes #34 (art by Dennis Calero)

The other two stories are considerably less interesting. The Lallor story adds Wildfire to the Legion in a somewhat too complicated fashion (he was apparently on the team before the first volume, but seemed to be killed), and it's not as though the Legion really needs more members-- the roll call in the front of the book lists nineteen active, full members, and there are so many story and character hooks for them that Waid and Kitson set up in the first five volumes that still haven't been followed up on. The Gobi story is mostly there just to get Supergirl out of the way, returning her to the 21st century for the events of World War III and whatever it was she did in her own book after the Infinite Crisis.

I imagine his tenure as Legion leader will go off without a hitch.
from Supergirl and the Legion of Super-Heroes #36 (art by Dennis Calero)

The idea of Supergirl as Legion leader has promise, given she's instinctively nice and selfless, but also new to this time and place, but Bedard's story gives her almost nothing to do in this capacity except take orders from Brainiac 5. And though I like Brainy, he overshadows the other characters a bit too much with his complicated machinations (taking after his ancestor in L.E.G.I.O.N., except that that Brainiac was a lead, whereas this one is supposed to be an equal member of an ensemble). I found myself pretty dissatisfied with the thrust of Bedard's brief run on the title. I'd like to see more development of the characters that Waid and Kitson set up-- there are lots of Legionnaires we still know so little about, including Cos's cofounders, Saturn Girl and Lightning Lad!

I should say that Dennis Calero does a pretty good job on art. I'd hate to be the guy with the job of following Barry Kitson as artist on anything, but Calero does a good job on action. On the other hand, his figures and faces look a little too posed at times, especially when he seems to be tracing a facial expression that just doesn't look at all appropriate for the situation.

Two Ways of Looking at Coastal Elites

As the title implies, the immediate catalyst for this post is the recent election and its fallout, where suddenly the term "coastal elites" seemed to gain major currency. But the thoughts behind this post have been percolating for a whole.

Where Are These Alleged Coastal Elites, Anyway?

I live in Connecticut. Connecticut voted for the Democratic candidate for president in the past seven presidential elections, since 1992. Connecticut is one of five states where Democrats control the governorship and the legislature. If you mention "Connecticut" to people not from New England, most of their understanding of it (if they have any at all, I sure didn't before I moved here) seems to derive from Gilmore Girls--  a tv show about the granddaughter of rich people who goes to Yale.

But my apartment is in an old mill town that went bankrupt in the 1980s, and once had the highest rate of heroin usage per capita in the country. It's a lovely place, and I'm happy to live here, but when I ride the bus with people working shitty jobs at the grocery store, or walk from the bus stop to my apartment past dilapidated buildings, I don't feel very elite. There's a guy I talk to at the bus stop most mornings who spent some time in jail (I'm not sure what for) and goes on rants about how much he hates Donald Trump. I don't think he's a coastal elite promoting radical identity politics. (The county I live in actually went for Trump, though, 51-43, something I wonder how many people who live in it even actually know.)

This article on coastal elites suggests that "[i]f you care about poverty, relocate to West Virginia or Memphis." But there's plenty of poverty on the coast. Polarizing America into the "heartland" and the "coastal elites" is a gross oversimplification that has very little to do with my actual experience of living on the coast.

Yet, They Exist

However, as someone who grew up in the Midwest, I have definitely encountered a bias against the noncoastal parts of America while living in Connecticut. As I am an academic, I mostly find this attitude in the way that academics think about working in the rest of the country. Do you know what's a fate worse than unemployment? Having a tenure-track job in the fourth-largest city in Pennsylvania. And the way this is expressed is often in a sort of taken-for-granted way-- like everyone in audience agrees with you that having a job like that would just be dire.

And also in my experience, it's a bias born of a lack of real experience. Now there's definitely a subset of folks who came to Connecticut from the Midwest and have this attitude that they're glad to have escaped it, and though I disagree with them, I know their opinions are at least founded on experience. But I have heard people say they could not work somewhere other than Boston, New York City, or Los Angeles who I know have almost been to no states that don't share a border with New York.

I guess I find it particularly disappointing because most English academics are all about diversity and open-mindedness-- but being willing to live in West Virginia or South Dakota is apparently a bridge too far. Heck, there are some who apparently find living in the part of Connecticut I reside in a bridge too far, and exude resentment that they've been exiled to a whole two hours outside of New York City. If you can't represent yourself and your values to people who don't necessarily share them, and you're an educator, I sort of wonder at your commitment to, well, education. You should be able to do more than preach to the choir.

Review: Imperial Eyes by Mary Louise Pratt

Trade paperback, 276 pages
Published 2008 (originally 1992)

Borrowed from the library

Read January 2013

Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation
by Mary Louise Pratt

Like many good critical books I read during the final flurry of my Ph.D. exams, I kind of forgot about this one until I went back over my notes to write this review-- a mere four years since I read the book. Pratt has some good insights into the imperialist/scientific/capitalist discourse of the nineteenth century, showing how scientific ways of seeing and imperial ones are entangled, how the Europeans culturally constructed their colonial authority, how "a woman [...] is not to see but to be seen, or at least she is not be seen seeing" (102), and how supposedly colonial metaphors of understanding were really ones of control (if you paint a landscape, you're actually making yourself the producer, for example). I wasn't as interested in imperialism and power then as I am now; I should go back over it and see what new insights I can glean.

Reading Roundup Wrapup: January 2017

Pick of the month: Shellshocked by Keith Giffen, John Rogers, Cully Hamner, et al. This was a tough choice, between this and The Omega Men, both of which deliver what I want out of superhero comics, but in completely different ways: one is an angsty and funny answer to Spider-Man and forerunner for Ms. Marvel, the other a grim and gritty examination of the tactics of revolutionary/terrorist violence. But Shellshocked made me laugh, so I gave it the edge. I did also very much enjoy Metamorphosis.

All books read:
1. Star Trek: The Next Generation: Metamorphosis by Jean Lorrah
2. Manhunter: Origins by Marc Andreyko
3. The Jack Kirby Omnibus, Volume One: Starring Green Arrow by Jack Kirby with Joe Simon, France E. Herron, Bill Finger, Dave Wood, and Robert Bernstein
4. Blue Beetle: Shellshocked by Keith Giffen & John Rogers
5. The Fall of Hyperion by Dan Simmons
6. Threshold, Volume 1: The Hunted by Keith Giffen
7. Endymion by Dan Simmons
8. The All New Atom: My Life in Miniature by Gail Simone
9. The Mighty Thor, Vol. 3 by Walter Simonson
10. The Outsiders by S. E. Hinton
11. The Omega Men: The End Is Here by Tom King
12. Forever… by Judy Blume

All books acquired:
1. Star Trek: The Original Series: Elusive Salvation by Dayton Ward
2. Star Trek: The Complete Unauthorized History by Robert Greenberger
3. Collected Twelfth Doctor Comic Strips, Volume 2: The Highgate Horror: Collected Comic Strips from the pages of Doctor Who Magazine by Mark Wright, Jonathan Morris, Steve Lyons, Jacqueline Rayner, and Scott Gray, with Roger Langridge
4. Star Trek: The Original Series: Allegiance in Exile by David R. George III
5. Elisabeth Sladen: The Autobiography with Jeff Hudson
6. Dr No by Ian Fleming
7. Little Black Book of Short Stories by A. S. Byatt
8. Among Others by Jo Walton
9. Voices by Ursula K. Le Guin
10. Powers by Ursula K. Le Guin

Books remaining on "To be read" list: 653 (up 5)
Books remaining on "To review" list: 53 (down 10)

Review: Infestation v.1 by Dan Abnett, Andy Lanning, Mike Raicht, David Messina, Nick Roche, Giovanni Timpano, et al.

Comic trade paperback, 124 pages
Published 2011 (contents: 2011)
Acquired February 2013
Read October 2016

Infestation v.1

Written by Dan Abnett, Andy Lanning, and Mike Raicht
Art by David Messina, Nick Roche, and Giovanni Timpano
Prologue Art by Elena Casagrande with Claudia Balboni
Inks by Gaetano Carlucci
Colors by Joana Lafuente, J. Brown, and Scarlet Gothica
Letters by Robbie Robbins and Chris Mowry

I bought Infestation because it includes a Star Trek comic, but I read it now because it crosses over with IDW's Transformers tales. Infestation is more of a cross-through than cross over: a zombie outbreak begins in the Covert Vamiric Operations universe (a franchise original to IDW), and then escapes through a dimensional portal to four different realms, those of Transformers, G.I. Joe, Star Trek, and Ghostbusters, meaning each of those series has a short story about zombies. The first volume collects the kick-off issue and the Transformers and G.I. Joe tales. The frame story is boring (lots of characters you don't care about doing cliche zombie-fighting things), the Transformers story is a confusing mess (tons of robots and lots of gobbledygook, plus it draws on past continuity regarding Kup I don't know anything about), and it turns out that I just don't give a crap about a bunch of G.I. Joe villains (plus this one doesn't even feature Infestation's ostensible main villain). This should have been fun, but it wasn't at all.

I found the mass of robots confusing to sift through, a disappointing turnout from the usually dependable Nick Roche. But maybe it's the coloring? The later IDW stories in particular use shading to make robots stand out from one another and the background much better.
from The Transformers: Infestation #2 (script by Dan Abnett & Andy Lanning, art by Nick Roche)

Next Week: The end to Infestation!

Review: The Beth Book by Sarah Grand

My review of the new reprint of the 1960s Avengers comic strips is up at USF. Read it!

Trade paperback, 571 pages
Published 2013 (originally 1897)

Acquired June 2016
Read July 2016

The Beth Book by Sarah Grand

"I don't believe in celibacy at all," Beth said cheerfully. "Celibacy is an attempt to curb a healthy instinct with a morbid idea." (494)

This novel concerns the life story of a girl named Beth, who grows up into a woman named Beth. Beth is one of those delightfully sassy female protagonists: there's not a little bit of Jane Eyre in her youth, especially when she is shunted off to a conservative girls' school, to which she turns out to be totally unsuited, but manages to bring under her control, almost. For example, many of the younger girls find their ways into informal "families" managed by the older girls, but Beth does not. A teacher suggests she ought to be, so Beth forms her own: making herself the "mother" to a group of older girls, the worst-behaved ones in the school. When the teacher expresses concern that they are a bad influence, Beth responds that she will straighten them out. And she does. This phase of the book was probably my favorite, combining as it does jokes with some good early feminist contempt for Victorian women's education, which left you unable to do anything except get married.

I hate to be one of those people who diagnoses fictional characters who were invented before the relevant mental illnesses were discovered, but I wanted to read both a mild autism spectrum disorder and bipolar disorder into Beth. Beth has "bright eyes" with "phenomenal receptivity" (42) and "learned to read a countenance long before she learned to read a book" (43), but sometimes struggles to pick up on unspoken social cues. When she's chastised for speaking with her mouth full by her uncle, she rejoins that he never told her this rule, and she will abide by it now that she knows (126-7). She has a similar complaint when at school. We're also told at one point that she suffers from "depression of spirits" but that she also has phases of great activity and excitement. By all accounts, Beth is pretty squarely based on Sarah Grand's life, and I know little about her.

I picked up this book because it features a vivisectionist, but it's not a anti-vivisection novel in same way as, say, Wilkie Collins's Heart and Science. (Incidentally, Beth reads Collins's The Moonstone at one point.) Rather, the middle of the novel is an extended and effective tale of a bad marriage, of Beth being psychologically abused by a terrible man, reminding me of Frances Hodgson Burnett's The Shuttle. Virginia Woolf famously formulated that a woman needs "a room of one's own" in order to write, and Beth has to go through an awful lot of work to find such a room for herself under the gaze of her husband, a doctor who controls her finances, belittles her intellect, reads her mail, won't let her talk to other people, carries on affairs, and accuses her of infidelity. It's horrifying, and very effectively done.

"Dr. Dan" works in a lock hospital, a hospital for the treatment of veneral disease in women, though Beth doesn't know this when they get married. You might think looking out for women's health is good, but I guess early feminists were against this because of the double standard. Women would essentially be locked up without trial, but nothing ever happened to the men they slept with, something Beth criticizes Dan for here, who can only justify it on the basis that "[i]t’s a deuced awkward thing for a man to be suspected of disease" (417). It ruins his prospects! But part of the reason Beth is against Dan's occupation also seems to be, unfortunately to a modern reader, moral revulsion: Beth calls him a "pander" (i.e., a pimp) and their entire social circle shuns both of them for it. The novel criticizes their social circle, but only on the basis that Beth didn't know she married such a man. But, I want to know: surely someone has to treat these women? The novel doesn't really offer an alternative, though everyone does cheer when the Contagious Diseases Act is repealed, closing the lock hospitals, in 1886.

Part of the book's opposition seems to rest on a thesis that some people absorb the morality of their surroundings, and when Dan looks at degradation all the time, he becomes degraded himself, and soon begins to delight in it, and delight in trying to degrade Beth alongside him. Also it gets kind of weird and eugenicist at one point, when Beth complains that Dan is working against nature by encouraging the survival of the unfittest: "Let the unfit who are with us live, and save them from suffering when you can, by all means; but take pains to prevent the appearance of any more of them. By the reproduction of the unfit, the strength, the beauty, the morality of the race is undermined, and with them its best chances of happiness" (458).

Like I said, it's not an antivivisection novel per se. Rather, vivisection is just a quick way to establish that Dan is just even more despicable than you thought: he has a secret lab in their home where he vivisects dogs, supposedly "in the interests of suffering humanity," but Beth rejoins that he does it "[i]n the interests of cruel and ambitious scientific men, struggling to outstrip each other" (456). She hopes for the day that vivisectors will be ejected from society, and that's vivisection's whole role here-- just a way to establish that Dan is really nasty.

Outside of this, the last 150 or so pages of the novel get kind of dull, unfortunately. There are a lot of discussions between Beth and her friends (many of whom originate in a different Sarah Grand novel, The Heavenly Twins) about what makes good novels and bad novels, which initially I found interesting, but soon got tedious, and then there's this whole thing about Beth nursing a sick lodger which I found uninteresting except for when it taught me the origin of the Salisbury steak. But on the whole this was an enjoyable read, for its depiction of a prodigious child, of a horrendous marriage, and of the limits of Victorian women's education. Plenty of jokes, too.

What's a Grecian Urn?: A Pun-ctilious History

Say you're talking to someone very learned about John Keats. And they're just nattering on, and you're like, who cares? How do you stop this? Simple: you ask, What's a Grecian urn? They begin to explain, Well, it's a kind of old vase-- and you cut them off. "About sixteen Euros a day."

I've deployed this joke periodically since I discovered it; a couple weeks ago I reduced a colleague to severe anger, to my extreme delight. Said colleague (I would say friend, but I suspect no more) asked if the joke was born of the financial crisis and Greek economic collapse, and though I was certain it was older than that, I wasn't certain how much older.

So: I investigated this for you. Google Books was of course my first stop. What turned out to be more interesting than I expected is the way the joke slowly mutates over time, its form undergoing alterations.

The joke is first recorded there in 1929, 110 years after Keats wrote his famous poem.

This hit is from Air Travel News, on a page of miscellaneous jokes (other winners include "The gnu is fast disappearing. Shall this little animal be allowed to become extinct? Gno! Gnever!"), but you'll see that it cites it to Life magazine. Google Books includes that it was in Life in the same year, but Google Books won't let me see those back issues.

It seems to get recycled around those kinds of page-filling joke lists a lot, but the answer begins to mutate. In The Literary Digest in 1936, the answer is "Very little" (plus the joke is cited to The Weekly of Auckland, New Zealand). This answer also appears in The Unitarian Register in 1937 and Typo Graphic in 1940. Some attribute names to the speakers, like "Joe" and "Sam," but in a 1941 issue of Foreign Service (the magazine of the VFW), it becomes a smart-arsed pupil, who says, "It depends on what he does," and this version has some staying power, being the almost universal form during the 1940s.

By 1941, it's common enough to yield a metajoke in the Saturday Review:

I wish I could see more of this one to understand the context better, but it appears to be a series of updates on proverbial boys?

In the 1950s, the smart-arsed student version is replaced with a variant featuring a dumb answerer: someone asks, "What's a Grecian urn?" usually a child in the form, "What's a Grecian urn, daddy?" and the other person says, "I dunno. I guess it depends on what he does."

In the 1960s, it actually becomes a joke by union members to make fun of their own, appearing in two union magazines (Carpenter in 1966 and News and Views by the Ohio AFL-CIO in 1967) in the form, "The youngster, doing his homework, asked his business agent father: 'Dad, what's a Grecian urn?' 'I dunno,' replied Dad. 'It'd depend on what his classification was.'"

In the 1970s, it finally mutates into the form I know, where the answer is just a simple amount of money: "Two-fifty an hour" (Westways, 1975) or "about ten drachmas an hour" (Walt Disney's Story a Day, 1978) or "about 20 drachmas a week after taxes" (Rajasthan District Gazetteer, 1978) or "about three drachmas a day" (Musical Heritage Review, 1983) or "a few hundred drachmas at a bare minimum" (How Do You Get a Horse out of the Bathtub?, 1983) or "ten drachmas a week" (Everyman's Word Games, 1986). Apparently the income rate of a Grecian is highly variable.

I should note that in a 1978 New York Classified, the joke warps all the back around into a non-joke, where the punchline is that there is no punchline: "'My wife just bought a Grecian urn.' 'What's a Grecian urn?' 'You know — "Beauty is truth, truth beauty".'" Yeah, I don't really think it's funny either. The 1970s is also when I found regular hits for "What's a Greek urn?" It does appear one or two times prior to that, but the 1970s is when it takes off; it must be when people who don't actually know the poem get hold of it.

I didn't find any Google Books references using euros, which is how I always tell it. There are a lot of opinion columns about the Greek debt crisis that use it as a headline or an opening line, though.

The joke even gets a mention in "Zero to Hero" in the 1998 Disney animated film Hercules:

Review: The Riddle of the Sands by Erkine Childers

Trade paperback, 301 pages
Published 2011 (originally 1903)

Acquired September 2013

Read January 2015

The Riddle of the Sands: A Record of Secret Service
by Erskine Childers

I read this book while travelling to the Eaton Collection to read science fiction from 1890-1910 during with future war/revolution. This turned out to be something of a coincidence, as The Riddle of the Sands is pretty much a member of the same genre-- except that it's not science fiction. It's about a planned German invasion of Britain, but the invasion is thwarted during the trial stages, meaning there's no counterfactual or future history proposed. Yet the book is clearly responding to the same concerns that drive contemporary science fiction novels like The Three Days' Terror and The Stolen Submarine: Britain's supremacy is under threat, but Your Humble Author knows how to rectify that, both in reality (some policy changes) and in fiction (plucky amateurism, which is the supreme skill of the fin-de-siècle Englishman).

If ever you wanted to know how difficult yachting in sandy waters was, this is the book for you. I mean that both facetiously and seriously: I never even thought about it before, but Childers really makes you the reader feel as though you're lost in an unnavigable fog. Hard going sometimes, but fun, and worth it. (The film adaptation is decent, too, though I think my wife mostly liked it for Michael York in tight trousers.)

Faster than a DC Bullet: Project Crisis!, Part LXI: Zero Year

Comic trade paperback, n.pag.
Published 2015 (contents: 2013-14)
Borrowed from the library
Read October 2016

DC Comics: Zero Year

Writers: Scott Snyder, James Tynion, Greg Pak, Marguerite Bennett, Justin Gray & Jimmy Palmiotti, Marc Andreyko, Christy Marx, John Layman, Francis Manapul & Brian Buccellato, Jeff Lemire, Van Jensen with Robert Venditti, Kyle Higgins

Artists: Greg Capullo & Danny Miki, Rafael Albuquerque, Aaron Kuder, Fernando Pasarin & Jonathan Glapion, Eduardo Pansica & Júlio Ferreira, Trevor McCarthy, Andrea Mutti, Pat Olliffe, Jim Fern, Jay Leisten & Tom Nguyen, Romano Molenaar, Daniel Sampere, Travis Moore, Vicente Cifuentes, Scott McDaniel, Aaron Lopresti & Art Thibert, Jason Fabok, Chris Sprouse & Francis Manapul, Karl Story & Keith Champagne, Andre Sorrentino, Denys Cowan & Bill Sienciewicz, Victor Drujiniu & Juan Castro, Ivan Fernandez & Rob Lean, Allan Jefferson, Will Conrad & Cliff Richards, Andy Clarke
Colorists: Fco Plascencia, Dave McCaig, Arif Prianto, Blond, Paul Mounts, Guy Major, Chris Sotomayor, Sonia Oback, Tomeu Morey, Brian Buccellato, Marcelo Maiolo, Matt Hollingsworth, Garry Henderson, Peter Pantazis
Letterers: Nick Napolitano, Taylor Esposito, Dezi Sienty, Todd Klein, Travis Lanham, Jared K. Fletcher, Carlos M. Mangual, Rob Leigh

Strictly speaking, this book doesn't cover a crisis, but throughout this project I have found it interesting to examine the fallout of crises as much as crises themselves: reading History of the DC Universe and Legends added to my comprehension of Crisis on Infinite Earths, for example. So, I'll be reading the five big collections DC has released from the "New 52" era (after Flashpoint, before Rebirth) in the order they take place.

This book gives snapshots of the early lives of a number of superheroes, framed by two parts of a Batman origin story. Someday I will read the full Batman: Zero Year story, but I liked what I got of it here. The book opens with Bruce Wayne as Batman taking down the Red Hood Gang, in what seems to be one of his first real superheroic actions. It's hard to judge the writing, since I only have a snippet of the story, but I really enjoyed Greg Capullo's art and Fco Plascencia's colors. This is a moody Gotham, but in a very different way to that of Frank Miller and David Mazzucchelli. This is a harsh, dynamic, neon Gotham-- a purifying crucible for the weird. The story ends with a little epilogue that introduces the idea that a giant storm is about to hit Gotham... and some fellow calling himself the Riddler has deactivated the electrical grid.

Who knew Gotham was so pink?
from Batman vol. 2 #24 (script by Scott Snyder, art by Greg Capullo & Danny Miki)

This provides the setup for the stories that follow, as various young heroes who either live in Gotham or come to render aid to Gotham each has their own experiences during the hurricane. I think there are about twenty-five different stories, and as you might imagine, that results in quite a range of quality, andI don't think I could point to any I found outright terrible, though many are somewhat generic, which is perhaps worse.

Review: The Transformers: Last Stand of the Wreckers by Nick Roche, James Roberts, et al.

Comic hardcover, 175 pages
Published 2015 (contents: 2010)
Acquired August 2016
Read September 2016

The Transformers: Last Stand of the Wreckers

Written by Nick Roche & James Roberts
Pencils by Nick Roche & Guido Guidi
Inks by Nick Roche, John Wycough, Guido Guidi, & Andrew Griffith
Colors by Josh Burcham & Joana Lafuente
Letters by Neil Uyetake & Chris Mowry

Long before the Transformers Humble Bundle came along, I'd heard of Last Stand of the Wreckers. It was described in hushed tones, as one of the best Transformers comics of all time-- and even one of the best comics of all time, full stop. And what I knew of it indicated it would appeal to me, as it is about a group of second-string robots fighting for their lives. So when I got the IDW Transformers Humble Bundle and Last Stand of the Wreckers wasn't in it, I took a gamble and purchased it-- not just in paper, but in hardback, so confident was I that I would like it.

Mottos are tough to come up with.
from The Transformers: Last Stand of the Wreckers #2 (script by Nick Roche & James Roberts, art by Nick Roche & John Wycough)

Thankfully I was correct. Last Stand of the Wreckers takes a group of some of the worst Autobots out there and assigns them to the Wreckers, the amoral Autobot commando team with the highest mortality rate of any Autobot unit. My favorites were Pyro and Ironfist. Pyro's toy was a "redeco" of Optimus Prime's, and so the writers turn this into a point of characterization: Pyro modified himself to look more like Optimus, and spends his time making dramatic poses and trying to come up with mottos. Ironfist is a fanboy who writes up detailed accounts of Wrecker missions under the pseudonym Fistiron... only despite that, there's something darker going on with him no one knows about. (Except for Prowl, because Prowl knows everything.) Plus Verity Carlo, the young human who befriended the Autobots in Infiltration, is there too.

And they're even harder to live up to.
from The Transformers: Last Stand of the Wreckers #4 (script by Nick Roche & James Roberts, art by Nick Roche & Andrew Griffith)

These characters are sent into a former Autobot prison that's been conquered by a depraved, rogue Decepticon. A lot of them don't make it. I don't think it's as amazing as people say (probably because I still struggle to distinguish robot characters on sight, and this volume has more than most), but it is very good. The real heroes are the people who don't think it matters, and do the right thing anyway, even if they're not always doing the right thing for the right reason. This is definitely a book about heroes.

Real life: never as good as the book.
from The Transformers: Last Stand of the Wreckers #3 (script by Nick Roche & James Roberts, art by Nick Roche, Guido Guidi, and John Wycough & Andrew Griffith)

It's made even better by the fifty-plus pages of backmatter, which includes multiple prose short stories adding depth and nuance to the characters. These I read over a few days after finishing the main comic, and they left me wanting to reread the book all over again with these new insights in mind. These stories show that, like the best characters, even second-stringers are more than meets the eye.

Next Week: Meanwhile, in another dimension, it's the beginning of an Infestation!