Review: Batman: Year 3 by Marv Wolfman, Pat Broderick, John Beatty, et al.

When I did my big readthrough of all of Batman's "Year One" stories (and related tales), there was perhaps one very notable omission: Batman: Year 3 by Marv Wolfman, Pat Broderick, and John Beatty, which was originally published in issues #436-39 of Batman vol. 1 in 1989. This is because Batman: Year 3, unlike Batman: Year One, Batman: Year Two, or indeed spin-offs like Batgirl: Year One and Two-Face and Scarecrow: Year One, has never been collected.

When you read it, though, it's easy to see why. Year One and Year Two were both interruptions to the ongoing narrative of Batman. Even though they originally appeared in issues #404-07 of Batman vol. 1 and issues #575-78 of Detective Comics vol. 1, respectively, they had nothing to do with what preceded or followed them-- they were sort of miniseries within an ongoing series. Year 3 is different: it was published between A Death in the Family and A Lonely Place of Dying, and has a frame story set during that time, with Batman dealing with the emotional fallout of the death of Jason Todd (Robin II) at the hands of the Joker.

"Frame story" is actually kind of misleading, as I would estimate that probably more of the story is set in the "present" than the "past." Year Three is when Dick Grayson's parents died, and he became Robin; the present-day storyline partially deals with the fact that Dick's parents' killer, Michael Zucco, is about to be released from prison. The flashbacks we see are primarily to provide context for this: the death of the Graysons, the hearing where Bruce adopted Dick, Dick's introduction to the Batcave, Dick's training and debut as Robin, and so on. (Much of this would later be re-depicted in Dark Victory and Robin: Year One.)

This means the bulk of the story focuses on Zucco's imminent release, and a gang war occurring in Gotham at the same time, which Batman handles with much more brutality than is typical. Part of the purpose of flashbacks is to show how parterning with Robin caused Bruce to soften from the Frank Milleresque way he was depicted in Year One-- and how now that a Robin is dead, his old brutality is reemerging. Wolfman is very good with the characters of both Bruce and Dick, and between this and A Lonely Place of Dying, I would definitely read more Batman stories by him.

But Wolfman's success with this is probably also the reason this story hasn't been collected. Batman: Year 3 is a good depiction of how Batman started to fall apart following the death of Jason Todd, but despite its title, it's not a very good standalone adventure in the early years of Batman: it's no Year One, that's for sure, but it's not even a Year Two. It ought to be collected, but not on its own. Better would be along with Wolfman's A Lonely Place of Dying, as it sets up Batman's need to always have a Robin, and Tim Drake (who becomes Robin in Lonely Place) even puts in a cameo at the circus during the flashback to the death of the Graysons.

Batman: Year 3 originally appeared in issues #436-39 of Batman vol. 1 (Early Aug.-Late Sept. 1989). The story was written by Marv Wolfman, pencilled by Pat Broderick, inked by John Beatty (#436-38) and Michael Bair (#439), colored by Adrienne Roy, lettered by John Costanza, and edited by Denny O'Neil.

Review: Dreamworld and Catastrophe by Susan Buck-Morss

A few recent audio drama reviews at Unreality SF: the Doctor and Benny try to save Christmas in "The Hesitation Deviation"; the Doctor submits funding applications (not as good as it sounds) in Vampire of the Mind; and two Masters meet in, well, The Two Masters.

Hardcover, 368 pages
Published 2000

Borrowed from the library

Read September 2013

Dreamworld and Catastrophe: The Passing of Mass Utopia in East and West

by Susan Buck-Morss

I liked the first chapter of this book a lot. It sets up a lot of interesting ideas: that there is an intimate connection between the state and violence (1) (shades of James C. Scott's Seeing Like a State), that state violence against noncitizens is more acceptable than that within the civil state (8, 16), that revolutions are simply wars fought in civil society for the control of time rather than space, i.e., the future rather than territory (22, 29), and that revolutions sacrifice the present to bring about a better future (29). Once Buck-Morss set up these basic principles, however, I found the rest of the book much less compelling; it was one of those critical books where I just kept flipping pages, hoping to find something insightful, but to very little avail. As always, this doesn't necessarily mean it was bad, but it certainly wasn't the book I was looking for.

Faster than a DC Bullet: Project Crisis!, Part LXIII: The New 52 Villains Omnibus

Comic hardcover, 1168 pages
Published 2013 (contents: 2013)
Borrowed from the library
Read November 2016

DC Comics: The New 52 Villains Omnibus
by Greg Pak, Paulo Siquiera, Netho Diaz, Marguerite Bennett, Ben Oliver, Cliff Richards, China Miéville, Mateus Santolauco, Carla Berrocal, Riccardo Burchielli, Liam Sharp, Jock, Tula Lotay, Marley Zarcone, Brendan McCarthy, Emma Rids, Emi Lenox, Jeff Lemire, Frazier Irving, David Lapham, Carmen Carnero, Sloane Leong, Kelsey Wroten, Michelle Faran, Annie Wu, Zak Smith, Alberto Ponticelli, Dan Green, Geoff Johns, Sterling Gates, Manuel Garcia, Rob Hunter, Matt Kindt, Sam Basri, Keith Champagne, Bit, Derlis Santacruz, Tom DeFalco, Chad Hardin, Edgar Salazar, Ann Nocenti, Dan DiDio, Fabrizio Fiorentino, Tom Derenick, Philip Tan, Jason Paz, Tony Bedard, Geraldo Borges, Ruy José, Paul Levitz, Yildiray Cinar, Aaron Lopresti, Art Thibert, Brian Buccellato, Chris Batista, Tom Nguyen, Francis Manapul, Scott Hepburn, Andrea Sorrentino, Charles Soule, Jesús Saiz, Marv Wolfman, Cafu, Corey May, Dooma Wendschuh, Moritat, Angel Unzueta, Robson Rocha, John Ostrander, Victor Ibañez, Brian Azzarello, Michael Alan Nelson, Mike Hawthorne, Ken Lashley, Raymund Bermudez, Sholly Fisch, Jeff Johnson, Andy Smith, Steve Pugh, Pascal Alixe, Scott Lobdell, Dan Jurgens, Ray McCarthy, Aaron Kuder, Brett Booth, Norm Rapmund, Robert Venditti, Rags Morales, Cam Smith, Jim Starlin, Howard Porter, Stefano Landini, Dale Eaglesham, Andy Kubert, Andy Clarke, Scott Snyder, Ray Fawkes, Jeremy Haun, Frank Tieri, Christian Duce, Peter J. Tomasi, Graham Nolan, Guillem March, James Tynion IV, Jorge Lucas, Tim Seeley, Francis Portela, Gail Simone, Justin Gray, Jimmy Palmiotti, Jason Masters, John Layman, Georges Jeanty, Derek Fridolfs, Javier Pina, Neil Googe, Szymon Kudranski, Scot Eaton & Jaime Mendoza

The Book as a Whole
This book ties into Forever Evil, an event where the Crime Syndicate (i.e., the Evil Justice League) temporarily took over the Earth. As a result, most of DC's monthly titles were "taken over" by supervillains-- like, Action Comics #23.2 featured General Zod. Yes, there were decimals in the numbering. Some series were taken over four times, some just once. One presumes this was in proportion to popularity; it's easier to get someone to buy four extra issues of Action Comics than of Swamp Thing. These vary in type: some show what the villain in question was doing during Forever Evil, some show random other adventures of the villain, some show the origin story of the villain, some do more than one. I'd guess that more than half aren't even stories, but just set-up: leading into Forever Evil itself, or a Forever Evil spin-off, or just leading into a forthcoming issue of an ongoing where said villain is going to turn up. Like when I reviewed The New 52 omnibus, I'm going to tackle each individual grouping of issues, since there are too many to look at each on its own.

That's the kind of casual, fun attitude I like my international spies to have.
from Justice League of America vol. 3 #7.3 (script by Tom DeFalco, art by Chad Hardin)

Justice League (Darkseid, Lobo, Dial E, Secret Society, Deadshot, Killer Frost, Shadow Thief, Black Adam, the Creeper, Eclipso, Black Manta, Ocean Master, Desaad, Solomon Grundy, Grodd, Reverse-Flash, the Rogues, Count Vertigo, Arcane, Trigon, Deathstroke, the Cheetah, First Born)

If I learned anything from this section, it's how few people should be allowed to touch the New Gods: to stories featuring Darkseid and Desaad are so mundane as to completely miss the point of the characters. Darkseid doesn't need an origin story, he's "the Tiger-Force at the core of all things! When you cry out in your dreams-- it is Darkseid that you see!" How can such a character have a youth and a backstory? It makes him mundane to give him a motivation, and Darkseid should never be mundane.

Review: The Transformers: More than Meets the Eye, Volume 1 by James Roberts, Nick Roche, Alex Milne, et al.

Comic PDF eBook, n.pag.
Published 2012 (contents: 2011-12)
Acquired August 2014
Read November 2016

The Transformers: More than Meets the Eye, Volume 1

Written by James Roberts & John Barber
Art by Nick Roche and Alex Milne
Colors by Josh Burcham
Letters by Shawn Lee

This is one of those books that you keep laughing aloud at, and your wife is like, 'what's so funny,' and you're like, 'um... it's a Transformers comic?' The new status quo for IDW's Transformers is that the Autobot/Decepticon war is over, and both sides have returned to Cybertron, along with the "NAILs," the nonaligned Cybertronians who fled the chaos of the war. So there's a lot of conflict between these three sides. The Autobots don't know how to exist in a world without war, the Decepticons are all in prison right now but that can't possibly be sustainable, and the NAILs don't see the Autobots as having any more legitimacy than the Decepticons. The first issue here sets up the basic conflict, which seems very ripe with storytelling potential, and it ends with Optimus Prime abandoning Cybertron, his argument being that he's a living symbol of the war, and peace can never truly come to Cybertron as long as he hangs around.

He's not wrong, you know.
from The Transformers: Death of Optimus Prime (script by James Roberts & John Barber, art by Nick Roche)

This leaves the remaining Autobots conflicted about what to do. Rodimus wants to hunt down the mythical Knights of Cybertron and implore them for guidance; Bumblebee wants to make a go of it on Cybertron, mending the conflict between the three sides. So once Rodimus's Lost Light takes off, the book essentially splits, with More than Meets the Eye following the Lost Light and Robots in Disguise staying on Cybertron.

Return to the Threeboot: A Review of Legion of Super-Heroes: Enemy Rising

Comic hardcover, 192 pages
Published 2008 (contents: 2008) 
Acquired and read August 2016

Legion of Super-Heroes: Enemy Rising

​

Writer: Jim Shooter

Pencillers: Francis Manapul with Aaron Lopresti, Sanford Greene
Inkers: Livesay with Matt Ryan, Nathan Massengill
Colorists: JD Smith with Nathan Eyring
Letterer: Steve Wands

With Supergirl gone, the "threeboot" Legion returns to its original title, though it gains a new (less attractive) logo in the process. It's always odd when a new creative team takes over a title with a very distinctive voice, especially if that new creative team doesn't have any interest in aping what came before. Jim Shooter's writing is not really like Mark Waid's at all, nor is Francis Manapul and Livesay's art anything like Barry Kitson's. Though you might argue that the Waid/Kitson Legion never lived up to its potential-- the revolutionary idea was downplayed more and more as the series went on, and they seeded so much character stuff in the first twelve issues that they never came back to as Supergirl and the Dominator plot took over the focus-- I'm not convinced the solution was to basically throw all that out. The idea of the Legion as an inspiration to the youth of the galaxy, and the face of a wider moment, is completely gone here: we never see the crowds outside Legion H.Q. anymore. Even the DC Comics spinner racks are gone from H.Q.; when we do briefly see Phantom Girl with some comics, they're drawn as generic books, not as recognizable issues of DC Comics as they would have been during the Waid/Kitson run.

Ah, yes, I too really enjoyed the classic book Comics.
from Legion of Super-Heroes vol. 5 #43 (art by Francis Manapul & Livesay)

Plus Shooter introduces future space cursing to the title, which is... terrible, to put it mildly. I don't remember anyone using any of that stuff during the Waid/Kitson run, other than "grife," which works because it's basically "grief." But under Shooter, suddenly everyone is saying "florg." People are "florged" and bad guys are "florgging." It's a desperately terrible word that needs to go; it throws me out of the story every time I read it. Florg florg florg florg florg. It's not real! It doesn't even sound like it could be real!

Like, how can I take dialogue like this seriously?
from Legion of Super-Heroes vol. 5 #38 (art by Francis Manapul & Livesay)

Putting aside all my change-of-creative-team kvetching, how was Enemy Rising, which collects the first half of Jim Shooter's run, before the "threeboot" was inceremoniously dumped for the "deboot"? Basically, it's okay. Shooter has the Legion being overstressed with crises popping up across the solar system and the galaxy, while Lightning Lad-- the new leader-- struggles with United Planets bureaucracy. The bureaucracy was fun at first, but the longer it goes on, the more irritating it gets, because it's the same thing again and again, as Lightning Lad gets more calls than he can handle, pisses someone off, and the Legion gets a new restriction slapped on it, repeat ad nauseam. I kinda felt like he deserved a better portrayal of his leadership than he got, and based on the way this subplot is seemingly resolved at the end of the book, I don't think it was worth the eight issues spent on it. (Plus, does it make sense that the United Planets would be anti-Legion again in the wake of the Dominator War?)

Other than that, the Legion is fighting mindless aliens that are popping up across the galaxy. Brainiac sets up a minor mystery about them, but other than that, they're not very compelling foes. The minor enemies the Legion encounters, like Science Police officers, aren't very interesting either. And was it really necessary to have a group of space pirates turn up to threaten our teenage heroes with sexual coercion? Ick. His Legionnaires seem more bickering than Waid's, too. Not that Waid's didn't argue, but it usually seemed to come from principled beliefs; these guys are just mean to each other a little bit too much.

The whole premise of this series is that she's underage, you know.
from Legion of Super-Heroes vol. 5 #37 (art by Francis Manapul & Livesay)

I liked Francis Manapul's later work on The Flash, but here he doesn't do a ton for me. It's not bad, but the sort of anime-influenced style he uses is a little generic. I really liked Aaron Lopresti's fill-in, on the other hand-- his characters were very expressive, and I loved the playful stuff he did with Chameleon throughout the issue.

If I was a shapeshifter, I'd be making my fingers into miniature people when I was bored, too.
from Legion of Super-Heroes vol. 5 #41 (art by Aaron Lopresti & Matt Ryan)

I guess I'll see where this all goes, but for now it comes across as a sort of action-adventure epilogue tacked onto the Waid/Kitson run. Nothing wrong with it on its own, but I felt that Waid and Kitson were reinventing these characters and concepts, whereas Shooter is just using them somewhat generically in a widescreen story.

Conferencing

courtesy Lego Grad Student

Last week, I attended a meeting of the Nineteenth-Century Studies Association. It was my first time going to that conference, and my first time going to any conference in almost a year. Something that I want to change but haven't yet managed is that I almost never repeat conferences-- there are a lot of conferences I've just gone to one meeting of. Maybe someday, but logistics always seem to get in the way.

NCSA is sort of a mid-sized conference-- not the massiveness of the MLA or even one of its regional affiliates, but not the small intimacy of the Thomas Hardy Association or the Science Fiction Research Association. It's interdisciplinary and trans-regional as well-- unlike, say, the Victorians Institute, it attracts people doing nineteenth-century studies focusing on all kinds of countries (e.g., America, Britain, Italy, France) and across all kinds of disciplines (literary studies, history, art history, architecture).

That was probably both its strength and its weakness. When panels are arranged right, there's a kind of synergy: one of my colleagues from English was on a panel about performance and race with someone who studies theatre and someone who studies film-- there were neat correspondences and connections with their papers, and interesting questions from architecture-minded folks in the audience!

Though I enjoyed my co-panelists' presentations, things lined up a little less well there. You had my paper on three science fiction novels (The English Revolution, Marmaduke, Emperor of Europe, and When All Men Starve), a paper on a digital edition of Thomas Carlyle's Sartor Resartus, a paper on fan participation in a YouTube version of a Jane Austen novel, and a paper on a nineteenth-century pastel artist who used proto-photographic techniques. Supposedly these were united by being about technology, but the uses of technology were so varied as to render connections difficult or impossible. What do my future-set books have to do with insights gleaned into Sartor Resartus by thinking about it as hypertext?

People seemed to like my paper, though, and I found my co-presenters' interesting, too. Unfortunately, I went on the second-last session on the last day! So I wasn't able to parlay that into much of anything.

Maybe next year I'll actually go back? I liked it enough to make that worthwhile, I think.

Review: Logicomix by Apostolos Doxiadis, Christos H. Papadimitriou, Alecos Papadatos, Annie Di Donna, et al.

Comic trade paperback, 347 pages
Published 2009 (originally 2008)
Borrowed from a friend
Read February 2015

Logicomix

Concept & Story: Apostolos Doxiadis & Christos H. Papadimitriou
Script: Apostolos Doxiadis

Character Design & Drawings: Alecos Papadatos
Color: Annie Di Donna
Inking: Dimitris Karatzaferis & Thodoris Paraskevas
Visual Research & Lettering: Anne Bardy

This book was okay. It's a comic that straddles historical fiction and biography, providing the life story of Bertrand Russell as well as some background in developments of logic in the early twentieth century. It's occasionally interrupted by pages where the creators of the comic discuss creating the comic. These moments I found twee and not very insightful. The main story is fine, though not very deep, and I was irritated at the number of things the creators outright made up yet still ascribe character significance to-- the whole book is driven by a dichotomy between madness and logic in Russell's life that has no basis in reality.

Faster than a DC Bullet: Project Crisis!, Part LXII: The New 52

Comic hardcover, n.pag.
Published 2011 (contents: 2011)
Borrowed from the library
Read October 2016

DC Comics: The New 52
by Geoff Johns, Jim Lee, Scott Williams, Dan Jurgens, Aaron Lopresti, Matt Ryan, Ivan Reis, Joe Prado, Brian Azzarello, Cliff Chiang, Francis Manapul, Brian Buccellatto, J. T. Krul, Freddie Williams II, Gail Simone, Ethan Van Sciver, Yildiray Cinar, George Pérez, Tony S. Daniel, Philip Tan, Eric Wallace, Gianluca Gugliotta, Wayne Faucher, Paul Jenkins, Bernard Chang, Grant Morrison, Rags Morales, Rick Bryant, Jesús Merino, Scott Lobdell, R. B. Silva, Rob Lean, Michael Green, Mike Johnson, Mahmud Asrar, Dan Green, Scott Snyder, Greg Capullo, Jonathan Glapion, Ryan Winn, J. H. Williams III, W. Haden Blackman, David Finch, Richard Friend, Peter J. Tomasi, Patrick Gleason, Mick Gray, Ardian Syaf, Vicente Cifuentes, Judd Winick, Ben Oliver, Guillem March, Kyle Higgins, Eddy Barrows, J. P. Mayer, Duane Swierczynski, Jesus Saiz, Kenneth Rocafort, Doug Mahnke, Christian Alamy, Fernando Pasarin, Scott Hanna, Tony Bedard, Tyler Kirkham, Batt, Peter Milligan, Ed Benes, Rob Hunter, Mikel Janin, Yanick Paquette, Jeff Lemire, Travel Foreman, Alberto Ponticelli, Joshua Hale Fialkov, Andrea Sorrentino, Dan Abnett, Andy Lanning, Ferndando Dagnino, Paul Cornell, Diogenes Neves, Oclair Albert, Miguel Sepulveda, Nathan Edmondson, Cafu, Jason Gorder, Ron Marz, Sami Basri, Joe Bennett, Art Thibert, Adam Glass, Federico Dallocchio, Ransom Getty, Dan DiDio, Keith Giffen, Scott Koblish, Justin Gray, Jimmy Palmiotti, Moritat, Mike Costa, Graham Nolan, Ken Lashley, Ivan Brandon, Tom Derenick, Jonathan Vankin, Phil Winslade, Brett Booth, Norm Rapmund, Scott McDaniel, John Rozum, LeBeau Underwood, Sterling Gates, Rob Liefeld, Ig Guara, Ruy José, Fabian Nicieza, Pete Woods, Paul Levitz & Francis Portela

This book is unpaginated, but as it collects 52 issues, and most single issues these days are 20-22 pages long, it must contain around 1,000 pages of comics, making it nearly unreviewable, especially given that this book isn't one big story (like some other DC omnibi I've read, such as 52) but rather the beginnings of 52 different stories. Still, I'm going to try, and I'm going to do it by speaking to 1) the book as a whole, 2) the continuity issues involved, and 3) each subsection of the book. So please bear with me. Each of the issues is a #1 issue, published in the wake of Flashpoint, which reset the DC universe.

The Book as a Whole
To be honest, it's not a very satisfying reading experience. I think it could have been, but that would require a totally different way of approaching the single-issue comic than is normal in the 2010s. None of these are done-in-one stories, a format that still exists, but is probably avoided in the first issue of a series more than anywhere else, given that you want your readers to pick up issue #2. That said, I don't think they needed to be as formulaic as they are: I'd estimate the 75% of the stories here have the same structure of fight scene→bit of personal life or backstory→dramatic last page appearance of someone. Sometimes the order of "fight scene" and "bit of personal life or backstory" is swapped. As I kept on reading, I just got tired of seeing this cliche over and over again. I'd say that it was unsatisfying to not know the end to the fifty-two different stories begun here, but in actuality, I don't want to know the end of the fifty-two different stories begun here, as most didn't do enough to grab my interest in their twenty pages. Some dude turning up on page twenty does not a hook make if you haven't laid an interesting groundwork first.

The Continuity Issues
Sometimes I think people overestimate how much continuity contributes to the reading experience of a book. I've seen a lot of complaints about the New 52 that it's hard to get invested in characters when you don't know what old stories count and what ones don't. But Crisis on Infinite Earths did the exact same thing-- it was ages before the "past" of the new, integrated DC universe was completely built up, and I think people forget how piecemeal it was at first. The pre-Crisis Wonder Woman and Superman continued to appear for a year or two because George Pérez and John Byrne's reboots weren't done yet! The pre-Crisis Superman, for example, turned up in an Omega Men storyline that was explicitly post-Crisis, yet there's no way it could happen with the post-Crisis Superman. So things are going to be a bit muddy when you introduce a new shared universe all at once, and I think that's okay.

That said, I'm not sure why DC didn't got full clean slate with more of these characters. For example, we're told Animal Man has been a hero, retired from heroing, and is now returning to heroing-- but this doesn't add anything to the story when he could just be a recently established hero. Too many of the characters here have semi-complicated backstories because bits of their pre-Flashpoint backstories have been retained, but nothing is done with these backstories. Arsenal and Starfire apparently worked together on a team of teens before, but not in the Teen Titans because the Teen Titans #1 here is about the first Teen Titans team coming together. So they were just on... some team? But it doesn't really matter because they don't act like they know each other at all. Why not make it their first meeting then? Though the idea of there being a bunch of former teen sidekicks is weird anyway given DC's compressed the timeline down to five years. Like, you can have everything be fresh and new, or you can have a bunch of legacy characters, but it seems to me you can't have both. (And yet there are four different Robins!)

Like, this is neat because it gives you enough to go on if you don't know Deadman, but also upends the formula with a genuinely expected yet interesting final-page reveal.
from DC Universe Presents #1 (script by Paul Jenkins, art by Bernard Chang)

Justice League (Justice League, Aquaman, Wonder Woman, The Flash, Captain Atom, Firestorm, Green Arrow, Hawkman, Mister Terrific, Deadman)

Only three of these stuck out to me in a good way: Wonder Woman is slickly drawn, a surprisingly dei noir take on an old character. I read the first few issues of this run on Comixology back in 2011, and though I forgot to keep reading, this reminded me of what I enjoyed then. Everything I've ever seen of Francis Manapul's take on the Flash has been solid, so I ought to pick it up someday, though this one I liked more for the art and layouts than the story (it definitely fits into the cliche #1 format I mention above). I was surprised by how much I enjoyed the take on Deadman here. Like, this had great ideas and amazing artwork. On the other hand, the new Justice League #1 is almost embarrassing, and Justice League International is the perfect example of the kind of comic book you just can't do in a brand-new universe-- none of these also-ran character have backstories now!

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!

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.