Review: Batman: Arkham Asylum 15th Anniversary Edition

Writer: Grant Morrison
Artist: Dave McKean
Collects: Batman: Arkham Asylum OGN (1989)
Published: DC, 2004; $17.99

The subtitle of Grant Morrison and Dave McKean’s Arkham Asylum: A Serious House on Serious Earth is quoted from the English poet Philip Larkin: “A serious house on serious earth it is, / In whose blent air all our compulsions meet, / Are recognized, and robed as destinies.” Larkin was writing about churches – serious places where serious questions might be asked about man’s place in the universe – and the reference seems fitting for a tale so rife with religious imagery and which outwardly appears to interrogate the nature of its hero’s existence.

The subtitle also suggests Arkham Asylum’s conscious opposition to what DC had in years past called “Imaginary Stories.” Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, such stories were typically one-off tales about possible realities (such as one comic in which Superman revealed his secret identity to and subsequently married Lois Lane), stories that would have no bearing on the ongoing continuity of the DC universe. By contrast, the supposedly “serious” Arkham Asylum fashions itself, as it does its version of the Joker, as “super-sane” – that is, as a serious, sober reflection of what the Joker’s psychotherapist calls “the world as a theatre of the absurd.”

In selecting Batman as the book’s hero, however, Morrison attempts a narrative sleight of hand. The introduction via flashbacks of Amadeus Arkham – founder of the asylum where Batman’s most disturbed (and most disturbing) nemeses are interred – is yet another red herring, distracting readers from the realization that Morrison’s tale is far from some universal parable about the nature of madness; nor is it an attempt to plumb the depths of the everyman’s soul. Indeed, Arkham Asylum evinces not so much the monomythic Hero’s Journey as it does a highly specific character assassination of what Morrison would later call “the ’80s interpretation of Batman as violent, driven and borderline psychopathic.”

Morrison’s outright contempt for the 1980s version of Batman is just one of many fascinating insights yielded by the annotated script included with the book’s 15th Anniversary Edition. The script goes a long way toward explaining some of Arkham Asylum’s more bewildering moments, among them Batman’s bizarre reaction to the Joker pinching his butt (“Filthy degenerate!,” Batman screams rather than simply punching him in the face) and an odd reference to the Joker wearing heels despite appearing in totally conventional attire. As it turns out, Morrison originally intended for the Joker to appear dressed as the singer Madonna, “in a black basque, seamed tights and lace-up stilettos.” In this early version of the story the Joker “projects an absolute confidence that confers upon him a bizarre kind of attractiveness and sexuality,” which throws into sharp relief Batman’s lack of sexual maturity. Of Batman, Morrison writes:

His body is a fortress of flesh, bulwarked against the ravages of a merciless world. Consequently, he stands perfectly straight to the point of stiffness. We can imagine him walking with his buttocks clenched. His is the posture of an obsessive, anal personality. . . . He is completely incapable of any kind of sexual relationship.

But if Morrison’s goal is to recuperate Batman from a sexually impotent failure and into a Christ figure capable of “physically demonstrating his new-found dominance” (as Morrison writes at the script’s conclusion), then he does so to often uncomfortable effect.

The Joker’s previously mentioned feminization – in combination with Arkham Asylum’s most disturbed male characters all donning dresses by the end, and with the text’s frequent allusions to the murderer Norman Bates’s transvestism in Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho – constantly threatens to push the story into the realm of transphobia. Morrison adds notes of homophobia to the list of concerns as well, as in the script’s description of the villain Clayface: “an avatar of filth and corruption, the personification of pestilence and infection, whose impure touch carries instant contagion. Alert readers will perceive him as AIDS on two legs.” Batman proceeds to brutally break those legs in response to Clayface’s expressed desire to “share my disease.”

Dave McKean’s artwork, all the while, is an abstract phantasmagoria of squalor and darkness. He eschews the realism of Morrison’s script in favor of more impressionistic renderings that suggest the characters’ feelings by way of their shadowy environments rather than through conventional framing, composition, or coloring. His artwork functions as yet another narrative sleight of hand, in that it papers over some of the more embarrassingly self-important moments of Morrison’s script. For example:

The recurring Fish motif – which relates to Pisces, the astrological attribution of the Moon card – also relates to Christ, who in turn can be linked to the Egyptian God Osiris, whose life and descent into the underworld parallels with the story of Amadeus Arkham. We also see later that the Asylum is built upon a Vescica Piscis – this symbol . . . forms the ground plan of much religious architecture and is used in the construction of most of the major buildings of antiquity, like Stonehenge and Avebury in England. It is a development of the Greek symbol for Christ.

Morrison supplements such totalizing descriptions with, among other things, Freudian childhood anecdotes and lengthy quotations from Aleister Crowley. Captured here is a young Morrison at perhaps the most hubristic point of his career; in short, he writes, “everything in this story reflects and comments upon everything else.”

Conceived in the immediate aftermath of Watchmen and The Dark Knight Returns, Arkham Asylum represents an extreme response to the grimdark aesthetic pioneered by those comics: one that ironically adopts that aesthetic in order to repudiate it. But whereas later responses to Watchmen (like DC’s recent DC Universe: Rebirth) would attempt to rise above the pervasive darkness of that comic with more uncomplicated tales of good’s triumph over evil, Morrison and McKean’s tale is arguably the victim of its own attempted seriousness. Weighed down by its more problematic themes and the pretension of its young writer, Arkham Asylum is simply, ultimately trapped in a quagmire of its own making: one of inescapable darkness, madness, violence, and death.

Review: Black Widow: Web of Intrigue

Writers: Ralph Macchio, George Pérez, Gerry Conway
Artists: George Pérez, Bob Layton, Luke McDonnell, Paul Gulacy, George Freeman
Collects: Marvel Fanfare #10-13 (1983-84), Bizarre Adventures #25 (1981), Black Widow: The Coldest War OGN (1990)
Published: Marvel, 2016; $24.99

In the last few years, Marvel Studios president Kevin Feige has repeatedly insisted that making movies about female superheroes is an important priority for him. The claim is rather shocking given that Feige has produced more than thirty superhero movies over the last two decades, only one of which (2005’s Elektra) has featured a female character in the lead. While Russian super-spy Black Widow has long been considered the most obvious female candidate for a solo superhero movie at Marvel (given Scarlett Johansson’s portrayal of the character across five movies since 2010, with at least two more Avengers movies in the works), plans for any such film have yet to materialize. In fact, the first female-led Marvel Studios film will apparently be 2019’s Captain Marvel – not the most obvious choice, since the character has yet to appear in a Marvel film. It’s also disappointing in that both Captain Marvel’s world and her superhuman abilities are generally in keeping with the kind of superhero movies we’ve seen time and again, whereas Black Widow’s milieu is more in line with the likes of James Bond or The Avengers (the 1960s British television series, not Marvel’s superhero franchise).

I mention all of this because I’d hoped that Black Widow: Web of Intrigue might establish a worthy blueprint for the argument that stories about female superheroes – and the character Black Widow in particular – have just as much potential for mainstream appeal as Iron Man, Captain America, Thor, and other white male superheroes. Of course, any number of more recently published female superhero comics (not to mention last week’s Wonder Woman feature film) could be marshaled to that argument – including, yes, a number starring Captain Marvel. But what might have made Web of Intrigue a more worthy proving ground is the ubiquity of its main attraction, a four-issue run on the 1980s series Marvel Fanfare by writer Ralph Macchio and artist George Pérez. It’s been reprinted several times, including in magazine form in 1999 and in a 2010 hardcover as part of Marvel’s Premiere Classics line. In the comics world, that sort of longevity – as in the cases of The Dark Phoenix Saga, The Death of Gwen Stacy, and God Loves, Man Kills, stories from the 1970s and 1980s that have been (or soon will be) adapted as feature films – tends to be its own kind of pedigree, at least in Hollywood’s eyes.

Unfortunately, Web of Intrigue is a profound disappointment in terms of how it represents its female protagonist, and I can only hope that stories like this one won’t ever be used as a model for superhero films starring women. The story sheds consistent doubt on Black Widow’s professional competence and emotional fitness for the job, linking those qualities explicitly to her gender: “If it came down to a showdown,” she wonders, “would Natasha Romanoff, the woman, allow Black Widow, the spy, to perform her duty? I had no answer.” The story also defines the character almost exclusively in relation to men. Her mission – to track down the father figure who raised her, who has possibly defected to the Soviet Union – is further complicated by the feelings she develops for a Soviet-employed American scientist she seduces while working undercover. Her top-secret S.H.I.E.L.D. dossier, as recounted by Nick Fury for a panel of the international spy organization’s all-male leadership, lists not her achievements in the field but rather which male superheroes she’s dated.

It doesn’t help that Web of Intrigue is painfully overwritten by Macchio, who is rightly better known for his various editorial roles at Marvel than as a writer. In action scenes, especially, he refuses to let Pérez’s artwork speak for itself. When Pérez draws Black Widow performing a (perfectly visually comprehensible) midair twist to take out two goons who are shooting at her, for instance, Macchio can’t resist scripting this clunker of a thought bubble: “I heard others scrambling about on the roof while I was inside…must twist as I fall to fire at them.” But worse is Macchio’s dialogue for Fury, who reads like a stereotypical Southern hick straight out of The Dukes of Hazzard: “Awright, Sam, I got all this info you wuz askin’ fer. But, in the future, howzabout lettin’ me give the orders around here. I wuzn’t hired to be no blasted errand boy, y’know.”

It’s actually pretty astonishing just how many offensive stereotypes Web of Intrigue manages to include in just four issues. A multiethnic team of assassins dispatched to capture Black Widow comprises a mostly naked sumo wrestler and an (even more naked) spear-chucking warrior who Black Widow refers to as “the African.” The book’s protagonist unreflexively calls Chinese-American S.H.I.E.L.D. agent Jimmy Woo an “Oriental,” despite the term having fallen out of fashion nearly ten years before these comics were published. And it all ends with a masterclass in the objectification of the female body, with the contrivance of this excuse for Black Widow to run around in her underwear for the story’s last ten or fifteen pages:

The trade paperback edition of Web of Intrigue includes another two stories beyond the four-issue Marvel Fanfare storyline. The first is a fairly incoherent black-and-white tale that seems mostly an excuse for artist Paul Gulacy to draw the story’s characters as various Hollywood celebrities of years gone by. It ends, inexplicably, with two pages of Macchio’s purple prose recited by a Humphrey Bogart stand-in.

This book’s second “bonus” is the 60-page graphic novel Black Widow: The Coldest War, by writer Gerry Conway and artist George Freeman. Published in 1990, it follows up on the story of Black Widow’s first husband: Red Guardian, the Soviets’ answer to Captain America. It’s the best part of this collection, but that isn’t saying much; like the previous stories, it’s still uncomfortably concerned with positioning Black Widow’s professional capabilities in relation to her gender and sexuality. Characters’ names are spelled inconsistently throughout the story and text is sometimes hard to read against the background colors, signs of how cursory the editing and production design for Marvel’s early-1990s graphic novels often were.

As much as I wanted to be able to advocate for this book, I’m afraid I can’t see much that’s positive in Black Widow: Web of Intrigue. It’s precisely the sort of female-led superhero comic that today’s films and comics should strive not to emulate. That doesn’t mean that film studios and comic book publishers shouldn’t strive for parity in their representations of women, though; it simply suggests that, in telling future stories about women superheroes, we might all be better served by looking to the cultural attitudes of our own time rather than seeking creative inspiration from the past.

Review: Spidey, Vol. 1: First Day

Writer: Robbie Thompson
Artists: Nick Bradshaw, André Lima Araújo
Collects: Spidey #1-6 (2016)
Published: Marvel, 2016; $17.99

When Spidey was first announced in 2015, it was pitched as “an all-new ongoing series of done-in-one, in-continuity tales set during Peter’s teenage years.” I was excited when the news broke. It had been a long time since a series like Untold Tales of Spider-Man had focused on the early years of the main-Marvel-universe Peter Parker; in fact, it had been a long time since Marvel published a really good creator-driven Spider-Man series not immediately tied to present-day continuity in general. What I expected of Spidey, based on the initial press, was a continuity-lite version of Untold Tales or maybe even something in line with the better issues of Marvel Adventures Spider-Man: a series with recognizably classic versions of the characters we’re familiar with, but without too much historical baggage. Instead, now having read Spidey, I find myself disappointed with a series that deviates significantly from what was promised and, on top of that, seems unable to decide exactly what kind of comic it wants to be.

First of all, Spidey is definitely not set in any kind of established continuity. In this book Peter Parker is being tutored by his high school crush Gwen Stacy (who doesn’t appear in Marvel’s main universe until Peter is in college). He fights a variety of Lee/Ditko-era villains that include the Sandman, the Lizard, and the Vulture, all of whom he’s seemingly met before in this universe; and yet, he hasn’t met J. Jonah Jameson (who first appeared in Amazing Spider-Man #1) or sold a single photograph of Spider-Man by the time the series begins. Instead, apparently, he’s some kind of Internet sensation: “My last Spidey selfie got six zillion likes on Insta,” he proclaims in the second issue. And while being divorced from main-universe continuity isn’t necessarily a deal-breaker, there are already plenty of high-school Spider-Men across a range of media: Brian Michael Bendis’s Ultimate Spider-Man in the comics, Sam Raimi’s and Marc Webb’s versions in the movies, and television shows like The Spectacular Spider-Man and Ultimate Spider-Man (the latter being completely unrelated to Bendis’s comic book, sadly). But what’s most important about that statement is that all of those comics, movies, and television shows are a lot better than Spidey.

Even the two Amazing Spider-Man movies – the latter of which is probably the worst superhero movie I have ever seen – do a superior job of establishing believable characters than Spidey. Each issue (except for #5) begins with the same full-page illustration depicting the character’s origin, but with slightly different text overlaid in each instance. Often, this text establishes the general theme or conflict for the issue. These themes tend to be expressed in the form of some maxim conveyed by Peter’s Aunt May or Uncle Ben. But rather than ever exploring Uncle Ben’s most important shred of wisdom, the one that arguably defines the Spider-Man franchise – “with great power there must also come great responsibility” – the series harps on such banalities as “be yourself,” “never give up,” and “don’t fall down.” Almost every issue ends with Peter cryptically repeating the day’s lesson to Aunt May, who always seems to be either doing the dishes or making dinner. It’s a shockingly regressive portrayal of the character, especially in light of her far less domestic role as a humanitarian aid worker in recent issues of Dan Slott’s Amazing Spider-Man.

Much of the painful simplicity of Spidey’s stories can be forgiven if we read it as simply being geared toward very young children. I’m hesitant to do so, however, mainly because of how thoughtlessly it approaches the subject of Peter’s bullying at school. Throughout the first six issues, Peter is tormented relentlessly by his peers: he is physically attacked, shoved, and spit on. His head is held underwater in a public toilet, and he takes the beatings administered by school jock Flash Thompson in dutiful silence. “I could crush Flash and all his buddies,” he thinks. “But if I do that? I lose the balance Uncle Ben always talked about. I’ll lose it and fall. No more secret identity. Which would break Aunt May’s heart.”

This line of thinking is a downright pathological extrapolation from Stan Lee’s portrayal of the character, in which Peter’s “bullying” mostly took the form of verbal barbs from girls he awkwardly asked on dates. By not using his powers in those cases, Peter was not merely protecting his secret identity; he was also choosing not to use his powers for personal gain or in the service of spite and pettiness. In Spidey, his tacit acceptance of extreme physical bullying represents an uncomfortable refusal to stand up for his own basic dignity as a human being. It doesn’t take superpowers to ask an adult for help or to speak up against the people who make your life a living hell, and Spidey’s failure to recognize that is deeply troubling.

All of that said, Nick Bradshaw’s artwork for the series’ first three issues is genuinely lovely. It’s filled with the kinds of fun details and Easter eggs you might expect of an artist like Mark Buckingham or a Generation X-era Chris Bachalo. The Sandman’s amorphous limbs transcend panel borders, emphasizing the character’s physical uncontainability, and when the Lizard’s minions invade New York City, dozens of tiny reptiles skitter around the panel borders. Bradshaw’s artwork does suffer from an overabundance of two-page spreads, though, which I suspect were designed for (and therefore probably read better in) digital formats; there’s just too much gutter loss in the trade paperback for me to believe that these pages were laid out with a traditional print book in mind.

André Lima Araújo’s artwork in issues 4 through 6 conveys the story well enough, but you can really feel Bradshaw’s absence in these issues, especially since writer Robbie Thompson still seems to be writing for an artist who’s going to supplement a sparse script with tons of visual detail. Araújo just isn’t that kind of artist, unfortunately, and his tendency to draw tiny figures inside huge panels results in a comic that often looks and feels cavernously empty.

In the end, I’m just not sure what this book wants or even is trying to be. If it’s intended to appeal to longtime Spider-Man fans, then why does it tell such juvenile stories in a totally unremarkable new continuity? If it’s trying to convey wholesome lessons for children, then why doesn’t it try harder to establish Peter as a good role model with at least some modicum of self-worth? If it was designed purely as a vehicle for Bradshaw to unleash his artistic talent, then why is Bradshaw gone after the first three issues? And why, ultimately, was this series promoted as something that it so completely is not? Perhaps what’s most frustrating about Spidey is that it seems so blissfully ignorant of these questions in the first place.

Review: Doctor Strange: The Flight of Bones

Writers: Dan Jolley, Tony Harris, Ray Snyder, Michael Golden, Jim Starlin, Michael T. Gilbert, Kieron Gillen, Peter Milligan, Ted McKeever, Mike Carey
Artists: Tony Harris, Ray Snyder, Paul Chadwick, Frazer Irving, Michael Golden, Jim Starlin, Michael T. Gilbert, Frank Brunner, Ted McKeever, Marcos Martin
Collects: Doctor Strange (vol. 2) #1-4 (1999); Marvel: Shadows & Light #1-2 (1997-98); Marvel Double Shot #4 (2003); and The Mystic Hands of Doctor Strange #1 (2010)
Published: Marvel, 2016; $24.99

My main interest in reading Doctor Strange: The Flight of Bones, which collects Doctor Strange’s short-lived Marvel Knights series from just before the turn of the millennium, was in seeing a mid-Starman Tony Harris drawing one of my favorite low-profile Marvel characters of the time. (It would be another ten years before a Doctor Strange movie was even rumored, and almost ten more before that movie was actually released.) I had always assumed that Harris also wrote these comics, since I’d never seen any other name mentioned in relation to them. I wasn’t completely wrong – Harris does receive “story” credit, along with actual scripter Dan Jolley and inker Ray Snyder – but he’s actually gone by the series’ halfway point, replaced by Paul Chadwick of Concrete fame. One can only speculate on what could have happened behind the scenes to cause Harris to abandon a four-issue miniseries after drawing just two issues, but the result, at any rate, is that Jolley is left holding the bag with a story that never really comes together.

Jolley’s writing isn’t bad, but he mostly seems to be doing damage control for a series that’s clearly gone off the rails. There are so many out-of-left-field narrative choices, even before Harris’s departure, that it’s difficult to imagine the final version of Flight of Bones as being at all similar to the series originally proposed. One is the jarring introduction of a third-person narrator halfway through the first issue, which is all the more baffling given that we see Strange dictating his thoughts to a magical, self-recording diary just a few scenes later. Would interspersing the story with first-person diary excerpts not have been a more engaging way of granting the reader access to Strange’s thoughts – and a cleverer one, too, given the diary’s presence as a physical artifact in the story? I also wonder at the choice to fill out Strange’s supporting cast with an obscure character named Topaz, a young woman who apparently featured in the 1970s horror title Werewolf by Night and a handful of issues in Strange’s first two ongoing series.

But the biggest head-scratcher is the total abandonment of the religious motifs that arguably define the first half of the series. Harris frequently intercuts the action of his two issues with Christian imagery – crosses, stained-glass windows, gargoyles, and gothic spires – that juxtapose (in a quite novel way for a Doctor Strange comic) the character’s simultaneous devotion to the occult and his non-belief in a Christian God. At one point Topaz even asks Strange about his religious beliefs, and Strange equivocates in a way that’s clearly meant to be revisited later in the story. That never happens, though, and the second half reveals that the apparently religiously motivated crimes of the series’ first half were all the work of a mind-control plot by Strange’s perpetual nemesis Dormammu. Following the reveal is an extended fight sequence in which Strange and Dormammu spout uncharacteristic quips and one-liners, making it clear that Jolley and company are just vamping for page length at this point.

Could the series’ intended interrogation of Christian belief have seemed simply too controversial to the series’ editors, inspiring last-minute changes that drove Harris from the title? (It seems unlikely that Jolley, Harris, and Snyder would have had a change of heart about the subject matter, given their future work together on the even more explicitly religious-themed Obergeist.) If so, the situation would be in keeping with that of Kevin Smith’s Daredevil: Guardian Devil – the very first story arc published under the Marvel Knights imprint, and one I’ve always suspected of editorial interference given its bizarre eleventh-hour plot turn, in which the apparent Second Coming of Christ is explained away as an illusion created by the Spider-Man villain Mysterio (who proceeds to commit suicide before any questions can be answered).

This collection is rounded out by a hodgepodge of Doctor Strange stories from various anthology titles, all by different creators, including such luminaries as Christopher Golden and Jim Starlin. The best one is probably the 2010 story by Kieron Gillen and Frazer Irving. Irving’s Doctor Strange was a welcome sight for me: his renderings of the character were by far the best part of his fill-in issues on Brian Michael Bendis’s Uncanny X-Men. Irving’s contribution aside, though, the art in these stories rarely compares to that of Flight of Bones’ first two issues; with its extreme detail, serpentine linework, and resolute portrayal of Strange as a dead ringer for Vincent Price(!), Harris’s work is certainly something to behold. It’s just a shame there’s so little of it to go around.

Review: Superman, Vol. 1: Son of Superman

Writers: Peter J. Tomasi and Patrick Gleason
Artists: Patrick Gleason, Doug Mahnke, and Jorge Jimenez
Collects: Superman: Rebirth #1, Superman #1-6 (2016)
Published: DC, 2017; $16.99

In the months immediately preceding DC’s Rebirth initiative, the publisher decided to kill Superman – this time for good. The catch was that the Superman to be killed off was the version introduced as part of 2011’s New 52 relaunch, which had effectively pushed the reset button on the DC Universe and “permanently” replaced the characters readers had been following since 1986 (when Crisis on Infinite Earths had similarly restarted the DC Universe) with new, younger versions unburdened by decades’ worth of continuity. The New 52 Superman had never been as well-received as the post-Crisis version, though, and with Rebirth – which is basically an attempt to reinvigorate the New 52 Universe by infusing it with pre-New 52 concepts – the publisher has (again, “permanently”) replaced the New 52 Superman with the post-Crisis Superman.

Luckily, Superman, Vol. 1: Son of Superman doesn’t make this convoluted backstory too hard to understand, and writers Peter J. Tomasi and Patrick Gleason do a succinct job of explaining the post-Crisis Superman’s return. Having escaped from his own universe just before it was destroyed, he’s simply been hiding out in this one for the last ten years; now, with the New 52 Superman having died in battle, he’s decided to take up the mantle again because, as he puts it, “the world needs to see again that there’s a Superman looking out for them.”

Unlike the first appearances of the New 52 Superman back in 2011, Tomasi and Gleason’s Superman takes time to pay tribute to the status quo it’s upheaving. This first volume’s opening pages, collected from the Superman: Rebirth one-shot, feature the post-Crisis Clark Kent’s attempts to resurrect the New 52 Superman by the same means he was brought back to life following his own death in 1992’s The Death of Superman (an event beautifully recapped, in flashback, by artist Doug Mahnke). He fails, since the “regeneration matrix” device that revived him apparently doesn’t exist in this universe, although it’s hard to buy that this is actually the last we’ll see of the New 52 Superman (this being superhero comics, after all).

Superman #1 continues to look back at the pre-Rebirth status quo, with Clark paying his respects at the New 52 Superman’s grave, but the past quickly fades into the background in Tomasi and Gleason’s series. Instead they focus on what’s arguably the most novel aspect of the return of the post-Crisis Superman: the fact that this Superman is a family man, his longstanding relationship with Lois Lane (who has also made the trip to the New 52 Universe) having produced a roughly ten-year-old son. These concepts were actually introduced not in Tomasi and Gleason’s series, as I had assumed going into this book, but shortly before DC Rebirth, in Convergence and Superman: Lois and Clark. It’s a testament to how well-written Son of Superman is that, even without having read either of those series, I felt at home with these characters – especially the young Jonathan Kent, who officially becomes the new Superboy by the end of this volume – something I haven’t been able to say about contemporary DC comics in a very long time.

Clark Kent’s interactions with his wife and child – who both, refreshingly, are in on the secret of his superpowers and share in his mission to protect and serve the greater good – are as natural as they are original to this franchise. In fact, they humanize Superman in a way rarely seen since the introduction of the New 52 Superman. In that sense, it’s hard not to read the book’s main conflict – in which a new version of the Eradicator (a Kryptonian Robocop, basically) is trying to “purify” Jonathan by, um, “eradicating” the human half of his DNA – as a critique of the various series starring the New 52 Superman, which arguably emphasized the character’s less relatable Kryptonian side to the detriment of his more down-to-earth human alter ego. It’s a compelling metaphor, although it becomes increasingly strained after it’s revealed that the Eradicator’s body somehow contains the soul of every dead Kryptonian (and also, for some reason, the soul of Pa Kent…?). But for as much as the last few issues collected in Son of Superman may lose sight of that central metaphor, the book remains both readable and endearing throughout.

The book owes a lot of its consistency to artists Gleason, Mahnke, and Jorge Jimenez, who trade off between issues with some frequency due to the series’ twice-monthly shipping schedule. All three make effective use of shadows and panel layouts, and every issue ends with a splash page (or, in the case of one issue, a splash page with a single inset panel). Their renderings of Jonathan are also totally of a piece, which is to say the character doesn’t appear to fluctuate in age from issue to issue the way child characters in superhero comics often seem to do (Damian Wayne, anyone?). It goes a long way toward establishing Jonathan as a fully-fledged character in the DC Universe, which I found to be Son of Superman’s greatest achievement.

The DC Rebirth Superman series is off to a great start with this volume, and I hope DC doesn’t intend to back down from the character’s new, family-oriented status quo anytime soon; combined with the post-Crisis Superman’s status as an outsider in the New 52 Universe, it opens up a lot of familiar ground for productive reexamination. There’s Superman’s relationship with the Justice League, for example, which makes for a pretty big question mark at the end of this volume as Superman introduces Jonathan to Batman and Wonder Woman – not his Batman and Wonder Woman, remember, but the New 52 versions of those characters (who have just experienced the death of their Superman and the sudden appearance of a new, older Superman from another universe!).

But most significantly – and most uniquely, for a contemporary superhero comic – Son of Superman sets out to explore how qualities like honesty, responsibility, and empathy are passed from one generation to the next. In a time when those qualities are so sorely lacking in people with power, books like this one remind us that there is, indeed, a Superman looking out for us. He resides in the better part of our natures, and his humanity, ironically, is a vital reminder of the strength we all possess.

Review: DC Universe: Rebirth – The Deluxe Edition

Writer: Geoff Johns
Artists: Gary Frank, Ethan Van Sciver, Ivan Reis, and Phil Jimenez
Collects: DC Universe: Rebirth Special #1 (2016)
Published: DC, 2016; $17.99

The recent publication of DC Universe: Rebirth – The Deluxe Edition, an eighteen-dollar hardcover version of the three-dollar softcover special issue released in summer 2016 to spearhead the latest relaunch of DC’s superhero line, makes now seem as good a time as any for me to resume posting on this blog. And while I only wish that I could in good conscience make some ham-fisted analogy between the “rebirth” of DC’s publishing line and that of With Great Power, the fact is that I find the Rebirth special off-putting in quite a few respects.

I probably haven’t read as many DC comics as the average DC fan, but I’ve certainly read a lot more than the average person in general. I only mention that because this book left me scratching my head at least once every few pages, and I can’t see it faring much better with the average non-comics reader or even with more seasoned comics readers who may lack an intimate knowledge of DC history. Of course, it would seem that the book was never meant for those audiences. DC president Diane Nelson suggests as much in her introduction to the hardcover edition: “I find it hard to believe that anyone reading this deluxe edition of DC Universe: Rebirth has not yet read it in another form, be it print or digital,” she writes. And while it’s a little sobering to see a major publisher of corporate comics openly admit to repackaging the same material for the same small group of fans over and over again (be it conceptually, as in the intensely nostalgic bent of the entire Rebirth line, or literally, in terms of trade paperback and hardcover collections of single issues), it’s also a little surreal to see that fact so baldly acknowledged by the company’s president in the opening pages of the Rebirth initiative’s flagship book.

The main story of the Rebirth special, which concerns itself primarily with the characters, histories, and interpersonal relationships that were erased from DC continuity as a result of the publisher’s “New 52” relaunch in 2011, is easy enough to follow; it’s the interstitial scenes and cutaways that make the overall book something of a muddle. In between scenes depicting the pre-New 52 character Wally West as he encourages the major characters of the post-New 52 DC Universe to remember his existence, writer Geoff Johns and his team of artists (Gary Frank, Ethan Van Sciver, Ivan Reis, and Phil Jimenez) jump around in time and space to tell brief vignettes about various other characters. The trouble is that many of these vignettes come and go without contributing anything to the book’s main story, instead leaving the reader with a handful of apparent revelations that make little sense if you’re not familiar with what, say, Blue Beetle or the Atom have been up to since 2011 (and how that differs from what they were up to before that).

Even a lot of the reveals concerning DC’s more popular characters fall somewhat flat. Among them is Batman’s discovery that there have been three Jokers (rather than just one) running around Gotham City since 2011. This idea might have been interesting as the payoff to some larger ongoing mystery in Batman’s corner of the DC Universe, but instead it just sort of drops into the story with a dull, embarrassing thud: it feels less like a deliberate plot development than it does an officially-sanctioned No-Prize designed to make sense of five years’ worth of conflicting editorial decisions regarding Batman’s nemesis.

The reveal that the pre-New 52 version of Superman has been living in hiding for the last five years is a little more interesting, but like many other sequences in this book it’s undermined by the book’s poor page layout. Superman’s vignette is similar to most of the other vignettes in the Rebirth special in that it runs for two pages; rather than being organized as two-page spreads, though, many of these sequences are instead split in half by a page turn. Not only does this make for some really choppy reading at times, but it robs several of the more potentially impactful moments of their significance. Take the page on which Aquaman proposes to Mera, for example, which arguably would have resonated more strongly had it not been paired with a page depicting the mournful, cordoned-off scene of the New 52 Superman’s death. The page break in the middle of the pre-New 52 Superman’s story fosters something more than just thematic incongruity, though, and I had to flip back and forth between the story’s two pages just to figure out how a particular character could have suddenly appeared in the scene without Superman’s noticing.

In general, these short sequences inflict a sense of bewilderment similar to what one might experience in the final pages of a Marvel crossover event. But whereas a book like Marvel’s Civil War, which bombards the reader with a flurry of short sequences that essentially preview the series and story arcs that follow that series, arguably earns the right to show us where characters like Spider-Man, Luke Cage, and the Punisher stand at the end of the story – that is, by virtue of having just portrayed these characters over the course of its seven issues – the Rebirth special offers no preceding context for the multiple previews it forces readers to endure.

But worst of all is the way the Rebirth special extends DC’s deeply immoral exploitation of Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’ Watchmen, by contending that the most fan-beloved aspects of DC history were erased by Watchmen’s Dr. Manhattan. For one thing, this is yet another ad hominem attack by DC on Moore, who Johns effectively blames here for how poorly received the DC’s New 52 initiative was – for having “weakened” the DC Universe by instigating a “war between hope and despair,” “love and apathy,” “faith and disbelief.” What Johns seems to forget is that Moore and Gibbons’ series was in fact a deconstruction of how insipid mainstream superhero comics had become by the late 1980s, not a call for superhero comics to become more dark and cynical. The publisher learned all the wrong lessons from Watchmen, and to call the thirty-year-old series to the carpet for that is both mean-spirited and dumb.

That’s not even what’s most upsetting about this book, though; more importantly, the Rebirth special promises to introduce the characters of Watchmen into the DC Universe for the first time. While this is not strictly illegal – the nature of Moore’s 1985 contract ensured that the rights to Watchmen would revert to him only once the series had gone out of print, and DC has assiduously reprinted it ever since – I have yet to see or hear a convincing argument that the decision is anything less than unethical. Both Moore and DC fully expected that the rights to Watchmen would revert to the authors – that’s how such arrangements had always worked out, and there was nothing unusual about this particular deal at the time – and it was only Watchmen’s tremendous success, ironically, that kept it permanently in print and forever out of Moore’s legal control. So while DC’s inclusion of Moore and Gibbons’ characters in the Rebirth special may be lawful in that regard, it violates the spirit of the initial agreement, which held that Moore and Gibbons were, at the end of the day, the rightful owners of Watchmen.

The widespread apathy of comic book readers toward this outrage has taken a range of disturbing forms, from criticisms of Moore’s physical appearance and religious beliefs to the absurd argument that a corporation such as DC cannot be expected to act against its own interests and should therefore be supported in the exploitative position it has taken against Moore (and other creators) over the years. These same readers valorize characters, like Superman and Batman, that frequently act against their own personal interests for the betterment of society: who fight, among other things, corporate greed (e.g., Lex Luthor) and strive to improve the world by directing the profits of big business toward global welfare (e.g., Batman’s charitable Wayne Foundation).

That fact raises a significant question: while it’s true that most corporations don’t act for the common good, does that really mean that we shouldn’t expect them to? In the cases of DC and Marvel, in particular – companies that generate billions of dollars on the backs of characters that espouse altruism, charity, and moral responsibility – should we not demand even the slightest emulation of the positive qualities they so relentlessly promote? Should we reward and celebrate these companies when, as in DC Universe: Rebirth, their actions represent not only a bullheaded unwillingness to redress past wrongdoing but also a concerted determination to persist in that wrongdoing? These are the moral questions, unwittingly, with which the publishers of contemporary superhero comics force us to contend.

Review: Uncanny X-Men, Vol. 1: Revolution

Writer: Brian Michael Bendis
Artists: Chris Bachalo, Frazer Irving
Collects: Uncanny X-Men #1-5 (2013)
Published: Marvel, 2013; $24.99 (HC), $19.99 (TPB)

Brian Michael Bendis’s Uncanny X-Men exists at a strange remove from All-New X-Men, being at once a companion piece to the writer’s other flagship X-Men title and a series with a coherent raison d’etre of its own. The first collected volume, Uncanny X-Men, Vol. 1: Revolution, focuses on the shambles Cyclops and his cohort (Emma Frost, Magneto, and Magik) find themselves in as they attempt to train a new generation of mutants. (It’s ironic, isn’t it, that Bendis’s “all-new” characters – Tempus, Triage, Fabio, and Benjamin – make their home in Uncanny, while the stars of All-New are the time-displaced “all-old” X-Men of the 1960s?)

Some of the most interesting and best-written moments in Revolution are actually ones previously seen in All-New X-Men, Vol. 1 and Vol. 2, presented here with a focus on the character interactions we didn’t see in Bendis’s other X-book. When Cyclops & Friends show up at the Jean Grey School to recruit more mutants to their cause, for example, Bendis overlays the war of words between Cyclops, Wolverine, and Kitty Pryde with a psychic showdown between Emma Frost and her former protégés, the Stepford Cuckoos. The girls feel betrayed by Emma’s apparent loss of her mutant abilities, casting a harsh light on Emma’s own sense of betrayal – one directed at herself on the one hand, but also at Cyclops, both for unintentionally breaking her mutant powers and for breaking her heart as well.

As fascinating as moments like these are in their own right, they also serve as consistent springboards to what gives Uncanny X-Men its own identity in relation to All-New X-Men: the “broken” nature of its cast’s mutant powers in the wake of Avengers vs. X-Men. If All-New is about inexperienced young mutants learning to utilize their talents to their fullest potential, then Uncanny is about experienced older mutants half-conscious of their new limitations but who try to do what they think is right anyway. Throughout Revolution the utter inability of Cyclops and his team becomes increasingly disconcerting, especially considering that half of them are completely untrained. While the team narrowly escapes potentially deadly encounters with Sentinel robots and the Avengers in this volume, it seems only a matter of time before Cyclops’s hubris will result in tragedy. Chris Bachalo’s artwork, fittingly, is as beautiful as it is unsettling, his frequently off-kilter panel layouts creating a near-constant sense of unease and impending danger.

The final issue collected in Revolution features painted artwork by the equally talented Frazer Irving, but unfortunately the story itself – about denizens of the demonic Limbo dimension coming after team member Magik – leaves much to be desired. As longtime readers of this blog might recall, I’ve never been too keen on demons serving as the antagonists of superhero comics (see also: my reviews of Superman: Kryptonite Nevermore, Batman – The Dark Knight: Golden Dawn, and Nightwing, Vol. 1: Traps and Trapezes). At best such stories tend to read essentially as cardboard cut-outs of one another, offering up supernatural excuses for the main character(s) to fight endless hordes of generically ugly bad guys. At worst, though, they legitimize the use of sexually violent language and imagery as a plot device; just consider the number of stories we’ve all read and watched about death-cults sacrificing virginal young women to Satan (or some other demonic entity). Only adding to the unpleasantness is that these types of stories tend to wrap themselves in pseudo-religious mumbo-jumbo, adding yet another dimension of poor taste to the proceedings.

In Revolution we have the worst of all these worlds, with characters threatening to “damn” and “punish” each other and Magik in particular singled out as a “stupid mortal girl,” a “broken doll” who “must be punished.” Magik, for her own part, sprouts horns and hoofs and begins referring to herself as “the Darkchilde.” It’s pretty insufferable stuff. It never gets quite as perverse as some of the character’s earlier appearances – I’m thinking especially of Chris Claremont’s Magik (Illyana and Storm) and the hopefully never-to-be-reprinted Magik miniseries of 2000-2001 – many of which more explicitly evoked pedophilia and rape. But even so, one might hope that this character’s thirty-plus years of publication would be long enough for us to have moved past this brand of storytelling.

Revolution ends right in the middle of this dreadful story, leaving it to drag on for another two issues in the series’ next collected volume. I’ll say more about the story’s conclusion should I get around to writing about that book, but in the meantime it’s worth noting how irritating it is that both this volume and All-New X-Men, Vol. 2: Here to Stay end on cliffhangers. Since characters weave in and out between All-New X-Men and Uncanny X-Men, this makes it impossible to read either series in trade without spoiling the other, even if you switch from one series to the other between individual collections. (And that’s to say nothing of how both series intertwine with Brian Wood’s X-Men, Rick Remender’s Uncanny Avengers and, eventually, Bendis’s Guardians of the Galaxy and Miles Morales: Ultimate Spider-Man.)

In short, while the first four issues collected in Revolution represent some of the strongest work by both Bendis and Bachalo in recent years, the way this volume concludes sends up serious red flags. I’ve mostly enjoyed Bendis’s two X-Men titles so far, and I sincerely hope this isn’t a sign of things to come.

Review: All-New X-Men, Vol. 2: Here to Stay

Writer: Brian Michael Bendis
Artists: David Marquez, Stuart Immonen
Collects: All-New X-Men #6-10 (2013)
Published: Marvel, 2013; $24.99 (HC), $19.99 (TPB)

All-New X-Men, Vol. 2: Here to Stay delivers on the promise of the series’ first volume with a story that, even more so than Vol. 1: Yesterday’s X-Men, prioritizes character development over plot. In fact, this volume represents some of writer Brian Michael Bendis’s strongest character work in years.

There is forward plot progression, to be sure, with Mystique gathering the villains Sabretooth and Mastermind for a crime spree that comes to a head in the next volume. But the real star of Here to Stay is the series’ time-displaced version of Cyclops, who wastes little time, following the events of Yesterday’s X-Men, in stealing Wolverine’s motorcycle to search for answers about his present-day self. As one might imagine, this makes for an amusing series of misadventures in which Cyclops comes to grips with the modern world as Wolverine tries to track him down.

The first two issues of Here to Stay, beautifully illustrated by guest-artist David Marquez, culminate in a conversation between Cyclops and Mystique (who this young version of Cyclops has never met). Mystique acts as something of a sounding board for Cyclops at first, allowing him to talk through the major events of Yesterday’s X-Men and granting readers the clearest access to his thoughts that we’ve had so far. But what makes this sequence most interesting to me is that it can also be read as a total inversion of Bendis’s much-celebrated Ultimate Spider-Man #13, in which Peter Parker comes out as Spider-Man to Mary Jane Watson (who, prior to this issue, thought Peter’s big secret was that he had a crush on her). The same honesty that characterized that conversation initially seems present here as well, with an empathetic-looking Mystique offering seemingly thoughtful advice to the angst-ridden Cyclops. Bendis turns that perception on its head, though, in the very next scene:

It’s a pretty surprising moment given the nature of the conversation that’s just taken place, and again, it strikes me as a particularly clever twist for those with an affinity for Bendis’s previous work.

The time-displaced Jean Grey develops in interesting ways here too, with the ethics of her newly acquired mind-reading powers brought repeatedly into question. The other three original X-Men – Beast, Iceman, and Angel – are given a lot less to do this time around. Angel in particular feels like a dead weight on this series, and despite a tedious subplot in which he fights generic Hydra robots alongside his present-day counterpart, his only real function here is to have his thoughts questionably manipulated by Jean. And while I’m not confident that the plot development teased by this volume’s cliffhanger ending – Angel’s departure from the Jean Grey School for the present-day Cyclops’s New Xavier School (and, thus, for the series Uncanny X-Men) – will make the character any more compelling or relevant, the prospect of a slightly decluttered cast in All-New X-Men is a hopeful one.

One final thing I couldn’t help but consider as I read these issues is exactly when Bendis proposes the original X-Men to have been formed. All signs seem to point to the late 1980s: the young Cyclops is baffled by cell phones and water bottles, and there are repeated references to the present-day Cyclops being around 40 years old while the younger version “looks twelve” (although I suspect he is closer to sixteen). For two and a half decades to have transpired since the formation of the X-Men contradicts the (frankly stupid) principle of Marvel’s “sliding timeline,” which would have us believe that all the events of the modern Marvel Universe have taken place over the course of less than ten years.

Here to Stay may lend some credence, then, to a theory advanced by Rich Johnston: that Marvel editorial at one point was purposefully seeding such continuity aberrations in order to justify a future “quarantine” of the X-Men and Fantastic Four franchises – the Fox-controlled film rights of both being the subject of much dismay among top executives at Marvel and Disney – from the rest of the Marvel Universe. It’s impossible to render a verdict based on the issues collected here, of course, but it’s something I’ll certainly keep in mind as I continue to read this series.

Review: All-New X-Men, Vol. 1: Yesterday’s X-Men

Writer: Brian Michael Bendis
Artist: Stuart Immonen
Collects: All-New X-Men #1-5 (2013)
Published: Marvel, 2013; $24.99 (HC), $19.99 (TPB)

All-New X-Men, Vol. 1: Yesterday’s X-Men is one of the most compelling superhero time-travel stories in years. The X-Men have featured in more than a few such storylines over the last several decades, with a staggering number of the franchise’s major characters hailing from one alternate future or another. It’s become quite a lot to try to keep track of, and it wouldn’t be inaccurate to characterize X-Men continuity, at this point, as being just shy of impenetrable. In All-New X-Men, though, writer Brian Michael Bendis scales back the onus other writers have often placed on the reader by effectively reversing the conventions of the typical X-Men time-travel story. The series makes no demands of us to keep track of alternate pasts, presents, and futures; the dystopic world it takes as its subject is our own.

The book’s high concept is that the Beast, in an effort to show a newly militant Cyclops the error of his ways, has brought the original five X-Men from the past to the present day. Much of the story takes place from the viewpoint of the time-displaced X-Men, thus casting a spotlight on just how far afield the franchise has come from those early issues by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby. To the original X-Men, in fact, their present-day incarnations are often entirely unrecognizable – literally so, in the cases of Iceman and the Beast – with the notable exception of Jean Grey, who in the present has been dead for quite some time. The original Jean thus takes on an almost messianic quality in the eyes of several characters, including Storm, Wolverine, and Kitty Pryde – all strangers to this Jean, as they weren’t introduced until years after Lee and Kirby left the original series. Wolverine is especially affected by Jean’s “return,” and perhaps as a result his relationship with the time-displaced X-Men is the most vexed of any of his peers.

And while the young Cyclops’s showdown with his present-day self serves as the book’s climax, it may be Warren Worthington, the Angel, who ultimately inspires more pathos than any other character in Yesterday’s X-Men. While Bendis doesn’t give him a lot to do in this volume, Warren effectively closes the book with perhaps the most heartbreaking lines imaginable in a story so obsessed with the disparity between past and present: “No one is mentioning me. No one is talking about what has happened to me, Bobby. Where am I?” Although the dramatic irony of Warren’s question will be lost on those unfamiliar with the events of Rick Remender’s Uncanny X-Force, the overall effect is still to underline how unsettlingly bizarre the world of the X-Men has become in recent years.

This volume’s only real weakness is that the original X-Men don’t get much face-time for the first few issues it collects, which focus more on the present-day Scott Summers and his efforts to establish a team of new mutants. As such, we get various de facto origin stories for new characters taking up space in a series ostensibly focused on the five original X-Men, and as a result we don’t see much of our protagonists until about halfway through the book. Bendis is setting up in these first few issues for his run on the rebooted Uncanny X-Men, which centers on Cyclops’s new team and began just a few months after All-New X-Men. Why that series couldn’t have just launched concurrently with All-New in order to give the original X-Men more time to develop on their own is anyone’s guess.

But the real issue that arises from Cyclops’s presence in Yesterday’s X-Men is that it undermines one of the book’s central premises: that what Cyclops is doing is terrible enough to warrant the Beast’s mucking about with the timestream in order to stop him. In point of fact, though, the Cyclops we encounter here seems pretty darn reasonable; while he engages in violence against “normal” humans with some frequency, he does so without killing anyone and only in order to save the lives of otherwise defenseless mutants. Thus, while future volumes in this series will see the characters of All-New X-Men come to view Cyclops with a greater degree of complexity, for the time being their opposition to Cyclops seems pretty thinly motivated.

Like many recent Marvel collections, Yesterday’s X-Men utilizes the company’s “Augmented Reality” app, which allows smart-phone users to access extra content by scanning obnoxious-looking red boxes littered throughout the book. This isn’t the first collection I’ve encountered with this “feature,” but it’s one of the more shameless in its execution. In one scene, Kitty Pryde prattles on about her concern for the Fantastic Four when they don’t answer her phone call; the panel’s “AR” box, when scanned, takes the reader to a minute-long advertisement for Matt Fraction’s Fantastic Four and FF series. It’s one thing to do a little tongue-in-cheek cross-promotion via editorial captions – a tradition inaugurated by Stan Lee himself in the early Silver Age – but it’s another to present such content as “bonus material” that adds value to a book. (Lest we forget, it wasn’t so long ago that collections like this cost a whole five dollars less.)

These criticisms aside, All-New X-Men is certainly one of the more interesting and original series to come from Marvel as of late. Despite the time-travel hook, Bendis seems committed to focusing on characters more than making a further mess of X-Men continuity, and for that reason alone I’ll be paying attention to where this series goes.

Review: Nightwing, Vol. 1: Traps and Trapezes

Writer: Kyle Higgins
Artists: Eddy Barrows, Eduardo Pansica, Trevor McCarthy, Geraldo Borges
Collects: Nightwing #1-7 (2011-12)
Published: DC, 2012; $14.99

If Scott Snyder’s aim in Batman, Vol. 1: The Court of Owls was to revise Batman franchise history at the macro level – by introducing the idea that Gotham City could be controlled for decades, without Batman’s knowledge, by a secret society of criminals – then Nightwing, Vol. 1: Traps and Trapezes operates at the opposite extreme. It revises franchise history at the micro level, by exploring the relationships between Nightwing (Dick Grayson) and several new characters with ties to his circus roots. The book’s strength lies not in its revelation of major “secrets,” but rather in its supporting cast members and the catalyzing effect they have on the main character.

The most interesting of the new characters is Raya, a redheaded woman who looks strikingly like Dick’s on-again/off-again love interest, Barbara Gordon. When Haly’s Circus returns to Gotham City and Dick sees Raya for the first time since his parents’ death, sparks fly between them instantly. (The book insists, ridiculously, that Dick’s parents were killed five years ago, which would make Dick around 19 or 20 years old – despite the fact that he and Raya are clearly portrayed as being in their mid- to late twenties, at the youngest.) In this respect, Traps and Trapezes is the polar opposite of a book like Batman: The Dark Knight – Golden Dawn, which does a comparatively poor job of retrofitting a new character into the history of an established one. Golden Dawn’s greatest flaw was that, for all its efforts to play up Dawn Golden’s importance to Bruce Wayne in scenes set during their childhood, her characterization in the story’s present was positively nonexistent. Where Traps and Trapezes succeeds, by contrast, is in its making Raya an integral part of the story’s forward momentum, rather than dwelling on her and Dick’s past relationship.

The fact that Raya has little in common with Barbara Gordon, apart from her looks, is an important element to the story. Their differences are underscored when Barbara guest-stars (as Batgirl) in the book’s fourth issue; whereas Raya teases Dick about fairly mundane topics (his never having seen The Godfather, for example), Barbara is more interested in Dick’s feelings and emotional well-being. Although Dick seems to think he’s happy with Raya, there’s an obvious distance behind her beauty – even before the story’s reveal that she is reluctantly helping Saiko, a mysterious assassin who serves as the book’s primary antagonist. The story’s focus on Dick, rather than his superhero alter ego, is underlined by the fact that Saiko is trying to kill the former; at first, he fails to even realize that Dick and Nightwing are the same person. In this sense Saiko is fairly analogous to the antagonist of Court of Owls, who initially hunts Bruce Wayne, not Batman.

The similarity of the threats Batman and Nightwing face in these two books is revealing in regard to both characters. The most compelling element of Court of Owls is its protagonist’s stubborn hubris – despite mounting evidence, Batman refuses to believe that there could possibly be a secret society at work in “his” city – and that element is largely absent from Traps and Trapezes. Dick whiles away weeks of story time without investigating either Saiko’s attempts on his life or the secret history of Haly’s Circus, despite its being hinted at by several other characters – a very un-Batman-like mode of operations. This is perhaps most surprising because Dick actually took up the role of Batman for a number of recent issues, some of which are collected in Batman: The Black Mirror (which, this book explicitly reminds us, remains within post-New 52 continuity).

In fact, the very point of this story seems to be to differentiate Dick’s crime-fighting methods from Batman’s, and in that respect the characters’ vastly different approaches to problem-solving accomplish the task. Traps and Trapezes ends with Dick’s repudiation of the nostalgia that fuels the very ethos of Batman’s mission: “We’re not defined by our tragedies or our turning points,” he thinks as he speeds away from the Batcave on his motorcycle, “we’re defined by the choices we make in the face of them.” If Batman’s war on crime is motivated by revenge, then, it would seem that Dick’s isn’t so much “motivated” at all as it is simply reactionary.

Although writer Kyle Higgins establishes Batman’s fixation on the past as problematic, he resists portraying Dick’s approach as faultless by comparison. It’s the character’s inattention to the past, in fact, which brings about so many problems in the present and keeps him relatively in the dark until Saiko conveniently explains himself in an expository info-dump near the story’s end. And then there’s the final scene, in which Dick angrily confronts Bruce Wayne in the Batcave only for Bruce to lay him out with a single punch. (The same scene also appears, from Bruce’s perspective, at the end of Court of Owls.) There’s more to Bruce’s actions than a lack of anger management – by punching Dick, he knocks out a tooth embedded with an alloy which would have transformed Dick into a mindless killer – but his methodology is disturbing, and Dick’s unquestioning acceptance of it is enough to indicate that he has yet to separate himself fully from the ways in which Batman traditionally operates.

The fact that this is the only scene in the book in which Bruce Wayne actually appears doesn’t help; more interaction between Dick and Bruce throughout could have given the scene more impact for both characters and made for a more thematically coherent climax. It’s not the plot’s only misstep, either – about halfway through the book, the story comes to a grinding halt with a ridiculously out-of-place issue about a rhyming demon who comes for the soul of a circus clown. It’s unclear at this early point in the series whether plot developments like this one are actually laying the seeds for future stories, just as it’s hard to tell whether the shakiness of Dick’s outlook toward his crime-fighting career is a character flaw Higgins plans for him to work through in future volumes, or just the result of lazy writing. Traps and Trapezes has enough strengths, though, that I look forward to searching out the answers to those questions in the next volume.

Review: X-Men: Days of Future Past

Writer: Chris Claremont
Artists: John Byrne, John Romita Jr.
Collects: Uncanny X-Men #138-143 and Uncanny X-Men Annual #4 (1980-81)
Published: Marvel, 2013; $19.99

Although The Dark Phoenix Saga is most often cited as the high-water mark of Chris Claremont’s comics-writing career (and, in particular, of his much-celebrated collaboration on The Uncanny X-Men with artist John Byrne), it’s a story of relatively little social force, a fantasy more in line with the likes of Star Wars than with the more politically radical genre narratives whose attitudes Claremont would seek to emulate in his later work. Of greater political and ideological interest, I think – especially given the allegorical weight the X-Men franchise has been invested with in recent decades – are the issues Claremont wrote directly afterward, collected in X-Men: Days of Future Past. Here we see Claremont’s writing in a state of transition, grasping at the social consciousness he would achieve a year later with X-Men: God Loves, Man Kills, and yet also falling noticeably short of it.

At the heart of Days of Future Past is a two-part storyline set, in part, in a dystopian future in which mutants have been hunted nearly to extinction by giant robots known as Sentinels. The last remaining X-Men – Kate Pryde, Wolverine, Storm, Colossus, Franklin Richards, and the red-haired psychic Rachel – conclude that their only hope is to change the past, and so Kate is vaulted back through time to prevent a political assassination in the series’ present day. Now possessing the body of her younger self – who has only recently joined the team’s ranks, as “Sprite” – Kate leads the X-Men in thwarting an attack on the U.S. Capitol, saving the life of the anti-mutant Senator Robert Kelly in the process. Whether Kate has succeeded in changing the future, however, is left an open question. (Later storylines, beginning with 1990’s nearly unreadable X-Men: Days of Future Present, would reinforce time and again that she did not.)

The reader is reminded with some frequency that events in the “present day” take place on October 31, 1980, described by the narrator as “the final Friday of one of the closest, hardest-fought presidential elections in recent memory.” And yet, despite setting the story at such a culturally charged moment, Claremont misses the opportunity to make anything more than a vague political statement. The only presidential candidate introduced to the reader is Senator Kelly, and what role his McCarthy-esque anti-mutant hearings play in his presidential campaign is never made clear. Ronald Reagan appears not once, although, as in real life, he would apparently win this election (he appears much later in Claremont’s run on this series, in 1986’s Uncanny X-Men #201).

Confusing things even further, a brief epilogue set a month after the election depicts the president re-activating the Sentinel project. The president appears only in shadow in this scene, although he is obviously (and, by historical necessity, must be) Jimmy Carter – who, if he has indeed lost the election to Reagan, could not realistically possess the political influence necessary for such a move. The attempt to conceal Carter’s identity is all the more baffling considering the fact that he had made a full appearance in the series just a few years earlier, at the height of the original Phoenix Saga.

Any potential for a coherent political commentary in Days of Future Past is thus lost in the book’s ambivalent attitude towards real-life figures and events. Furthermore, I think a great deal of its falling short in this sense can be contributed to artist John Byrne. While he’s credited as “co-plotter” on the issues collected here, the partnership between Claremont and Byrne had in fact all but broken down by this point, with Byrne often drawing scenes in direct contradiction to Claremont’s scripts; the issue following the two-part “Days of Future Past” would be his last on the title. One of the major contributing factors to the book’s confused politics, I would argue, is Byrne’s avowed refusal to draw figures from real life: the aforementioned Jimmy Carter appearance was in fact ghost-penciled by inker Terry Austin. Byrne was notorious, as well, for using his favorite characters (especially Wolverine, who Claremont didn’t care for and planned at one point to write out of the book) as vehicles for his own right-wing views.

It should come as fairly little surprise, then, that a book “co-plotted” by Claremont and Byrne would possess something less than clear political sensibilities. Nor should it surprise us that the story’s most pointed political statements occur only in its script. A caption accompanying an otherwise innocuous establishing shot of the Pentagon, for example, ends with a surprisingly perceptive diagnosis of America’s renewed militarism at the turn of the 1980s:

This is the Pentagon, the largest building of its type in the world, command headquarters of the mightiest military machine that world has ever known. To many people, it is more truly representative – for good or ill – of the reality of America than the White House or Congress just across the Potomic [sic] River.

Claremont addresses the post-Tonkin breakdown of the checks-and-balances system even more pointedly later, in this exchange between civilians fleeing the story’s climactic battle: “‘Good grief! That sound – someone’s bombed the Capitol!’ ‘Yeah – and it was probably the White House that did it!’” As in the narration, Claremont’s politics begin to come through only where Byrne is literally unable to erase them.

While initial printings of Days of Future Past included only Uncanny X-Men issues 141 and 142, an additional five issues have been included since the publication of the 2004 trade paperback edition; the added content begins three issues before the book’s two-part title story, and ends with the issue that follows. Despite the inclusion of a John Romita, Jr.-drawn Annual that relates only tangentially to the rest of the book, the new contents make for a more thematically coherent narrative than in previous editions. The first issue collected not only wraps up The Dark Phoenix Saga with Jean Grey’s funeral and the departure of Cyclops from the team, but serves also as a flashback-filled recap of the franchise’s nearly twenty-year history to this point. It ends with the arrival of a new student to Xavier’s School for Gifted Youngsters: Kitty Pryde, whose character arc forms the crux of the 2004-and-beyond editions of Days of Future Past. The effect is to de-emphasize the dystopian and alternate-future aspects of the title story itself; newly framed, rather, “Days of Future Past” serves as a super-powered bildungsroman starring Kitty Pryde.

However, this shift in focus also further reduces the impact of a story already weakened by its artist’s failure to endorse the politics of its script. As we can see from later texts, Claremont’s politics would only become clear after he became the sole plotter of his work; in fact, as if to herald what was eventually to come, the first issue of Uncanny X-Men following Byrne’s departure was drawn (but not co-plotted) by Brent Anderson, who would go on to collaborate with Claremont on God Loves, Man Kills. We might well view Days of Future Past as not just the end of the Claremont/Byrne era, then, but also as the start of a progressive sensibility that would be fully realized only in the years that followed.