Wednesday Comics

This is one huge honkin’ comic book. And it’s one really beautiful comic book too.

Wednesday Comics was an experiment by DC Comics featuring tabloid sized comic pages featuring some acclaimed writers and artists presenting stories of DC characters…iconic and not-so-iconic…one page at a time published weekly (on newsprint no less.)

It seems unlikely to be repeated…16 tabloid pages for 4 bucks is probably too high a hurdle for a lot of comic fans to get over…but it was a grand little adventure just the same.

This big (17+” x 11+”) hardcover collects all of the stories on better paper and it’s a gorgeous comic book. All of DC’s big guns…Superman (with beautiful art by Lee Bermejo), Batman (a fine noir romance that might have needed a bit more room to breathe) and , Wonder Woman, Green Lantern, The Flash…are represented alongside of lesser-known (to the general public at least) classic characters like Hawkman, Sgt. Rock, the Metal Men, Deadman, Adam Strange, Metamorpho the Element Man, and Kamandi, the Last Boy on Earth.

The art is almost all wonderful and some of the stories are better than other. I was charmed by Jimmy Palmiotti and Amanda Conner’s whimsical Supergirl story featuring Krypto the Super Dog and Streaky the Super Cat (just go with it…:-), intrigued by Paul Pope’s pulp fiction re-imagining of the sci-fi hero Adam Strange, and engaged by the gritty WW2 Sgt. Rock story written by Adam Kubert and drawn by his legendary father Joe Kubert.

The rollicking Metamorpho adventure…by Neil Gaiman and Michael Allred…is also a great deal of fun as is the unlikely team-up of Catwoman and Etrigan the Demon by Walt Simonson and Brian Stelfreeze and Kyle Baker’s action-packed Hawkman story.

This book is pricey…it lists for $49.99…but it delivers in a big way. Wednesday Comics makes me happy and what more could you ask from a comic book than that?

Long Live the Legion?

I love the Legion of Super-Heroes. It’s a childish thing, I know…but the Legion is part of my childhood...one of my first great comic book reading loves when the 9 year old me started immersing himself in the fantastic, improbable, thrilling four-color adventures.

Loving the Legion…something that has continued from childhood into my continuing dotage…I am pleased that the ongoing cycle of their popularity has swung back to the popular side starting with Mark Waid and Barry Kitson’s reboot through the use of the team as important players in Justice League of America, Final Crisis, and the Superman books and on to the newest incarnation of their self-titled series (written by Legion legend Paul Levitz no less) along with a companion series in the pages of a revived Adventure Comics.

I’m enjoying it all. And, at the same time, feeling vaguely put off by it at the same time.

Partially it’s because the characters act and behave like adults (some of them are married and have children of their own) and yet the writers, for nostalgia’s sake I suppose, continue to have them refer to each other as though they were still children (above, for example, are Saturn “Girl”, a mother of twins, her husband Lightning “Lad”, and his twin sister Lightning “Lass”.) I have as much affection for the (sometimes silly) codenames the Legionnaires had the beginning but if you’re going to make them adults (which is fine with me, by the way) then you shouldn’t be trying to have it both ways by continuing to have them use names they had when they were teenagers.

But, much more importantly, there’s a very cynical edge to the Legion mythos that feels incongruous and self-indulgent. Waid’s reboot, for example, used a heated generation gap theme as its foundation while the later stories continue to focus on virulent xenophobia as the toxic element in the interplay between the Legion (who have always been an assemblage of beings from myriad worlds come together to protect the greater good) and the government (and apparently many people) of Earth.

The cynicism I spoke of earlier rears its head in the notion that we won’t have overcome petty prejudices like ageism and xenophobia after another 1,000 years have passed. It might make for good drama but it’s a sad (and lazy) commentary on the ability of beings to get past such 20^th/21^st century notions like those.

I understand that conflict is essential when telling stories but the Legion used to showcase how people from different worlds (and even different times) could come together…stand together…triumph together…over threats to the greater good. Legionnaires weren’t distrusted because they were young…or because they weren’t born on Earth…they were, instead, celebrated for what they were heroes who were will to put their lives on the line to make the universe a safer, more united place.

(Previous versions of the series had a decidedly dark edge…Keith Giffen’s "5 years later" reboot and Dan Abnett & Andy Lanning’s “Legion of the Damned/Legion Lost” run…and I quite enjoyed those but they were fighting against ominous forces coming from without and not from small-minded “Earth first” bigots who hate them no matter how many times they save the universe.)

Maybe that notion is not cool enough for modern comic book writers…if that’s the case it’s certainly a sad thing…for comics…for the Legion…for whatever young people who might find their way to comics (I doubt this overriding sense of mistrust and even outright distain for the titular heroes of the book would have engaged the younger me the way the “tales of Superboy and the Legion of Super-Heroes” used to back in the day.)

Maybe I’m just getting too old for these things.