Review: 'The Team-Up Companion'

In 1954, DC halved the page count of its World's Finest Comics and forced Superman and Batman into the same book as if they were a couple of recently divorced bozos sharing a flat. They mostly kept to their own sides of the room, but a new format was inadvertently born: the team-up. This was distinct from crossovers or guest appearances because both heroes were on equal footing in a shared title with both their logos on display. Pretty soon, team ups of everyone from Green Arrow and Martian Manhunter to Supergirl and Wonder Woman to Aqualad and Robin to Richie Rich and Casper to Spider-Man and Dracula (!) began proliferating funny books. 

Review: 'Jack Kirby's Dingbat Love'

In the seventies, Jack Kirby developed several titles for DC Comics’ “Speak Out” series, which would skew toward a more adult readership while tackling topics such as divorce, African-American romance, and street crime. DC did not like Kirby’s approach, watering down his comics in most respects and ultimately nipping them all in the bud. Consequently, Kirby’s work on True-Life Divorce, Soul Love, and Dingbats on Danger Street has become some of the rarest artifacts from the “King of Comics”.

Review: The Joker: Talking Bust and Illustrated Book

Hmm…how do I review “The Joker: Talking Bust and Illustrated Book”? It is produced by publisher Running Press, which suggests I should approach this package as a book, though DC Comics historian Matthew K. Manning’s The Joker: Behind the Smile is no taller than my thumb, and by my estimate, approximately 7,000 words shorter than the Wikipedia page devoted to the Clown Prince of Crime. There are some nice pictures illustrating such milestones as The Joker’s debut in Batman #1, Bill Finger’s creation of an official back story in the classic Red Hood storyline, the Neal Adams years, the Frank Miller and Alan Moore years, Batman: The Animated Series, and a few twenty first century comics.

The real star of this package is a plastic Joker bust the height of my middle finger that says several Jokery phrases (in either Mark Hamill’s voice or a reasonable facsimile) at the push of a button. As just a book or just a collectible, there would not be much to say about this mini box set, but taken together for a fairly reasonable price, “The Joker: Talking Bust and Illustrated Book” makes a decent souvenir from your latest trip to Gotham.

Review: 'Comic Book Implosion: An Oral History of DC Comics Circa 1978'

DC comics was suffering in the late seventies. Some blamed it on the harsh winter of ’78, a period of incessant blizzards that prevented a lot of kids from visiting the newsstand. Some blamed it on DC’s publisher, Jenette Kahn, whose failed scheme to reinvigorate her company involved swelling page counts, cover prices, and titles. Keith Dallas and John Wells accuse unsympathetic distributors in the epilogue of their new book Comic Book Implosion: An Oral History of DC Comics Circa 1978. However, they mostly stay out of the way, allowing quotations from reams of old articles and interviews to tell the story of a topsy-turvy period in comic history.

What we learn is that DC was not the only company in over its head. Golden-boy Marvel was too, only to be rescued from the abyss when it agreed to publish spin offs of a weird new sci-fi movie by the kid who’d made American Graffitti. However, the main focus is on DC, particularly Kahn’s planned “Explosion” that was to see 22 new titles hit the stands in a new longer format only to be cancelled at the last minute. The titles that were to be included in this infamous Cancelled Comic Cavalcade, where those titles ended up, and the reasons for that cancellation are major points of discussion.

There is also a lot of discussion of pricing and the business-side of comics publishing in this book, but all of those facts and figures are the least interesting thing about Comic Book Implosion. What’s more intriguing are the soap-opera drama, the bizarre and desperate ideas (an African-American superhero named Black Bomber whose secret identity is a white racist? Yow.), and the stray triumphs that emerged amidst the turbulence. We see the successful revival of the Teen Titans, the births of Black Lightning and Firestorm, the mania surrounding Superman: The Movie and its handsome star, and the ballyhooed bout between the Man of Steel and Muhammad Ali. And despite the initial failure of Kahn’s planned Explosion, she did a lot of good for DC, such as her cultivation of younger talent and new titles, her abolishment of lazy reprints, and her implementation of profit sharing.

Although Dallas and Wells did not conduct any new interviews for Comic Book Implosion, they culled their quotes from such a wide swath of sources, and from such an interesting line up of industry folk (including Kahn, Larry Hama, Neil Adams, Carmine Infantino, Archie Goodwin, James Warren, Muhammad Ali himself, etc.), that it doesn’t matter much. Yes, it makes for messy storytelling, but that’s basically the case with all oral histories. And Dallas and Wells’s refusal to editorialize allows us readers to decide who are the heroes and who are the villains, who is lying and who is telling the truth, which makes for more involving reading. The cavalcade of photos and illustrations— which includes an 8-page, full-color spread—makes it fun.

Review: 'Superman: The Atomic Age Sundays 1949-1953'

Pooh-pooh to the dark knights of today’s comics. I prefer it when superheroes get goofy, and there’s no super hero superer than Superman, and he gets super goofy in IDW’s new anthology of his Sunday comic adventures from 1949–1953. Thank artist Wayne Boring and writer Alvin Schwartz, who had enough refreshing disrespect for the Man of Steel to pit him against Arthurian knights and pose as a mustachioed minstrel named Clark of Kent or whittle giant marionettes so he could put on the puppet show that saves a country girl from marrying a smarmy con man. Superman hides Clark Kent robots all over Metropolis and makes a big brass monkey to thwart some thugs. He gets caught in the web of a giant caterpillar. Lois Lane rescues a parrot. It’s fitting that the only arch villain who appears in this daffy volume is that slaphappy, dimension-hopping imp Mr. Mxyztplk.

Without interruptions from B&W daily comic strips following their own story lines, Superman: The Atomic Age Sundays 1949-1953 reads like a proper comic book anthology, especially since the Sunday comics from this period are full page stories that minimize awkward recapping of the previous Sunday’s events. There is much wit, imagination, and heart in Schwartz’s writing as Superman goes about his zany business and criminals meet with more forgiveness than they usually do in the superhero realm. Just don’t expect Superman to settle down and get married. That’s one thing for which he has no forgiveness in these pages!

The book comes with IDW’s usual quality and authenticity: no digital altering of the artwork; grainy paper that recalls the texture of classic comic book pages without the thinness; a slick ribbon bookmark. A few extra extras aside from a brief though informative introduction from comic writer Mark Waid and a selection of Boring’s covers for Superman and Action Comics would have been nice, but you’d be a super jackass to complain too much about a volume as super as The Atomic Age Sundays 1949-1953. 

Review: 'DC Comics: A Visual History (Updated Edition)'

Last week I reviewed Matthew Manning’s Batman: A Visual History, which told the story of 75 years of dark knighting through perhaps every issue of DC Comics to feature The Dark Knight and his multitudinous co-stars. Manning patterned his book after another visual history he helped to write four years ago. DC Comics: A Visual History is at once more ambitious and less ambitious than its Batman-focused predecessor. It is more ambitious because it has to cover so many different titles, characters, and genres, and less because that plethora of themes means it can get away without being so exhaustive. Instead of the complete histories of Batman, Superman, Wonder Woman, The Green Lantern, Hawkman, Hawkgirl, and the rest, we hit the major beats (no surprise that Batman and Superman still dominate).

Review:'The Batman Files'

Being the Batman is dangerous work. The dude may have survived uncountable scrapes, but his luck couldn’t hold out forever. He has even died on occasion (of course, no superhero in the comic book world stays dead forever…at least no one as popular as Batman). He thought Dick Grayson did an OK job as his temporary stand in, but not a great one. So Mr. Bats very thoughtfully collected all the information he believes is necessary to be him in a volume called The Batman Files. This over-sized, full-color paperback includes reams of Batman’s personal diaries, newspaper clippings about everything from the murder of his parents to the time Joker shot and paralyzed Batgirl and how he got that T. Rex in his trophy room, dossiers on associates and adversaries from Commissioner Gordon to The Riddler to The Mad Hatter, maps of Gotham, blueprints of the various Batmobiles and Batcopters, and other assorted Batmaterial you might need if you ever put down that damn bag of Doritos, get your ass off the couch, and don the cape and cowl so you can pick up where Bruce Wayne left off.