Review: 'I Am the Night: The Ultimate Unauthorized History of Batman: The Animated Series'

Batman has gone through uncountable on-screen iterations (or, at least, two dozen), and each batfan has their favorite. Personally, I'm a campy Adam West fan. But even I will admit that the best realization of the caped crusader was Bruce Timm and Eric Radomski's. Batman: The Animated Series pleased fans to no end by capturing both the darkness and the fun of the comics, which is something that no other on-screen Bat-property has managed. It was beautifully animated, especially for an after-school cartoon from the nineties. The voice talent was top notch and the stories were often excellent. All the Batman movies or TV shows followed in the Animated Series' wake were merely sucking its fumes.

Review: 'Futuristic'

A new Mark Voger book is always a big event in my house. His books are like Santa sacks loaded with all the best vintage Christmas presents: toys and comics and TV and movie box sets, all devoted to a particular mid-twentieth century theme. Having put together lavishly visual and warmly personal odes to monsters, superheroes, the British invasion, Christmas, and hippie-esque culture in the past, Voger now sets his scopes on the future... at least the future as seen from the fifties and sixties. Robots and rockets and aliens and big-helmeted cosmonauts orbit Futuristic. 

Review: 'Superman: The Definitive History'

It has been 90 years since writer Jerry Siegel and artist Joe Shuster adapted their bald, hyphenated super villain Super-Man from an illustrated sci-fi pulp mag prose story into the spit-curled, milk-wholesome, unhyphenated superhero who is now more recognizable than Santa and Jesus put together, and a thousand times more powerful than either of those guys.

Review: 'Zowie!: The TV Superhero Craze in '60s Pop Culture'

Crashing into a Gilligan-and-Jeannie-populated TV scene too dumb to fully recognize how dumb it was, Batman dropped a big load of camp--distinct from Gilligan and Jeannie's kitsch--onto TV screens. Whether you were a hyperactive six year old or a hyper-hip sixteen year old, Batman had appeal, doing dual work as a sincere superhero adventure and a genuine and genuinely funny comedy at a time when such things simply didn't exist on American television. 

Review: 'It Rose from the Tomb'

It's kind of funny that, in his new book It Rose from the Tomb, Peter Normanton expresses surprise that TwoMorrows was interested in publishing a book on the history of horror comics, considering that this would not be the first horror-centric book that comics-centric publisher has published (if you have not checked out Mark Voger's Monster Mash, you need to get it together, Daddy-O!) and that horror is so integral to comics history. It's the main reason why kids devoured funny books in the fifties and why the comics code shut them down. Marvel and DC were known to dabble in horror, and it was the life's blood of E.C. and Warren. And because even the chintziest horror comics were outlandishly visual and vivid, horror comics is the perfect theme for one of TwoMorrows' visual and vivid volumes.

Review: 'Atlas Artist Edition No. 1, Featuring Joe Maneely'

Joe Maneely is not as well known as, say, Steve Ditko or Jack Davis among comics connoisseurs. He didn't get a chance to be. After ten years of work with Atlas Comics, Maneely died in an accident on a train at the age of 32. 

One cannot help but ponder what might have been when viewing one of the roughly 3,500 pages of artwork he produced in his brief career. 215 of them are anthologized in Atlas Artist Edition No. 1, Featuring Joe Maneely. He was apparently game for any assignment, working on sci-fi, horror, medieval, old-west, war, humor, romance, and (aging least successfully, of course) "yellow-peril" stories (a-hem).

His style remained consistent regardless of subject matter: lots of detail, hatched shadows, etched faces. There's a hint of the underground comix to come a decade after his death in his style, although its unlikely that an old-fashioned worker like him would have found a place in that grass-perfumed nook of comics-dom.

What-might-have-beens aside, what is may not always be A+ storytelling—there's a reason titles like Haunted! and Adventures in Terror are not as well-remembered as Tales from the Crypt, and a Seven Year Itch parody from comedy-comic Riot is anything but a riot and barely comedy—but Maneely's artwork is always top-notch. This volume captures it with incredible respect. Atlas Artist Edition No. 1 is an over-sized hardcover with beautiful reproductions of 38 stories and a gallery of Maneely's covers. The coloring is wonderfully authentic—none of that garishly-digital recoloring that has absolutely ruined many an EC-anthology. This is the way classic comics reprints should be done.

Review: 'The Alex Ross Marvel Comics Super Villains Poster Book'

 

In 2019, Marvel artist Alex Ross created a mural of heroes for the comic giant's NY offices. A few years later he followed it up with the natural dark counterpart, and now Abrams ComicArts has compiled these portraits in The Alex Ross Marvel Comics Super Villains Poster Book. 

Because Ross created each painting individually before situating it in the larger work, he is able to give each baddie his or her own page to be pulled out and pasted on your wall. With nothing but a plain white field for background, each colorful creep is free to pop from the book's 11" x 16" pages. 

Review: 'The Simpsons Treehouse of Horror Ominous Omnibus 2: Deadtime Stories for Boos & Ghouls'

1993 was a big year for The Simpsons. It was when the series' finest season, number four, aired and when Matt Groening started Bongo Comics to continue the Springfieldians' antics off the small screen. 

The key to The Simpsons' comedic success, way back when the show actually was comedically successful, was its constant barrage of sharp, insightful, and/or outrageously silly jokes that went by so quickly you had to watch the best episodes a dozen times for everything to register. It all comes down to writing, pacing, and editing, most of which goes out the window in the transition from TV to comics. Frankly, The Simpsons comics were not really funny. With their over-reliance on trotting out obscure characters, lazy self-references, lazy puns, and slack pacing, they're not too different from what the TV series would start becoming during its spotty eighth season. 

Review: 'Cliffhanger! Cinematic Superheroes of the Serials: 1941-1952'

Well before superheroes became staples of feature films, or even TV shows like the Superman series of the fifties or the Batman one of the sixties, muscled men in tights most regularly appeared on screen in matinee serials. Both Superman and Batman got their live-action starts in serials. So did future TV and movie stars such as Captain Marvel, Captain America, Flash Gordon, and Dick Tracy. It was a very sensible way to bring these characters to the screen, as the short, action-packed, cliffhanger-beholden structure of a serial episode was pretty similar to that of a comic issue. 

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: 'Britmania: The British Invasion of the Sixties in Pop Culture'

That The Beatles changed the world is as widely known as how there's this fiery thingy in the sky called "the sun." The most obvious offshoot of the international success of four British lads was all the English groups that went global in their wake: not just critical dah-lings like the Stones, Who, Kinks, and Animals, but also cuddlier fave raves like Herman's Hermits, The Dave Clark Five, Peter and Gordon, and Petula Clark. But the influence went deeper, farther, and weirder than that, as shaggy, buck-toothed, often incongruously posh British characters began invading American sitcoms, comics, dopey beach movies, cartoons, bath products, and pretty much everything else an ad-man could imagine. The British Invasion was a siege fought and won in the record shops, but its aftershocks rattled everything everywhere. 

Review: 'American TV Comic Books: 1940s-1980s'

We all know that Wonder Woman, Plastic Man, and The Crypt Keeper are classic comics characters. But what about Emma Peel, Davy Jones, and Ed Sullivan? Indeed, comic artists have transformed a whole bunch of TV personalities and characters into caricatures on funny-book pages. Most TV-based comics didn't last long, most were published by Dell, and most were written and illustrated with all the care and artistry one puts into something intended as a quick cash-in.

Peter Bosch collates these sundry cash-ins in his new book American TV Comic Books: 1940s-1980s. The book consists of very tidy entries on everything from a 1949 comic based on Suspense to well past his titles' timeline for an entry on Stranger Things comics. Each entry includes a short paragraph about the history of the given TV show and an even shorter paragraph on the comic adaptation, which mostly consists of a list of the involved artists and a critique rarely more extensive than "good" or "bad." 

Considering how goofy fun Bosch's topic is, it's a shame that his writing is so dry (paging Dr. Mark Voger... ). But the copious illustrations spread throughout the book, which include full comics pages and covers and such delightful oddities as a handy page translating Edd "Kookie" Byrnes's 77 Sunset Strip lingo for anyone unhip enough to not know what "fill me in" means, are a gas.

Review: 'Batman: The Ultimate Guide (New Edition)'

With yet another Batman movie being the most hyped new release, it is a fine time to get more new Bat-product onto shelves. Although Batman: The Ultimate Guide is apparently not 100% new since it is an update of a book originally published in 2001 (though, it must be pretty different since it was written by a totally different author and details a lot of Bat business that went down in the past twenty years), and it is only an ultimate guide if we forget that Batman has had a very active life off of comics pages (which would require some sort of Hugo Strange brain-eraser thingy), it is still a neat, if brief, trip through 80-something years of Batmania. 

Author Matthew K. Manning had a potentially difficult task in distilling Batman's many, many, many iterations in the comics down to a history that could fit on 200 image-crowded pages. He included profiles of the Batmobile, the Batcostume, the Batcave, the Justice League, and Gotham City,  as well as various friends, foes, and love interests. There are a few profiles of key comic issues with synopses and illustrative panels. There's a spread on that time Green Lantern turned Batman into a zombie. I even learned a few things (I had no idea False-Face appeared in the comics in 1958 and was not an invention of the sixties TV-series), but the book's main draw is it's colorful, spectacular, and varied rogue's gallery of images.

Review: 'The Masters of the Universe Book'

In the early eighties, Kenner's line of Star Wars 3 ¾-inch figures dominated toy store shelves, leaving its competitor Mattel lagging behind and scheming to catch up. The only way to compete with George Lucas's weird wookiees, jawas, and yodas was to get weirder, bigger, and all-around zanier. The braniacs at Mattel inflated their figures to a whopping 5½ inches, pumped their plastic muscles to asinine proportions, oversaturated them with candy colors, and gave them daffy names like Stinkor, Clamp Champ, Buzz-Off, Two Bad, Webstor (not to be confused with the character Emmanuel Lewis originated), and, for the leader of the gang, He-Man. 

Marvel Comics Artist's and Artisan Editions

Before the colorists have their ways with comic book pages, line artists conceive and perfect the contours of the superheroes who swing across skylines on their webs or smash through brick walls. For some aficionados, pre-colored pages are the purest products of the central artist's vision, hence the existence of "Artisan" and "Artist's" editions of iconic comics. 

IDW's latest additions to its "Artisan" and "Artist's" library showcase Jack Kirby's unpretentious illustrations for Fantastic Four issues #71, #82-84, and Annual #6 (in which the Invisible Girl brings down an android and the FF put Maximus's hypno-gun out of commission), John Romita's similarly bold and basic work for Spiderman #67-69, #71, #75, and #84 (in which Spidey finds himself shrunk down to 6 inches and grapples with the Kingpin), and a random assortment of pages depicting Jim Lee's comparatively complex work on X-Men. 

Unlike the "Artisan" homages to Kirby and Romita, Lee's Artist's Edition makes no attempt to spin stories. It's all about the art, which appears on astoundingly huge 12" x 17 1/2" pages in a hardcover package with giant centerfold. When the illustrations are blown up to such proportions and drained of color, the eye is drawn to unexpected spots on the page. The central images that register with perfect punch on standard-sized pages step aside to allow the small details to swoop out: the tirelessly applied hatching, the wrinkles of a furrowed brow (there are a lot of those), the stubble on a square jaw (lots of those too). 

The pages of Jack Kirby's Fantastic Four: Artisan Edition, John Romita's The Amazing Spider Man: Artisan Edition, and Jim Lee's X-Men: Artist's Edition are also uncommonly tactile despite the absence of consciously applied color. Taped-on typed page numbers, globs of white paint, penned notes in margins, and even dirty fingerprints humanize comics that always seemed a bit like they slipped in from some more perfect dimension.

Review: 'Orbit: The Seventies'

Orbit: The Seventies is a fairly bizarre attempt to convey the biographies of four key stars of seventies rock in comic form. The weirdness starts on the cover with prominent portraits of Steven Tyler and Bruce Springsteen. Neither singer is a focus of this book. Rather, it tells the tales of David Bowie, Alice Cooper, Keith Richards, and Michael Jackson. 

Orbit begins with a cursory biography of Bowie that often reads more like bullet points than a proper story. The telling is so slapdash that the writer makes it seem as though Bowie divorced his first wife because she attempted suicide. While some panels are well rendered, much of the art looks like it was made with GIMP's cartoon filter.

A lot more thought went into the section on Alice Cooper, which uses kids messing with a Ouija board as a means to relate Cooper's story in a suitably spooky/silly manner and acknowledges when myth and fact get muddled. The inorganic, Saturday Morning cartoon style art is not exceptional, but it is more consistent and individual than the sloppy, generic art in the Bowie chapter. 

The Keith Richards story uses an unspecified overdose as a way into telling his story, although that device is quickly abandoned for another quick bolt through a career too complicated to adequately convey in twenty pages of speech bubbles and pictures.  The grey, smeary art looks like it was rendered with debris from an overused ash tray. It's appropriate to its subject but terribly ugly. 

The weirdest chapter is reserved for the weirdest artist in this book of weird artists. A sort of Jiminy Cricket character narrates a hagiography that outright dismisses all charges that Michael Jackson was a child molester. It would have been more moral and truthful to take a less firm stance on that touchy and controversial subject, but I guess it's naive to think that any life can be accurately and satisfactorily captured in a twenty page comic.

Review: 'Star Trek: Year Five: The Wine-Dark Deep'

One of the great pleasures of the first three issues of Jackson Lanzing and Collin Kelly’s Star Trek: Year Five is the comic series’ faithfulness to Gene Roddenberry’s original TV show. Artists and writers alike rendered characters with perfect fidelity to Kirk, Spock, Uhura, Sulu, Bones, and the rest. The stories could have been adapted to actual episodes of the original TV series due to a simplicity and clarity in line with what could be brought to the small screen in the late sixties.

Review: 'The World of Twomorrows: Celebrating 25 Years of the Future of Fandom'

In his introduction to The World of Twomorrows: Celebrating 25 Years of the Future of Fandom, Mark Evanier rewrites a quote from playwright George S. Kaufman to declare, “If you want to get revenge on a publisher, convince them there’s an audience out there for books and magazines about comic book history.”

Review: 'Star Trek: Year Five'

At the beginning of each episode of Star Trek, Captain Kirk informed us that the crew of the starship Enterprise was on a five-year mission to explore strange new worlds and so on. Unfortunately, he and the rest of the gang never got to finish their mission on TV because hostile aliens from the planet NBC aborted it after just three years.

In light of season-three’s high ratio of stinker episodes like “Spock’s Brain” and “Turnabout Intruder”, Star Trek’s early cancellation may have actually been merciful, though there were more tales worth telling in that universe, hence the franchise’s healthy life beyond 1969.

One of the most recent continuations of the Star Trek story returns us to its origins to complete the Enterprise’s original mission. Star Trek: Year Five is a comic series from IDW that began last April, and the groovy thing about this series is how faithful it is to the original series at its best. Like that original, Year Five is the work of multiple writers and multiple directors—or in this case, artists—yet all are dedicated to recreating the Star Trek we know and love in terms of storytelling, characterizations, themes, and visuals. While the art style varies from issue to issue, it never becomes so stylized that we cannot recognize the faces of Shatner, Nimoy, Nichols, and the rest. As soon as Bones orders Kirk to drink brandy on the job in “episode” one (these are episodes, not issues), we are transported right back to the sixties. Fortunately, that period flavor does not extend to its treatment of Uhura, who gets a much bigger role throughout these comics than she did in the original series (Sulu, however, tends to get sidelined).

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”.