Batman #664-669, 672-675

Grant Morrison, writer

Andy Kubert, J.H. Williams III, Tony Daniel, Ryan Benjamin, artists

DC Comics, April 2007-April 2008 or so

22 pages each

$2.99 each

Grant Morrison is my favorite superhero comics writer, one of the very few writers in comics I’ll read anything by. Batman is my favorite superhero, the only character I feel an attachment to as an entity rather than as a character in a story that may or may not be good by artists and writers who may or may not be good. Put Morrison and Batman together and you should have a recipe for Sean T. Collins Nirvana, but for some reason that hasn’t been the case. What I seem to recall being the standard Kubert Bros.-related scheduling difficulties early on; Morrison working in a deliberately choppy, almost disjointed narrative style both within individual issues and from issue to issue and short arc to short arc; sketchy, sloppy art from Kubert and unremarkable ’90s-style art from Daniel and Benjamin jarringly interrupted by a bona-fide star turn from the great J.H. Williams III; that awkwardly inserted Ra’s al-Ghul-centric crossover with all the other Bat-titles; my job at Wizard coming to an end and with it my weekly free access to superhero comics…put it all together and you have a book tailor-made for me that I wasn’t even following.

I was recently loaned a more or less complete run of Morrison’s tenure on the title–sans the initial “Batman & Son” arc that introduced Batman and Talia al-Ghul’s enfant terrible son Damian and the issues pertaining to the Ra’s al-Ghul crossover in which the old villain attempts rebirth in the body of his grandson–and I was pleased to discover I liked the whole thing a lot.

Like so many of Morrison’s long runs it’s badly hampered by the art he’s saddled with, perhaps moreso here than in other cases since so much of Morrison’s staccato scripting depends on nuances of body language, facial expression, and mise en scène. Meanwhile, that pow-pow-pow pacing and those brief, three- or two- or even one-issue story arcs give the illusion of a lack of continuity within the run overall. But taken in one sitting these problems are easily smoothed over, and what reveals itself is a dual project.

First, and credit here goes to my friend Kiel Phegley for pointing this out, Morrison foregrounding Batman as the main point of interest in every story. Whereas normally the character plays a particularly badass brand of straightman to the more glamorous villains and horrifying murder-mysteries he’s up against, Morrison’s emphasis is on the hero himself, and on establishing him as every bit as weird, exciting, scary, and memorable as his antagonists. This is reflected in Morrison’s choice of antagonists itself: as with All Star Superman, he’s trotting out a parade of baddies who in one way or another serve as his flawed doppelgangers. The peak-human-specimen al-Ghul family, the crimefighting Batmen of Many Nations and their billionaire benefactor, three crazed Batman-impersonating policemen, even Bat-Mite–they all throw what makes Batman Batman into sharper relief via contrast, demonstrating that while he is indeed weird, exciting, scary, and memorable, he’s also a fundamentally good person who never loses sight of the values that matter to him and by which he’s chosen to define himself.

Second, Morrison is slowly advancing a novel and vastly more enjoyable take on the shopworn “shadowy villain manipulating things behind the scenes” mega-storyline in the person of the Black Glove, a figure of unknown provenance behind many of the story’s events. Morrison has basically avoided those annoying scenes where the shadowy figure literally appears as a figure in shadows once or twice per issue, making ominous statements and showing us just enough of his silhouette that we can start guessing whether he’s Mysterio or Hush or whoever. Instead, Batman arranges his recent cases into a pattern at the center of which is a hole in the shape of something that’s more of an idea rather than a person–a “king of crime” figure so brilliantly evil that even Batman had no idea he existed and had been pulling strings for nearly Batman’s entirely career. It’s all coming out in this kind of slow, unnerving fashion, more identifiable as something feeling weird about the stories rather than as a story element in and of itself. Hopefully the central revelation will be as satisfying as that of, say, New X-Men. At any rate, while I can see why people (myself included) may have gotten a bit lost in the shuffle, I’m now reading some of the book’s more oblique storytelling choices as just that–choices–rather than lapses, and I’m firmly back on board.

Boy’s Club

Matt Furie, writer/artist

Teenage Dinosaur, 2006

40 pages

$5

Buy it from Buenaventura

This is one of the funniest comic books I’ve ever read. The closest thing I can compare it to is the music of the cock-mock-rock band Electric Six; both take the absolute lamest aspects of rokkin’-out culture–bad drugs, bad booze, bad food, bad jobs, bad taste–and po’-facedly present them like features of that lifestyle rather than bugs. Instead of phony rock gods, the main characters of Boy’s Club are a quartet of ’80s-style funny-animal cool dudes with all the right moves, like a cross between Bill & Ted, the Tri-Lams, and the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. Many of the funniest gags center on their cliché-heavy responses to absurd situations–lots of big grins and thumbs up, statements like “oh snap!” and “it’s a free country” and “peace out!”, words like “amigo” and “awesome,” and so on. Meanwhile, the visuals come across like a sitcom version of Paper Rad, frequently riffing on drug experiences to pull of non sequitur sight gags like one character’s face melting off or morphing into Falcor from The Neverending Story. The best jokes–and in this book, that means they’re pretty goddamn great–combine goofball visuals with that deadpan duuuude humor: a six-panel grid of reaction shots to a particularly huge hero sandwich, a character’s response to finding another character’s vomit in the bathroom sink. They’re kind of like Achewood if that strip were done by the guy your roommate bought pot from in college rather than a software designer. It’s the kind of comic you’ll stick in friends’ hands and force them to read it. If you like humor comics I really can’t recommend it highly enough.

Mome Vol. 10: Winter/Spring 2008

Al Columbia, Sophie Crumb, Dash Shaw, Ray Fenwick, Émile Bravo, Jim Woodring, Robert Goodin, John Hankiewicz, Tom Kaczynski, Jeremy Eaton, Kurt Wolfgang, Paul Hornschemeier, Tim Hensley, writers/artists

Eric Reynolds & Gary Groth, editors

Fantagraphics, December 2007

120 pages

$14.95

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Mome Vol. 10 by contributor, in order of appearance:

* Al Columbia’s gorgeous and frightening front cover is so great that I found myself trying to justify the “someone’s about to torture an animal” back cover image, where normally I’d just say “fuck that shit.”

* I really like the ink and watercolor portrait that is Sophie Crumb’s first contribution to this volume. Her comics, though, are more of the smug writing and unpleasant art that have put me off of her work in past volumes.

* Dash Shaw’s science-fiction story is my favorite thing by him I’ve seen so far. I feel like his lo-fi diagrammatic art and layouts are really clicking here, while the storyline’s central conceit of a man who comes from a world where time runs backwards is ambitiously complex and demands Shaw be inventive in solving the problems it presents him with visually. The use of color is measured and smart, and there’s a weird pathos to both the ideas and the way Shaw draws the characters. I could imagine Kevin Huizenga doing a wicked cover version of this strip.

* Ray Fenwick does his sublime/ridiculous prose/subject matter juxtaposition thing again and I don’t think it works all that well here. Celebreality gossip culture is a soft target.

* Émile Bravo does another sociopolitical pictographical parodical morality play involving various ethnicities’ views of those below their rung in the social hierarchy; it’s a sensible idea but not something that blows you away with its insight, and I think he undercuts it slightly with the punchline.

* In the conclusion to Jim Woodring’s “The Lute String,” Pupshaw and Pushpaw are punished by the elephant god for their transgressions by being sent to Earth Prime! It’s as much fun looking at Woodring’s art as it is seeing this pair of pranksters get their comeuppance, and meanwhile it’s really odd and funny to see Woodring draw normal people. That punchline panel is a scream.

* I really like the way Robert Goodin draws people, with big forearms reminiscent of Popeye and really unique facial designs. I’ve seen world-culture myths adapted before, of course, and this Indian shaggy-dog story doesn’t stand out all that much in terms of the moral imparted or the mechanics of getting there, except for that lovely art.

* John Hankiewicz’s debut Mome contribution is a doozy. The narrated story, a tale of a gentrifying neighborhood reminiscent of Tom Kaczynski’s contribution to Vol. 9, draws attention to Hankiewicz’s finely detailed environments and thus heightens the frisson of seeing three very different types of figures moved through it by the cartoonist: a fairly realistic representation of the narrator and (I think) his father; a giant-headed, Tweedle-Dee/Tweedle-Dum-esque couple whose out-of-scale-ness represents the gaily crass nouveau riche new inhabitants of the neighborhood–in one memorable panel, they appear totally and disconcertingly naked; and a thickly delineated, faceless abstraction of a female, symbolyzing the anonymous self-mutilator whose weblog or livejournal the narrator habitually visits. It’s this strip I’ll return to, no doubt.

* I was going to say something like “Tom Kaczynski returns to the familiar territory of industrial/commercial environments altering people’s internal landscape,” and then I thought how funny it is that a subject like that is familiar territory for someone. I’m grateful that’s the case even though I don’t think it’s all quite cohered to the level of power he hopes for yet. This one comes close, but for some reason I think it would have worked better if it were longer and had more time to build up to the ending.

* Jeremy Eaton’s art is text-heavy and really loose, Stieg-esque I suppose. I’m not 100% sold on his short-story-ish tale of a retarded man accused of a gruesome crime, and I’m not sure the limited scope of his layouts gives his loose line enough room to breathe and really have an impact, but I’d like to see more.

* This is my favorite chapter of Kurt Wolfgang’s “Nothing Eve” so far. It’s replete with insightful observations about crowd dynamics, and a funny (if slightly overwritten) wink at how Hollywood inflects our view of how momentous occasions are supposed to unfold.

* Paul Hornschemeier’s heroine gives her one-night-stand the kiss-off in this installment of “Life with Mr. Dangerous,” and I think the scene plays realistically and uncomfortably. But Amy’s affect is so flat and her reasons for being such a downer all the time so underexplored that it seems to me like it’ll be really hard for her to hold our interest as a main character in an eventual collection of this story; I found myself agreeing with her gossipy coworker’s harsh assessment of her even while I thought the coworker herself was a bit too one-dimensionally glib.

* The punchline panel for Tim Hensley’s sole Wally Gropius strip this volume continues the disturbingly violent undercurrent he kicked off with the Jillian/incest strip last ish, and also serves as a rejoinder to the callous Columbia image that follows on the back cover.

* As is the case with pretty much every volume of Mome, it’s tough to imagine a better value for your alternative comics-buying dollar. The range in tone, style, subject matter, and even quality makes it a uniquely bracing quarterly(ish) view of the state of the art.

Mome Vol. 9: Fall 2007

Ray Fenwick, Tim Hensley, Al Columbia, Eleanor Davis, Jim Woodring, Gabrielle Bell, Andrice Arp, Joe Kimball, Mike Scheer, Tom Kaczynski, Brian Evenson & Zak Sally, Kurt Wolfgang, Paul Hornschemeier, Sophie Crumb, writers/artists

Eric Reynolds & Gary Groth, editors

Fantagraphics, October 2007

120 pages

$14.95

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Mome Vol. 9 by contributor, in order of appearance:

* Ray Fenwick’s text-heavy pin-up pages, drawn on the dismembered back covers of old hardcover books, mostly do that ironic combination of grandiose language and quotidian concerns, but for my money his best gags are the simplest. His “FUCK YOU AND YOUR BLOG” page, where that line of text is juxtaposed with a jauntily floating balloon, is a little easy but still made me think of scanning it and posting it on message boards; the conclusion of his first piece, which states that your estranged former best friend is “not available for comment,” hit me like a punch in the gut.

* Tim Hensley’s Wally Gropius strips have always been both funny and interesting to me in their absurdist, angular deconstruction of old Archie visual and narrative tropes, but I think this is the volume where they really made me sit up and take notice. The panel to panel physical business in the library-based strip “Shh!” is a delight to behold, and the incestuous conclusion to “Jillian in ‘The Argument'” is a note-perfect, savage lampoon of Sam-and-Diane-style “enemies become lovers” rom-com rhythms.

* Al Columbia can draw like a motherfucker but that’s really the only thing I got out of his Hansel & Gretel pastiche. Aside from the kiddie-killer’s creepy face it wasn’t really funny or scary.

* Eleanor Davis’s tale of two brothers and the abandoned house they discover in the woods reads like a cross between her usual monster-myth beat and the observational-drama family matters of her minicomic Mattie & Dodi. I’d probably still prefer the straight-up former to a combination of the two. However, Davis’s ambiguous treatment of what the brothers experience in the house and the casual fraternal violence of its aftermath is certainly unsettling.

* The first half of Jim Woodring’s “The Lute String” is a bonanza of adorably mischievous drawings of Pupshaw and Pushpaw, weird fungal creatures and transformations that gently trigger a phobia I have about growths, and a portrait of what God looks like in the world of Frank. (He’s an elephant!) Woodring comics are funny and scary and beautiful and look like Woodring comics and nothing else, which is a colossal achievement.

* I don’t get why Gabrielle Bell spots blacks the way she does. It clutters the image and distracts from the rhythm of the page.

* Andrice Arp does her own thing with another adaptation of a pre-Revolutionary War anti-English broadside. What’s interesting about these is how astutely they simulate what comics probably would have looked like had comics proper been around at that time, not just in terms of the character designs and typography but the metaphorical visual vocabulary itself–a haughty English captain vomiting his heavily taxed tea down the throats of helpless colonists, for example.

* Joe Kimball’s vertiginous page layouts and masterful graytones maintain the eerie air of his previous contribution to the series, but the comparatively straightforward visuals and storyline–involving an old man returning to his vampiric lover for one last embrace–reveal limitations in his figurework and storytelling.

* Mike Scheer’s art is indeed astonishingly lush given that it was created in ballpoint pen, but beyond that I don’t connect with it. I like the overly long titles he gives each piece, though.

* Tom Kaczynksi’s vaguely Ballardian tale of a young couple traumatized by the construction of a high-rise condo in their ersatz neighborhood is another of his capitalist cautionary tales, and like the earlier ones it somehow never feels didactic despite the potential for lecturing or hectoring. I think it might be because he is primarily concerned with the emotional impact of consumer society rather than the political, philosophical, or economic impact. The narration is just shy of hard-boiled, which is funny, and placing his story right after one of Bell’s makes for an interesting contrast in terms of how the two artists differ in their depictions of urban ennui–Kaczynski is colder and sharper, and while his characters lack the warmth of Bell’s his pages convey their information more dynamically and convincingly.

* Zak Sally’s adaptation of horror writer Brian Evenson’s shifting-identity body-horror story “Dread” is a case of designy typography overwhelming whatever power the story itself might have had.

* At this point Kurt Wolfgang’s Bagge-esque cartooning is almost as out of place in Mome visually as Sophie Crumb, and it’s not the kind of style I gravitate to naturally, but the fact that his story’s premise is “last night before the end of the world” is a hell of a way to keep you eagerly coming back in anticipation of the climax. With my luck nothing will happen.

* This is the most effective chapter of Paul Hornschemeier’s “Life with Mr. Dangerous” so far, and not just because of the nudity–I just really liked the panel where our heroine’s murmur of “I’m sorry” to her absent boyfriend is partially drowned out by her one-night-stand’s snores.

* Sophie Crumb…I don’t see the appeal.

New X-Men Volume 6: Planet X

Grant Morrison, writer

Phil Jimenez, artist

Marvel, 2004

128 pages

$12.99

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New X-Men Volume 7: Here Comes Tomorrow

Grant Morrison, writer

Marc Silvestri, artist

Marvel, 2004

112 pages

$10.99

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Originally written on July 19, 2004 for publication in The Comics Journal

Grant Morrison is the X-Men franchise’s angel of mercy. In the two decades since Chris Claremont transformed a third-tier Stan’n’Jack creation into the most popular concept in North American comic books, no greater act of love has been committed on behalf of mutantkind than the truly mighty act of deadwood clearance that was Morrison’s much-heralded run on New X-Men. Culminating in the issues collected in the trade paperbacks Planet X and Here Comes Tomorrow, Morrison’s labor of love meant killing not just characters but concepts, entire ways of writing both the X-Men and superhero comics in general. The posturing villains, the alternate futures, the constant battles, the tortured soap operatics, even the costumes (easily the ugliest in all of superherodom, by the way)–for this potentially fascinating heroic-fantasy concept to be fascinating once again, Morrison says, we’ve got to wipe out everything they’ve come to be known for and start over. And it worked. Naturally, the House of Ideas undid nearly all of it within a month of Morrison’s departure.

Morrison refers to his four-year run on the title as one giant graphic novel; Planet X and Here Comes Tomorrow are the concluding chapters, and as such tie together nearly every loose end of theme and plot left dangling during his incredibly dense tenure. The big reveal that sets this final act in motion is the discovery that Xorn, the Chinese X-Man and healer with a star for a brain (!), is in actuality Magneto, the X-Men’s nemesis, presumed dead in an anti-mutant genocide that kicked off Morrison’s run. In the guise of the gentle Xorn, Magneto has exerted his influence over the Xavier Institute’s “special class” of ugly, poorly adjusted mutant teenagers, while simultaneously sowing the seeds of discontent and death among the X-Men themselves in the form of everything from extramarital affairs to widespread drug abuse. We’ve seen Magneto come back from the dead before, but we know we’re in uncharted territory when his first post-unmasking act is to quite literally destroy Manhattan. (This was sign number one that Marvel would be hitting the big red reset button once Morrison defected to DC. Where’s Spider-Man going to fight Doctor Octopus–Hoboken?)

Despite giving the preening bad guy his brightest moment in the sun, Morrison’s aim with Planet X is to savagely mock the character to the point where the last vestiges of appeal in his violent brand of sci-fi identity politics are erased. Magneto, who throughout the series had become a beloved martyr figure, his image appearing on the t-shirts and bedroom walls of disaffected mutant youths everywhere, quickly finds that he lacks the vision thing. His new “subjects” have seen him die and return so many times they don’t believe it’s actually him now. The special class, unwitting members of the new Brotherhood of Evil Mutants, either prefer Xorn outright or just think it’s kinda queer for their fearless leader to have dressed up in costume for months. In one hilarious sequence, the self-styled Master of Magnetism launches into a rousing speech so grandiosely Shakespearean that one can hear the mellifluous voice of Sir Ian McKellen proclaiming it in the next X-movie, only to be told by his henchman Toad that the masses can’t even hear him, seeing as they’re milling about in the street and he’s inside the upper floors of the Chrysler Building. Throughout this volume Morrison displays a genuine comedic gift, particularly in contrast to superhero writers whose idea of a gag is to have Ant Man crawl up his wife’s vagina. Morrison has said in interviews that his brutally satirical treatment of Magneto was a condemnatory reaction against the so-called nobility of a character who is nothing more than a murdering terrorist. It’s a welcome point of view even here in the real world, where we’ve so often been beseeched to “understand” the inexcusable, and where ostensible humanists serve as apologists for benighted fundamentalist slaughter.

Phil Jimenez, a solid if not thrilling artist of the George Pèrez school whose talent (besides drawing a fierce Jean Grey) lies in evoking superhero classicisms well enough to be able to subvert them too, draws Magneto throughout as an eight-foot-tall, floating, purple Darth Vader, but transforms his right-hand man Toad into the type of hip London scumbag who sells E outside of Sophisticats. Before long, the increasingly impotent potentate is addicted to Kick, the mutant club drug/performance enhancer. Bereft of new ideas, he begins dredging up idiotic schemes from X-books past, like reversing the world’s magnetic poles, a move as sure to kill mutants as it is to kill everyone else. By the time this pathetic old asshole finally gets his comeuppance (at the claws of Wolverine, naturally), his long-time rival Professor X has dismissed Magneto’s ossified, coercive philosophies utterly: “…the worst thing you ever did,” he tells the would-be dictator, “is come back.” Or as the stylish living weapon Fantomex puts it to the villain, “Is everything you say a cliché?” Adamantium claws may cut off your head, but having your self-created legend deflated really hurts.

Here Comes Tomorrow is to dystopian-future X-stories what Planet X was to Magneto stories: the final word. Readers of blockbuster superhero titles like Paul Jenkins’s Wolverine: Origin or Jeph Loeb’s Batman: Hush can tell you that while throwing a shock reveal into your story is easy, doing it in a way that’s supported at all by what’s come before, that’s both difficult to figure out before the reveal and impossible to miss afterwards, that enriches your understanding and enjoyment of what you’ve already read, and that generally doesn’t make you want to punch yourself in the face is apparently beyond the ken of most mainstream writers. Not so with Morrison, who after his surprise resurrection of Magneto in Planet X reveals a puppet master behind not just the once-again-dead magnetic supervillain but nearly every bad thing that went down in Morrison’s run and beyond. The “intelligent bacterial colony” known as Sublime was the very first form of life on Earth, and has labored for three billion years to stay at the top of the evolutionary ladder. The inherently powerful and fabulous mutants are the only true threat to Sublime’s self-confidence; he therefore worked behind the scenes in various guises to make sure that mutants were too busy getting killed by both humans and each other to realize their true potential for greatness. Here Comes Tomorrow takes place 150 years in the future, a time in which Sublime is preparing his final assault on the lifeforms of Earth by resurrecting the omnipotent and destructive Phoenix (aka Jean Grey), who was killed by Magneto in a final act of defiance just before his own execution.

If your eyes are already glossing over from simply reading a description of the hoary X-concepts being trotted out here, hang in there. (And ignore the fact that this arc marks the return to Marvel of early-90s superstar artist and Image co-founder Marc Silvestri. I’ve never been wild about the hyperrendered style of Silvestri, Jim Lee, and the like, but nor am I morally offended by it, as are some observers of the scene. There are a few storytelling lapses here–it would have been nice if the oft-mentioned White Hot Room in which the Phoenix resides was actually, y’know, white–but they’re mainly out of Silvestri’s hands. For what it’s worth, I think his style works rather beautifully here, cranking up the intentional superheroic/supervillainous clichés to eleven and giving this crazed, patchwork future a rough-hewn glamour and muscular sex appeal. His Wolverine, for instance, is both a man who is believably ready to die and a man with an unbelievable ass.)

What truly separates Morrison’s story from every other all-powerful-villain-in-a-future-we-may-be-too-late-to-prevent tale you’ve come across is not just his proficiency in generating stunning sci-fi concepts (the Termids, the Crawlers, the Feeders, the Phoenix Corps (!)) or instantly riveting characters (the Proud People (complete with Magic Car and Mer-Max the talking whale), Tom Skylark and Rover, Appollyon the Destroyer), though indeed introducing all of these in a four-issue arc whose world we’ll likely never see again is equivalent to throwing a gauntlet in the face of other writers of imaginative comic-book fiction. (See Morrison’s Seaguy for a similar act of “I’ll see you and raise.”) No, the strength of this book, and of Morrison’s entire tenure with the characters, is his belief that love trumps the horror of the world, and his ability to convey this in a way that’s emotionally direct without being trite or mawkish. It’s Dr. Hank “Beast” McCoy’s heartbreak over his own lies that gives Sublime an entrée, and Scott “Cyclops” Summers’ refusal to let go of a failed love with Jean Grey that ensures Sublime’s success; in the end, it’s connections that are just as personal–between ugly Ernst and disembodied Martha, between the identical triplet Stepford Cuckoos, between human Tom Skylark, his Sentinel parent Rover, and his robotic lover EVA, between the near-immortal Wolverine and his beloved Jean Grey–that set Sublime up for the fall. And it’s Jean Grey’s love for Cyclops, great enough for her to rewrite history and let him admit his own love for her one-time rival Emma Frost, that fixes “the hole at the heart of creation” and undoes Sublime’s machinations once and for all.

Morrison rode into New X-Men at the crest of a wave that saw Marvel taking bold risks with its core characters and ushering in a new writer-driven era of good, and even great, superhero comics; he rode out as persona non grata, his celestially vast ideas out of joint with a newly conservative company aiming mainly either to mimic the methods of blockbuster action cinema or mine fanboy nostalgia. He intended his forty-issue X-Men novel to be a gift to the franchise, but the gift has gone mainly unopened: Most of his new supporting cast has been shuffled offstage, the profoundly fresh relationship between Cyclops and Emma Frost seems poised for the chopping block, and eternal X-scribe Chris Claremont resurrected Magneto almost before Morrison had a chance to leave the building, pegging the villain’s whole Manhattan meltdown on the work of an impostor. (Would that we could place blame for the past twenty years of X-Men comics on a similar entity.) But we the readers are left with one of the most humanistic, richest, funnest, greatest superhero comics ever written. That’s gift enough.

DC Universe #0

Grant Morrison, Geoff Johns, writers

George Pèrez, Doug Mahnke, Tony S. Daniel, Ivan Reis, Aaron Lopresti, Philip Tan, Ed Benes, Carlos Pacheco, JG Jones, artists

DC Comics, April 2008

32 pages

50 cents

Four of the six* ongoing DC-published superhero titles I read are written by Grant Morrison and Geoff Johns. The former is as engaging as ever in All Star Superman and Batman (which reads better in chunks than it does in monthly installments), while the latter has truly come into his own with Green Lantern and the Superman series Action Comics (both of which are at this point my all-time favorite main-line runs of their respective lead characters). Morrison, for his part, is my favorite superhero writer, and I enjoyed his earlier collaboration with Johns on 52. So despite having no interest in Countdown to Final Crisis and some innate resistance to the DC approach to crossovers–they tend to be epic discussions of comics-y concepts like continuity and multiverses, as opposed to Marvel’s tendency to root its events, however perfunctorily, in more familiar ideas like the privacy/security tradeoff or post-9/11 paranoia or whether the ends justify the means–I naturally gave this book a whirl based on my appreciation of its writers. I even brought home a copy since Jim Hanley’s was giving them away for free!

It’s a fun book. I don’t think I knew that it was going to be a collection of teases for upcoming storylines rather than a self-contained story, or even a coherent prologue to a larger story. But this approach seemed like a smart way to get across several things:

1) The DCU is heading in a unified direction…

2) …dictated by storylines involving the big iconic characters rather than Donna Troy and the Pied Piper…

3) …and written by Grant Morrison and Geoff Johns rather than Jimmy Palmiotti and Justin Gray. Heck, given the reception of Countdown and its countless spinoffs, even Greg Rucka and Gail Simone, who are riding shotgun with vaguely connected tie-ins, seem like a huge deal.

DC Universe #0 seems to show that DC recognizes that its core characters/franchises (Batman, Superman, Green Lantern, perhaps Wonder Woman) are all pretty strong right now, so why not recalibrate the company’s crossover mojo around them rather than trying to force people to be interested in peripheral nonsense about nobodies? So instead of Monarch and Jason Todd, you get Batman grilling the ever-creepier Joker about a long-running plot thread involving a godlike supervillain gunning for the Dark Knight. You get one of Johns’s now-trademark multi-panel rapid-fire tastes of the rainbow of power rings now zipping around outer space. You get Superman in the future with the Legion of Super-Heroes (a concept I really don’t cotton to, but Johns has earned some credit in this department with his most recent Action arc), preparing to do battle with the hilarious fanboy-entitlement metaphor Superman-Prime. You get Wonder Woman’s godly forebears preparing to replace her with an army of 300 knockoffs, which makes for a funny visual at least. You get a creepy villain holding the scales of justice and trying to recruit other villains into yet another version of the Secret Society of Super-Villains, this one a Scientologyesque cult presumably dedicated to the awesome Jack Kirby villain Darkseid. You get an obliquely established return of Barry Allen, the long-dead Silver Age Flash, that plays itself out primarily through the shifting tone (and colors) of the narrative captions; it’s pretty funny to see Morrison do a mainstream-press-worthy character revival the same way he might establish an obscure plot point like, say, the link between the Undying Don and Ali-Ka-Zoom in Seven Soldiers. And you get the Spectre, but hey, they can’t all be winners.

As might already be apparent, the book is written in the crazy million-things-happening-at-once style of Morrison’s JLA Classified, Seven Soldiers, and those acid-flashback Batman issues from a few months ago, Johns’s Action Comics Annual and Sinestro Corps Special, and the pair’s 52. It’s possible to see the seams between the two writers’ work from time to time, but it takes some doing. I’m really happy to see Johns genuinely collaborating with Morrison and holding his own–it’s worth it for the horrified reaction of blogosphere snobs alone.

The art, needless to say, is of varying effectiveness. (Ivan Reis does what Ed Benes would like to do much better than Benes actually does, for example.) I think the George Pèrez cover is ugly and unnecessarily retro. However, I do like the design of the house-ad teaser pages interspersed throughout the comic to tout the relevant tie-ins–the text so blocky and matter of fact it’s almost funny. And they beat the hell out of either those orange Countdown-slogan teasers or the previous wave of motivational-poster-style teasers.

That being said, the notion that this is at all accessible to someone who isn’t a giant nerd is laughable. But I don’t care, since I am a giant nerd and I don’t give a shit about this particular book attracting new readers. That’s what manga is for! And even then we’re only talking about the first volume in a given series. I think the myth that “every issue should be written like it’s somebody’s first so that superhero comics would be more accessible” might make sense from a publishing perspective, but not necesarily a storytelling one, and maybe not even a publishing one anymore either given who the audience really is. I mean, any given fourth-season episode of Lost or Battlestar Galactica is completely incomprehensible to people who haven’t been following along, yet we fans don’t complain about that because we are fans and that’s who the shows are aimed at. Nobody gets upset because Death Note Vol. 7 isn’t a good jumping-on point, because that volume is for preexisting Death Note fans. Virtually everyone who picks up a comic called DC Universe is going to be someone who is already familiar with what a shared universe is, and that is totally fine. Now, the big corporate superhero companies can claim that the goal of something like DCU #0 is going to woo Johnny Dailynewsreader, but we don’t have to play along by evaluating the book negatively based on that standard. The standard I evaluated it on is “here’s a book by two of my favorite writers at DC that leads into their upcoming storylines on various titles–does it make me happy I’m reading them?” The answer was yes.

* All Star Batman & Robin, the Boy Wonder and Ex Machina