Lost classic review: 1st Issue Special #9 Doctor Fate

Joe Kubert cover is just the beginning of  the issue's great art.

When all the golden age DC characters were getting reboots in the late-50s, early 60s, Dr. Fate was somehow left behind. Sure he got a couple of Showcase outings (teamed up with Hour-Man!), but for the most part, he was relegated to the JLA- JSA team-ups.

The first great attempt to establish him as an A-lister would be in the mid-70s First Issue Special by Marty Pasko and Walt Simonson. Not quite a reboot, but Pasko and Simonson redefined him for the next 40 years.

First the art, yeah, Murphy Anderson was good for the Showcase issues, but holy crap, Simonson's work here is a revelation.We had never seen him this way. Simonson has always said Kirby was a big inspiration on him. I don't see it in the faces or bodies, but like Kirby he has a gift for making the characters look like they're jumping off the page. Instead of the shading lines on Fate's helmet that had been done historically, Simonson keeps the helmet clean, and it's striking. In the old books, if he cast a spell, usually lightning bolts would emanate from his fingers, here, it's magic symbols forming geometric patterns. The attention to detail even extends to the characters' word balloons, each character's word ballon has a unique shape. It's just amazing.

The story keeps up and obviously inspired the art. An old foe (like ancient-Egyptian mummy old) returns from the dead to kill Fate to impress his god. Havoc ensues. Meanwhile, Kent Nelson's wife Inza overcomes her superhero wife fatigue to help him (and the mage inhabiting his body) independently from him. For perhaps the first time, Inza is not a hostage.

It's just beautifully drawn and wonderfully written, and makes me wish it was picked up as an ongoing series with this creative team.

Review of 10-year-old comic book I've finally gotten around to reading, part1

Having kids didn't stop me from buying comics, it just kept me from reading them! So I've stumbled upon a couple books I finally got around to reading.



Action Comics Annual #10

This one's a head scratcher. The cover has the go-go checks, layout  and the '48pg giant' logo all from the 60s, which is supposed to evoke some feeling of nostalgia from old-timers like myself. I bit, I bought it, expecting a bunch of standalone Superman stories like the good old days, but no.

Instead it's a collection of unfinished stories, and Superman is hardly in it. My first clue should have been Superman not even being on the cover (he is featured prominently on the alternate cover, so those readers must have been really disappointed.)

OK, no Superman and unfinished stories. Oh, I get it, there had just been another reboot, and these were the introductory stories to upcoming interminable story arcs for the next issues of Action.

At least that's my theory, I hadn't bought too many Actions after this.

That, and I hate DC story arcs. They never finish. They spend more thought on setting up the arc than actually seeing it through.

The first story ..um no, not actually a story. Lex Luthor goes through a jungle imagining different ways to kills Superman. He finds some Kryptonite, and that's it. Four pages. Great Art Adams art though.

Second story is a retelling of the introduction of Mon-El. Why didn't they just reprint the original story from the 50s? The only difference is instead of stressing the cover tease of a brother from Krypton (not really), it stresses Clark Kent's loneliness. It does have a beginning, middle and end though, unlike everything else in the book. Eric Wight provides some indie-comic style art.

The "Mystery of the Blue Sun" story is the real head scratcher. Thanagarian space police cruisers investigating destroyed cruisers come upon some Bizarro Supermen. Once again, that's it. Two pages! At first I thought it was a production error because the "story" ends abruptly and it goes to a two-page spread of the "Secrets of the Fortress of Solitude," ... then a two-page comic about the Wii, you keep flipping pages looking for the Bizarro story to continue, and it never does! It's always great to see Joe Kubert, especially in the 2000's when he was nearing retirement, but still. There's no there there.

"The Criminals of Krypton" is the closest we get to a story with some interesting concepts. It's based on the deleted scenes from the first Superman movie where the Kryptonian council sends its storm troopers to take out Jor-El. OK, great idea, tell me more. We get some background on the Phantom Zone villains (they weren't evil, just misunderstood -- or lobotomized) -- and more background on Jor-El. OK, a good story, with beautiful art by Rags Morales.

By then though it's too little, too late, because it closes with the continuation of Lex Luthor unveiling the new and improved Metallo

It's all a big tease and big cheat, DC is essentially saying: Here's a bunch of unfinished ideas we may or may not get back to, thanks for your $3.99 though.

I used to think I stopped buying comics books because I had kids and no time to read them, now I'm thinking it's because I kept feeling like I'm getting cheated.

R.I.P. Joe Kubert

His career spanned 70 years! He was always 10 years ahead of most other artists. It's an amazing body of work.

Classics of Western Literature 3: Justice League of America 200

In the 1940s in All-Star Comics, the Justice Society would split up to catch a villain, and in each individual chapter, the hero would be drawn by the artist who drew the hero in their regular titles. By the time the Justice League came out in the '60s, page counts were half of what they used to be so one artist would do the whole league.

For the plus-sized JLA 200, instead of assigning each hero his current artist, each chapter was illustrated by the hero's silver-age artist, from some 20 years earlier. The Flash-Elongated Man chapter was drawn by Carmine Infantino, the Green Lantern- Atom chapter was drawn by Gil Kane and the Superman-Hawkman chapter was drawn by Joe Kubert. (Kubert of course had only drawn Superman on covers, but had been drawing Hawkman since the 40s!)

This was a thrill for fanboys who grew up in the '60s with these artists, or fanboys like me who read the reprints of these masters. I promptly took out my 100-page super spectaculars to compare how the artists did the characters in the '60s to what they looked like in the '80s. And the amazing thing is, they all got better.

The George Perez, Dick Giordano and Brian Bolland art was just icing on the cake.

I have no idea what this book is going for on eBay, but if you want everything you need to know about DC's silver age all in one book, this is the book.