The Matt Signal

Batman #28
Story: Scott Snyder & James Tynion IV
Art: Dustin Nguyen

From Zero Year to Six Months Later, this issue is a peak into the future of Gotham, a city that is actually more bleak than the Gotham that we're used to seeing. It's time again with a check in on Harper Row, Scott Snyder's everyone/new supporting cast member to the Bat books, who tends to pop up during interlude issues between major arcs. Harper is wandering the streets of New Gotham, as it seems to be called, and winds up in the one remaining nightspot. Whatever has happened in Gotham seems to have made it a police state, but since it's Gotham, it's a police state corrupt to its core. While we are definitely in medea res here, but I don't feel totally lost. Writers Scott Snyder and James Tynion IV do a great job of making this feel like a story where we could just continue from and have the backstory filled in. I want to avoid spoiling too much, but since every major comic news site has pretty well spoiled every surprise in the issue (and there were quite a few), I will say that I like Harper's new identity as Bluebird, and I'm curious to see exactly what her relationship is with Batman. I also tend to prefer Batman and Catwoman as allies, the idea of Selina taking over Gotham's rackets is a fascinating one, and Dustin Nguyen's sleek, slinky, American Hustle Selina Kyle is cool not just because it's great, but to show just how versatile an artist he is in comparison to his current work on Li'l Gotham. And that last page reveal! I don't know exactly what this plague that is in Gotham is, and I suppose I'm not supposed to, and I don't know what Spoiler has to do with it, but I'm happy to see her back. Batman: Eternal starts in April, and if you're unsure of whether you're interested in the new weekly, this issue serves as a great peak into that world.

Batman: Li'l Gotham #11
Story & Art: Dustin Nguyen & Derek Fridolfs

Speaking of Dustin Nguyen and Li'l Gotham, the penultimate issue of the most fun Batman comic in years came out this week as well. Making it around to the second year of holidays (each short story is themed around a holiday, and are digital first, so the printed editions don't line up with the holidays within, and since we started with Halloween, this issue brings us back to October), we're not getting the major holidays. The first of the shorts is for All Saint's Day, where Batman has to bring Damian for a supervised visit with his mother and grandfather. By story's end, we get Azrael (Jean Paul Valley, but dressed in Michael Lane's costume), reference to both Neal Adams "hairy chested love God" Batman and Jim Lee's New 52 costume designs, zombie members of the Order of St. Dumas, and Damian riding Man-Bat while fighting them off. The second story, featuring The Clock King and the end of Day Light Savings Time (ok, not really a holiday, but Calendar Man would be good with it too, and that's all that counts to me), has various alternate versions of Batman trying to restart time after Clock King created adevice that has frozen Gotham You get a classic blue-and-grey clad Batman, Zebra Batman, Vampire Batman, FruitBatman, Armored Kingdom Come Batman, and even crotchety old Bruce Wayne from Batman Beyond. It's the kind of craziness that works so well with Batman, better than with pretty much any other superhero; I don't know why, but all those alpha male/type A Batmen tend to have a great crazy rapport, and it's fun to see Clock King freak out and the goofy FruitBatman save the day. The first trade of Li'l Gotham hits this week, and if you're the slightest bit a Batman fan, or have a kid who is, you should really snag this book.

Ms. Marvel #1
Story: G. Willow Wilson
Art: Adrian Alphona

This books technically came out two weeks ago. But amazing sales and great word of mouth made me snag a copy. And I'm really glad I did. This first issue is not in the least bit a super hero comic, with only a hint of the craziness that makes for a superhero story, but is instead more of a teenage drama. Kamala Khan is the kind of teenager we don't get a lot of in comics; she's special in the way we all are, different and interesting, but not "super." She comes from an Islamic household, and her faith is an important part of her character, but not something that defines her. She's sweet, smart, and while I haven't been a teenager for more time than I'd like to admit, the feeling of not fitting in that she is going through is something that most of us can really empathize with. She has a very clear voice, as do all the characters in the title. Her parents and brother only appear for a couple pages, and I already like them, and I already like her friends Bruno and Nakia. And the school alpha girl/mean girl isn't the typical nasty Cordelia Chase clone, but is a condescending little brat who is the perfect example of how some people think their culture is superior to everyone else's. It's also charming to see that Kamala is an Avengers fangirl; I can't wait to see her interact with the Avengers. On top of a really strong first issue script for G. Willow Wilson, the art from Adrian Alphona is top notch. Best know for his work on Runaways, it's great to see Alphona working with a teen hero again. Marvel really pushed this book out into the mainstream, and I often find those attempts hollow, but in this case I'm glad they did. We got a lot of walk in business from people who were either not regular comic fans, or not regulars at out store anyway, and for them to be interested in a comic is great, and since it's a comic of strong quality, I hope it means they'll be back. So, long story short, and pardon the paraphrase Stan, but Make Mine Ms. Marvel!

She-Hulk #1
Story: Charles Soule
Art: Javier Pulido

Now, this was a book I was in for from the beginning. I'm not a huge She-Hulk fan, but the combination of art by Javier Pulido and the fact that this series seemed to be hearkening back to Dan Slott's wonderful couple years on the title that was a combination of law and superheroics had me very excited, and the book delivered. Charles Soule has been all over the place lately, and I've been enjoying his run on Swamp Thing a great deal, and this book is equally well written but has a completely different flavor. Jen Walters, the Sensational She-Hulk, starts out the issue working for a law firm and feeling like everything is going her way. But by the end of the first full scene, she's out of work, and things aren't looking so rosy. But an encounter at a bar has her representing the wife of a C-List villain against Tony Stark's company for stealing his tech, and we see that the law in the Marvel Universe isn't any more straightforward than it is in this world. While Jen doesn't have the same anger issues as her cousin, she still can be bit temperamental when provoked. When getting in to see Tony Stark to just talk doesn't work, she winds up meeting with Stark's chief counsel (a guy who simply calls himself Legal, and who I hope show up again). Jen tries to work within the system, but the little guy versus the multi-billion dollar corporation doesn't go well. So she smashes her way in to see Stark. Hey, can't hurt to be a Hulk. We see every aspect of Jen's personality in this one issue; she's smart, she's tough, she believes in the law, but she will crack some heads if she needs to. By the end of the first issue, everything is wrapped up and a new status quo is set. Yes, you heard me right: the first issue is a done-in-one story. When was the last time that happened in a book from one of the big two? That's two-for-two from Marvel on solid first issues with female characters. Maybe I need to try Black Widow too.

Happy almost-George Washington’s birthday (even though Presidents Day was two days ago and under the Julian calendar his birthday was Feb. 11)!

In honor of our first president – who recently came back from the dead to lead an army of his fellow zombie presidents against humanity – here’s a short sampling of classic characters who have run for or were appointed to American political office.

PRESIDENT LEX LUTHOR: A new millennium brought a new president to the D.C. universe in the form of Superman’s most hated enemy, Lex Luthor. Luthor became president mostly so he could mess with Superman and Batman, having masterminded the earthquake that turned Gotham City into No Man’s Land, framed Batman for murder, brought about the destruction of Clark Kent’s hometown, divided the Justice League and attempted to blame Supes for a kryptonite meteor headed toward Earth.

PRESIDENT CAPTAIN AMERICA: In the early 1980s, Roger Stern and John Byrne (Hey, that rhymes!) wrote a story in which Steve Rogers considered running for presidentbut ultimately turned it down as he considered his superheroics to be apolitical. Roughly 30 years later, in 2012, Cap was elected in the 1610 “Ultimate” universe, accepting the job in the pages of Ultimate Comics: The Ultimates in a story by Sam Humphries and Luke Ross. He has since been killed by good old 616 Galactus.

PRESIDENT GARY “THE SMILER” CALLAHAN: Spider Jerusalem, the bowel-disruptor wielding, cranky journalist star of Warren Ellis’ brilliant Transmetropolitan, starts out antagonizing a president he’d unaffectionately nicknamed The Beast. Enter the devil he doesn’t know. The Smiler becomes Spider’s main nemesis for the run of the series after admitting flat-out that he became president to oppress and punish people and going so far as to have his political director and his own wife and children killed to earn sympathy in the polls. Also, he kinda looks like Paul Ryan.

PRESIDENTIAL HOPEFUL GRAYDON CREED: Creed first appeared as one of the Upstarts, a 90s cabal of mutants (and one mutant-hating human) who got points @midnight-style for assassinating 80s targets like the Hellfire Club, the New Mutants and the Hellions. Starting in ’95, the X-writers put him on a path toward the White House, backed by head Prime Sentinel Bastion. Proving that almost all the good X-ideas were Chris Claremont’s, however, the writers get their Days of Future Past on and have Mystique kill her own son. (P.S.: The DOFP reality was supposed to be last year. And yet here we are: no sentinel overlords, no mutant hounds, no hoverboards.)

NEW YORK CITY MAYOR MITCHELL HUNDRED: In Ex-Machina, the superhero known as The Great Machine was elected mayor of New York City after he saved one of the Twin Towers on 9/11. Some of the best stories in the Brian K. Vaughn series weren't the ones where Hundred uses his powers to talk to machines in green font, but when he deals with everyday issues such as private school vouchers, gay marriage and the death penalty. He makes you wish he was your mayor, you know until the end (no spoilers).

NEW YORK CITY MAYOR J. JONAH JAMESON: After years of lambasting Spider-Man in his rag, The Daily Bugle, JJJ received an opportunity to kick his single-focus Spider-bashing into overdrive as mayor of the greatest city on Earth. That said, the odds were stacked against him, what with Spider-Man being an Avenger and all, and other city officials resigning because of his over-dedication of city funds to hunting the wall-crawler. And in the biggest sign that his decades-long quest is a fool’s errand, he ends up giving him a key to the city.

DEFENSE SECRETARY DELL RUSK: Long before he became DC’s Green Lantern guy (then Aquaman guy, now Superman guy, maybe next Plastic Man guy?), Geoff Johns had a stint writing Earth’s Mightiest Heroes. Part of his run involved a mysterious plague that turned people into crimson corpses. The plague was ultimately linked to Defense Secretary Rusk, who turned out to be the Red Skull in disguise (spoiler, schmoiler, he’s right there on the trade cover). The late, great Disney XD cartoon “Avengers: Earth’s Mightiest Heroes” adapted the storyline in the brilliantly condensed manner it adopted most Avengers storylines, managing to work in the Falcon, the Winter Soldier and the Red Hulk for good measure.

DEFENSE SECRETARY TONY STARK: If a man who literally wraps himself in the flag can be elected president, surely one of the nation’s top weapons manufacturers can run defense. Tony took the job to keep an eye on how his products were being used by the U.S. military but ended up being ridden out on a rail during Brian Michael Bendis’ Disassembledstoryline when the power-overloaded Scarlet Witch made the recovering alcoholic Stark appear drunk and belligerent during a press conference. Residents of the Marvel Universe must have short memories, though, as just a few years later he became director of SHIELD after Civil War. SHIELD continued its commitment to questionable leadership after Secret Invasion, when Stark was ousted in favor of a man who chases Spider-Man around in purple pajamas.

SEN. ROBERT KELLY: You know the old saying: If at first you don’t assassinate, try, try again. Kelly’s death was first foretold as part of Chris Claremont’s Days of Future Past storyline in 1980. In that storyline, Kitty Pryde, possessed by a future version of herself, saves the senator from taking an arrow through the neck from Destiny. Kelly next almost died in 1989 at the hands of the Sentinel Master Mold but was saved by his wife, former Hellfire Club waitress Sharon, who did die. In 1997, Cyclops saved the senator from Bastion’s Prime Sentinels during Operation Zero Tolerance. Not long after, Pyro, who was dying of the Legacy Virus, attempted to redeem himself by preventing the senator from being killed by Mystique’s Brotherhood of Evil Mutants. But after all those attempts on his life by pissed-off mutants and robots, who should kill him but some pissed-off flatscan named Alan Lewis. FUN FACT: In the 1990s X-Men cartoon, Kelly is elected president, replacing a woman who used a treadmill in the Oval Office.

HONORARY MENTION: KANG/KODOS: Yeah, I know I’m getting off-medium, but who doesn’t love “Citizen Kang,” the 1996 Simpsons’ Treehouse of Horror vignette in which Kang and Kodos run for president as Bob Dole and Bill Clinton, dooming the human race to slavery regardless of the outcome? “Don’t blame me, I voted for Kodos!”

Dan Grote is the author of Of Robots, God and Government and My Evil Twin and I. He and Matt have been friends since every 25^th issue came with a foil-embossed cover, a hologram trading card and free pogs.

I'm about to speak a blasphemy as a Batman fan, but the world's greatest detective is Sherlock Holmes (Batman is a close second). He's been portrayed by more actors than pretty much any fictional character, has more pastiches written about him in more formats than anyone else, and is still feverishly discussed by legions of fans. I've read the complete canon of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's original Holmes stories more than once, and have read a lot of pastiches, so picking up this collection of a European Holmes comics, Sherlock Holmes and the Vampires of London published by Dark Horse Comics, was a no brainer.

Sherlock Holmes is one of literature's ultimate rationalist heroes; he lives in a world of the mind where everything is answered through deduction and forensics. Modern writers have often paired him with the supernatural. Some of the most famous Holmes comic stories have him fighting Dracula, Mr. Hyde, The Phantom of the Opera, and even zombies. But if you put Holmes in a world where his skills don't matter, where magic is the rule, he loses his relevance; he isn't Batman, who has all those cool gadgets and can work with magic or a magician, and accepts that there are things in the world that can't be dealt with rationally. However, a judicious use of the supernatural, in a setting where Holmes can use his knowledge, insight, and not inconsiderable physical skill to fight them, makes for a truly intense tale.

The story opens during the period where Holmes is thought to be dead after his fateful encounter with Professor Moriarty at the Reichenbach Falls. While in Paris with his brother, Mycroft, Holmes is attacked by things that can only be vampires. After dispatching them, Holmes does his research and waits for them to make their next move. Holmes is surprised to see a woman who bears a striking resemblance to Irene Adler, one of his greatest nemeses and the one person to ever outsmart him, but knowing that it can't be her, he knows that a trap is waiting. After demonstrating a brilliant way to avoid being turned by the vampires, Holmes finds out their leader in London seeks his aid, and so he sets off with Joyce Middles, the vampire who is Adler's double, to meet this leader.

These early scenes with Holmes are juxtaposed with a vampire slaughtering his way through London's upper crust. His intentions aren't made clear until Holmes confronts Selymes, the leader of the vampire nation. It seems Owen Chanes, one of his vampire subjects, has gone rogue and is killing people distantly related to, or close acquaintances of, Queen Victoria, in an attempt to draw the Queen's ire on Selymes, and it's working. Holmes is tasked with finding and disposing of Chanes before the queen sends her forces after the vampires, and if he is unsuccessful, not only will Holmes die, but so will Watson and Watson's wife, Mary. So Holmes makes a deal with the devil to protect his friend, and the game is afoot.

What follows is a game of cat and mouse, with Holmes being at times cat, and at times mouse. He hunts Chanes, while trying to figure out his motives for these very public killings. The story nicely mixes all the aspects of Holmes. He must be in disguise to hide the fact that he still lives from both his friends and the remainder of Moriarty's men; he spends his time researching and doing chemical experiments, meeting with informants, and laying traps for Chanes. Joyce Middles follows him as his vampire contact, and works as Holmes's sounding board. All the while, Chanes continues to kill, and the Queen's patience grows ever thinner, as does that of Selymes, who is by no means a patient employer. By the end of the story, tragedy has struck, Holmes learns the truth, and a great conflagration occurs to claim the evil. And, true to Holmes in the original books, Holmes in the end chooses to do what is right, since justice and the fostering of the "humane side of the criminal," is more important than simply acting out of what would be legal or what would be expedient.

Writer Sylvain Cordurie has a wonderful feel for Holmes as a character. His voice is usually dry, rational, and analytical; observing everything around him. Cordurie gives him flashes of emotion, especially when Watson and Mary are in peril. The story is actually narrated as a journal Holmes is writing to leave for Watson in case of his death during the adventure, and while Conan Doyle did write a couple of stories from Holmes's point of view, Watson remains the narrator of most because his voice is more relatable, more human. Still, the fact that Holmes is slightly out of his depth in dealing with these supernatural creatures allows him to be read as such an insufferable know-it-all and pushes the mystery forward.

Since the book is a product of European creators, the art has a very different feel than most of the comics you'd find on the racks. Laci's art is thoroughly detailed, with gorgeous Victorian backgrounds and perfect period costumes. His faces are expressive, especially when it comes to fear and the darker emotions. He is clearly an artist with a horror background, as writer Cordurie said he decided to use a traditional vampire model, with all the spectacular powers and the ability to change into a bat monster to play to Laci's strength as an artist. His Holmes is drawn from the classic stories, resembling the original illustrations, and is a treat for the Holmes aficionado.

Sherlock Holmes is one of literature's greatest characters, and vampires are the monsters that have haunted the nightmares of people for generations. This mix of the two makes for an action packed story, good for both the long standing Holmes fan and the newcomer brought in by the current crop of film and TV Holmes. The choice to pick it up is, well, elementary.

Sherlock Holmes and the Vampires of London is a hardcover graphic novel published by Dark Horse comics, and is available at all good comic shops, bookstores, and on-line.

Animal Man #28
Story: Jeff Lemire
Art: Rafael Albuquerque

We're near the end of Jeff Lemire's excellent run on Animal Man, and this issue is the big confrontation between Buddy Baker, his family, his allies, and Brother Blood and his allies and agents. A lot of the issue is combat, with Buddy facing down the last Totem of the Red, the beings who empower him, who has betrayed the others to create a new agent on Earth, Brother Blood, while his daughter Maxine is fighting Blood himself. But within all the grand comic book battles, drawn amazingly by Rafael Albuquerque, we get a lot of character. Maxine shows that she has the biggest heart, willing to sacrifice her power to save her friend, the Shepherd, and Buddy proves that his family and his love for them are his greatest strengths. Maxine's quest to resurrect her brother comes to its end, the only one it really can. Kids don't understand death, at least not in the way grown-ups do, and Buddy must have a hard conversation with her. Ellen Baker, Buddy's wife, isn't left out in the cold, and shows that she is as brave as her husband and daughter. The last page reminds readers of the deal Buddy made to save his family, and that things might be as happily ever after as it appears. Next month, the series will end, with an issue both written and drawn by Lemire, and it's going to be missed as the most mature series to come out of the New 52.

Daredevil #36
Story: Mark Waid
Art: Chris Samnee

And this volume of Daredevil comes to and end with a perfect coda to everything Mark Waid has been doing for thirty six issues. There are SPOILERS ahead, so beware. The end of last issue was a big one, a major moment, when Matt Murdock reveals in open court that he is Daredevil. After spending so long hiding and trying to put that particular cat back in the bag, this is a huge deal. The reasoning behind it is perfectly laid out, and it works brilliantly. The speech Matt gives in court about why he tried to hide his identity after the Daily Globe revealed his identity is a powerful speech, and it is a speech a Matt Murdock by any other writer since Frank Miller introduced Elektra couldn't make. This is a Matt Murdock who has finally, truly, grounded himself again and doesn't have the same raw, bordering on insane, edges that he has for thirty years. Waid has had Matt grow as a character. It's wonderful that Matt does what he does not just to protect his friends and himself, but because it's the right thing to do to protect the law. For all his manipulations, Matt is a lawyer who really believes in the system, and the perversion of the Sons of the Serpent, a hate group, planting members in the institutions of New York, is something that Matt can't take. The final fight in the courtroom between Matt and the Serpent foot soldiers is a literal representation of what Matt has been going through since the Serpents plot began, with him fighting them in every way he can. The final pages are both sad and heartwarming, as Matt must pay for the years of half truths and lies he has had, and plans to set off on a new life. It all flows perfectly from what Waid has been doing, and is one of the most satisfying endings I've read in a long time. Next month, a new volume of Daredevil begins from the same creative team, with a new city and a very different status quo for Matt Murdock, and I'll be a long for the ride. If you haven't tried out this book yet, it's going to be a great jumping on point, so don't wait any longer.

The X-Files: Conspiracy- Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles
Story: Ed Brisson
Art: Michael Walsh

Every year or so, IDW Publishing does a crossover between its various licensed properties; in the past they were the two Infestation crossovers. They're not bad, they're not great, but they're sure fun. This year, instead of using characters that were created within comics as the connective tissue, the connecting characters are The Lone Gunmen from The X-Files. After receiving a fax from the future, The Lone Gunmen are travelling, attempting to gather the components they need to develop a cure for a plague that will wipe out millions. The plague and everything is a mcguffin to just get The Lone Gunmen to meet the Ghostbusters, Transformers, the Crow, and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. This issue is the TMNT issue, and is by the creative team of Ed Brisson and Michael Walsh, who did one of the most underrated Image mini-series of the past couple years, the time travel noir Comeback (seriously, track it down. If you saw and liked the movie Looper, this is right up your alley). I'm not reading the current TMNT series, but I didn't feel the least bit lost in this issue; everything I need to know about the current Turtles status quo is easily explained. It's really a Leonardo story, where the Turtles leader is getting stir crazy while the Turtles hide from their nemeses, The Foot Clan. The Lone Gunmen and the Turtles run afoul of an old X-Files nemesis from one of my favorite episodes of all time, "Bad Blood," written by Breaking Bad creator Vince Gilligan. I won't spoil what that particular creature is if you haven't seen it or don't remember it, but it's one of the funniest X-Files episodes and an equally amusing use here. It's well worth checking out the issue, even if you aren't reading the crossover or either of the current comics if you remember that episode. Aside from that, we get a good Leonardo story, some forward momentum on the crossover, and some great art by Walsh, who drew the initial arc of TheX-Files: Season 10 and who is fast becoming a favorite artist of mine. Conspiracy nuts and ninja turtles: what more could you ask for?

Today (assuming this is Wednesday) marks the start of a new volume of Marvel’s Fantastic Four, featuring James Robinson on writing duties and Leonard Kirk on art. It also marks about a week since the Internet melted down over a skinny guy being cast to play the Thing. Wait, that wasn’t the scuttlebutt, was it? Was it about the guy from That Awkward Moment playing the smartest man in the Marvel Universe? Ah, it’ll come to me.

Fantastic Four is praised regularly for the unique family dynamic of the book – husband and wife Reed and Sue, younger brother Johnny, children Franklin and Valeria, Ben the creepy rock monster uncle – but just like the Justice League, the Avengers or the X-Men, it’s still a team book, with new members rotating in every once in a while to switch up the dynamic and keep things fresh.

So if you think you had problems with Hollywood’s casting of the team, check out these other incarnations of the Four that were, shall we say, differently Fantastic.

Four minus one equals Any Inhumans Lying Around?: Mr. Fantastic, Human Torch, Thing … and Crystal/Medusa (Fantastic Four #81-? and #132-159): The FF were probably the first superhero team to write maternity leave into their health plan. During Sue’s pregnancy and later after Franklin was born, she was replaced on the team by the two most prominent female Inhumans: Crystal, one of Johnny’s many, many, many girlfriends over the years, and Medusa, who, being queen of a race of people and all, you’d think would have more important things to do.

Four minus one equals SWEET CHRISTMAS!: Mr. Fantastic, Invisible Woman, Human Torch and … Luke Cage (Fantastic Four #168-170, 1976): When the Thing reverted to plain old Ben Grimm, Reed replaced him as the team powerhouse with the original Hero for Hire. Makes sense, considering in 1973, Cage famously confronted Dr. Doom regarding services rendered by demanding “Where’s my money, honey?”

Four minus one equals H.E.R.B.I.E.: Mr. Fantastic, Invisible Woman, Thing and ... H.E.R.B.I.E. (Fantastic Four cartoon, 1978): Chalk this one up to rights issues. At the time that NBC wanted an FF cartoon, Universal had optioned a Human Torch project. And because it wasn’t 30+ years later, when NBC and Universal are part of the same company, the cartoon had to go Torchless. Enter H.E.R.B.I.E., a Lee/Kirby creation that was not at all a flaming teenager. H.E.R.B.’s presence spawned the legendthat Johnny was pulled from the show because execs thought kids, inspired by the Torch, would try to light themselves on fire. Decades later, H.E.R.B.I.E. would be one of the funnier characters on Marvel’s “Super Hero Squad Show” aimed at younger viewers.

Four minus two equals Date Night!: Human Torch, Thing … Crystal and Ms. Marvel/She-Thing (Starting in Fantastic Four #306, 1987): Every couple hundred issues or so, Reed and Sue leave the team to try to save their marriage. During this phase, they were replaced by Crystal andSharon Ventura, a professional wrestler who eventually is transformed into a Thinglike creature. You can almost picture Johnny and Ben looking at their respective teammates/dates, looking at each other, and slow-nodding while that song from the end of Ferris Bueller’s Day Off plays.

Four minus four equals New Fantastic Four: Spider-Man, Wolverine, Hulk and Ghost Rider (Fantastic Four #347-349, 1990): Holy hot characters! When the original-recipe FF is kidnapped by a Skrull named De’Lila, a new Four forms to rescue them, made up of what were arguably Marvel’s most popular characters in 1990. (Yes, Virginia, there was a time when Ghost Rider sold comics) Together they took on the Skrulls and the Mole Man, all well-rendered by Art Adams, with story by Walt Simonson.

Four minus two equals the post-Civil War 4: Human Torch, Thing … Storm and Black Panther (Starting in Fantastic Four #543, 2007): The superhero Civil War did a number on Reed and Sue’s marriage (again, something that appears to happen every few years), so they took some time off and replaced themselves with Wakandan royalty. T’Challa, of course, is no slouch in the science department himself, and Storm is … a woman. So see, it all balances out!

Four minus one plus one equals The Future Foundation: Mr. Fantastic, Invisible Woman, Thing and … Spider-Man (Starting in FF#1, 2011): The Human Torch, who was killed-but-not-really in the Negative Zone, willed his spot on the team to Spider-Man, because the two were friends, and also because they’d essentially be replacing a younger, wise-cracking blond man with a younger, wise-cracking brunette. Hey, beats getting replaced by H.E.R.B.I.E.! Eventually, Johnny got better, and he and Peter became roommates for a time, allowing writer Jonathan Hickman a wealth of opportunity for Odd Couple jokes.

Four minus four equals FF: Ant-Man, She-Hulk, Medusa, “Miss Thing” (Starting in FF#1, 2013): While the Richardses went on a time-travel adventure somewhere near the start of the Marvel NOW! era, they appointed an additional four superheroes to mind the store in their place, including a science guy (Scott Lang’s Ant-Man), some muscle (She-Hulk), a mother lion (Medusa; again, don’t you have a race to rule?) and …a pop star who slept with Johnny Storm. This iteration of FF has the dubious distinction of being the book Matt Fraction left in a hurry so he could write Inhumans, but it also has fun art by Mike Allred.

Four minus three equals Ultimate FF: The Invisible Woman … Iron Man, Falcon and Machine Man (Starting in Ultimate FF#1, 2014): This one’s not even on the stands yet, so there’s little to say about it other than writer Josh Fialkov and artist Tom Grummet are using the latest refreshening of the Ultimate Universe to craft a version of the team never seen before. And good on them.

This past Monday, Hollywood lost one of its great comedic minds. Harold Ramis was an actor and director who appeared in, or was responsible for, many great comedies, including Groundhog Day, Meatballs, and Stripes. But for many like me, his greatest role would be in Ghostbusters, the 1984 classic about a group of scientists and their friends and allies fighting all manner of spook, spectre, and thing that goes bump in the night, where he plays Dr. Egon Spengler, my favorite of the Ghostbusters. It is one of my favorite movies of all time, one of those movies that every time you see it on you have to stop and watch, and has spawned toys, video games, multiple animated series, and more than a few comics over the years. Today, instead of my standard recommended reading, we're going to look back on the history of The Ghostbusters in comics (apparently, there was a long running Marvel UK series, but the majority hasn't been reprinted here in the States, so I'll not be addressing that here).

Just on the outside chance you have never seen Ghostbusters and are unfamiliar with the characters and concept, the Ghostbusters started out as three professors and paranormal investigators who, after being thrown out of academia, start a business to trap and contain various ghosts. Peter Venkman is the mouth of the Ghostbusters, the public face, always with a smart comment, played by Bill Murray. Egon Spengler, played by Ramis, is a scientist and paranormal researcher, a big brain with not a lot of social graces. Ray Stantz, played by Dan Aykroyd, is also a scientist, responsible with Egon for making the Ghostbusters proton packs, PKE Meters, and various other ghost fighting tech, and is the heart of the team. Winston Zeddemore, played by Ernie Hudson, is the fourth man on the team; he is not a scientist, hired when the business picks up, but smart and full of common sense, something that Egon and Ray are often lacking, and Peter just doesn't care about. Along with Janine Melnitz, their trusty receptionist, and Slimer, a ghost they keep around for testing and who is a sort of mascot, they make up the Ghostbusters.

The Real Ghostbusters (NOW Comics)

The Real Ghostbusters was the animated series based on the film. Many a great voice actor appeared on the show, notably Lorenzo Music,best known as the voice of Garfield, as Peter Venkman, Frank Welker, best known as Megatron from Transformers and Fred from Scooby Doo, Arsenion Hall as Winston, and Maurice LaMarche, best known as The Brain from Pinky and the Brain and numerous characters on Futurama, as Egon. The show was very smart for its time, with some episodes written by the likes of J. Michael Straczynski, J.M. Dematteis, and Michael Reaves, and despite the animation not being as strong as modern cartoons, the stories hold up extremely well, incorporating all manner of world mythologies, as well as the Cthulu Mythos. With a successful cartoon, it was only a matter of time before the license was sold to comics. NOW Comics was a publisher in the late 80s and early 90s that focused mostly on licensed properties. The comic series did a good job of staying in the flavor of the animated series, with the same sort of tongue and cheek sense of humor and intelligent stories. Many of the comic stories were tied together by common antagonists; a personal favorite of mine was Nurtog, a freakin' ghost T-Rex. Let's be fair, aside from The Dresden Files, where else are you gonna find an undead T-Rex? NOW also published a three part mini-series adaptation of the film sequel, Ghostbusters II, done in the style of The Real Ghostbusters, which is a fun little oddity. With the exception of that adaptation and a couple annuals, this series was recently reprinted by IDW Publishing in two omnibus volumes.

Ghostbusters: Legion (88MPH Studios)

After a drought of many years with no real new Ghostbusters content, fledgling comics company 88MPH Studios picked up the license and presented a four issue mini-series called Legion. Set firmly in the continuity of the movies (although resetting the movies in early 2004 instead of the '84), Legion, set six months after the events of the movie, has the Ghostbusters dealing with a new outbreak of paranormal activity that they track back to Michael Draverhaven, a friend of Ray's who studied with Egon, Peter, and he in college, and who was caught in an accident that linked him to the spirit world and to a sort of hive ghost called Legion. It's a pretty intense story, very creepy, and has an emotional core of Ray dealing with what happened to his friend. 88 MPH was supposed to follow this mini-series up with an ongoing, but the company folded before it could. The series was collected in trade paperback, although that is long since out of print.

Ghost Busted (Tokyopop)

Ok, this is the one book discussed here that I haven't read, and simply discovered through research for this piece. It's a manga size/style book published by Tokyopop in 2008. It's an anthology of connected short stories, and it's something I'm going to have to track down for the completist in me, something none of my fellow comic book fans know nothing about, I'm sure...

The Other Side (IDW Publishing)

The same year Tokyopop released their one Ghostbusters related comic, IDW Publishing started releasing comics in what is by far the most successful run of Ghostbusters comics to date. The first mini-series published was The Other Side. The Ghostbusters run afoul of the ghosts of some of America's most famous gangsters, including Al Capone and Bugsy Siegel, who are running a pipeline to get spirits out of the afterlife, and wind up being displaced from their bodies and sent to the afterlife themselves. The Ghostbusters are on the run from beings on the other side who are after them because of them being, well, ghostbusters, but find a little help from some of America's greatest gangbusters; if you're a fan of gangster movies and true crime, you'll get a kick out of seeing so many legendary G-Men and Mafiosi tossed into one ghostly caper.

Displaced Aggression (IDW Publsihing)

Displaced Aggression is a story that, while using the classic Ghostbusters designs, hearkens back to some of the fun and over the top storytelling of The Real Ghostbusters. Written by Scott Lobdell, whose run on Uncanny X-Men you you might have read about here recently, the series splits the Ghostbusters up and sends them on an journey through time, with each one in a different era: Peter is in the Old West, Ray is in medieval times, Egon in the distant future, while Winston is in the present, fighting the good fight against Koza'Rai, the father of Gozer, the Sumerian god the Ghostbusters defeated in the first movie. This story is very much a comic book story, with big action scenes and crazy designs that you couldn't pull off on the budget of most movies.

The Miscellaneous IDW Ghostbusters

Before getting into the discussion of the main IDW ongoing Ghostbusters series, I just wanted to touch on some of the one shots and crossovers IDW has done for Ghostbusters. Aside from Halloween, Valentine's Day, Christmas, and Comic Con specials, the Ghostbusters have taken part in three of IDW's intercompany crossovers, throwing different franchises together. In Infestation, the Ghostbusters must fight an interdimensional zombie outbreak in a story that ties in to IDW's own Covert Vampiric Operations, or CVO, comics franchise. The Real Ghostbusters had to deal with Martian Ghosts in Mars Attacks The Real Ghostbusters. And just last month, the Ghostbusters met The Lone Gunmen of X-Files fame, finding there was something even the Lone Gunmen have a hard time believing, in X-Files: Conspiracy- Ghostbusters. None of these are essential reading (although Infestation does have some threads that play out in the ongoing I'm about to talk about), but part of the great fun of comics are crossovers between characters you never thought would meet, and these definitely fall under that category, because lets be frank, whoever thought they'd see Frohike of the Lone Gunmen hit on Janine?

Ghostbusters Ongoing (IDW Publishing)

After two successful mini-series and some one shots, IDW decided to give the Ghostbusters their own ongoing. Two volumes in, the series is going incredibly strong. The series has been written by Erik Burnham and drawn, with only a couple of guest pencils, by Dan Schoening, along with other writers and artists doing back-up stories.

The series is set in continuity with the movies, set after the events of Ghostbusters II, with the Ghostbusters comfortably doing their ghostbusting with the unfortunate government oversite of their old nemesis, Walter Peck, now head of the Paranormal Contracts Oversight Commission, or PCOC for short. The use of Peck shows one of the huge strengths of Burnham's writing; he is clearly a huge fan of all versions of the Ghostbusters, and draws in characters and aspects from all of them. Along with the main cast and movie characters like Peck, Kylie Griffin of the spinoff Extreme Ghostbusters series shows up working in Ray's paranormal bookstore, The Rookie and Ilyssa Selwyn from the recent Ghostbusters video game both pop up, and Burnham takes characters from earlier comics, keeping Tiyah Clarke, a love interest introduced for Winston in the "Tainted Love" Valentine's Day one-shot, and deepens their characters. He has also created some new characters, including Ron Alexander, a sleazy scientist who is Peter Venkman if he didn't have Ray and Egon to keep him on the straight and narrow and who has been forced to work with the Ghostbusters, and Melanie Ortiz, an FBI Agent who serves as the Bureau liaison with the Ghostbusters. Expanding the cast has allowed different aspects of the Ghostbusters to show that you wouldn't see when they're just interacting with each other, like Winston's romantic side with Tiyah or Ray's paternal streak when it comes to Kylie.

With Burnham having been working on the series now for nearly thirty issues, he has been able to really get a great feeling for the characters. Reading the stories, you can hear the dialogue in the voices of the actors who portrayed them on the big screen. The series is funny, having the same sense of humor as the films. It also maintains the stakes; while the comic can be fun and the characters get off plenty of zingers, the ghosts they encounter have an air of menace that could be lost if the writer decided to play the setting more for laughs.

Over the course of the two volumes of the Ghostbusters ongoing (the first one ran sixteen issues, the second is currently on issue thirteen), Burnham has set plenty of challenges before the Ghostbusters. The stories have included adventures that took them on a cross country good will trip to bust ghost in various cities, or dealing with the Ghost-Smashers, a team of second rate Ghostbuster knock offs with tech even more unpredictable than the Ghostbusters own. The first arc of the second series had the Ghostbusters trapped in another dimension; Janine had to fill in along with some of the supporting cast that had been built over the first series, allowing those characters time to shine. Egon had to travel into Janine's mind to save her from ghostly possession by one of her ancestors while the others were on a ghostly pirate ship. And the most recent arc took the team through the holiday season, as bogeyman activity in New York grew. The most recent issue, which was released just this past Wednesday, begins, "Mass Hysteria," an eight part story written to celebrate the 30th Anniversary of the Ghostbusters franchise, which will not only bring everything that Burnham has been plotting to a head, but reintroduce Dana Barrett and Louis Tully, two important characters from the films, into the comics.

Dan Schoening's style is perfectly suited to this comic. His characters are expressive, a bit quirky, and every page just exudes energy. His designs for the ghosts are genuinely creepy, with many truly terrifying scenes. Schoening is clearly also a fan of all eras of Ghostbusters, evinced by his design for Janine's new boyfriend, who resembles the animated Egon, down to his massive blond pompadour haircut. His art has just the right balance between comedy and horror to work on a property that treads that line so well.

IDW has been collecting the Ghostbusters comics in trade, so they should be easy to track down, with each mini-series in its own trade, as well as all of the holiday themed one shots, along with a new story, collected in a volume called Haunted Holidays; theer is also an omnibus edition collecting all those stories. The ongoings has been collected in six trades, with a seventh on the way. However, all sixteen issues of the first volume are about to be released in a deluxe hardcover called "The Total Containment Edition."

And that's the comics history of Ghostbusters, one of the greatest pop culture franchises of all time. Harold Ramis was a great director, actor, and writer, whose work has touched legions. This final piece of art is from Ghostbusters artist Dan Schoening's DeviantArt page, and is one of the best tributes I've seen to Ramis. May he live the same day over and over again in the next life, and may it be the best day ever.

So, do to various things this weekend, I was not able to finish this week's stack. I might try to get in some more reviews tomorrow, but here are a couple for today.

Beware the Batman #5
Story: Mike W. Barr
Art: Dario Brizuela

Oh, Beware the Batman... Just as it was hitting it's stride on TV, it gets cancelled, and the DVD that had the two unaired episodes left it on a cliffhanger. But even with that, there were two issues of the comic left, and this was the first one of those. It's a great little comic for many reasons, but the first thing that grabbed my attention about it was that it is written by Mike W. Barr. I've written about Barr's run on Detective Comics before, and once I finally dig out the rest of the issues from the move, I plan to talk about his tremendous Maze Agency. He's one of the best writers for a good mystery, and this issue is exactly that, a fun play fair mystery (for those unfamiliar with the term, a play fair mystery is one where the clues are laid out and you can figure out whodunnit). The plot involves someone posing as Katana, a character Barr created for Batman and the Outsiders, and killing people. We are presented with three suspects, and while Batman goes to hunt down Tobias Whale, gangster, Katana investigates the suspects. After a well orchestrated action sequence, Batman deduces the identity of the killer. I won't give away who or how he figured it out, but it makes perfect sense. This is a fun comics, and shows what this series could have been if it weren't cut tragically short.

Sheltered #7
Story: Ed Brisson
Art: Johnnie Christmas

Sheltered has been building slowly over the course of its seven issues so far in the best possible way. After killing their parents, the kids in a survivalist encampment have been degenerating into a Lord of the Flies-esque community. After last issue, when adults arrived and the kids went off half cocked and started shooting, things are happening fast. Lucas, the leader of the community, is doing his best to maintain control. The hunt through the forest for the one adult who managed to escape the shooting is drawn beautifully. It's an intense sequence, and brutal; artist Johnnie Christmas keeps the sequence intense with shadows and you feel sympathetic for both the poor schmuck who is being chased through the woods by automatic weapon wielding kids, and for the kids themselves when things start going south for them. Meanwhile, back in Safe Haven, Victoria, the series protagonist, finally escapes the bunker that she was imprisoned in a few issues back and goes out to have words with Lucas. The character development on the series principal characters is continuing really well, and the supporting cast is feeling more fleshed out with each issue. The high concept of this series and writer Ed Brisson are what got me to try it out, and while it isn't one of those major Image releases, the ones that get all the press, it should be; it's a quality comic getting better with each issue.

Writer Warren Ellis launches a new volume of Moon Knight for Marvel this week, with art by Declan Shalvey. In many ways, Ellis is the perfect writer for this character, whom he previously worked with in a six-issue run on Secret Avengers in 2011. Ellis is a man who loves throwing high-concept, futuristic, pseudoscientific ideas at the wall to see if they stick, and Moon Knight is the vessel of vengeance for an Egyptian moon god or something. In a recent CBR interview, Ellis said of writing MK, “You can get really weird. Also, you can provide, as an entire plotline, the sentence ‘punching ghosts,’ and nobody bats an eyelid.” Stop. You had me at hello, I’m Warren Ellis.

As we look to Moon Knight’s future, let us also look to the past, to but a small sampling of Ellis’ most outré ideas:

The alien race that killed its own god (Excalibur): In 1994, Marvel gave Ellis the then-third-tier X-book Excalibur to infuse with his dark, distinctly British sensibility. Among his first acts was creating the snarky but haunted spook Pete Wisdom and teaming him up with not-a-girl, not-yet-a-woman Kitty Pryde. Together they discovered Wisdom's employer, Black Air, was experimenting on an alien race called the Uncreated, self-named because they killed their own deity as a means to conquer their inferiority complex. After doing so, the race traveled the stars looking to exterminate any lifeforms that did not embrace their atheism. Ellis next used the Uncreated in 1995's Starjammers miniseries, in which the titular space pirates defeated the nasties by projecting an image of their god, leading the Uncreated to commit seppuku. (For more on Ellis’ Excalibur run, read Matt’s Recommended Reading column from last May.)

The most obvious visual representation of Darwinism ever? (Storm 1-4): Ellis and Terry Dodson did a four-issue Storm mini in early 1996 that picked up a few dangling Morlock/Gene Nation plot threads from earlier in the ’90s. Storm is shunted into an alternate dimension run by Colossus’ brother Mikhail Rasputin, last seen flooding the Morlock tunnels and disappearing with the undercity dwellers. In Rasputin’s pocket world, where time moves in erratic patterns, the Morlocks were trained to become Gene Nation terrorists by climbing The Hill. Literally, every denizen of this world had to scale and survive a giant hill to prove their fitness and worth to Rasputin.

The bowel disrupter (Transmetropolitan): “Now, what setting? Watery, loose … prolapse.” One of Ellis’ greatest triumphs and crazy-idea farms is this 60-issue Vertigo series starring Spider Jerusalem, a futuristic Hunter S. Thompson whose work for The Word uncovers the dirty deeds of one president after another and puts a big old target on his back. It’s a near-future world in which people fight for the right to change species and there’s a children’s show called “Sex Puppets.” There’s also a gun that makes people poop themselves, which Jerusalem uses to threaten stripper turned “filthy assistant” Channon Yarrow and actually uses on the president known as The Beast in issue #4 in 1997.

Superman and Batman as a gay power couple (The Authority): Ellis ported Superman analogue Apollo and Batman analogue Midnighter from Stormwatch to The Authority. In their new book, the two were revealed to be a gay couple. Back in 1999, this didn't happen all that often, and so the book received a GLAAD award. Arguably these two paved the way for other gay couples in comics such as Northstar and Kyle Jinadu, Batwoman and Maggie Sawyer, and Wiccan and Hulkling.

Right-tool-for-the-job expert-dispatch service (Global Frequency): This 2002-04 Wildstorm book may be the best example of what happens when Ellis favors concepts over characters. Global Frequency was a 1,001-member organization (about on par with Jonathan Hickman’s Avengers cast) of the world’s foremost experts in their field, who are called in as crises warrant based on field of expertise and proximity. In a way it was like a super-serious version of G.I. Joe, with a mix of military, intelligence, scientists, ex-cons and the like all working to save the world, except the characters didn’t stick around long enough for anyone to decipher who the Shipwreck and Roadblock analogues were. Even the artists changed from issue to issue. Also it was almost a TV show.

The guy who buggers cars (Two-Step): In 2003-04, Ellis wrote a quickie three-issue miniseries for Wildstorm with Amanda Conner and Jimmy Palmiotti about a bored, cheeky London camgirl named Rosi and a zen gun-for-hire named Tony who run afoul of a gang whose trademark is having artificially large wedding tackle. Among their number is a Baby Huey of a man named Ron who enjoys having sex with cars to the point where they explode. According to TLC’s My Strange Addiction, this is a real thing.

Having Iron Man inside you (Iron Man: Extremis): In 2005-06, Ellis got to tinker with Iron Man's origin, tying the creation of the first Iron Man suit to the war in Afghanistan as part of a six-issue arc that introduces the concept of Extremis, a nanotech virus that allows fir the constant healing and enhancing of the body in the latest attempt to re-create the Super Soldier Serum that transformed Steve Rogers into Captain America. Tony infects himself with Extremis and in so doing becomes one with Iron Man, allowing parts of it into his bones and give his brain a complete upgrade. Elements of the Extremis story were used in the Iron Man movies, including the updated origin story.

Supervillain marketing (Thunderbolts 110-121): Ellis took over Thunderbolts after Civil War in 2007-08. During that period, the ’Bolts were Colorado’s Initiative superteam and were run by a Tommy Lee Jones-looking Norman Osborn. Osborn used his business acumen (when he wasn’t using his crazy acumen) to market the team through Saturday morning cartoon commercials, brainwashing kids into rooting for psychotic killers like Bullseye, Venom and the Strucker twin who was in love with his dead sister.

Honorable mention: Warren’s novel ideas (Crooked Little Vein, 2007; Gun Machine, 2013): Ellis’ two published novels are every bit as idea-rich as his comics. Without going too deep into either, it should be noted that in Crooked Little Vein, the two main characters inject saline into their genitals to artificially swell them and then have sex, and in Gun Machine, a Wall Street financier explains that the key to the future of financial-market real estate is pingback, the time it takes information to transmit from a given location, to ensure the fastest, most competitive buying and selling.

And now for something slightly different...

I've written about Tiny Titans before, the Art Baltazar/Franco Aureliani book about the sidekicks of superheroes as little kids in Sidekick Elementary. Well, this week I'm writing about a webcomic, the first one I've ever specifically recommended. It's called JL8, written and drawn by Yale Stewart, and when I heard about it, I thought it was going to be similar to Tiny Titans, only featuring the Justice League. But it's something else entirely, and something really great at that.

JL8 centers around the students at Schwartz Elementary (named for DC Editor Julie Schwartz, the editor known to be principally responsible for the Silver Age at DC Comics), and their adventures in and around school. It's a blend of schoolyard hijinks, character pieces, comedy, and a little bit of action here and there. Stewart does a great job in balancing the humor with the character, like many a good comic strip does. The characters are all eight years old, and the plots maintain a threat level that works with small kids; the main nemesis we've seen the young heroes deal with is a schoolyard Legion of Doom, but we'll get to them later.

The principal cast of the strip are most of the traditional Justice League, and read perfectly like younger versions of those characters. Clark (Superman) is kind and thoughtful. His best friend, Bruce (Batman), is brooding and a bit standoffish, but is a great friend to Clark. Barry (Flash) is always in a hurry, and talks faster than he thinks. Hal (Green Lantern) is swaggering and confident. Diana (Wonder Woman) is sweet, but maybe the toughest of the kids. J'onn (Martian Manhunter) is the transfer student from Mars, still learning what it's like to be an Earth kid. The one main cast member who isn't one of the original JLA is Karen (Power Girl); it's nice to have another girl in the cast to give Diana a girl friend to talk to. She's spunky, and loves ponies.

Stewart's webcomic works like a classic comic strip, where each installment stands on its own, but if you read for a little while, you get caught up in the larger plotlines that he's been building for some time now. The strange little kid "romance" between Bruce and Karen has been going for a while, with Bruce revealing he likes Karen, and her being interested since he has horses. Or the various scenes of J'onn learning about what it means to be an Earth kid.

There have been a couple of major arcs over the course of the series. In one, Bruce, Clark, and Hal save a grandma from a mugger, and when the paper calls them "kids," they get tough new costumes to show what big guys they are (costumes that funnily resemble the New 52 versions of their costumes), but there's a lesson about heroism and what it means to be a grown up that is smartly done. There's also the story of Diana's birthday party, where we see a lot of typical kids party tropes, mixed with a bunch of party chaperones who are Amazons and a clown that Bruce really doesn't like.

There are some strips that really stick out for me. A personal favorite of mine is strip 27. In the previous strip, Bruce left Clark at Clark's house, and after seeing the warm welcome Clark got from his parents, Bruce walks away looking sad. So the next strip picks up right after.

That little bit of character there, developing the relationship of Bruce and Alfred, is not just heartwarming, but it does a good job of fleshing out Bruce, who is often portrayed a grumpy and a know it all.

Aside from the well thought out plotlines and cute young versions of the Justice League, the series is littered with DCU cameos and easter eggs for those who know their DC Comics. Julie Schwartz, who I mentioned earlier, is the kids teacher, Darkseid is the gym teacher (a better job than his lunchlady gig in Tiny Titans), and Neil Gaiman owns the local bookshop. Other DC Comics characters pop up in the background or in cameos, and there have been a couple of great ones from Mikey and Ted (Booster Gold and Blue Beetle). In the same vein, if you know your "Bwa-ha-ha!" era of Justice League, then this strip is worth a good laugh.

The other recurring group of characters are what I think of as the Lil' Legion of Doom. They're all recognizable, but I have to admit, I love the version of the Joker the most (not exactly shocking, huh?). Not a clown yet, he's still the Red Hood, made clear by his red hoodie, which is a great touch. Aside from Joker, we get Lex Luthor, Cheetah, Captain Cold, Toyman, Poison Ivy, and Solomon Grundy.

JL8 is a webcomic that does so many things right. It takes advantage of the serialized format, and does fun things with characters that you wouldn't see in DC Comics. It's an all ages strip that you can share with your kids to help foster a love of these great characters, and isn't that something that we all should do?

JL8 is updated usually twice a week, and can be found HERE. You can also follow the strip on Facebook and Twitter.

Scooby-Doo Team-Up #3
Story: Sholly Fisch
Art: Dario Brizuela

Sholly Fisch's Scooby-Doo Team-Up is one of the most fun books on the rack. While absolutely an all ages book, and completely accessible to everyone, it also is full of great nods to DC Comics past and the history fo Scooby-Doo. Last issue featured the Mystery Analysts of Gotham from the 60s, including many classic DC detectives, and this issue brings us not only two serious C-List Bat villains, The Spook and False Face, and references to A Pup Named Scooby-Doo, but also brings in Bat-Mite. It reads like most Bat-Mite stories, with Bat-Mite coming in to "help" Batman and in the process making everything much worse, but adds in Scooby-Mite, a fifth dimensional imp who is Scooby-Doo's biggest fan. This leads to an amusing deconstruction of the whole Scooby-Doo formula that still shows the value of the characters. Fisch does a perfect job of blending the Caped Crusader and Mystery, Inc. It would surprise no one that Fisch wrote the tie-in comic for Batman: The Brave and the Bold, a series that was based around such blendings. The issue's end adds in another reference, this one to the Teen Titans cartoon that serves as a nice little cherry on top of the issue. If you enjoy Batman or Scooby-Doo this is a great issue to give a read.

She-Hulk #2
Story: Charles Soule
Art: Javier Pulido

Charles Soule has been doing a great job picking up where Scott Snyder left off on Swamp Thing, but as good as that book is, his She-Hulk is an even more impressive feat. Two issues in, and it's already creeping high up on my list of best comics on the rack. After hanging out her shingle for her own law firm at the end of last issue, this issue sees Jen Walters, She-Hulk, attempting to get her firm going. We start to meet the rest of the cast of the series, including her new paralegal, Angie Huang, who has a pet monkey that goes everywhere with her and whose cryptic answers to Jen's questions clearly indicate there's more to her then meets the eye, and Sharon King, the owner of the building Jen has set up shop in, who is a mutant who lost her powers and now rents to exclusively super powered clientele. After a day of making no progress thanks to the law firm she left last issue who are out to blackball her, Jen heads out for a night on the town with Patsy Walker, another former Avenger, Hellcat. Patsy seems to be as hard up as Jen is, and when she gets a few too many in her, she leads Jen to assault an A.I.M. lab that she heard about. We get a short but comedic battle between two A.I.M. goons in cyber suits and Jen, and by the end of the battle, Jen has one more employee in Patsy. One of the nice touches is hearing the A.I.M. goons talking about how taking out She-Hulk will get back to his higher ups and help him make more money to support his kids. That kind of dialogue adds a nice touch of realism to the book. The final page looks to be setting up Jen's first big case and setting her firmly in the sights of one of the Marvel Universe's biggest bads. If you've been enjoying Marvel's sleeper hit Hawkeye, this is definitely a book you should be reading.

Velvet #4
Story: Ed Brubaker
Art: Steve Epting

Velvet is a great example of everything Image Comics is doing right. It reads like nothing else on the rack and takes it's genre by the throat and does amazing things with it. After her disastrous mission in the previous issue to Belgrade, Velvet Templeton has a lead on Agent X-14's movements, hopefully getting her closer to who framed her for murder. Set in Monaco at the Carnival of Fools, we get Steve Epting at his best, drawing opulent and realistic backgrounds and characters in classy clothes and wild costumes. Velvet is hunting Roman, and Ex-KGB agent who has gone freelance, and finds him at a casino, playing Baccarat. Brubaker makes a fun joke about Baccarat, something I think many of us who have read James Bond has thought, and pretty soon, Velvet is caught up in another fight with spies. The fight scenes that Brubaker writes and Epting draws are brutal, and I like the internal monologue playing in Velvet's head; Brubaker makes it clear that fighting isn't a game to Velvet, that this is part of the job and she's willing to do anything to end it as quickly as possible. The issues ends with some classic spy banter, and another hint of Velvet's mysterious past. Brubaker has done a great job of balancing the plot driving each individual issue with the overarcing plot of the series, allowing for each issue to feel almost complete in itself, something many writer's can't do. With Captain America: The Winter Soldier, based on a series by this book's creative team, coming out in less than a month, this is a great time to jump onto Brubaker and Epting's creator owner spy series.

Batgirl #29
Story: Gail Simone
Art: Fernando Pasarin

Gail Simone's Batgirl has been a consistently enjoyable comic, one that does a good job of mixing action, emotion, and character. This most recent issue was the second part of a two part story where Batgirl and her friend and sometimes partner Strix, a Talon of the Court of Owls who abandoned the Court, are up against Silver, a vampire hunter who believes the Batman family are vampires who have taken control of Gotham. Silver is a good addition to the pantheon of anti-heroes or villains, as he is clearly unbalanced, but is trying to do something good. He has kidnapped a small child, but I don't think I'm spoiling too much of a twist when its revealed he was actually right and she is a vampire.Artist Fernando Pasarin does a great job drawing the fight scenes between Batgirl and Strix and Silver and his companion/valet Miss Targa; they're well choreographed martial arts fights. What I found very interesting was also an interaction between Batgirl and Strix. After Silver escapes at the beginning of the issue, Strix makes it clear to Batgirl that she will kill Silver if he has harmed the girl that was kidnapped. And while Strix tells Batgirl she will not kill, she is lying. And while there is no murder by issue's end, I think we're going to see further conflict between the two; Strix was trained to be a killer, and it'll be hard for her to break that training. Next issue is a fill in, and the one after that sees the return of one of my favorite Gail Simone creation, Ragdoll of Secret Six fame, so I have a feeling you'll be hearing about Batgirl again here soon.

Batman #29
Story: Scott Snyder
Art: Greg Capullo

Batman is one of the few books I right about here every month, and for good reason, and that reason isn't just that I love Batman. Scott Snyder has an excellent feel for Batman as a character, and his "Zero Year" story has been a great re-imagining of Batman's early days in Gotham. This issue marks the end of the second act of the story, called "Dark City," with Batman escaping the Riddler's death trap from the end of last issue to go and try to stop Riddler from taking over all of Gotham's technology. I believe it was Paul Dini who once said that Riddler is the hardest Batman villain to write, since he has to be as smart as Batman, and his plans need to make perfect sense on a second read through. Snyder has really captured this; Riddler feels like a real threat, something many writer have failed at, and a perfect intellectual nemesis for Batman, without descending into the unctuous snobbery of the Riddler in the Arkham video games. The issue also pays off the confrontation between Batman and Doctor Death, a freakishly re-imagined version of the first name villain Batman ever fought. That re-imagining is part of a truly impressive issue from artist Greg Capullo. Capullo has splash pages inspired by Frank Miller, as well as the horrible Dr. Death, and scenes of destruction in Gotham that sent shivers down my spine. The issue also has a scene with the Waynes and young Bruce, and its a scene that I feel is important. The Waynes are a touchstone in Bruce's life, the great incorruptible past, and seeing them with him, not as absentee parents who left their son for Alfred to watch, makes the great tragedy of Batman's life more resonant. "Savage City" begins next month, the concluding third of "Zero Year" where all the seeds Snyder has sewn will bear fruit. If he can pull this off, this is an arc that could go down as one of the great Batman stories; I'm hoping he can do it.

Batman : Li'l Gotham #12
Story & Art: Dustin Nguyen and Derek Fridolfs

All good things... Batman: Li'l Gotham has been one of the most enjoyable books on the racks for the past year, and I've been expecting the final issue to really hit a high note, and I was right. The two stories are Thanksgiving and Christmas, and each show the charm and knowledge of Batman history that have defined this series. The first story sees Damian on the hunt for Jerry, the turkey he took on as a pet in the previous Thanksgiving installment, and winds up running afowl (see that pun, folks, that's why you read this blog) of the Condiment King. Yes, a Z-List villain created as a gag for Batman: The Animated Series who showed up one or twice as a gag in Chuck Dixon's run on the Bat titles. It's a fun story to see just how Damian has actually grown to care about the turkey, and to be less of a little sociopath. The final story is a Christmas tale of Alfred and Damian looking through a family album of the family. Pictures of Bruce growing up, as well as all the Robins, adorn the pages, and are narrated by Alfred and Damian's commentary. The issue is a survey of Batman's life, and shows a Batman that we'd never see in the mainstream comics: one who leaves gifts for the inmates at Arkham and gently carries his sleeping son to bed. Batman is a character with so many facets, it was nice to have a book on the racks that showed a different Batman.I hope that we see more Batman from Nguyen and Fridolfs sometime soon.

X-Files: Season 10 #10
Story: Joe Harris
Art: menton3

The X-Files was a TV series that depended on its mystery and mythology. It was a series where for every answer you got, you got three questions. With the debut of the comic series that picks up where the series left off, the mythology has picked back up, and there are new mysteries. One of the major mysteries was how various cast members long thought dead are back. This issue, "Further Musings of a Cigarette Smoking Man," a follow up to a classic episode, gives us a few answers. The Cigarette Smoking Man, also known as Cancer Man, was one of the principal antagonists, and a character whose history was shrouded in mystery. This issue gives the reader snapshot views of moments in his past that may or may not be true. Ties to the Bay of Pigs and various other historic events, as well as his connection to the Mulder family, are explored, and moments with his own family show the history of the enigmatic figure. The art by menton3 is in the style of Ben Templesmith, heavily lined and full of shadow, works with the subject matter and character. As I said before, the issue gives the reader new questions to ask by the end, but those questions keep the reader coming back for more, and that's a big part of the appeal of The X-Files.

Ed Brubaker’s Captain America, 2005-2013 (Vol. 5 1-50, Reborn miniseries, renumbered 600-624, Vol. 6 1-19, Winter Soldier 1-14, assorted one-shots, minis)

The latest Captain America movie, in theaters April 4, exists for two reasons: One, because the first movie and subsequent Avengersmovie made boatloads of money. Two: Ed Brubaker.

Brubaker spent nearly a decade swimming in the deepest ends of the Captain America mythos. And he started by taking The One Thing That Was Never Supposed to Happen and executing it in a way that was fanboy-complaint-proof. Wait, who am I kidding?

Bru did his homework on Cap, mining decades of Simon, Lee/Kirby, Steranko, Stern/Byrne, Mark Waid and more to craft a dark, cool spy thriller starring colorful, easily-written-off-as-uncool characters such as the guy who talks to birds, the guy whose face appears in the abdomens of robots and the French guy who fights with his feet, wears lots of purple and has a pointy mustache. Brubaker doesn't hide from the ridiculous parts of Cap's past. Instead, he welcomes them, gives them a warm blanket and a bowl of hot soup and says "Come on in here, fella, let's see what we can do to get you on your feet."

It should be noted that Brubaker had great help in these endeavors from artists like Steve Epting, Bryan Hitch and Butch Guice, whose shadow-heavy lines helped strike the perfect high-espionage, low-cheese tone for the book.

"It's no secret that Cap, as a character, has had some great runs, but in between them he has also had some seriously not-so-great runs,” Bru writes in the forward to the first of three hardcover omnibi encapsulating his run. “What I cared about (was) the characters."

And somehow Brubaker manages to cram them all in: the Red Skull, Bucky, Sharon Carter, Nick Fury, Nomad, Falcon, Arnim Zola, Batroc the Leaper, Namor, the original Human Torch, Union Jack, Crossbones, Sin, Baron Blood, Dr. Faustus, Mother Night, Spitfire, AIM, Baron Zemo. Each with their own role to play in the magical history tour.

The run starts with Rogers at a low point, not long after the "Diassembled" storyline and the deaths of several Avengers (don’t worry, most of them got better, except for this guy). It’s the perfect time for the Red Skull to launch a multi-city terror plan involving a branch of AIM, his old henchman Crossbones and a cracked Cosmic Cube. Except he’s assassinated at the end of the first issue by the Winter Soldier, a “Cold War myth” revived by Aleksander Lukin, a Russian energy tycoon and former military.

In creating the Winter Soldier, Brubaker pulls a long-con retcon, rewriting Cap’s history all the way back to the Golden Age, but at no point did I roll my eyes like I did, say, when I found out Hal Jordan went crazy because he was possessed by a fear monster, or Xorn was real despite being made upor (insert your least-favorite retcon here).

Cap goes missing for entire issues, giving his supporting cast a chance to tell their (sometimes convoluted) stories. We see how Jack Monroe, the ’50s Bucky who spent the ’90s looking like Lorenzo Lamas in Renegade, lives his last months, and an entire issue is dedicated to Crossbones torturing Sin, the Red Skull's daughter, until she remembers who she is. PS: Crossbones and Sin come off like the Bane/Harley team-up the Batman writers never thought of.

Every few issues, though, all the puzzle pieces are put on the board at once, and you get to see Cap and Sharon, WS, Skull/Lukin and Sin/Crossbones all get in the way of each other, such as in issue 21.

The bulk of the run is collected in three hardcover omnibi. The first covers issues 1-25 and introduces the Winter Soldier and begins his redemption arc. The second covers issues 25-42 and starts with the death of Captain America and ends with WS assuming Cap's identity. The third covers issues 43-50, 600-601 (there was a renumbering), and the Reborn mini, and tells the stories of the new Cap leading up to the return of Steve Rogers and defeat of the Red Skull. Following those omnibi is the so-called "Heroic Age," the period during which original-recipe Cap served as "Commander Rogers," head of SHIELD, while WS continued in the stars and stripes. Not long into that period, new Cap's identity is outed, and WS is called to account for his Cold War crimes by both the U.S. and the former USSR.

One thing you have to wonder as you read on is whether the world will ever tire of these two men from the past – Cap and the Red Skull – imposing their World War II beef on the present, forcing Invaders team-ups, creating new Master Men, digging up old Doom Bots, forcing the past to repeat itself because it's the only world they understand. You can definitely see why, when Rick Remender took over the book, he decided to start with a story that involves almost no actual knowledge of Cap continuity outside of Cap good guy, Zola bad guy.

There is some repetition, which probably can’t be helped over eight years. There are at least two stories about small Midwest towns that are fronts for the science-terror cell AIM, one as Brubaker just begins tracing the Winter Soldier’s redemption arc, another in a backup strip not long before Fear Itself.

Brubaker’s run made such an impact that, not two years after his creation, the Winter Soldier appeared as a miniboss in the first Marvel: Ultimate Alliance video game. The soldier also appeared in a few episodes of Disney XD’s Avengers: Earth Mightiest Heroes cartoon, and Lukin’s Kronas Corp. building is part of the New York skyline in the Lego Super Heroes: Marvel Universe video game.

Final thought: The identity of the Winter Soldier was revealed fairly early in Brubaker’s run. Theoretically, his identity has been known to the public for nine years now. However, I took an informal, wholly unscientific Facebook poll, and there are still plenty of non-comics readers who don’t know, but who saw the first Cap movie, liked it, and plan on seeing the sequel. And while some of them have had the secret ruined for them by nerdy friends and spouses or by press for the movie, I prithee, let them be surprised. I mean, I thought it was obvious from the commercials that WS is the ski patrol guy from Hot Tub Time Machine, but I still wouldn’t mind seeing the movie with someone who, when they see the big reveal, drops their jaw in shock. I say let them have that moment.

Recently, writers Ben Backer and Ben Blacker were announced as the new writers on Marvel's Thunderbolts. If you're a comic fan not familiar with Acker & Blacker, it's understandable; their Marvel credits include a couple annuals and the Wolverine: Season One graphic novel. But for some of us, Acker & Blacker are huge names. They are the creators of the live show/podcast The Thrilling Adventure Hour, "America's favorite new time podcast in the style of old time radio." This doesn't sound like something I'd talk about on my blog that is dedicated to comics, but there is The Thrilling Adventure Hour graphic novel, released from Archaia last year, so there is an actual comic to work with, along with themes that tie in to a lot of what I like to talk about here.

The Thrilling Adventure Hour has been playing in Los Angeles for about seven years, doing a night of different recurring serials. It's a wonderful mish-mash of genres, taking a couple of the story types that would have appeared on classic radio and mixing them together to come up with something wholely new and hilarious. The show presents stories with tongue planted firmly in cheek, but still finds a way to make you really care about many of the characters.

The regular cast of The Thrilling Adventure Hour, called the Workjuice Players, includes many actors that you might recognize, including Paul F. Tompkins, Paget Brewster, Marc Evan Jackson, Mark Gagliardi, Busy Philipps, James Urbaniak, John DiMaggio, and others. Guest stars include such Hollywood luminaries as Nathan Fillion, Molly Quinn, Joshua Malina, Gillian Jacobs, Linda Cardellini, Natalie Morales, and a whole bunch more. Each monthly show in LA is usually bookended by two recurring segments, Sparks Nevada, Marshall on Mars (starring Marc Evan Jackson and Mark Gagliardi as Sparks Nevada and Croach the Tracker) and Beyond Belief (starring Paul F. Tompkins and Paget Brewster as those married mediums, Frank and Sadie Doyle), with other segments in between, as well as ads for the show's "sponsors," Workjuice Coffee and Patriot Brand Cigarettes.

Last year, through Kickstarter, a graphic novel was created based on The Thrilling Adventure Hour (abbreviated TAH from here on out for brevity's sake), with a short story for each of the recurring segments and a couple of the occasional ones. I'll give you a rundown of each of those segments, along with a quick discussion of the short in the graphic novel. It's a lot of information, but once you dig into the series, it'll all come to you pretty quickly, trust me. The graphic novel, by the way, had introductions from Patton Oswalt (who has guest starred) and Ed Brubaker (who has guest written), so if you don't entirely trust me, that's a pretty dang fine pedigree.

Sparks Nevada: Marshal on Mars
Illustrated by Randy Bishop

Sparks Nevada is a mash-up of western and sci-fi, about a swaggering square jawed hero, the titular Sparks Nevada, and his loyal Martian companion, Croach the Tracker. Sparks is the stereotypical western hero, at least on the surface, who has blasters and a pair of robot fists that he uses to stop rogue robots on Mars. Croach is under "onus," as he puts it, to Sparks for having saved his tribe, and thus must work off the onus by aiding Sparks. The onus never seems to run out, or if it does it comes back pretty quickly, so the two are always stuck together. Sparks doesn't really get Martian culture, and so pretty much brushes off much of what Croach says and does. Their dynamic is hilarious, and is one of the bedrocks of the series. This is by far the most serialized on the segments on Thrilling Adventure Hour, with recurring characters like The Red Plains Rider, a human raised by Martians who now defends her adopted home, The Barkeep, Felton, the typical western townsperson who runs in begging the Marshall for help, Rebecca Rose Rushmore, space Western novelist, Pemily Stallwark, champion of the punishment soccer, and Cactoid Jim, King of the Martian Frontier, who I'll discuss more in his own spin-off segment later. The short in the graphic novel is not continuity dependent, and does a great job of giving the reader, who might be unfamiliar with the series, a good introduction by giving a tale of Sparks and Croach fighting robot outlaws. Once you've finished the story, I would suggest starting the podcast archives at the first Sparks Nevada and working your way forward.

Phillip Fathom
Illustrated by Jeff Stokely

Phillip Fathom, the Deep Sea Detective, is a supporting character in another segment we'll get to shortly, Captain Laserbeam, but was given his own short in the graphic novel. I feel this works because he is a character who is firmly rooted in the comic book tradition. A merman of some sort, his origin remains unclear, whose parents died at sea, he now defends the harbor of Apex City with his San Andreas Trenchcoat, that seems to have an endless supply of gadgets. He has been voiced by a couple of different actors on the show, but that voice always resembles the growl of a recent actor who played a certain Caped Crusader on the big screen. The story in the graphic novel clearly draws those parallels even tighter with a villain who resembles that hero's arch foe. I would suggest podcast #79, "Tinker Taylor and Tyler Too!"

The Cross-Time Adventures of Colonel Tick-Tock
Illustrated by Chris Moreno

Colonel Tick-Tock is the chief agent of her majesty Queen Victoria's Royal Chrono Patrol, who keep time working on schedule. This is possibly the strangest of all the segments on TAH, with Colonel Tick-Tock and his Trick Clock often stop dinosaurs, vikings, and the like who have wandered into time anomalies and arrive in the wrong time period from hurting important historical figures. The fun of Colonel Tick-Tock is often how ridiculous these historical figures are, very much in a Mel Brooks History of the World Part 1 way, and include Saccho and Vanzeti as The Odd Couple and a recurring roll for none other than Nicola Tesla, a Matt Signal favorite. The story in the graphic novel deals with Colonel Tick-Tock going back to the dawn of man to stop a brilliant caveman from using his time machine to accidentally destroy history. So, yes, weird and silly. I would suggest podcast #31, "Electric Rivalries"

Captain Laserbeam
Illustrated by Lar deSouza

Captain Laserbeam is a classic, do-gooding superhero. With the aid of his Adventurekateers, he protects Apex City from supervillains who would feel very much at home on the classic Batman TV series, to which the segment owes a lot of inspiration. The running gags are familiar to comic fans, with a hero who is too good to be true, and kind of goofy; there is also a serious Tick vibe here. The motifs that run through each episode are the same, with the details shifting, feeling a lot like comics in the 50s. Particularly fun is the use of "team-up" between heroes to mean something very different and specific. The story in the graphic novel shows Captain Laserbeam's numerous number themed villains, especially Sudoku. Yes, a Sudoku themed villain with accompanying traps. I would suggest podcast #89, "Uncanny Exes!" or #49, "Poetic Injustice!"

Cactoid Jim, King of the Martian Frontier
Illustrated by Evan "Doc" Shaner

Cactoid Jim is part of the Sparks Nevada universe, a time displaced astronaut who now serves as one of Mars' defenders. Jim is good at pretty much anything, and is handsome and good natured to boot. His persona is drawn somewhat from the public persona of the actor who voices him, geek culture darling Nathan Fillion. The graphic story has Jim doing battle with Murdermen, creatures who, well, their name pretty well sums it up. Jim outfoxes them, like he usually does, and winds off riding off into the sunset after doing good. The difference between him and Sparks Nevada is that Jim has more of a "Golly gee, twas nothing, ma'am," attitude, versus the more jaded Sparks. I would suggest podcast #83, "Mayor's Retreat"

Jefferson Reid, Ace American
Illustrated by Evan Larson

Jefferson Reid is a segment that appeared early in TAH's history and then seemed to fade away, I want to believe partially because Nathan Fillion also voiced Reid, and frankly Cactoid Jim is a more fun character and the writers would rather write for Fillion as Jim. Reid is a World War II era Nazi smasher, with kid sidekicks and a can-do American attitude. With his best girl, Agent Abby Adams, and his boss, General Rex Flagwell, he is the star agent of the AVC, the American Victory Commission. In the graphic novel, he fights dead American soldiers reanimated by Nazis, a Nazi impostor, and his own reanimated dead sidekick. I would suggest podcast #21, "Ace and Mr. President"

Tales of the USSA,United Solar System Alliance
Illustrated by Natalie Nourigat

The final short in the Sparks Nevada universe, Tales of the USSA is a Star Trek like travel through the galaxy, with a touch more soap opera mixed in. Captain Gene Peeples captains a ship with his wife as XO, his daughter as an officer, and his least favorite ensign dating his daughter. The graphic novel has Peeples and his crew arrive at the planet of the Spiderpeople, where they have to make a treaty. Well, you can imagine since this is a comedy, that things go about as well as you might expect. I would suggest #58, "T-Minus"

Down in Moonshine Holler
Illustrated by Joanna Estep

Down in Moonshine Holler is the story of Banjo Bindlestuff, the hobo name of millionaire Jasper Manorlodge, who gave up his riches and rides the rails to find his true love, the Hobo Princess, alongside his hobo mentor, Gummy. Banjo and Gummy get into different wacky adventures, usually involving finding a woman who might be the Hobo Princess who turns out not to be, and Banjo must think of a way to get them out of a predicament by using, "The Hobo Way." The story in the graphic novel is, as far as I can tell, the only straight adaptation from an episode of the show (I'm still working my way through the entire archive of episodes, so I might have missed one), adapting episode #23, "The Lottery." This will be appreciated by you literature buffs, as Banjo and Gummy wind up in the town from Shirley Jackson's classic short story, The Lottery, and have to stop the stoning from happening so it doesn't poison the stone soup stone of the Hobo Duchess, Lulu Pepper. I would suggest #84, "Nativity Ploy."

Amelia Earhart, Fearless Flier
Illustrated by Joel Priddy

So, when Amelia Earhart disappeared, she didn't die. Instead, she became part of the AVC (from Jefferson Reid), and is now their secret time travelling air force, stopping Nazis from altering the timeline. Amelia Earhart has a similar vibe to Colonel Tick-Tock, since they both involve time travel and ludicrous versions of historical figures, but Amelia is much less passive and has the goal of stopping any number of classic Nazi-type villains, including a scientist brain in a jar, Otto Drangt, who appears in the graphic novel, along with Der Schneemann, a Nazi Yeti pilot. Amelia must rally a crew of pirates to help her stop the Nazis from altering the 1700s to take over America before it was America. I would suggest #44, "Vive Le Reich?"

Beyond Belief
Illustrated by Tom Fowler

And saving the best for last. Beyond Belief is the story of Frank and Sadie Doyle, boozy high society couple who just happen to be mediums and unwilling supernatural detectives. This is far and away my favorite segment, and I think many fans agree with me on that (Not to say the rest are bad, mind. I just love this). The relationship between Frank and Sadie is priceless, with the two of them deeply loving each other, and wanting nothing more than to enjoy their lives together with their other great love: booze. Alas, things keep coming to them asking for help, including ghosts, vampire, werewolves, mummies, witches, and chupacabras. The dynamic is based on Nick and Nora Charles, Dashiell Hammett's society detectives from The Thin Man, only with even more booze and some monsters thrown in for good measure. A lot of the episodes toss classic genre tropes on their heads, as well as classic horror stories. While there is some continuity here, more than most of the other segments, it is more episodic than Sparks Nevada, and can really be picked up anywhere. The story in the graphic novel involves a war between Irish vampires and mummies, a Japanese ghost girl, and forbidden love. As well as booze. Lots of booze. I found it hard to pick one or two episodes to recommend, so I wound up picking six, which I had to cull down from a longer list:

#5 "Wishing Hell" (the origin of Frank)
#25 "Rosemary's Baby Shower" (The introduction of Sadie's best friend, vampire Donna Henderson)
#76 "Djinn and Tonic" (the Doyles find a lamp with a genie, and there's a great play on David Mamet's Glengarry Glen Ross between JK Simmons and Joe Mantegna)
#80 "Sarcophagus Now (The Doyles in an Egyptian pyramid meet Bast, the cat goddess, who is more catlike than usually presented)
#147 "The Complete Christmas on Mars Show 2012 (the Beyond Belief segment is guest written by Ed Brubaker, and called "Claus and Effect")
#153 "When Cthulu Cthalls (Acolytes of Cthulu come knocking. What more can you ask for?)

This is just scratching the surface of all the fun that can be found in The Thrilling Adventure Hour. There are other segments, recurring characters, and guests that can be found by looking up the show's web-site, which I'll link to below. I love old time radio, and The Thrilling Adventure Hour takes it, dusts it off, slaps on a new coat of paint, and creates something magical in its own right.

The Thrilling Adventure Hour graphic novel is available at any comic shop or bookstore. To learn more, you can go to the show's website, or download podcasts from the store of your smart phone or mobile device.

American Vampire: Second Cycle #1
Story: Scott Snyder
Art: Rafael Albuquerque

Scott Snyder and Rafael Albuquerque's American Vampire returns with a new volume in an issue that i a great place for new readers to jump on. The final issues of the previous volume did a great job of closing that first chapter, and so our series two principle characters, American vampires Skinner Sweet and Pearl Jones are in very different places than the last time we saw them; set in the sixties, a decade after the end of the last arc, Pearl is running a halfway house for vampires trying to flee they're past and make good lives without killing, and Skinner is, "The Sugar Man," a highway bandit riding a motorcycle, not the evil mutant. Each character has a gorgeous two page spread beautifully put together by Albuquerque that gives a montage of their pasts, and no knowledge of the previous series is required. The issue opens with a scene of Pearl defending her newest charge from a lynch mob, which is done very cleverly, playing off reader expectations, since the reader doesn't find out until later the girl is a vampire, and seeing a large group of white people with pitch forks and torches chasing a young African American girl conjures images that aren't out of horror movies, but historical horrors. There is more to the girl than seems, as she is tied to the mysterious Gray Trader, the villain who was hinted to in the final issue of volume one. Skinner, meanwhile, heads to hijack a cargo that is not what he expects, and seems to run afoul of the Gray Trader himself. The Gray Trader is the new mystery to keep readers guessing, and to draw Pearl and Skinner back together in the dance they have danced since Skinner turned Pearl. American Vampire has done an excellent job of building its mythology and developing different threads, and it looks like the second half of the series will be drawing those threads together into a new, terrifying tapestry.

Buffy the Vampre Slayer: Season 10 #1
Story: Christos Gage
Art: Rebekah Isaacs

While I thought Season 9 of Buffy the Vampire Slayer was an improvement on the somewhat meandering Season 8, the real highlight of the Whedonverse comics last year was the wonderful Angel & Faith by Christos Gage and Rebekah Isaacs. Gage knew the character well, and wrote character driven stories that explored his two leads and pushed them to new places they hadn't been before, while mixing in humor and action in big doses. Isaacs is an artist who has quite a few credits under her belt, and is just waiting for that one big project for her to become a breakout star; her characters are distinct, well wrought, and she draws great action, great character pieces, and some creepy monsters. When it was announced this team would be moving over to the main Buffy series with the new season, I was excited to see what they would do with the whole Scooby Gang, and it has paid off. While Willow and Spike appeared in Angel & Faith, Buffy herself didn't, and Gage hits it right out of the park in issue one with his narration from Buffy's point of view; he captures her voice, while also making her the confident character that she has completely developed into over the course of the last season. This issue ties up a loose end from last season, using that as a way to bring all the relevant characters into play, as Buffy and her allies fight off an horde of zompires, the mindless vampires created by the lack of magic the previous year. By issue's end, the zompires are destroyed, but the new breed of vampire introduced at the end of season nine confronts Buffy, and while it looks like things might end poorly, a couple old allies reappearing tip the balance. OK, SPOILER hats on, so stop here if you haven't read the end of Angel & Faith, or want to avoid knowing a bit of the end of the issue, even though it was telegraphed at the end of A&F. Buffy's reunion with the de-aged Giles is a scene that warmed my heart. Giles was one of my favorite characters in the Whedonverse, and his loss was keenly felt when he left the series (something Buffy references in her narration). I'm sure there will be plenty of humor down the line from a father figure in the body of a thirteen year old, but for the end of this issue, the teary moment when Buffy and Giles embrace is done so beautifully and wordlessly that it was definitely the moment of the week for me.

Daredevil #1
Story: Mark Waid
Art: Chris Samnee

For the past three years or so, Mark Waid's Daredevil has been a breath of fresh air. Since Frank Miller, Daredevil as a character has been mired in so much darkness that it's been hard to see the red costume in all that black. But when Waid came on, he brought some joy back to the character, making him fun and fearless without making him a poor man's Spider-Man. This was vastly helped by his artistic collaborators, especially Chris Samnee, who worked on much of the run. Last month saw the end of that volume, and this month sees the dawn of a new era. While many All-New Marvel Now! number ones introduce new creative teams on their books, the change in Daredevil is very much internal and plot driven. After the end of the last volume, Matt Murdock, Daredevil, has had to move to San Francisco, where he lived back in the 70s briefly. With his powers and identity public, Matt can work with the government of the city. I'm curious to see of Waid actually uses some of the material established with the Marvel Universe San Francisco back in Uncanny X-Men, or if he'll just start fresh; I have no problem with either, frankly, but am curious. We get an issue that has Daredevil going to rescue a kidnapped girl, and then must escape the terrorists who kidnapped her. It's a good place to start, because you get a good impression of exactly how Daredevil's powers work, something that Samnee has developed a great visual representation for, and to see the new status quo with his new partner, both in law and crime fighting, his maybe-sorta-ex-girlfriend, Kirsten McDuffie (in all fairness, there are very few female characters in the Marvel Universe who aren't Matt Murdock's ex). The two have an easy banter that is charming, and Kirsten is willing to stand up to Matt, and even hit him back in a metaphorical way. The final page sets up a mystery that I don't expect to last long, but definitely left me scratching my head in a good way. If you have heard good things about Daredevil, this is a perfect place to jump on, so go for it.

Star Wars: Dawn of the Jedi- Force War #5
Story: John Ostrander & Jan Duursema
Script: John Ostrander
Art: Jan Duursema

So far today I have written up three new number ones that are places to start a series. The final review of the day is a final issue, and more than just the final issue of a series or mini-series, but the end of an era. John Ostrander is one of my three favorite writers in comics, and he has had a run on Star Wars comics that stretches over a decade. With the license shifting from Dark Horse Comics to Marvel Comics in 2015, a lot about Star Wars comics is up in the air, so this is definitely the last Star Wars comic by John Ostrander published by Dark Horse, and maybe ever. And it's a perfect send off. Working with his regular collaborator on these comics, artist Jan Duursema, Ostrander brings the story of the war between the Infinite Empire of the Rakata and the Jee'dai, the order that will someday become the Jedi of the films, to a close. Each of the major characters gets a resolution to their arc, and that's an achievement with such a large cast; but then again, Ostrander crams more into one issue than most writer do into three. Xesh, the Force Hound and sometimes Jee'Dai, and Shae Koda, have a showdown while Daegon Lok, the mad Jee'dai general, faces down Skal'nas, the leader of the Rakatan invasion. Sek'nos Rath, the Sith Jee'dai, faces his won darkness when he confronts Trill, the woman who betrayed him. And Tasha Ryo, the Twi'lek Jee'dai seer, finds her connection with the Force after it was severed. It's a very satisfactory end, and it leaves the world open if anyone wants to revisit it in the future. I am going to miss Ostrander and Duursema on Star Wars more than any other creative team, and I'm going to look forward to revisiting all their work in a re-read soon, something I intend to write up later in the year.

Yesterday, Marvel made a big announcement: A new series starring Miguel O'Hara, the Spider-Man of the year 2099, was being launched, and it was being written by the character's creator, Peter David. I've written about Peter David before, in regards to his run on X-Factor and his adaptations of Stephen King's The Dark Tower. But that's barely scratching the surface of his work. Peter David is one of my favorite writers in comics (and other media), and so today I thought I'd touch on some of his work that you might not have read and isn't readily available. This work in either completely uncollected, or has lapsed out of print in trades. I'm not going to talk about the original Spider-Man 2099, though, since I intend to do a full piece on that when the series gets closer. And now, without further ado, the lost legends of Peter David.

Atlantis Chronicles

Peter David does great small, personal stories that are character-centric, but is equally at home writing on a grand canvas. The grandest canvas he might have ever written on was in DC Comics'Atlantis Chronicles, a seven issue mini-series that traced the history of the lost continent of Atlantis, from shortly before it's sinking to the birth of Aquaman. There are three distinct arcs within the series. The first is the story of King Orin, the king at the time of the sinking, and his brother, Shalako. From them, we get the history of the two great cities of Atlantis, Poseidonis and Tritonis, and a blood feud between the two brothers and their children and grandchildren. Feuds between, and blood spilled by, brothers becomes a central theme of Peter David's run on Aquaman and related titles, and the second arc furthers it by investigating Atlan, a great sorcerer of Atlantean history, and his brothers, Haumond and Kraken, and Atlantis's invasion of the world above the waves in ancient times. The final arc, the shortest, deals with Queen Atlanna and her marriage to King Trevis. Atlanna is the mother of Aquaman, and Peter David made a serious retcon, changing Aquaman's birth father from a human lighthouse keeper to Atlan, the immortal wizard he had introduced in the previous arc. The series gave plenty of background to Atlantis, creating a story in perfect scope with it's timeline, set over millennia. It also gave a reason why the Atlanteans had a problem with blonde hair, the reason historically given to why Aquaman was cast out of the city as an infant. Estaban Maroto's art is gorgeous, done in the European style, and while each era of Atlantis is distinct, each has a continuity of design that follows the evolution of the undersea civilization. The mini-series was written as a lead in to a new Aquaman ongoing that wound up doing to a different writer, but some years later, DC came back to David, who got to write the story that he had planned.

Aquaman

The run on Aquaman lasted over forty issues, and built a new vision of Atlantis for the modern DC Universe. The run is best known for it being the series where Aquaman lost his hand and got a harpoon and hook in its place. But there's a whole lot more to it than that. The series built on the history set forth in the Atlantis Chronicles, with characters like Atlan and Kordax the Cruel, and with lost cities, magicians, and alien invasions. David took a lot of the other underwater and Atlantean characters of the DC Universe and brought them into one world, including the World War II era heroes Tsunami and Neptune Perkins, the ancient sorcerer Arion and his granddaughter, Power Girl (at least at the time she was thought to be his granddaughter. Power Girl's background has changed even more times than Hawkman's), and the former Global Guardian, Dolphin. Dolphin became a major part of the cast, becoming the love interest for Aquaman, and then the object of a love triangle between Aquaman and his sidekick, Garth. It was during this run as well that Garth went from being Aqualad to Tempest. David developed Garth's character, giving him a new set of powers that made him more distinct from Aquaman, and helped bring him out of Aquaman's shadow. The series also continued to play on the theme of brother versus brother that Atlantis Chronicles began, with Aquaman at war with his brother, Orm, or Ocean Master, and the war between Aquaman's sons Koryak, the illegitimate son Aquaman discovered he had early in the series, and Arthur Jr., the possibly resurrected son of Aquaman and Mera, or possibly the son of Thanatos, a dark version of Aquaman. Unfortunately, these plot threads were left unresolved when David left the series unexpectedly, but the series did a great job of making Atlantis a viable part of the DC Universe and both Aquaman and Tempest more a part of that universe. Nearly all of the developments have been retconned out by the New 52, but that doesn't take away from the underwater adventures David crafted.

Supergirl

When Peter David started writing Supergirl, it was during the period when DC Comics wanted Superman to be the last son of Krypton, so there were supposed to be no other Kryptonians in the DC Universe. So the Supergirl he was given was a telekinetic shapeshifter plasma being called Matrix. At the beginning of the series, Matrix is bonded with a human girl, Linda Danvers, and the series explores their bonding. But more than that, it becomes one of the earlier times where Peter David explores the theme of faith and religion, one that will become central to a work I'll be discussing shortly. The series moves from what might be a traditional superhero book into a mix of the supernatural and horror, with Supergirl becoming and Earth Born Angel, one of three who work the will of the almighty on Earth. Not only is Linda tested, but we see her mother, Sylvia, who is an ordinary woman with strong faith, dealing with the calamities that come from a superhero in a small town. One of the regular supporting characters/antagonists of the book is Buzz, a demon who tells a story in an early issue that does something DC Comics of the era rarely did, which is tie Vertigo into DC by referencing the events of the Sandman story, "Season of Mists." As the series progressed, the mythology David built around heaven and angels in the DCU takes on an interesting life, and he builds a whole new supernatural corner of the Universe that has really not been explored, including Wally, a young boy who may or may not have been an aspect of God. Over the course of the eighty issues, readers are treated to watching the Supergirl aspect of the character grow more human, and Linda grow up. The final arc of the series, titled "Many Happy Returns," is particularly well regarded, as it saw the return of a pre-Crisis Supergirl. The end is a sad one, one I don't want to spoil any of, but it's a tragedy of Shakespearean proportions. Linda really didn't appear much after that, but the themes were furthered in another Peter David series.

Fallen Angel

Initially published by DC Comics, where it ran for twenty issues, Fallen Angel was a series that Peter David eventually took to IDW Publishing, where it ran for thirty-three issues and two mini-series. While initially seemingly a follow up to Supergirl, with the main character being that series title heroine after the ending of the series, it quickly became something very different. Lee, or Liandra, lives in the city of Bete Noire, which is the center of causality in the world; what happens in the city changes the world outside it. The Fallen Angel, as Lee is called, serves as a court of last appeal for those lost souls who have nowhere else to turn. The book exists in a world of perpetual moral grey; even Lee, our heroine, is not entirely a heroic character. The characters around her are even more grey, many of them downright evil, but are always painted with a human brush; they all have their good points as well as their bad, although some, like the Magistrate of Bete Noire Dr. Juris, have far fewer good ones than others. The first arc of the IDW run, "To Serve in Heaven," is one of my favorite Peter David stories, revealing Liandra's origin, which has a fascinating theological bent, one that would I'm sure offend anyone of a fundamentalist mentality, but taken as a literary device makes the senseless universe make a lot of sense, even if it's very dark sense. And for you Whedon fans out there, the -first mini-series published after the series proper ended, The Return, features an appearance by Illyria, elder god from Angel. The availability on these trades might be a bit better than the other books on this list, but is spotty enough I felt like I should include it, since I view it as one of the definitive works of Peter David.

The Incredible Hulk #397-467 & -1

When it comes to comics, Peter David is probably most famous for his extended run on The Incredible Hulk, a run that lasted for over one hundred issues, and is arguably the greatest run on that character. Certainly, none of the modern runs by the likes of Greg Pak and Jason Aaron would have been possible without the groundwork David laid. And while Marvel has collected the first half of the run in the Hulk Visionaries: Peter David trades, the second half remains uncollected, and this is some of the best work on the entire series. While those first trades include art by Image founder Todd MacFarlane and legendary Hulk artist Dale Keown, the rest of the run includes early work from Gary Frank, work from Liam Sharpe and Angel Medina, and the run was rounded out by Adam Kubert. While some of the issue sin the middle are clearly marred by the editorial interference that was rampant in Marvel comics at the time, there's still so much in those seventy plus issues, it's hard to plug it all in here. Peter David's writing is never decompressed, but with the narrative continuing for over ten years, he finds ways to cram more into each issue. Hulk and Betty's relationship develops, as does that of Hulk's best friend, Rick Jones, and his girlfriend/wife, Marlo. We see the conclusion of the saga of the Pantheon, the group of international trouble shooters with ties to Greek Myth that Hulk works with. We get an interesting inversion of the classic Hulk/Banner relationship. The Hulk spends time without Banner in him, and it's done in a way that's different than when it's been tried before. Hulk briefly becomes a Horseman of Apocalypse. Thunderbolt Ross returns. And that's just a handful of stories. Peter David does a ton with a character that any writers would write off as a character that just smashes things, and that vision is what has allowed other writers to do different and interesting things with Hulk since then. There are many issues of note within this part of the run, but I want to draw attention to a few. Issue 418 is the issue which cover I selected above, the wedding of Rick and Marlo, an issue that is both hilarious and heartfelt, and ends with a trademark Peter David pun. Issue 420, "Lest Darkness Come," deals with the very real issue of AIDS in a way that very few superhero comics could. "Grave Matters," part of a month where all Marvel comics were numbered -1, tells the story of the death of Bruce Banner's abusive father, Brian, and is narrated by a weird circus Stan Lee; it is probably the best of those -1 issues, and adds depth to the relationship that in many ways defined Bruce's life. And the final issue, 467, "The Lone and Level Sands," is narrated by a Rick Jones of the future who recalls what happened to Hulk for the decades after the events of the previous issue. It's a send off to a run that still stands as one of the greatest of the 90s, and shows David had plenty of further ideas for the Hulk without leaving the readers fuming about dangling plot threads. The final pages are some of the most emotionally draining and beautiful that I have ever seen in any comic.

There are a lot of other works by Peter David, including runs on Star Trek, the Young Justice comic that loosely inspired the animated series, his teen-spy series for Dark Horse Spyboy, and so many more. And that's not even touching his novels. I have a couple projects in the works involving Peter David, one that will dig more deeply into the Hulk, but that's for another day. For today, why don't you go out and pick up a book by everybody's favorite Writer of Stuff.

All-New X-Factor #5
Story: Peter David
Art: Carmine Di Giandomenico

We're five issues into All-New X-Factor, and I admit to feeling bad I haven't reviewed an issue yet. It's not for lack of quality. X-Factor was one of the consistently best books Marvel published for years, and the new version hasn't lost that quality. It's exactly for that reason that it's fallen below this radar; books this good regularly just sort of are expected to be good. But after talking about Peter David on Friday, I knew I had to discuss the new issue. The new team, the corporate X-Factor in the service of Serval Industries, has a very different dynamic than the previous one. The last X-Factor was a dysfunctional family; this one isn't there yet. There's a very funny dynamic here, with the two siblings sniping at each other, Gambit not trusting Quicksilver, the newly added Danger acting really weird, and the manipulative CEO of Serval Industries, Harrison Snow, clearly up to something. This issue begins the two issue arc that will round out the team's roster, with the first appearances in the series of Warlock and Cypher. Warlock is seemingly in league with his evil father, The Magus, who is hiding among humanity with the most conspicuous and evil sounding human name ever; clearly he doesn't get that there are no people with the last name Smaug. The action sequences are top not, with artist Carmine Di Giandomenico pulling out all the stops, but it's the smaller scenes that really grab. Danger's strange obsession with Gambit, after he helped reboot her in the previous issue, is interesting, building a different relationship between them, and fleshing out Danger. And I have to say, for everyone who rags on Cyclops, Havok once again proves to be the creepier Summers brother with his having Quicksilver hanging around X-Factor to spy on his ex, Polaris. This isn't going to come back to bite Havok on the ass when his occasionally unbalanced ex-girlfriend finds out. Not at all.

Bloodhound: Crowbar Medicine #5
Story: Dan Jolley
Art: Leonard Kirk

The new Bloodhound mini-series wraps up in an issue that is intense final issue that ties up all the story points, but leaves the characters in a very dark place. Clev, the man who hunts super people, his partner, Agent Saffron Bell, and their erstwhile super powered ally, Terminus, confront Dr. Morgenstern, the man who has been giving everyday people superpowers. Morgenstern's reasoning behind his program is warped and sent chills up my spine, especially in its logic. But in pushing Clev's buttons, Morgenstern made a mistake, and the confrontation comes to a bloody conclusion. The core of the issue is not the action or violence, and there's plenty of both, but the emotion. Morgenstern's pain at the death of his son, that has not faded, parallels Clev's own loss, caused by Morgenstern, and we see Clev as a man who feels like he has nothing left to lose. He ends up in a place even worse than the one he was in when the series began, both literally and figuratively. While the ending is a downer, it works in the context of everything we've seen in the series; not everyone gets a happy ending. The final discussion of Morgenstern's plan furthers what I read as a comparison to super powers and firearms, dealing with some of today's most divisive political topics in a way that comics do so well. I hope that we get to see more Bloodhound in the future, so if you didn't try the series, a trade will be arriving shortly, so give it a shot.

Manhattan Projects #19
Story: Jonathan Hickman
Art: Ryan Browne

After the past few issues, stories that have forwarded the main plot of the series, it's nice to go back a revisit the inner mindscape of Joseph Oppenheimer, where the war continues between Joseph and his brother, Robert, who he consumed and took his mind, especially after the shocking ending of the previous issue and the seeming death of Joseph. Hickman's story is exciting, with all sorts of crazy ideas that work because we're in a world completely controlled by the wills of the combatants, but artist Ryan Browne is the absolute star. Having drawn the first "Finite Oppenheimers" story, returns to draw the bizarre world, with all the different versions of Oppenheimer in all of their different costumes, all the bizarre weapons, and all the chaos of massive battles of different versions of one guy massacring other versions of himself. I'm being cagey, because I don't want to give away all of the cool things that Hickman provides Browne to draw, because the joy of the issue is experiencing each page and all the detail worked into it. Browne's style works well with the series; his won but not so far from the work of series regular artist Nick Pitarra to be jarring. The issue ends with a resolution of the end of the previous issue, showing who it was who shot Oppenheimer in the real world, and it's the return of a character I have been waiting to return for some time. Every issue of Manhattan Projects is so stuffed with crazy ideas and twists that I keep thinking, "Nothing's left to surprise me," but every issue I'm proven wrong, and I love that.

Sandman: Overture #2
Story: Neil Gaiman
Art: JH Williams III

It's been five months since the first issue of Sandman: Overture, and I admit that I thought even my excitement, as an avid fan of all things Neil Gaiman, might have been dulled by the length of the wait. But by the end of the first page, I was enchanted again. The issue opens not directly where the first issue left off, but in the present, nearly a century after the events of the previous issue. Daniel, the current human incarnation of Dream, meets with Mad Hettie, an immortal bag lady from the original Sandman, and retrieves an item that I can only imagine will have importance in the future. With that, we return to the convocation of Dreams from the end of the last issue, with the different aspects of Dream having a conversation. Or is it a monologue? There is an amusing discussion of the semantics of dealing with an infinite number of the same being, all slightly different, speaking to each other, before events start to play out. The oldest Dream, the Dream of the first beings, talks to the others, and as each of the Dreams seems to be pulled away, Morpheus summons one who can answer his questions about the death of the Dream in the previous issue and what he was told about a coming end of all things. And in the end, Morpheus heads off with the Dream of Cats to go to a place the Endless should not walk and meet with a being whose description left me with my jaw on the floor. For an issue where there is next to no action in the strict sense of the word, an issue that is for all intents and purposes and extended monologue, a lot happens. The understanding of the cosmology of the universe the Endless exist in is expanded, and the threat is made more clear. And as ever, the art of JH Williams III is something to behold. It is literally breathtaking; there were some of his trademark double page spreads that made my breath catch in my throat. The different Dreams are all meticulously crafted, all different yet still clearly aspects of one being, and the dream house that Daniel and Hettie walk through is a twisted house that is part Escher, part Giger, but all the lush painted art of Williams. According to Gaiman, we won't be seeing issue three until July, another four months, and while I won't say I'm not disappointed, the quality of the first two issues makes it worth the wait.

Deadpool loves married! Marvel announced earlier this year that its overmarketed Merc-with-a-mouth will be getting hitched in April’s issue 27 (issue 26 came out last week), a megasized book featuring backup strips from the creators who have helped shape the character over the years, including Fabian Nicieza, Joe Kelly, Christopher Priest, Frank Tieri, Gail Simone, Daniel Way and more.

All of those writers put their stamps on the character. Nicieza co-created Deadpool with Rob Liefeld and a decade later partnered him with Cable for a buddy-cop comedy that totally shouldn’t have worked but did. Priest made Deadpool obscenely self-aware. Tieri returned him to the Weapon X program. Simone body-swapped him and replaced him with a completely different character. Way gave him multiple voices in his head, a facet of the character that made its way into a 2013 video game. And current writers Gerry Duggan and Brian Posehn have woven Wade Wilson deeper into the tapestry of the larger Marvel Universe (while letting their comedian friends write letters to the editor and creating SHIELD agents in the image of 30 Rock’s Scott Adsit).

But there was a time, long before all that, when Deadpool was a relative baby in the universe, a supporting player in X-Force who carried a pair of miniseries but otherwise was known as the guy who looked like a cross between Spider-Man and Deathstroke the Terminator. Kelly gave Deadpool a backstory, people to care about, people to spar with and about a billion pop culture jokes in between.

That doesn’t necessarily mean the book was a commercial success, of course.

“I was told we were canceled almost every third issue, and it got to be so ridiculous because I couldn’t plan anything. Eventually I left with issue #33 because I was just tired of being told we would be gone soon. I had more stories, but I feel I said everything I wanted to and it was a good place to leave,” he told Bleeding Cool in an October 2013 interview.

And Kelly gave old ’Pool a proper ending, letting him walk off into the sunset with his beloved Death, but with the caveat that he was only 99 percent dead and would likely be revived in 30 days.

But back to the beginning. Kelly sets the tone right away in issue No. 1, having Deadpool sneak up on a Bolivian guerilla squad while at the same time speaking his yellow-box exposition out loud.

At the outset, Wade's supporting cast includes Weasel, his weapons and tech supplier; Blind Alfred, an Aunt May lookalike he keeps prisoner; Gerry, a Haight-Ashbury hobo in whom our antihero confides; Patch (not this one), a diminutive mustachioed man who gives Wade his jobs; CF, a fellow merc who Wade regularly puts Looney Tunes-style hurts on, to no permanent injury; Fenway, another merc who talks in baseball speak (none more one-note); and T-Ray, an albino Akuma-from-Street Fighter knockoff who antagonizes Wade at every opportunity, wears a bandage on his nose at all times and knows magic.

Kelly's run begins a long line of writers showing Wade he could be a great hero if he wasn't such a self-loathing a-hole. Right off the bat, he risks his life to stabilize a gamma core nearing critical mass in Antarctica after a fight with Alpha Flight's Sasquatch. (Yup, Sasquatch, that was the big "get" for the first issue of this series, though to be fair, this was not long after Onslaught, and most of the big Marvel heroes were in a pocket dimension. But still, Wolverine was available. I’m pretty sure he had no nose at the time, but he was available.)

The first DP series also introduced much of the world to Ed McGuinness, whose blocky, yet-round-at-the-edges style has provided the perfect pencils for Superman, Hulk, Nightcrawler and more since then. Some of the most fun art is in the scenes at Hellhouse, where mercs go to get their orders and McGuinness and other artists go to draw background characters who look like Street Fighter and Mortal Kombat characters, because it was the ’90s.

Kelly was an early adopter of the recap page at the beginning of the book explaining the players and their current predicaments plus jokes and jokes and jokes. Not long after the book's debut, Marvel began including recap pages with many more of their books, sometimes in gatefold format. Nicieza’s later Cable and Deadpool series also used the recap page to set things up and deliver additional jokes.

The series also sets up a long-term frenemyship with Taskmaster, who before Kelly was an obscure Avengers villain but after becoming a recurring Deadpool character went on to be a key part of the post-Civil War "Initiative" storyline and even star in Marvel Vs. Capcom 3.

’Pool’s romantic allegiances shift pretty quickly during the first year. He starts the series crushing on X-Force member Siryn, a by-product of a teamup with her and father Banshee in a Mark Waid/Ian Churchill mini that ran a couple years before the series. Not long after, he begins hanging out with Typhoid Mary, the multipersonality character from Daredevil. But perhaps the most interesting romantic endeavour he pursues under Kelly is Death, the feminized concept previously only wooed by Thanos. Of course, one could argue Deadpool’s dalliance with Death is also a far-too-obvious metaphor for Wade’s desire for an end to his suffering, the same suffering that drives him to be a nonstop joke-and-murder machine. But the whole Siryn thing was probably bordering on Angel-and-Husk creepy anyway.

Also, hope ya like dated references! The first five issues alone include jokes about Speed, Ace Ventura, The Nanny, Cindy Crawford, Kerri Strug, Sally Struthers, the musical Stomp, Diff'rent Strokes, Johnny Dangerously, the Macarena, Lionel Richie, My Left Foot, Alice Cooper, Mr. Belvedere, the SNL land shark sketch, Webster, the Olsen twins, Yanni, Wilford Brimley, the Partridge Family, "Time to make the donuts,"The Tick, Herbie the Love Bug, Hulk Hogan, Ginsu knives, This Is Your Life, Carrie and Polaroids. And man, lemme tell ya, I found every word of it high-larious in 1997.

Kelly's Deadpool is traded in Deadpool Classic volumes 1 through 5. The first volume includes only the first issue of the series, as it bookends his first appearance in 1991’s New Mutants 98 and two limited series.

Detective Comics #30
Story: Brian Buccellato & Francis Manapul
Art: Francis Manapul

Detective Comics has had the most creative teams of any of the core Batman comics since the New 52 began. I really enjoyed the last team of John Layman and Jason Fabok, but when I heard the creative team on the (to me) surprise hit title, The Flash, Brian Buccellato and Francis Manapul, were coming on, I was excited, and the book has definitely lived up to that excitement. The first issue is dense, introducing a lot of new characters and concepts, and really setting up what I assume is at least their first arc, if not the themes and characters of their run. We don't get any supervillains in issue, just Batman fighting some street level thugs, although one is addressed as The Squid. This could be a completely new character, despite the name that connects him to a Gotham mobster from the 80s. We also meet Elena and Annie Aguila. Elena is a self made woman who is trying to help Gotham's East End revive, and Annie is her sarcastic, extreme sports motocross driving daughter. Elena is clever, and is able to push all the right buttons to get Bruce to side with her plans. One of the buttons she pushes is mentioning Bruce's son. Damian's death is not public knowledge, and so this is a different blow than she intended. With the return of Jason Todd, Batman lost one of the tragedies that defined nearly twenty years of his character; Damian's death returns that tragedy, and amps it up since Damian was Bruce's biological son. There's also a thread introduced involving a crooked councilman, and the mention of a new drug called Icarus. While the issue might sound busy, it all plays well together and feels like different aspects of one story that we haven't seen how all the pieces fit together. The art is astounding as ever, Manapul is, for my money, DC's top artist right now, with a sense of motion that worked perfectly for The Flash. I wasn't sure how his style would work in Gotham, but it is a home run. The art is gorgeous, and Batman's combat flows. The motor cross scenes are also astounding. And his character beats are equally lovely; the expression on Bruce's face when Elena mentions Damian is heartbreaking. I think that this run is going to live up to the name of the series, playing a long running mystery for Batman to solve; I like it when Detective Comics lives up to its name.

She-Hulk #3
Story: Charles Soule
Art: Javier Pulido

Ok, three issues in I can safely say that She-Hulk has become my favorite comic currently published by Marvel Comics. I love my dark, serious comics (I'm a Batman fan after all), but I also like a comic that has a sense of humor while still taking the world it exists in seriously, and this volume of She-Hulk does exactly that. The issue picks up pretty much where the last issue left off, with Kristoff, son of Dr. Doom, asking Jen (She-Hulk) Walters to represent him in seeking asylum in the USA. Jen gets to spend some time with Kristoff, who carries himself with the air of one who was raised by a megalomaniacal- mad scientist- sorcerer- dictator. From the moment Jen and Kristoff head to the courthouse, we get a scene out of a classic comedy, with Dr. Doom sending his Doombots to find ways to stop Kristoff from making it to the courthouse by the five o'clock deadline. Jen smashes them, steals a Fantasticar from her former Fantastic Four teammates, and even sets up a decoy. Soule does a great job of showing that Jen thinks with her brain as much as her fists, one of the things that separates her from her more famous green-skinned cousin. Pulido does a great job of showing Jen bulking up in combat; I forget that despite being big, she can get much bigger when the need arises. There's also some fun images panels dealing with Kristoff's chauffeur turning out to be a Doombot and Jen smashing it; Pulido makes what could be simple little thing into a great sight gag. The issue ends reinforcing the idea that when Jen takes on a client she will do the best she can for them, even if that puts her in the cross-hairs of a major bad guy. Looks like Jen's off to Latveria, and I have a feeling Doc Doom might regret getting involved in this one.

(This past weekend saw the release of Marvel Studios newest film, Captain America: The Winter Soldier. So your humble host, and contributor Dan Grote, went out to see if the movie lived up to the hype. Here's what we thought)

Dan Grote:Captain America: The Winter Soldier is a movie of basements with sub-basements, secrets with sub-secrets, ops within ops, escapes via quickly created holes in the ground, and tall buildings with really long elevator rides and easily shattered glass. And Cap and Black Widow go to all the floors.

My friend Rob called it the Empire Strikes Backof the Marvel Cinematic Universe after he saw it, on account of storytellingwise, it's easily one of the best of the bunch (up there with the first Iron Man and Avengers). But I'd compare it to a different Star Wars movie, considering the mission at the end is essentially to blow up three death stars by exploiting the womprat-sized weakness at each of their cores. Also, Robert Redford’s character finds the lack of faith of the other members of the World Security Council disturbing.

Matt Lazorwitz:While I see both those comparisons, I would liken the movie more to The Dark Knight. Both are intense, action based films with plots that mirror current political fears. In 2008, urban terrorism was a fear that permeated every day, which granted hasn’t really changed, and that film’s Joker was this idealized (for want of a better word) urban terrorist; he just wanted, “to watch the world burn.” The Winter Soldier deals with a fear that has come to the fore in the past couple of years; the fear that Big Brother is watching. In a day of Edward Snowden and the NSA leaks, the idea of terror using what the government has set in motion, or the government using that knowledge to itself instill terror, is a real one, and the film takes it to the logical endgame in a world where things like S.H.I.E.L.D. exist.

DG:Seriously, though, this movie is more than two hours long, but I would have gladly sat for three. As someone who loves Cap, especially Ed Brubaker’s run on the book, this movie gave me everything I wanted: Action heroes with dry, cool, wit; geopolitical intrigue, a WarGames reference, at least three cameos that made me smile despite my dropped jaw, what briefly appears to be an old British woman who isn’t Helen Mirren fighting people, and Alan Dale.

Most refreshingly, it was leaps and bounds better than Captain America: The First Avenger, which, let’s be honest, was a two-hour-long Act I, as much as I enjoyed it.

ML:While I haven’t read the Mark Waid mini-series of the same name (and I know I need to, especially with some real good press on it lately), this is one of the best examples of showing how Cap is a, “man out of time.” He doesn’t dwell on it, and it’s not just played for laughs, with scenes of him looking at iPods and commenting about record players, like it could have been. But the general sense of not fitting in, of not knowing who he is and where he should be, was done perfectly, not dwelled on, but always there. And the final action scenes of the movie, where Cap re-dons his World War II era costume, both show who Cap is and when he is most comfortable, but also are physical representations on the theme of the world of the past in conflict with the world of the present being crafted by Hydra.

DG:The relationships between the movie’s main protagonists are spot-on, especially between Cap and Falcon (Anthony Mackie is a fantastic addition to the MCU, btw). There's always a danger of Falcon being treated as Cap's sidekick, but that was never the case. They were always partners. And in the movie they find common ground as soldiers having a hard time adjusting to being “home,” which provides a perfect way to weave in Sam Wilson’s background as a social worker in the comics.

ML: The rapport between Chris Evans and Anthony Mackie was clear from the film’s opening scene. The two played off each other perfectly, not just in how they were written, but how they were realized by two great actors. Evans has come into his own as an actor as Captain America, and while he hasn’t done a, “golly shucks,” sort of performance, he’s always stood apart. Giving him a friend in the present lets us see a different aspect of him. And Mackie plays the Falcon as a hero in his own right, looking to Cap for inspiration but not looking at him as his boss.

DG:Cap and Black Widow make great work spouses, which is good, because ScarJo eats up a lot of screentime. It’s pretty much a team-up movie the whole way through. She and Cap even go on a Scooby Doo-like adventure in a dusty old basement with a secret room behind a bookcase (which leads to my favorite surprise scene in the whole movie).

And Cap and Fury, well, it could have ended up being more of the same from Avengers, if they hadn't removed him from the equation early on.

ML: I was also happy to see Cobie Smulders as Maria Hill given a time to shine. Maria Hill in the comics is a hard character to like, as she seems to be just to the left of classic Marvel hardass government guys like Henry Peter Gyrich, always waiting for the heroes to screw up. Here, she is Fury’s loyal right hand, and has plenty of action scenes and plenty of brains, and works with Cap and company not begrudgingly, but as part of the team.

There are actually quite a few strong female characters in the film, especially when you look at it in comparison to other superhero movies. Black Widow and Hill alone would be impressive, but when you also factor in Emily Vamcamp’s Agent 13, who doesn’t get a ton to do, other than have some great fight scenes, but is set up nicely to be the female lead in Cap 3 (hopefully Black Widow will have graduated to her own film by then), you have more women fighting then in pretty much any movie I can think of that isn’t specifically an ensemble movie about women warriors. And one final note, Haley Atwell’s brief appearance as an aged Peggy Carter is both beautiful and tragic.

DG:Directors Joe and Anthony Russo are known for their work on NBC’s Community, and you can see that show's genre-bending humor in the movie, especially when they play with tired action flick cliches like threatening a low-level baddie with a fall from a tall building to extract information.

There are a couple of shots toward the end that are boldfaced homages. Cap plunges into the water - again - and after Cap is shot in the stomach, he lies in the exact same pose He did when he was killed in the comics. And of course the scene where all the fake D.C. cops attack Fury reminds of the Blues Brothers (and, uncomfortably enough, of racial profiling).

With that same Fury scene in mind, I want to tell whoever first thought of having a car or truck flip forward and explode in movies this: I love your work, but I'm worried it's been overused, especially in superhero movies (see also X-Men: The Last Stand, The Dark Knight).

Also as you watch this scene and the rest of the movie, ask yourself: Why was Fury the only person allowed to have bullet/shatterproof glass? If I lived in the MCU, after this movie, I would invest in a glass factory; that’s all I’m saying.

Audience observation: There were at least three people in a not-that-packed theater who gasped when the Winter Soldier took off his mask. Compared to some of the other surprises in this movie, this one was horribly kept, but I’m happy those people got an extra thrill.

ML:Before we get to wrap ups and final thoughts, I figured it best to actually talk about the film’s title character, the Winter Soldier. This film is so much more than that, more than just about that one figure, but I frankly couldn’t think of a better title, and it certainly is one that is dynamic and interesting. Sebastian Stan does a great job acting with just his body and eyes. His origin works well here, fitting seamlessly into the universe that has been crafted, and Stan plays the tormented side of the character as well as he does the ruthless side. I don’t know exactly where they’re going with him in the future, but I hope we get to see more of his interaction with Cap.

DG:Biggest quibble (and I don't consider it all that legitimate a gripe): Batroc was not Batroc-y enough. I'm not saying I wanted the purple-clad French martial arts master to be a joke, but I did want him to fight with more bravado and braggadocio. At the very least yell "Zut alors!"

Random observation: In the first action sequence on the ship, when Cap takes out the first pirate from behind, I really wanted the words "Y silent takedown" to appear on the screen, because I've been playing a lot of Arkham Origins lately.

Trailer notes: I was disappointed the Guardians of the Galaxy was the same one from two months ago. Next to Lucy in my notebook, I wrote "ScarJo is LIMITLESS SPECIES." Who the hell looked at Kelsey Grammer's resume and said "How have we not put him in the Expendables movies?" I do not buy Megan Fox as April O'Neill.

ML: This film had some of the best fight choreography I have ever seen. The up close fighting between Cap and Winter Soldier was that tight, Taken style, with tremendous economy of motion, while fights between other characters was broader and more open. I like how Black Widow doesn’t fight like Cap, who doesn’t fight like Falcon. That was smartly done.

As a personal pat-myself-on-the-back moment, when Agents of S.HI.E.L.D. debuted, I observed that it felt like the season’s seeming big bad, Project Centipede, were like Hydra, and wouldn’t it be great if that played into Winter Soldiersince it would be coming out near the end of the season. This is being written Tuesday morning, so I haven’t seen the new episode yet, but judging by scenes from last week’s episode, I just might have been clairvoyant.

Oh, and just in case you don’t know, stay through the credits in this one. There are two scenes like in Thor: The Dark World, one mid-credits, teasing an upcoming Marvel Studios film, and one at the end, giving a final sting to this movie. It’s 2014 and we’re nine movies into the Marvel Cinematic Universe; I was shocked at the number of people who got up right as the movie ended, and more shocked at the people who left after the first scene. You stuck with it this long; what’s five more minutes?

So, in the end, the consensus here on The Matt Signal is that Captain America: The Winter Soldier is one of the strongest entries in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, and a good film over all. On a scale of one to five, this one gets five cybernetic Soviet issue arms up.

(Post movie trip to the Bargain Book Warehouse. Yes, I wore an Invincible t-shirt to see Cap. You don't wear a band's t-shirt to their concert, you don't wear a superhero's shirt to his movie.)

It's been a while since we've gotten a new adventure of Scratch, the cat who can summon his past and future lives to his side. I wrote about Scratch 9 in recommended reading for last year's Free Comic Book Day, and with a new series set to debut in June with a preview on FCBD this year, it's time to revisit Scratch and his friends. I got a preview of the first issue of the new mini-series, Cat of Nine Worlds, and I'm happy to say it's right up there with the previous series in terms of quality, meaning it's one of the best all ages books I've read this year.

This new series opens with Garogga, the first of Scratch's incarnations, a sabretoothed cat, investigating a bad feeling. And his investigation tins up... Scratch? Wait, Scratch calls his other incarnations to him, not goes to visit them. So, right at the beginning, we have a mystery, and we start to get the answers right off. We flashback (or is it forward?) to the present, where we see Penelope, Scratch's girl, getting ready to go to camp, and looking for Scratch to say goodbye. It's a sweet scene, and reinforces one of the central themes of Scratch 9: friendship. Penelope has to leave without saying goodbye to Scratch, and shortly arrives at camp Robo (not to be related to Atomic Robo, although wouldn't that be a great crossover).

Pretty soon, the action of the series starts, as Penelope and Scratch (who winds up at camp with Penelope. How? Read the comic!) once again run afoul of Dr. Schrodinger, the evil scientist whose fascination with sending his consciousness into other bodies and responsible for Scratch's powers, who is out for revenge for Scratch and Penelope stumbling across his plans. And by issue's end, Scratch has gone back in time as a result of Schrodinger's plot, and we're back at the beginning.

One of the real strengths of Scratch 9 is it's characters. Not only is Scratch clever, but his relationship with Penelope is endearing; if you've ever had a cat who really loves you, you can see that relationship in Penelope and Scratch. Penelope shows just how smart she is in her time at Robot Camp, an aspect of her character that gets more play this time around. While we don't get a lot of time spent with Scratch's friends from the previous series, we do get to see some of Garogga's cast from his short in the Cat Tails mini-series. Schrodinger isn't exactly a villain of great depth; he has no tragedy in his background as far as we know. He's just a jerk. And frankly, I'm fine with that. Not every villain needs to be Magneto, who you can sympathize with. Sometimes a villain who is a mustache twirling bad guy is fine.

The art for this new series is provided by a new artist to the series. Joshua Buchanan takes over for original series artist Jason T. Kruse, and the hand off is seamless. Buchanan's art is fun, light and expressive. Penelope's facial expressions are well rendered and full of emotion, and Scratch is feline while still being more expressive than a cat's face could be if rendered "realistically." The designs for Schrodinger and his robots are very cool, and the new villainous character, who I don't want to talk about and ruin the surprise, has a similar design to another character, but the coloring and the facial expressions make for a smart design and an excellent addition to the cast.

There are more good all ages comics out there now then there have been in a long time, but still, finding on this smart and fun is a rarity. Scratch 9 is smart and fun; it doesn't talk down to it's audience. I'm a cat person, and Scratch is the kind of cat I want, and would be even if he didn't have superpowers.If you're looking for a book to share with your family, this is definitely a book to look at. Scratch 9 is back, and there's nothing that could make me happier.

There will be a new Scratch 9 issue for Free Comic Book Day, and Scratch 9: Cat of Nine Worlds is going to be released in June. Issue 1 is solicited in the current issue of Previews, so if you're interested, head to your comic shop now and place your order.

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