POBB December 5, 2018

Pick of the Brown Bag

December 5, 2018

by

Ray Tate

Welcome to the Pick of the Brown Bag.  I'm Ray Tate, and I take the hits for you, so you don't waste your money on trash.  This week's contenders include Batman, Doctor Who, Immortal Hulk, The Martian Manhunter, Nightwing, Red Hood, Star Trek/Transformers, West Coast Avengers and The Wrong Earth. As always, should you not have the time to check me out here, I'm on Twitter: #PickoftheBrownBag.

In 1955 Detective Comics, Professor Erdel mistakenly transported Martian scientist J’onn J’onzz to our world and died from a weak heart before he could reverse the polarity of the neutron flow. 

Stranded, J’onn assumed the form of a nondescript human named John Jones, joined the police force and put his superior mind and power to work against crime, which Martian evolution eliminated long ago.  

Diane Meade entered the picture in 1957 under the terribly titled story  “Female Nemesis.”  She crimped J’onn J’onzz’s style something fierce.  Her femininity however had nothing to do with it.  J’onn worked best when alone.  Then he could employ a vast array of powers.  

Diane eventually becomes a full cast member and an unwittingly progressive love interest.  Despite being a green-skinned alien, J'onn in the original adventures didn't face the kind of racism you expect.  Men shake his hand.  Women kiss him.  Diane wants bed him.

Actually, Kermit…

J’onn with Batman, Superman, Wonder Woman, The Flash, Aquaman and Green Lantern establish the Justice League.  He becomes the face of the Justice League in the Post-Crisis.  J.M. DeMatteis and Mark Badger tweak some of his mythology in a funky mini-series.  They reveal J'onn's native form, which Bruce Timm and company will use in the animated series Justice League.

Jon Ostrander and Tom Mandrake succeed in giving J’onn his own comic book.  Taking a page from another Martian Manhunter series American Secrets, they firmly establish J’onn’s longevity and wisdom by equivocating his fictional and historical introduction.  In fiction-context, among the DC heroes only Wonder Woman is older than J’onn.

Steve Orlando reintroduces J’onn J’onzz in a new miniseries, and boy howdy does it suck.  Instead of making J’onn, a scientist or a Martian detective as some reorganized his origin, Orlando turns J’onn into a Martian mob enforcer who lords over Mars’ seediest sections.

Orlando’s short run on Wonder Woman knocked me out.  This is Orlando at his worst.  Orlando grafts Hawkworld onto The Martian Manhunter.  It's a nightmare.

Tim Truman reintroduced Hawkman and Hawkgirl in Hawkworld during the nineties.  Hawkworld served as a wrecking ball to continuity.  In Hawkworld, Katar Hol and Shayera Thal deal with their historical enemy Byth, but Byth in this story is a crooked cop/drug addict and dealer.  He trades in Krotan which allows the user to change shape.

The shape-shifter J'onn is a crooked cop on a gritty Mars, that eschews the Utopian pulp source material.  This latest version of Martian Manhunter also serves as a wrecking ball to continuity.  It appears a drug from Mars called Fright Foam made its way to earth where John Jones and Diane Meade investigate a domestic homicide.  Show me how this story differs from Hawkworld.  The only minor change is that J'onn is both present tense protagonist and past tense antagonist.

Although, I suppose Orlando's real question is how did a Martian scumbag turn into the heroic Maritan Manhunter.  This mini-series opts to answer a question that until now didn't need posed.  J'onn J'onzz never was a Martian scumbag.

The best shake-up of the Martian Manhunter’s lore occurred outside of DC Comics.  Ever since former Alias and Mantis star Carl Lumbly voiced the Martian Manhunter so eloquently in Justice League, black actors portrayed the Martian Manhunter.  Phil Morris essayed the character on Smallville and now David Harewood on Supergirl.  It puzzles me why Orlando and artist Riley Rossmo maintains his historical whiteness, albeit in a grotesquely cartoonish caricature.

As to Diane Meade, I could laud her rank as detective, but Mark Waid and Brian Augustyn did it first.  So, instead, I’ll ask what the hell’s up with the Johnny Bravo hair?

In summary, The Martian Manhunter is derivative, repulsive due to a betrayal of J’onn J’onzz’s character, white and rife with take-it-or-leave-it artwork better suited for the Ralph Bakshi Mighty Mouse series from the 1980s.  Mind you, probably no other artist better captures the protean sex lives of Martians.  Of course, I really didn’t ask for that.

In the last issue of Doctor Who, a group of aliens known as the Grand Army of the Just surrounded the Doctor and friends as they investigated the appearance of a human wearing a Vortex Manipulator, forever known in Doctor Who parlay as “cheap and nasty time travel.”

Captured, the Doctor, Yaz, Graham and Ryan attempt to use their resources to make good from a bad situation. Naturally, the Doctor is a few steps ahead of everyone and smoothly orchestrates their escape.

Tone, comedy and dialogue along with Rachel Stott’s superb art capture the look and feel of the new Doctor Who.  Although occasionally Jody Houser’s dialogue gets a little repetitive when factoring in the premiere.  No doubt due to the freshness of Doctor Who's new season.

Doctor Who’s plot thickens as our neophyte time traveler introduces himself and relates a judicious smattering of facts but not the whole truth.

He and his partner are prisoners of the newest Doctor Who Big Bad, a beast that looks a little like Anubis but probably unrelated to the Egyptian Gods the Doctor’s already met in the series and in the comic books.  He's not an established Doctor Who creature, folks.  So revealing his presence isn't a spoiler.

Congratulations to Scott Lobdell who did what I thought impossible.  He raised Batwoman from flatline to mediocre. 

Batwoman and Red Hood followed breadcrumbs that led them to a criminal organization nesting in a Mayberry like town.  

The townsfolk overcame Jason through sheer numbers and left him to be killed by a Solomon Grundy stand-in.  Batwoman showed up and the battle did begin.

Batwoman's team-up with Jason Todd is notable because Lobdell ticks off all the boxes that comprise the unconnected background of Batwoman.  She talks military since she was a soldier: “hostiles,” “fall back” and “advantage to press.”  

Because of her soldiering, she’s no mean fighter.  However, as far as I know, Batman never trained her.  So, she shouldn’t really be equal to Jason or any of the immediate Batman Family.  

I suppose you can argue that maybe, just maybe, a really good soldier can plausibly take out the Grundy robots—cleverly named Mondays.

Oh, and Lobdell doesn’t forget to remind the reader why Batwoman exists in the DC Universe.

She’s gay.  No, I’m not disparaging the LGBT community or LGBT characters.  I support LGBT.  However, I’m as interested in this Batgirl-substitute as much as I’m interested in any Batgirl-substitute.  Not at all.

Lobdell furthermore goes above and beyond to make Batwoman almost tolerable. He gives Batwoman a touch, just a touch of humanity.  She conveys her condolences to Jason.  This is probably the first time Batwoman ever managed an emotion.

Dick Grayson currently suffers from amnesia caused by the trauma he experienced in Batman  He’s now Ric Grayson, happy-go-lucky taxi driver and scrounger trying to forge a new life.  Because of his injury he must seek out mental counseling, and sister, does he choose the wrong doctor.

That is Jonathan Crane, also known as the Scarecrow, currently enjoying Arkham Asylum’s revolving door policy.  As previous issues of Nightwing intimated in flashback, Johnathan Crane hates Robin because he refused to succumb to fear.  Indeed, the lad appeared to harbor no fear.  

While Ric Grayson goes to counseling and tries his luck at love with the local barkeep, a group of like-minded public servants attempt to take Nightwing’s place.  It takes a village to be Nightwing apparently.

Soon, the cadre is making waves in the media, and because of the vague similarity between cop and hero, the reporters don’t drop the penny.  

I'm not a Nightwing fan but Scott Lobdell and Fabian Nicieza make this book difficult to drop.  Art by Gary Brown and Will Conrad blend well together despite fostering different styles.  Ric Grayson isn't a bad character, and the idea of spreading Nightwing amongst a span of police and firefighters is intriguing.  The new Nightwings are also decent heroes being fleshed out with each issue.  The inclusion of the media demonstrates that in this day and age, it's almost impossible to be outside of camera range.  That doesn't however trip up the game.  

A lot of the book reads true.  Ric Grayson is essentially a new character.  He doesn't understand why his family cannot accept him the way he is.  Without the capes and the cowls, the saga would almost be a no-frills drama.  

Two Dragonflies.  Two earths.  The dark Dragonfly comes from the corrupt, gritty earth.  Dragonflyman is a lighter crimefighter from a more optimistic parallel world.  

Dragonfly’s arch-nemesis is a psychopath called the One, who with criminal mastermind the One used a mirror to cross earths.  The Dragonflies followed. 

In this issue, Dragonflyman demonstrates his innate martial skill and an overall sadness in response to Dragonfly’s cesspool of a planet.  At the same time, he effects change for the better.  

Meanwhile, Dragonfly confronts the happier hero’s contacts.

The Wrong Earth takes a simple idea and digs deep.  The story and art by Tom Peyer and Jamal Igle, respectively, doesn’t actually judge which earth is the better of the two.  Instead, Peyer and Igle study the framework of both genres and pull out examples and insights.

Dragonflyman does seem to protect the rich, and that’s because his type of story evolved from the cozy mystery where a body is found in the library of a country estate.  Nobody questions the wealthy’s privilege.  They're in a sense part of the background, something you need to accept in order to get to the who done it.

The way Dragonflyman behaves however indicates that he protects all citizens of his world and feels the weight of the disenfranchised and the victims of crime.  He, like Bruce Wayne, operates under the principle of noblesse oblige. 

The darker Dragonfly’s type of mystery arose from the private eye novels where corruption is rife, crooks come in the flavor of higher classes of people.  So, naturally, the corruption spreads, and few can maintain their integrity.

Stinger, Dragonflyman’s sidekick, also opens up a door.  Mortally wounded by the One, the other One’s henchwench Deuce helped the parallel alien Dragonfly take the lad to a hospital.  Dragonfly sat at Stinger’s bedside and displayed his humanity toward the stranger with a familiar face.  Dragonfly lost his Stinger, and the boy’s death motivated him in a different direction.

Deuce in another scene duped a jury into releasing she and the flunkies on their own recognizance.  While it’s true that Deuce acted out of pure kindness and empathy toward the fallen Stinger, she’s not above using that act to secure her release.

The sixties Batman show wasn’t just notable for its male rogues.  The female of the species demonstrated equal wit and guile.  The Batman gallery of gunsels considered Catwoman, Marsha Queen of Diamonds, the Siren and Olga equals among them.  

It’s no real surprise when Deuce amusingly proves to be smarter than the psychotic One and more than capable of dealing with him.  The One simply underestimates Deuce because of the inherent sexism of his era.  Whereas on Dragonflyman’s earth, women have enough smarts to take over a gang.

In the last issue of Batman The Penguin told Batman the truth.  He’s being played by a master chess player.  Batman confronted the gamesman and in the heat of the moment broke the faith between he and Commissioner Gordon.  This chapter is about the repercussions of that confrontation.

Tom King, Mikel Janin and Jorges Fornes juxtapose Batman’s relentless search for information—read beating the crap out of every one of the costumed criminals loose in Gotham City—with Commissioner Gordon’s slow shift in attitude.  This inner turmoil explodes in a frustrating moment that’s tinged with schadenfreude.

Just when you think you have a handle on the situation, Batman returns home to find a guest in the Batcave.  His presence threw me off completely.  So, well done Tom King.

The Immortal Hulk in addition to opening a major new twist in the story christens and defines Gamma Flight.  Not exactly Hulkbusters as much as Hulk mitigators.

The group directly contrasts the pulp inspired Shadow Base, out to kill the Hulk.  There’s simply no way an agent named Burbank can work for the Shadow Base and not be an allusion.

In addition, General Fortean seems to be straight out of the Men’s Adventures magazines from the nineteen fifties.

Writer Al Ewing draws all these factors to Los Diablos, where Bruce Banner saved Rick Jones from a gamma bomb that irrevocably altered his life.

This sequence of events started because of secret villain.  A specter possessed a townie that stabbed Walter Lankowski, killing him in the process.  Gamma irradiated people however appear to be immortal.  So, the apparition possessed Lankowski as he turned to Sasquatch.  The wraith then puppeteered him into battle against the Hulk.

Ewing basically used the entirety of John Byrne’s run of Alpha Flight as foreshadowing.  Byrne established that Sasquatch actually harbored a demon called Tanraq.  Teammate Snowbird subsequently rips out the heart of Tanraq/Sasquatch.  Ewing once again used Sasquatch as a vessel.  Indeed, the gamma irradiated seem particularly susceptible to this kind of hijacking.

The Hulk absorbed Sasquatch’s gamma radiation, in turn absorbing the ghost.  Scientific ghost-chasers often give an explanation for their quarry through quantum physics.  So, let’s say that the apparition bonded to Sasquatch’s irradiated ions.  The Hulk then took those ions into himself. 

The Shadow Base convinced the Absorbing Man to “serve his country” and undergo experiments that turned him into a gamma capacitor.  So when he duked it out with Hulk, he absorbed the Hulk’s radiation and the ghost in the machinations.

Because Creel doesn’t possess the Hulk’s willpower, he fell as a pawn to the supernatural, and led the Hulk and his pursuers into a trap.  The Immortal Hulk exemplifies an engrossing blend of science fiction and horror,.  You simply never expected such complexity from a Hulk series.

The West Coast Avengers opens with Captain America calling Kate Bishop and chewing her out probably in the nicest way over her use of the name West Coast Avengers.  This name-game also occurred in Astonishing X-Men.  The humor presented by writer Kelly Thompson is a different sort.  It's more Kate-centric.

The scene cuts to an earlier confrontation with a loser bad guy called Gridlock that also allows Thompson to introduce her team to new readers and artist Danielle Di Nicuolo to strut his stuff.

From there, the Mayor of Los Angeles asks the West Coast Avengers to investigate some unusual happenings.  Alas, it's a trap.  Not a spoiler, and calling America Chavez ushered in new problems for Kate.

Despite promising not to split up and fall into horror movie cliches, the orchestrators of this danse macabre have other ideas.  Quentin Quire and his lady Gwenpool find themselves stuck in a Tunnel of Love.  Hawkeye and America a hall of Mirrors.  Kate and Fuse a weapons gallery.

Watching the heroes work things out is part of the pleasure of the West Coast Avengers.  The deconstruction of the attacks demonstrates their under-the-belt experience.  If the heroes weren’t so readily ambushed, they may have figured out that the attacks originate from multiple foes that I expect will become the new Masters of Evil.

One of these antagonists is a personal favorite.  I’ve always considered her a hero, but she possesses the background to vacilate between good and evil.  Her motivation no doubt is a good one.

In this issue of Star Trek/Transformers everything you want to happen, everything you didn’t even dream of happening in such a crossover happens.

Decepticons attacked a Federation Base and soon allied with the Klingons.  Captain James T. Kirk and the crew of The Enterprise entered the picture on a rescue mission.

Encountering Autobots and Decepticons, Kirk and company mistakenly wound Optimus Prime.  After a Vulcan mind-meld however, Spock determines Prime to be fascinating and good.

Too late the heroes.  Because the Decepticons and their alien cohorts attack The Federation personnel and Optimus Prime.  This forces them to retreat into the caves where the Autobots hibernate.  

Jim convinces Ratchet than he and his crewmates are on the up and up, and this collusion leads the rousing moment of pure imagination.

Respectful of Star Trek, particularly Kirk, and the Transformers.  Done in the style of animation and with a complement of cartoon additions, Star Trek/Transformers is a must for any fan.

The CW Elseworlds Batwoman 

Better, stronger and more human.  Ruby Rose's portrayal of Batwoman as well as her new history far, far exceeds the piss-poor substitute-Batgirl from the comics.  

Rose and the director appeared to base her movements on Michael Keaton's Batman.  

This is noticeable especially when she pulls out a grappling hook gun and proceeds to decimate the criminal element of Gotham City.  Blake Neely the superb composer of all the CW superhero shows also gives Batwoman a decidedly Elfman-like theme.

Rose furthermore imbues more depth to Kate Kane.  In comic books, you can mistake Kane for a mannequin.  Not so in the Elseworlds special.  Rose imbues an aura of complete relaxation to Kane and rather than being a rich, layabout, Kate in the television series attempts to use her fortune to better Gotham society.

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Batman is an urban legend on the Arrow/Flash earth, but on Supergirl's Earth, Batman is a known quantity.  The writers wisely do not retcon Kara's knowledge or the hints of Batman in Supergirl. They instead use these setups to propel the story forward and cut to the chase.  

While Barry and Oliver have no idea how to start a search for the Batman, Supergirl quietly pushes them in the right direction without compromising Bruce's secret identity.  

In a replication from the Birds of Prey television series, we learn that Batman left Gotham City.  Kate took over Wayne Enterprises and his role as protector.  

Kate and Bruce are on more friendly terms.  There's a suggestion that they grew up together.  It's likely that Batman trained Batwoman in this mythology.  Given that Arkham inmates immediately fear Batwoman, Batman and Batwoman may have also been partners in crimefighting, 

There appears to be no Batwoman on Supergirl's earth, but they shake hands and in dialogue allude to the brilliant Elseworlds Finest by Barbara Kesel, Matt Haley and Tom Simmons.  In that reimagining Barbara Gordon became Batgirl when Joe Chill shot her father, who saved the Waynes.  In short, I'm in.  I'm ready to watch Batwoman.