POBB February 26, 2020

Pick of the Brown Bag

February 26, 2020

by

Ray Tate

Welcome to the Pick of the Brown Bag.  In this blog, I, Ray Tate give you my thoughts and feelings about the past week's comic books.  This includes Amethyst, Ant-Man, Batgirl, Detective Comics, Grimm Noir, Heathen, Hidden Society, Red Hood and the Outlaws, Red Sonja and Vampirella Meet Betty and Veronica and Wonder Woman. You can also find these reviews as quick and dirty sentences on Twitter: #PickoftheBrownBag.

Vampirella and Red Sonja attempted to save Betty and Veronica from Vampirella's blood thirsty sister Draculina.  The blonde alien vampire attempted to flee with the Riverdale teens through a portal to the dying planet of Drakulon.  Unfortunately, those pesky laws of time sent V and Sonja back to the 1970s where Dan Parent is king or Archie Comics cartoony style.

Because Parent isn't trying to be realistic as illustrator Maria Sanapo from previous issues, the ladies look even sexier.  Writer Amy Chu also intensifies the burlesque with nods to horror and exploitation.  For example, at the drive-in, the real movie Blacula unspools.  

The vampire attacks are remarkably gory.  The seventies fashions designed to show more skin.  Parent's cartooning makes this all palatable.  His art basically transforms the mood like hokey special effects.  If Alice were murdered in a more realistic fashion but with the same amount of gore and terror, it might have been too much.  As Parent presents it, she's still very dead, but we can move beyond her to a strange moment when Sonja enters the Heart of Darkness and she appears to be singling out Riverdale's boy genius Dilton for potential future snuggling.  Lucky Dilton.

Tormented by a misogynist culture, the Viking girl Aydis either had to marry or die because she kissed a girl.  Instead, her father took her out to the woods and murdered her with his bare hands.  Nah.  Aydis' Dad was a forward thinking, loving father.  He just wanted to get his daughter away from those lunatics.  Aydis freed the legendary Brynhilde from the Ring of Fire not to bind her to her bed but to simply show the people that the gods can be defied.  Alas, there's consequences.

The fellows are Trolls and something Aydis cannot fight, but as Natasha Alterici's and Ashley Wood's story progresses, we see that the Trolls are victims of Odin's wrath as well.  This was a very tricky story.  Aydis reasons with the Trolls, but she's still their prisoner.  She despises what Odin's done to the Trolls, and she has a plan of rescue in mind.  I don't really want to give the story away, but genuine sweetness abounds in the tale and makes for a fitting return to the comic book racks.

The new title Hidden Society reminds me of the opening of Dungeons and Dragons where the Dugeonmaster renames Hank, Eric, Diana, Presto, Sheila and Bobby.  Each member of the Hidden Society on the cover gets an intro and a scene to introduce themselves to the audience/reader.  Instead of a Dungeonmaster, we get Ulloo the Wizard.

Who looks, acts and sounds like a Hanna-Barbera Arabian Knight.  This should not be construed as a minus.  Laura, the blind girl, who commands a cigar-smoking goat-genie is the most original of the creations.

The boy magician reminds me of Johnny Quest's Hadji.  Even if he doesn't have the turban and Prince Turhan also from The Arabian Knights, but the crowd pleaser is without a doubt Lucy Lawless as Mercy.

Hidden Society is mostly harmless.  An undemanding, entertaining episodic gathering of eagles that's given import by clean and beautiful art from American Vampire's Rafael Albuquerque. 

Amethyst returns as she’s wont to do.  This time, with Amy Reeder at the helm of story and art.  For those who don’t know Amethyst, Reeder gives you a crash course.

For those who want a more historical lesson.  Amethyst began in the Bronze Age, created by Dan Mishkin, Gary Cohn and Ernie Colon. Though Amethyst seems ripe to be an outlier, her  creators and the Powers That Be actually aligned her with the DCU.  The Crisis on Infinite Earths affected she and Gem World.  She met Superman, fought alongside Dr. Fate and battled Legion of Super-Heroes’ foe Mordru.  Amethyst made the cut to the New 52, and this is the version of Amethyst that we see.

Amethyst returns to Gem World and finds it in ruin, her people gone.  There’s a lot that going around these days. 

She soon reunites with her winged horse, which was once a feathered unicorn but probably deemed too phallic and seeks to discover what happened.  She goes to the former swashbuckling Lady Turquoise who now rules the Gem Realm of the same name.

Not exactly the help that she’s looking for, and for some reason, Reeder crossed Turquoise with a Thark.  Amethyst takes her cause to the people, and thank goodness, the interesting looking one takes up the sword.

Amethyst serves as an excellent introduction to a surprisingly old character.  Writer/artist Amy Reeder creates a new threat for Amethyst to fight and a new mystery to solve.  The art is utterly gorgeous fusing science fiction pulp to fairy tale elegance.

Right from the start.  You want to just light Batgirl afire.  A whimpering Jason Bard spews our dialogue that echoes through time and space to its very coinage by the Venerable Bede.  And even then it seemed old.

You may ask why is Batgirl fighting a dragon?  Is it a cool homage to Tom King’s Batman doing the same?  A bit early for that, but no.  Batgirl is stuck in a poorly reiterated version of Dan Abnett’s Unearth from Titans.

As I said in the previous review Ernest Hinton, the bald fellow isn’t like this.  He’s a harmless fantasy writer.  So why is he trying to kill Batgirl, especially since by the rules of the new game he has his lady love, former publisher, Margaret?  He has no motivation.  But then he never did.

It took Batman three pages to end his dragon.  Batgirl spends fourteen.  First she tries to end the dragon with love.  When that just makes the dragon bigger, she tries courage and hack writer Cecil Castellucci just cannot help but remind us of her other epic fail “Oracle.”

Then we find out not just love but also fear feeds the dragon.  So fear and love feed the dragon.  Logic would dictate a lack of emotion should starve it.  Of course, Castellucci’s allegedly dramatic story doesn’t have the sensibility of Ghostbusters.

This whole thing appears to be Castellucci’s idiot attempt to redeem Jason Bard with an alleged love for Barbara Gordon.

Uh-Huh.  That doesn’t make him less of an asshole.  Need I remind you, Jason Bard sent Babs’ father to prison and attempted to kill Batman by blowing up the Batmobile.  Jason Bard’s attraction to the hot redhead in the story just means he’s got eyes and a penis.  Incidentally, he was attracted to his hot redheaded partner and Vicki Vale another hot redhead in Batman Eternal. The thing is Jason Bard gravitates toward hot redheads.  They are his sexual preference.

Unity? What the hell does that mean?  That doesn’t even make sense because Bard doesn’t know who Batgirl is.  Fine.  Unity forges a giant sword that a Batgirl uses to fight the dragon with Jason.

Unity was the answer is all along.  Then why...

So it is love then? Is it unity or love?  They’re not the same things.  You can be unified in hatred.  You can be unified with enemies for a common cause.  

That’s not love.  And you’re not Kirk.

Can this get any fucking worse? Yes.  Yes, it can.  Castelllucci once again reinforces her idea that Ernest Hinton is malicious, and a Batgirl is blind.

You see.  I am unified.  That is.  I have no doubt.  It is my firm belief that Dan Abnett never meant for Ernest Hinton to be a sadistic son-of-a-bitch.  It is my firm stance that Jason Bard, the New 52 version, is a right old bastard who will throw himself at any redhead.  I never thought I'd miss the old Jason Bard.  The square, but there you have it.

Red Hood and the Outlaws is mainly about Jason leading Artemis and Bizarro on a train heist.

You had me at train heist.  You didn't have to include a weird death scene with former crime boss Suzi Su.  You didn't have to spotlight a Brian Yuzna moment.  You needn't have added a wtf character from the Giffin and DeMateis era of Justice League.  You didn't need to leave me on a Doom Patrol cliffhanger, nor rope in that diminutive cameo.  You didn't have to throw in some fun confusing stuff about the All-Caste or Isabella and Jason's dog.  You had me at train heist.

So, if you guessed that Detective Comics is about Two-Face.  

You're correct, sir and/or madam.  

Detective Comics is indeed about Two-Face.  

Batman's investigation into Two-Face's latest crime leads him to a new murder and some unsettling developments.

The answers to these questions adds an original facet to an already crowded visage.

Valda is the Viking lover of Native American adventurer Arak.  This affair occurred in the Bronze Age.  

Valda debuts in the New 52 here in the pages of Wonder Woman.  The story doesn't really go beyond a gorgeously illustrated fight between Wonder Woman and Valda before Steve Orlando once again captures the whole point of Wonder Woman and what Amazon loving submission means.

Once Valda and Wonder Woman talk things out, Diana realizes that Valda has good reason to wreck of the present day.  This leads to the return of the Invisible Jet redesigned fantastically by artist Max Raynor.

If the rest of Wonder Woman was this good I would be happy, but Orland cannot help but trot out his Mary Sue of a character the brand new Paula Von Gunther.

I just hate this whole thing.  Orlando tries to discretely detach Paula Von Gunther's name from the Nazis and fails miserably.  If the Von Gunthers were using the Nazis to get at the Amazons, a woeful achievement, then why was her mom an inbred white supremacist hick?  

If Orlando is trying to say something about how racists blind themselves with false flags and facade rationales, then why does Paula shuck the life Wonder Woman facilitated so readily once that idiot Leviathan shows up? Paula you see wasn't raised racist.  Diana dropped her off to foster parents of good character.  Paula in the current issue denies that her cretinous family were Nazis.  It doesn't make any sense.

Ant-Man hired himself out to find the missing bees that absconded from a farm.  His investigation leads him to fellow John Byrne creation Swarm. Swarm however isn't the bad guy.  Still, his past Scott Lang will not and should not forget.

Zeb Wells' story is a blast from start to finish. Byrne created Swarm at the height of Bee-Mania.  Africanized Honey Bees were going to sting us to death in several movies of the week, as well as in theaters.  Killer Bees became a staple of Saturday Night Live.  Byrne in one of his cheeriest moods combined this zeitgeist with Nazis and gave us Swarm.

Wells sends up Swarm with his own contributions to the insect man sub-genre.

I mean.  If you thought he may be sincere with Vespa or even Tusk, Thread is a dead giveaway to a punchline.  So, yeah.  Ant-Man teams up with Swarm, unifies one may say to combat a bigger menace.  Meanwhile, Cassie Lang's Mom disses Kate Bishop's West Coast Avengers in a completely Mom kind of way.  You get laughs.  You get dark humor.  You get a Nazi Bee-Man who loves Scott Lang now.

Grimm Noir.  Look at that cover.  How can you resist? The one-shot by Gerry Duggan casts the Thing as a hardboiled detective.  You know he was inspired by Ben's usual stealth outfit of fedora and long coat, which artist Ron Garney takes great pleasure in fitting.

Grimm isn't just about rain-soaked streets and tough men meeting other tough men in two piece suits.  Ben's nightmare which foreshadows the missing neighbor is very noir-driven and frequently overlaps imagery with such memorable cinema as Murder My Sweet.

Because this is not just a noir, where the protagonist acts as Alice and falls metaphorically into hell, Duggan cleverly makes Alicia Masters a forensic anthropologist who reconstructs the face from Ben Grimm's phantasm.  

Thus, instead of a photograph, Ben actually carts around the statue to show potential witnesses.  The fact that Duggan could slip in a 1940s styled opera singer into the mix is inspired.

The Phantom in this case is a loser villain from Marvel's past.  I'll give you a tiny hint.  He seemingly lost his life in the swamp.  When Ben actually confronts the leader of this Dance Macabre, it's clobbering time.  The noir falls to the wayside of a happy ending filled with FF action and optimism.  That's really only how this story could have ended.

Pick of the Brown Bag

May 15, 2013

by 

Ray Tate

Welcome to the Pick of the Brown Bag.  Batgirl, Birds of Prey, Catwoman, Nightwing, Simpsons Comics, Supergirl and Wonder Woman are on this week's hit list.

Originally, Bruce Gordon cut by a cursed diamond turned into Eclipso.

As time went on, writers tweaked that origin to suggest Eclipso was a dark god that inhabited the black diamond and possessed the unlucky individual injured by the gem.  

In the Bronze Age, Dan Mishkin, Gary Cohn and Ernie Colon created Amethyst the Princess of Gemworld.  

Writer Christy Marx and artist Aaron Lopresti rebooted Amethyst for the new 52.  Marx in previous issues of Sword and Sorcery implied that Eclipso was an inhabitant of Gemworld.

Magical trickster John Constantine, using a portal gem left to him by Princess Amaya, gave Eclipso a one-way ticket back home.  Eclipso quickly re-established himself on Gemworld, what the inhabitants call Nilla, by disposing of various leaders and gathering disgruntled members of their Houses.  Possession also swells his ranks.

Eclipso in the last issue turned his attention to the House of Amethyst, specifically Princess Amaya's aunt Mordiel, the Big Bad since the new 52 debut of Sword and Sorcery.  Mordiel ain't going down fighting, and if she must ally herself with her sister Graciel, Amaya's mother, so be it.

Marx works in an exciting duel effortlessly illustrated by Aaron Lopresti pitting Amaya against Eclipso.  She twists the plot into a serpentine scheme and evolves a satisfying ending to the Amethyst saga that seems as if it were planned since the beginning.  I kind of doubt that because it looked to me like Marx had intended to string along the schemes and villainy of Mordiel for quite a long time.

Lady Graciel trained her daughter as a warrior since she was a child.  Marx characterized the youth as a sharp individual who quickly adapted to her new surroundings.  

These factors made DC's cancellation of Sword and Sorcery a mere nuisance rather than a true disruption to Marx's story.  Marx recoups her plans to make Amaya a real force in the DC Universe within a coherent story that doesn't really sacrifice a shred of the major plot.  Her partner Lopresti having plenty warning produces a vivid lush mural that unfolds a superb visual narrative.

In Birds of Prey Marx creates a tale of betrayal and the reaffirmation of an old friendship.  Starling threw in with Mr. Freeze last issue, but Marx, while abandoning Duane Swierzynski's fine creation, does so in style.  Marx gives Starling a rationale for betraying the Birds.

Starling has a point even if delivered badly.  Getting rid of the Owls can only be described as a good thing.  Marx attempts to humanize the Owls when Mr. Freeze tortures one, but it doesn't work.  Mr. Freeze is no longer the sympathetic character from Batman: The Animated Series, and we've seen what the Owls can do in Batman.  I felt no sympathy either way.

Because Starling sides with Mr. Freeze over a debt, Marx still characterizes her possessing a moral code, albeit somewhat warped.  Starling also refuses to kill the Birds, including Strix, and secured Mr. Freeze's guarantee of mercy in regards to her teammates.  Furthermore, consider a hidden reason behind Starling's turn.

Starling was spying on the Canary for nutso Amanda Waller. She may have decided the time was right to align herself with a villainous colleague from her past in order to remove herself and the Canary from Waller's radar.  Afterall, she can't observe Dinah when she's on the run, and Waller no longer has eyes on the birdie.  

Everything Starling does mirrors the characterization from issue one.  It's a testament to Marx's writing that she can dispense with Starling by having her act the villain yet still make these actions in character.  

Marx's Batgirl is dead-on perfect, and artist Romero Molenaar makes Batgirl's duel against Starling a forgone conclusion.  Starling gets in a couple of good shots, but Batgirl is a master of martial arts ably demonstrated by Molenaar.  It's wonderful how artists and writers embrace the Darknight Daredoll and recognize her resonance.

Daniel Sampere takes over for Adrian Syaf in Batgirl.  Syaf's semi-regular substitute illustrates an excellent Batgirl, aloft, distraught, in battle and momentarily overwhelmed.  

Batgirl is on the receiving end of some pain thanks to the surprising edge Batgirl writer Gail Simone gives to a new Ventriloquist.  I'm a tough sale on Chucky-type stories, and even Simone and Batgirl cannot bring me to exactly cheer this tale of floppy legs.  That said, I still admire Simone's attempts to get around the usual, impossible demonic doll traditions.  

Realistically, somebody like Chucky can only be successful at sneak attacks.  A doll doesn't possess the weight to engage in leverage dependent viciousness.  A ventriloquist dummy cannot throw his weight around because he hasn't any.  You can create a magical exception, but it's still difficult to suspend one's belief over anything that can be punted.

Simone finds a unique murderous method for the doll to employ that's perfectly plausible, and the hidden mechanism gives the vent figure enough weight to make a superhuman push a viable threat.  Still Simone's really asking a lot from the reader.  Dummies just aren't remotely threatening, even to a Batgirl that's emotionally turbulent.

Babs suffers from guilt over, well nothing really.  

It looks like the Powers That Be decided that Simone couldn't orchestrate Batgirl's paralyzation of her brother after all.  According to a colleague from Yamagato Industries Business Report James Jr. is alive and about as well as can be expected in Suicide Squad.  The damage Batgirl inflicted now amounts to putting out his eye.  That's really weak, DC.

Catwoman targets the Penguin as he returns to power.  Ann Nocenti produces some excellent characterization for the foul bird and his feline femme fatale.  In a brilliant move, Nocenti demonstrates Catwoman's cunning with a carefully concealed bug in the Gotham PD.  This street level heist and eyes on the prize really suit Catwoman's persona.  Her fight against one of the Penguin's demonically possessed henchmen is less Successful but artistically impressive.

Nightwing features serviceable artwork by Brett Booth and a bit of the old Kyle Higgins.  Turning Nightwing into a cardshark thanks to his circus history is clever, original and fitting, but the Chicago story continues to sag with the introduction of an additional character and a goofy attempt to instill empathy in Tony Zucco.

Wonder Woman kicks ass in a really good melee against her namesake as Apollo tries to protect the throne of Olympus from the perceived threat of a "widdle" baby.  There's not much else to say about the story because writer Brian Azzarello lets Cliff Chiang speak for him.

GOOD PLAN!

Michael Alan Nelson returns to Supergirl for a mediocre farce in which Supergirl's underwater Sanctuary attacks the Girl of Steel and her earth two counterpart Power Girl because it can't tell the difference between the two.  It assumes one must be a clone, verboten on Krypton.  If it wasn't for Mahmud Asrar's assured artwork this story would be entirely forgettable.  

Asrar has a way with superheroes that's fresh and clean.  While agreeing with the traditions of anatomy and proportion, Asrar also appears to be a student of Chuck Jones animation where the subtle shift of a brow indicates volumes of emotion.

Finally in a masterful Simpsons Comics Ian Boothby generates comedy out of an absurdity that could be a reality.  Forced to take two jobs at the nuclear plant, Homer finds himself in a very odd situation.

Something even more implausible occurs in Springfield Elementary.  Bart finds the ultimate cheat code.  This leads him on a whirlwind ride that somehow spins him to Homer's place of work.

Boothby's gut-busting gags evolve within the massive joke being perpetuated in the plot, and the means in which he returns to the status quo is a splendiferous slapstick orchestrated expertly by Phil Ortiz and Mike DeCarlo.  Art Villanueva provides an explosion of hue and awe for the candy-colored city of Springfield.

The artists expand a little when turning to Bart's virtual world, but by and large this issue of Simpsons Comics exemplifies what the talent does best.  They explore familiar settings from the television series and sharply stick to the modeling.  Their imagination comes in the form of how they deconstruct the animation.  Converting the fluid into static yet lively panels that issue the illusion of the very movement the artists used as source material.