WITH APOLOGIES TO MR NEBULA

This ’ere cosmic sundial indicates that it’s once again time to unfurl my bristly spiralled proboscis and use it to pick the rusty lock that needlessly secures the BARGAIN BASEMENT OF DOOOOOM. After a couple of Marvel-tastic instalments, it’s time to head back across the Bleed in search of cheapo-bin booty. Whenever I think DC, the first title that pops into my head is Justice League – and it’s a pretty close-run thing between the Giffen/DeMatteis and Grant Morrison incarnations of the team. 

Closely followed by the Detroit era. I'm only human.

Today, I’m going to take a look at a very much lesser-known title in the Justice League family. In the late ’80s and early ’90s, the Giffen/DeMatteis League was big news, and led to a number of spin-off titles, including Justice League Europe, the Martian Manhunter mini series, a Huntress special, Mr Miracle, Justice League Task Force and JUSTICE LEAGUE QUARTERLY. This meaty, 84-page fifth-week title, published (appropriately enough) four times a year, ran for 17 issues between 1990 and 1994. Most were anthology editions, though a handful consisted of one long story. And it’s fair to say that the majority were a big ol’ pile of G’Nort droppings. Lame, lazy stories, shockingly weak artwork, tenth-tier characters. Was the world really crying out for Praxis, Jack O’Lantern, Rising Sun and Stinky the Cat solo adventures? Who? Exactly.

Mind you, it was at least an attempt to branch out and diversify, and some pretty big names contributed to this thing: Mark Waid, William Messner-Loebs, Dave Cockrum, Phil Jimenez – and Mike Mignola, who contributes an absolutely stunning cover to an otherwise forgettable #14. 

And in amongst the astounding amount of unsupportable cobblers, there’s a handful of glittering gems. I’d recommend adopting an extremely selective approach to JLQ, so here are three specific issues that are worth your pentagonal coinage. Firstly, issue #1. 

Set not long after Booster Gold quit the team in Justice League America #37, this book-length tale by Giffen/DeMatteis follows Booster as he is recruited into a new corporate super-team, the Conglomerate, alongside the heavy-hitting A-listers Gypsy (ex of Justice League Detroit), Reverb (brother of the late Vibe), Vapor, Echo, Maxi-Man (human feminine hygiene product) and the aforementioned Praxis (who?).  The team sport the leather-jackets-over-lycra look that would come to be popular in the ’90s, but theirs are festooned with myriad corporate logos, including LexCorp. LexCorp! From a man who used to operate out of Metropolis… not known for his attention span, that Booster.

Booster’s shamelessly grubby sell-out shilling unsurprisingly irks his former friend and teammate Beetle, and tensions escalate between the two teams. Things come to a head when the Conglomerate are despatched to a South American nation state to unseat a dictator – ostensibly for humanitarian reasons, but in truth merely to protect the commercial interests of their sponsors. Despite the middling art and frankly underwhelming knockabout super-powered action, this it is a pretty interesting story by virtue of its pretty astute and surprisingly subversive political commentary, as well as some superb moments of ‘Bwah-ha-ha’-era League silliness.

Issue 3 is another book-length epic, this one written by Keith Giffen and Gerard Jones, with art by a young Mike McKone (lately, most famous for the Avengers: Endless Wartime graphic novel). This is some of his earliest comics work, and while a little raw and embryonic, it’s still fantastic. His is a really unique style, clean and light, a curious mix of ultra cartoony and highly naturalistic. The story follows on from the story in Justice League Europe #15–19 that found the team travelling to a dead world to battle a bunch of extermination-level villains (a great five-issue run, worthy of its own column at some point). During that adventure, the JLE encountered a guy named Mitch Wacky, who was anything but. Formerly a version of Walt Disney, he was a broken man, crushed by the death of his world, and would do anything to bring it back. In JLQ #3, he gets the chance. He and then-former Green Lantern Kilowog pool their tech expertise to build a machine that can travel through both time and space, and they head back to avert that disaster that killed Mitch’s world. Unfortunately, the process is not without its complications, and they find themselves shrunk to a few inches tall.

A hand-picked team of Justice Leaguers follow in their tiny footsteps in an attempt to prevent the space-time continuum being ripped to shreds. Much Giffen-esque ridiculousness ensues, including hyper-melodramatic Avengers parodies, an extremely creepy robot, a flying boot, mind-bending temporal paradoxes and Guy Gardner becoming intimately acquainted with the inside of a dog (where, if Groucho Marx is to be believed, it’s too dark to read). Yet this is offset by some moments of genuine anguish and horror – an unlikely mix, but Giffen and Jones somehow make it work.

Incidentally, I first read this issue while I was at university. It coincided with a period in which the metaphysics class was discussing the implications of time travel and its attendant paradoxes. I brought it up in a seminar as an example of the reverse grandfather (not a sex position). They looked at me strangely.

Anyway… #5 comprises four separate stories, three of which are stinkers. However, the lead tale, Mark Waid’s ‘Be Careful What You Wish For!’, again gorgeously rendered by a barely pubic Mike McKone, is a real beauty – the best of this bunch. Around the world, metahumans are falling ill and losing their powers. Thus far, it’s a bunch of the more interesting early ’90s second-stringers: Geo-Force, Valor, Red Star, Rebis (of Morrison’s Doom Patrol, in a relatively rare mainstream DCU appearance) and the Will Payton incarnation of Starman. Back at JL headquarters, Ice is suffering a crisis of confidence, feeling out of her depth and underpowered – though you’d think that having Blue Beetle and the Elongated Man as teammates would be quite the self-esteem boost for someone who can freeze your intestines with a thought.

As the JL get embroiled in the ailing heroes mystery, they encounter mysterious super-powered men in black and trace them back to an extremely creepy artificial Stepford-style small town. It turns out the power-stealing men in black are being controlled by an old League foe for a specific purpose… which I won’t spoil here. The setup is nothing special, perhaps, but the payoff to this story is hugely rewarding, weaving together both the mystery and Ice’s personal struggles in a satisfying and unexpected way, taking in some pretty sobering meditations on life and death along the way. Frankly, this one story is far too good for this title. 

It also features J'onn twatting someone with a locomotive.

While largely a stinking puddle of boiling monkey sputum, JLQ is not to be disregarded in its entirety. It offers a valuable lesson or two in discernment, in digging a little deeper to find diamonds, one of which is the size of my head.

Shop wisely, folks.

(originally published on The Big Glasgow Comic Page) 

KILL RAVENS, SMUGGLE BUDGIES

Greetings, largely agreeable human-shaped entities, and welcome once again to a weekly showcase of the eminently affordable floppy treasures lurking in the BARGAIN BASEMENT OF DOOOOOM. I’ve recently been dangerously revelling in the new Savage Hulk series from one of my all-time favourite comics artists, Mr Alan Davis. Which is as sufficiently flimsy an excuse as any to explore one of his lesser-known titles: KILLRAVEN.

Now, the character of Killraven and the world he inhabits do not stem from Davis, nor from this 2002 six-issue mini-series. He originally appeared back in Amazing Adventures #18, in 1973, brought into being by the extremely adept hands and minds of Roy Thomas and Neal Adams. However, his origins and inspirations are actually much, much older. Killraven – real name: Jonathan Raven – lives in a world that has been taken over by Martians. Not the benevolent and thoughtful seven-foot beetle-browed children of Mars presented by DC, but the old-school, Earth-invading, tripod-piloting, human-slaying aliens conceived by H.G. Wells in his pioneering 19th-century novel The War of the Worlds.

In Wells’ story, the seemingly unstoppable Martian onslaught ends [SPOILER ALERT] in ignoble failure, as the invading forces are wiped out by common or garden Earth germs. In Marvel’s take on the story, the Martians return in 2001, presumably armed with Lemsip and hand sanitiser, and succeed in slaughtering or enslaving the entire planet. Only a scant few stand against the ravaging hordes – most notably, the freedom fighter Killraven. A former gladiator in the Martian arenas, Killraven is an exceptional fighter, who, due to unforeseen side-effects of alien experimentation, is immune to his tormentors’ psychic abilities and invisible to their scanners.

While the original Killraven series was set in a possible future for the Marvel Universe (he encounters the Guardians of the Galaxy and is a member of a future version of the Avengers), Alan Davis’s 2003 version is set in a parallel world-slash-alternate timeline. Yes, it’s variant version of a possible future that may or may not come to pass in a fictional multiverse. Take into account that Wells’ Martians also turned up in Alan Moore’s League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, and you could end up in all kinds of cross-company, pan-universal, inter-dimensional knots. We’re several large steps removed from reality here, so let’s just roll with it. And let’s not even mention the version of Killraven that placed him in the Planet of the Apes continuity and named him Apeslayer. No, really.

The basic plot is this: A young boy called John and his mother are scavenging for food among the rubble of a New York City largely populated by crumbling skeletons. They narrowly evade a Martian patrol only to encounter human bounty hunters, who murder John’s mother in cold blood. It’s then that Killraven and his band of Freemen (M’Shulla, Camilla, Hawk and Skull) arrive and dish out cold, hard justice, in the form of slashy-slashy ultraviolence. The group take young John under their wing, and then essentially charge headlong from one grim-but-weird post-apocalyptic scenario to another, along the way meeting the pyrokinetic Volcana Ash; part-plant bounty hunter Mint Julep; the monster Grok; would-be despot Lucifer; genetically engineered Moreau-style creatures; and a whole host of other bizarre characters – including, of course, those pesky Martians.

To be honest, the story itself is somewhat thin, but it’s nonetheless oddly satisfying, taking in themes of freedom and escape, rising above your destiny, living a life with meaning and dignity in an oppressive world. In an age of decompressed, drawn-out storytelling, it really stands out as a homage to the old school – Davis draws heavily on the 1970s source material in tone as well as content. It’s dense, melodramatic, high-concept stuff, yet for all its speechifyin’ and endless flashbacks and somewhat stodgy wordiness, it really rattles along at an incredible, rollicking pace. And as for the art… oh my.

If you’re not familiar with the work of Alan Davis, a) where have you been? and b) stop reading this and go to a comic shop. A legendary British comics creator, he’s been in the business for over 30 years, and is rightly celebrated for his work on some titles you might have heard of: Miracleman, Captain Britain, X-Men, Excalibur, Wolverine, New Mutants, Captain America, Avengers, Fantastic Four, JLA, Legion of Super-Heroes, some guy called Batman… He’s been in demand for a long time, and to my mind, seemingly gets better and better with age. He’s one of a handful of artists whose name on a book pretty much guarantees that I will buy it – especially when Davis is inked by artistic soulmate Mark Farmer, as he is here. 

One of Davis’s lifelong dream projects was John Carter, Warlord of Mars. When he pitched it to Marvel, they said no, but instead offered him Killraven (which is more or less the same thing). Davis’s passion for the concept is palpable, and the resulting artwork is absolutely, utterly phenomenal. As epic and widescreen as it gets, with incredible, dynamic compositions, explosive action and sumptuously imaginative visual design. Davis even manages to sell the skimpy PVC mankinis worn by Killraven and his fellow Freemen, making them seem like basic, functional battle garb instead of middle-management weekend-gimp fetishwear from Argos. 

There are countless jaw-dropping moments over these six issues, including numerous extended, beautifully choreographed hand-to-hand combat sequences; horrific images of Martian atrocities; the incredible splash when we first see Mint Julep’s eccentric mode of transportation. This is a world in which Davis can – and does – really let rip. It’s an Earth in the future, but one devastated in the present day by forces from beyond, who have perverted this world beyond imagining. He is therefore able to meld together post-Apocalyptic scenes of ruined landmarks and recontextualised 20th-century artefacts; alien beings and technology; weird, misshapen monsters; psychic warfare, bordering on magic; and a load of sinewy gladiators running around with blades. Like Brian K. Vaughan and Fiona Staples’ Saga, it’s a book that’s halfway between sci-fi and sword and sorcery, and revels in its hinterland status. 

Highly recommended for aficionados of gorgeously vivid renderings of near-naked barbarian-type people struggling for emancipation in an endless war against concepts stemming from Victorian literature. You know the type.

(originally published on The Big Glasgow Comic Page) 

OF HUMAN (AND AMAZON) BONDAGE

I've recently been quite taken with Azzarello/Chiang's work on Wonder Woman, which led me to stumble across the shot below from The Brave & the Bold, which in turn is pretty clearly a deliberate homage to the J.G. Jones page from The Hiketeia. Both depict Diana as statuesque, physically dominant and imposing, with a foe at her mercy. Both feature a dominated male opponent, helpless, with his hands in the air – one naked on his back (or at least topless), the other face down, eating dirt, dressed in rubber. Maybe it's just me, but I suspect both are pointed references to the not-too-subtle BDSM subtext that characterised the early WW stories by her creator, the psychologist and notorious sexual progressive William Moulton Marston. 

     

Cliff Chiang, The Brave & the Bold #33 (2010)

J.G. Jones, Wonder Woman: The Hiketeia (2002)

In the old days, it used to be the case that Diana lost her powers when she was tied up – yup, bondage was her kryptonite. Conversely, by tying someone else up with her golden lasso, she would remove their ability to tell lies – they would be rendered emotionally naked and vulnerable. She may have lost her weakness long ago, but these themes remain, and the most macho of men – including the Batman – may find themselves helpless beneath her red-and-white bootheel. Make no mistake, this is Wonder Woman as dominatrix.  

This illustrates how WW is a complicated figure in terms of gender politics – historically rooted in BDSM, but no longer bound (literally) by submissive roles, having transcended her origins to become a cultural icon. As an ambassador and warrior from a matriarchal society, she's often regarded as a feminist icon, though one frequently treated as a lust object, both within and outside comics.

It's notable that both of the pages below were scripted and drawn by men, and both are imbued with male gaze to differing extents. Whatever your interpretation of the gender politics in these pages, there's a definite intermingling of feminine empowerment with sexuality here. So is she a fantasy figure of male titillation (albeit of a somewhat kinky kind) or a symbol of female strength? Or both? Are these inspiring, kick-ass images or just one step removed from Robert Crumb's giantess fantasies?