Gary Erskine

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Like Superman vs. Wonder Woman, Steel, the Indestructible Man, All-Star Squadron, The Young All-Stars, The Crimson Avenger, The Demise of Justice, The Justice Society Returns!, and All-Star Comics 80-Page Giant, this is entirely set during World War II, fleshing out the Golden Age in a modern style—which to me has become one of my favorite types of JSA story.

Unfortunately it is not very good. It is a a long miniseries, at six 30-page issues, but less seems to happen in it than in many minis of four 20-page issues. Before I picked this up, I was reading Don McGregor's Jungle Action run, and it took me longer to read a 17-page issue of Jungle Action than a 30-page issue of this. Like, there are lots of boring fights and boring meetings; the characters have long conversations about things that aren't interesting and don't matter.

The characters themselves are fairly generic. In "continuity insert" stories like The Demise of Justice and The Justice Society Returns!, the writers and artists were able to express the depths and personality of these Golden Age characters, but there's barely any of that here. It wants to be a Johnny Thunder story, about his desire to be a writer, but this doesn't go anywhere interesting. Johnny befriends the real Golden Age science fiction writer Jack Williamson, and this could be fun and meta, but unfortunately, it makes for long boring scenes. I don't rate Kevin J. Anderson very much as a writer, so I was not surprised by any of this... I was however disappointed, because I was hopeful anyway. I did kind of think the usually excellent Barry Kitson might be able to save it, but if there's nothing interesting to draw, it doesn't matter how well you draw it.

The Justice Society and Earth-Two: « Previous in sequence | Next in sequence »… (més)

Access a version of the below that includes illustrations on my blog.

In this volume, the zombie infestation spreads to two more universes, those of Star Trek and Ghostbusters. Turns out that I don't give a crap about Ghostbusters (saw the first movie when I was a kid, enjoyed it, haven't really thought about it since and don't care to, and Kyle Hotz's artwork made the characters difficult to distinguish), but Star Trek-does-zombies is just perfectly nailed by the Tiptons, Casey Maloney, and Gary Erskine. Kirk, Spock, McCoy, and two security guards end up stranded on a Federation colony that's been infested by zombies, and have to stay alive long enough to make it to their shuttle and/or send off a distress signal. It's a perfect little slice of the zombie genre infused into the Star Trek universe, down to the predictable but utterly satisfying moment where McCoy scans a guy, says "He's dead, Jim," and then he lurches back to life. (And guess which of the five Starfleet characters end up as zombies?)

Add in computers with reel-to-reel tape decks, and a comedy robot, and you basically have everything I could want out of this kind of tale. You even get Captain Kirk fighting zombie with a wrench and Doctor McCoy with a zombie-cure-serum gun. And I don't really understand what's up with the sexy vampire lady who appears in all four realities-- but when her form adapts to the Star Trek universe, it's of course in the form of a woman in a TOS miniskirt.

I had thought that the finale issue would involve all the different series coming together in some way, no matter how small, to provide a final solution. Like, I didn't expect Captain Kirk, Optimus Prime, Bill Murray, and whoever the hell leads G.I.Joe to meet, but I did think all four side stories would somehow contribute to the end of the story. Well, they don't; all there is is a single shot of the four universes through a portal. Instead it's a bunch of tedious supernatural nonsense to wrap it all up, and I don't care. But at least this misbegotten mess gave me a good Star Trek zombie tale.

The Transformers by IDW: « Previous in sequence | Next in sequence »… (més)

Access a version of the below that includes illustrations on my blog.

They've had a couple of confusingly-titled standalones to their names already,* but the Dead Boy Detectives have finally landed an ongoing series, some twenty years after the characters rel="nofollow" target="_top">originally debuted in The Sandman (and almost as long since they became detectives in The Children's Crusade). I'm not sure why, but I committed to reading every Sandman spin-off years ago, so here I am!

Schoolboy Terrors contains three stories. The first, "Run Ragged," is a short tale of the two ghost boys (Edwin, d. 1910s, and Charles, d. 1990s) helping find a lost dead cat; events quickly spiral out of control and they end up enrolled in a creepy school. This is fun, if inconsequential stuff: like Jill Thompson did in her run on the characters, Toby Litt and Mark Buckingham extract a lot of humor from the two boys' interactions with girls. (Charles is obsessed, Edwin less so.)

School turns out to be a fruitful setting for the Dead Boy Detectives (Thompson's run was also set in one), as in the title story, they end up traveling to St. Hilarion's, the very school in which both boys died, eighty years apart. They're there to protect Crystal Palace, the daughter of a performance artist who likes MMORPGs but is possibly being set up as the receptacle for demons coming through from another dimension. I like the idea of taking the boys back to the scene of their demise, but it shows up one of the fundamental difficulties of the Dead Boy Detectives premise. What happened to these boys was terrible and gruesome-- they were both killed by bullies-- but the inclination is to put them into light-hearted goofy adventures. The plot in "Schoolboy Terrors" is about kids being killed so demons can use their bodies, sure, but the writing and especially Buckingham's art emphasizes the goofiness more than anything else, and the danger is all "fantasy violence," not realistic violence. Yet the boys have this fundamental, disturbing trauma in their backstories that is difficult to reconcile with their ongoing adventures, and bringing them back to the scene of their deaths makes that disjunction hard to ignore. Neil Gaiman is actually pretty good at mixing horror with childlike whimsy, but Toby Litt is not as talented a writer (no slight to him, of course).

That said, "Schoolboy Terrors" is a decent, if sometimes aimless, adventure; I felt like the boys spent a lot of time toing and froing with little purpose.

The last tale here is "Halfway House," which seems to set up the new status quo for the Dead Boy Detectives: solving supernatural difficulties with their new friend Crystal Palace. I remember complaining during Ed Brubaker's run that the rules of being a ghost often seemed arbitrary (the resolution to his storyline turned on a previously unseen ability of ghosts to create miniature ghost duplicates of themselves, as I recall), so I was pleased when Litt and Buckingham gave us a two-page spread explaining the rules of being a ghosts.

Otherwise, this is a cute if somewhat confusing story about a cursed mirror, dead Victorians, and philosopher cats.

Litt and Buckingham are clearly treating this as an ongoing; there are hints of something bit going on that I imagine will pay off in volume 2. The real highlight of this book is Mark Buckingham's art; I had mixed feelings about his very short run on Doctor Who, where he inked himself, but here, with other inkers, his work really pops and delights. Great facial expressions, great layouts.

* The first was called The Sandman Presents: The Dead Boy Detectives and the second just The Dead Boy Detectives. One notes that the definite article has vanished from the title this time out.

Neil Gaiman's The Sandman Spin-Offs: « Previous in sequence | Next in sequence »… (més)