Some Memorial Day reading

It’s Memorial Day in the United States, the day when we particularly pay respect to those who have given their lives in military service to our country. I’ve never served myself, but my grandfather was a medic and my uncle is also a vet, plus I’ve got several friends and acquaintances still in the military today. Like so many, I’m eternally grateful for what they do to preserve our safety and way of life and try to display my appreciation every chance I get.

Speaking of doing just that, a Memorial Day reading list of comics that honor or highlight military service is a pretty paltry offering in the grand scheme, but hey, you stick with what you know.

(Speaking of what I don’t know, I’ve never gone back and familiarized myself with the war comics of yore, but if anybody feels like recommending some in the comments section, I’d be curious to know which ones were the cream of the crop in your mind)

CAPTAIN AMERICA #255
I tend to think of the origin of Steve Rogers, the original and iconic Captain America, as being the best and most quintessential story about what it means to serve your country and possess that drive to be a part of something more than yourself (and again, I myself have never been in the military, so please take statements I make like that one with your preferred helping of salt). It’s a tale of a young man possessing inadequate physical capabilities to be a hero, but a relentless heart and spirit that would not quit and propelled him all the way to being not only America’s greatest symbol for liberty, but the most inspirational hero within the Marvel Universe. Though it’s a story that has been told many times by many great creative teams over the past seven decades, I don’t believe any two folks captured the majesty of Cap’s humble beginnings better than the quintessential team of Roger Stern and John Byrne in this special 40th anniversary issue.

THE JUSTICE SOCIETY RETURNS!
In 1999 as DC prepared to re-launch the Justice Society franchise with JSA, they tested the waters first with the “Justice Society Returns!” event, set in the Golden Age and showcasing the old school heroes in a series of one-shots bookended by two chapters. It was a pretty awesome and underrated little event that I need to get more in-depth into another time, but the gist was that a bunch of Nazis during World War II use Doctor Occult to summon a mystical baddie named Stalker who the JSA battles in Washington DC, but then he splits his power all over the globe, leading the team to pair off in classic fashion to go after the bad guys. Some of the one-shots were of a higher quality than others, of course, but I include it here because among my favorite chapters were those set in the theater of war with the military playing a strong supporting role, in particular National Comics #1 where Mark Waid and Aaron Lopresti place The Flash and Mister Terrific behind enemy lines as well as Smash Comics #1 where Doctor Mid-Nite tries to put up with Hourman against a similar backdrop in a story by Tom Peyer and Steve Sadowski.

THE LIGHT BRIGADE
Another oft-overlooked gem (yeah, I should get to this one too), it’s a mix of straight-up action with some spiritual overtones and pretty heavy metaphysical questions as a crew of WWII grunts end up with an angel in their ranks and get propelled into a quest to protect a heavenly artifact from falling into demonic hands who happen to have allied from the Nazis. On the one hand, it’s not exactly light reading from writer Peter Tomasi as I alluded to above, but on the other, the themes of brotherhood, commitment, and why soldiers do what they do are really the driving stuff behind this story; the angels and the flaming swords and the unkillable Nazis are just window dressing. This really is a story about the willpower of the human spirit, particularly in those who serve in the military, with jaw-dropping art by Peter Snejbjerg lighting the way.

AMAZING SPIDER-MAN #574
A still-recent story that we’ll have to see whether or not it stands the test of time, but I was genuinely moved by Marc Guggenheim and Barry Kitson’s account of Peter Parker’s tormentor-turned-friend Flash Thompson’s time in Iraq and I don’t think there’s much question he’s perhaps a more interesting character now than he has been in years as a result of this story and the glimpses that have followed. In part it’s a story about how Spider-Man inspired Flash to try and be a hero, but really it’s more about how that heroic drive resides in normal people who can’t fly or lift cars, and how they exist in the real world. I’ve heard and seen praise of this issue by actual military folks and their families, which of course is a far greater stamp of approval than I could ever give it.

Happy Memorial Day and to those men and women serving my country, thank you so much for what you do.

Requiem for Damage

So amidst the chaos that was Blackest Night, several characters ended up taking a dirt nap, as one would expect in an event all about death. Like many other readers, I kinda figured a good chunk of the casualties would end up resurrected by series end, but folks like Tempest, the female Hawk, Firestorm’s girlfriend Gehenna and the new Captain Boomerang were still resting in piece as of this writing, as was former Teen Titans and erstwhile Justice Society member Damage.

Upon reflection and seeing the solicit for next month’s issue of JSA: All-Stars, I remembered that I actually kinda liked Damage, so I figured I’d write about him for a bit.

Grant Emerson, the lad who would be Damage, first showed up in 1994 in his own self-titled series. I found the cover to the first issue particularly eye-catching, so I decided to give it a shot. I actually quite enjoyed that initial story by Tom Joyner and Bill Marimon as Grant spends the first half of the issue as your typical put-upon high school teen—struggling through classes, arguing with his folks, crushing on a cute girl, etc.—and then out of nowhere he explodes. Literally. His body becomes ground zero for a huge energy blast and he emerges as a juiced up bruiser who just destroyed his school. And then he fights Metallo for a bit.

It was the moments immediately after the explosion that really grabbed me though. Grant’s best friend is terrified of him and runs away. The coaches and authority figures he instinctively looks to for support and guidance are freak out too. The girl he likes is actually the only one who will come near him, but he bolts because he’s afraid he’ll hurt her. He speeds home to find his parents gone and some forgettable mercenaries at his house, and the issue ends there.

I didn’t end up getting the second issue of Damage—or any other issue for that matter—not for any reason I remember (probably money), but that sequence has always resonated with me. Super hero comics are usually such a wish fulfillment avenue and that moment where the hero gets their powers is typically such a feel good moment, but this was the nightmare version of that, where your whole world falls apart, everybody you counted on abandons you, and you’re left with no idea what to do next. It was a well-written piece of business with a protagonist close enough in age to me that it really stood out to me as being unique and thought-provoking

(Howard Mackie and Tom Grummett did a kinda similar story a year or so later in X-Men Unlimited that also grabbed me the same way and shared a lot of the same themes, but props to Joyner and Marimon for doing it first)

While I didn’t follow Damage in his book, I kept abreast enough of what was going on in comics and the DC Universe via Wizard and other avenues that I learned his “parents” were actually just people paid by Vandal Savage to watch him and that he was the son of the Golden Age Atom injected with DNA from like a dozen other heroes.

The next place I actually saw Damage was in Zero Hour #0, and it was pretty nuts. After not having appeared in the entire line-wide Zero Hour event, Damage shows up in the final issue as part of the randomly-assembled squad of heroes Waverider hastily pulls together to go fight Parallax and save the universe. Despite only having been around a few months, Damage was shoulder-to-shoulder with Superman and Captain Atom fighting for reality. Even crazier, Damage’s powers end up being the key to undoing all the crap Parallax did to the timestream and he literally becomes the “big bang” that re-starts the DC Universe, something that was both bizarrely cool and a point that would be brought up usually as a jab or self-deprecating remark in stories for years to come. I personally always thought it was pretty cool that Zero Hour architect Dan Jurgens was tuned in enough to the DCU to bring in such a new character in such a major role.

I jumped out of comics around this time, but when I came back in a few years later, I caught up on Damage’s time with the New Titans; while that book may have been on its last legs, certainly one of the bright spots was Grant Emerson attempting to fit in among other young heroes with way more experience than him, getting hit on by Terra and reprimanded for not being good enough by Arsenal until he walked out on the team in a huff.

That second bit proved important down the line as Arsenal would end up plucking Damage from a few years in obscurity following the cancellation of his book and recruit him for a new Titans team (and series) partially out of guilt for not being a better mentor. A tiny cosmetic change to Damage’s costume—giving him white pants to contrast his primarily purple top—made him really stand out visually in my eyes, and it seemed like the character was going places…but he never seemed to get there. Writer Devin Grayson never really seemed to find much to do with Grant during her tenure on Titans, and then wrote him out towards the end of her run with the revelation that his fake “father” had abused him as a child. To help Grant collect himself, Arsenal takes him to the Navajo reservation where he was raised in order to give him a safe place to rebuild; it was an interesting premise, but it never really went anywhere.

A couple years later, Geoff Johns began using Damage occasionally for cameos in the JSA books as a member of the unofficial “All-Star Squadron” team that formed during Our Worlds at War and later as part of the new Freedom Fighters. Grant only got a few lines here and there, but formed a neat bond with his real father’s godson, Atom-Smasher, and again seemed to be building a bit of momentum.

In the very first issue of Infinite Crisis, written by Johns, the Freedom Fighters got massacred by the evil Society, with Damage managing to survive but having his face horribly scarred by Zoom. Johns used this set-up to bring Grant into the JSA for real when the Justice Society of America series re-launched, albeit under a full face mask like his dad wore and with a new cynical and self-destructive attitude.

Damage ended up working his way towards a healthier outlook on life in the early issues of JSoA, thanks in large part to the newly-married Hourman and Liberty Belle taking a special interest in him (as Jesse Quick, Belle had actually been one of Damage’s teammates in the Titans). I remember chatting with Geoff on the phone once during the early days of JSoA and assuming that he was working towards some sort of love triangle between the three characters, but he emphatically told me that wasn’t in the cards and that he was far more interested in showing a genuine friendship among the trio; stuff like that, where Geoff zigs when anybody else would have done the clichéd zag, is part of what makes him such a talented fellow and why that first year and change of Justice Society of America was so special.

Over the course of JSoA’s Johns-written era, Damage would undergo many trials and milestones, including a rematch with Zoom, temptation by Gog, and a challenging romance with non-English-speaking Judomaster. After 15 years of wandering through the DC Universe, it seemed Grant Emerson had finally found a nice little niche.

So of course when he had his heart ripped out by Jean Loring during Blackest Night—written by Geoff Johns, no less—I sighed a little sigh.

Fun fact: I’ve never gotten anywhere near close to finishing it to the point where I’d want to really share it with anybody, but I actually have a half-completed Damage script set around the start of Justice Society of America sitting on my desktop. It was born out of the bug I get every so often to try my hand at actually writing comics—it typically doesn’t last long—and another conversation with Geoff, this time about how to construct a comic script. I’ve only attempted that feat a couple times over the course of my life and never made it to the end, but Damage is the one I’ve come closest with. I’d rather not say anymore, because who knows, maybe someday…

(Another fun fact: the above gorgeous black and white piece by Dale Eaglesham is one I had a role in commissioning as it was for a Justice Society sketchbook Geoff and I pitched to Wizard when the series kicked off)

Damage was never really among my very favorites or even a guy I’d likely pick in my top 30, but there was still something about him that stood out. He was a character who provided some impressively memorable moments during his uneven 15-year existence and likely had a lot more potential than ever got used, so here’s to ya, pal; if you get resurrected in All-Stars next month, I will still feel this post was somewhat worthwhile.

Five Comics Worth Reading - April 2010

Every now and again I read a comic and am just like “Wow, this book is sick,” but don’t always have more than a few sentences to say about it, let alone a whole post. To that end, with no ambitions whatsoever of any sort of regular schedule, I use this recurring feature babble about books I’m really digging.

Books like these.

THE BOYS
From Preacher to Hitman to Punisher, Garth Ennis does his best work when he uses over-the-top violence, gore, and crude trappings to mask the fact that he’s actually telling a story with a lot of heart. Yeah, his stuff is funny and gross and often ridiculous, but his characters are some of the most sincere you’ll find and the guy can write dialogue that will well up your eyes when he wants to.

Back when The Boys first started, I thought it might be Ennis taking a break from the serious stuff to go full-bore in surface mode, telling the nastiest super hero parody he could, and truth be told I would have been ok with that; it was still a good monthly laugh and Darick Robertson’s art is just gorgeous. But over time after some growing pains, The Boys has revealed itself as being—surprise surprise—a book with a lot of heart about characters with tremendous depth and an intriguing world in which everybody is playing everybody…with a healthy dose of super-powered sex jokes padding the panels.

The recent run of one-off “origin” issues for the oft-neglected characters of Mother’s Milk, The Frenchman and The Female was great, ballsy stuff, with Ennis going to the well and coming up with back-stories rooted in classic tropes yet spinning in entirely new directions. The latest arc, in which Butcher has come to suspect something’s up with Hughie—for my money one of comics’ most likable characters with a fantastically Ennis romance—and sends him to do recon on a socially-stunted Legion of Super-Heroes pastiche is shaping up to be more of the goodness.

And seriously: Darick Robertson is amazing.

HOUSE OF MYSTERY
Rickey and I have talked up House of Mystery quite a bit in private over the past couple years, though I’m not sure how often we’ve plugged it here on the blog—well, better late than never I suppose.

It’s a really cool book for many reasons, not the least of which is that it pays off on the potential for a format I and many of my fellows have often seen in an underexploited genre, that being the anthology book. No, it’s not a traditional multi-story anthology and there’s a pretty heady main plot threading through the series, but the idea that every month you can get a cool short horror-tinged story by the likes of Sam Kieth or Farel Dalrymple (to name a couple recent contributors) is just a neat and special thing. The conceit of these stories coming out of the book’s set-up wherein patrons at the bar around which it’s centered must pay their tab in tales is also quite an ingenious one if I do say so (I do).

But the short story icing aside, Matt Sturges has really weaved a delicious cake of—wait for it—mystery in the main narrative. The recent direction semi-change of rotation in and out of certain cast members really shook things up in the right way, as the old guard are not forgotten nor are their unanswered questions, but we’ve also got new faces and conundrums creeping up, headed up by heroine fig’s creepy and possibly homicidal brother Strawberry. It’s a smart book as you’d expect from its pedigree, but certainly not too dense for any old joe to dive right in.

JUSTICE SOCIETY OF AMERICA
Like many others, I was a bit concerned when Geoff Johns ended his landmark run on JSA and fearful that whoever took over would not be able to nail that elusive formula that makes a book centered around 70-year old characters and certainly lacking a certain sexiness still work in this age of super hero comics. I think it took Bill Willingham awhile to ease his way in, but he seems to be hitting on the right cylinders now.

Halving the book’s cast was a good move, since fifty percent of the JSA is still bigger than pretty much any other team excepting the Legion, and Willingham wisely assembled a team consisting primarily of characters whose voices he can nail. Whether it’s the stoicism of Alan Scott, the gruffness of Wildcat, the perkiness of Liberty Belle or that in-over-my-head terror Doctor Fate exudes, Willingham knows his players and their quirks and how the group dynamic should work.

The story arc with Mordru was a nice bit of fun, and now the current multi-parter in which the team is fighting across two eras to prevent new age Nazis from taking over the world is shaping up as quite the sizable epic. The peril feels quite real and the action is well-choreographed. With the focus more on Mister Terrific with a dash of folks like Doctor Mid-Nite and Lightning thrown in, Willingham is also moving the camera around nicely, which is a necessity on a book like this.

Jesus Merino has come into his own as well, still clearly influenced by his years of inking Carlos Pacheco but not shackled by it; he draws real pretty.

WOLVERINE: WEAPON X
When Jason Aaron is on his game with Wolverine, I’m not sure I’ve seen more than one or two other writers who make the character more enjoyable to follow.

I was re-reading the recent standalone issue about Logan’s love life a few nights ago and found myself smirking with every page at how fun Aaron makes this guy who has been a perennially put-upon and tortured character for so long and so often. Yeah, the angst is certainly still there in Weapon X, but this Wolverine is more a guy with some crazy war stories to tell but whose charisma and wit draws you to him, as opposed to the depressing guy wallowing in the corner of the bar.

Aaron also helps his case by never taking Wolverine too seriously, or letting the character do so either. Self-conscious sequences of the writer poking fun at how his charge seems to be a dozen places at once or scenes where Logan is getting a sex talk from Jubilee and especially Wolvie asking to hold Luke Cage and Jessica Jones’ baby make the crazy ass battle sequences where this guy is tearing people apart with his claws so much more effective via contrast.

But the current arc with an army of Deathloks coming back from the future to hunt down a master list of super heroes so they can rule their own time period Terminator style is just a whole other step beyond.

It’s hard to really encapsulate what makes this story so darn fantastic, but it illustrates that Jason Aaron is perhaps without peer when it comes to visualizing the craziest big picture concepts ever and then actually following through with them. He did it on Ghost Rider with stuff like Johnny Blaze storming the gates of heaven on a motorcycle and challenging the baddest angel in the land an issue or two after fighting a possessed steam shovel and he does it here with an army of cyborg killing machines coming back in time to kill people we’ve never heard of because their kid will grow up to be a legendary hero. The time jumps, the continuity winks, and the way he handles new and old characters just so darn well in the midst of unparalleled craziness is just a masterful thing and a joy to see unfold.

X-FACTOR FOREVER
As somebody who never had any emotional attachment to Louise Simonson’s run on X-Factor from when I was like eight and no particular fondness for the original X-Men outside of a tough-to-quantify fandom for Iceman, this was the last book I was expecting to get into.

But it’s really a good read.

My hat is off (or it would be if I were wearing one) to Ms. Simonson for being able to analyze her work of two decades ago and re-imagine it for a modern day audience without it feeling stagnant or at the other extreme dragging it kicking and screaming on a forced migration into the 21st century just by sticking iPods in the characters’ hands. She has instead pulled off perfectly the act of balancing nostalgia with a knowing awareness of how storytelling conventions have evolved and created a comic that reads like a fun super hero book from a simpler time without coming off stale or pedantic; this I imagine can’t be an easy thing to do.

As an X-Men junkie, I love the feel of the story wherein Apocalypse has grand designs involving destiny and whatnot we’re only getting the tip of, but I’d imagine somebody picking the book up cold could also just appreciate the idea of characters with neat costumes and cool powers fighting a giant robot across New York City. The book has thus far succeeded in both servicing those of us looking for a trip back to the elaborate X-Men mythos of yesteryear while also being new reader-friendly.

Simonson also just writes a great Apocalypse, and her re-imagining his full history in the back-up is a great bonus.

Dan Panosian really brought his A-game as well, and has clearly worked to keep growing his craft from his Image days back in the 90’s. His design skill for the aforementioned costumes is spot-on and the guy can do a fight scene like wow.

Our Comics Decade: 2001

Kiel
College, man.

Fuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuck.

I'm pretty sure that there's nothing I could write about my first year of college that would sound meaningful or important. I mean, I'm pretty fucking sure that 99% of Americans couldn't write something meaningful or important about their first year of college. But I'm also sure that anything close to feeling that epic for me came along at a time when I was not what doctors would call sober. At least in all the clichéd hijinx, there were some pretty fun comics around and fun people to read them with.

I lived in this dormitory at Michigan State called Abbot Hall, which – besides being across the street from the 7-Eleven with the most Slurpee sales and variety (8 flavors rotated weekly with a calendar to tell you what was coming) of any location in America – was generally awesome for having rooms set aside for other arts and letters majors. That meant damn near everyone on my floor was studying English or Theater or Art or Drug Use or whatever. Amongst my new peers was a fine art major named Ariel who would aggressively tell me that superhero comics were fucking stupid compared to Battle Angel Alita whenever she had a chance and a good buddy we called Stomp who was known for wearing Morrisey t-shirts and studded collars, running the dorm's drunken Dungeons & Dragons night and getting way into CrossGen.

Coinciding with our matriculation was the opening of a new comics shop in East Lansing – the very well-run 21st Century Comics & Games. For the first time ever, I had a crew bigger than me and my bud Tony heading out on Wednesday and a shop that had deep stock of independent and alternative books and The Comics Journal and even fucking trade paperbacks (a novelty then, for sure). Though with all the new material I was able to explore, one of the books that stands out most to me from that time was a Marvel superhero book: Pete Milligan and Mike Allred's X-Force.

Honestly, the series was a hard sell for me at first, even though I was a big enough Allred fan to schlep a bunch of
Madman issues from Flint to San Diego that summer when my dad took me to Comic-Con (graduation gift!) AND bought even more at the show (Creatures of the Id #1 FTW!) for autographs. Still. Something about the whole "NuMarvel" approach of tearing up lame duck franchises I'd never read by putting entirely new characters in them (see also) felt really hammy and lame. It probably didn't help that this particular case of trying to make Marvel feel "edgy" again was Mike Allred drawing MOTHER FUCKING X-FORCE.

But I tried the whole thing out after hearing about how Allred's art helped make the gruesome "death of half the new team" opening chapter more satire than shock value. The vibrant pop art feel of he and his indispensable colorist/wife Laura certainly defined how the series was breaking from the "gritty splash page" mentality out the gate, but what kept me plugged in was Milligan's character work.

Plenty have written about the media satire and conspiracy threads Milligan weaved throughout the run, but what brought me back each month was the honest and brutal way he portrayed the team's flaws and emotions. With names like U-Go Girl and Phat and plots revolving around publicity campaigns, this X-Force could have easily been a camped up comedy fest, but the characters were always played straight. Vivisector and Phat weren't portrayed as Broadway-loving, fashion-conscious stereotypes. They were two gay men living under the extremely fucked up scrutiny of the public eye. The Anarchist's tough guy attitude saw a chink in its armor in the form of a surprisingly subtle struggle with OCD. Best of all, the awkward, combative and ultimately tragic love between self-aware and put upon leader The Orphan and self-destructive, would-be boss Edie Sawyer provided a rock solid emotional through line for a book that was often about letting superhero tropes wildly spin out of control.


As the series progressed, Milligan did the requist amount of envelope-pushing while Allred traded off with a series of guest artists so unique yet compatible in tone that it seems a shame to call the "fill in guys." X-Force never failed to take chances with the development of its cast, making Edie's eventual death somewhat expected but no less of a total fucking gut punch.

The series eventually relaunched as X-Statix as part of the general course of the story and NuMarvel's "just try some shit" nature, and a lot of those later stories are good too (until things lost steam with the whole Princess Diana incident). Still, for me it'll always be that initial X-Force rush of shattered expectations and surprisingly strong character work that made those comics so worthwhile and fun and memorable during a time when everything was coming on so fast that it's mostly a blur now.

Ben
2001 did not start out particularly well for me.

Since I can remember, I’ve always had a weak stomach and bad nerves. For most of my childhood and young adulthood it wasn’t anything I thought was anything serious or even medical, I just got really sick from eating Chinese food sometimes and paced like a nutcase before my wrestling matches even if I was going out to collect a forfeit—that’s just how it was.

Something happened over my winter break from college during my freshman year that I still don’t fully understand and can’t entirely explain. Some switch flipped in my head and I became terrified of needing to go to the bathroom and somehow being in a situation that wouldn’t allow it. I could not ride in a car for more than five minutes out of fear I’d be “trapped.” I refused to eat for days at a time and ended up losing about 25 pounds. Additionally, I began having episodes lasting as long as half an hour where I’d go into a blind panic, breathing heavily and barely able to communicate, fearful that somehow my life would never be “normal” again.

I ended up missing the start of my second semester as I ran through a battery of unpleasant tests that tried to determine what the heck was wrong with me. I celebrated my 19th birthday with my very first colonoscopy (I’ll never forget the sad look on the nurse who was checking me in’s face when she asked for my date of birth). Nothing revealed anything.

It was at the urging of my primary doctor that I ended up sitting down for a session with a therapist, an idea that both my parents and I were both pretty hesitant about as they both had been raised in a time when such a thing was looked down upona and I personally had negative connotations associated with the practice due to growing up in a rich suburban community where a lot of kids I knew went because their own parents didn’t feel like talking to them.

However, we were at the end of our rope, so we relented.

It was one of the best decisions I ever made, as sitting down and speaking with a third party made me feel safer than I had in over a month. Pretty quickly he diagnosed me with Panic/Anxiety Disorder and began to treat me. Through consultation with the other folks I had seen, he was also able to suss out that I had Irritable Bowel Syndrome and I was given instructions on how to deal with that.

Going to therapy was a life-changer for me, as it taught me how to deal with my problems head-on rather than hide from them. I’ve gone long periods since without being in treatment regularly, but I always find it’s nice once in awhile to take stock of where you’re at by chatting with a trained professional and getting your head on straight. Certainly therapy is not for everybody and not everybody needs it, but it’s done wonders for me, and if anybody reading this has ever thought about it but held back out of biases like the ones I had, I urge you to give it some more thought.

So over-self-sharing aside, what does all this have to do with comics?

I did make it back to school by February, but obviously it was not the easiest transition. For one thing, I didn’t know how the friends I had only made a few months ago would receive me after all this (I’d kept them caught up with the situation), but I needn’t have worried. Still, as I was still adjusting to the pressures and fears better awareness of my IBS and other conditions brought with them, things like having roommates, keeping a decent diet on cafeteria food and especially driving into town or using public transportation without being afraid. And don’t get me started on spending the weekend in the girl’s dorm at Trinity…

One of the things that helped me through this difficult transition period was of course the ability to escape into a world where the eternal battle between good and evil took center stage as opposed to mundane health problems and needing to locate the bathroom nearest to your classes.

Spending more and more time absorbed in comics naturally led to me wanting to expand my tastes; man after all can not live on X-Men alone.

I had grown up mostly a Marvel kid, with the X-Men books in particular being my poison, but I did occasionally wander over to check out the odd DC book, with the Death of Superman being a particular lure for me. However, the DC heroes had just never captured my young attention, as they seemed old (Superman was married, Green Lantern had grey hair) or trying way too hard to be cool (Aquaman had a hook for a hand, Gunfire was…Gunfire). I loved Superboy and to a lesser extent Robin and the Legion of Super-Heroes, but if I lived in the Marvel Universe, the DC Universe was more like my grandparents’ place in Cape Cod where my folks took me for a month every summer.

But as I said, at age 19, I was ready to try new stuff (in comics…pervs), so it was off to the DCU for me. JSA ended up being my gateway drug to a whole new level of the comic habit.

I was surfing Sarge’s for something to sample and the cover to JSA #27 by Rags Morales jumped out at me; I had a vague idea about the Golden Age Green Lantern and Black Adam from stuff like Zero Hour or articles in Wizard, but most of the other characters ere complete mysteries to me—mysteries with really neat costumes who Rags made look absolutely awesome.

Picking up JSA #27 revealed JSA #26, a cover with even more heroes completely foreign to me, with Hawkman, who I’d always thought of as one of the worst characters ever (everybody can fly, they just don’t all have giant cumbersome wings), standing front and center looking bad ass.

Perhaps this DC stuff I had written off years earlier had something to offer.

Because I had some disposable income from working at the school’s snack shop and needed to fill my days with something other than dwelling on my health, I snatched up half a dozen issues of JSA on a whim. By this point it was the fall of my sophomore year and I had my own room, so I was able to dive right into my new treasures without the prying eyes of roomates or unexpected visitors.

It’s definitely a bit ironic that I had shied away from DC as a kid because I thought of them as being “too old,” and yet here I was getting totally absorbed into a book headlined by some of the oldest characters of them all. But just as my teenage years had been all about youthful rebellion, pierced ears and razor stubble for me, I guess as I approached 20 and was confronted with setbacks considerably more serious than trying to sneak into R-rated movies, suddenly the idea of a place where the heroic ideal glows strong and people don’t fade away and become irrelevant as they age appealed to me a whole lot.

That’s what I found with DC. While I was still heavily into Marvel, and it’s protagonists with feet of clay, there was something beautiful about the stalwart champions of the DC Universe and the vast mythology they carried with them. At a time when optimism was what I needed most, books like JSA, Flash and Young Justice became just what the doctor ordered (along with medication and the aforementioned therapy).

And of course the coolest thing about waiting until I was in college to really discover the “other” comic company was that suddenly I had literally tens of thousands of new stories to explore. Reading JSA made me want to learn more about the other heroes of the DCU, so I picked up Batman, Superman and Titans. Reading those made me curious about DC’s past, so I hit the back issue bins for old runs of Justice League of America. Falling in love with George Perez’s art led to tracking down his full tenure on New Teen Titans with Marv Wolfman, which I have discussed at length here before. And all that led to the motherload: taking the gift certificate to New England Comics that my girlfriend’s parents gave me for Chanukah (which in retrospect I believe was their way of thumbing their noses at what they felt was my immaturity, but I could be completely off-base as they were always pretty nice to me) and using it to buy the biggest trade on the shelves: Crisis on Infinite Earths.

I wrapped up 2001 using the first half of my winter break to get lost in Crisis, mentally noting all the new (to me) characters I wanted to read more about later and thinking about what a difference a year makes.

Oh, and of course JSA also introduced me to the work of writer Geoff Johns, who would become very important not just to my fandom but my professional life as the decade rolled on, but we’ll get to that later.


Rickey
It's hard to remember how I first found out about Dave Crosland. Part of me feels like I first read about the intensely stylized writer/artist in a Wizard Magazine sidebar. Part of me remembers reading Jim Mahfood's website where he talked about Crosland with such contagious excitement that I caught the bug. And another part of me remembers stumbling across one of Crosland's "Slop" mini-comics while browsing the indie section of a comic shop in Austin, Texas. Whatever the introduction was, it split open the worlds of do-it-yourself and alternative comics for me to such a profound degree that I credit Crosland's work for helping me develop as an artist and a comics reader.

DIY comic?! What the fuck?! I can draw ANYTHING I want with ANY characters I want and then print it off at a Kinko's as a mini-comic and get my local comic shop to buy them and sell them for me?! MADNESS. But that's just what I ended up doing for the better part of about 6 years thanks to books like Crosland's. I remember lots of spectacular nights in my dorm sitting up late with my best friend Josh and drawing comics together and listening to music and talking about designs and ideas we otherwise never would have. Slop's energetic, signature style showed me and Josh that there was a market out there for just about every kind of comic and Slop's wide range of genres (poetic war parables, action-packed ninja tales, bizarre full-page pin-ups with an urban flair) and zany layouts taught us anything was possible when you were your own editor and publisher; and that creative freedom is the SOUL of indie comic-making.

My new addiction to Slop and other mini-comics kept me so consistently glued to the indie sections of all the local comic shops that I started growing an interest in and recognizing other artists I still adore today. It was my shopping for Crosland's work that helped put creators like Adrian Tomine and Chris Ware and James Kochalka on my radar. And it was THEIR work that put the works of guys like Seth and Yoshihiro Tatsumi and Paul Pope on my radar. And it was guys like that who put the literary alt comics scene on my radar and so on until NOW where I'm driving to shows like SPX and MoCCA and talking intelligently about comics with friends and sifting out PRECISELY what I like in a comic. It all grew out of simple 20-page Xerox'd mini-comics. And thanks to Crosland, I have many bookshelves bowing under the weight of MANY creatively explosive mini-comics from over the past decade whose contents get me just as excited about comic art and design as they did in 2001. Crosland's minis were popping with such fervor and life that they not only entertained me—they INSPIRED me to create. When was the last time a comic did that for you?

PS: I eventually met Crosland and his enthusiasm was no only-for-the-page show. I still have the business card he gave me tucked away in my wallet.