Spider-Man 2099 #1

“Begin the Future History of Spider-Man 2099”

Cover Price: $1.75
Bargain Price: $0.50
Cover Date: November 1992

I’ve been meaning to pick this one up for awhile because I heard that it was the best of the 2099 titles. I also generally like Peter David and artist Rick Leonardi’s work. As a comic, there's a good deal to like here. Leonardi is in top form and his designs for the book are suitably cool and futuristic without becoming campy or seeming too extreme (for a comic book anyway) for the relatively near dateline. I also like that there is very little effort given to tying the 2099 world into Marvel’s then current continuity with even Peter Parker only getting the briefest mention. It would be so easy to make our hero Peter’s descendant or biggest fan or have him transformed by the same equipment that affected Peter all those years ago, but David wisely avoids all of that. The origin is instead entirely original, if a bit too rooted in the nineties. Ambitious scientist Miguel O’Hara is betrayed by employer Alchemax, an omnipresent, evil corporation. First they addict Miguel to a designer drug and then, when he tries to use a gene resequencer to un-addict himself, they splice him with a spider. The origin ultimately takes up the second half of the book, working as a flashback following a pretty exciting action sequence involving Spidey 2099 and some cops on hover bikes. All in all, it’s a solid first issue, but I’m not sure if it was quite engaging enough to get me to seek out the rest of the run.

Booster Gold #32

“Tense Future”

Cover Price: $2.99
Bargain Price: $0.25
Cover Date: July 2010

People seem to forget that Keith Giffen and J.M. DeMatteis’ JLI was just as much about action and drama as it was about comedy. True, the comedy was a big part of the proceedings, but so were but the intense fights with Desparo, The Grey Man, and the mutated Thunderer as well as personal tragedies, exemplified by Blue Beetle’s brain washing. These were the spine that held that series together and offered a nice, if extreme, counterpoint to the interpersonal comedy the writing duo pioneered in those pages. The resulting mix was what made that series special, not merely one or the other. All that said, as the cover implies, this issue of Booster Gold does certainly have the “Bwa-Ha-Ha,” but it brings the action and drama as well. Booster finds himself in the future, helping a small group of refuge esescape catastrophe on Daxam. Unfortunately, the group runs into the Emerald Empress, leading to a truly excellent action sequence as Booster battles her Emerald Eye, drawing it away from the refugees and figuring that the Empress herself is not as big a threat. Booster’s monolog and his repartee with the refugees is classic Giffen and DeMatteis, but the scene that awaits Booster when he returns from fighting the Eye, revealing how badly he underestimated the Empress, not to mention one of the surviving refugee’s reaction to the aftermath, prove this issue a much closer spiritual successor to the JLI than much of the duo’s other recent efforts.

Jughead #300

“Happy Anniversary”

Cover Price: $0.40
Bargain Price: $0.25
Cover Date: May 1980

As with Disney’s duck comics, I have spent pretty much my entire comic reading life ignoring the Archie line. Lately, though, I’ve found myself becoming more and more curious about titles like Sabrina, the Teenage Witch and Josie and the Pussycats in particular. I also find myself increasingly drawn to Dan DeCarlo’s clean line work and very much enjoyed the recent Jughead #200. So, when I saw another Jughead anniversary issue in the quarter bins, I jumped on it, but I wish I hadn’t. This particular issue exemplifies everything bad about Archie comics. The art is almost unbelievably bad with a group of unnamed artists poorly aping the Archie house style with funky anatomy and half-hearted likenesses of many of the main characters. The main problem with the art, though, is the near complete lack of backgrounds, with panel after panel alternating between complete voids and solid color blocks. As for story, the issue contains four: a surprise party for Jughead, Jughead gets dumber when coach puts him on a diet, Archie and Jughead try to walk on a frozen lake, and Reggie challenges Jug to a pool game. Of these, the pool story is the best, but that isn’t saying much. As you can probably tell from the descriptions, these are hardly riveting narratives, with each story full of hackneyed jokes that, by 1980, were forty years past their prime. Still, I’m not ready to give up on Archie, but this issue isn’t doing the line any favors.

Catwoman #1,000,000

“Nine Million Lives”

Cover Price: $1.99
Bargain Price: $0.25
Cover Date: November 1993

DC Comics hates the obsessive compulsive comic book reader, a fact they’ve show with both their #0 tie-ins to Zero Hour and their #1,000,000 tie-ins to Grant Morrison’s DC One Million crossover event. During the month DC One Million came out, every book in DC’s line was numbered 1,000,000, even if it had no particular reason to tie into the JLA-centric story. Enter Catwoman #1,000,000. When I saw this thing in the quarter bin, I thought I’d struck gold: Jim Balent era Catwoman in the far future, with the ridiculous breasts and (God help me) computer cable dreadlock hair? Sign me up. Sadly, the book was both more ridiculous and less ridiculous than I dreamed. The plot, such as it is, focuses on the Catwoman of the future (I was really hoping to see Selina Kyle unnecessarily thrust into the future, but c’est la vie) trying to break into the future Batcave on Pluto for non-future Batman. For 22 pages, she runs around, fighting weird monsters and thrusting various body parts, but, as campy and titillating as that sounds, it’s all just so rote. There is no fun here or any of the winking of the camera that someone like Amanda Conner pulls off effortlessly, just a strange seriousness about things that I can’t imagine ever caring about. Still, whether I like it or not, someone certainly does, as Balent’s been making a living off this very thing for years now, whether Chris Sims wants him to or not.

Walt Disney’s Donald Duck Adventures #3

“Lost in the Andes!”

Cover Price: $0.95
Bargain Price: $1.00
Cover Date: February 1988

As a recent convert to the brilliance of Disney’s duck comics, particularly those by Carl Barks and Don Rosa, I have been actively seeking out these Gemstone reprint books, only to find that they’re actually pretty scarce in the local quarter bins. This one, picked up at antique fair, reprints the classic “Lost in the Andes!” story by Carl Barks, originally presented in 1949’s Four Color Comics #223. This is, without any doubt, one of the classic duck comics, considered by Barks himself to be his best. It’s a supremely memorable story featuring Donald and his nephews (regrettably sans Uncle Scrooge) on a global hunt for some elusive square eggs and the birds that lay them. Donald and the boys eventually find the eggs in the lost city of Plain Awful, a square city with square building, square people, and, of course, square chickens. Barks adds a particularly delightful, almost Star Trekkian twist by having all of the residents speak in thick southern accents, having been visited by a Southern professor years before. As with all good duck comics, Barks’ story reads like something out of a pre-Crystal Skull Indiana Jones movie, complete with action, adventure, globe trotting, lost cities, strange civilizations, and, of course, more than its fair share of humor all invariably squeezed into a fantastic single issue.

Mutant, Texas: Tales of Sheriff Ida Red #1

Cover Price: $2.95
Bargain Price: 5/$100
Cover Date: May 2002

As the title indicates, this series focuses on Sheriff Ida Red, a character created by Paul Dini and featured in a few Jingle Belle back-up stories. The rub here is that Ida Red is not yet a sheriff, with this mini existing to tell her origin. The story, expertly rendedred by artist J. Bone, Dini’s frequent Jingle Belle collaborator, begins with a baby Ida, orphaned when her mother is eaten by a giant rattle snake. From here, we see Ida’s early life, raised by a talking bear in the imaginatively created world of Mutant, Texas, a town full of people and animals who were mutated by a radioactive meteor strike into cactus guys, plant people, and talking bears, coyotes, and armadillos and, sadly, Ida, the town’s only “normal” human, feels a bit isolated and yearns to explore the outside world. This issue also sets up her chance to do just that with the revelation that many of the town’s mutant inhabitants are being kidnapped and exhibited in freak shows around south Texas. Bone’s “animated” style, in the same vein as Darwyn Cooke and Bruce Timm, fits the content beautifully and brings it all to life, giving the world the charm it needs to really be memorable. Ultimately, this issue could probably be a bit more engaging, but as the first part of a mini, it more than does its job. I’ll definitely be keeping an eye out for issues two – three at some upcoming cons.

Strange #1

“A Whole New Ballgame”

Cover Price: $3.99
Bargain Price: 3/$1.00
Cover Date: January 2010

Dr. Strange, who recently lost most of his powers to Brother Voodoo over in the pages of New Avengers, gets a new miniseries with this issue from Mark Waid and artist Emma Rios. Rios’ Manga influenced art is nice and clean, if not really my cup of tea, and Waid’s story, about a baseball team playing a gang of demons for their immortal souls, makes for a light and fun one and done tale. The end result is an issue that’s good enough, but feels like it could have been more. The has been magician breaking in a new assistant angle that Waid seems to be taking with this series was done much better in last year’s excellent Mysterius, The Unfathomable, which also had a slew of much more creative and gruesome looking demons. True, the story seems a little hampered from really indulging its premise by a general all ages vibe, but even that is contradicted by the Vertigo-eque cover and a T+ content rating that seems a little extreme to me (but then I suppose demons and immortal souls are probably a bit much for a lot of kids). Still, Thor: The Mighty Avenger is telling truly memorable, amazing stories right now without letting it’s A rating hold it back. All in all, I suppose my main complaint, and it’s sort of a double-edged one, is that the issue is good, but it’s just not as interesting or memorable as it could be.

Batman Annual #12

"Slade's Demon"

Cover Price: $1.50
Bargain Price: 3/$1.00
Cover Date: 1988

So Bruce Wayne is invited to a spooky mansion for a murder mystery dinner, when, needless to say, someone actually gets murdered. This instantly seemed like the perfect setup for Clue-style secret passages, darkened rooms, and skullduggery, with Bruce Wayne forced into solving a murder in his playboy alias, without ever letting on that he is really Batman. Unfortunately, only a page or so after the murder, Bruce changes into his Batman Underoos, with no one noticing that Batman has conveniently shown up at a house in the middle of nowhere just as Bruce has skedaddled. The mystery plot itself is a little thin, which doesn’t help matters, nor does the fact that the book has entirely too many characters, some of them with three different identities to keep track of: their civilian identity, their assumed identity for the mystery dinner, and, for several, the fact that they’re secretly someone’s father or son or whatever. Still, there’s a pretty good fight scene toward the end and a couple of really nice moments with Batman actually doing some detective work and deduction, so the issue’s got that going for it. It also has a solo back-up story featuring Jason Todd, wherein Jason struggles with whether or not to turn in his friends who have been changing their report card grades Wargames style. It’s so wishy-washy and pointless that I was yearning for a 900 number to call by about page four.