Day Eighty-Nine: The Team-Up You Demanded
There aren't enough stupid comics around any more. No, wait, that's not true. There are plenty of stupid comics around. For instance, there's Civil War, which brought itself to an abominably poor ending this week. I've decided, you may be interested to hear, that I'm not going to do a dissection of that particular dog of a story, as others have said it better elsewhere. Besides, for the most thorough kicking you're likely to read of it, you only have to wait three days and you can see it on The X-Axis. No, what there aren't enough of around any more are dumb comics. Ones where you can marvel at the big daft action and the people who punch people (they're the luckiest people in the world, I understand).
Unfortunately, since Thor is currently AWOL, there's a bit of a dearth of stories in which problems can be solved by hitting them really hard, sometimes with a utensil or other implement. Given how I've been pretty down on writer Jeph Loeb throughout the course of this blog, you may be surprised to learn that the book I'm going to recommend to you now came from him - it most certainly is a dumb comic, though, and a gleefully crazy one at the same time.
When Superman/Batman started in 2003, it was the first time those two characters had starred in a regular team-up book with each other since 1986, when the long-running title World's Finest reached the end of its pretty impressive 45-year run. This was a different beast, though - it was conceived as a showcase for a rotating group of artists, working on a series of story arcs, all written by Loeb, which formed a loose quadrilogy that in turn came together as one larger tale. It was a huge seller when it launched, and managed to lure Witchblade/Fathom artist Michael Turner back to a regular gig again after some time away from the drawing board, and after he was done with it the art chores were handed on to the (to be honest, much more talented) Carlos Pacheco. Turner's arc was about the return of Supergirl, and apart from a couple of great fights between Superman and Darkseid there's not a lot to really recommend it. Pacheco got to draw a tale of alternate universes, where various versions of DC Comics' chronology clashed and merged - it featured a cast of literally quite a lot, but if you don't have a Masters in DC continuity it's best steered clear of.
The dumb comics, and the only ones I can wholeheartedly recommend, were streets ahead of those two stories. They were the first and last arcs which Loeb wrote for the series, and were drawn by ex-Deadpool artist Ed McGuinness, whose huge and blocky figurework proved to be a natural fit for the kinds of gung-ho daftness that Loeb's stories provided. These elements included:
- Lex Luthor on super-steroids and with veins popping out of his forehead, taking the old purple and green battle armour out of mothballs to smack Superman around a bit;
- a giant rocket-ship shaped like a composite of Superman and Batman, split down the middle;
- someone who looks a lot like the Superman from Kingdom Come but is actually... well, that'd spoil it;
- Bizarro and his Gotham-styled counterpart Batzarro;
- gender-swapped versions of Batman, Superman and Superboy;
- and a Super-Batman made of Kryptonite.
Both of the Loeb/McGuinness arcs are currently available in hardback collections, and are well worth checking out. Partly for the stopped-clock occurrence of decent writing from Loeb, and partly for the brilliantly bold Fisher Price artwork of McGuinness, but mainly because these two stories take a silly idea, then layer on another silly idea, then twist both of those together into a really strange and silly idea, after which you pile on some utterly bizarre new elements and present the whole thing with chocolate sauce and chopped nuts on top and a straight face. The only word for it is dumb; these truly are dumb comics. With all the stupid comics clogging up the racks at the minute, a few more dumb comics would be a breath of fresh air.
