Dam da Dam, Part 2

Hello, newsletter chums:

You’re well, I’m hoping/assuming? I made it up to and through my workplace’s holiday party and I’m hugely relieved that’s over. Now I only have to maneuver my way through the dynamic tension surrounding the holidays—my department is open every days but not Christmas, right? Right, guys? Hello, heads of the company, hello?—get my two whole days off (well, three if you can 1/1/25) and, I dunno, do it all over again in 2025, I guess.

But anyway, that’s not here and not now: here and now is Saturday afternoon and me talking about some sweet, sweet comics (though I haven’t quite figured out how or what, though.

I guess I’ll give you my whole list of what I read in November, even though it truly is underwhelming—the joy of of a service like MangaPlus is being able to read serialized manga as it’s realized; the drag is that a month’s reading looks like the same eight titles over and over and over—with an eye toward shouting out the highlights. (And then, I dunno, maybe in 2025 it’s just the highlights though that seems too….curated, somehow. I like the mess of Graeme’s lists he publishes every month (though he reads so much more than I do, he will compress entire arcs into one entry whereas you’re going to see me do the exact opposite in just a minute). The stuff that doesn’t get discussed is still there, and I think that allows you a certain amount of freedom, should you want it.

Anyway, here’s Wonderwall:

And here’s what I have to say about…some of that:

Brave and the Bold issues #133-151: Such a tonic. Haney and Aparo is just a baseline for enjoyable comics, the sort of shit Harlan Ellison might excoriate as brain-deadening slop…because it pretty much is, but it’s also done with commitment and care and some unhinged stuff around the edges and it was done month and month out so there’s a ton of it?

(Not that it really matters, but I sometimes think of Ellison as a one-man version of social media before we had social media—one part vengeful nostalgia to one part sharp-tongued gossip, two parts nepotistic log-rolling to three parts interwoven self-pity and -aggrandizement, throw in a dash of dead-eyed accuracy—and so part of me thinks whoever the next Ellison is (if it’s not all of social media, that is), they’re extolling the virtue of all the TV shows Ellison was crapping on.)

That said, I started taking more extensive notes in my reading list specifically due to B&B—namely, if I didn’t write down at least a quick summary and opinion of what I read, I could barely remember reading it. So I can tell you with confidence some of the standouts here are issues #134 (Green Lantern renounces his American citizenship and defects to a foreign country, and Batman is tasked with bringing him back dead or alive) (oh, and Batman is caught and subjected to a form of psychological torture called The Demolishment, which I love); #139 (Batman and Hawkman have to deal with an unstoppable intergalactic bounty hunter who’s after Commissioner Gordon because Gordon accidentally on purpose merked an innocent alien during a sting alien years earlier) (again, just unhinged, and Aparo draws such a great Hawkman); #140 (Batman and Wonder Woman take on an international arms dealer who lives on his super-yacht out in international waters where he runs a malevolent circus—the whole thing kinda reads a bit like the seed for that issue of The Filth); #145 (Batman and Phantom Stranger take on a drug kingpin who enslaves his dealers with the power of voodoo—pretty much the issue where I decided the Phantom Stranger is just the GOAT of Brave and the Bold guest-stars); #149 (Batman and Teen Titans and the TT are probably a close second to Phantom Stranger when it comes to the best B&B guest-stars because Haney always uses them as an opportunity to be relevant and rap about what’s going on with the kids); #150 (Batman and a surprise guest-star that was actually kinda surprising, but in part because the whole thing revolves around Bruce Wayne being taken hostage and sneaking in and out to do stuff and almost getting caught like a grim & gritty French bedroom farce); and #151 (Batman and Flash go to a haunted disco—a sentence that’s nearly as delightful to type as the story is to read).

There’s other stuff that didn’t work as well for me but might for you—I’m just never going to get stoked about The Metal Men, ever, and I sometimes wonder if Haney’s ongoing use of “Plastic Man…but he’s a failure and a hobo until Batman teaches him to care again…until the next time he pops up as a failure and a hobo” is a bit un/conscious sabotage so Haney can play up his own similar-enough Metamorpho. There’s a Deadman story here that doesn’t work which is surprising because Deadman is a top five B&B guest star generally, and the Mr. Miracle issue is Haney taking the worst elements of the character—you can end every page with the characters getting killed, and then they’re alive on the very next page because….. *hand wave* Mister Miracle!

But yeah, having those Jim Aparo Legend of the Dark Knight volumes and just going through an issue or two a night? That’s living, my friend!

Godzilla, King of the Monsters #6-12: After having so much fun with Romnibus and the Micronauts collections, I figured this similar collection from Marvel would likewise be a gas, but the first five or so issues were pretty much a slog, I thought. (Also, for some inexplicable reason, Marvel didn’t include the original letters pages here the way they did for Rom and Micronauts which for whatever reason significantly dampened my enthusiasm (and not just because I’ve got a whole theory about Doug Moench and the letter pages of his comics).

But things turn around with Godzilla right around here as Red Ronin gets introduced. In the intervening decades since I first read the original comics and the time I got to rereading them, I kind of assumed Red Ronin—a Japanese twelve year old kid who ends up piloting a giant-sized robot done up like a theft of every Shogun Warrior toy currently on the market—had worked on me because it was such shameless pandering to the comic’s target market I couldn’t resist it, and the re-read would show it up to be the worst kind of hackneyed “Anakin in The Phantom Menace” pandering.

Nope, they’re just great. Rob Takiguchi is a Godzilla defender who steals Red Ronin from the military he knows will use it to kill Godzilla, but then finds himself trying to figure out how to save Godzilla without the big lizard totally destroying him first. Unlike the kind of cutesy implied motivations Moench (barely) gives the Big G for the first half-dozen issues, Rob has immediate dramatic stakes—conflicting goals, even—that really make his issues a treat.

Unsurprising for a guy who loves throwing turning characters into his comics into line-quoting movie nerds, Moench is clearly incredibly familiar with all the tropes of the Toho Godzilla movies and throwing in a giant mecha piloted by a young kid is also the move of someone who knows his kaiju. In fact, one of the charms in this deck of issues is watching Moench contrive a five-way battle between Godzilla, Red Ronin, and three other Toho kaiju he couldn’t get the rights for—seeing Herb Trimpe redesign Gamera to be “Triax,” a giant snail with feet and the ability to do the spinning Gamera rocket turtle thing is a joy.

But all that said, I should shout out issue #9, which left a bigger mark on my imagination than I realized: in it, SHIELD battles to keep Godzilla from breaching Hoover Dam while in Las Vegas, a gambling addict loses pretty much every last thing he has. Of course, he literally gambles his last dime on a slot machine as he and everyone else are being forcibly evacuated and wins big….just in time for Godzilla and the flood of the broken dam to wash everythinng and everyone away.

I mean, it’s a Marvel comic from 1978. Nobody’s going to mistake it for Under The Volcano. At its best, it reads like a monster movie echo of that Steranko issue of SHIELD where Steranko rips off two Ray Bradbury stories simultaneously?

But it does have a certain swing, and ever since in the back of my head, I always thought it’d be great to do an American Godzilla movie where Godzilla was the personification of a flawed protagonist’s addictions and flaws. Until I re-read this issue, I also thought it was my take on Godzilla.

But nope. It was Moench’s. Live and learn.

Sgt. Rock vs. The Army of the Dead #1-6: I don’t remember if you remember this but it’s a DC miniseries written by actor/fan-legend Bruce Campbell. I saw someone online make it sound like this was a thing worth reading—but I think that person was Ellisoning in a pretty big way.

The art is by Eduardo Risso, so it’s not a total waste. Far from it, in fact, because there’s also some fairly inventive setpieces so each issue always has something kind of fun and loopy about it. And in a way part of what’s refreshing about it is how little interest Campbell has in telling, like, a story? The characters are barely given names, much less backstories, so the motivations for Rock and Co. are just: be badasses, and kill Nazis.

One could argue that’s all you need, and I guess one could argue that if there’s anything Campbell and Raimi helped bring (back?) to horror, it was the idea that in a life-threatening situation, the only motivation anyone needs is a desire to survive—it’s almost comically universal.

But man, six issues. If this had been a screenplay, I can actually see a producer buying it—but they absolutely would’ve hired another screenwriter to rewrite the shit out of it so it had something more to it. I don’t know, maybe I should read that Paul Dano Riddler comic. Maybe Campbell and Dano need to collaborate? Dunno.

Gannibal vols. 1-3: OK, so I was probably high—I mean, I really don’t remember but as an operating excuse, let’s say I was high—I was high on the Internet one night and thought it’d be a good idea to back Ablaze’s Kickstarter to get Misaki Ninomaya’s manga series published here in North America and get all thirteen volumes digitally at a discount.

Well. Again, I was probably high, or I’m hoping I was high, because frankly I didn’t get a decent discount on the digital volumes at all and, hilariously enough, as the digital volumes started to come out, Ablaze didn’t distribute copies to the backers as they were released.

Not only could I have read the three volumes of Gannibal on Hoopla for free, I could’ve read them five months earlier. (Ablaze dropped the first four volumes on Nov. 1, the month after the delivery of all thirteen volumes was originally promised)

And I should say, if the comments on the Kickstarter updates are anything to go by, I’m still not getting burned as badly as the dudes who dropped between $200 and $250 for a hardcover boxed set—again, promised for October 2024 but clearly nowhere in sight.

It’s really easy to speculate on how the whole scenario came to pass if it’s not just the standard “comics publisher falls inot the mindset of overpromising on a fundraising campaign to get the money to help dig them out from their previous overpromised fundraising campaign” but the point is….Gannibal’s pretty good!

The first few pages of it, my heart sank as the Ninomaya’s sketchy characters rested choppily over blown out photo backgrounds. But the storytelling is actually quite good! Ninomaya takes his tale of a former big city policeman relocating as the sole lawman in a small rural village and somehow manages to ramp up the drama and the ambiguity simultaneously while keeping it believable? I understand why it was made into a TV show and why that show was a hit—the police dude and his apparent nemesis, the leader of a family clan that unofficially rules the area, are both meaty roles, the former being a fish out of water that has to think quickly and navigate situations that tend to escalate quickly, the latter being a mysterious badass who may be genuinely sympathetic to the policeman he has to try and control…or may just be seeming that way to control him.

It’s a little bit like Top of the Lake meets Justified meets The Wicker Man…but in rural Japan. It’s good. I may very well end up having to read the rest of the volumes on Scanlation sites after Ablaze goes bankrupt, but…it’s good!

ROM: Spaceknight #51-59: Grim as shit. I may write more about this as I get closer to the end of this volume, but reading this and Micronauts and see Bill Mantlo turn into Chris Claremont’s little brother and double down on Claremont’s “these characters are at war, and war is hell” take without all the BDSM boners is wild. For a number of reasons, it works better for me here, where Mantlo has the Dire Wraiths stand in for every ugliness in human civilization—in one issue, they’re causing mystical pollution that’s killing off already-dead Canadian industry towns; in another, they’re poisoning the blood supply in hospitals so that anyone who gets blood transfusion turns into a grotesque monster thing that has to be violently killed! And seeing Sal Buscema drop the weight on his pencil line and just go all in on tapered tubercular faces and pustulous chitinous monsters really helps sell how grim and squalid it all feels. It’s like you’re reading comics done by dudes who have hit the fun part of their time on drugs and now it’s just their addiction burrowing into them and undermining their faith in everything so they’ll never even think they can get help for what’s killing them because everyone wants them dead.

Yup, good times!

Gantz, vols. 1-3: Speaking of Feel Bad, Inc., I also want to write about Hiroya Oku’s cynical sleazeball series at some point but I don’t think I’ll do it yet. But man I forgot how when Japanese artists decide not to put on the standard manga “people are basically decent unless their overly restrictive culture crushes it out of them, but even if it does they can still be won back by the joys of firework festivals, high school graduations, or someone socially awkward still trying their best” blinders, things can get very dark very quickly.

Let’s put it this way—when Ohba and Obata decided to return to the dark thriller genre they conquered with Death Note, they came up with the idea of young suicidal teens saved by guardian angels so they could compete in a murder contest to become God. That is actually one million times jollier than Gantz, where people are saved from murder by an enigmatic sphere that gives them weapons and no instructions and turns them loose on the streets of Tokyo to kill alien grotesqueries who may or may not be total innocents. That sphere may or may not be God, but whatever it is, it cares nothing for those who die, and mocks those who live.

Don’t read it while you’re reading late period issues of Rom is what I’m saying.

Ok, well. There’s still more that I could talk about: Zdarsky’s Daredevil! The end of Wagner and Grant on Detective Comics, and Sam Hamm’s Blind Justice (the Sgt. Rock vs. The Army of the Dead of its day)! Sugar and Spike: Metahuman Investigations! Absolute Superman and Absolute Wonder Woman!

But that’ll be another day (uh, maybe).

You said you were good, right? I hope you’re good. Hang in there!

-Jeff