The announcements of new Booster Gold and Infinity Inc. series got me in an ‘80s mood, so with the help of Mike’s Amazing World Of DC I looked at books on sale in June 1987 (September cover dates) to see if my deja vu was justified. As far as the vanilla DCU titles are concerned, the ‘80s may well be making a comeback — that is, if they ever really left.

Before that, though, let’s yak about the June 2007 books themselves.

BATMAN

While I didn’t care a whole lot for 2005’s “Nightwing Year One,” I’m looking forward to Marv Wolfman’s flashback story, starting in Nightwing #133, about Dick’s misspent year at Hudson University. Wolfman was writing Batman around this time (1980, pre-New Teen Titans), so I’m curious about what he chooses to revisit. My only complaint is that the cover doesn’t show the first Nightwing costume, instead going for the ‘90s ponytail-and-glider-wings mess. In regular Bat-news, having Zatanna return to Dini’s Detective for a two-parter sounds promising; and Morrison revisits his JLA Classified prelude to Seven Soldiers, sort of, by showing us the Squire and the rest of the Club of Heroes in Batman #667.

CROSSOVERS

Catwoman #68 and Atom #12 tie into Countdown, so right there we see how Countdown’s immediacy makes it more of a “traditional” crossover than 52. With regard to the representative cover, Evil Mary Marvel was a dominatrix (welcome, Google searchers!) in “I Can’t Believe It’s Not The Justice League,” so her transformation is either an homage to, or another slap at, the Giffen/DeMatteis style. As for the other Big Event, until I see the first issue, Amazons Attack just sounds like a combination of Atlantis Attacks! and a weird — but strangely enticing — ‘70s disaster movie. Or, come to think of it, a Saturday-at-9:00 Sci-Fi Channel offering with a really big budget. AA’s tie-ins include Teen Titans #48 and (duh) Wonder Woman #10. The Gail Simone Crossover Festival continues, with the Secret Six still in Birds Of Prey and Gen13 visiting Tranquility; and the Outsiders/Checkmate crossover concludes.

COLLECTIONS

The Batman & Son hardcover (out in August) apparently also includes the Damien-centric Batman #666, the prose Joker story, and a couple of upcoming issues that, like the prose story, don’t seem to have anything to do with Damien. The Harley & Ivy miniseries will be collected in July, but I don’t remember it being as fun as you’d think, and I don’t remember the Judd Winick/Joe Chiodo special at all. The Showcase Presents Batgirl volume might be fun on some level, but I’m not sure about those late ‘60s stories. The closer it gets to the early ‘70s, the better, I think. However, the Showcase Presents Martian Manhunter volume should be pretty interesting, because the early MM adventures mostly featured him in disguise. I’ve long thought J’Onn J’Onzz would make a good TV superhero in this post-”Smallville” age of de-emphasizing costumes, and this Showcase volume could be a primer for that kind of treatment.

The Silver Age Jimmy Olsen collection presents Internet snark-fodder in convenient book form. I only wish Nicholas Brendon had written the introduction, so he could compare Turtle Boy with the “funny” syphillis.

I continue to be ambivalent about the 52 collections (Vol. 2 comes out in July). On one hand they’re more economical than the $2.50-a-week floppies, and who knows when somebody will reveal in the commentaries what happened to, say, Jack Knight. On the other, though, the initial appeal of 52 was its first-draft-of-history immediacy — and who, besides the scholarly, goes back over bound volumes of Time or Newsweek?

SUPERMAN

It would be nice if DC’s eventual collection of “Last Son” deliberately excludes the 3-D elements advertised for June’s Action #851. Make the nigh-anachronistic floppy distinctive and thereby give it some measure of dignity — and yes, I did just say that 3-D effects were dignified.

Sounds like “Camelot Falls” (continuing in Superman #664) has a couple more issues to go itself, putting its conclusion somewhere around issue #666, which would be appropriate. Meanwhile, Superman/Batman tries to get back on the scheduling track with two issues in June. I had been ready to drop the title but may have to stick it out through the Alan Burnett/Dustin Nguyen arc.

The Superman Through The Ages special is probably worth getting for the expanded origin of the Earth-1 Superman, but I’m not sure why DC is so fascinated with John Byrne’s Superman vol. 2 #7 (which introduces the D-list character Rampage). It was packaged with the Ultimate Superman DVD set too.

Always good to see a new All-Star Superman. Can I refer to Supergirl #16 as the “shirt vs. skin” issue?

WITH ONE BREATH, WITH ONE FLOW, YOU WILL KNOW…

Blue Beetle #16 goes on sale twenty years to the month that the Ted Kord-era Blue Beetle #16 hit newsstands. Also, the aforementioned Byrne Superman issue was on newsstands in April 1987, if that counts for anything.

ACTION FIGURES

The Marvel Family figures look great, while the Superman “Last Son” figures look very beefy.

THIS AND THAT

The Flash #13 solicit refers to “the choice Bart was offered at the beginning of ‘Full Throttle,’” but if it’s between joining the Teen Titans or the Justice League … big deal, really. Who here thinks it will be the Titans…? When I first read the solicit, I thought it was some career-changing Nothing Will Be The Same decision involving the Speed Force and possibly Wally West, but then I looked at #9 and this week’s #10, and now I am underwhelmed. I do like the book more now that Marc Guggenheim is writing it, I’m just not wowed by #13’s solicitation.

The prospect of a final confrontation with Hath-Set sounds like Hawkgirl’s wrapping up its storylines and preparing for cancellation. Meanwhile, six issues of Tony Bedard writing and Kevin Sharpe pencilling (a/k/a the Post-Waid/Kitson Era) start in Supergirl and the Legion of Super-Heroes #31.

The “Spirit Jam” in The Spirit #7 should be very good. I’m especially excited about Kyle Baker and Jordi Bernet’s takes on the characters, and Chris Sprouse & Karl Story shouldn’t be too painful either.

Thanks to Michael Turner and Alex Ross, the two Justice League books coming out this June feature covers that just don’t appeal to me at all. The two most obvious things about Turner’s cover have been discussed at length already. I suppose these static, black-background images are meant to evoke Alex Ross’s Justice Society covers, but cripes, they’re dull. Like I said last month, these are the two big-adventure team books, and they’re advertised like Calvin Klein’s Obsession [link NSFW]. As for Justice, Ross’s “heroes” cover is another nostril-gazing extravaganza, and his “villains” cover looks like it was posted upside-down.

(sigh)

As we contemplate the cover of Danger Girl: Body Shots #3, let’s take a moment to remember the late Andy Sidaris, a former ABC Sports cameraman whose pioneering emphasis on cheerleaders prefigured a career producing and directing movies about hot women shooting automatic weapons and having lots of sex. Clearly Danger Girl carries on the same kind of tradition.

Indeed, what would William Moulton Marston and H.G. Peter have said to Mr. Sidaris upon viewing Savage Beach or Hard Ticket To Hawaii? We might guess by reviewing Michael Fleisher’s second Encyclopedia Of Comic Book Heroes volume. Another ’70s time capsule, it’s not only a fine, unironic introduction to the Golden and Silver Age Wonder Woman, it is also a good argument for keeping those stories in their own little bubble. Not so they could be walled off and forgotten, but rather to preserve them as the truly unique expression of Wonder Woman’s creators in the ‘40s, and the painful wrenching of that character into the DC of the ‘50s and ‘60s. Fleisher put a lot of his own psychoanalysis into the Batman and Superman volumes, but here he can pretty much let the work speak for itself. The book’s coverage ends with Diana’s renunciation of her powers, which led into the white-suit period, although it doesn’t cover that period at all. However, given the character’s strange relationship with her own history, that’s probably appropriate.

IT WAS TWENTY YEARS AGO TODAY

Now for my latest experiment. At least superficially, DC’s mainstream output for June 2007 looks a lot like June 1987, both in terms of titles and numbers. Its numbers for “DCU” titles are virtually identical — 42 issues spread over 38 titles in 2007, and 36 issues spread over 33 titles in 1987. The 1987 numbers also include the two “softcover” Teen Titans and Legion reprint books, which were redundant for direct-market shoppers. Moreover, while I didn’t expect to see a lot of miniseries in June 1987 (Silverblade, Who’s Who Update ‘87, and Wild Dog were the only ones I counted), it was a little surprising to see only four (the two Shazams, Amazons Attack, Countdown) solicited for June 2007. Unless, of course, there’s another Big Event not listed in these solicits….

Some similarities are obvious. Action, Detective, Superman, and Batman have been published pretty much continuously for nigh-unto 70 years. DC also has a number of longstanding titles (Flash, Green Lantern, Justice League, Legion of Super-Heroes, Teen Titans, Wonder Woman) that might go on hiatus, but will never truly be cancelled. Therefore, the difference is in the lower tiers.

Common titles in this category include Blue Beetle, Green Arrow (The Longbow Hunters in ‘87), Green Lantern Corps, Hawkman (Hawkgirl today), and Outsiders. To be charitable, we might add Doctor Fate (a 1987 miniseries, ongoing today but not listed in these solicits), two Justice Society-oriented titles (Infinity, Inc., and Young All-Stars then; Justice Society and JSA Classified now), and a “gritty political title” (Suicide Squad then, Checkmate now, with a Suicide Squad revival on deck). Omitting titles not solicited, that’s 17 books — just over half of the 1987 DCU output, and about 45% of the 2007 DCU titles.

(For the sake of completeness, the rest of the June 1987 titles were Booster Gold, Captain Atom, Fury of Firestorm, Infinity, Inc., The Question, Secret Origins, The Spectre, Swamp Thing, Tales of the Legion of Super-Heroes, Tales of the Teen Titans, Teen Titans Spotlight, Vigilante, Warlord, Who’s Who Update ‘87, Wild Dog, the toy tie-ins Centurions and MASK, the licensed Star Trek and The Shadow, and the non-DCU Electric Warrior and Silverblade.)

The comparison isn’t perfect, of course — Firestorm and The Spectre were still going strong in 1987, but are off the schedule today; and the new Booster Gold and Infinity, Inc. series have yet to be solicited. Still, the two months, twenty years apart, look more like each other than they do the outputs of June 1997 (which featured such titles as Hitman, Resurrection Man, Scare Tactics, and Sovereign Seven) or June 1977 (when DC’s classic war, western, and horror titles still shared newsstand space and the DC Bullet with the superheroes). Naturally, nostalgia drives the superhero books, and while mainstream DC in the immediate post-Crisis On Infinite Earths period seemed pretty open to experimentation, ironically today it seems to be mining that period.

Anyway, that’s my little historical argument, specious though it may be, for this week. What looks good to you?

This entry was posted on Thursday, March 22nd, 2007 at 12:00 pm and is filed under DC Comics, Features, Grumpy Old Fan. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.