YALSA top ten GNs 2007: Identity Crisis

Identity Crisis 
Written by Brad Meltzer. Illustrated by Rags Morales and Mike Bair.

Published by DC Comics (2006)

[Note: The issues that made up this series originally came out in 2004, but the paperback edition of the collection didn't make it out until 2006.]

I remember back when this series was coming out there was some controversy as to how it treated the characters. It took characters who had been in the Justice League in the 1970s and 1980s and retconned things so that the old stories seemed a lot darker than they had been. I remember that I didn't really have any relation to those characters, so at first I didn't "get" what some of the criticism was. But I went and read issues of Justice League International (and similar series) out of quarter bins, and I soon grew to enjoy those old series and was kind of saddened by how the characters were treated in this series.

A decade later, I kind of wonder why on earth this series was put on a YALSA top ten list. The only real excuse I can think of, is that 2007 was the first year they created one of these lists, they didn't really know what they were doing, and that it was a big event comic (so of course it's good?), because fuck it is kind of terrible. So terrible it's been put on a list of the worst comics of 2000-2009.

So, what is it, and why is it so bad? It's a mystery where the "whodunit" turns out to be someone completely unrelated to all of the previous hints and clues, and whose personality was radically changed in order to make them the perpetrator. It's a superhero story with murder, rape, misogyny, and other horrible stuff done so as to "humanize" the characters. (Of course, none of that happens to any of the superheroes, instead it all happens to members of their family. To make them FEEL THINGS.) I'm not saying superhero comics can't tell deep, emotional stories that feature those elements, but doing it to Elongated Man (or whoever) seems to cheapen everything else they've done. Superhero comics basically work on suspension of disbelief, and this comic seems to go out of it's way to break characters and make you realize how nonsensical the DC universe is. It has superheroes doing things that they they seem like assholes, and the problem with shared universes is that the characters and stories don't exist in isolation. Someone else is going to use the characters later, and they'll have to deal with this stuff.

You'd think Meltzer might understand that as one of the reasons he wrote this comic was to explain why Dr. Light was a terrible villain in the comics he read as a kid. He had to do this in a "realistic" way, making things grim and gritty, and ignoring the facts that pretty much everyone was a terrible villain back then and that they're superhero comics. It's not always appropriate to make characters do "realistic" things.

Okay, let's talk about Women in Refrigerators. This is a term (created by comic writer Gail Simone) to describe the many, many terrible things that happen to women characters in comics, frequently just so that the main (male) characters can have something bad happen to them without it actually _happening_ to them. The titular case was when a Green Lantern came home to find that his girlfriend had been killed and stuffed inside his fridge.

Identity Crisis does this in spades. Sure bad things happen to some male characters too, but even in death the female characters seem more screwed over. I mean, why be killed by a boomerang when you can be raped, and then killed, and then set on fire?

The last year or so has really seen an increase in comics that feature female leads, which is great, but reading something like this makes me wonder how long it is until Ms. Marvel gets raped or has her arms ripped off or something. A lot of writers, editors, and other people involved in comics seem to think that superheros need to be dark and gritty and...terrible. I wish they'd stop.

There was recently a controversy over an alternative cover for an issue of the Batgirl series currently coming out. Some fans felt (rightly so) that the cover (which heavily suggests sexual assault and can make Batgirl look like a victim) was inappropriate for the type of book that Batgirl is. I agree. Regardless of whether you think the cover is a good piece of art, you can't take it out of context. You have to view it as a cover for a comic, and consider what the contents of that comic are going to be. People (and there seem to be a lot of them) who say "No! It's a great cover! It's creepy and well drawn." are missing the point. It's not whether it's good, it's whether it's appropriate for it's context. A lot of people seem to feel it's appropriate for Batgirl, and I wonder what other comics they'd have been fine with this cover being on. Batman Adventures? Scooby Doo? Tiny Titans?

The reaction of those fans makes me pretty sad. So of course you'll all be happy to know that a tenth anniversary hardcover of Identity Crisis came out in December of last year. I'm sure a lot of fans love it's "realistic" take on superheroes.

YALSA top ten 2008: Blue Beetle

 

Blue Beetle (Volumes 1-2)
Written by Keith Giffen and John Rogers. Illustrated by Cully Hamner, Rafael Albuquerque, and others.
Published by DC Comics (2006-2007)

So ages and ages ago I was originally going to read and review these graphic novels in something more like chronological order, and I read (or attempted) to read books from the first few years of these awards. (This plan didn't last long.) In the case of Blue Beetle my local library system didn't have the first two volumes of Blue Beetle, so I read every other Blue Beetle thing they had at the time. Since lots of copies of books had gone missing, this amounted to two books, a later volume of this series (Vol. 4: End Game), and the Blue Beetle Companion, which tracked the history of the character from the 1930s up to around 2008 and educated me about the Blue Beetle radio show from 1940 (it is terrible).

There's really no reason to mention this, because now I've actually read the first two volumes, but I figured I needed to link to those radio shows _somehow_. Anyway, reading the first volume of Blue Beetle nine years after it came out is somewhat confusing. Now, this is because Blue Beetle is a shared universe superhero title, and like many of them it refers to other superhero comics that were coming out at the time. I didn't realize/remember this (despite the fact that I think I've read this volume before), and really it's not that big of a deal, but there's some amount of story that's happening in the Infinite Crisis event crossover that isn't really explained that well/at all until the second volume.

Okay! So what is Blue Beetle about? It's about a kid who finds a magic (or alien?) scarab beetle thing  that gives him crazy cool armour and he (of course) becomes a superhero. Of course, there are some fun bits that do make it different from Spider-Man or other teenage heroes. First, it's set in El Paso, which actually has way more superpowered people than you would expect, but also doesn't exactly have Superman hanging out. Second, Jaime's parents know he's the Blue Beetle, this leads to some pretty fun interactions between them when they're asking if he has his homework done before he can head out to save the world.

The design for this Blue Beetle is still pretty cool looking, and I think it's kind of impressive how this version of Blue Beetle has actually become the one that is shown in other media. The Jaime Reyes Blue Beetle appeared in Smallville, Batman: The Brave and the Bold, Young Justice, a number of video games, and even a live action test trailer for a TV show.. That probably makes him one of the more successful non-white superhero characters ever, let alone one that was created less than a decade ago.

While these two volumes do feature six pencillers over twelve issues, the art manages to stay fairly consistent. There's also some pretty nice colouring in there that I wasn't expecting. (There's also some fairly terrible colouring that makes it seem as though Jaime has horrible growths on his face instead of facial hair, but you can't win them all.)

So the art's generally well done, the supporting cast (and their relationships with each other) is pretty good, the mystery about the scarab is decent, Jaime is a likeable character, and the book overall is fun. (This is what people have been saying for about a decade now...) If you gave me more issues I'd read them. Mostly though, I think I'm just glad that Jaime has proven popular enough to still be around, and not be killed off in some crossover or other like so many other characters.

YALSA top ten GNs 2014: The Adventures of Superhero Girl

The Adventures of Superhero Girl
Written and illustrated by Faith Erin Hicks
Published by Dark Horse (2013)

I used to live in Halifax, and while I was there The Coast (the free weekly newspaper) ran two comics by local creators: True Story by Mike Holmes (which my friend Jen appeared in) and Superhero Girl. I thought that I read The Coast every week, but there were times where I felt that Superhero Girl didn't make any sense and that I must have been missing pages. I checked online but I hadn't actually missed any, leading me to assume that reading this comic at one page a week was a pretty terrible format (at least sometimes). There were one off stories but, as there's only so much you can do in half a page, there were also multiple part stories that I clearly was incapable of following when serialized.

As for the story, Superhero Girl is a superhero in a not very large city where while there are still supervillains, they are kind of crummy and are more likely to be the type to thrown marshmallows than destroy the city. Superhero Girl  has to deal with trying to keep a secret identity (she is bad at this), figuring out how to pay rent (she is also bad at this), trying to have a social life (ditto), and fighting crime (she's actually pretty good at this). It's goofy and funny, and I really have to say that it reads _much_ better in collected form.

I've written before about Hicks' art (and how much I liked it), and it's still good here. Her character designs are good and she's great at expressions. Plus there are kitties and ninja and evil future duplicates and... The worst thing about it probably comes from the fact that it was told at the rate of one page a week. I'd rather have just read a complete story about Superhero Girl. Still, Hicks' has said she'd like to draw more at some point, so maybe some day...

YALSA top ten 2007: Nextwave: Agents of H.A.T.E. (Volume 1)

Nextwave: Agents of H.A.T.E. (Volume 1): This is What They Want
Written by Warren Ellis. Illustrated by Stuart Immonen.
Published by Marvel Comics (2006)

A friend of mine used to have a zine that was focused around monsters. Each issue spotlighted a different monster, and she'd have a section of movie reviews which she called "what I remember reviews". It didn't matter how long ago she saw the movie, or how much (if anything) she remembered about it, she'd write something about it. That's going to be the case with some of the reviews of these YALSA top ten books too, I have actually read a bunch of them, though in some cases it was quite some time ago...

Nextwave was a title I read when it was originally coming out as single issues. I'd have happily read it again, but the VPL doesn't have either volume in their catalogue. Honestly though I'm not that surprised, cause they'd probably have been stolen if they ever did have them.

Warren Ellis is (twice over) the reason I'm so into comic books. First with his run on Excalibur which got me to start going to comic book shops so that I could get every issue, and then later with the Warren Ellis Forum where I discovered many, many different creators and titles, and even made friends! However, while Ellis has written some stuff I've liked a lot (and has been influential to the comics medium), there hasn't been much released in the last decade that I can say I thought was really good. Now admittedly he's releasing a lot less material than he used to, but I just read through his bibliography and was like "oh yeah, I read all of Freak Angels, that was pretty decent", but keep in mind that I had completely forgotten that I read a six volume series.

However, Nextwave is the last title that Ellis was involved with that I think can be classified as "really good"! It's a superhero comic, but it's more of a comedy than most "mainstream" superhero comics are. The main cast are a bunch of minor characters that not many people cared about, and over all it's pretty ridiculous. For some of the characters Ellis pretty much just ignored the existing personality traits entirely and made up new ones. While this is frequently seen as bad writing, in this case the new versions of the characters seemed to be far more interesting than the ones that had existed before and later appearances of some of the characters, namely Machine Man and his newly human/fleshy one hating, beer drinking self, have reflected this.

I honestly can't remember that much about the art other than that it was "good", but Stuart Immonen is a pretty rad artist overall, and Ellis definitely wrote him some great scenes to illustrate in this comic.

When it was first announced that the series was going to end at issue 12, I wasn't that sad as I thought the comedy aspect of the title would get old if it had kept coming out indefinitely. But once it was finished I did miss it, and wish there was slightly more of it in existence. So yeah, if you're at all interested in superheroes as a subject this is probably worth reading, but if you don't spend your spare time reading Wikipedia articles about obscure Marvel characters be prepared to have some of the jokes go over your head.

Plus it has an official theme song! How many comics get that?