Book: Superman: Red Son
Pen : Mark Millar
Pencil: Dave Johnson, Kilian Plunkett
You really cannot get better “What if…” stories than this one. Taking the definitive American icon and turning him into a Soviet citizen and watching how events unfold? That has to be one of the major achievements in comic book imagination. Thank goodness it was imagined by a very versatile non-American. Instead of having a jingoistic, “us good, them bad” feel, it turns out to be a sensitive, thought-provoking study of how the world would be in an alternate scenario.
Red Son begins in the early 1950s. Lois Lane is working at the Daily Planet, but she is married to a certain Lex Luthor, widely considered to be the smartest mind on Earth. Eisenhower is the president and he wakes America up to startling news, the Soviet Union had a new weapon, a superhuman with powers of strength, flight, heat vision and super-hearing. The Cold War decisively turns one-sided. Agent Olsen of the CIA approaches Luthor with a request to develop either a weapon to counter Superman or a Superman of their own. Meanwhile, in Moscow, all Superman wants to do is to help people, despite pretty much everyone pegging him to be Stalin’s successor.
Luthor spends years trying to thwart the threat of Superman, even taking a sabbatical from his marriage to do so. Stalin’s death, and a chance encounter with his childhood sweetheart, Lana Lazarenko, forces Superman to take charge of his country’s destiny. He brings peace, stability and prosperity. The causality was freedom. Superman was so sure of his ideals and principles and confident in his abilities that he didn’t want anyone thinking otherwise. A rebel who dressed up like a bat often caused chaos here and there, but not enough to change the order of things. Diana, the princess of Themyscira, joins hands with Superman. Soon all of the nations of the world, except two, joined the Warsaw Pact and became Superman’s allies. The two standing out were the United States of America and Chile. (Millar, you rascal!)
While Millar changes the circumstances drastically, one thing is constant: Superman. He still stands for good. He believes that by being the best he can, he is only serving humanity. But by ensuring peace he has taken away the freedom of choice. Superman is too good to be a downright evil dictator, but taken independently, his actions resemble one. That is the central premise and not once does Millar waver away from it.
Luthor is far from a sympathetic figure. His obsession with bringing down Superman continues unabated and while it begins as a matter of national interest, it moves into personal vendetta. At the same time, if we were to independently look at his argument, Luthor comes across as someone who stands for freedom of choice.
Once you get over the audaciousness of the setting you realize how intricately Millar has plotted his story. He asks as many questions of us as he answers. This is probably the most serious work Millar has attempted and it is also readable as hell. It is also a supergeek’s wet dream as familiar DC characters turn up in different avatars and homage is paid to famous covers by incorporating them in these panels, in a drastically different setting, including the famous shot from Action Comics No. 1. The artwork is also a throwback to an earlier era, while the color by Paul Mounts is a rare example of colouring making a comic book stand out, with its constant dull, reddish tint, that somehow feels so right.
Red Son is the best Elseworlds tale I have read. If there are any better, I would definitely buy them. Elseworlds has been rightly come under fire for releasing a lot of rubbish. Being different just for the sake of being different. This is the best advertisement for such a series. We need not be tied down by the rules of continuity, but the essence of what made these superheroes great can be taken to tell a rollicking tale with no boundaries.
Book: Manhunter: The Special Edition
Pen: Archie Goodwin
Pencil: Walt Simonson
Sometimes, magic just happens. Because of, irrespective of, in spite of circumstances, magic happens. In comics it is very hard to come across such examples, even more so when the name Alan Moore is not connected with it. Manhunter: The Special Edition is magical.
Manhunter was a pretty obscure character that existed from the 1940s. He had many avatars and was always on the second rung, despite having a run by the one and only Jack Kirby. He still is. But in 1973, Archie Goodwin and Walt Simonson joined together for a brief journey. A magical journey.
Paul Kirk, aka Manhunter from the ‘40s, suddenly shows up in Nepal. Nothing so unusual but for the fact that he had been dead for decades. Everything points to an imposter, but his fingerprints are the same and he looks exactly like how he looked 30 years before. Christine St Clair, an Interpol agent, is after him. She finds him and unravels a conspiracy that is way bigger than anything she had ever imagined. Involving the greatest minds of the world from the 1940s, a search for a peaceful world, the corruptibility of the human mind and the determination of one man to make a difference, the story unravels across countries with a breathless pace. It culminates in a shattering climax.
Manhunter came out in an eight-page format. It was an additional story in the main Detective Comics issue which featured Batman and other higher-rated heroes; an extra. This Manhunter ran for seven issues, out of which six were only eight pages long! Eight pages to make an impact each time. And twice for these eight pages they won awards for best story. Goes to show size doesn’t matter for magic! For the last issue, they decided to include Batman in the storyline and suddenly they were the main event.
The eight-page format meant you had to find a fine balance between story and visuals that would prevent either from overcrowding the other. Enough things should happen to give a structure to the story, but not so much that it seemed like cramming. The initial storyline – The Himalayan Incident – is startling in its economy, but extremely effective in introducing the character. Cathedral Perilous, my personal favourite, has a fabulous set up. A tourist family turns up at an old cathedral. They walk around taking photographs, while the youngest son is the one witnessing incredible things happening. Of course he is not even able to tell that to his parents. And when he ends up saving someone, he realizes the dream of every comic fan of playing a part in their favourite comic.
The story of Manhunter is not extraordinary. It does not introduce any ground-breaking theory or have a humdinger of a plot with unexpected twists aplenty. It also does not introduce any new style of drawing. But what it does is takes itself and its reader seriously, while accepting it is about a comic book character. In very few pages it manages to tell a complete story that is large in its scope, intimate in its characterization and flawless in its construction. You cannot wait to turn the page, but also do not want to rush yourself.
The Special Edition has an added story that is amazing in that it never feels like an add-on. For the 25th Anniversary edition the collaborators were asked to write another short story. While initially skeptical, they both arrived at how they would approach it. In between Archie Goodwin died. Walt Simonson made it the ultimate tribute to his friend by making it a silent comic, without any dialogue. What could have been a tacky and commercial venture instead became a poignant and poetic epilogue to a fully-realised epic. In short, it remained magic.
Book: Green Arrow: The Longbow Hunters
Pen: Mike Grell
Pencil: Mike Grell
Green Arrow can easily, and to an extent, correctly, be described as the poor man’s Batman. Billionaire, playboy, vigilante without superpowers, young kid’s guardian, who later became a sidekick, the whole shebang. It all changed when the billionaire became a leftist. Suddenly he became more interesting. A seemingly ridiculous combination with Green Lantern seems to have been a huge success with the writers being able to tackle real world concerns within the framework of comics.
The real, gritty re-imagining happened with this book. Mike Grell was asked to write and draw a three-issue storyline. Grell did that, and stayed on. He decided that the flashiness and the trick arrows of old had to go. He didn’t try to get rid of the Robin Hood inspiration, but instead just let Arrow be an admirer of Robin Hood. The action was shifted from the fictional Star City to Seattle, where Oliver Queen aka Green Arrow has moved to with his girlfriend Dinah Lance, who also moonlighted as the crime-fighter Black Canary.
In Seattle, two sets of serial killings were making headlines. Prostitutes were being slashed by someone with a very sharp knife, and senior citizens were being bumped off by someone with very sharp arrows. Meanwhile, a cracked-up junkie lands on their porch.
Dinah decided to go and find the source of the drugs, while Oliver decided to work on relaxing the fingers by going after the local hoods. He soon finds who the slasher is, but comes out badly in the encounter. The next girl is about to be killed and Oliver is late on the scene. But then a mysterious arrow kills the man. The archer turns out to be a masked female. Before introductions are made, she turns around and shoots another geriatric.
The Longbow Hunters is a major milestone in Green Arrow’s journey. Yet you feel it should have been much more. It touches all the right chords, keeps itself rooted in reality, connects to the then-recent political events and has a good structure. But somehow it seems to be missing something. Maybe the story should have been a little longer. You need to read it two or three times to get a hang of what happened. While this is not necessarily a bad thing, here it feels abrupt. The artwork is efficient, without being overly pretty, but then this is not a pretty story.
The writing, unfortunately, does not rise above the average. The Green Arrow is famous for having a at least four quips for every situation. Here there is nothing that stands out. The same person performing both writing and drawing duties meant there wouldn't be any conflict of visions. At the same time, a different collaborator might have brought something different to the table. The Longbow Hunters seem like a project that had so much promise, but delivered less. Maybe I am wrong. The Longbow Hunters might have been a milestone comic that was ahead of its time. It just hasn't aged well.
Book: Wolverine
Pen: Chris Claremont
Pencil: Frank Miller
I’m Wolverine. I’m the best there is at what I do. But what I do best isn’t very nice.
Of course you have read it before. Even heard it in the movies. But imagine you haven’t. You can imagine. You are a comic book lover, after all. Imagine opening a comic book about a second-rung character who never had a solo series. These are the first lines in the book. Suddenly you get a chill. Am I about to read something spectacular? Is this the kind of book every comic lover dearly loves to discover? A bolt from the blue. A masterpiece without an advance warning. An hour later you put it down. The naked awe on your face says it all.
Wolverine was a popular side character. His propensity to use extreme force at the slightest provocation (or not) was his biggest draw. He was a pint-sized bunch of dynamite, probably as tall as Hugh Jackman’s third rib. After all, the animal he was based on was very small and very dangerous. But this violent streak also made him a pretty one-dimensional character. Not too many writers found him that interesting beyond a point.
It was under such circumstances when comic legend Chris Claremont joined hands with a young artist called Frank Miller to bring out a four-issue miniseries. Yes, that Frank Miller. And no, I didn’t get the names interchanged. Before attaining superhero status himself and rising to (IMHO) the second position on the list of great comic writers, Miller made a name as an artist.
Claremont and Miller did the unthinkable. They took the action to Japan. To take a hot-blooded American superhero to space was fine, but outside the US, only sporadic visits were allowed. Technically, Wolverine is Canadian, but you know how so many Americans think it is the 51st state! But to have a complete story set in another country was just not done. But the co-conspirators had no choice. They were going to treat Wolverine as a ronin, a fallen samurai. And Japan had to be the scene.
Beginning with a primeval encounter with a man-eating bear in the mountains, Wolverine travels to Japan to be with his beloved Mariko Yashida who had run away without an explanation. There he finds that Mariko was forced by her father to marry another man. Wolverine was bested in a duel by Shingen, Yashida’s father, and left for dead. He is saved by Yukio, a mysterious girl highy skilled in the art of warfare. Wolverine and Yukio join hands to escape the group of assassins known as the Hand. Together they find ways to save Mariko from her fate.
Wolverine is an adventure story. It is also a love story. Taking the familiar trappings of a man in search of his woman, Claremont and Miller transport it to another land and culture. With minimum fuss they tell a story and they are done with it. But they do it with such precision that you are not left wondering if anyone could have done it better. You know no one could have.
Claremont would go on to become one of the most prolific writers of Wolverine, but these four issues are probably the best he has conjured up. Miller is prodigiously, no, ridiculously talented. I usually leave discussions on artworks to the experts, but one thing that is stunning about this book is how well it holds up against the ravages of time. You do not feel that it is from a period where most of the artwork today seems silly and dated. There is a sense of motion in each page and the action is choreographed in the truest sense of the word.
The graphic novel should have stopped at four issues. Instead it adds an additional two issues from The Uncanny X-Men to it. This is a continuation of the story with a different artist, but ends on a cliff-hanger. It may work as an extra, but to club it with the Wolverine miniseries is to dilute its effect. But that’s me nitpicking. Wolverine is a game-changer. This is one of those stories that will stand the test of time. A perfect alchemy of a great writer and an amazing artist.
Title: The Ultimates 2 – Vol 2: Grand Theft America
Pen: Mark Millar
Pencil: Bryan Hitch
Hawkeye!
If you want to take out one defining image from Grand Theft America, then it is Hawkeye. A minor character who is always almost a sidekick to the gods and monsters and superhumans in the Ultimates, an interrogation scene in this book shows us Hawkeye like we have never seen him before. He is a human without any steroid-enhancements or explosion-exposures. Just a dude with a particular set of skills. And what skills! If you henceforth cringe at any comic or movie where Hawkeye is part of the scenery, then this book is responsible.
Let’s go back to the beginning. The Middle-Eastern interference in Gods and Monsters caused a lot of after effects. One of it was a young boy who hated Captain America for what he considered an unprovoked attack on him and his country. The boy would become the trump card in Loki’s grand scheme.
Hawkeye’s family gets attacked and there are no remains of anyone. SHIELD checks the secret cameras and discovers, to their horror, who the traitor is. The shattered team has no time to regroup when Loki makes his move. This is the stuff of their worst nightmares and America is going down. With five of their original team either incarcerated, or disgraced or a traitor, Quicksilver and the Scarlet Witch have a lot to do, especially during the battles. But the battle is never truly over unless it is over.
Millar’s liberal politics play a big part in the plot. And it is actually kind of reassuring to see America pay for their foreign policy decisions! In the end, however, this is an American mainstream comic that would be read mainly by Americans, so the fault cannot be theirs alone. Still, one has to admire the guts and gumption Millar, during his peak, brought to what should have been all-out superhero story.
Bryan Hitch’s art is top-notch throughout. It is very evident why he is such a sought-after artist. The writer and artist tango like rarely done before to create a high quality product that will ensure the one thing you do after completing the book is to start again. Be glad you live in a time when Millar and Hitch’s Ultimates run is over. It means you have the opportunity to read the whole story at one go. I honestly cannot think of waiting months for the next issue.
Grand Theft America is a fabulous climax to The Ultimates saga. It is the single biggest reason to acknowledge that the Ultimate line that Marvel created was not just a gimmick. This is what superhero comics should aspire to. Oftentimes, in the midst of all the pontification and pondering and psychoanalysis, the casualty is fun. Millar and Hitch’s run on The Ultimates never lets that happen.
At the end, though, Grand Theft America still can be encapsulated in one word.
Hawkeye!
Book: The Ultimates 2 – Vol 1: Gods and Monsters
Pen: Mark Millar
Pencil: Bryan Hitch
The Mighty Thor has his day, and more, in Gods and Monsters. All over The Ultimates, Millar has been teasing us how not everyone was buying the whole ‘Thor is a god from Asgard’ line and people still believed he was just a crackpot with his heart in the right place. It is time to settle that.
The American government, as it usually did, decided to interfere in the affairs of a Middle Eastern country. The supposedly global peace-keeping force – the Ultimates – were sent to sort it out. They did. But Thor dissented and pulled out of the team-up. Before you could say “Ultimates Disassemble” the secret about Hulk is leaked out. The public screams for blood and Fury is only too eager to give them a scapegoat. Despite a blind lawyer, one Matt Murdock, defending him, the jury already made up their minds and it is time for one of the most shattering decisions in comics.
While SHIELD was trying to move into damage control mode they received a call from the European Defense Initiative, the guys who created Captains Britain, France, Spain and Italy! They also meet Gunnar Golmen who was heading the Norwegian group and the secret of Thor comes out. It is time to take the so-called God of Thunder down.
On another note, after his loss of face, Hank Pym is not allowed anywhere near the Ultimates. He goes and joins another superhero team up called the Defenders, which doesn’t exactly end well. But then he learns the truth that is going to be the pivot of the Ultimates 2 storyline. There is a traitor in the ranks.
If you are going to have Thor in the limelight, then you should have his main adversary, too. Loki makes his entrance briefly, but you know he has big plans. Gods and Monsters sets up everything for a grand finale, but that is not to say that it is not capable of standing on its own. With, not one, but two catastrophic events, this is an action-packed edition leaving hardly any time to breathe. At the same time, the constant cut to how the world reacts is how Millar grounds his comic.
The four editions of The Ultimates and The Ultimates 2 can be compared to a relay. Gods and Monsters is the under-appreciated third-leg. As any coach would tell you if your third man is not solid, you would be leaving the impossible for the anchor. Gods and Monsters is solid. The Ultimates are shown at their most vulnerable. An opponent smart enough can dismantle them brutally. And they have such an opponent. Doubts are slowly being raised about the position the Ultimates hold, who they report to and when they should stop. We know a storm is coming. And we can’t wait.
