Category: Comics

Here we go with month 2 of DC’s 1984 output, with the May 1984 cover date on books shipped in February. This is based on what I could read on DC Universe Infinite, so there are a bunch of issues missing again. Overall I’m glad I read these issues, but outside of SWAMP THING there were no home runs. Even my favorites like TALES OF THE TEEN TITANS and LEGION OF SUPER-HEROES let me down a little. A lot of DC’s books this month were perfectly serviceable but most of them are the sort of thing that I would read and then put in my long box and not think about for a long time afterward.

STELLAR SWAMP THING: I started reading Alan Moore’s run on SWAMP THING in trade paperback collections several years ago. I honestly don’t remember exactly how far I got. I’m happy to have jumped back into it with this reading project, that’s for sure because this work really stands out when compared to the other superhero books DC was printing at the time. This month’s issue 24 features the Justice League of America, operating in the background, remarking about how helpless they and the other superheroes are. It creates quite a mood as Swamp Thing has to find a way to reason with the world’s plant life. The artwork matches the writing thanks to Steve Bissette, John Totleben and Tatjana Wood’s work.

I noticed that these SWAMP THING issues in DC Universe Infinite have a “Conversion by Wildstorm” logo that I have not seen in any of the other digital issues I’ve read. It makes me wonder exactly when this conversion was done, and whether it was done specifically for digital or for a particular printing of the collected editions. I certainly think the colors work well for reading on a tablet, and I am looking forward to more.

HOW TEEN ARE THESE TITANS: I make no secret of my fondness for George Pérez’s artwork or the Teen Titans as characters. And with issue 42, TALES OF THE TEEN TITANS starts one of its most famous stories, The Judas Contract. But this first issue of the storyline focuses on the characters interacting out of battle. While that is often a strength in the series, this issue makes me spend way more time than I want to reading about the inappropriate age-gape relationships that Marv Wolfman and Pérez wrote into the book. Yes, he’s a bad guy doing bad things, but Deathstroke should lose any semblance of being a villain with a code or even an anti-hero as a result of him sleeping with a fifteen-year-old Terra.

Meanwhile, already-divorced failed professor Terry Long is in no way an appropriate match for Donna Troy if Donna is in fact a teenager. Now, I almost talked myself into giving this relationship some slack because I think Wolfman and Pérez are treating the main characters more like young adults – they all live on their own and have jobs; Donna is a successful freelance photographer. So maybe in that light the gap between Terry and her should be seen as smaller and less problematic. And then I thought about this issue having Changeling flirt with Terra and I got the heebie-jeebies all over again. I just wish such a classic series didn’t have this ick factor hanging over it.

EARTH-2 REPRESENTS: Whatever concerns folks at DC had about the multiverse being confusing didn’t stop them from publishing two books written by Roy Thomas set on Earth-2, with INFINITY, INC. joining ALL-STAR SQUADRON. On top of that, the Earth-2 Huntress had a backup feature in WONDER WOMAN. I think that once you take the “daughter of Batman and Catwoman” angle away, Huntress is a costume and crossbow in search of a character, so I’m glad to have a glimpse at the original concept here.

The problem is that I think I like the concept of Earth-2 – a world where in 1984 superheroes had been around since World War II – more than the execution in these books. Especially the first two issues of INFINITY, INC., where characters barge into a room to demand that the Justice Society of America listen to them and then get upset when the barged-upon characters are a little cranky about it. Even in 1984, there were comics with better dialogue and characterization than this.

FAVORITES MAKE SOME EARLY APPEARANCES: That said, INFINITY, INC. has artwork by Jerry Ordway, who would go on to work on some of my favorite issues of the Superman books in the 1990s. And ARION, LORD OF ATLANTIS 19 has work from Jan Duursema, who did some great work on Dark Horse’s Star Wars titles in the 2000s. It’s nice to see their work in these early issues. I admit, two issues in to my read, I am still trying to figure out exactly what’s going on in ARION – this is probably the character I am least familiar with, and it seems like Duursema and writer Paul Kupperberg have already built quite a bit of lore in the 17 issues I missed. Of course, today I don’t even have to hit the back issue bins if I want to go back and get into the series from the beginning – I would just have to hit a few buttons on my app. I’m kind of interested in seeing how much I can figure out as I go, though.

MONITOR MENTIONS: 1984 is the last year before all hell breaks loose for DC, but even early in the year you can see the storm clouds gathering. This month sees two mentions of the Monitor, including an extensive scene in GREEN LANTERN 176 written by Len Wein, who helped to edit CRISIS ON INFINITE EARTHS. The other mention comes in VIGILANTE 6, written by Marv Wolfman. So it’s the folks who were at the center of the planning trying to work in these appearances – which would wind up not quite fitting the more benevolent Monitor who would show up in CRISIS issue 1. But that’s the risk you take when you try to build your reboot plane while the publishing line is still flying.

BAT BOOKS DELIVER: Doug Moench delivers another two part caper in BATMAN 371 and DETECTIVE COMICS 538 that also keeps the subplots moving smoothly. I love this pacing, where you get a complete story in one month but there is also time for characters to evolve a little. I love the characterization of a much healthier Bruce Wayne and Jason Todd. These books are right in a superhero sweet spot for me. So far, of the books I’m reading for the first time, BATMAN and DETECTIVE are the two titles where I like the 1984 status quo better than what I found when I started reading in 1989.

Let’s talk about DC Comics published in January 1984, cover date April 1984. I’m not going to do issue by issue roundups here (unless I get feedback that people would want to read such a thing), but rather I’ll try to comment on general themes and observations. (See the Intro post if you want to know why I’m doing this series.)

WHAT WAS MISSING: This is not a criticism of the DCU Infinite app – it’s a tremendous value that gives you access to a huge and growing library at a price so low I sometimes feel guilty. But there are gaps in what it includes, either because DC hasn’t created digital files or because they just haven’t seen fit to include it, I wasn’t surprised that titles like ATARI FORCE and STAR TREK weren’t there, but I was surprised that the April 1984 issues of SUPERMAN, NEW ADVENTURES OF SUPERBOY and THE FLASH were not. (I couldn’t find any issues of the following titles: BLACKHAWK, GI COMBAT, SGT ROCK, NEW TALENT SHOWCASE, or ARAK, SON OF THUNDER; THE WARLORD #180 was also missing.)

SO MANY WORDS: I don’t know if I have the patience or time to do a more systematic study of this, but between thought balloons, third-person omniscient narrator captions, and expository dialogue, most of these comics just flat out had more words in them than the issues I’m reading from the 2020s. Granted, Roy Thomas in ALL-STAR SQUADRON #32 does a lot to up the total, but even the average issue does a lot more telling of the story. Len Wein uses the narrator captions in GREEN LANTERN #175 to establish a newspaper as a framing/transition device, for example. You don’t really see the writer address the audience directly like that these days.

SHORTER STORIES: A lot of these books had stories that wrapped up in one or two issues, like they were episodes of a procedural drama rather than an ongoing serialized storyline. SUPERGIRL #18 has an antagonist that Supergirl dispatches by the end of the issue and is never seen again, and I’d say at least a quarter of the book is given over to a relationship subplot that’s already in progress. FURY OF FIRESTORM #22 works a one-issue recap of Firestorm’s origin into a rooftop conversation.

For comparison’s sake, I took a look at two modern books I have been meaning to catch up on – Tom Taylor and Mikel Janin’s first story in DETECTIVE COMICS was seven issues long, and the next issue of Mark Waid, Dan Mora and Tamra Bonvillain’s BATMAN/SUPERMAN: WORLD’S FINEST kicked off a four-issue arc. With that many issues to tell a story, you can use fewer panels, and you can spend time on each step of the back and forth between protagonist and antagonist. At the same time, a reader needs to invest months into watching Batman solve a single case.

Now, in January 1984, Paul Levitz and Keith Giffen were finishing up the four-issue “Omen and Prophet” arc in LEGION OF SUPER-HEROES, and Marv Wolfman and George Pérez were about to start the four-part “Judas Contract” in TALES OF THE TEEN TITANS. And there are probably done-in-one stories today that I miss because I am not reading every book that comes out in a given month. But I definitely feel like the base unit these days is more often “an arc” than “an issue,” and I get the opposite vibe from 1984.

BROADER STROKES: I think because many of the stories were shorter, writers felt the need to push emotional beats to develop and resolve quickly, with characters making intense, dramatic statements and then dispensing with resultant conflicts very quickly. I noticed this most prominently in issues of JUSTICE LEAGUE OF AMERICA and FURY OF FIRESTORM written by Gerry Conway. That rooftop conversation in FURY OF FIRESTORM either advances or resolves a love triangle – I’ll find out in subsequent issues.

BAXTER BEGINS: I read two issues printed in DC’s Baxter format, which used better paper in order to show more detail and allow for better color reproduction than newsprint. (Shout out to colorists, by the way, and I’m gonna have more to say about that in future roundups.) These books were sold exclusively to comic shops in the direct market and did not bear the seal of the Comics Code Authority, so among other things, they were able to have a different and more mature tone than the rest of the line.

OMEGA MEN is a series I had read before, and reading issue 13 again here reminded me of how surprised I was by how bleak that series was in the way it showed violence and oppression, and how lonely the struggle against it can be.

Meanwhile, VIGILANTE brings the 70s/80s attitude that the system is broken and can’t keep people safe to superhero comics, as a former district attorney takes it upon himself to take out the bad guys. On the one hand, this feels like a weird theme for superhero comics, since most of the characters already are people who take the law into their own hands. But even in 1984, writers were grappling with this – just in this month’s issues, the Legion has friction with the Science Police and the United Plantes government, and Supergirl talks about how the United Nations has authorized her to enforce the law and protect the people. So I guess there’s a place for a book like VIGILANTE, where the characters don’t even want the approval of the system.

BATMAN IS IN GOOD SHAPE: Doug Moench was writing both BATMAN and DETECTIVE, and his skill plus the general approach to characterizing Batman before Frank Miller changed the game with YEAR ONE and THE DARK KNIGHT RETURNS really works for me. Don Newton and Gene Colan do a great job with the pencils of these issues, and I was fascinated by the coloring on BATMAN #370. It reminds me of watercolor paints, and there’s so much white space. It’s so unlike these other issues that I would love to compare the DC Universe Infinite version to the original printed issue to see if they look alike. Whatever the case may be, I liked the effect.

We see the first, pre-CRISIS version of Jason Todd stepping into action as Robin (having received the blessing of Dick Grayson in an earlier issue that I snuck into this reading pile). Bruce has a level of humanity and emotional maturity that he too often lacked in the 90s. Gotham feels like a city that has its challenges but isn’t hell on Earth. He’s leading a team in BATMAN AND THE OUTSIDERS and he even gets to reconcile with Superman in a backup story in WORLD’S FINEST #302. There’s a reason I usually use the Bronze Age Batman costume when I’m playing LEGO BATMAN: LEGACY OF THE DARK KNIGHT. I like this interpretation of the character a lot.

SUPERMAN NOT SO MUCH: It’s hard to feel as optimistic about Superman at this point. Granted, there were two Superman-related books I couldn’t read because they aren’t in the DCU Infinite library, but that’s a point of concern in itself – it would seem there hasn’t been enough demand to reprint or digitize these stories. And the stories I did read in DC COMICS PRESENTS #68 and ACTION COMICS #554 didn’t really get me excited about the character. Now, DC COMICS PRESENTS is a team up title, so maybe Gerry Conway was more focused on exploring Vixen than Superman. And ACTION COMICS this month was a fairly simplistic tale from Marv Wolfman paying homage to Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster and the concept of Superman more than the character. So maybe I’ll have a better impression in subsequent months.

WINNERS AND STILL CHAMPIONS: The two series from this era that are huge chunks of my back issue collection are TALES OF THE TEEN TITANS and LEGION OF SUPER-HEROES. They were some of my first glimpses of pre-CRISIS DC and their reputation is well-deserved.

Paul Levitz on the Legion is a master of juggling the huge cast and all of their relationships and subplots while creating knock-down drag-out super-battles. He made the 30th Century a rich setting with political and cultural conflicts that the Legion needed to navigate. Keith Giffen is a hugely talented writer himself, and during this era his pencils still have a more traditional look that I prefer to his later, more stylized work.

And boy, did the storytelling in the Legion need to be dense to carry all of that material. Never mind the nine-panel grid – look at Giffen saying F it, we’re doing sixteen panels. (This page is actually from the first part of the Omen and Prophet Arc – I did go back to read the whole thing rather than jump in on part 4.)

Of course, if you’re going to talk about detail in comics storytelling, the master George Pérez was at work in TALES OF THE TEEN TITANS. I think his 1980s work is my favorite of his long career – he was certainly excellent from the 1990s through the 2010s, but the 80s was the perfect mix of detail and an open, graceful quality for me. This issue has several short battle scenes leading to a conclusion where the power of love and friendship (and energy bolts) saves the day. And boy, does Pérez sell every bit of it. Before I finish this review of 1984 I’m pretty sure I’ll wind up re-reading the whole original Wolfman-Pérez NEW TEEN TITANS run. But for now, that’s a wrap on January 1984.

This is a bit of a pet project that I’ve been meaning to start for a while now, and Adam Mallinger gave me the final nudge to get moving on it when he started his Superfan XL site that discusses the post-Crisis Superman stories from the 80s and 90s. I am going to read as many of the comics that DC published in 1984 as I can – a task made much easier by the DC Universe Infinite app – and sum up my thoughts here, with one post dedicated to each month.

Why?

First and foremost, 1984 is the year before DC overhauled its continuity with the CRISIS ON INFINITE EARTHS maxiseries. I started regularly reading comics in early 1989, so the “post-Crisis” DC was my primary reference point. At the same time, the late 70s/early 80s versions of the characters influenced many of the spinoffs and merchandising that introduced me to the characters when I was a kid, so even if I didn’t know those stories, I feel a connection to that time period. So I want to try to get to really know the specific quo that DC felt needed to be massively disrupted.

Second, I want to do some intentional thinking about how superhero comics storytelling has changed. The decline of newsstands and the rise of the direct market in the 1980s led to experiments with format and technique that I think turbocharged the usual evolution and development of the art form. 1986 is often noted as a pivotal year that included stories like WATCHMEN and THE DARK KNIGHT RETURNS. I want to look back a little earlier and see how those experiments were unfolding. So I’m going to be comparing 1984 both to today and to the late 80s/early 90s when I was an avid reader and purchaser.

Third, tying into the first two points, when I am done, I may want to indulge in a bit of an Elseworlds-type creative exercise and ask myself what kind of stories DC could have told if they hadn’t gone ahead with CRISIS ON INFINITE EARTHS. If nothing else, such an exercise could make for a heck of a roleplaying game setting.

So far this has been a lot of fun. So let’s get started.

• January 1984 – April 1984 Cover Date
• February 1984 – May 1984 Cover Date