Comics Review - John Byrne's Superman/Batman: Generations

I've never liked Elseworlds.

They're like "What If?" without an understanding of what made "What If" work, namely, the entire fantasy of the story comes from one divergence from reality. An example of a good "What If?" premise would be, if Spider-Man had only been a couple seconds faster and managed to save Gwen Stacy on the George Washington Bridge, or if Professor X touched the Gem of Cytorrak in that temple in Korea instead of Cain Marko. We could see what happened after that one difference, so everything was extrapolated from that.

For instance, according to "What if Wonder Man had lived?" if Wonder Man had survived after Avengers #10, Swordsman would have backed out from the original Lethal Legion, fearing the Avengers' sheer power. The Mandarin would have killed him right there, before he met Mantis, meaning that the Celestial Madonna would never have had the protection of the Avengers.

See? It's that kind of continuity-driven stuff that made What If? fun to read for big Marvel nerds.

Heck, even the Imaginary Stories of the sixties worked because they were mostly just alternate futures assuming a shared background, like the legendary "Superman-Red, Superman-Blue" or "the Death of Superman." They were extrapolations with the same start point.

Elseworlds, on the other hand, usually violate the number one rule of alternate history fiction: more than one divergence from reality, what S.M. Stirling once called "alien space bat" stories. With so many divergences, or worse, an improbable divergence…screw it, there might as well be alien space bats in there, too. (Stirling's exact quote, who's meaning changed thanks to the telephone game, was: "the only way Operation Sea Lion would have worked is if the Nazis had alien space bats helping them.")

Example: Superman: Red Son has a great idea for a divergence: if Superman landed in Russia instead of America. But why would Superman landing in Russia make Batman Russian, too? Eduardo Barretto's Speeding Bullets had the same divergence as the Bruce (Superman) Wayne what-if backups. What if Superman's spaceship landed in Gotham and he was raised by the Waynes? Great idea, but why would Lex Luthor become the Joker? (Maybe alien space bats made Lex do it.)

In fact, Elseworlds were sometimes like those dumb episodes of the Simpsons where they redo Hamlet, only with Bart as Hamlet and Moe the Bartender as Claudius. It's usually either a straight up recasting, or slipping a hero into another story (as with Thomas's retelling of Fritz Lang, Superman: Metropolis) in a fanfiction-like way that doesn't comment on either.

Elseworlds are like poetry: probably a lot more fun to write than they are to read.

Despite all that, Superman Batman – Generations had a really irresistible concept: what if Superman and Batman aged in real time? Instead of always being in their mid-thirties and having their pasts roll up behind them, Batman and Superman showed up in 1939, aged in real time, got married, had children and successors that continued their fight.

Superman doesn't get older, but Clark Kent has to. Batman's successors, like Dick Grayson and eventually his own son, took a page out of the Phantom's playbook and pretend there's only been one Batman, to add to his aura of mystery. Some of Superman and Batman's older supporting cast die off, like Perry White, Commissioner Gordon, and Alfred. Alfred remains a presence in the books because he appears to Bruce Wayne as a ghost occasionally, continuing to serve after death.

The 1930s-set stories feature giant robots and autogyros, while the 1950s stories had some of the sillier aspects of comics at the time, like alien invasions and magical imps playing pranks. John Byrne, like me, can't commit to true silliness: his 50s comics feel more like Marvel monster comics, with a Twilight Zone style dark ending than like the game-playing in Superman's Pal, Jimmy Olsen. He makes only passing references to transformations to give a sense of place; his focus is on that era's space opera.

In the 1960s, the series touches on how the heroes faced Vietnam, with Superman's mortal son serving in the army. The issue set in the 70s were the high point, due to the appearance of big-league scary menaces, an era when comics stopped messing around: Ra's al-Ghul, and the supercomputer version of Brainiac. By the 1980s, when comics got moody, Batman started to wear spiky armor and had a hostile relationship with the police.

The lives of the two heroes intersect in many ways, like how Batman's son and Superman's daughter fall in love in the 1970s, and in the 1980s, Batman's son raises Superman's grandson. By the end, you need a flowchart, but aren't all families like that?


World's Finest Team

John Byrne, with Generations, is the first person to ever answer the question to my satisfaction why Superman and Batman, heroes who have different spheres of influence (Superman is science fiction, Batman is atmospheric horror and crime) team up regularly and are good friends. I mean, in story logic, why ARE they buddies, anyway? Pairing up the two always felt like what it is: a gimmicky marketing stunt pairing together two very different big heroes to double their money.

According to Generations, the two heroes are united by the fact they're first. They were the trendsetters in the early devil may care, rough and tumble world of early superheroes, where, back in the 30s, heroes still had balls and Superman interrogated people by throwing them off buildings. They set their own rules and everyone since followed them. They may have mellowed out later and behaved themselves, but they alone remember the early days when everything was new. As a consequence, their lives are intertwined.


Generations I is Luthor's Story

Unlike the sequels to Generations, the first Generations is made especially readable by the fact it isn't a series of vignettes with no payoff meant to show the passage of time. It's a single, central unified story told over a broad amount of time, featuring the revenge of Luthor, a crafty genius and manipulative liar who orchestrates tragedies designed to destroy Superman's family: fearsome, cunning schemes, like Iago from Othello. Since over time Batman and Superman's families intertwine more and more (e.g. Superman's daughter marries Batman's son), this means Batman comes into the mix as well in Luthor's plot.

Not a lot of reviews talk about how Superman/Batman: Generations is, basically, about Luthor, and how his crafty revenge plays out over decades.

What makes someone your greatest enemy? It's not power, because if it was, Brainiac would be Superman's greatest foe, not Luthor, an alien supercomputer with near infinite resources to draw on. No, the reason Luthor is Superman's greatest enemy is because he has the ability to get nasty and personal. He can wound Superman's emotions in a way a computer wouldn't understand or attempt.

(This is also, incidentally, why I suspect the Borg were seldom used as bad guys in Star Trek: despite the fact they're so powerful and threatening, they are so alien you can't interact with them on the personal level needed for regular stories.)

Luthor turned Superman's powerless son against him by lying to him since childhood, convincing him to try to murder his sister. He has assassins kill Superman's supporting cast, all while Superman was searching for Luthor, so Superman would carry guilt for not protecting them. Only when all this was done did Luthor intend to kill Superman by depowering him, then by placing his brain into Superman's body.

This is not the "good guy on the inside" Luthor seen in Maggin's novels, who never wants to harm innocent people in his crimes, where it's a real tragedy he turned to crime, and there's hope he can be redeemed. No, this Luthor is a true complete monster.

With the intriguing outlier of Doctor Doom, who was portrayed as oddly noble, classy and honorable, Byrne typically has evil with a capital E villains who are sheer acid inside.

Superman/Batman: Generations is so completely Luthor's story that even in death, he is victorious: Superman kills Luthor. It's an accident, but it's broadcast all over the world and made Superman look like a killer.

"Well, It Doesn't Feel like an Elseworlds!"

The nicest thing I could say about Superman/Batman – Generations is, it doesn’t feel like an Elseworlds. It feels more like a particularly unusual and accurate adaptation into another medium. There was nothing about their characterizations that were changed for the sake of change; in Byrne's head, he's probably writing about the "real" Superman and Batman. It feels like a deliberately classic, "original recipe" take, like the intention behind the All-Star books. It's a characteristic of the best Elseworlds, like James Robinson's the Golden Age: they don't feel like Elseworlds.

This felt more like Superman than the Superman I've known in some time. This miniseries featured a Superman who was a gadgeteer-tinkerer, who in his spare time, builds robots. He also enjoys flying into space and battling alien invaders, and if he has a problem on earth he flies into space to see if aliens have figured it out. Byrne's predilection for science fiction, as a big fan of Star Trek, really helps him "get it" here. That's the closest take yet to how I envision the character.

I wasn't a huge fan of some of John Byrne's decisions in his Superman reboot Man of Steel back in '86, but he gets the classic, Schwartz-era incarnation. When doing Man of Steel, I think it went to John Byrne's head he was able to change things and go off-model, and he's even said as much. If he was placed to draw and script "classic model" Superman, he can do a decent job.

A lot of people blame Byrne for things he didn't do. He was accused of stripping Superman of a lot of imaginative baggage. Actually, the whole point of "Man of Steel" was, it was a skeleton framework, a story with many deliberate gaps set over the course of years. So if someone really, really wants to bring in Vartox or the Superman Robots, there's room in the back for it. (Byrne's Superman run was filled with traditionally weird Byrne tics that didn't help matters, like that unpleasant Metal Men team up where Superman tells them they're just robots and not real people at all.)

Likewise, the Batman here feels about right. Batman has a terrible problem, which is taking himself so goddamn seriously, to the point the imagination and adventure were stripped out. Batman, like the Shadow, always had some spooky classic horror movie/art deco atmosphere that made him cool, which made the Bride of Frankenstein and Universal inspired stylization of Tim Burton perfect for bringing him to screen.

It's unfortunate Batman is defined by the high-concept draining Nolan movies these days. I applaud them for being great films, but all the same, they're movies I RESPECT, but I don't LOVE them. Does that make sense?

Knightwing

Knightwing had to be my favorite new character in the series. Raised by Batman's son, he's secretly Superman's powerless grandson (a sign of how oddly incestuous and interconnected the Superman and Batman family tree became towards the end of the series).

He had a funny idea behind him: eventually, as time went on, sooner or later, one of the family members of the Batman of the 1980s-1990s would be a Stan Lee-written, Marvel Comics style hero, an acrobatic, bold costumed athlete like Hawkeye or Daredevil, who unlike the serious Superman and Batman, taunts his foes with smartaleck comments. Like Captain America and Daredevil (but unlike Batman), he fights mainly superpowered foes. He's the kind of character Crackerjack from Astro City was created to comment on.

If you called him a wiseass, he'd probably take it as a compliment. He talks in a normal way of speaking, unlike the "Great Scott! I've got to act fast!" way Bruce Campbell-chin heroes like Superman and Batman talk. Knightwing is more friendly, earnest, low-drama, subdued and likable compared to the comparatively high-strung Hawkeye or Daredevil, and you get the feeling that Knightwing, unlike Captain America, is a lot younger and isn't a macho, savvy guy who knows everything. He responds to the shocking discoveries around him with an Englehart-like "man, can you believe this shit?" that seems to be the ending of every Avengers story from the 1970s on.

In Generations II, we even learn Knightwing fell in love with a woman he sent to prison for 10 years. I ask you, could that type of coincidence-dependent yet emotion-wringing complication BE more Marvel?

Knightwing is a great character to end the first series on. His name wasn't chosen by accident. Originally, Nightwing was an identity used by Superman in the Bottled City of Kandor. Despite the fact Superman doesn't have any more powers than any other Kandorian, he can't ignore crime, so he created an identity inspired by Batman. Years later, Dick Grayson adopted the Nightwing identity full time. If the ending of the story was to be a merging or blending of the Superman and Batman line, this was a great place to start.


Mortality

Johnny Redbeard has a rep for being nuts, but he has an attitude to comics I agree with. He doesn't buy the cynicism death doesn't mean death as long as a character's face is used to sell beach towels. (Forget Ra's al-Ghul's Lazarus Pits. The secret to immortality is merchandizing.)

This all but makes it inevitable his best work would be on non-canon side projects where dead means dead and change means change without affecting profits from action figures and lunchboxes.

There's a notion of permanence that makes everything feel more real. When people die, they stay dead. And interestingly enough, Gold Kryptonite shows up in this series more often than regular green Kryptonite does.



Generations II – DVD Deleted Scenes/Extras

The world in Generations was interesting enough to want more. So, here comes Generations II. Unlike the first Generations, Generations II doesn't have the spine of a unifying central story. It's a collection of unrelated things that happened, which often have zero payoff.

What's the difference between a story and a bunch of things that happen? A story has unity. Things that appear have payoff later. A story has a unifying central theme (theme is just a fancy sounding term that means what the story is about, what it has to say, the thesis statement), one that achieves resolution at the end.

Generations II doesn't achieve any of those things. Set in and around the original story, it answers questions like whether or not the Dick Grayson sixties Batman had a Batgirl, and what Wonder Woman was doing all through the original Generations. It even takes care of unfinished business from the original, like making sure Alfred's ghost moves on to his eternal rest. In other words, it's not a story or even a sequel, it's a collection of the comic book equivalent of DVD deleted scenes and extras.

Despite it being a collection of events without payoff and not a real story, it's nonetheless interesting if you found the world of the original interesting. It gives more character development to characters given short shrift, like how moody and vengeful Batman's son got after his wife Superwoman died, and gave us more information on Knightwing.

In general, it's good supplementary material worth reading to fans of the original Generations....until the ending goes somewhere totally terrible.

Generations I had the occasional dumb ideas. The worst is that Bruce Wayne was Robin in his teenage years (say what?), but the really terrible stuff would have to wait until Generations II.

What comes next? Spoilers, but it's so dumb it should be spoiled:

Bruce Wayne's parents knew about their fate, but went to their fate willingly, knowing their sacrifice would create the Batman.

In the annals of disastrously immoral choices insufferably presented to the reader as a "heroic sacrifice," this, far and away, takes the cake. It's right up there with One More Day and Spider-Man giving up his marriage in order to save his aunt's life. Martha and Thomas Wayne consigned themselves to death to leave their only child an orphan, angry and filled with grief his entire life? To do what? Create a superhero and prevent him from living a normal life? Does that sound selfless, for a parent to leave their child an orphan? Does that sound like a choice any parent would ever make?

If you have children, I ask…does that sound at all like the choice YOU would make? (I might be wrong here, but I understand John Byrne is not a parent, but is a step-parent.)

Does anyone like this idea? Anyone? I doubt the groveliest Byrne sycophant in the world, the biggest unhealthy lickspittle enabler in the delusional insulated bubble of the Byrne Robotics Forum, would look at that and say, "wow, that's cool. It's like Byrne found a missing puzzle piece that makes everything we know fit retroactively. It makes the Waynes look so selfless!" I can't even imagine even the wretches at Byrne Robotics defending this.

The amazing thing is, it's not even true. You don't even need the Waynes to die to make Batman, at least according to Alan Brennert in only one of the most famous and often reprinted stories ever.



"You Didn't Say 'Simon Says!'" Morality

I don't think Byrne entirely understands the morality of honesty. A shocking number of plot points in this series involve villains forcing heroes to make promises, and then the good guys win by finding "fine print" ways to break their promises, like a scheming contract lawyer. I kept expecting Superman to tell Luthor, "ha ha, Lex, it doesn't count, because you didn't say Simon Says!"

It's a characteristic of moral midgets: they believe keeping your word, no matter what the cost, no matter how circumstances change, no matter what side effects happen, is the height of moral behavior. It isn't. One of Fritz Lang's best movies, "Kriemhild's Revenge," was about how, because of an oath and promise, the Nibelungs' closed ranks to protect a murderer from his just fate. The fact they protected a killer just because "they promised " wasn't presented as "honorable," but a pointless, thickheaded waste that led to everyone's death.

But, okay, let's agree for now it's important to keep a promise even if it's to a lowlife like Luthor and the Joker in a circumstance where he has your pregnant wife prisoner. Fine. Even if that's the case, how does that jibe with the "aha, you forgot to say I couldn't…" petty legalism Superman uses to "outsmart" bad guys?

How is playing "Simon Says" in any way moral behavior?

It's totally okay to lie to evil people to save lives, even if you're Captain America or Superman. Likewise, it's morally wrong to tell the truth if the consequences of that are way, way worse ethical breaches than just dishonesty.

Heck, there was one great Avengers story where competition junkie villain Imus Champion captures the Avengers and, unless they agree to face him on his terms, he'll unleash nuclear weapons to destroy innocent people? How did the Avengers save the day? Firestar used ants to get a message out to Hank Pym, who wrecked Imus Champion's equipment during the contest. Imus got angry that this wasn't either fair play or sporting because the Avengers called outside help instead of a fair contest, but the Avengers say, "we do whatever it takes to save lives."


Generations III – Skip This One

Generations III tries to weave a story over a thousand years, but it ends with an enraging "it was all a dream" finale that meant the entire series didn't matter.

Because centuries of time pass between the stories, essentially, everything important that happens, happens in between and we hear about it in flashback.

Like all terrible stories DC did in the 2000s, it involves the New Gods in a central role. Guys, this stuff is just not that cool.

I've never read a story in my entire life, where, literally almost everything that happens just ends up not mattering. Superman having children with Beautiful Dreamer, who Darkseid kills and are never brought up again?

Nobody seemed to know why this series was made, so why should we come up with reasons it should be read?


Things to Ponder: 

• Who the heck is Bruce Wayne's wife? The book never reveals, except we know it isn't Talia, because we see her when the story gets to the 1970s. 

• Batman's 30th Century starship (Batmobile? Batship?) looks like a Romulan Bird-of-Prey. Maybe the Romulans do custom jobs.

• Batman's silver-streak hair is so cool looking, it should be his permanent look. 

• Johnny Redbeard really dove in deep into his Silver Age Imaginary Story collection to bring up the scenarios here. Batman got permanent superpowers in Generations III, and the possibilitron in Generations II came from an actual story about a future predicting machine of Superman's invention. It's like a window into an alternate universe where people actually remembered these stories happened and used them. DC has long-term memory loss issues with their continuity, especially compared to Marvel. 

Final Thought

All in all, the first miniseries feels right because of one reason. It's amazing to forget Superman and Batman have been around for a really long time. Here's what the first Batmobile looked like. 

Eulogy for Dwayne MacDuffie

Dwayne McDuffie, a guy best known for writing for the DC Animated toons and then actually getting to write Justice League, died recently, which is an ugly shock because he was energetic, relatively young, and wasn't obese or anything. He's the kind of guy you figure can go the distance, and his death (due as I understand it, to accident) is the kind that makes you angry.

In his capacity at working at animated DC, particularly Justice League, he created some of the slickest, coolest cartoons ever made, the single best expression of DC superheroes in any medium ever. Dark, smart and old-school cool, Justice League was the first animated DC cartoon to use long-term arcs and is generally considered, along with the early seasons of Batman and Mask of the Phantasm as the high point of superhero animation.

Let me tell you the exact moment I realized Dwayne McDuffie was my kind of guy.

During the DVD of the Justice League episode 3-parter, Dwayne said he was absolutely shocked by the buzzkill, disappointing revelation that Hawkman's wings were some kind of strap on to his cosume and not actually a part of him. So, if you look closely at his Justice League show, at no point do any Thanagarians take their wings off, ever - even when by themselves...and if someone unfamiliar with DC were to, say, draw a conclusion from that...well, that wouldn't be his fault, would it? They don't say the wings are a part of them, they just heavily imply it!

This is such a clever way around outright contradicting canon that I have to give him props for sheer sneakiness.

Also, note that Nth Metal is onl mentioned as an engineering concept totally unrelated to flight.

I thought I was the only one this drove up the wall and it's nice to know I wasn't alone. People that are totally entrenched might wonder what the big deal is, but I started off a Marvel fan, reading Marvel-only as a point of pride. Naturally I got curious about DC because I liked superheroes, and one of the first I wanted to read was Hawkman because he looked so darn cool: he had wings and fought with ancient weapons. He looked like a DC version of one of Frank Miller's Ninja heroes.

Instead, we have a character that is an alien (huh - why is that necessary?), who uses ancient weapons for no reason except an insane whim, whose motive for coming to earth and remaining there is murky at best, and worst of all, his wings aren't a part of him. This final bit removes the element of fantasy and adventure. It makes him a phony, a sham, a lie...like a pimply faced, Doritos-smelling teenager pretending to be Santa Claus at a mall. The real Hawkman is a lame character like Wonder Woman, in that he makes absolutely no sense so it's impossible to like him.

Regardless, here's another thing that Dwayne MacDuffie have in common: we're both Englehart fans.

Here's the pudding...the very first story arc after the three-part introductory movie was actually based on Englehart's dramatic splash story in JLA 140-142 featuring the origin of the Manhunters and their attempt to steal the power of the Guardians, the inciting incident of which is framing Green Lantern for murder.

What's more, the two characters that were the best developed in the entire comics run were Hawkgirl and Jon Stewart. It was Englehart's idea to bring Hawkwoman into the JLA with the impressive logic that if Hawkman was a member, why wasn't Hawkwoman, anyway? Though it should be noted that it was Gerry Conway a few years later that had Hawkwoman as a member without her husband.

Finally, it was Englehart who established the character of Jon Stewart as a leading man. When Englehart took over Green Lantern, the expectation was he was going to bring Hal Jordan back. Which he didn't do for at least an entire year, doing to the one thing nobody expects: writing Jon Stewart as such an interesting and competent guy, when he finally got around to Hal Jordan, I didn't want Hal back.

Even one of Englehart's minor stories was adapted by the animated series, including a Batman/Aquaman team up in Legends of the DC Universe.

Thus, Dwayne MacDuffie was a guy on my wavelength. I know he will be missed, and in an era when people who just don't care or know anything about comics characters except campy water cooler jokes (ahem - Brave and the Bold) he was someone that loved the characters and took them seriously. He was a rarity and his enthusiasm will be missed.

Peter Cannon, Thunderbolt: Unleash the Powers of the Mind!

Did you ever see a character and say to yourself, "this guy is too cool for words. Why aren't they a bigger deal than they actually are?"

Two of my favorite DC characters were always in that category: the villainous Kobra and Pete Morisi's sixties hero, Peter Cannon, Thunderbolt.

First, check out the house ad up top for his first Post-Crisis series. Pretty groovy, eh?

One thing that always blew my mind about Thunderbolt was how he's the only superhero I can think of where his archenemy is a real historical person: Queen Evila, the Ancient Egyptian immortal sorceress, was outright stated to have been Hatshepsut II, who in real world history was the only female Pharaoh other than Cleopatra.

Peter Cannon, Thunderbolt has the extreme distinction of having his imitators and outright ripoffs be more famous than he is. First, there's Iron Fist, who Chris Claremont has flat-out said in every single interview given on the topic was a character "inspired" by Peter Cannon, Thunderbolt: their origins are the same, the American baby raised in Tibet after a plane crash. And everyone knows the role the Charleton heroes played in the creation of the Watchmen, with Dr. Manhattan as an expy for Captain Atom, Rorschach as the Question, and so forth....and Ozymandias was the inspiration and starting point for Ozymandias, with his tremendous speed, martial knowledge, and mystic obsessions.

The common "Marvel Zombie" attitude is that DC is staffed by old phogeys that are totally out of touch with popular culture. And every time I am inclined to think that's an unfair and undeserved stereotype DC does something that reminds me of how totally legitimate it is, by their total failure to cash in on the pop culture zeitgeist.

When Star Wars and Battlestar Galactica was a big deal, DC unveiled their sorry afterthought, Gerry Conway's Atari Force. Marvel, meanwhile, responded to the Star Wars craze by doing Star Wars comics. Then you have DC's years-too-late attempts to cash in on the Martial Arts craze, featuring a lily-white dude (I'm just saying!) named Richard Dragon.

A few recent failures to capture the imagination come to mind. For instance, Barry Allen was a police scientist years and years before the public fascination with scientific/forensic police work and had been dead for decades by the time of the CSI craze. Though in that case it's probably for the best that Barry stayed dead, if Barry was alive, he could have a lot of cachet to do something audiences like.

The second example I can think of is the current popularity of Avatar: the Last Airbender. I'm sure someone must know of the untapped potential here! My God, Peter Cannon could be DC's answer to Avatar! Avatar was a series about a hero raised by Tibetan monks that constantly reincarnates over and over. That's the same with Thunderbolt, also called Vranya (which is a real Indian word, incidentally).

No wonder nobody Challenges the Unknown much: it's the same crap over and over

Challengers of the Unknown is a comic about a series of four interchangeable men, all armed with their own separate hair color, who all come together to take risks because they survived a plane crash and came to believe they're all living on borrowed time. This leads to the most interesting and distinctive element of the series, that frankly makes it impossible to dislike: they have such an entertainingly matter-of-fact attitude to their own deaths, and a fate-tempting recklessness, that they come off as a little insane. The Challengers are adrenaline junkies that specialize in suicide missions, gleefully playing Russian Roulette with God.

Unlike other comics, this one has an anxious edge that borders on horror. Anyone with superpowers is a villain, and they use their powers in frightening ways. The stories have a background of subtle dread that really speaks my language.

The comic's first two issues are among the best comics I've read from that period - head and shoulders above most of the comics of the time. But by the third issue, you can pick out a formula that starts to emerge. The Challengers basically experience the same story over and over: like Scooby-Doo they split up, they find some weird unexplained phenomenon, usually a monster of some kind, and then, while being blackmailed into doing the bidding of a villain who wants an object that will give him superpowers, they experience four different stories where they experience four different monsters or locales. At the end, the villain acquires powers, and the Challengers trick him in some way where he loses those abilities. In the archetypal Challs story, there are usually "four magic jars" (or something to that effect) that we're left wondering what's in them. (SPOILER: Usually a monster, or maybe an evil mirror.)

This is a very basic example of how to tell a story. "Hey, it's a box. What's inside?"

As soon as the formula clicks in, Challengers becomes unreadable, because there's never a new kind of story, only plugging different numbers into the formula above. The scripter/plotter job on Challengers has to be the easiest gig in the entire world: it's less an act of creation and more like filling out a big Mad Lib. I guess that's the real reason that few people "challenge the unknown" much. Because it's the same thing over and over.

Worse, none of the four characters really have personalities of their own. They are absolutely and totally interchangeable. At least with Doc Savage's aides they had separate skills: Monk was a chemist, Ham was a lawyer, etc. But even that bare bones, primitive level of one-dimensional characterization is absent: the only place one knows that Red Ryan was a circus daredevil was the title page. He never showed any acrobatic ability. When did Rocky, "champion wrestler," ever wrestle anything? You'd think Professor Haley would have scientific skills that he uses, but he's generally no smarter than any of the others.

This is why I find it hard to believe that Challengers is in any way an antecedent to Fantastic Four. Anyone that says that doesn't understand what actually makes FF great: how interesting and distinctive the four lead characters were.

After the descent into a repetitive formula, Challengers isn't readable. I've often been told by people that like traditional Westerns that I "need to acquire an appreciation for formula." Personally, I think the sole function of formula is to prepare you to accept more formula, the same way that the only function of bad movies or books is to prepare you to accept more bad movies or books.

That said, Challengers starts off really, really strong, with two great stories - the second of which, the Ultivac story, has in my opinion, the best art of Jack Kirby's career. Ultivac is a giant robot capable of reading minds. But in a twist, he's actually a sympathetic creature that is trying to protect his own existence. The real enemy is revealed to be the greed of people that want to exploit a human robot for their own purposes.

To quote the Garbage Pail Kids movie: "Ugliness? Meanness of spirit and greed, these are real ugliness. To be blessed with...unusual features...is an adventure."

It's actually pretty shocking, because for the most part, traditional adventure comics of the 1950s are suspicious and distrustful of outsiders of any kind, who are usually malevolent instead of sympathetic. Take for instance the LSH hero Lightning Lord: the only singleton on a planet of twins, if he was in an Andre Norton sf novel (which always feature disabled outsiders as the main characters), or in the outsider-sympathetic Marvel comics, he would be a hero and protagonist instead of a villain. Being an outsider and standing out made him, in the 1950s, twisted instead of likeable.

One of the great additions the Ultivac story was that of June Robbins. Here's an interesting historical footnote about the story: computer operation and programming in the beginning decades was a mostly female, "pink collar" profession, like secretary work. In fact, I like to tell people as a joke that my Grandmother was a computer - and by computer I mean the original definition, a woman with good math skills that double-checks the calculations of engineers. Many of the major figures in the early days of Computer Science are female, like Grace Hopper. It's often hard to believe today, where Computer Science majors are 90% male (I am not making this statistic up, by the way, though this should be obvious to anyone that has ever been around a computer science or IT department - maybe they should stick Twilight posters on the walls of the classes or something).

In fact, I'm getting my masters in Information Science, which includes the technical aspects of information organization work...metadata, electronic database management, etc. I've often heard an extremely sexist (but funny) comment that this line of work is just library science for men. I've also heard of Masters IS students referred to as "guybrarians."

The first Challenger story was likewise really strong, and it forms the Challenger formula: they find a magical box, which they open each section, each of which contains some bizarre creature from the elder world. One really effective scene has them draw straws - and the winners are thrilled when it's their turn. And Kirby deserves credit for creating monsters and menaces that are really fearsome. The strength of the first Challenger story is based on individual images: things like a giant hand that emerges from the sea and crushes a ship underneath.

Like Roger Zelazny, who only wrote two books that I really like yet I count myself a fan of his because of how great those two are (Lord of Light and Amber), I can consider myself a Challengers fan despite the fact that they have an astonishing ratio of bad stories to good ones.

Here's my advice if you find Challengers of the Unknown in Showcase form: check it out from the library, read the first four stories, and give the book back the next day.

Crisis on Infinite Earths

With a story as well-read, intimately annotated, written about, and scrutinized as "Crisis on Infinite Earths," I never thought that I would discover something about it that nobody else has yet...but it seems that I have.

With the pervy George Perez art, it's really easy to play a little game that I like to call "spot the nipple." Seriously - once I realized what to look for, I ran into a near dozen. Here's a freebie to get you started: gee, Dolphin, it sure must be drafty on that head ship of Brainiac's...! If Perez applied himself more, he might be able to snatch the title of "perviest artist ever" from John Byrne.

There is an argument that it might require some perviness on my part to notice this, but all I have to say in my defense is to not shoot the messenger. I'm just the one sayin' it, I'm not the one playin' it.

Now it's confession time: I haven't re-read Crisis in years and years, and I really, really wanted to like it.

There was a time when I was history's greatest Crisis critic, and I was skeptical about its ultimate results. Some of you that may not have noticed, but I'm an unapologetic continuity-hound. Suspension of disbelief is like trust: it is never given away. It has to be earned, and it can be broken. Dispensing with continuity tatters and undermines that suspension of disbelief.

More than that, I just plain love the Marvel and DC Universes. I love their history, love the characters inside of them, and love the stories that have been told with them. To ignore any part of that troubles me.

As an unapologetic continuity-hound, Crisis bothered me. Green Lantern was an example of a comic that maintained its history. It's possible today to have a reference to a 1960s issue by John Broome, because almost everything is still in play; there is an unbroken line from Hal Jordan's first appearance in Showcase to today. However, the same can't be said of Hawkman or Aquaman. Previously, both characters had pretty straightforward (if uninteresting) identities, but at least you knew who they were.

It troubles me how absolutely inured DC fans are to this, to the point where they don't realize how wrong or extraordinary this situation is. Every single Marvel comic ever published, going back to the days of Stan Lee, Kirby and others, are a part of Marvel history. The same Spider-Man that was in Amazing Fantasy #15 back in 1963 is the same Spider-Man that Marvel publishes comics about today. The Thor that first showed up in Journey into Mystery is the same Thor published today, in an unbroken, continuous line, with none of their stories cut, excised or omitted.

There are exceptions ("Teen Tony" comes to mind, who was erased from existence), but they are impossibly rare and easy to discount. The idea of characters being totally different people based on when they're published, or of major alterations to their backstory, or of wholesale reboots that break a character from their past completely, are not normal. They should never be treated as "par the course" for superhero comics.

The person that made me change my mind about Crisis and its effects was Geoff Johns. He saw potential in a single-verse. For instance, if the JSA was on "Earth-1" during World War II, instead of being the JLA of some alternate earth, they became something much grander: elder statesmen. They were the legends that inspired everything, from their time to the era of the Legion of Super-Heroes. Geoff Johns was the first DC guy to treat DC comics like a Marvel-style universe, with consistent continuity. Thanks to Geoff Johns, I realized that what came from the ashes of Crisis was a world that was just as worthy as its predecessor, that remembered its past; not as cheesy throwaway in-joke references to a "Pre-Crisis Batwoman," but as something alive.

So, when reading Crisis on Infinite Earths, I wanted to like it. If I liked it, it would be a sign of my personal evolution and growth as a human being. It would be a sign of my personal fairness and lack of ability to hold long-term grudges. A lot of the Pre-Crisis fans I know always remind me of people in the Balkans and the former Yugoslavia, who are still pissed off over things that happened in 1315.

But unfortunately, as a story, I didn't like the original Crisis. Here's why:

1. The Anti-Monitor is not an interesting villain. Give me one adjective to describe the Anti-Monitor's motive or personality. At the end of the day, Crisis on Infinite Earths was built around a villain that was only half of an idea. The Anti-Monitor had no real well-defined motive for destroying the Infinite Earths, no real personality to speak of, never appeared before Crisis, and never really appeared again afterward. In fact, part of the reason the Anti-Monitor was so threatening was that his powers were so vaguely defined as to be limitless. He was, in short, boring.

This is a huge flaw because in superhero comics, villains are more important than heroes because the actions, personality and motives of villains drive the story. It's possible to have a boring hero with interesting villains (Thor and the Challengers of the Unknown comes to mind) but the converse is never, ever true.

What's more, something as huge-scale and epic as Crisis deserved a huge villain. Imagine if the story was set around a very charismatic, frightening, threatening villain: Darkseid comes right to mind as someone that would be right for a story like this, or the Wolfman revamp of Brainiac as an infinitely intelligent supercomputer who was out to find and replace God.

Lots of people believe Crisis to be superior to Secret Wars, but I don't. The reason is that Secret Wars was a story that was centered around the greatest supervillain of all time, Doctor Doom: how Doom thinks on a totally different level than any other character. Secret Wars had a noble, tormented Magneto that fought on the side of the good guys, a neurotic and underconfident Molecule Man, an Enchantress that finally succeeded in seducing Thor because real feelings were actually shared...and so on. Secret Wars was a story centered around interesting villains who did interesting things.

And while we're at it, with the exception of Pariah, a tormented soul, and the new Dr. Light who was redeemed by other stories, none of the other characters introduced in Crisis were all that interesting either: Alexander Luthor, the Monitor, Harbinger, and so on. All of them fail the "give me one adjective to describe their personality" test.

2. Huge 'disaster movie' plot that ignored the human element. Unfortunately, Crisis glossed over a lot of things, and it never stopped to smell the roses. One might say that's what they were going for: a big disaster movie sort of story. But disaster movies are always terrible. I can't think of a single example to contradict that statement, something I can usually do with most genres. The reason is that there's a difference between an event and a story. An event is something that happens. A story is about people. It's telling the most famous image from disaster movies are of places: the burning building, the White House getting zapped by aliens.

3. Crisis didn't tell us anything that we didn't already know. Crisis was an incredibly ambitious story. It dealt with the beginnings of the universe, the beginning of the Guardians, the creation of the multiverse and the antimatter universe of Qward. This story could have wrestled with profound questions and revealed surprising truths, even answered questions as deep as the existence (or nonexistence) of God. Okay, so it didn't have to go that far, but it was surprising that Crisis didn't tell us anything that we didn't already know. It showed the creation of Qward and Krona's experiment, things that all long-term Green Lantern fans already know.

Avengers Forever was another ambitious story: it sought to tie together all of Avengers history into one big story. It told us tons of things we didn't know before, including some things that change everything: for instance, Immortus was responsible for the Avengers discovering Captain America frozen in ice. AF even showed us how Immortus was created, and even dealt with a really profound idea: the ability of human beings to one day become like gods and channel the Destiny Force, the way Rick Jones did.

4. Marv Wolfman's 'Pollyanna' narration. Whenever Marv Wolfman wants a moment to be poignant and powerful, he writes in this weird cross between 'Pollyanna' narration and baby talk. He did this all the time in Teen Titans and it drives me crazy. "They they go, the greatest, bravest beings ever known!" or "Supergirl is more selfless than...most anyone!" Groan. Wolfman is the absolute last person tapped to pen a death. Speaking of which...

5. The deaths were gutless, and there wasn't enough of them. Okay, this is going to strike people as a very novel angle of attack here, but it's a little gutless that all the deaths in Crisis are of expendable characters. Yes, I would include Supergirl and the Flash as expendable characters. The Flash was the lowest-selling of DC's heroes, with a cancelled comic, who received a Happily Ever After and was placed on a bus away from the rest of the universe. I hate to say this, because I think Kara's best stories were her Superman Family backups, but Kara, come 1985, was likewise a has-been who's top-selling heyday was back in the 1960s.

Besides those two, who else died in the Crisis? Actually, surprisingly few people: the Bug-Eyed Bandit, Prince Ra-Man, Kid Psycho, Aquagirl, Earth-2 Green Arrow. This is what I mean when I say the deaths in Crisis were gutless and didn't take risks. Earth-1 Green Arrow is a character. Earth-2 Green Arrow was the answer to a trivia question. This is going to surprise people that think of Crisis as a bloodbath, but nobody really important actually died and the casualty list was astonishingly short. Two deaths that stand as especially gutless are Kole (who was created just for the purpose of having a Titan dying in Crisis) and Nighthawk, who hadn't appeared in a DC comic since the 1950s and was brought back for the sole purpose of killing him off.

Personally, I find it amazing that Tomahawk lived to the end! I figured he was a dead man walking for sure.

(Incidentally, as my cousin, Eddie Michigan, once pointed out, no one ever saw the Golden Age Speedy die. So he could be out there somewhere...)

Now, there were a few things I liked about Crisis.

I have to say, Crisis was an opportunity, and they took full advantage of that opportunity, in the sense that it could allow characters that would otherwise never see each other to interact. What does Hawk say when he's on a mission with the Communist superhero, the original Starfire, for instance?

Kamandi's friendship with King Solovar of Gorilla City. That was the best part of Crisis for me. It showed Kamandi, distrustful of talking animals, who was befriended by a character as unlikely as Solovar: a wise, kindly, aged being, saintly, fatherly and benevolent. To have Kamandi lose someone like him was really touching.

I loved the story with all the super-villains, under the command of Luthor and Brainiac, taking over three of the earths. This was when the story started to really get good: this actually had a lot of promise, especially with the contrast between Luthor and Brainiac, two characters with whom it should be said, Wolfman can write in their voices very well. Why couldn't this have been the A-plot of Crisis, instead of all the boring stuff with the boring Anti-Monitor? This was a comprehensible story with villains that have comprehensible motivations.

There was one story that did right what Crisis did wrong. It was, believe it or not, Underworld Unleashed.

Neron was a strong villain, one of the few examples of a crossover villain that was interesting enough to become a regular part of the DC Universe and used after the crossover ended. He is also one of the few examples of a DC character that is more interesting than his Marvel equivalent.

Mephisto, his demonic Marvel counterpart, for instance, is dressed as something in red tights: a cliche take on the Devil. Neron is more unique: he is massively muscled and physically perfect in an eerie way. Neron was enigmatic, powerful, and extremely threatening. Mephisto on the other hand, is a textbook example of villain decay: he's been beaten by nearly everybody, so it's impossible to take him seriously anymore.

There was one very bittersweet thing about Crisis: it was the last, great hurrah of the Pre-Crisis DC Universe, made by people for whom a story like this is obviously a calling instead of just a job. For that reason, I can't find it in me to truly dislike Crisis. From the Frightful Five, to Angle Man, it was the last celebration of the Pre-Crisis universe.

...until the coming of Geoff Johns. :-) Nothing ever really ends, does it?