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. 

Doc Savage's oft-misunderstood "Crime College"

Modern readers unanimously find Doc's Crime College pretty creepy and sinister. It's a place where bad guys either get an operation to remove their memories, or are retrained psychologically to hate crime (exactly what the Crime College did wasn't that clear, and the hints varied on the novel). To modern eyes, the Crime College sounds like brainwashing, or a lobotomy, or both. It doesn't exactly help Doc keeps the place a secret.

Doc's Crime College crops up in other places in pop culture, never taken at face value, usually to talk about how disturbing the implications of it are. The B-Mod devices in "Squadron Supreme" were based on it, as was the memory wipe for criminals on Babylon 5. And the Crime College is immortalized in literature thanks to a mention in Truman Capote's "In Cold Blood."

I've always said the Crime College is the single most misunderstood element of the entire Doc Savage canon. It has to be understood in terms of the context it existed. In the 1930s, the Crime College seemed very modern; a humanitarian alternative to prison that emphasized true reform instead of punishment. There was a time when the brain, as an organ, wasn't all that understood and lobotomy seemed like a miracle cure for many disorders. Lobotomy was on the cutting edge (no pun intended), much like how we regard stem cell research today.

The Crime College seems like an extension of the rationalism of the Doc Savage stories, applied to behaviorism and ethics: criminal tendencies aren't due to "evil" or supernatural causes but bad upbringing and problems with the brain as an organ. Modern psychology bears this out: a good portion of violent criminals were abused as children, physically and sexually. This doesn't give them the right to harm innocent people – I'm just saying, it's very possible to create a very reasonable argument violent crime is solvable by psychological treatments. Could anything be more modernist?

What's more, the 1920s and 1930s were defined by the shellshocked attempt to understand the hideous human evil of World War I. The answer, by writers of pulp and horror fiction, was sometimes to say that normal people aren't capable of evil. There were a few stories by August Derleth in the 20s that explained the cause of World War I: an evil subrace of mankind living among us in secret that hated and sought our destruction.

Heck, maybe one of the most famous artists of the early 20th Century, Stanislav Szukalski, claimed that Communism, Facism, WWI and WWII were caused by a subrace of humans that bred with Yeti. He seriously believed this and he was NOT joking. Heck, he devoted a huge chunk of his obvious talent to showing evil people in history kind of look like Yeti if you squint hard enough.

And…c'mon, guys: you really think Doc Savage of all people, Abe Lincoln and Hippocrates in a ripped shirt, would actually lobotomize criminals? It's beyond his moral code. Something like that would make Doc, his world and heroism, look sinister and hypocritical.

I find the view the Crime College is some behavior modification to be untrue. It has to be understood in the context of its age: the belief in rational, compassionate, scientific reform methods that make prison and punitive methods obsolete, and a naïve attempt to understand human evil. I think we have to accept the Crime College at face value and not project suspicion on it..

Doc Savage Reviews: the 1987-1990 DC Comics

The Doc Savage DC comics could have been a series like the Marvel comics adaptation before it in the 70s, which started off adapting famous Doc novels into comic form, and then told original stories in the same vein.They used this formula just fine with Conan the Barbarian, which started with adaptations and then told original stories.

But instead, under Dennis O'Neil and the Kuberts, DC decided to do something more bizarre and unique: they decided to have Doc and his allies age in real time, and advance the timeline to modern day. It was the exact same idea as John Byrne's Superman/Batman: Generations Elseworlds story, where the two famous heroes started in 1939, aged in real time, found wives, and had children and grandchildren who continued their legacies.

The end result is that Doc Savage acquired a dynamism that was really lacking in the novels, which had a status quo like a sitcom. In the O'Neil/Kubert mini, one of his Five was a traitor. Doc got married (Monk and Ham didn't, but I guess they didn't change that dumb law yet). Doc's grandson fought evil, as did Pat's granddaughter. And most importantly, new characters were added as allies…including a woman.

Not only did Denny decide to advance the timeline, he also decided to make another very surprising creative decision: he wanted to actively question and deal with some of the contradictions in Doc Savage, which the books themselves conspicuously overlooked.

For instance, Doc and his gang were staunch humanitarians, but how could they reconcile that with the fact they got into fights for fun and used heaping helpings of violence to solve their problems? A character of Doc Savage's grandson was added just to ask a pretty pointed question I've sometimes wondered: do Doc and the gang go on adventures out of a desire to help mankind...or because it's fun to beat people up? To his credit, Chip Savage isn’t just a buzzkill drag all the time. The story makes you respect him as a person of principle. He acts as the group conscience, and Doc listens to him and adjusts his strategies accordingly.

And then there was Doc's Crime College. Everyone who reads Doc today universally agrees the idea of a place where bad guys are either operated on to lose their memories, or retrained psychologically to hate crime (exactly what the Crime College did was vague and the hints varied depending on the novel) is pretty creepy and sinister. To modern readers, the Crime College sounds like either brainwashing, or a lobotomy, or both. So, why not do a story that deals with that head on?

And then there was some of the implied attitudes of Doc and the group that would come into conflict with the modern world. For instance, the urge to protect women and keep them out of the group, and getting past national rivalries that were white-hot in Doc and the group's time. To that end, one of Doc's new allies was a Russian, and another  was a woman.

In fact, that's a big problem with Doc's new allies, with the exception of Doc's grandson: they can be entirely encapsulated by single word. Hillbilly. Woman. Russian.

Finally, the book makes mention of the fact that it's kind of creepy how the aides do whatever Doc says and don't think for themselves. This is obviously due to their trust, but it is off-putting, and when confronted with that, Monk has a "blue-screen" moment.

In short, the book tries to be a more low-key version of Watchmen to Doc Savage. It was too "different."


The Doc Savage Family Tree

The decision to make Princess Monja from the Valley of the Vanished secretly Doc's wife was a no-brainer. Everyone seems to do that! It makes sense, though: she was one of the few women to show up more than once. She had a take charge attitude that marked her as different from the usual girl. Besides, it's interesting how PJF's speculations had more impact on the perception of the character than the actual content of the original novels did.

Besides, she kinda reminds people of Dejah Thoris from Barsoom, doesn't she?

This reminds me of nothing quite so much as how, in the 1960s, Superman had a lot of "Imaginary Stories" where he did things like get married, die, or reform Lex Luthor. Eventually, the same scenarios came up over and over to the point Imaginary Stories had a kind of weird counter-canon even the actual stories considered the default trajectory of events. Every Imaginary Story made practically the same assumptions, like Clark Kent would replace Perry White as editor of the Planet after Perry White retires. Rokyn was first mentioned in an Imaginary Story as the place the bottled city of Kandor was enlarged on, before Kandor was enlarged there in "reality."

Doc Savage's son with Monja was a neurotic who couldn't hope to live up to the standards of his legendary father, who ultimately lost his mind because he lived his life in a big shadow, and truthfully, was also a bit of a dick. Okay…does this remind anybody else of Dr. Venture from Venture Bros?


The SF Elements

Here's the first big problem: I don't think O'Neil quite understood a Doc Savage story was not quite the same thing as a Fantastic Four story.

His plots all seemed like they were originally meant for Fantastic Four: Doc Savage finds a crashed UFO (interesting, as Doc debunked UFOs in 1946, when they were called Foo Fighters), with a transporter that sends him away for years. In one story, new character Shoshonna Gold is revealed to be a psychic getting mental emanations from the Moon, where aliens are creating war waves. Doc has to head to the Moon in a rocketship to stop them. Along the way, a robot sentry left by the aliens tries to capture Doc's grandson (could that be more FF?).

That may work for an FF story, which was often about expeditions that find weird alien machines, and the solution is to the problem is figuring out the aliens don't understand humans or the damage they're doing. When the situation is explained, the aliens eventually leave, as they mean us no harm. But Doc Savage was about emphasizing plausibility. There are no real aliens or psychic powers, only mysteries with rational explanations.

The worldview of Doc Savage stories is fundamentally skeptical. Even the more far out things in Doc Savage usually were believable at the time of writing: in the 1930s, a dinosaur island was just at the limit of possibility, and based on sound real, current science about closed off/island ecosystems.

Unfortunately, the one place I would forgive a fantasy element – a cell treatment to keep Doc's gang in fighting trim – turned out to be a fake. This had the unfortunate side effect of leaving the original five mostly non-combatant. After fighting aliens on the moon making wars with mind waves, who dissolved when brought to earth…they pick THIS story to play the skeptic card?


Phase II – The Mike W. Barr Years

Mike W. Barr took over Doc Savage after Denny O'Neil left, which constituted a dramatic lurch in the direction of the series to something more traditional, eventually ending in exclusively "flashback" stories to the 1930s. If O'Neil's take is New Coke, then Mike W. Barr is Coke Classic.

I feel sorry for poor Mike W. Barr. You can tell the guy wanted to write Doc but was saddled with a vision he didn't quite understand. He's an old hero and SF pulp aficionado usually given the job of working on licensed properties. During his work on Green Lantern, he slipped in Lensman references, introducing characters named Arisia and Eddore.

I don't think Barr ever warmed up to O'Neil's unique take, and I can't help but feel he was baffled by the whole thing. First chance he got, Mike W. Barr brought back classic Doc Savage elements. He set a story around the Valley of the Vanished, and in what might be the high point of the comic, had John Sunlight return to life thanks to the formula in Resurrection Day.

John Sunlight's return in #11-14 is easily the best part of this series. It is identical to the only Conan the Barbarian novel written by the original author: "The Hour of the Dragon." It's about a conspiracy bringing a mummy back to life to use as their puppet, but the mummy turns out to be smarter and more manipulative than the people who wanted to use him, and turns the table on them, creating an even more threatening menace than before. It's a downright chilling moment to see the Devil Genghis restored.

Let me go out on a limb here: Mike W. Barr's "flashback" issues set in the 30s might just be the most faithful take on Doc Savage, including the PJF stuff.


Why did nobody like it? 

Well, it didn't help it was introduced to the world by what might be the most misleading house ad ever:

In no sense is this ad true. Doc isn't a detective, he doesn't look different.

Personally, I didn't like these comics when I first read them. It was too different from what I was expecting, which was a more traditional Doc adaptation – something it only became near the end.

People usually read comic adaptations to recapture the enjoyment they had experiencing the original. This was a lot more important back in the day, when there was no VCR and movies infrequently played on television. Comics were how you got a "movie experience" when one wasn't playing. For instance, Bob Hope had a comic book that did well. It made sense to do one around Bob Hope, who had a reliable comic persona (an uncharitable person would say he played the same guy in every movie). The only modern comedian with a similar "brand" would be Adam Sandler. The comics replicated the experience of the usual Bob Hope movie, from his travel to his hound dog womanizing. In short, you read the comic version because you liked what it was based on and wanted to see some more.

That said, I liked it more on rereading it once I got over the experience of it being something totally different. It's like somebody handing you a coke and telling you it's a milkshake.

That said, I don't know if I'd really want to see any more in this timeline. None of the new characters are all that memorable, not Woman, Russian, or Hillbilly. The SF elements were so out of place I expected to see Kirby machines.

Worse, the O'Neil run didn't commit to its ideas, so it wasn't even a good Watchmen-like subversive take. If you're going to explore the morality of the Crime College, make a statement on it, instead of just using it as the backdrop to a thriller plot. That's the trouble with this incarnation of Doc Savage: it was too traditional to be subversive, and too subversive to be traditional. It had an identity crisis. The series toyed with some serious ideas but didn't commit to them. It figured just mentioning them is enough, and you've done your job. Monk is disturbed by the idea he might just be Doc's puppet? Have him change or make a decision about that, don't just have a scene where that's brought up!

The only interesting dynamic was Doc's pacifist son, but that's because he was the one subversive idea O'Neil gave some payoff.


Recommendation? 

The O'Neil/Kubert tales are a misfire, but it misfires in a very unique way (this is the difference between a failure and a fiasco – a fiasco is failing with style). Recommended, if you're curious, but know what you're in for.

The Mike W. Barr stories come recommended. Especially the John Sunlight arc at #11-14, and the flashback story starting at #19.


Final Thoughts

• I understand coloring in four color "dot" printing is often imprecise…but why does Doc have the same skin color as Adam Warlock?

• I take it back, the Russian member of Doc's crew was pretty cool. He was a hairy weirdo, but he was a Doc Savage fanboy that wanted to be just like him. I find it hilarious that, like Rasputin, he's irresistible to women despite not getting a haircut or shaving. 

• The later drawings, incidentally, come the closest to how I've always visualized the character in my head. 

• The Air Lord arc starting in #18 is one of the few times Doc fights a true supervillain. Somehow, it feels right.