DETECTIVE COMICS #440, #441, & #442

"GHOST MOUNTAIN MIDNIGHT!"
Penciler: Sal Amendola | Inker: Dick Giordano | Writer/Editor: Archie Goodwin

They can't all be winners...

Archie Goodwin started his run on DETECTIVE COMICS with two mostly strong stories (aside from his characterization of Bruce Wayne, as discussed last week) -- and he immediately follows those up here with a pair of duds. And this is where, as I did years ago when reading NEW TEEN TITANS, I will note that allowing your writer to edit himself is not really a great idea! If Julie Schwartz had been editing Goodwin on DETECTIVE around this time, he might have helped to whip these tales into shape. But unfortunately, that wasn't the case.

"Ghost Mountain Midnight!" opens with a young lady named Sarah Beth kidnapped from a nightclub in Gotham where she works as a minimally-clad server. Batman does some investigative work and learns that Sarah Beth was taken by her own brothers to their home in the Appalachians. Batman tracks the group down and discovers that Sarah Beth is to be executed as a sacrifice to an Indian god, per the terms of a pact her family made with the Indians decades ago. The Caped Crusader saves the girl, kills a bloodthirsty bear (more of that Batman-on-animal violence we touched on a couple weeks back), and solves the mystery of a moonshine ring in the mountains. All in a day's work for our hero, and all extremely silly to boot.

The bizarre, out-of-place plot isn't helped by Goodwin's phonetic accents for the hillbilly characters; they're all running around saying "yew" instead of "you" and "hit" instead of "it". Sal Amendola's layouts aren't the greatest either, though Dick Giordano does what he can to turn them into something presentable.

SHATTUCK

About three years ago, I wrote about Wally Wood's CANNON comic strip, which was published by the Overseas Weekly some decades back. Wood also furnished two other strips to the Weekly back then: the very well-known SALLY FORTH, and the much more obscure SHATTUCK. Last year, Fantagraphics Books, who published the CANNON collection in 2014, issued a hardcover for SHATTUCK as well. I had enjoyed CANNON and SHATTUCK's price was right, so I went ahead and picked it up.

SHATTUCK is a western strip, and while the division of labor isn't perfectly spelled out, it seems that it was masterminded by Wood and produced by his studio: written by Nicola Cuti and drawn at various points by Howard Chaykin, Dave Cockrum, Syd Shores, and Jack Abel, with contributions from Wood himself as well.

The book's afterword notes that the story behind the strip's creation, and the people who worked on it, is probably of more interest and importance than the actual strip itself, and that may well be true. SHATTUCK isn't awful by any means; but it's not exactly groundbreaking, either. It tells the story of Merle Shattuck, an outlaw who kills the sheriff of a town called Sundown and then goes on the run.

STAR WARS: THE MARVEL YEARS OMNIBUS, volume 1

No "Unboxing" for March. For the first month in a long while (like, years), I received nothing new in the mail! So instead, let's take an in-depth look at a book I received last month: Marvel's STAR WARS: THE ORIGINAL MARVEL YEARS OMNIBUS, volume 1.

I've never read Marvel's STAR WARS series, but I've wanted to check it out for years. I missed Dark Horse's original trade paperbacks, as they came out long before I became a collected editions fiend. Dark Horse later did their own "Omnibus" versions of the series in a group of five volumes, and I considered picking them up many times, but I could never bring myself to do it since they were printed in a little tiny trim size smaller than the original comic book dimensions. I never understand this. I know many comic book readers have fond memories of digests from their younger days, but I've never been on board with that format. Even as a kid I thought it was silly to shrink a comic book down to a smaller size. The art becomes tiny and cramped-looking and the letters are harder to read. I'll go a little bit smaller than the original dimensions, say for reading a comic on my iPad -- which I love -- but anything beyond that is a non-starter for me.