CAPTAIN AMERICA, SPIDER-MAN, AND THE X-MEN

It's hard to believe, but I haven't written anything about a Marvel series here in nearly a year, when I looked at X-MEN '92 last March! My Mondays have been nonstop DC for fourteen months now, while my Fridays have been dedicated to other characters, universes, and publishers. So, if for no other reason than to justify all those little heads up top, I figured I should head back to the House of Ideas for a few weeks in an All-Digital Review Grab Bag!

We'll lead off this Friday with THE ADVENTURES OF CAPTAIN AMERICA, a 1991 limited series by Fabian Nicieza and Kevin Maguire. Then, one week later, we'll stick with Nicieza and jump ahead a decade for 2001's SPIDER-MAN: LIFELINE, drawn by Steve Rude.

Then we'll look at a couple of odd projects that tickle my recent interest in newspaper adventure strips: CAPTAIN AMERICA: THE 1940S NEWSPAPER STRIP, a project written and drawn by Karl Kesel in 2010, meant to read as it it were a vintage strip from the Golden Age, and the SPIDEY SUNDAY SPECTACULAR, a 2011 collection of backup pages from a run of AMAZING SPIDER-MAN issues, written by Stan Lee and drawn by Marcos Martin in another comic strip-inspired pastiche.

And after those, we'll wrap up with Marvel's Merry Mutants in a two-week look at X-MEN: GRAND DESIGN, a still-ongoing series of one-shots by writer/artist Ed Piskor which retells the X-Men's story from the beginning using the conceit that every later development was planned in advance.

So... face front this Friday, frantic ones! Mighty Marvel's comin' atcha!

RAPTORS BOOK 4

Art by: Enrico Marini | Written by: Jean Dufaux

RAPTORS book four starts off with an odd vignette that initially feels like there's been a multi-year time jump. We see a family being stalked by vampires in an old factory, and dialogue informs us that these places exist around the world. Called "Hell's Kitchens", they are where vampires corner and stalk humans as prey. It feels like the proclamation passed in the prior book -- that humans will be rounded up and thrown into zoos for the vampires' amusement -- has come to pass. But then Aznar Akeba shows up and kills the vampires (though not before they brutally murder the family's parents), and we cut to the vampire council, shocked that Aznar has turned against them. So apparently these Hell's Kitchens exist in the present, but humanity isn't aware of them. It is, as noted, a confusing opening scene, but it's not the end of the world.

Moving along, we find our heroine, Lenore, has become the lover of Camilla since last we saw them. But Lenore leaves Camilla, choosing to walk her own path away from the vampiress. Then we catch up with Lenore's former partner, Spiaggi, who makes a deal with the vampire council: if they put him in charge of the police, he'll find Lenore and Aznar and turn Aznar in to them in exchange for their letting Lenore and him disappear.

Next, Lenore teams up with Aznar and Camilla's brother, Drago, to attack her family estate. She kills her brother while Drago murders her mother and father, and Aznar wipes out everyone else. The vampire trio destroys the house, then Lenore leaves with Aznar.

DETECTIVE COMICS #404

"GHOST OF THE KILLER SKIES!"
A tribute to the great Joe Kubert & Robert Kanigher
Script: Denny O'Neil | Art: Neal Adams & Dick Giordano | Editor: Julius Schwartz

Note: Screenshots below come from BATMAN ILLUSTRATED BY NEAL ADAMS VOLUME 2 and are not representative of these stories' original colors (the covers are presented as published, however).

It's 1988. You're nine years old. Tim Burton's BATMAN movie is due out next year. BATMAN: THE ANIMATED SERIES is still four years away. You've "grown up" (insomuch as a child can be considered to have done so) with Batman, but never actually read a comic book featuring the character. Your only exposure to Batman has been via reruns of the Adam West TV show, the Filmation cartoon, and SUPER FRIENDS. But you've come to like the character quite a bit through those incarnations, and somehow you wind up with a copy of THE GREATEST BATMAN STORIES EVER TOLD, a trade paperback (published by Warner Books rather than DC Comics) collecting, ostensibly, some of the best bat-material of the past four decades.

So you start reading. You merely skim some of the early chapters because the artwork doesn't appeal to you. But soon you find yourself reading stories from the fifties and sixties. This is the Batman you recognize from TV. Colorful! Fun! Battling zany villains and accompanied at all times by Robin, the Boy Wonder!

Then you get to page 162, and suddenly things change. The artwork is more realistic. Batman looks different; longer ears, darker colors. The tone of the story is considerably moodier than what came before. Robin is nowhere to be seen. And, on the very first page -- murder! A mystery unfolds! You've seen Batman solve mysteries before, in the stories earlier in this book, but you've never seen him try to unravel a murder. Before the story is done, two more people have died. You wonder if you're supposed to be reading this stuff! Did they slip some kind of "grown-up" Batman story into this book by mistake? What would your parents say if they knew you were reading about people getting strangled to death?

RAPTORS BOOK 3

Art by: Enrico Marini | Written by: Jean Dufaux

The fourth installment of RAPTORS has way more action than either of the previous volumes. It begins with a police raid in which a gaggle of cops are killed by Camilla, while elsewhere, her brother Drago murders a senator who was depicted in the prior book as a key member of the vampire shadow council.

At the same time, a mysterious priest is, for unknown reasons, trying to track down our protagonist, Detective Lenore. Instead he finds a massive community of runaway children living beneath the city. The children reveal to the priest that they've fled their families for fear of being "turned" to vampires by their parents. Interestingly, in the prior book Lenore observed that there weren't as many children in the city as there used to be. If that many kids have run away that it's a noticeable epidemic, does that mean that the majority of the adults in the city are undead at this point?? The story doesn't get into this, but it seems likely.

However the Earth still has a decent-sized human population, as our next scene is a meeting of the vampire council in which it's decided that humanity will be rounded up and herded into zoos rather than continuing to enjoy freedom (and ignorance of the vampires' existence, apparently). It's at this point that we finally catch up with Lenore, living in solitary confinement since she was captured by the police at the second book's conclusion. She's stripped in her cell and nearly raped, but her partner, Spiaggi, comes to her rescue along with the priest.

DETECTIVE COMICS #400 & #402

"CHALLENGE OF THE MAN-BAT" | "MAN OR BAT?"
Story: Frank Robbins | Art: Neal Adams & Dick Giordano

Note: Screenshots below come from BATMAN ILLUSTRATED BY NEAL ADAMS VOLUME 2 and are not representative of these stories' original colors (the covers are presented as published, however).

For the vast majority of his Batman output in the seventies, Neal Adams worked with Dennis O'Neil as writer. But he did illustrate scripts from a few others as well: Mike Friedrich, in a Christmas backup story we skipped. Len Wein and Marv Wolfman, and then Wein alone, in a pair of stories we'll eventually cover.

And, of course, Frank Robbins. According to Adams in the introduction to BATMAN ILLUSTRATED BY NEAL ADAMS Volume 2, Robbins had expressed interest to editor Julie Schwartz in working with Adams. Adams, meanwhile, had been doodling and come up with a character called Man-Bat. Adams and Robbins crossed paths at the DC offices, and Adams asked Robbins to write the creature's debut appearance -- which brings us to "Challenge of the Man-Bat" and its sequel, "Man or Bat?"

In the first story, Batman fights a group he calls the "Lights Out Gang", who commit robberies in complete darkness. When they bait Batman into a trap at Gotham's natural history museum, the Caped Crusader is joined by a mystery bat creature to fight them. The gang is defeated in the end, and Man-Bat escapes into the night.

RAPTORS BOOK 2

Art by: Enrico Marini | Written by: Jean Dufaux

It seems my issue with the first volume of RAPTORS somehow traveled back in time twenty years to land in the ear of writer Jean Dufeaux, because as of this second installment, the infuriating vague aimlessness has vanished and the story has become defined, informative, and compelling.

An indeterminate amount of time has passed since the first book, and our heroes, detectives Lenore and Spiaggi, are still believed dead to the world. The police are seeking answers from Lenore's brother, Newton, and he promises to inform them if she turns up. Meanwhile, the detectives have closed in on Lenore's former lover and current head of the police force, Barnes -- who was revealed in the previous book to be a member of the immortal cabal running the world. Lenore and Spiaggi catch up with Barnes just after he's murdered a young woman, and chase him to the roof of a nightclub. But he makes an impossible leap to the next rooftop and then, before our heroes' eyes, is murdered by the mystery twins.

At this point the story devotes a large chunk of its runtime to a new character named Aznar Akeba -- a college student who we learn, by way of an on-page murder and resurrection, is also one of the immortals. Akeba is taken before the secret council, where they reveal to him -- and to readers -- their origins. It turns out (though for some reason the actual word is never used) that these folks are all vampires! Centuries ago, they gave up their weakness to daylight in exchange for a loss of their bloodlust, and integrated into human society as humanity's hidden masters. The telltale cysts behind the immortals' ears have developed over time and mark them as descendants of those vampires who made the transition into humankind.

DETECTIVE COMICS #395 & #397

"THE SECRET OF THE WAITING GRAVES" | "PAINT A PICTURE OF PERIL!"
Story by: Denny O'Neil | Art by: Neal Adams & Dick Giordano

Note: Screenshots below come from BATMAN ILLUSTRATED BY NEAL ADAMS VOLUME 2 and are not representative of these stories' original colors (the covers are presented as published, however).

Last week's "One Bullet Too Many!", by Frank Robbins, Irv Novick, and Dick Giordano, set up the status quo which would define Batman for the full decade of the seventies (and even in to the early eighties) -- but it's DETECTIVE COMICS 395's lead story, "The Secret of the Waiting Graves", which I've seen identified in more than one place as the tale that set the mood for the upcoming decade. Certainly it unites the Caped Crusader's definitive creative team of that era, in Dennis O'Neil and Neal Adams.

And there definitely is a mood here! While "One Bullet Too Many" was a decent introduction to the setup of the seventies and the sorts of Batman stories the decade would present, it also felt very straightforward and not all that different from what had come before. Even though the action was set mostly at night, it was still a fairly bright four-color adventure. But thanks primarily to Adams' artwork, "The Secret of the Waiting Graves" and "Paint a Picture of Peril" both drip with the sort of dark, gothic atmosphere one would expect from a Darknight Detective.