Comic Book Herald

Reading Order Guide For Beginners & Fans

DC Comics

The Old 52: Animal Man’s Autopsy

by Leave a Comment

Buddy Baker, Animal Man, is often referred to as DC’s “everyman.” In Jeff Lemire, Travel Foreman, Steve Pugh, Rafael Abluquerque and John Paul Leon’s 30 plus issue Animal Man run under New 52’s first wave, Baker was given his most recognizable roles as a faulted (but familiar) father, a friend, an activist, and even as a struggling actor. Lacking both the power set and emotional capacity to emulate Clark Kent, Buddy Baker is no Superman. No, Buddy Baker is a man, and a man is little different than an animal.

But Buddy is also the inauspicious figurehead for something much larger than himself. He’s the eyes and ears of the animal world, beautifully sharing and communing with it — the Red — in a way few can, as a citizen and a family member. He’s also their avatar, their immune system, and their mantle for responsibility, a superhero. More often a victim than not, his life with all of its individualized traumas expresses the global trauma and rot begetting the New 52 world. [Read more…] about The Old 52: Animal Man’s Autopsy

Best of the Martian Manhunter!

by Leave a Comment

Martian Manhunter #1 variant cover by Joshua Middleton

Among DC’s many great heroes, the Martian Manhunter stands out for being especially underrated. His early appearances are difficult to track down in trade; he is the “Big 7” League member with the very least in the way of solo stories, and he has long been used primarily as a supporting character with few chances to truly shine on his own. Making his debut in a back-up feature in Detective Comics #225, Martian Manhunter joined the League more or less as a substitute for Superman back when DC feared that overusing the son of Krypton would weaken sales. Eventually, interest in MM waned, and he vanished almost entirely when writers had him return to Mars to be with his people once more. But let’s face it, that was never going to be the end of the road for this rad telepathic shape-shifting Martian.

Truly, you can’t keep a good Manhunter down, and after years of sporadic appearances, he finally returned to regular continuity in 1984, rejoining the Justice League in 1987. Since then, he’s been considered a mainstay of the team, but his versatility and effectiveness as a team member cuts way down on the time we spend looking deeper into his inner world. That’s all the more reason why Martian Manhunter’s greatest moments deserve celebration, because he has been with the League for a long time and he deserves the recognition!

[Read more…] about Best of the Martian Manhunter!

DC’s Earth One: You Can’t Go Home Again

by Leave a Comment

Earth One Box Set

Superman: Earth One v1

Michael Straczynsk • Shane Davis • Ardian Syaf

Batman: Earth One v1

Geoff Johns • Gary Frank

Wonder Woman: Earth One v1

Grant Morrison • Yanick Paquette • Nathan Fairbairn • Todd Klein

Earth One: Genesis

By 2010, Marvel was deep into its Ultimates Universe, their alternate universe for experimenting with modernizing their heroes and taking big swings. By the same token, DC was mostly past the failure of its All-Star line, which attempted the same approach and met some success, but ultimately never coalesced into a cohesive vision the way Ultimates had.

Earth One is an attempt at replicating the first and fixing the second. Like Ultimates, the line focuses on retelling the origins of popular superheroes now recast in the 21st century. And like All-Star, it tries to do that by giving DC’s top talent a ton of freedom.

[Read more…] about DC’s Earth One: You Can’t Go Home Again

The Old 52: Morrison’s Batman Incorporated Pt. 2

by 2 Comments

On February 25th, 2013, the New York Times arts desk column exclusively revealed that Damian Wayne would meet his untimely death at the end of Batman Incorporated #8, a story which naturally spread like wildfire among sites like IGN, ComicsAlliance, and Newsarama. DC then announced that throughout March 2013, the Bat-titles would take part in a month-long event called Requiem, with each issue adorned with an ‘R’ logo in tribute to the fallen Bat-family member. It was now clear why the second volume of Batman Incorporated was in-canon; DC wanted a news story and a sales boost. [Read more…] about The Old 52: Morrison’s Batman Incorporated Pt. 2

The Old 52: Batman Incorporated Pt. 1

by Leave a Comment

The Old 52 is not a series examining Grant Morrison’s seminal Batman run. If I were writing about Batman Inc. (Vol. 2) for such a series, I wouldn’t hesitate to praise it to the stars. The end of Morrison’s monolithic run was characterized by consistently astonishing artwork from Chris Burnham, Morrison’s typically playful and inventive profusion of ideas, and excellent characterization of each of the lead characters. I’ve previously argued that it’s a fitting end to one of the greatest superhero stories ever told and that it’s due for a critical reappraisal.

This begs the question, of course, why it received such a lackluster reception at the time. It wasn’t necessarily that critics or fans thought that it was bad, per se. It’s more accurate to say that Morrison’s ending felt spoiled, both in a literal sense (which we’ll get to), and in the sense that the disdain DC editorial held the comic in was so obvious that it felt self-evident that the events of the series weren’t what Morrison had originally intended. Reading it on a monthly basis was an ambivalent experience; Morrison’s vision of a Bat-story drawing upon the character’s entire history had already been hopelessly compromised by DC’s baffling new line-wide continuity demands, and readers watched in horror as the situation was exacerbated by the publisher’s willingness to permanently compromise the story’s effectiveness in exchange for momentary publicity gains.

Even though Batman Inc. is a relatively special case within the New 52 — the only other series that was a direct continuation of a pre-reboot run was Geoff Johns’s Green Lantern. Its demoralizing publication history ironically makes it a perfect case study through which to examine the staggering editorial mismanagement that hobbled the entire initiative. So, instead of a critical deep-dive into the themes Morrison & Burnham explore through the series, this article will tell the story of one of DC’s most colossal failures over the five-year history of the New 52. [Read more…] about The Old 52: Batman Incorporated Pt. 1