My ongoing mission: read DC Comics' output from January 1980 (cover date) to Crisis! Today, I'm looking at the comics at newsstands on the week of May 5, 1983.
Wonder Woman #306: Great (if utterly unrelated to the issue's contents) cover by José Luis García-López. Inside, Heck is now on art. Senator Abernathy, Diana's and Etta's landlord, suffers a heart attack and is whisked away by Steve Trevor and a military team. Unsure what's going on, Wonder Woman follows them, and helps nab a team of terrorists who try to kill him. She's angry at Trevor for being secretive, but it turns out Abernathy had given some information to an enemy nation in an attempt to save his wife, which led to him being kept under surveillance. Trevor just didn't tell Diana because he knew she liked Abernathy and wanted to preserve her impression of the old man. At the end of the issue, Aegeus abruptly appears and stabs Trevor.
In the Cavalieri and Bair/Bryant Huntress backup, the Huntress manages to fight her way of the Tarr and Fether's criminal psych ward, making common cause with one of the "violent cases" to do so. Unfortunately, something happens to Huntress shortly after their escape.
Amethyst: Princess of Gemworld #4: Mishkin/Cohn and Colon pack a lot of story into these pages. Granch enters another dimension in a belly of a giant reptile to free Dark Opal’s other sons, but they don't believe he's there to help them and try to kill him. Dark Opal lures Amethyst into a trap with Citrina's soul as a lure, but the Princess and her mentor are able to outsmart him. Meanwhile, Lady Emerald is forced to turn over her eldest daughter to Dark Opal. and on Earth, Amy's parents deal with her latest disappearance.
Arak Son of Thunder #24: The Thomases and Gonzales/Alcala reach the two-year mark with this title, and they provide a map of Arak's travels, which is a touch I always appreciate. A lot is going on in this one! Arak and Angelica are still in Hell with Baphomet. Malagigi and Johannes are in Albracca desperately trying to find a way to stop Gog and Magog, rival armies fated to destroy the world. Satyricus and Brunello are trying to rescue Valda from Haakon. Arak arrives just in time to help those two (his and Angelica's escape from Hell having weirdly occurred off-screen), but when Gog and Magog arrive as giants made from the bodies of each army, everybody (but Angelica) works together to halt their rampage with Greek fire. In the aftermath, Angelica tries to reclaim what's left of Albracca, but Malagigi's magic stops her.
Johannes becomes Prester John like we knew he was going to, and Albracca does a Brigadoon. Our heroes head out, presumably to return to France.
Blackhawk #261: Nice Cockrum cover on this one. Evanier and Spiegle get back to more interesting stuff with the return of Domino and the War Wheel. After stealing a German code book, the Blackhawks intercept messages that reveal the German's have the British blue code book. This is due Domino, who has been seducing and murdering a series of British generals. The rest of the Blackhawks try and fail to stop the new War Wheel, which gets away, while Blackhawk goes after Domino and ultimately captures her. Hearing of Domino's capture, Hitler dispatches 4 mean that look just like him, the four Zwillings, to kill the leaders of the Allies. We also get in extended flashback to Domino's origin this issue, and I suspect Evanier modeled the stern Frau Bulle who trained her on Granny Goodness.
Camelot 3000 #7: Arthur and his knights win some victories, but the good feelings are short-lived. The untimely but inevitable betrayal occurs, and Arthur banishes Lancelot and Guinevere after catching them in the act. Then, the issue ends with Tristan contacting Morgan Le Fay and agreeing to betray the knights in exchange for being turned back into a man. One of the things most interesting to me about the series is Bolland's futuristic 80s designs, and they are really on display here.
DC Comics Presents #60: Burkett and Novick team Superman with the Guardians of the Universe. The Weapon-Master (the villain from a recent arc in World's Finest) steals the power of the Central Power Battery of Oa which enables him to control the minds of many of the Green Lanterns, so the Guardians send Superman out with the wannabe poet who was supposed to have been monitoring the power levels on the Battery. Pretty standard stuff after last issues Ambush Bug zaniness.
Fury of Firestorm #15: While Multiplex and Enforcer engage in some exposition-delivering discussion, Firestorm manages to break free from containment. He briefly defeats Enforcer, but Multiplex outsmarts him, and eventually both villains escape. Clarissa, Stein's ex, continues to try to drive a wedge between them and gain Ronnie's confidence. Senator Riley is forced to accede to the demands of the ultra-wealthy industrialist who is employing Multiplex and Enforcer, voting to grant him some sort of atomic energy monopoly lest his kidnapped daughter come to harm.
Justice League #217: Kupperberg and Patton/Tanghal are on board as the new team, and we get a story linked to Kupperberg's Arion: Lord of Atlantis mythos. When an energy-beam emanating from an undersea crevice (where old Atlantis lies in ruins) causes seaquakes in the undersea city of Atlantis and transforms three surface humans into elemental beings who attack other cities, the Justice League goes into action in their usually "divide and conquer" fashion. The villain turns out to be the ancient, Atlantean sorcerer, Daanuth. Now, this guy shares a name and a home base with the villain in Arion, but he looks nothing like him, but less Elric-y and more wizened bald guy. I wonder if Kupperberg wanted to use the concept, but they weren't sure if Arion was actually in DC continuity as yet? Anyway, this issue for some reason feels a bit more of a throwback to the middle of the Bronze Age than some recent issues that preceded it (though not really the immediately previous arc).
Sgt. Rock Annual #3: Kanigher is joined by Spiegle on art for "No Time for Graves," which like the last annual, is a notch above the standard Sgt. Rock tale, aided by the increased length and Spiegle's art. Easy is headed to R&R, but when a new standoffish Polish American soldier steals a truck, Rock and crew figure it's to sell the contents to the black market. It isn't, as they discovered as they chase him across German lines. Instead, it's full of Polish kids whose parents were various sorts of "undersirables" the Germans sent to camps, and a priest trying to get them to the coast to meet a boat bound for Haifa. When the soldier gives his life to destroy a machine gun nest, Rock and the others take up the transport. The trip sees some of the kids that get introduced lose their lives and the priest too, but the rest make the ship. Rock and the others leave the bodies of both refugees and Wehrmacht on the beach where they fell because they have places to be and there is "no time for graves."
9 comments:
Wonder Woman #306: "Great (if utterly unrelated to the issue's contents) cover by José Luis García-López."
Agreed, although that makes five generic covers in a row IIRC, which still feels weird. Were the last four also by Garcia-Lopez?
Arak Son of Thunder #24: Almost halfway through the 50-issue run of this book, after which Arak pretty much disappears forever barring a couple of trivial cameos and references. I enjoyed his run, but in a way I'm glad they've left him in peace since 1988. The series gave him a decent ending to his saga and watching some bumbler drag him out for some idiotic event storyline or a mean-spirited or preachy deconstruction would spoil that. Stories should end. Comics could do with remembering that more often.
No, the Wonder Woman covers have been by a variety of folks.
Great as always. I just shamefully realized that Arak got the mohawk on like 9-10 issues ago and I didn't even register it.
Seems like Easy should have made a little time to at least bury the refugees.
@bombasticus - He'll be back to long hair by the end.
@PT - Take it up with Rock! :D
I bought Amethyst, Camelot 3000 and Firestorm out of this bunch, and bought JLA as a back issue some time later.
Who's the editor on Wonder Woman? Is it someone who came in to the biz as a writer or an artist? There's a big change here from the baloon-laden covers of just a couple years before.
Looking back at the covers, I don't know that word balloon laden has been the most common cover type throughout the 80s (captions are much more common). There are 2 covers with word balloons since the 1982 cover dates, but completely wordless covers outside of the logo have gotten more common since then. There have been several editors over this period: Wein, Wolfman, and Colon.
Adam Rebottaro is the lead artist on the Sentinel Comics RPG. He's talked about changing comic cover styles over the decades quite a bit on the game's Letters Page podcast, although it's spread out in so many episodes it's kind of lost in the mix unless you're listening for it. One of the metatextual conceits of the IP is that there was a publishing company called Sentinel Comics with a long history that loosely parallels DC and Marvel, so he's spent a lot of time trying to accurately emulate art styles from different decades, particularly on covers. According to him the 80s were definitely lighter on captions and balloons than the previous couple of decades, which drives his writer partner nuts when he wants to shove a bunch of words onto the cover of a faux book from the era.
If you want to do some digging into the subject yourself, this site is a positive joy to browse through. Don't be shy about searching for titles that don't appear on the main menu, there's some hidden stuff (like a full run of Kamandi).
https://www.coverbrowser.com/
That sounds like a great resource, thanks.
I am likely thinking of DC's 70's covers which were often terrible and wordy. Yet I bought a bunch of DC's back then despite that.
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