My mission is to read DC Comics' output from January 1980 (cover date) to Crisis. This week, I'm looking at the comics that were at newsstands on the week of March 8, 1984.
Giordano's "Meanwhile.." this month talks about the debut of both the New Gods reprint series and Blue Devil. He also talks about the upcoming DC Who's Who and a maxi-series History of the DC Universe.
Atari Force #6: Conway and García-López/Villagrain continue the story from last issue with Tempest, Dart, and Pakrat infiltrating the alien ship that we know belongs to the Dark Destroyer. They walk into a trap. Tempest is beaten by the Dark Destroyer himself, but Dart and Pakrat manage to elude his troops. The Destroyer taunts Martin about being close to his goal of killing the children of his enemy the Atari Force. Instead of breaking Martin, though, it rouses him to action. This issue is better than the last few. It finally seems like we are moving forward and García-López's layouts are great.
Fury of Firestorm #24: This was the first Firestorm story I ever read. Indeed, it's perhaps the only issue of the title my brother and I ever bought off the racks. It's a good issue, but it may have been the Blue Devil preview that lured us in. In the main story, the Conways and Kayanan/Tanghal continue from last issue with Lorraine and Ronnie paying a visit the Bonner's house to try and confirm Ronnie's suspicion that Byte who was out to kill Belle Haney is actually Blythe Bonner. They discover that Frank Bonner, Blythe's and Barney's father and Ronnie's teacher, is probably an alcoholic and he's pining over a photo of Belle Haney! After an angry Blythe throws them out, they go find Belle Haney who admits she was once Belle Bonner and the mother of the kids. When she was working at home, the kids got accidentally shocked by some of her computer equipment. Frank got angry and kicked her out, though later it seems he has told the kids she left them. This being the 80s, instead of just getting a shock, the kids got super-powers, so our heroes learn the origins of Byte and Bug, just as they show up to whisk their mom into a computer Tron-style and kill her.
The heroes save Belle, and Byte and Bug exit to the real world. Bug begins to have second thoughts about killing people, and Byte lashes out at him too. Frank arrives to see all this. Byte realizes what she's done escapes into an electrical outlet as her brother dies (according to the internet; I didn't feel like the issue was entirely clear), but her parents reconcile. Anyway, pretty good story with 80s themes of computers, women in the workplace, and the dissolution of families.
In the preview by Mishkin/Cohn and Cullen/Marcos we are introduced to Dan Cassidy, a movie stuntman who has made an almost Iron Man-level powered suit as the monster costume for a film. See what we lost with the rise of CGI? Anyway, the Trickster, another special effects guy in his regular ID, shows up to take Cassiday down a peg. Hijinks ensue when a silly villain takes on a guy who doesn't know from superheroics and still has to work the kinks out of his new suit. This preview well presents the humorous approach to supers that will inform the title and also introduces us to the books supporting cast. After this, we were looking forward to the ongoing book, and we didn't have to wait long.
DC Comics Presents #70: Team-up comics have always been the "junk food" of comics publishing, but some stories are better than others. Kupperberg and Saviuk/DeZuniga deliver one of those others here, teaming up the Metal Men with Superman. A mad scientist captures the Metal Men and puts them through several end-of-the-world scenarios created by his seemingly all-powerful computer in an effort to find someone that can continue with him post the end of the world. Superman shows up and saves the Metal Men, then suggests to the scientists that it just might be his creation of a very real end of the world scenario that ends the world.
Justice League of America #227: Cavalieri and Patton/Alexander conclude their Fiatlux stoyline, and really, it's about time. Lord Claw, the third Fiatlux leader, takes control of the cult after the defeats of the other leaders in previous issues. His gimmick is the use of genetically engineered animals. Green Arrow, Black Canary, Zatanna, and Hawkwoman return from Hellrazer's dimension to join the other Leaguers in attacking Claw's island base, with only Hawkwoman having any suspicion that Zatanna has been possessed by the demon. Hellrazer emerges from Zatanna's body and kills Lord Claw, taking over Fiatlux himself, but luckily Zatanna remembers the spell that will transport the demon back to his own world.
This is a rather Marvel-type story with a fair amount of action, but it isn't really a very good one. Interestingly, a lengthy letter in this month's letter column says the problem with JLA's low sales is that the characters can't have impactful stories here (in contrast with the New Teen Titans) due the need for characters to appear elsewhere. Editorial responds that Conway is still working on a plan to deal with that...
Wonder Woman #316: Mishkin and Heck continue Wonder Woman's fight against Tezcatlipoca. She finally defeats the god (maybe) when she shatters an image which bound him to his mortal host. She frees the Amazons from his mental domination--though these strangers are still a mystery. They ask Wonder Woman if she is really Artemis and tell her that Hippolyta told them she was dead, but that the queen has "lied before." Meanwhile, Griggs meets a soldier in the Central America nation of Tropidor who tells him the rebels worship Tezcatlipoca, Steve Trevor and a gremlin near Paradise Island, and Sofia threatens Hippolyta with revealing the secret of her manipulation of Diana. Still not sure where Mishkin is going with this, but if this were a modern comic I'd say we're heading toward a soft reboot.
In the Huntress backup by Cavalieri and Beachum/Martin, the Sea-Lion takes time to gloat as he prepares to inject the captured Huntress with a mutation, giving her time to escape. Sea-Lion is defeated and taken into custody.
4 comments:
Justice League of America #227: "Interestingly, a lengthen letter in this month's letter column says the problem with JLA's low sales is that the characters can't have impactful stories here (in contrast with the New Teen Titans) due the need for characters to appear elsewhere. Editorial responds that Conway is still working on a plan to deal with that..."
Is that even remotely plausible? Other than a few big names the JLA is composed of characters who didn't have their own titles at this point and AFAIK no creative teams were clamoring to use people like Red Tornado or the Elongated Man as guests. The JLA writers could have done pretty much anything they wanted with most of the team and no one would have gotten fussed about it.
Much more inclined to think sales are bad because there's been too many bad stories clumped together, and the current creative team just isn't great at their jobs.
Clearly both editorial and at least one writer thought it was an issue as well as at least this one letter writer. This is the reason why the Detroit League was how it was. They may have been wrong, but "publish better stories" isn't super actionable beyond changing the creative staff--and the low sales have been occurring with multiple teams.
I think a very likely scenario is that fans were indeed looking to more X-Men/NTT-like stories in general, but there wasn't a way to get there with JLA that was likely to work.
I think Gerry's plan for the JLA ended up being the Detroit Justice League, Aquaman's version of Cap's Kooky Quartet. I think we needed to wait for the Giffen/DeMatteis/Maguire JL for the series to recover.
Atari Force is a lot of fun at this point. JLGL is one of the greats and I remember Ricardo Villagrain looking pretty good over his pencils.
I was pretty close to checking out of Firestorm here, but Blue Devil was a real favorite for a while.
I'm pretty sure I purchased some Firestorms before this issue but I know I had this one - the Blue Devil supplement was absolutely a draw for me. I look forward to reading your comments on that series as it plays out.
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