These Heroes Are Lost In More Ways Than One

Project: Superpowers
Dynamite Entertainment

I really enjoyed the initial volume of this title from Dynamite Entertainment. While he wasn't handling all the art chores, who doesn't like a little Alex Ross eye-candy in the form of covers and character sketches? But I find that I am typically more a story person, and Project: Superpowers Volume 1 was an interesting idea presented very well.

The concept of the series is to take any and all golden-age comic characters who have since disappeared from the publishing world and not only bring them back, but make an in-story reason for their many decades' absence. In Volume 1 of this title, readers learn that many of these colorful heroes and heroines were trapped in a magical urn,  the mythical Pandora's Box, in the 1940s. There's the story of the man responsible for their entrapment, not necessarily the evil villain one might suspect. There is the way the world has changed after having an abundance of super-powered humans show up and then just as mysteriously vanish. And when the entrapment is ended in modern times, the heroes must not only deal with being people in a time and world unfamiliar to them, they must also deal with how they themselves have been changed by their time away. Volume 1 made for a great read.

Then after a break, Volume 2 came out and the series seemed to lose some of its focus and direction. The story from Volume 1 was being continued, but also several of the characters were broken off into solo series with varying degrees of success. The overall narrative seemed to suffer under the weight of its own scope along with trying to incorporate events from the various other series. More and more characters were spotlighted and given a chance to shine, but there were so many, few of them really seemed to reach any kind of potential.

It's been about a year since any new books in this line were published or solicited, so I can only guess that I'm not the only reader who felt the series began to suffer in its second year. That doesn't mean there aren't any gems among the various titles and issues of Project: Superpowers Chapter Two. And, as I've already said, I found the first volume to be an excellent tale both told and illustrated well.

Check them out and see what you think or feel free to chime in with your thoughts if you've already read either series. And check back next Tuesday for more.

You CAN Go Home Again ... But Should You?

Going to talk today about the most recent incarnation of DC Comics' The Warlord. I did not buy the original series when it debuted in First Issue Spectacular back in 1975. Instead, I discovered the series' creator, Mike Grell, in the pages of Green Arrow: The Longbow Hunters. From there, I went back and learned more about Grell's earlier comics work on Jon Sable, Freelance, from First Comics, and The Warlord from DC, slowly collecting various back issues of each series.

The Warlord character starts out as Travis Morgan, a U.S. Air Force pilot, flying a spy mission to photograph equipment over Russia. Morgan is spotted and intercepted by Russian MiG fighters and ends up being shot down over the North Pole. But instead of crashing, his plane descends through an opening in the earth, landing in an inner world of eternal daylight. This fantastic inner world is filled with dinosaurs, mythological creatures, magic, science and warriors. Morgan earns the title Warlord and finds a mate while adventuring in this new land called Skartaris. The Warlord's adventures continued through more than 130 issues, but Grell left the series after issue No. 71.

The series was brought back by DC and its creator in 1991 for a six-issue miniseries. The title was next re-imagined, albeit unsuccessfully in 2006 by Bruce Jones, and finally relaunched in 2009, once again with Grell at the helm.

This latest incarnation of the Warlord, like Grell's return to the characters in 1991, was really a continuation of his earlier run, and in all honesty, I have to say was somewhat lackluster. Not bad, just not really great, either.

If you are a fan of Grell's Warlord stories, there is little new territory covered in either the 1991 series or the 2009 version. The stories included are mostly re-treads of plots and situations handled in the initial run of the series. Completists will like that Grell finally resolves one major plot thread left dangling from the initial series' first couple years in this latest series. The most recent series also serves to bring Morgan's story to a close, if the reader so desires. While it was nice to have Tinder's and Morgan's dangling plot thread at last resolved, and while the writing was still good and the art truly excellent, this latest relaunch was still little more than eye-candy, unfortunately.

You Can Go Home Again

New Teen Titans: Games
DC Comics
Marv Wolfman, writer
George Perez, artist

I've been thinking about getting back into the habit of posting reviews, and I have a number of them lined up in the coming weeks. But when I decided I definitely wanted to resume the blog, I wanted to wait until I'd had a chance to read this book and review it as my first entry back.

It was the New Teen Titans by Wolfman and Perez that got me into serious comic collecting, so it seemed appropriate. After all, this book was begun in the mid 1980s when the Titans popularity was at its height and finally saw completion and release in time for the group's 30th anniversary celebration. I'll let you look elsewhere on the web (or even in the foreword and afterword of the book itself) for the details behind that long creation process, but this book has been rumored and promised many times and very anxiously awaited by fans of the series.

And it does not disappoint.

These two creators who have worked on so many characters over their respective careers have flawlessly returned to these characters, bringing them to readers in a way that feels like visiting old friends. Much has happened in the intervening years in the fictional lives of Nightwing, Starfire, Cyborg, Troia, Changeling, Raven, Jericho and Danny Chase. They are all very different characters today, the ones still around, but this is not meant to be a contemporary story, and these are YESTERDAY'S Titans.

The story doesn't fit quite perfectly into the existing continuity of the time; fans so inclined would have difficulty trying to place the events of Games firmly between two issues of the regular Titans series of the time. It obviously would have to happen before the tragedies involved in the Titans Hunt story line yet after Raven's redemption and adoption of her white costume, and after the arrival of Danny Chase. Much pinpointing beyond that would be difficult, but should not diminish what is a wonderful story.

If you were a fan of the Wolfman/Perez Titans in the past, do yourself a favor and seek out this book. If you've never read a Titans story from that era, but enjoy more recent incarnations of the team, I imagine you'd still like this glimpse of what came before. And even if you've never read a Titans story before, but enjoy a good superhero thriller with elements of espionage and mystery thrown in for good measure, you could do a lot worse than this tale.

This is one of the great ones, Kiddie Cops!

Be back next Tuesday for more.