What if USA Attacked Canada? We Stand on Guard (2015) by Brian K. Vaughn

 

Front cover of We Stand on Guard TPB by Brian K. Vaughn

This book collects the following comics: We Stand on Guard (2015) #1-6

Score (out of 5 Capes)

Four out of five capes for a well-paced sci-fi adventure with overtones of the current geopolitical environment and somewhat uneven art.

My Review

With the annual Canada Day celebration landing this week, when Canadians celebrate the birth of the country, let's take a look at Brian K. Vaughn's sci-fi thriller about the USA conquering and occupying Canada. Full disclosure, this reviewer lives in Canada, as regular readers may have picked up by the occasional letter u slipping into words like "colour" and "favourite."

In real life, President Donald Trump started his second term by launching a trade war with Canada, tariffing some of our most critical industries, speculating about using "economic force" to take us over, and repeatedly promising to make us the 51st state.

Canadians responded with "elbows up" by boycotting American products. To this day, Canadian tourism and travel to the USA remains down over 30% and the buy-anything-but-American movement has made it almost impossible to find California wines or Kentucky bourbon in Canada.

The ongoing tensions with our larger, more powerful and now more belligerent and dangerous neighbour to the south makes We Stand on Guard all the more believable and disturbing.

American-born author Brian K. Vaughn wrote this sci-fi thriller well before Trump started beating his drum - with the original comics published in 2015, and this trade paperback collection in 2017, this predates by a decade the current political tensions.

The story starts in 2112 with a massive terror attack on the White House and Washington, D.C. The USA blamed Canada for the attack and launched a missile-filled counter-attack that destroyed the capital city Ottawa and kicked off a boots-on-the-ground military occupation.

Included in the missile strikes was a direct hit on the Roos home. Five-year-old Amber and her older brother Thomas survived but both parents were killed.

Each chapter begins with a glimpse of the things Amber and Tommy did to survive while on the run, evading the soldiers occupying their country. Stowaways on a train near The Pas, Manitoba; surrounded in a cabin in the northern Churchill; hiding with the pets of an elderly couple.

But the main story is in current-day 2124, outside Yellowknife in the Northwest Territories. Little Amber, now a young woman on the run for more than a decade, made it to the isolated, sparsely populated and harsh climate of Canada's far north.

But despite the vastness of Canada, Amber could not escape the presence of the American invaders. Whether through automated robotic wolves designed to seek and destroy insurgents and freedom-fighters or through boots-on-the-ground and giant flying machines, the American military was everywhere.

American interest in the far north was due to the vast freshwater sources of the region. Continued climate warming had wiped out much of the green spaces and water sources in continental USA so they began extracting and exporting fresh water from Canada. The 22nd century's version of oil.

But the vast north was not empty, and Amber joined the freedom-fighting cell of insurgents nicknamed the Two-Four, a name straight out of Canadian slang, which Vaughn did briefly explain to those not in the know. And what a motley cross-section of Canada the Two-Four is, with a smiling, blond Booth, French-talking LePage, battle-scarred Dunn who was pushed into his insurgency after his husband was killed fighting the Americans in the Battle of Brunswick, fiery Syrian immigrant Qabanni, all under the leadership of Chief McFadden.

Once the Americans captured McFadden, they tortured her - no need for physical brutality though, these 22nd-century inquisitors can make you experience anything they want through brain wave manipulation - until she gave up the Two-Four's location.

In the final confrontation, Amber showed just how deep and long-lasting the hatred becomes among those wronged by the callous violence of the American military and their policies. Even though American soldiers twice call themselves the good guys, Vaugh's anti-war message is clear: producing deep hatred in life-long enemies will come back to bite you.

While Vaughn is American, he knows enough about Canadian culture to work in a few nods, such as the Two-Four or checking someone's Canadian bona-fides with questions about hockey. He also gives Canadian artist Steve Skroce space to leave visual Canadian Easter Eggs, sometimes without remark, other times as a key visual clue. They are always fun to encounter as I flipped the pages.

Skroce's art, befitting its subject matter, is at times brutally violent. People are not just killed, they are blown apart in ten thousand gory little bits. He also fills the pages with countless little details and touches, rich backgrounds and strong compositions. And the evolution of Amber, from scared little girl to wary ally to passionate suicide bomber, comes through loud and clear in his close-ups.

Colourist Matt Hollingsworth does some beautiful work, fantastic gradations and highlighting that bring out the best of these images.

Where Skroce's art suffers, though, is from overly stiff body postures. It works when they are standing around filling in the story through their conversation or leaning over to work on their weapons. But once the action begins, they tend to look like they were sketched from an artist's desktop mannequin, arms and legs bent at set angles, leaving the viewer feeling like he could not quite nail the natural look.

The story overall is dark, disturbing, at times a little ponderous, thought-provoking. A fun read, some Canadian boosterism and anti-war messages cast in geopolitical tensions that hit frighteningly close to home for the current moment. 4 capes out of 5.

What I loved

Clever little Canadian touches like "The Littlest Robo" show

The book is filled with little Canadian Easter Eggs, clever touches scattered through the visuals, and occasionally though less frequently in the dialog, that resonate with the Canadian readers.

Like this panel. The word balloons offer no comment, but the show that the newly arrested elderly couple was watching, "The Littlest Robo," is a cute 22nd-century reboot of that Canadian 1980s classic feel-good lost-dog show "The Littlest Hobo."

Or when a prisoner proves he is real, that this is no longer a tech-induced coma dream, using a classic Canadian candy bar.

Another perfect Canadian element is Québecois actor Les LePage, who banters along with the rest of the Two-Four squad (even the name - very Canadian!) almost exclusively in French, which is never translated. No asterix, no angled-brackets and "translated from French," just the assumption that either the context makes it reasonably clear what he might be saying, or that the Canadian readers and our extensive exposure to French will get it.

What I didn't love

Too many giant military mecha weapons sneaking up on people

The gorilla-shaped mecha weapon behind Booth must be over 100 feet tall. As one of the intrepid Canadian freedom fighters says a few panels later, "C'est difficile à manquer."

Yet no one heard, saw or felt its approach. American mechanical military equipment provides so many jump-scares in these pages that I am left wondering how observant these Canadians really are.

How did they manage to survive this long, through more than a decade of occupation by the violent, trigger-happy, hi-tech American invaders, if this massive machine has such an easy time sneaking up on them?

Related Reviews

Other works published by Image Comics and Brian K. Vaughn include Paper Girls reviews for volumes 1 to 6

Brian K. Vaughn also wrote the sometimes-brilliant Y: the Last Man, see my reviews for all volumes.

Quick Reference Details

Writers:  Brian K. Vaughn
Artists:  Steve Skroce, Matt Hollingsworth
Published By:  Image Comics
Published When:  April 11, 2017
Parental Rating: Mature (violence, language)

Back cover of We Stand on Guard TPB by Brian K. Vaughn

Alone and Uncontrollable - Supergirl (2011) New 52 vol 1 - Last Daughter of Krypton

 

Front cover of Supergirl volume 1 Last Daughter of Krypton TPB

This book collects the following comics: Supergirl (2011) #1-7

Score (out of 5 Capes)

2/5 Capes for an origin story reboot that misses the mark in too many ways.

 

My Review

In celebration of the upcoming Supergirl movie's release, we are reviewing a cross-era sampling of Supergirl graphic novels and trade paperbacks. This one comes from her DC Comics New 52-era ongoing series.

Every new Supergirl ongoing series we've looked at in this series is a significant change from the previous one - Is she Kara Zor-El? Linda Danvers? Both? teenaged? college-aged?

This volume collects the first seven issues of the New 52 version of Supergirl and brought a new reset of her origin myths.

She is Kara Zor-El, in her middle teenage years. She was launched in a one-person spacecraft by her father, to escape the doom coming to Argo City. Now, she has arrived on Earth but seems completely overwhelmed, shocked and confused by the change.

Will she respond with Fight or Flight? Definitely Fight. Anything and everything sparks a violent response due to her fear, confusion and anger.

Writers Michael Green and Mike Johnson used much of the first two issues to imagine the onset of her super-powers under Earth's yellow sun and her reaction. The changes only added to the fear and confusion overwhelming poor Kara.

When super-hearing brought a cacophony of sounds, she fell to her knees, overwhelmed.

The arrival of X-ray vision also freaked her out, and artist Mahmud Asrar depicted it in a series of panels peeling back the layers of human anatomy - first the skin, then blood vessels, then muscles, then bones.

Super-stregth. Flight. her powers emerged over a matter of hours, a far more ferocious sudden onset of changes to a body than puberty could ever muster.

When cousin Kal-El showed up and removed at least the language confusion, her flashback of holding his little infant body just three days earlier, in her time, produced yet another reaction of rage and violence.

Through those flashbacks, showing a girl learning the ways of Krypton's scientific classes, as well as the rigours of physical combat training (and her shaky grasp of its concepts), we met someone thoughtful and articulate, patient, kind and eager to please. Such a contrast to the rage machine that emerged from the spaceship. 

If her response to danger is to dig in and fight, it is a new personality trait compared to the flashbacks.

The kindness visible in the flashbacks also must have been lost in space. She only intermittently realizes the side-effects of her strength and violence - most notably after smashing Superman through several layers of the Great Wall of China. Or working briefly with one of the guards holding her prisoner to tech genius and billionaire Simon Tycho.

But then the kindness disappeared again and she trashed Tycho's entire satellite, and nearly him as well.

In the second half of the collection, Supergirl battled four Krypton-spawned Worldkillers. Green and Johnson gave them a range of powers and physical appearances, and Asrar depicted the running battle, crossing multiple chapters, with great energy and excitement. Even with the confrontation ending in a draw, it felt like a victory for our heroine, who again found a tiny scrap of compassion for others and saved some innocent bystanders.

In all, this collection is a mixed bag. Kara's constant, over-the-top reactions of rage and force are so unlike the girl depicted in the flashbacks. The re-imagined origin hews more closely to the classic than it at first seemed - the brave new direction not so different after all. And while Asrar's visuals have some very strong moments, such as the beautiful depictions of a range of emotions in Kara's face, other times they are filled with shortcuts and rough outlines of less-prominent figures.

The result is a disappointingly one-dimensional take on a classic heroine. 2 capes out of 5.

What I loved

Great range of emotions in her face

Artist Mahmud Asrar packs so much emotion into Kara's eyes and lips, such a delight to look at! 

In this high-conflict book, he is most often called upon to show anger, determination, fear. And he nails those standards, of course.

But he finds and exploits other opportunities as well. In this panel, for an early example, Kara Zor-El has arrived on Earth but faced with unrelenting strangeness of her environment, she can only conclude it is a vivid dream. Asrar endows her face with a sly, wistful and affectionate look. 

 

What I didn't love

Reacting with violence does not fit the scared, confused girl of the rest of the narrative

When she emerged from her crashed space craft, a roughly 16 year old Kara Zor-El was understandably frightened and confused. And when her first contact with humanity was an encounter with mechanized warriors bent on control and violence, she responded in kind.

But she responds with anger and physical force to, well, everything, long after that first encounter.

It makes for a high-energy, conflict-filled thrill-ride. But it is also completely out of step from everything the flashbacks and other back-story elements tell us about who she is.

The constant anger, the quick and willing resorting to physical violence don't fit. Can this sweet, intelligent, science-minded youth really turn into a rage-machine so easily?

Related Reviews

Supergirl Silver Age volume 2, stories from 1962-63

Daring New Adventures of Supergirl (volume 1) from the early 1980s

Supergirl by Peter David (Book 1) from the mid-1990s

Ghosts of Krypton from Supergirl's 2005 ongoing series

 

Quick Reference Details

Writers:  Michael Green, Mike Johnson
Artists:  Mahmud Asrar
Published By:  DC Comics
Published When:  Oct. 23, 2012
Parental Rating: Teen

Back cover of Supergirl volume 1 Last Daughter of Krypton TPB

Cures for Cancer - Supergirl vol 3 Ghosts of Krypton (2007)

  

Front cover of Supergirl (2005) volume 3: Ghosts of Krypton

This book collects the following comics: Supergirl (2005) #23-33, Action Comics #850

Score (out of 5 Capes)

3 out of 5 capes for a sometimes challenging tale of mighty heroes encountering the limits of their abilities.

 

My Review

In celebration of the upcoming Supergirl movie's release, we are reviewing a cross-era sampling of Supergirl graphic novels and trade paperbacks. This one comes from her 2005 ongoing series, collecting issues published in 2007-8.

Why do superheroes only battle the super-villains? With all their skills and powers, why not make a real difference in humanity's battle with hunger? or poverty?

Or cancer?

The creative team of writer Kelley Puckett and artists Drew Johnson and Ron Randall plant this dilemma deep in Supergirl's mind over the course of the chapters collected here.

It initially comes up, not through any innate philanthropy or desire to conquer a more significant challenge, but by simple misunderstanding. After she screwed up in a battle with Reactron, Superman tag-teams her out of the fight and assigns her to protecting the innocents in the building damaged by the battle. She rescues five-year-old Thomas, telling him "You're not going to die." 

But Thomas has cancer and he thinks she's saving him from the disease, not the building.

Superman spends a lot of time in these pages cleaning up after his still-learning cousin, and on hearing of the misunderstanding he brings her to Thomas's hospital bedside to explain what she really meant to him and his family.

Except she doubles down on her promise, kicking off a multi-chapter quest to find a way to cure at least one case of cancer. A soldier from 400 years in the future tries to stop her; Wonder Woman introduces her to Paradise Island's Purple Rays and their healing - but not curing - powers. Resurrection Man with his ever-changing powers, different every time he comes back to life. Doctor Luzano and his nano-technology. It is a wild ride.

Puckett gives us lots of intriguing, if less mainstream, ideas, perhaps reflecting the still-maturing mind and youthful impetuousness in our mid-teens young heroine. It's easy, in Puckett's hands, to forgive and forget about some of her more ridiculous inspirations. 

The collection is called "Ghosts of Krypton" and Kara's memories and longing for her destroyed home planet is a constant across all these collected issues. But with the exception of just one or two chapters, it is a motivational background theme. It puzzles me, therefore, that it gets the top-billing of the volume title.

Drew Johnson leads the art duties, with substantial assists from Ron Randall and a handful of others. They give us some intense action scenes although the strongest pages are the more reflective moments of self-analysis or teaching. Like Supergirl's meditation while sitting on an orbiting satellite or the moments of mentoring from Batman. For all his taciturn bluntness, I think he likes her and sees all her both raw potential and inherent risk.

In all, Puckett solidly handles the challenges of balancing a super-powered teenager's angst, loneliness and confusion over her lost family and gaps in her past, with an inspired if ill-advised obsession to cure a young cancer patient. It produces a melancholy overall tone, leavened with moments of light-hearted humour.

As great as it is to see a significant hero taking on a real-world humanity-killing villain like cancer, this collection gets side-tracked a few times and dilutes the impact of Supergirl's almost existential struggle, really only peaking in a couple pages. Her takeaway from the punch in the gut she experiences beside Thomas's corpse is "maybe time travel!" As much as this might have been a risky story arc, it could go so much further.

What I loved

Heroes meet the limits of their power with the death of 5-year-old Thomas

Little five-year-old Thomas is a key character crossing most of the chapters collected here. Unfortunately, Thomas has cancer and is dying, his remaining time measured in hours and days, not months and years.

When Supergirl promises to save him from a collapsing building, he takes her assurance that she won't let him die more broadly than just in the imminent threat of being crushed.

When Supergirl shows her youthful impetuousness by doubling down on her promise, extending it to his cancer too, it sets off a series of increasingly desperate attempts to intervene. Ultimately, they all fail and he dies. She and Superman must face his grieving family in the moments that followed.

I loved how the creative team handled Kara Zor-El coming to terms with mortality and the limits of her abilities. Her emotional swings, growing desperation. Even after the apparently crushing finality, she still has ideas. The idealism, hope and creativity are non-stop, and Puckett and Johnson take us through all the roller coaster ride.

What I didn't love

Little inconsistent details like skirt shape add up to visual annoyances

This collection's images often feel rushed, leading to moments of visual sloppiness and annoying hiccups in the little details.

The panel sequence above, for example, has Supergirl's iconic outfit switching skirt styles from moment to moment. Is it wavy? pleated? pencil-straight? It apparently depends on the mood and available time of the penciller.

In the case of the skirt, it's a key part of her iconic outfit. The 2005 ongoing series made some choices of how to tweak the outfit, none of them terribly complicated. So it is a recurring annoyance to see the lack of care delivering on those details. 

Related Reviews

Supergirl Silver Age volume 2, stories from 1962-63

Daring New Adventures of Supergirl (volume 1) from the early1980s

Supergirl by Peter David (Book 1) from the mid-990s

Quick Reference Details

Writers:  Kelley Puckett
Artists:  Drew Edward Johnson, Ron Randall
Published By:  DC Comics
Published When:  June 6, 2017
Parental Rating: Teen

Back cover of Supergirl (2005) volume 3: Ghosts of Krypton

Big Themes in Small Places - Supergirl Book 1 by Peter David (1996)

  

Front cover of Supergirl (1996) by Peter David book 1

This book collects the following comics: Supergirl #1-9, Supergirl Annual #1, Supergirl Plus #1 and a story from Showcase ’96 #8

Score (out of 5 Capes)

3 out of 5 capes for stories that take the protoplasmic Matrix version of Supergirl down into intimate family-level drama. 

My Review

The late author Peter David was a prolific and award-winning author. On several occasions, he took well-established characters and given them new life and new direction. 

One of my personal favourites was Aquaman who, under David's pen, lost his hand in battle and became a much stronger, imposing and dangerous character. For Marvel Comics, he also won multiple awards for his innovative work with The Incredible Hulk series.

So I can think of no one I would rather see writing for the protoplasm-based Matrix version of Supergirl. After the traditional Supergirl was killed in the events of Crisis on Infinite Earths, the character was rebooted with none of the Kryptonian mythology and with very different powers and experiences.

In the new mid-1990s ongoing series, the first nine issues of which are collected here, David shrank her world down. Down from anything cosmic in scale, or inter-planetary or earth-sized, all the way down to the small town of Leesburg, and even the bungalow of the Danvers family.

In fact, the climactic battle between the forces of Good and Evil, angels and demons, takes place around the Danvers' dining room table as Linda / Supergirl faces her Cockney-accented antagonist Buzz Aldrin. Flan for dessert has never been so explosive!

While the setting is collapsed down into a small but overheated, dense mass, the themes David weaves into the stories are big. Good vs Evil, not in the abstract, but in the spiritual realm. Religion, belief, faith, trust, power, authority and its potential for abuse all factor into the almost mystical feel of these pages.

Linda's mom, Sylvia Danvers, is a leading point of connection between Supergirl, Linda, and these spiritual forces at play. Her involvement in her local church, helping out both the parish and the priest, put her at the center of the ultimate confrontation between Supergirl and Buzz. The jaded cynicism and suspicion of religion that dominates the tone of the tales ultimately refuses to dismiss the spiritual realm altogether. Rather, it is co-opted into the ultimate conflict.

Breaking up the intense and at times overly melancholy central conflict with Buzz are several appearances by more standard superhero friends and foes. Gorilla Grodd takes over the church and causes mind-controlled chaos for a couple chapters. Chemo makes a brief but destructive appearance. Rampage pounds a Ferrari to pieces. Superman and Mary Marvel pop by, not necessarily for pleasant visits.

Gary Frank, who shares some writing credits in this collection, is the lead artist for the ongoing series. At the height of the mental confusion between where Linda ends and Supergirl begins, he shines at sharing that sense of bewilderment with his viewers. His flashback sequences are superb, filled with dark and foreboding teases, as Linda slowly recovers glimpses of what led to her death before the merger with Supergirl. 

Overall, in true mid-1990s fashion, his characters are all impossibly tall and slim, long-legged beauties. Except for Buzz, whose unnaturally long and straight nose becomes increasingly unsettling as his mask slips and his evil intentions are revealed.

This collection drew its stories from several different titles: the first nine issues plus an annual from the Supergirl ongoing series, a Supergirl Plus one-shot and an issue of Showcase '96. It all adds up to seven different writers, eight pencillers and seven inkers getting a credit somewhere in these pages. 

The David / Frank team serves as the backbone, and the shifting visuals are the best hint that we've reached the Annual or Showcase sections. It is frustrating, though, that nowhere in the collection is the source of each chapter identified. Mary Marvel's appearance - Peter David wrote it, but Gary Frank was not part of the art team, so was it in Supergirl or Supergirl Plus? or maybe the Annual? Some tighter collection editing was definitely needed.

Matrix / Supergirl was a strange period in this long-established and easily recognized heroine. Peter David grounds it in the intimacy of family relationships, a bold change of direction that, at least in these first chapters, is ultimately too chaotic and not enough to restore the shine of the classic character.

3 out of 5 capes.

What I loved

An aggressive reporter is touched by Supergirl's vulnerability

I love the more intimate scope and setting of these stories.

Silver Age Supergirl was always popping over to Atlantis, travelling to a distant planet or jumping backward and forward through the time barrier.

Pre-Crisis 1980s Supergirl was all grown up and facing adult problems while making her way in the big city.

Post-Crisis Matrix Supergirl stories took a whole different approach to the character, jettisoning the mythology for something radically different.

In these stories, Peter David is still working with the protoplasm-based Supergirl. But while she is arguably less human than the Kryptonian version, David roots her adventures in very relatable human circumstances.

In the opening Showcase story, Supergirl must cope with the physical, mental and emotional stress and exhaustion of making an impossible choice: save the life of a pregnant woman or that of a middle-aged priest. Only one can be saved, she has just fractions of a second to make her choice and will have to live with it ever after.

This emotionally wrenching tale concludes with the powerful panels above: an aggressive reporter, doggedly pursuing her story by seeking comment from Supergirl, finds her sleeping peacefully beside the recovering new mother in a hospital bed. Such a tender and touching moment that sets the tone for the whole book.

What I didn't love

The Psi-blast power of Linda / Supergirl / Matrix

From her late-1950s debut, the conceit around Supergirl had always been: all of Superman's amazing powers - super-strength, invulnerability, flight, heat-vision, etc. - in the body of his teenaged cousin.

Her death in Crisis on Infinite Earths three decades later was a shocker, a powerful moment in the evolution of the DC characters. DC Comics wanted to bring back the Maid of Steel but also wanted to honour that courageous twist. So they gave us Matrix, a protoplasm being mimicking Supergirl.

Naturally, the powers and abilities of Matrix-Supergirl should not be required to line up with her traditional powers. That's canonical and continuity-baggage thinking that had no place in the post-Crisis world.

But the power to project a mental psionic blast of energy, as pictured here, or to turn invisible, and the seemingly reduced invulnerability leading to several wounds and bruises, really shake up the Superman comparisons. The name and outfit still look like his, and like her traditional appearance, but this is a very different character. 

The change in powers and abilities subverts our expectations, opening the door for new angles on the character. And Peter David does try to lead us through that door, with occasional success. But he can't quite bridge the differences in the battle sequences. At least the ensuing chaos builds on our sense of the disorientation Linda is experiencing in these pages.

Related Reviews

Supergirl: the Silver Age volume 2 (1962-3)

Daring New Adventures of Supergirl from the mid-1980s

Aquaman Book 1 by Peter David

Quick Reference Details

Writers:  Peter David
Artists:  Gary Frank,  Terry Dodson, Cam Smith
Published By:  DC Comics
Published When:  Oct. 25, 2016
Parental Rating: Teen

Back cover of Supergirl (1996) by Peter David book 1

World, Meet Supergirl! Review of Supergirl the Silver Age volume 2 (1962)

  

Front cover of Supergirl: the Silver Age volume 2

This book collects the following comics: Backup stories from Action Comics #285-307 (1962-3)

Score (out of 5 Capes)

Silver Age sensibilities sensibilities and assumptions are very different from current ones, more than 60 years later. Nothing here is too consequential or, really, very interesting. 2 out of 5 capes.

My Review

With the new Supergirl movie opening in a few weeks, let's take a look at past comic book representations of the hero.

Supergirl's early years included a run of backup stories in Action Comics. Her more famous cousin got the lead, of course, but she had a solid run of her own tales tucked into the end. This book collects nearly two years' worth of these tales, ones that originally ran between February 1962 and December 1963.

The collection starts off with a splash - a full-length feature telling of the great unveiling. In Supergirl's earlier adventures, she had been limited in action and hidden to the world. She would, when requested, swoop in and assist Superman, but they otherwise took pains to hide her existence from the world. But with Action Comics #285, her existence is revealed and she is introduced to the world, to international and even inter-planetary fame and acclaim.

But she still must protect her secret identity. So she builds a tunnel from the home of her adopted family that would allow her to come and go unobserved. Mom and Pop Danvers take in stride the shocking revelation that this sweet teenaged high schooler they have been raising is none other than Supergirl!

Superman co-creator Jerry Siegel handled the writing duties for the first seven stories included here, before Leo Dorfman took over the scripting role. While Dorfman kept his changes to the character and mythology to a minimum, with Super-horse being perhaps the biggest new twist, there is a noticeable difference in the writing styles of the two men.

Siegel's stories unfolded at a breakneck pace. Supergirl would go from Atlantis to Metropolis to Space to miraculously resurrecting Lex Luthor over the course of just a few pages. Siegel's dramatic plot twists were frequent, dramatic and extreme.

Dorfman still packed in no shortage of drama, space travel and time barrier crossing. But he slowed the pace, resisted throwing in dozens of swings, and instead went deeper into the back-story, relationships and emotions of the characters.

Several of the stories in the collection feature Super-Horse, a former half-man, half-horse centaur whose lover was duped into giving him the wrong potion - rather than making him fully human, he became 100% horse. Immortal and super-powered, sure, but also and always a horse.

These tales of the Super-Horse are some of the oddest in this collection. His courage and powers enable him to save a damaged submarine and rescue Supergirl on more than one occasion. But the extended bout of amnesia and the story of being turned human for 24 hours, during which time he sparks a romance with Linda Danvers, are ripe for psychological analysis.

In these stories we are reminded repeatedly that our hero is a high school aged girl in her mid-teens. Stereotypes of a girl's interests and emotional state are regularly on display. 

Most out of step, though, with our 2026 sensibilities is surely the speed with which she and her parents agree on her marrying Tor-An. In the collection's final tale, a Kryptonian villain and escapee of the Phantom Zone seduces Supergirl and moves to marry her within days - with the blessing of her parents, Superman and key people of the bottle-city of Kandor (which makes regular appearances in these pages). 

The pictures throughout the collection are provided by artist Jim Mooney. While largely following the Silver Age's standard 6-panels-a-page layout structure, he packs in loads of close-ups on our heroine. She is often front-and-center in these images, allowing him to convey her emotional reactions. Whether she responds with courage, shock, dismay or humour, Mooney manages to embody and portray her emotions with clarity. With just a few lines, he communicated so much emotional detail.

The body postures in Mooney's images are somewhat static and simplistic, which works against him in the action sequences in particular, leaving them stiff and awkward. His renditions of Supergirl in flight are the clearest and most frequent examples of this stiffness - she looks like a soaring star-fish, limbs splayed in all directions like she is about to fall off a wire.

With its wild swings through time and space, era-based stereotypes and so much focus on other characters like Super-Horse to the detriment of our heroine herself, these stories would not have the success today that they did in the early 1960s. But they serve as a great touchstone of the history and starting point as we explore the evolution of Supergirl.

2 out of 5 capes.

What I loved

Supergirl flies away from a super-conundrum posed by Black Flame

Supergirl is the star of these pages, obviously. Artist Jim Mooney reminds us of that fact by placing her in the foreground on panel after panel and page after page.

One of his most-used techniques is to place her face in profile in one corner of the image, reacting to the words or actions of others depicted in the rest of the image, an approach he leans on especially when she is in her Linda Danvers secret identity.

In the image above, the villain's boastful, gloating words dominate the top half, and Supergirl fills most of the bottom half of the frame. It focuses our attention on her emotional response more than the cruel words of Black Flame who, in turn, shrinks in the distance.

With these visual choices, here and elsewhere, Mooney very effectively keeps his readers focused on our young hero.

What I didn't love

Time travel sure is easy! Supergirl pops over to the year 4,000 AD

Hardly a story goes by, in this collection, without Supergirl flying off to another past or future time or, less frequently, another planet, meteor or galaxy.

These stories were created in the early 1960s, as the jet age and space age ramped up. So our writers might be drawing on the contemporary interests in space travel and science fiction. But their frequency grows wearisome. Can we think of so few stories where both the challenge and the solution are entirely in our own time and on our own planet?

Writers Jerry Siegel and Leo Dorfman both seem convinced that Supergirl would only face a villain, natural disaster or other challenge if Superman were away. Not off battling challenges elsewhere, but entirely unable to intervene. So nearly every story has an almost throwaway line that Superman is off-planet or traveling in the past or future.

Even Supergirl, though, cannot stay on little old 1960s planet Earth. Need to know more about the origins of one of the characters? No problem, just pop through the time barrier to go see their history for yourself. 

I grew weary of the conceit long before the end of this collection.

Related Reviews

A flirty teenaged Supergirl teams with Green Lantern in the Brave and the Bold - Lords of Luck

Linda Danvers goes to college and Supergirl moves to the big city in the 1980s Supergirl books one and two

Quick Reference Details

Writers:  Jerry Siegel, Leo Dorfman
Artists:  Jim Mooney
Published By:  DC Comics
Published When:  Aug 7, 2018
Parental Rating: General

Back cover of Supergirl: the Silver Age volume 2

So Many Storms - the Fury of Firestorm the Nuclear Men (2011) vol 1 - God Particle

  

Front cover of the Fury of Firestorm the Nuclear Men vol 1: God Particle

This book collects the following comics: The Fury of Firestorm the Nuclear Men (2011) #1-6

Score (out of 5 Capes)

3 out of 5 capes for a creative new take on Firestorm. Is it an improvement over previous mythologies?

My Review

With the new The Fury of Firestorm ongoing series kicking off a few weeks ago, let's revisit the trade paperbacks of some past iterations of the flame-headed nuclear fusion hero.

Firestorm's earliest comics are hard to find in collected editions. His original series, Firestorm the Nuclear Man, debuted in 1978 but only lasted five issues. The character had lots of potential, though, making appearances in the Justice League of America series and getting more than a dozen backup stories in The Flash.

When he returned in his own solo series, The Fury of Firestorm in 1982, it kicked off a long run, lasting until 1990. Like the short first series, these tales all centered around teenager Ronnie Raymond and middle-aged professor Martin Stein.

The third Firestorm series brought Jason Rusch into the Firestorm fusion, following the death of Ronnie in the DC crossover event Identity Crisis. This third volume ran from 2004 to 2007.

Fewer than 20 of those first 150 or so Firestorm comics have been reprinted in collected editions like a TPB. So we are kicking off this review of Firestorm books with God Particle, which collects the first six issues of Firestorm's fourth series, 2011's The Fury of Firestorm the Nuclear Men.

It's a long and somewhat unwieldy title. But don't miss the subtle shift to the plural - nuclear men not nuclear man. Because this new series has Firestorms popping up all over the place. Eight of them appear in this collection of the first six issues, and we get big hints that there are many more. So many that one of them, Mikhail Arkadin of Russia who calls himself Pozhar, takes on the personal mission to eliminate as many of them as possible.

In this take on the character and mythology of Firestorm, part of DC's line-wide New 52 books, professor Martin Stein is already dead. But his research had discovered what he called the Firestorm Protocol which he distilled into a substance that could imbue humans with the classic powers of Firestorm: element transmutation, nuclear blasts, flight and more, always with flaming heads.

Individual scientists trying to keep up with Stein's research and make a name for themselves, corporations and industrial espionage, military strategists and more all have an interest in Stein's work. But the whole protocol was unstable and the resulting Firestorms it created are dangerous to themselves as well as others.

Within this larger, globe-spanning battle over the Protocols, we meet our two teen heroes. Ronnie Raymond is the high school star quarterback; Jason Rusch a brilliant science-minded teen who has been working after school assisting Martin Stein. They have a testy relationship, in line with the classic jocks-vs-nerds conflict.

When a corporately funded assault team attacks, Jason triggers the vial of the Protocol that Stein had left in his possession. The result endows both him and Ronnie with separate, individual and remarkably stable Firestorm powers - maybe Stein had solved the instability flaw before his death?

They also discover that they can fuse together, but unlike classic Firestorm, this time neither of them is in control of the result - a monstrous, towering flame-headed monster calling itself Fury.

Gail Simone handles the writing duties, with a plotting assist from Ethan van Scriver. Simone injects a lot of layered relational elements into the plot. If classic Firestorm always had the Raymond - Stein partnership at its core, this one replaces that with a Raymond - Rusch tension. Jason's relationship with his father also plays a central role, and we get several other tender or emotional moments involving other characters like teenaged love interest and friend Tonya, the mysterious Director Zither and her personal history with Stein's research, even some interpersonal connections in the attack team.

The story itself settles into a regular rhythm. Each chapter opens with a violent encounter with an international Firestorm, then zooms in on Ronnie and Jason in their struggles, zooms out to reveal another angle of Zither's complex history and motivations, moves back to lots of blazing nuclear explosions, and ends with a twist to hook us into the next chapter. It's a comfortable, standard formula and Simone paces it reasonably well.

Yildiray Cinar leads the art duties, with an assist for a couple issues from Norm Rapmund. Firestorm has never looked better. Each of the many nuclear men wears a variation on the theme, with their own unique colour combination as a nice assist to us potentially befuddled readers. These outfits shine and almost glow with ripples of power and flames everywhere.

The page layouts vary widely and can get a little over-crammed with small visuals. For one key example, Cinar uses 20 panels on a single page to show Jason's medical intervention to save a friend. For all their compactness and occasional clutter, the narrative flow is rarely unclear.

Overall, it is an intriguing new beginning, a whole new direction for Firestorm. The first volume ends with almost nothing resolved, as Simone draws out key plot points into the second book. I am curious enough to look for the next volume.

3 out of 5 Capes.

What I loved

Firestorm has never looked better, even with the goofy transmutations

These Nuclear Men look good! Firestorm has never looked better. 

Gone are the goofy, poofy sleeves, so painfully dated to his origins in the late 1970s and the fashions of the day. The original outfit avoided bell-bottoms but certainly quickly became very dated.

The other elements that remain from those earlier outfits - the red and yellow colours, the nuclear symbol, the fiery hair and wrap-around balaclava-like face frame - just look and work better in this book than they ever have before.

High praise for that goes to lead artist Yildiray Cinar. He pulled off a solid redesign. It is helped, in no small part, by the ability to roll out variations as this book has a surprisingly large number of Firestorms. He kept the core characters - Raymond and Rusch in the frame above - true to the origins, while leaving them easily distinguishable and with strong ties to the history and mythology of the character.

Even the cheesier parts of classic Firestorm are presented in a well-handled reinterpretation. In the panel above, Jason has transmuted the ground into hands grabbing hold of Ronnie's ankles, an action reminiscent of the power ring constructs of Green Lantern. In this book, such moments are present but far fewer and more subtle than in Firestorm's 1980s books. 

What I didn't love

The classic Firestorm fusion produces this unpleasant monster, Fury.

The fission and fusion elements of Firestorm are present in this book, but they look a lot different. I am not a fan of this take.

Classically, Firestorm is composed by the fusion of two people. Not so here. Any individual infected by the serum or protocol or particle - the narrative is not as clear about this as I would like - can become a metahuman endowed with all the nuclear powers simply by shouting their magic word. But unlike the "Shazam!" that gives the Marvel family their divinely sourced powers, these diverse Firestorms do a lot of nuclear blasting, brooding and sizzling.

Fusion only appears a couple times in these pages, when Ronnie and Jason fuse to become the monstrous nuclear giant named Fury. He towers over mere humans, standing 15 feet tall or so. He can grab hold of the half-dozen fiery strings that are attached to his chest and crack them like a whip, with devastating results on any human flesh they touch.

He is loud and rude, immensely powerful and uncontrolled, and while Ronnie and Jason are both inside the monster, neither has much sway over its actions.

As good as these Firestorms look, the abundance of individuals and ferocity of the fused version are ultimately disappointing.

Related Reviews

New 52 Futures End volume 1, volume 2 and volume 3 take Firestorm in a whole new direction.

Firestorm rejoins the Justice League in New 52 Justice League volume 4

Quick Reference Details

Writers:  Gail Simone, Ethan van Sciver
Artists:  Yildiray Cinar, Norm Rapmund
Published By:  DC Comics
Published When:  Sept 18, 2012
Parental Rating: Teen

Back cover of the Fury of Firestorm the Nuclear Men vol 1: God Particle

FOMO - Review of Absolute Batman vol 1 - the Zoo (2025)

  

Front cover of Absolute Batman volume 1 The Zoo

This book collects the following comics: Absolute Batman (2025) #1-6

Score (out of 5 Capes)

4/5 Capes for an exciting and novel new take on Batman and the entire circle of characters, a little rough on the edges but with loads of potential.

My Review

The Absolute line of books from DC Comics has made a huge splash with comics fans. None more so than Absolute Batman. The first issue has been reprinted multiple times and every new issue of the ongoing series places high on the monthly sales charts.

The series has been getting so much attention that I could not ignore its trade paperback collection any longer. I needed to get myself a copy to read now, so I would no longer feel like I was missing out.

I see why there is so much buzz behind this title. Writer Scott Snyder has done a superb job of reimagining and reinterpreting the entire Batman mythology and universe.

The previous high-water mark, the set of three original graphic novels Batman: Earth One, included some clever new twists and takes of Batman's origin story but left many of the secondary characters roughly within their canonical takes.

Snyder feels no need to hew so close to canon. The characters are still there - Selina Kyle, Edward Nygma, among many others - but rather than homicidal or psychotic villains and anti-heroes, they are part of Bruce Wayne's circle of peers, poker buddies, former classmates. Still all special, with their gifted intelligence, curiosity and acrobatic skills, and so on, but at least in the early days of Absolute Batman, they help more than they battle.

Snyder likewise gives us a fresh take on Bruce Wayne. Still driven, strong, athletic and acrobatic, still highly intelligent with clever inventions. But no longer the wealthy playboy and business tycoon. Now, he is a construction worker.

Its outside-the-mansion take on Bruce is reminiscent of the limited series The Return of Bruce Wayne, in which he was reimagined as a pirate, a Puritan-era man, a Stone-aged primitive and more. But those were much more limited in length of run and in size of the Bat universe. This series uses the ongoing format to go much deeper into the details of its reimagined Gotham and all its characters.

This Bruce Wayne, rather than rely upon his millions and billions, deliberately torches in flames and smoke the hundreds of millions of dollars given him as a bribe to look the other way from the villainous chaos exploding throughout Gotham.

The zoo of the book's title and first story arc of the ongoing series is the literal Gotham Zoo, where beloved and wise teacher Thomas Wayne was killed while protecting his son and classmates on a school field trip. The tragedy's telling is carefully paced out with flashbacks running throughout the book, raw memories from the invention competition that was rewarded by the field trip to the day itself and the police and courtroom scenes that followed.

These flashbacks and their gradual unpacking of such critical events in the life and formation of young Bruce are one reason why I prefer reading - and reviewing - graphic novels and trade paperbacks. By collecting so many chapters in one place, it is easier on the reader to follow the threads and emotions that run through these scenes. No need to wait until next month or the one after that to start putting those pieces together.

In these first chapters of the ongoing series, Batman is still rough around the edges in his tactics, strategies, equipment. Through other flashbacks, we get a glimpse of earlier outings, when he was even less polished in his abilities, but he is clearly a quick study and is making his way toward the incredible, nearly flawless crime-fighter of legend. Will the Absolute Universe Batman wind up in that same place?

The visuals also show some rough edges that could stand some polish. Yes, they convey the gritty, intense and dark mood of the series, but on several occasions lead artist Nick Dragotta and fill-in Gabriel Hernandez Walta seem to take short cuts, leaving us with some sloppy and over-inked panels.

But those are just the edges. At its core, this book and the Absolute Batman series are beautiful and intense. Dragotta in particular makes great work of silhouette and shadow in controlling the mood of the scene and the flow of the narrative. Battle scenes are intense. This new Batman is truly terrifying, dangerously violent and slightly unbalanced, all of which is conveyed by Dragotta's art.

A new take on Batman also needs to wrestle with the tools of the non-meta man in the costume. The decades of accumulated miracles on his utility belt are not completely swept away but rather are replaced with several shocking and brilliantly creative new tools and weapons.

The bat-trimmed dump truck. The collapsible battle-axe with logo-shaped head. The mask's ears that can be detached and used as daggers or rotated for a bloody head-butt. The extendible arms. The multiple pieces of the cape and the diverse ways such a cape could be used. Snyder must have had no end of fun brainstorming these ideas, and I suspect more will come in future books.

My FOMO - fear of missing out - caused me to bump this up my list of books to acquire and review. And I am glad it did. This is a delight and sets up well for a long run of an alternate but very enjoyable take on Batman.

What I loved

Innovative and genuinely bat-themed tools of the trade

Batman's famed utility belt has long held all manner of clever inventions and tools for his battles with the evil villains he confronts. We have emerged from the more comical era where everything became bat-themed simply by slapping the prefix "bat-" on it: bat-cave, batmobile, batarang and so on.

The creative teams behind Absolute Batman kept the core idea - a man with no super-powers but lots of intelligence, inventing things to help him battle his enemies -  while throwing out most of what came before and doubling-down on the tie-ins to the Bat theme.

My personal favourite is the one pictured - extendible rods, inspired by the way some bats walk around using their arms. And in the stories in this volume, he makes good if occasional use of this innovation.

It is hardly the only one. Another impressive new weapon is the collapsible battle-axe with two-bladed head shaped to match the blocky logo on his chest. The bat ears on his cowl and mask are also cleverly converted into weapons with multiple uses, whether removable knives or ones that can be rotated for other uses.

And since he needs to get around, there are also vehicles like a motorcycle and a dump truck (!) bedecked in subtle but functionally important bat logo trimmings.

Every Batman era and writer introduces new such Bat-weapons. In this heavily reimagined Absolute universe, though, these stand out as brilliant, innovative and on-point. Nice!

What I didn't love

Scratchy, over-simplified art

For such a high-profile, imaginative and innovative rethinking of one of comics' flagship characters, the visuals frequently disappoint. Sure, they evoke a dark, gritty and violent world with a hero ready to meet the challenges before him. But too often artists Nick Dragotta and Gabriel Hernandez Walta give us something that feels slapdash and rushed, or that spends too much time on the wrong details.

Take the image above, for one example. It is a flashback panel to the earliest days of Batman's vigilante crime-fighting, so a simplistic profile layout and basic framing and facial details is consistent with the basic beginning and simplistic approach of the budding new hero.

But the effect is overwhelmed by the dominant detail of the background, the metal bars on the window, dirty brick and graffiti walls, rusty pipes and shadows. It sets the mood but overshadows the main actors in the scene. The net result is even more attention on the scratchy, careless look of our hero and his prey.

The problem continues outside these flashbacks as well, with so much time spent on the novel tech and tools or the hellhole of Gotham that the main characters wind up looking rushed and half-finished.

Related Reviews

All In Saga that kicks off the Absolute DC Universe

Another take on Batman in Justice League 3000

Batman as Pirate, Puritan and more in the Return of Bruce Wayne

Quick Reference Details

Writers:  Scott Snyder
Artists:  Nick Dragotta, Gabriel Hernandez Walta (#4)
Published By:  DC Comics
Published When:  Aug 5, 2025
Parental Rating: Teen

Back cover of Absolute Batman volume 1 The Zoo