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Having read the first comic, I feel like talking about it and it deserves its own thread. Image Comics has taken to reviving dead publications from the "Golden Age," those bizarre anthologies with tons of back-up features. They pick a series and allow it zombified life for one "next issue," starting with Fantastic Comics. All the old features are renewed by new artists and writers, with a pretty clear palette.
It's an honourable effort, but the first attempt leaves me a bit cold. Stardust the Super-Wizard is revived by Joe Keatinge and the Allreds, and it looks great but is ultimately a little too painful in its postmodern treatment of the character, the metaphor is too obvious, to really do anything for me. It didn't feel like much of a story, either, like someone had tried to expand upon a one-sentence metaphor in somebody else's comic book.
Which isn't to say they're all a bit lackluster; I quite liked the weird science and horror of Joe Casey & Bill Sienkiewicz's revamp of Flip Falcon in the Fourth Dimension -- they went madly off in a new direction with it, using the presumed status quo of the no doubt tame Golden Age original to make something genuinely creepy.
The projects range in style from outright mimcry of the original (I'm thinking of Jim Rugg's Captain Kidd) to Ashley Wood's Sub Saunders, a very wet dark thing made up of untranslated German and extreme close-ups, slippery sound effects, and intimations of darkness -- beautiful but I'm going to look at it a few times to see if I understand it any better. Made me feel a bit like David Lynch was massaging the back of my neck after sticking his hand under a cold faucet.
There's some weird woman-fear going through some of the stories -- Golden Knight is a beautiful duplicate of the Prince Valiant style of sword and sorcery seems to have an odd tone to it with the relationship between the main characters, though I had to wonder if there was supposed to be some queer subtext going on there. The Yank Wilson, Superspy Q-4 story was sharp to look at but relied too heavily on some boringly Fifties matrimonal horror punchline to really amount to much of anything, not to mention the weird ethnic stance (which seemed, sure, to make fun of the American government's racial politics, but only as far as a bad pun goes). Still, I'm not entirely sure, walking away from it, that the undercurrents are something specifically psychosexual on the writers' parts or if they're making some comment on the "girls have cooties!" mentality of the original comics.
The whole package of course mimics the original right down to the original, there's a prose story in there, and the promise of the next issue (heh), a revival of Quality's Crack Comics. Besides making me wonder would have happened if Plastic Man had failed to achieve some fame and was relegated to the public domain, I'm looking forward to at least looking at the next book, just to see what they make of the Clock -- even if it feels, just now, like a bit of a noble failure.
It did raise some questions for me, about the legal status of characters; they're supposedly all public domain, but the Clock -- to be featured next time 'round -- is owned by DC, though they've only ever mentioned him once, in a Starman comic by James Robinson. Is he technically public domain because they haven't use him, or would they have had to license him from DC? How does public domain work -- anyone can use them, even if they end up having more than one version running around (I'm thinking of the Terra Obscura Fighting Yank versus the other one, from the more recent Alex Ross-covered thing)? |
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