Comics: Yet More First Issues!

For a solid fourth week of visits to my beloved Comicopia here in Boston, I’ve had first issues in my bag when I left. As I’ve mentioned here at Stevereads before, I remember when the appearance of a first issue was a big deal, fairly rare – finding one on the spinner rack of Trow’s Stationary was a rare and vaguely unsettling experience, a jostling of the universe’s settled order, and the troubling possibility, like a pregnancy, of introducing something dreadful into the world.

Of course, those were the days before the ridiculous speculator-boom hit the world of comics and turned every basement-dwelling, Doritos-scarfing, mouth-breathing virgin into a wheeler-dealer bagging every pristine new purchase in plastic, dreaming of reaping enormous profits when that copy of The Adventures of Razorback #1 squintuples in value. Nowadays, that mindset has taken firm root in the comics world, and as a result, comics companies – no fools them – have become quite liberal in their production of first issues.

Gone entirely is the even vague presumption that these first issues represent the optimistic beginnings of enterprises of great merit. Gone is even the pretense of hope for actual success. Nobody at Marvel, for example, expects to see a 100th-issue anniversary celebration of Karnak; it’s unlikely that the folks at DC see much potential for longevity in Bizarro. No, the most the various creators are probably hoping for in their new first issues is a long-enough run to fill up a couple of the graphic novels where the companies make their money anyway.

It can lead to some depressing reading experiences, but I’ve been mostly lucky this month, and this week continued the streak. I bought, for instance, the first issue of Black Knight, in which writer Frank Tieri and artist Luca Pizzari find Dane Whitman, Marvel Comics’ Black Knight – a former member of the Avengers (including playing a major role in great Bob Harras/Steve Epting run on that title) – now the warlord of a weird planet in an alternate dimension, cut off from Earth but still visited regularly by the ghost of one of his illustrious Black Knight ancestors, who’s concerned that Dane Whitman is succumbing to the dark bloodlust embodied in his magic ebony sword.

It’s an interesting take on the character, and the issue ends with a nifty cliffhanger that will probably have me buying the second issue as well.

The week’s other first issue doesn’t quite count, since it only kicks off a mini-series, not an allegedly ongoing title (although since, as I mentioned, most new ongoing titles are such half-hearted affairs they fade into the woodwork fairly quickly anyway, there isn’t much of a difference between the two anymore): It’s DC’s Batman Europa #1, with script by Matteo Casali and Brian Azzarello and artwork by Jim Lee, and it has a storyline that must have seemed like pure gold during some boozy pitch meeting: Batman finds himself infected with a mysterious, deadly virus, and the clues about it lead him to Berlin, where he finds the Joker menacing a young hacker who’s connected to the virus in some way. And in the course of the ensuing fisticuffs, it turns out that the Joker is likewise infected – and the two arch-enemies have to work together to hunt down a cure before they both die! Comic book gold, yes?

It doesn’t withstand a moment’s scrutiny, of course. Not only is Joker’s involvement haphazardly mechanical (some guy finds him, tells him he’s been infected, and points him toward Berlin – Joker kills the guy without learning anything more from him than the presence somewhere in Berlin of the aforementioned young hacker – but no such guy makes a similar announcement to Batman; if he hadn’t used the super-sophisticated equipment of the Batcave, he’s simply have withered and died and been none the wiser), but the actual script offers not one single believable reason why Batman would need to team up with a mass murderer in order to find the creator of the virus – the Joker brings nothing to the hunt. It’s a story that doesn’t manage to limp two paces outside that pitch meeting.

And yeesh, Cassali and Azzarello don’t exactly shine in the writing department this time around. Berlin itself is introduced with a chunk of dead prose, for instance:

For the dead, the defining city of the 20^th century. War-tumbled into seclusion, then rolled into rage. But that pulse is now just an echo … through the Brandenburg Gate. The blood, though it’s still here … even at Checkpoint Charlie, now just a footnote of the past. That’s what Berlin has become – a bad dream that it wants to wake up from. Here, the Weimar Republic was burnt to the ground … and fifty years later, the Reichstag was built anew in glass and steel.

But the past … it may fade, but it doesn’t go away. The hill of the Berlin Planetarium is constructed from World War Two debris and rubble. When people gaze at the stars, their feet are firmly on a ground they can’t deny.

And to add to these annoyances, there’s also the fact that this particular first issue, at $5, is roughly four pages long. The back half of the issue is entirely taken up with full-page in-house ads.

The only thing compensating all these drawbacks was something that actually took me a few pages to realize: this isn’t the “New 52” revamped Batman with the weird piping on his costume – it’s the normal Batman, and he’s dealing with a Joker clearly out of the established continuity of DC’s current lineup, a “classic” Joker dressed in green and purple. The story would need to get a whole lot better for me to return for another issue, but even so: it sure was nice to see DC trot out these iconic versions of their characters, even if it’s only for a mini-series.