House to Astonish Episode 197
We’re back once again with a full slate of comics news, remembering Ian Kennedy and Tom Veitch, and discussing the Hero Initiative’s JLA/Avengers reprint, DC’s upcoming Black Label titles, Marvel’s Wild Cards and Thunderbolts revivals, IDW’s Last Bot Standing and the Amazon/ComiXology disaster. We’ve also got reviews of Iron Fist and Nightwing, and the Official Handbook of the Official Handbook of the Marvel Universe has a burnin’ love. All this plus an underground car park, trading cards with staples and Carnage, the most well-adjusted man in comics.
The podcast is here, or here on Mixcloud, or available via the embedded player below. Let us know what you think, in the comments, on Twitter, via email or through our Facebook fan page. And if you wanted to buy a t-shirt from our Redbubble store, then well, we wouldn’t say no.
Not the US comics industry sleep-walking into a malfunctioning distribution monopoly! Who could have seen that happening? Again.
I’m the opposite of Paul. I’d quite happily have the Visionaries in Transformers (assuming they were written properly, unlike the actual cross-over we got) but GI Joe being thrown in absolutely doesn’t work for me. The presence of giant transforming alien robots completely overshadows everything about GI Joe utterly.
I have to admit, when you said the new Iron Fist was Swordmaster, I immediately thought you meant Swordsman from the Avengers, went to Jacques off D+ Hawkeye and thought “wow, that’s a bold synergy choice!”.
I thought the same thing about the Swordsman.
First Issue Special does have some good issues, mainly the warlord, Dr Fate and Manhunter ones. Some of the others are definitely in the weird 1970s DC category.
I’ll gladly add the Mikaal Tomas “Starman” to First Issue Special worth reading lists. Sure, he only had that one appearance (until Robinson), but I can’t naysay a character created as an homage to Ziggy Stardust.
For anyone else who hasn’t heard of the Dingbats of Danger Street, the short version is “You know all those Jack Kirby kid gangs? Well, it’s another one.” ISTR Karl “never met a Kirby concept he didn’t like” Kesel had them get in a turf war with the Newsboy Legion, and at the very least the rhythm of the name was an influence on Grant Morrison’s Newsboys of Nowhere Street.
A new Thunderbolts series! And Paul and Al grimly mark another recording date on the twenty-year-planner they’ve got the Lightning Round schedule on.
I’m not as convinced as Paul about Amazon reinstating the subscriptions for non-US folk.
The website, customer service answers, etc don’t mention anything about them working on it, just that it’ll be no longer available, same as how when they switched to Amazon they took away iOS in-app purchases and it never came back.
Ditto the DRM-free downloads.
On a related note, we’re still waiting on DC Universe Infinite to be available outside the US, something they said would be ready by the end of summer 2021.
I was so excited for a new Thunderbolts book, and that’s about as far from what I want out of a Thunderbolts story as humanly possible.
Re: Volcana, the Fantastic Four Annual backup she’s in (#23) seemed to be positioning her as a reluctant hero. Her powers get expanded to something less inherently lethal (she turns to volcanic rock and has superstrength et al.), it plays up her sympathetic nature and her grieving over the death of Molecule Man, and she even beats up Moonstone (not one of Karla’s better showings). Haven’t read her subsequent appearances but I guess it didn’t take. She’d fit neatly into many iterations of the Thunderbolts concept.
I’m not sure why Thunderbolts is such a hard concept to put across. Bad guys pretending as good guys, bad guys trying to be good guys. It’s not hard.
I’m with Al on Tom King’s Batman output, but his Supergirl miniseries that just wrapped up was absolutely one of the best books I’ve read recently. It’s much more optimistic than the books they named on the podcast and the artwork is gorgeous, I’d describe it as Little Nemo-esque. It’s one of those rare books where I was a little sad to see the story end.
Much like Al, I loved his Omega men and vision books, but the bloom fell off the rose a long time ago.
I gave up on his Batman prob during Joker vs Riddler. He’s just become yet another grimdark merchant, even if he’s a really good writer.
Ronnie Gardocki- you’d think it would be that simple wouldn’t you?
Hi guys, I love the podcast – but is there a mistake in the first download link? I always download it as an MP3 and then listen it to it on my old iPod. The usual first link I go to (“The podcast is here”) takes me to a Libsyn login page, and if I try to create an account it wants me to pay for hosting my podcast, so I’m wondering if you maybe linked the wrong page there?
Following up, it looks like this was what the link was supposed to be – https://housetoastonish.libsyn.com/webpage/2022/02
If you haven’t read the Wildcards books, they’re basically “What if superheroes, but for grownups?” Which was still *slightly* novel in the late 80s/early 90s. I haven’t read any in decades, but I don’t think there’s anything valuable in the concept any more.
Cheers S, it looks like I had somehow tried to link to the specific area of the podcast hosting dashboard for the episode, rather than the permalink, like a complete nitwit, but it should be fixed now
The only character I remember from WildCards is “the great and powerful turtle,” who was created by Martin himself I think in the first book.
Yeah, Turtle was one of the good ones, that really ran with the concept. A guy has powerful telekinesis and wants to fight crime, does he go around in spandex punching people who might shoot at him? No, he welds armour plates onto an old VW frame and levitates it, sitting safely inside while he does his thing, because he’s sensible.
Later, and with different authors, things went off the rails a bit. There was a guy who got different super powers depending on what drugs he snorted, and junk like that. Someone turned into literally King Kong I think?
Wild Cards is a great concept, albeit one that can go off rails rather easily.
In a nutshell, it is an alternate Earth where history diverged due to an alien would-be biological experiment gone terribly wrong. The environment itself somewhat resembles Marvel’s own “New Universe” of the late 1980s after The Pitt, but is taken much better care of. Granted, that is a low bar.
Interestingly, Chris Claremont seems to have conceived the Jumpers plot of around book 9 or so.
The core idea is indeed wild. It would be nice to see Marvel fully implement their take on Doctor Tachyon, Croyd “Sleeper” Crenson, Tom “Great and Powerful Turtle” Tudbury and others. There was a four-issue miniseries by Epic back in 1990, but it was a bit hurried.
“I gave up on his Batman prob during Joker vs Riddler. He’s just become yet another grimdark merchant, even if he’s a really good writer.”
I can’t say the War of Jokes and Riddles is a good story, and yet I keep coming back to it because of how bizarre it is. I like that it just refuses to be another the concept markets it as, even if what it actually is is utterly bizarre.
I reread Tom King’s Batman run recently, and . . . honestly, I’d say the first 50-ish issues hold up better, but then Tony Daniel comes on and blah, and then the last 35 or so issues are all about Bane and Thomas Wayne, and blah. I have a personal theory that the whole thing MIGHT have worked if Mikel Janin drew it all, but we’ll never know.
I think the run has lots of good ideas and some very strong issues and moments throughout. But it’s incredibly scatterbrained, and I sort of like that Tom King either won’t or can’t conform to DC’s typical schlock superhero writer mold.
“I like that it just refuses to be another the concept markets it as”
I’m not sure what “another” is doing there. I was trying to say it’s nothing like what you’d expect it to be, maybe something like Hush or a typical Jeph Loeb story where villains are featured and taken out one by one.
On the plus side, at least they didn’t build up to the Swordmaster reveal for six months, all the while it being entirely obvious that it was Daredevil, only to switch last minute to it being Echo.
And then doing the exact same story again a few months later.
At least they didn’t do that.
Oh. That’ll teach me for commenting too early.
Wild Cards started out as the setting for GRRM’s campaign for Chaosium’s Superworld role-playing game. It has, of course, been adapted for numerous other superhero rpgs since then.
See also: the Malazan books, Record of Lodoss War, The Expanse,and — allegedly — Firefly.
One assumes that Game of Thrones is based on a D&D campaign in which the GM moved away before the final session.
I’m still a big King fan, but I didn’t read his Batman run so maybe that’s why? That book in particular seems to have turned a lot of people off.
He definitely got darker after that – Strange Adventures and Rorschach both had some pretty bleak moments, but in service to meaningful stories. That makes them a lot more interesting to me than what I consider “grimdark” stories, which trade in empty shock value. But I see the resemblance.
And he’s said in interviews he’s going to lighten up, which he is with The Human Target. He apparently had some stuff to get off his chest first.
For my money, Mister Miracle was the perfect balance of dark, funny, and relatable. Such a great miniseries.
I first encountered Volcana in a Spider-Man/X-Men prose novel, where Spidey’s in an alternate universe where the X-Men are villains who rule the world, and Volcana and Titania are amongst the scrappy band of freedom fighters. While at the same time, the regular Volcana and Titania are amongst the villains recruited to stop the X-Men from rescuing him. From this I got the impression that they were basically a double act, and I was surprised that Titania was always solo or with Crusher in the comics.
I like your take, but I do think Doom would react to being told “You took my normal life from me, and now I have no way of getting it back” with “Yes, I did. And you’re welcome.”
I’ll say, on the digital comics distribution alternative front – while it’s not supported by a lot of companies, DriveThruComics is out there, and it’s probably able to have a degree of financial stability thanks to the digital RPG distribution side of the business.
Valiant and Dynamite have a bunch of their books on there, and IDW had been putting out their D&D books digitally on the site (though they’re not there now)
Tom King’s early stuff is very strong. Grayson, Omega Men, Vision, Sheriff of Babylon all worth reading, often excellent. Then came his Batman run, which was wildly inconsistent. As Josie said, the first 45 issues are generally better than the last 30 or so. I rate the story right after issue 50, drawn by Lee Weeks, very highly as well. He also wrote Mister Miracle, a comic which a lot of people (including me) loved. I think most readers thought that story proved he was a good writer, even if Batman could get really wonky.
The much-hyped Batman 50 was terrible, however. The letter to a character + pin-up art made for a rough read, the Bat/Cat” shtick was driven into the ground, and the conclusion to the engagement plot didn’t work. A few months later, we got Heroes in Crisis, which almost no-one liked. Tom King went a critical darling and fan favorite to the subject of an enormous amount of backlash.
Now, I think comic book readers are more aware of how he repeats themes and writing tics, less likely to praise his work outright, and More skeptical when his name is attached to a project. I bought Rorschach out of curiosity and ended up liking it, but I’m waiting for critical appraisal before getting any of his newer works. I hope he hits the heights of his early comics and Mister Miracle again.
Tom King wouldn’t be the first creator to make a name with smart, self-contained, and poignant takes on unusual characters — or, int he case of Grayson — characters with a temporary and unusual status quo — only to run into issues on marquee titles.
Rick Remender stands out to me in this regard. Great on Uncanny X-Force (especially early on) and Venom, much less effective on Uncanny Avengers (which was meant as a flagship book) and on Captain America. And Nick Spencer had similar issues on Captain America and, especially in his later run, on Amazing Spider-Man despite the great work he’d done on Superior Foes of Spider-Man and Ant-Man.
I think it’s the combination of having to write self-consciously “epic” stories with “big changes” on those marquee titles and the concomitant editorial involvement. Things that work for oddball premises with “side” titles and characters or things that work in a high-concept miniseries don’t work as well with “main” titles.
My sense is that distinctively voiced creators who make waves with B-list and below characters and “side” books run into big problems on marquee titles.
Often, those marquee titles and flagship titles come with some combination of demands for epic event storylines or comprehensive and defining takes on characters with way more history and media presence combined with editorial meddling.
What works as a smart, off-kilter, or conceptually original take on a less-defined or “central” character, a planned and self-contained run, and a book that gets to largely stay to itself has little room to work in those conditions.
And the result is usually convoluted, try-hard, and/or hastily reshuffled plotting and storytelling.
It happened to Remender, it happened to Spencer, and it happened to King. In the case of King’s Batman, it was definitely the one-two punch of having his original plan for the wedding storyline modified by editorial, then trying for an “epic” and “defining” wrap-up.
And Heroes in Crisis ran into the same kinds of overstretched gimmick concepts and heavy-handed editorial meddling that are visible in, say, Remender’s Axis or Spencer’s Secret Empire.
@Omar K.: Total agreement that King falls into that camp for those reasons. The one exception to your rule that I can think of is Grant Morrison — from Animal Man to Doom Patrol to JLA to Final Crisis. But they’re definitely unusual in terms of being able to write oddball and widescreen in equal measure.
Honestly, I must have completely blocked out Heroes in Crisis. What a terribly misguided story. Do what you want to Adam Strange or Rorschach or Miracle Man (and in arguably non-canonical stories, to boot), but leave poor Wally alone. Hasn’t he been through enough?
@Mike L.: King does hit that “disillusioned aging hero” note over and over again, which means readers have to be tuned into that wavelength to really enjoy his work. But since I’m basically surrounded by military veterans with PTSD, his work really speaks to me.
Total agreement that King falls into that camp for those reasons. The one exception to your rule that I can think of is Grant Morrison — from Animal Man to Doom Patrol to JLA to Final Crisis. But they’re definitely unusual in terms of being able to write oddball and widescreen in equal measure.
SPOILERS FOR TOM KING’S MISTER MIRACLE
I think most of the British wave of 1980s writers manage to avoid it. I think it helps that they tend to play more with high-concept stuff even in their quirkier or more offbeat work, and they tended to “go big” quite often.
Morrison’s Doom Patrol is oddball, but it has its share of big, worLd-destroying abstract menaces, so JLA’s not that big a leap to write the JLA, for example.
I think it helps that some of the British comics of the 70s and early 80s where these folks got their starts — 2000 AD, for instance — tended to blend the absurd and the grandiose pretty often. And ther mode of absurdity was hyperbole, exaggeration, and satire.
Those 80s British writers have a tendency to take a sort of distance from the inter-character dynamics and character interiority, to aim for the conceptual through the characterization. they’re capable of finely detailed characterization, but there’s always an additional abstract or thematic thing they’re working through, and this tends to animate the plots much more than the character dynamics.
I’d say folks like King, Remender, and Spencer tend to linger on the personal and emotional rather than abstracting from it. They share a tendency to find the absurdly human within the high-concept, not the other way around.
Writers like King, Remender, and Spencer tend to challenge the idea of grand themes or conceptual oppositions and alignments; the messy human-ness, the absurdity of desires and stubborn traits, wins out over any kind of conceptual “purity” or abstracted, unlived truth.
In that respect, they’re a bit like Steve Gerber, who was great at finding the offbeat humanity of oddball characters dealing with unusual stakes and situations, but tended to mediocrity or unsustainable excess when he worked on more mainstream fare like Daredevil or tried to go epic with stuff like Void Indigo.
Morrison, Moore, and others of their generation of big-name writers tended to have their stories resolve at the conceptual level; human characters often live out ideas and archetypes in their work, or stand before them. Gerber, King, Spencer, and Remender tend to have characters whose messy, irrational human-ness makes a lie of the high concepts and the big thematic clashes.
Heck, that’s arguably the ultimate point of King’s Mister Miracle: the grand battle of the gods, the great puzzle-box of reality, just doesn’t matter if it means losing that family life, that little human connection.
Contrast the end of King’s Mister Miracle with the ending of Alan Moore’s “For the Man Who Has Everything,” where the right decision is literally for Superman to see the clues that he’s trapped in a dream, even if it means losing the experience of fatherhood and scaring his imaginary son.
SPOILERS FOR TOM KING’S MISTER MIRACLE
I presume Aaron had too much success with Thor and smaller books to say his Avengers is the aberration of his career so far.
I do agree the 80s British wave has a very high success rate, both in terms of critical and financial terms.
It seems to me that Morrison and Moore are the two exceptions, who can do just about anything superbly in the comic book field.
Otherwise? The British writers were much better with lesser-known characters they could use more of their own voice.
-Milligan never really achieved much success on any top of the line characters.
-Jamie Delano basically had no interest in writing superhero characters.
-I’d argue that Gaiman wasn’t able to replicate his most successful work on established company properties.
-Pat Mills never bothered with superhero comics.
-I’ll grant that Alan Grant is another exception as far as his Batman. That seems more of a Chris Claremont circumstance though, of the writer connecting with the character. I’m not sure what Grant could have done with a character other than a vigilante like Batman.
“A few months later, we got Heroes in Crisis, which almost no-one liked.”
I just reread it this weekend, and yeah, it’s still bad, and it’s hard to pin down why he thought it would work.
I guess a running theme through most (all?) of King’s work is psychological stress and how that causes people to make decisions they would otherwise be wiser not to have made. This approach is successful with stuff like Vision, Adam Strange, even some Batman stories, like the Mr. Freeze arc. But he tries to write Booster and Harley as cartoonishly insane (which . . . Harley usually is) and balance that with themes of real psychological trauma, and it’s just offputting.
And then there’s the whole awful handling of Wally West, though to be slightly fair to King, DC had been mishandling Wally West so consistently for the previous ten years, King was pretty much handed a broken character that superficially resembled a fan favorite.
“Heroes in Crisis ran into the same kinds of overstretched gimmick concepts and heavy-handed editorial meddling”
Did it? Is there a statement anywhere that the published story is not what King intended? I mean, I know it was originally planned to be 7 issues and got extended to 9, but other than that, it seems incredibly self-contained. Still bad, but elements don’t seem shoehorned in.
“I presume Aaron had too much success with Thor and smaller books to say his Avengers is the aberration of his career so far.”
I picked up a collection of Aaron’s first 12 issues of Avengers and was just shocked by how . . . juvenile it was. It feels like he’s writing for 6-year-olds.
And look, I wasn’t a fan of stuff like Hickman’s chess-piece-moving Avengers-New-Avengers-Infinity nonsense, but I at least appreciated that he was trying something new and trying to be ambitious.
Aaron’s Avengers is just action figures colliding. There’s just nothing there.
Thom H: I don’t work in the same field as you, but I like King’s work overall. I haven’t read Strange Adventures, however, because I’ve heard that it mines material similar to Mister Miracle but with less aplomb. I’m ok skipping another “disillusioned aging hero” comic.
Omar: great point about the writers who find success with marginal characters and struggle with the bigger books. I thought of Nick Spencer as another guy who went from acclaim to being on the outs with fans. I forgot about Remender- I also liked Uncanny X-Force and Venom- but he definitely fits.
I think Jeff Lemiere fits that category as well- great Indy books, decent runs on Green Arrow and a few C-listers, didn’t work out on X-Men or Green Lantern- but he never had a high-profile critical flop.
Your point about less editorial interference and a greater focus on characterization might explain why there are more great runs on Daredevil than on Superman.
Mark Coale: Jason Aaron managed to avoid a similar backlash because his only big failure was Original Sin. His Avengers run might be the comic that hurts his reputation. I don’t think he’s damaged any character the way Heroes in Crisis damaged Wally West… yet.
Chris V- most of the British writers of the ‘80s seemed uninterested in super-heroes. I wonder if they were given the chance to go near those characters. Sure, Grant Morrison wrote JLA and Batman* eventually, but they started on Animal Man and Doom Patrol. Alan Moore wrote a few Superman stories, but he wasn’t tapped to write the character’s ongoing post-Crisis. Gaiman got Black Orchid and then Sandman because they were properties no one else was interested in. I wonder if ‘80s Gaiman would have been permitted to write what he wanted on a Superman monthly, or if he would have given up in frustration.
* Arkham Asylum & Gothic were stand alone stories in special formats, not the Batman monthlies. I’m talking about writing gigs on ongoing series.
Josie: your description of Aaron’s Avengers is depressingly accurate. I also thought Hickman’s Avengers was a bit of a slog. He leaned too hard on his ideas (the Builders… ugh) and didn’t write most of the characters well. I know some people liked it. Bendis’s run before it was pretty bad, and Hickman’s was different? I’ve heard the New Avengers title was better, but I don’t like the Illuminati concept so I didn’t read it.
As for Heroes in Crisis, I remember reading or hearing that Dan Didio steered King toward killing off characters and/or making Wally West the culprit. I’ll see if I can track down the info…
Yes, I dropped Strange Adventures because it seemed too much like King was becoming a one-trick writer after Mr. Miracle. I also expected that the book wouldn’t go where it seemed to be going with Adam Strange (since I didn’t finish the series, I’m not sure if I was correct). I would unequivocally recommend King’s Vision and Mr. Miracle. King’s work after that didn’t pique my interest.
I would argue that Lemire got implicated in the Inhumans vs. X-Men debacle. One of the worst comics ever published.
I’d also point to Justice League Dark as an embarrassing comic. I was embarrassed to be reading the book after the introduction of Nick Necro. I couldn’t believe Lemire could write such a truly dreadful comic.
I get the idea that Lemire puts most of his effort in to his creator owned work and phones it in on company properties.
I’m a really big Thunderbolts fan, and I liked Zub’s 2016-2017 run well enough. But this doesn’t, at face value anyway, seem like a Thunderbolts book at all.
If you really break it down to basics, Thunderbolts oscillates between two premises: Villains working within the law, or heroes working outside the law. Either way, the book is defined by the characters not fitting into the mold they’re expected to, and fighting against their own nature.
Zub has tried to explain how this book will be about “redeeming the concept” of Thunderbolts, which I like. Frankly I find the constant attempts to push the Thunderbolts into a Suicide Squad shaped box irritating, and I’m glad for a more heroic take. That said this book seems to be “heroes, working within the confines of the law.” That is to say superheroes being superheroes. Which … isn’t what Thunderbolts is. At all.
That said, having listened to some interviews Zub has given, you can tell he’s really passionate about the projects, and about Thunderbolts as a franchise. Since I’ve liked his earlier works on Thunderbolts, and there’s always a chance he’ll bring in more classic T-Bolts characters later on, I’m willing to give this a chance. I’m certainly willing to bear with this if it convinces Marvel that Thunderbolts deserve an ongoing title. I’m hoping that a lot of the press around the book is smokescreen for some twists on the premise that make this more properly a T-Bolts book. If it isn’t and the solicits should be taken at face value, the best that we can hope for is a good book that’s a bad Thunderbolts book.
Oh well.
The cynic in me says the Thunderbolts IP is being readied for the MCU as they will be Vanessa’s team (US Agent, Yelena, etc). So this book may just be keeping the name in peoples consciousness for a year or so.
I haven’t read Lemires JLA stuff, but I read Black Hammer, so thats close enough, right?
Milligan wrote some good Batman stories, but was he ever the monthly writer in the main two books?
Josie: in the last few lines of this interview, King says he didn’t decide who would be the main characters of HiC, editorial did: https://comicbook.com/dc/amp/news/tom-king-on-heroes-in-crisis-the-fan-reaction-and-more/
I conflated that w/ Didio saying he hated Wally West and the notion that he had a list of characters he wanted killed off. It may have been other editors who told King to make the murderer Wally, but I wouldn’t be surprised if Didio had a hand in the decision.
He was on Detective Comics during the late-1980s. It wasn’t that long of a run (I want to say nine issues). Batman was treated as the main title at the time…with, I think, Doug Moench on that book. I enjoyed the Milligan comics much more. I get the feeling that DC editorial wasn’t happy with Milligan’s output on the character and wanted to get him off the book fairly quickly.
That would be Milligan’s best “mainstream” character work. Then, there’s a lot of his work-for-hire writing, like Elektra…which, the less said the better. Milligan is definitely at his best when he can fit his distinctive voice with a suitable character (the surrealism of Shade or the humour of X-Statix).
Mark Coale: In the early ‘90s, Milligan wrote Detective Comics #629 – 633, 638 – 640, & 643, as well as Batman #452-454 and 472 – 473. I don’t know the circumstances behind his run, but “Dark Knight, Dark City” rules. It was the first Batman story I picked up in comic book form and it blew my 12 yr old mind.
Yes, “Dark Knight, Dark City” is one of the top Batman stories. I think DC liked that story and selected Milligan to replace Grant on Detective Comics based on the strength of that story-arc, but then Milligan’s stories ended up a mix of noir/weird fiction that (while they stood out to me for being something different for Batman) were too unusual for what DC was looking for as Batman moved in to the 1990s. So, they went with Chuck Dixon instead. That’s just my suspicion based on how DC treated Batman as the book everyone should be reading and completely ignored Milligan’s Detective, but for all I know Milligan may have wanted off the book or only signed on for a short run in between creative teams.
“I feel like Heroes in Crisis and Batman and Mister Miracle all sort of tell the same story, like my second theme. The first theme was about the Iraq War, the second theme in my career is about, “what do you do after trauma?””
– Tom King
Well, at least he admits it.
“As I’ve said many times before, I don’t pick the characters for my story; I give my plot to the editors and then the editors pick the characters for me.”
– Tom King
That’s not editorial meddling. That’s just . . . editorial. That’s what editors are supposed to do.
I find it weird that King would have a whole pitch accepted only to be told which characters the story would be about. Actually, I could see a writer pitching a series and being told to put Harley Quinn in it. Anyway, the editorial directive to use Wally West is probably one reason why he was handled so badly. Not to excuse King, though. I don’t think Heroes in Crisis would have been better with different characters (“oh no, I Gangbusted too hard and killed Wildebeast! Curse you, issues!!!”)
I think Vision was the first King title I read, and I thought it was great. I then went back and read Sheriff of Babilon and the Omega Men – SoB was very good, but Omega Men was the one I really loved (not that it’s objectively better, just more of my kind of thing).
Afterwards it started to be mixed. Mister Miracle was great at times, but overall I found it to be too meandering. His Batman run was incredibly uneven (the ‘Bruce Wayne does 12 Angry Men’ story was fatastic). Heroes in Crisis had Clay Mann on art and that’s about the only good thing about it.
But I keep coming back for more King. There’s something about those books that makes me want to see for myself how they turned out this time. (Plus he gets all these fantastic artists for those prestige minis).
And the current-ish crop is… as uneven as what came before. If I said Mister Miracle was meandering, then I don’t even know what to call Strange Adventures. Maybe just pointless (but it looked great!). Rorschach was a decent thriller that gained absolutely nothing from the Watchmen connection or the bizzare inclusion of not-actually-Ditko and actually-Miller characters (but it looked great!). I’ve fallen behind on Supergirl Does True Grit in Space because it didn’t capture me (but it looks great!) and on Batman/Catwoman because it’s a barely coherent mess (but it looks great!).
But Human Target looks great and reads great.
I agree with Mike L. that Alan Moore doesn’t quite fit the mold of “can write anything” the same way Grant Morrison does. He can write A-list characters like nobody’s business, but only in self-contained stories.
I can’t imagine Moore being as flexible with all of the character changes in JLA like Morrison was, for example. I think projects like WildCats and Supreme worked mostly because Moore was given complete creative control. He doesn’t fit into the culture of big, work-for-hire comics as well as Morrison can.
—–
Mister Miracle and Strange Adventures were thematically similar, for sure, but serve as the inverse of each other, maybe? I recommend reading or finishing SA if you haven’t — it keeps surfacing in my mind in a way that even MM doesn’t. But the two series definitely ping off one another in some interesting ways.