Mindless Ones

From secret staging grounds on two of Cybertron’s moons, the valiant MINDLESS ONES prepare to draft some short comics reviews…

Metamorpho: The Element Man #5 – Steve Lieber (art), Al Ewing (script), Lee Loughridge (colours), Ferran Delgago (letters)

Issue after issue, Ewing and Lieber find new ways to turn the language of groovy “educational” comics into an invitation to play. My favourite individual example of this so far is in issue #3, a two page spread drawn like a maze puzzle for kids/timefuct beatniks, with inserts showing our heroes blundering through a series of traditional perils.

Without this fundamental conceit, and its perfect extension of “a solid chromium foot… one of the hardest substances in the human body” into a bespoke absurdist aesthetic, some of this comic’s barbs against “A.I.” would have felt like mere prompts for applause. As it is, they’re of a piece with the Mad Mod’s monologues, or this issue’s grand duel between solar avatars – carefully arranged incongruities set in opposition to the banal ones our culture is producing en masse.

Resistance is all about finding the space in between the circuits, you see. Easier for Element Woman and Andor than you or me, but don’t let that stop you trying, Metamaniacs!

Batman/Superman: World’s Finest Annual 2025 – Dan McDaid (art), Christopher Cantwell (script), Mark Waid (story), John Kalisz (colours), Steve Wands (letters), Dan Mora (cover)

Let me pay this comic one of the highest compliments I know: having read it, I don’t need to read any of the other issues in this series. This despite the issue in question being part 3 of a 6 part crossover between this comic and Justice League Unlimited. Writing an entertaining single issue under these conditions is a distinct formal challenge, and Cantwell and Waid have a lot of fun with it here, loading up a villainous plan with a twist that is both skilfully foreshadowed and compelling in its own right.

Artist and friend of the blog Dan McDaid has been doing some great work over at DC comics lately, finishing up extended runs on Kneel Before Zod (with Joe Casey) and Shazam! (with Josie Campbell). Zod provided plenty of opportunities for McDaid to flex his big boy drawing arm while depicting rugged action against a series of classic sci-fi landscapes. Shazam, meanwhile, showed that he could provide moments of formal play and true menace in an otherwise amiable fantasy.

This World’s Finest annual is all about the villains, though, and its chief appeal – beyond the old school comics writing craft mentioned above – is the amount of fun McDaid has drawing these goons. My favourite moment comes in this panel, where Bizarro, Cheetah, Lex and the Joker contemplate their own dark futures.

I don’t know which detail I’m most fond of here, Bizarro looking like he am no shat his pants, Lex and Cheetah’s duelling eyebrows, or the Joker’s stream of consciousness slowing to a trickle as he doubts his life choices and the company he keeps.

The annual is full of wee bits like this. Plastic Man swamping the villains and the page itself; a fun collision between Superman and Bizarro; some impeccable disdain from Lex. The art of providing familiar pleasures is easy to underrate until you realise how seldom it’s done well.

Remember: Maggie and Hopey were apart to begin with. It seems strange to have to say it, given that the earliest Locas stories are built around letters from one of these characters to the other, but if you’ve read enough of these comics it can still feel wrong somehow. “Maggie and Hopey” seems like it should be the foundation of these stories, or at least the point of departure, and yet the letters say otherwise.

The fact that these letters managed to escape from the sci-fi romance Maggie was living and made it all the way back to a dive flat back home might feel equally unsettling, if not for how they landed back home:

Maggie’s adventures among the sundered spaceships are big news, for sure, but everyone wants to get a word in because it’s not science fiction or fantasy – it’s just stuff that’s happening over there, alongside the quickly abandoned and careless tribal tropes Hernandez deploys in these early stories.

Still, as I made my way through LOCAS: The Maggie and Hopey Stories again this year, it was a another kind of distance that kept pulling me back down into the sea of ink in front of me. I’ve not read this collection from start to end since it came out in 2004 – in normal times, most of my reading is done on buses and trains so 700 page hardbacks don’t really get much play – but I’ve dipped in and out enough to know my thoughts about these stories.  I also know enough comics artists these days to be aware that seeing old art and new art together in one collection isn’t always pleasant for the creator, but if you’d asked me about LOCAS before this reread, I would have said that this was the most important journey to follow in these pages.

Watching Hernandez jettison detail as his art style takes off can be a source of real pleasure for the reader, then, but even in the earliest Mechanics stories it’s obvious he would have struggled to compose an ugly panel, let alone an ugly page. His gift for conveying character through facial expressions and body language is exemplary from day one…

…and while the clear lines and flat blacks that would come to dominate Hernandez’s pages are a dream to read, the more detail-heavy pages that front-load this collection have a sense of life and discord to them that Jaime still makes occasional use of in his later work.  Take the spiralling angles of this shot from inside a rocket on page 37…

…which finds its later echoes whenever Hernandez needs to make physical space feel alive with alien intelligence:

Or check out those early wrestling shots, which Jaime will work out how to link together more dramatically a couple of hundred pages into this collection, albeit without the crackle of dead technology that shrouds these early images:

The way Hernandez adapts these early textures into his later work goes some way to explaining the unsettled tone of these comics.  Together or apart, Maggie and Hopey exist in a world that can accommodate horned millionaires, wrestlers who dabble in regime change, crash house poverty, space-bound superheroes and demonic shadows.  These more fantastical elements don’t just survive the development of Hernandez’s art style – in fact, these two aspects of his work make each other conceptually possible, with a shifting sense of realism prompting the easy layering of wild cartooning and clipped portraiture in his mature work, and the cartoonist’s restlessness leading these strips into strange new territories whenever his hand demands it.

The one thing that doesn’t stick around in any form from those early strips is the playfulness with page layouts, and that’s a shame because it means we rarely get to see how Jaime would have developed rhythmic action sequences like this one:

…or what he might have learned to do with these mixed tempo pages, where some of the narrative moves moment by moment while other tiers play back and forward with the narration:

Given what follows, it’s an acceptable loss of artistic possibility.