Paul Neary (1) (1949–2024)

This book is so underrated. It truly does take a look at what a world with superhumans might actually be like, if editorial edicts didn't force that a status quo be maintained. There are other series that do this as well, but few as well, and this was one of the first. Furthermore, many of those series are mature audience series, while this comic explores these realities in a way that is all ages and can be enjoyed by anyone. It's also tempting, in stories like this, to kill characters show more without reason, just because you can. The consequences of the actions in these issues always seem organic and never exploitative. One of my favorite Marvel comics. show less

Mark Gruenwald takes classic superhero archetypes, characters that will definitely seem familiar no matter which of the main two companies you grew up reading, and looks at them in a very realistically-minded way. Consider, if you were one of the most powerful beings on Earth, and the world was in chaos, wouldn't you at least consider the possibility of using your powers to enforce some form of order? That is exactly what the Squadron Supreme do in this series, and the moral implications show more strike such a chord.

The team at first seems to be a simple Justice League rip-off, but Mark's storytelling makes them so much more. Again, he is playing with archetypes. We could find a collection of characters that pre-dates the DC super team that match perfectly with each of the Squadron members. That's what makes this collection of characters so special, and why you keep seeing them in some form or another through the years.

Gruenwald takes a very serious look at the actions of heroes and the moral implications behind them. Something that may seem genuinely noble may have some fatal flaw that isn't revealed until things turn bleak. Like Watchmen and Kingdom Come later on (although, with only a year between Watchmen and Squadron Supreme, it is obvious Gruenwald wasn't the only one to have the idea, especially when Moore had his in the works for a very long time), we get to see a much grittier realism in comics than was really accepted at the time. These characters were not protected by some editor who was thinking of a future, because they may not have one. Death is real in the world of the Squadron Supreme. show less

Mark Gruenwald seems like he was a pretty lovely guy. Certainly by all accounts he was greatly liked, and his enthusiasm for the life he led and the greater stories he was involved in spinning comes through in every page. And so when you hear that he wanted his ashes mixed with Squadron Supreme, specifically, it disposes you well toward it.


But it's good on its own merits. JLA pastiche--in a much more direct way then I realized reading these as a kid--and predating Watchmen or Kingdom Come, show more it's the earliest book I know looking at what would happen if the superheroes decided to return and run shit, rule the world.


Being the first, and coming in that pre-Watchmen, pre-Dark Night Returns, whatever else, era, Squadron wears its innocence a little. These are Silver Age heroes trying to run a black-and-white world with no shades of grey, not the highly sophisticated Bendis Daredevils and Norman Osborn-in-Dark Reigns of today. They're a bunch of mid-20th century upper-middle-class American professionals, decent and naive, and yeah they're superheroes but you know the plastic's still on the couch at home. Whizzer is even a mailman. And the kind of equal-opportunity engineering-based way they solve their problems, and the non-partisan, "get with the team, chum!" way they bust opposition, is just to be expected. And Gruenwald could have done something with this, but he doesn't really--barely hints at how all fascism is brightly coloured and "chum"-based in ways. The end comes not because twelve superheroes could never keep the whole thing down forever, but because Kyle Richmond, a dopey second-rate Batman, kills a bunch of Squadroners with climactic fisticuffs (after getting beaten down by Captain America in a pointless worldhopping guest shot, just so we can see that he's second rate). That's what makes the impression. The deaths of friends. And then rather than try to salvage something (public health insurance?) from the debacle, they dismantle it all so humanity can find its own way, somehow oblivious that that's just as much meddling. But they have a Main Street, my superhero friends are the milkman and Bill from the branch office and we play poker conception of the world, so it makes sense really. In real life tyrants cause chaos by nature.


So it's not real life, but it's good social-engineering-Utopia allegory and superhero soap opera. Even if ultimately what you're left with is that this could not succeed, but that the Squadron were not enough to do it. They're not smart, dude. they're manipulating each other with the most bald-faced pretexts, they're refusing to take even the simplest of consultative or precautionary measures personally or politically, which when you've set yourself up as oligarchy is just criminally irresponsible. and even just in regular life--oh man, you should see Tom Thumb with his many PhD's invade the future empire with just one reformed criminal and a stun gun and try to find the cure for cancer. He knows nothing about the language, the people, the security setup--he just bumbles in and does it, showing that they are as incompetent 4000 years forward. You should see how he behaves with his life on the line. They're all like enormous children with zero capacity for forethouhgt or planning. I'm with Iron Man: register 'em. I guess that's why the superhero registration act stuck around. Anyway, this is kind of like a double pastiche, then, because if it were described to you it could sound completely credible, but when you see the things they say and do, you get that they're behaving within limits set by the soon-to-be-exploded superhero conventions of the day, i.e., like they're slightly retarded. But that's no different from a lot of great stories, and Gruenwald was first to put these incredibly productive issues into the air. show less

Access a version of the below that includes illustrations on my blog.

Unlike its predecessor volume, this contains only two strips that had been previously collected, and only one of them by Panini at that; Black Legacy was in the Cyberman Ultimate Collection, and Skywatch-7 in a volume of IDW's Doctor Who Classics series. So the amount of new-to-me material is much higher here, making it feel more worthwhile. But on top of that, I also found that the material here was more diverse and show more unusual than what was collected in the previous volume.

The stories here come from an era where the back-ups went from a regular feature to a more sporadic one, before fading out entirely. The last couple aren't from DWM itself, but special tie-in issues, one from a decade after all the others, which date from 1980 to 1982.As usual, I am only writing up stories I hadn't read before. On top of that, I did read all the stories in publication order, but here I am going to sometimes review them out of that order... you'll see why.

Yonder...the Yeti
A group of hikers in the Himalayas end up encountering the robot Yeti and the Great Intelligence. Some DWM stories manage to cram a lot into a little space to good effect, but this one just felt crammed to me; I struggled to follow the art or copious plot twists. Maybe I was tired when I read it... maybe I'm just getting old!

Black Legacy
Previously reviewed as part of Cybermen: The Ultimate Comic Strip Collection here.

Business as Usual
This won't set your world on fire, but I found it an effectively creepy use of the Autons. Moore does a good job of extrapolating how an Auton story would go with no Doctor; David Lloyd's talents are put to good use with some of the more horrific moments.

Stardeath / 4-D War / Black Sun Rising
This trilogy of stories from Alan Moore chronicles some of the early history of the Time Lords, and is the first depiction of a "Time War" in the Doctor Who mythos. (The existence of a "Last Great Time War" of course implies earlier, less great Time Wars.) In Stardeath, Moore really dives into the history, showing the moment alluded to in The Three Doctors where Omega gets trapped in a black home; I think this is the first story to unite that idea with the fact that in The Deadly Assassin, the Time Lords use a black hole as a power source for their time travel operations. The hardware is beautifully drawn by John Stokes and, the story uses the same design for Rassilon that we would later see in The Tides of Time. On top of that, someone comes back in time to stop the Time Lords from becoming masters of time... and in doing so accidentally gives the Time Lords a key piece of time-travel technology. Timey-wimey, as we would now say.

Such temporal shenanigans are what drive the last two stories here, which focus on the Time Lord "Special Executive" trying to maintain Time Lord influence in the face of opposition from both contemporary and futuristic enemies. Moore is typically inventive, but I didn't find the agents of the Special Executive very Time Lord-y, to be honest. Cool concepts but I feel like they needed a bit more of a Doctor Who veneer.

The Touchdown on Deneb 7
This is a K-9 story. Like K-9's Finest Hour from the previous volume, the Doctor is in it a bit but it focuses on K-9; like K-9's Finest Hour, it's not very good. If there was some kind of explanation for the key plot point that K-9 is acting totally out of character, I missed it!

Voyage to the Edge of the Universe / Crisis on Kaldor
The idea of taking a group of Dæmons and sending them on a trip to the edge of the universe seems pretty random, to be honest, but if you buy that, this is a pretty good story, in that it really lets David Lloyd cut loose with some crazy visuals. The Kaldor story was less interesting to me (I have never really been into the cut-rate Asimov of most Kaldor stories), but it did have a very macabre twist ending. The main strip in this era, under writers Steve Moore and Steve Parkhouse, really loved its stories based on weird concepts that ended with a real downer, and these stories totally fit into that vibe.

The Greatest Gamble / The Gods Walk Among Us / Devil of the Deep / The Fires Down Below
To be honest, I have never much rated John Peel as a Doctor Who writer (or, for that matter, a Star Trek: Deep Space Nine one, having suffered through Objective: Bajor, which seems to owe more to Jon Pertwee Virgin Missing Adventures than the tv show it's supposedly based on). His stories often have that fatal combination of being bad and dull, of being fundamentally misconceived in some unenjoyable way. So I was surprised how much I liked this run of tales, which brings in the Celestial Toymakers, the Sontarans, the Sea Devils, and the Quarks. What he's quite good at here is shifting into different genres; none of these feel like Doctor Who stories without the Doctor, but stories from other universes with Doctor Who monsters stuck in: a gambling parable, a tomb exploration story, a pirate story, a military thriller. This is exactly what I want out of the DWM back-up strip! He is helped, of course, by a stable of very strong artists who do a great job adapting themselves to each genre. I really enjoyed all of these.

Skywatch-7
Previously reviewed as part of Doctor Who Classics here.

Minatorius
Like The Stolen TARDIS from the previous volume, this is branded as being from "Tales of the Time Lords"; there never were any more. Based on this, we dodged a bullet. I don't think McKenzie really gets Time Lords; why does the one in this story have a wise-cracking robot drone? John Stokes draws some great alien vistas, though.

The Fabulous Idiot / A Ship Called Sudden Death
These two stories take some characters from the main strip's The Free-Fall Warriors and explore what they get up to when the Doctor's not around, part of that building of a coherent DWM universe that was going on during the Peter Davison strips. The first one is fun enough; I always enjoy a bit of Steve Parkhouse art, and there's some good jokes here about Doctor Ivan Asimoff. The second, about the Freefall Warriors, I found less interesting. There are too many of them in too little space. But you know, give me some Dave Gibbons anyday and I am a happy man.

City of Devils
I do love Sarah Jane Smith, and Vincent Danks does great on art here, but like most Gary Russell–penned comics, this one is pretty pointless. Sarah and K-9 basically stand around while we go through the usual Silurian story. The story doesn't climax so much as just stop.

Stray Observations:

• Does the existence of "The Original Writer" imply the existence of "The Unoriginal Writer"? And if so, who is it? Anyway, I get it if Alan Moore doesn't want his name on the cover or credits page, but I do find it amusing when the behind-the-scenes material has to contort around giving his name. Like, can he really object to people relaying the fact that he wrote something?


• A couple years after this, Moore would introduce the Warpsmiths to his Marvelman comics, and I could imagine the Special Executive fitting right in there. The backmatter reveals they would be reused in his Captain Britain run; whenever I get around to reading my Captain Britain Omnibus, I look forward to encountering them again. If I'd known ahead of time, maybe I would have incorporated those comics into this project, as I did Transformers, Death's Head, and The Sleeze Brothers!


• Supposedly the Dæmon in Voyage to the Edge is the same guy who shows up running a bar in that really bad Gary Russell story from the McCoy-era strip (see The Good Soldier). God knows why, though.


• I am pretty sure I have read that DWM's The Betrothal of Sontar (2006) was the first use of "Sontar" in the Doctor Who mythos (1993's Pureblood used "Sontara"), but actually it's used in The Gods Walk Among Us way back in 1982.


• For those of us who love the DWM universe, surely the female UNIT commander in The Fires Down Below ought to have been Muriel Frost. Or rather, surely the female UNIT commander in The Mark of Mandragora ought to have been Major Whitaker! The story is set in 1984 and says that Lethbridge-Stewart is in charge of UNIT, which I have to imagine causes some problems but I try to not think about UNIT dating very much these days.


• Back when I wrote up Skywatch-7, I expressed some confusion about the "Maxwell Stockbridge" pseudonym that Alan McKenzie used for his back-up strips, in that it seems like a clear reference to The Stars Fell on Stockbridge et al., but not only predates that story, but DWM itself! The backmatter here goes into that; McKenzie says it was his pseudonym of choice, based on the house pen names used on The Shadow and The Spider (Maxwell Grant and Grant Stockbridge, respectively), and that Steve Parkhouse told him the creation of a DWM character named Maxwell from Stockbridge is a total coincidence!


• The Freefall Warriors went on to appear in a Captain Britain back-up in 1985. I am guessing rights issues mean this has never and will never be collected. These issues go for an average of $13 apiece on Mycomicshop.com; I imagine at some point I will give in and buy them to complete my DWM journey!

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