Ryan Sook

Disclaimer: This book triggers so much nostalgia in me that my positive rating cannot be trusted.

In a story that evokes the classic Superman vs. Muhammad Ali and the many Superman vs. Flash races, Black Canary enters the ring against long-time rival Lady Shiva for a definitive answer to who is the greatest hand-to-hand combatant in the DC Universe.

Along the way, we are given one of the most in-depth looks at the relationship between Dinah Lance and her mother, the original Black Canary. This show more is a most welcome tale for those of us who feared Watchmen was as close as we'd get to such an offering.

Throw in some well-done cameos from Green Arrow and Batman, and this is my favorite Black Canary story ever.

Ryan Sook's beautiful art is the frosting on the cake.

There are flaws throughout the story, sure, but I cannot see them through my misty eyes.

FOR REFERENCE:

Contains material originally published in single magazine form as Black Canary: Best of the Best #1-6.

Contents: Rounds One-Six / Tom King, writer; Ryan Sook, illustrator -- [Cover Gallery] / Ryan Sook, David Nakayama, Leirix, Saowee , Rachta Lin, Joelle Jones with Jordie Bellaire, Belén Ortega, Chrissie Zullo, Dan Hipp, Otto Schmidt, Chuma Hill, Kendrick "Kunkka" Lim, Chris Ng, and Dustin Nguyen, illustrators show less

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

This books reunites Blue Beetle and Booster Gold... in the hands of Booster Gold's original creator, Dan Jurgens! I was a bit trepidatious about this going in because it seemed to me that Jurgens treated Booster more seriously during his JLA run than Giffen and DeMatteis did in their run that created the duo. Could he recreate their dynamic when he hadn't been particularly interested in the original version of it to begin show more with?

Well, I need not have worried. He very much leans into the goofier version of the characters—but in a good way. Here, they have decided to form a superhero team accessible to "regular" people, unlike the Justice League up in space (very much like in a previous JLI reunion book). But with Ted no longer in command of the Kord Industries money (he loses it here; I didn't know he had ever got it back, though, because last time I heard he had lost them... though admittedly that was the late 1980s!), they need to find crowdfunding!

It's a fun way to reinvent the fame- and money-obsessed Booster Gold for the twenty-first century. The book is peppered with comments from people watching the livestream of the duo, and I enjoyed this a lot; there's a lot of good interaction and cute hijinks. Some hope they do well, some think it's all faked, some are women stanning for one character or the other, some hope they die... and one is Guy Gardner just there to say mean things about them! But the book is not as cynical as some takes on Booster and Beetle have been, even ones penned by Giffen and DeMatteis. The two bicker, but they fundamentally get along; they seek fame, but it doesn't make them craven or obsessed with money. At their root, they're people trying to do good, and the book leans into that.

Maybe a little too much; I didn't want the book to put them through the wringer per se but it seemed to me it didn't quite challenge them to the extent it might have. But that's clearly not what Jurgens is up to here. The book is obviously meant to just be a light and charming return of some classic characters, and it succeeds perfectly at that.

Overall, I enjoyed the art by Ryan Sook and various others. Sook has a light, expressive style that communicates character very well, which is perfectly suited to Jurgens's writing. But why did Ted suddenly acquire black hair? This is redhead erasure! (Also on the collected edition, Kevin Maguire gets cover credit for drawing one-third of one issue. Nice work if you can get it, I guess.)

The first five issues weave in and out of one big story, about Ted and Michael fighting an alien warlord who has an ancient claim on the Earth. There's lots of room for side stuff, though, like a fun issue where Ted and Michael retell the story of how they first worked together, and they have very different memories of it. And it turns out that Guy Gardner of all people knows how things actually went down! (This is the story Maguire helps draw; he does the Beetle-narrated flashbacks while Jurgens himself does the Booster ones. Perfection. They've both still got it of course.)

After this, we get a shorter story about them going up against "Black Beetle." One thing that annoyed me was that throughout the series, there would be explanatory footnotes pointing you to issues you'd literally just read (e.g., "see Blue and Gold #2!" when reading issue #3) but when Black Beetle turns up, the characters talk about encountering him before... but I'd never encountered this guy before. I looked him up later, and he previously appeared in Booster's late 2000s ongoing... a comic from fifteen years prior. Why didn't that get a footnote? show less

After wounding Darkseid with a bullet fired through time Bruce Wayne is struck down by a bolt of omega energy and thrown into the deep past where he must fight his way though amnesia and follow clues he left for himself, jumping from era to era, chased by something big and nasty with teeth and tentacle, first as a cave-man, then as a witchfinder, then as a pirate, then as a cowboy and so on until he gets to a station hanging over the heat death of the universe, while his superhero friends show more search for him to stop him because he's so soaked in omega energy when he returns to his his own time he'll destroy the whole world AND I MEAN COME ON.

Return Of Bruve Wayne is the culmination of a few years' worth of build-up and it's got the usual Morrisonian high mind-mending-concept-to-page rate and also Bruce Wayne as a cave-man, a prate, a cowboy, etcetera. Really, it's got everything, and it still feels fresh and mad and fun. show less

I have read and enjoyed many comics written by Grant Morrison, and then I have read others that struck me as a kind of low-grade metaphysical action writing: a spew of cultural information thrown at the rough grid that is the basic foundation of comics, with the expectation that readers would make sense of it, and credit him with the ability to construct disparate connections between far-flung subjects.

This book fits fully into the latter group. For all the strengths of such Morrison books show more as We3, his Animal Man writing, his run on the X-Men, his excellent Superman -- well, this collection of stories about Bruce Wayne's return from the depths of time is perhaps the strongest evidence of what could be called the "deceitful claptrap" thread running through other of his work.

On the surface, the idea is strong: Batman is the least super-powered, the least supernatural, of superheroes in the DC pantheon. To have him barrel through time, from prehistoric mythology through sea-faring pirates and Salem-era witchcraft, is to have a study in contrasts. Morrison knows what he's doing. He knows that Batman is a myth of a man, and that no myth as strong as his could grow to the fore without slowly tossing seeds back in the timeline -- all myths build on pre-existing myths, and the stronger the new myth the more likely the older ones are to come to appear less as precedent and more as prefiguring.

But the thesis is where the book stops being enjoyable. Beyond that, it is a series of pastiche renderings of various period cliches, each garbled just enough to appear mysterious, but in truth the mystery is really just sloppiness benefiting from a very strong brain and some accomplished illustrating partners.

I always thought Morrison's best work was his work-for-hire, when he had to limit his fathomless penchant for mythmaking to the contours of a pre-existing character. It was true of his X-Men, and of his Superman, and quite recently of his Batman, but this time around his worst inclinations got the better of him. show less