Dick GiordanoRecensioni
Autore di Superman: Man of Steel
Recensioni
Batman: Gordon of Gotham di Chuck Dixon
But then, along came Byrne, who promised to shake things up and give us the Superman we deserve.
Instead, he mostly told us things we already knew, just making the telling a touch prettier. Over the first 27-ish years these six issues span, we're treated to some average storytelling, some pretty art, and the rest is rather vacuous.
We're introduced to Ma and Pa Kent, Lana Lang (who really gets a short shrift in her very few pages), Lois Lane, Lex Luthor (Christ, what's with all the L alliteration in this series?), and Jimmy Olsen. We get a bit of Supe's real parents, and a whiff of Perry White, and a frankly dumb and insulting issue starring Bizarro. And he did something I didn't think Byrne was capable of...he made Batman boring.
Byrne's better than this. But he seemed reluctant to stray too far from what had already been done before. Superman is almost sickeningly moral.
I remember, 34 years ago, when my buddy Allan had purchased the first issue or two of this, and I was flipping through it. There's one scene where Clark is seen sitting in the dark in his bedroom back in Smallville. His parents come in, and he says something like, "They all just wanted a piece of me."
I remember how excited I was at that single panel. That, to me, spoke volumes. How do you humanize and de-power someone like Superman? By taking it all for granted. By wanting to stretch him so thin, by pulling him in different ways, by turning him into a brand instead of a man...that angle could have been interesting to read about. But, nope, Ma and Pa helped make him a suit, and he learned to put on glasses, and everything was great again.
Considering, at the same time, from the same publisher, a little title called Watchmen was being unleashed, this little experiment fell really flat for me.
Kiddo dove into this the moment I handed it to him - and he's just as eager as I to read the next volume :)
This book collects three four-issue miniseries that feature Commissioner Gordon and/or the Gotham City Police Department; it's a precursor of sorts to Gotham Central, though I am pretty sure that the only main character here who is also a main character there is the ubiquitous Renee Montoya. Each of the stories here has a slightly different focus.
"Gordon's Law" is pretty squarely focused on Commissioner Gordon himself, as he discovers that there's possibly some corruption in the GCPD, which means he can't trust anyone on the force-- and to make things worse, he only wants cops to go after cops, which means he rejects Batman's offer of assistance as well. The story is kinda complicated; there are a lot of characters, and most of them were new to me (if not new to everyone), and though I really like the gritty tone established by Klaus Janson's artwork, he didn't always make it easy to remember who was who. Its biggest weakness is probably that it's one of those stories where tons of "old friends" we've never seen before turn up, and the narrative expects us to be surprised when an "old friend" we've never seen before turns out to not be altogether trustworthy. And that's not the only obvious twist, but there were some good ones as well. Overall, it's an okay tale: some good crime fiction influences, but it doesn't really have anything to say about Gordon, about the GCPD, or about Batman.
"GCPD" is the most like Gotham Central of all the stories here; the commissioner is just a minor part of a sprawling, ensemble tale of various members of the GCPD pursuing various cases. Harvey Bullock struggles with anger management, a new partner, and a serial killer; Renee Montoya goes undercover as a diplomat's wife to help catch an assassin; two cops named Kitch (a trained lawyer) and Cav (a grizzled old vet) track down art thieves and an insurance scam; an administrator named Hendricks tries to figure out who's stealing stationery. As you might imagine, some of these stories are better than others: I always enjoy a Montoya tale, but Chuck Dixon doesn't really make her very unique, and the circumstance she ends up in seems incredibly contrived to say the least. (Do local cops really handle assassination plots against foreign officials? Would there really be no plan for cancelling the operation when it all goes wrong and the diplomat deliberately endangers Montoya's life?) On the other hand, I did enjoy the Harvey Bullock plot. This was my first real exposure to the character (he was retired during Gotham Central), and he gets to do some good old-fashioned investigating that shows off his intelligence as well as his human side, and I liked his contentious relationship with his new partner.
The Kitch/Cav plot had its moments, but some of its beats were very familiar. Is the lawyer-turned-cop who is mocked for his education by the cops and for his slumming it by the lawyers, and flirts with going back to law only to be reminded that lawyers are corrupt, a thing? I am pretty sure I read this exact story last year in Fort Freak. I liked Cav, though. The best character of all, however, was Hendricks: of course a desk officer grimly determined to catch an office supplies thief in the fact of mockery from his colleagues was my fave. The law begins and ends with him! I've previously struggled with Jim Aparo art on stories of the "gritty" type, but to my surprise, he paired really well with Bill Sienkiewicz on inks: Aparo does great figures and great storytelling, but Sienkiewicz's rough inks add the right tone for an urban cop story. Best art in the book.
"Gordon of Gotham" is even less about the GCPD than "Gordon's Law," as it's mostly a present-day Gordon telling Batman about his last year as a Chicago cop, leading into the events of Batman: Year One. As anyone who read my review of that story would know, I love Jim Gordon, and Dennis O'Neil really captures what it is that I like about him. Gordon is just a man trying to do the right thing in a world that will never reward him for it, because it is a world that needs Batman. Gordon argues with his wife (there's a callback to his struggle with domestic violence from Night Cries, another quality Jim Gordon tale), but ends up stopping a diner holdup almost by accident, then decides to go after corruption, but the world itself is corrupt, and he quickly gets in deeply over his head and ends up making choices that violate his moral core... or so he had thought. O'Neil piles on the twists and the action in a compelling way, and I really liked how this set us up for the Gordon of Year One, down to his decision to grow a mustache. The only real weakness is the frame; I wonder why they didn't just do this story in pure flashback.
Gotham Central: Next in sequence »
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Stevil2001 | 1 altra recensione | Sep 9, 2016 |
Stevil2001 | 1 altra recensione | Sep 9, 2016 | 
All this means we end up with some self-consciously epic tales, beginning with the death of a key character and working through a backwards trip to creation and a voyage through the realm of Death. Englehart's exuberant storytelling is matched by Brunner's visuals. Whilst they lack Ditko's oddness there's a trippiness there that the straight-edge could never bring. What's also noticeable is a willingness to take potshots at Christianity; the Sise Neg and Silver Dagger storylines criticise the notion of godhood and the dark places where organised religion may lead respectively. It's a brave move at any time in US history and it's mildly surprising that it made it to print, let alone that it didn't cause a large scale controversy. Another winner from the madness of '70s Marvel.
I'm mostly ambivalent about the art. It's okay, but not what I prefer in my comic book art. The faces seem to be very weirdly drawn.
Still, where I don't like Byrne's art, I do like most of his stories. The Batman/Superman one especially has interesting interactions between Batman and Superman. And the Bizzaro story was fun too, I always love a good Bizzaro story.
The first arc, originally published in Marvel Premiere Vol. 1, #9 & 10 (July & Sept. 1973), is begun in media res, as the previous issues were noodlings in the Robert E. Howard vein by writers Archie Goodwin and Gardner Fox (#4-8, Sept. 1972 - May 1973); the two Englehart-scripted, Frank Brunner-pencilled issues collected here see Strange confront the Lovecraft-inspired (or, at least, 1950s "B" sci-fi-movie-inspired...) entity Shuma Gorath, assist his mentor, the Ancient One, in a manner that he'd hoped to never do, and assume the mantle of Earth's Sorcerer Supreme.
The second arc, originally published in Marvel Premiere Vol. 1, #12 - 14 (July - Sept. 1973), finds Strange once again confronting his first nemesis (and rival for the position of the Ancient One's disciple), Baron Mordo, and also dealing with Marvel Comics' version of a real-world mystic (or charlatan, depending on your point of view...) Count Alessandro di Cagliostro, a.k.a. Giuseppe Balsamo (1743 - 1795), and a mystic from the 31st century named Sise-Neg; hold the latter's name up to a mirror and you'll get a fair inkling as to what he, and this story arc, are about. The Sise-Neg story arc is notable for being the first of Marvel's Bronze Age brand of apocalyptic stories, a trick that Englehart himself would later reprise in the pages of Doctor Strange (Vol. 2, #6 - 9; Dec. 1974 - Aug. 1975 [there was a 4-mo. hiatus btwn #6 & #7]) and that notorious writer and editor-in-chief Jim Shooter would claim for his own with the Enemy/Korvac/Michael saga in The Avengers and the two Secret Wars mini-series, and would reach its nadir with the Crossing storyline in Avengers and the cross-title Onslaught and Heroes Reborn storylines.
The third and final story arc collected here is the one featuring Silver Dagger -- the only Marvel supervillain to have been a papal candidate (top that, Doctor Doom!) -- and Dr. Strange's death. No, really.
X-Men and Iron Fist scribe Chris Claremont would revive Silver Dagger in the pages of Marvel Team-Up (Vol. 1, #76 & 77; Dec. 1978 & Jan. 1979), but, as with far too many sequels, to far lesser effect than his debut.
It's safe to say that Englehart doesn't get into the occult stuff nearly as deeply as Alan Moore does in his Promethea series or even Grant Morrison in The Invisibles; however, he was the first writer of Dr. Strange to attempt to lay out an internally consistent schema for white magic, and ground it to real-world magical theory, which was in and of itself revolutionary, to say nothing of revelatory. Englehart is arguably the only writer to treat Dr. Strange as an actual mystic rather than a superhero, other than Roger Stern, who would write the character for three issues in 1978 (though he would plot more) and, more famously, from 1981 to 1985. (I've not read most of Claremont's run on Doctor Strange, which came between Stern's tenures on the book.)
Frank Brunner's pencils are justly admired: save for Steve Ditko, who co-created the character with Stan Lee, no one has made Dr. Strange's milieu look as flashy, surreal, dark, sinister, and just plain out there as Brunner did. (While the pencil-and-ink team of Gene Colan and Tom Palmer are also highly regarded, to my mind they were more suitable on a straight-up horror title like Marvel's Tomb of Dracula than on a more mystical one like Doctor Strange.) His pencils are nicely complimented by the inkers: Ernie Chua (better known as Ernie Chan, who is better known for his work on Marvel's Incredible Hulk and Conan the Barbarian) on Marvel Premiere Vol. 1, #9; the various members of Neal Adams' Continuity Studios, who were credited as "The Crusty Bunkers" (MP #10, 12 & 13); and DC Comics' Dick Giordano (MP #14; Doctor Strange Vol. 2, #1 & 2, 4 & 5). The recoloring -- the cover (originally for DS Vol. 2, #1) by Angelo Tsang of Udon; the interior by V.L.M. -- is vibrant and vivid, and does much to differentiate the artwork from Marvel's superhero fare of the early 1970s. There are quarter-page reproductions of the original covers included here; comparing this collection's cover with the cover to DS Vol. 2, #1, one can see that Tsang perhaps ill-advisedly recolored the Orb of Agamotto from blood-red to gold -- there is a grinning death's head inside it, y'know -- but that's a cavil.
Unfortunately, while Englehart's run initially sold enough to give Strange his own title again (his first solo title ran for less than 20 issues in the late 1960s; the character even vowed to give up sorcery in the pages of The Incredible Hulk Vol. 1, #126 [Apr 1970], of all places), and even, briefly, a monthly publishing schedule, after a while the appeal palled enough (and the sales dropped enough) for Marvel to fire Englehart from the book and assign a series of lesser writers to gank it back towards superheroic conceptions of magic: slightly more mystical than the good doctor was portrayed in the pages of The Defenders, but not too much. When Roger Stern finally took up the reins of the book in earnest, he took pains to keep the good doctor grounded with Marvel's main-line superhero continuity (as Englehart did not; then again, Strange was starring in The Defenders, Marvel's "non-team" that included the likes of the Hulk, the Sub-Mariner, the Silver Surfer, and Valkyrie, at the time -- which Englehart also wrote), and even wrote finis to Marvel's take on Dracula after Tomb of Dracula was canceled.
If my digressions make this collection seem prohibitively back-story happy, rest assured, it's not: you really don't need to know any of the previous, contemporary or subsequent developments in Dr. Strange's life and career to appreciate the stories contained within, although if you're so inclined, such familiarity will only give you a deeper and richer appreciation of just how big of a "Marvel Milestone" these comics were.
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