Jack Miller (1)Recensioni

Crítica | Aquaman: Nascimento e Morte do Aquababy
https://www.planocritico.com/critica-aquaman-nascimento-e-morte-do-aquababy/

Showcase 32

First Thoughts:

The Showcase series originally was a try-out issue of a new DC character who, if successful, got his own mag. All in color for a dime! Early Aquaman fought monsters and had his sidekick Aqualad along in their undersea adventures.

Story and Plot:

Aquaman and Aqualad discover a diver in trouble. The diver is rescued and gives a tale about a wizard and deep-sea treasure. Through a series of situations and traps, Aquaman, helped by his ability to tell fish what to do – recovers the treasure. Two vials! One turns you into a monster, the other back to human again.

This is typical Silver Age, with Aquaman trying to fend off the diver/monster (talk about an ingrate!) and try to prevent the monster from stealing a cargo of gold bricks from a cargo ship that is in the ocean.

It looks like the end for Aquaman.

What’s interesting about the story is how Aquaman does not give up. He even commands seagulls which I didn’t know he could do. All the stories about Atlantis, his half-brother or other enemies are in future mags.

Nick Cardy art is fun to look at, the scripts were hilarious, and these comics at the time also gave educational articles. This one was about Captain Jacque Cousteau who invented the aqualung. Coolness!

Final Thoughts:

Worth a read. This is Aquaman’s fourth appearance in Showcase before he got his own book. He was never really considered a top character like Superman/Batman and was usually played second fiddle to them.

Check it out!

Someone should write a book about all the 4-member hero teams of the '60s, the template consisting of the brilliant team leader, his musclehead friend, the cheesecake girlfriend, and the girlfriend's kid brother. While Marvel's Fantastic Four is perhaps best known, it was hardly the first. Among the many others were Rip Hunter and the Sea Devils.
Rip was my favorite, providing an interesting time travel concept with adventures historical and futuristic, and a combination of the two. The nice thing here is the musclehead friend isn't quite as dumb as most, the girlfriend besides being cute also proves useful, and the kid brother although annoying at times is nowhere near as obnoxious as others.
I've seen occasional comparisons to Dr Who. I've never been able to get through many Who episodes, but what I've seen, Rip is must more active and involved than the Doctor, who tends to stand back and let others do the work.
If you're a fan of '60s comics then you may already be familiar with Rip Hunter. If you're not a fan you may be difficult to win over. But readers should give it a try. It's a really good series with likable characters, decent art, and good storytelling.

To be honest, this book is a bit rough. A large part is due to the nature of the stories: occuring in '60s anthologies books, there was no guarantee that the readers had read the previous instalment, so the early stories each begin with a multi-page, and to the reader encountering them in this volume, tedious recap of the character's origin.

The best comes towards the end, where Neal Adams really lets free on the artwork. On the other hand, the worst is the second story: not only is there the tedious recap, the art has also been re-inked and re-coloured. By Adams himself, admittedly, but the use of modern digital colour techniques feels out of place in this volume.

This volume collects every Green Arrow comic printed between 1958 and 1969 (including those already reprinted in 2001's The Green Arrow by Jack Kirby) in black and white. Though a nice idea, such an undertaking quickly reveals that these old Silver Age comics were never designed to be reprinted, as they quickly grow stale and repetitive: there are some fifty-nine comics of 6-7 pages here, all of them ending with Green Arrow and Speedy being resoundingly smug. The writing is by a variety of folks, but Lee Elias provides the majority of the art, which is good, aside from the fact that I want to punch his "cherubic" Speedy in the face.

There's a weird number of stories about Native American tribes who still practice "the old ways"; I'm assuming this is because obviously all Indians practice archery, so our hero fits right in. What makes this even weirder is that in "The World's Worst Archer!" we learn that Speedy used to live with an old-ways Indian tribe... a fact never mentioned before or since, though it would have been relevant on any number of occasions. Later stories are a little bit more sensitive towards this, though "The Wrath of the Thunderbird" has a character unquestioningly assert that the reservation system has done nothing but good for Native Americans. Also weird is this volume's depiction of women in the person of the lovely Miss Arrowette, whose arrows are of course all feminine (the hairpin arrow, the powder-puff arrow, the lotion arrow, and so on), but can't cut it because crime-fighting's too dangerous for a woman. Right, Oliver-- I see that it's not too dangerous for your thirteen-year-old ward. She returns a couple times, though, and eventually gets a story where she's able to hold her own and help GA in solving a case, rather than hinder him.

The best stories are the ones that actually have some room to breathe, and thus include a plot-twist or two. Toward the end of his run, Green Arrow began receiving ten-page stories, the strongest of which was the nicely surreal "The Land of No Return". Even better, however, were his appearances in The Brave and the Bold alongside the Martian Manhunter and Batman. My favorite story was "The Senator's Been Shot!", which sees both Oliver Queen and Bruce Wayne contemplating giving up their secret identities-- Oliver so he can use his financial wealth to do good, and Bruce so he can go into politics. They don't, of course, but it's nice to see the characters wrestling with any kind of moral quandary, and Neal Adams's fantastic art and layouts make what could have been a still-somewhat-conventional story fairly edgy in tone. Coming at the end of the book and the end of the Silver Age, the changes this story brought were a long time in coming.

Green Arrow and Black Canary: « Previous in sequence | Next in sequence »

Fun to read these short comics, but they don't go into the depth of J'onn as recent graphic novels ("The Others Among Us"). That's not surprising, considering most of these are 8-page stories. I'm still glad to read the original Martian Manhunter stories as he's become one of my favorite heroes in recent times.½

Green Arrow has always been an interesting super hero filled with angst and a bleeding heart making him Batman with out the grudge. These early reprints, while very different from the modern grim "realism" of today's incarnations, are fun and great background for understanding the evolution of the character.