First Wave Special – Review

By: Jason Starr (writer), Phil Winslade (artist), Lovern Kindzierski (colorist)

The Story: I think we can all safely conclude the Avenger’s got some major issues.

The Review: With the end of the First Wave miniseries, DC now has the awkward situation of having set up a fully-realized, separate world from their primary continuity, but with only two titles to support it (the underwhelming Doc Savage and the more pleasing The Spirit).  It’s not clear where they’ll take this strictly pulp/noir universe from here.

First Wave Special doesn’t really give a good indication of DC’s plans for this world.  The story doesn’t follow up the series in any way, nor does it tie into any of the related ongoings (except for featuring El Mano Negra and Shonder Zeev, New York mobsters briefly mentioned in The Spirit).  Mostly the issue acts as a character piece for the Avenger, AKA Richard Benson, who played a fairly big role in the First Wave miniseries, but whom you got to know the least.

And overall, he gets a fairly strong showing here.  His gunning for Zeev gives him ample opportunity to demonstrate his utter ruthlessness, which is pretty intense.  I’m not sure even Batman would beat the teeth out of a mobster with a brick, especially after saying he won’t.  Starr does a good job balancing the Avenger’s narration with exposition and his internal broodings, though it gets heavy-handed every now and then.

Besides the angst, the Avenger’s sense of justice is incredibly contradictory.  Savage is correct in his assessment that Benson has a code only he understands; the Avenger spends the issue going after Zeev and his thugs for crippling a client, but when it comes to the atrocities El Mano Negro commits against the innocents of the city, Benson doesn’t “give a damn about any of this.”  But considering his grim origins, it makes sense personal vendettas are the only ones he’s interested in taking up.

The Spirit #12 – Review

By: David Hine (writer), Moritat (artist), Gabriel Bautista (colorist)

The Story: You ever get a feeling from dolls that their eyes keep following you around the room?  Well, you should be worried—because actually they might kill you.

The Review: With any genre of art, you’ve got a few ways of going about it: stick to conventions for a traditional, if formulaic, work; stretch the boundaries and give a new spin to the genre’s spirit; or bring in elements from other genres for a mash-up category all its own.  An ongoing comic has the luxury of using all three routes as it sees fit for the story it wants to tell.

For the first leg of his run on The Spirit, Hine gave pretty standard fare as far as pulp stories go: mobsters and their dicey business, femme fatales, private eye cases.  But lately he’s grown more confident in offering more dramatically challenging material, and now he’s even bringing a bit of retro (even uber-retro, since puppeteers and their servant golems are old news for fiction) sci-fi stuff to the table.

By itself though, the robot mannequin concept would seem gimmicky and out of place in a title so obviously rooted in straight-up detective work.  But Hine smartly doesn’t give too much focus to the puppets themselves (although the Spirit doll is all kinds of creepy fun), but rather to their creator, mad-scientist assassin, the Professor.  What started out as a rival mafia premise is slowly becoming more of a character piece, the kind of thing Hine’s proven himself very good at.

The little layers Hine gives to the Professor this issue elevate the old man from creepazoid to a sympathetic figure.  Even though we know nothing of his history, the way Hine writes his behavior and reactions, especially to Ellen Dolan, says a lot about what a life starved of love he’s had—it certainly explains the robot-dame he has as his escort, and why her physical affections towards him in the end result in her beheading.

First Wave #6 – Review

By: Brian Azzarello (writer), Rags Morales (penciller), Rick Bryant & Phil Winslade (inker), Nei Ruffino (colorist)

The Story: If you happen to be fighting giant robots and dinosaurs on a floating city in the middle of a tsunami, you’ll get pretty down too.

The Review: Figuring out the ending to any kind of story is probably the toughest part of writing.  There’s an urge to neatly wrap it all up with a bow on top, but that’s not always possible.  Some endings take time to come together, making it rough for comic book miniseries.  Since there’s a definite cap to their space and deadline for their completion, they don’t have the luxury of letting the story meander along until it kind of finishes itself.

This last issue of First Wave definitely seems like a spare issue or two would have helped out a lot in pulling all its plot threads together in a tighter way.  Azzarello does his best with what he’s got, but the pace still feels rushed, almost furiously cobbled together.  Even to the very end, he introduces twists which never pan out—the serum that turns blood into gold, for example—which indicates he has a much grander vision in mind that what he ends up with.

Certainly a lot of the more emotional, pontificating scenes need more grounding to sell.  Anton Colossi’s childish breakdown would be more convincing had we seen more signs of his instability beyond a weird, but not totally off-putting devotion to his mother.  But his mad ravings are kind of an eye-roller: “I am sooooo [sic] done hearing can’t, when I can do any damned thing I want!”  You’re really left with the sense of him as an insignificant lunatic.

The Spirit #9 – Review

By: David Hine (writer), Moritat (artist), Gabriel Bautista (colorist), Paul Dini (co-feature writer), Mike Ploog (co-feature artist)

The Story: The feud between the Ottoman and Bauhaus families ratchets up when the Spirit discovers a connection between Ophelia Ottoman’s murders, her dead husband, and a long-lost treasure.  But since this is Central City, that connection isn’t as clear-cut as you might think.

The Review: When DC included the Spirit in its First Wave revival of pulp heroes, it seemed like a good fit, but also kind of sudden.  The Spirit had recently been re-introduced under Darwyn Cooke’s pen and enjoyed success on the first leg of his series, but lost steam after Cooke (and his powerhouse retro-penciling) departed.  The Spirit was on the brink of losing his place in Central City to the Flash, who was about to be resurrected in the pages of Final Crisis, before he got transferred from his DCU-prime ongoing to another in the First Wave universe.

The Spirit now lives in a world kept perpetually in a kind of post-Prohibition era, and he thrives here more than he did in a land where metahumans walk the land and the Internet reigns supreme.  His skills as a detective and punch-up vigilante get better display when he’s forced to get down and dirty to do his work.  While the Spirit lacks the Bat Man’s viciousness and Doc Savage’s intellect, he keeps enough tricks up his sleeve to face down any sticky situation.  His scheme to give a pair of lovers a chance at freedom while ensuring they pay for their crimes is both inspired and twisted.  The final scenes leave you smirking at the Spirit’s triumph, but anticipating the blow-up that’s sure to come somewhere down the line.

This is the kind of thing Hine does a particularly good job at: portraying the Spirit as Central City’s last, best hope, but pulling back to show the enormity of what the Spirit has to face.  Even as the A-story is running full-speed, there are signs laced throughout hinting at just how deep crime goes in this world.  Even though each story arc may last only a couple issues and is fairly self-contained, a sense of a much bigger, almost omniscient foe looms at certain beats of the issue.  Each case acts as a puzzle piece, but one that fits at unpredictable corners of the bigger picture.  It’ll be very exciting when the Spirit figures out exactly what he’s really up against.

First Wave #5 – Review

By: Brian Azzarello (writer), Rags Morales (penciller), Rick Bryant (inker), Nei Ruffino (colors)

The Story: The Blackhawks, Doc Savage, the Spirit, Rima the Jungle Girl, the Bat Man, and the Avenger are set on a collision course with the Golden Tree just as it pushes toward its ultimate goal.  Facing destructive powers beyond those of the last world war, our heroes must act fast to prevent another from taking place—if they can survive long enough, that is.

The Review: Even though history’s taught us that the fifties weren’t quite the sunny years people believed them to be, there’s still a lot of nostalgia for that period, and for good reason.  It was a decade of unprecedented confidence in what people—Americans, in particular—were capable of.  That’s the magic Brian Azzarello attempts to capture in First Wave.  By making a world scrubbed clean of all metahuman and alien elements, he raises the stakes for his characters by challenging them to show what they’re really made of.

Having a world entirely populated by mortals instantly pumps the tension bar.  There’s no Superman to fly in, bare his bulletproof chest, and save the day.  The heroes have to take risks to get things done, and when they’re in danger, the only tools at their disposal are their skills and guts.  Azzarello does a great job setting up tight situations for his characters to force or bluff their way through, keeping the action pumping all throughout the issue.  It’s classic stuff—speeding bullets, fisticuffs, and daredevil stunts.

What prevents the issue from going totally pulp is the inclusion of a bit of retro sci-fi and exotica, which is very fitting for the period Azzarello’s trying to channel.  The technology has all the grandiose flair people envisioned back then, but has enough attention to actual engineering principles to make it believable.  The Red Right Hand is portrayed with the dress and mannerisms of stereotypical natives, but they demonstrate their intelligence through their posture and interaction.  The end result is a Golden Age that feels credible; you could be fooled into thinking this is a world that can exist in a modern era.