Random Back Issues #48 - Joe Kubert Presents #5

Like the Fallout series says, 'war never changes.' Or more broadly, shit runs downhill.

Joe Kubert Presents was DC giving Joe Kubert 6 issues to do basically whatever he felt like doing. Which certainly produces better results than when they give similar carte blanche to Dan Didio, Geoff Johns, or Tom King.

Of the five stories in this issue, Kubert handles art chores on three, and writes two of those. The one he doesn't, "Farewell" is about a historian and his son visiting the Normandy beaches the historian's father fought on, and reflecting on war. There's a text piece in the middle of the book where Kubert explains this is a trip Levitz and his son actually made at one point. I don't know if Levitz' father was in Easy Co., as the grandfather in this story was. It kind of leaves open whether Rock died there, although Kubert mentions he and Len Wein had Rock die saving a kid from the last bullet fired in the European Theater in Legacies.

 

"The Biker", done entirely by Kubert, is about a veteran who lost his leg in Afghanistan to a very determined woman with a bomb, and now roams the U.S. on his motorcycle. (The text piece notes the main character is partially based on Kubert's oldest son Dave, who lost his left leg in a motorcycle accident.) He decides to camp in an abandoned house for the night, but it's not a good place to stay. Especially when he finds a photo of the family that lived there, and the mom is a dead ringer for the lady that nearly killed him in Afghanistan. So there's a bit of Edgar Allen Poe in it, but I'm not sure the story has enough room to breathe to pull it off. The unease can't settle in quickly enough.

The last story is by Brian Buniak, and involves Lois Lane interviewing the Angel and the Ape team on how they started a detective agency. This part is just Angel telling her story up until them, which involves excelling in all forms of combat and academia, but being given the boot from the detective agency she joined because she didn't fit in their 'exotic/cool dynamic'. Even after she catches notorious international criminal Jean-Francois Henri, thanks to his limo driver waiting at the airport with a sign with his name on it. Lois doesn't seem pleased with how long-winded Angel's being, and Sam takes over in the next issue. 

 

Look Lois, just because Angel's story doesn't involve her being turned into a baby or an ostrich during some dumbass attempt to prove Clark Kent is Superman, doesn't make it a bad story.

In addition to all that, Sam Glanzman does a brief retelling of the first four years of the war in the Pacific, and Kubert continues his story about a runty little kid on a 19th Century whaling vessel in "Spit". That one's interesting because it's done on some sort of entirely grey paper, with just extremely dark, thick lines. I almost think he might be working with charcoal, but I can't swear to that. It definitely conveys what a dreary, awful existence life on a whaler would be, especially for the kid at the bottom of the totem pole.

[6th longbox, 160th comic. Joe Kubert Presents #5, by Paul Levitz (writer), Joe Kubert (artist/colorist/letterer) in "Farewell"; Sam Glanzman (everything) in "Back and Forth 1941-1944"; Joe Kubert (everything) in "The Biker"; Joe Kubert (everything) in "Spit"; Brian Buniak (everything) in "When Hairy met Angel"]