I think this might be the one of only two titles in my entire comic collection written by Gerard Jones, and it comes up two weeks after the other one. Well, same warnings apply as mentioned in Sunday Splash Page #176 regarding Jones.
Set during Ralph's time on Justice League Europe, the story involves some mysterious party trying to disrupt a big European Unity conference, through the magic of nation-specific super-villains. Like the sausage-wielding German guys up above. Ralph loves a mystery, leaving Sue increasingly annoyed as he ignores her to, from her perspective, chase phantoms. Which grants an opening for the ruler of Modora, who seems to have a lot of the same weapons as the villain Sonar, to try and woo her.
I've heard Ralph and Sue compared to William Powell and Myrna Loy from the Thin Man movies, and I can sort of see it. Although I think Sue is Powell, where she doesn't really want any part of this crime-solving stuff but keeps finding herself in the middle of it. Ralph, who is ready to jump into action at the hint of anything suspicious, seems more like Loy. Either way, the whole thing is kind of charming and sweet.
Parobeck's art here is far closer to what I think most fans think of. Much more streamlined, fewer and stronger lines than in El Diablo. Some of that might be Templeton as inker. Not having seen Parobeck's pencils on their own, I don't know for sure. Very expressive, and with Taylor's colors, not too grim or serious. It fits with the overall tone of the story, which is ultimately just some second-rate Doctor Doom trying to protect his little kingdom from the dangers of working together for greater economic strength. For its own good, of course.
2 comments:
Yeah, I still have a ton of stuff by Jones in my collection - the 90s GREEN LANTERN run, as well as his stuff from JLE and later JLA. There's no denying he was a big part of the success of Lantern's relaunch (and that he also ran JLA into the ground by the mid-90s) but I can't help feeling the work's tainted by his later crimes.
I only have the few issues of JSA and the JLE stuff with Parobeck's pencils and remember at the time thinking the art was just a little too cartoon like, for me. Having re-read the JSA stuff a couple of years ago, I found myself liking the nice clean, uncluttered style a lot more. Shows what I knew in the 90s, eh?
I'm pretty sure I'm in the same boat. I don't know if I was ever a huge fan of Liefeld's art, but I definitely liked MacFarlane's stuff on Spider-Man, with all the crazy spaghetti string webbing.
Since he mostly worked for DC, I'm not sure I really encountered Parobeck's art until after his passing, outside of one issue of The Fly from that Impact! Comics line. Which probably helped me appreciate it more when I found it.
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