Sunday, June 09, 2024

Sunday Splash Page #326

 
"Masks and Manes", in Manhunter #14, by Kim Yale and John Ostrander (writers), Doug Rice (penciler), Pablo Marcos (inker), Julianna Ferriter (colorist), Albert De Guzman (letterer)

The most well-known Manhunter is probably either Goodwin and Simonson's Paul Kirk, the super-soldier unfrozen by a secretive "Council" to lead an army of clones of himself (only to end up killing those clones), or Marc Andreyko's Kate Spencer, the district attorney who borrows a bunch of supervillain gear to become a lethal avenger of the night.

But the first Manhunter to get their own series, which ran for two years, is Mark Shaw. Shaw has some backstory about being part of a Manhunter (the proto-Green Lantern killer 'bots) cult, and as part of that, pretending to be both a JLA-fighting super-villain, and a merc hero type (under separate identities.) I can barely follow that even when Ostrander and Yale try to explain it.

The important part is Mark received a lot of training, but at the cost of his sense of self. Now he's trying to rediscover himself as a person, while using that training as a bounty hunter (and solver of other assorted problems.)

Ostrander and Yale try to thread the needle between more serious missions and threats, and sillier ones. So Shaw might get a line on Captain Cold because Cold's a Cubs' fan and bets on them - to win, the dumbass - religiously. Or he might keep Catman from escaping a museum heist by altering the cops to a particular car with a lot of unpaid tickets, and Catman's finds his getaway vehicle booted.

Those tend to be more interludes than long-running threads. There's a lot of stuff with Mark's family and his place in it. He's adopted, so he doesn't feel like he fits, and the family is loaded, full of CEOs and attorneys, so a career as a costumed skip tracer isn't the done thing. Lots of recriminations, guilt, harsh words on all sides there. Mark has to deal with two versions of a superhuman, shapeshifting, questionably sane assassin. The latter fight, which takes up most of the last quarter of the book's run, puts Mark's family in the line of fire and forces him to more fully confront his time in the Manhunter cult. It's not putting it behind him, so much as making peace with the bad and assimilating the good.

Also, it involves a benevolent telepathic alien Yeti, so there's that.

The book and character sort of spun out of Ostrander using him during the Millennium event tie-ins for Suicide Squad, so Shaw interacts with Waller a couple of times, gets some help from Oracle and Waller's niece (the one who died on Apokolips). He gets tangled up in The Janus Directive, which is a better tie-in than the Invasion! one, where Wally West's harridan of a mother hires Shaw to go to Cuba and rescue Wally (aka the Flash) from aliens, or Castro, or something. I think it's an attempt at a more lighthearted story, the whole thing a big stupid mess, but it's not funny, so it doesn't work. The one where he takes a job from an Australian salvage company to stake first claim on some alien war-mech that got left over, and finds Checkmate, the Rocket Reds and Lexcorp all after it too, works better.

Doug Rice draws most of the first year-and-a-half of the book, with Grant Miehm taking over for the final arc. Rice's art is looser than Miehm's, more malleable to comic exaggeration. Mark's mask is more expressive under his pencils, almost fluid at times. Rice uses shadows to break up panels or guide the eye more than Miehm, but Miehm's heavier line probably fits the grimmer, more brutal fight with Dumas at the end.

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