Sunday Splash Page #383

"Say the Magic Word," in New Champion of Shazam #3, by Josie Campbell (writer), Evan Shaner (artist/colorist), Becca Carey (letterer)

Due to circumstances I'm unaware of, Billy Batson sealed himself up inside the Rock of Eternity about 3 years ago, our time, taking all that Shazam magic with him. But then he had a vision and sent the power (and a magic talking bunny) to Mary, so she could be a champion. Unfortunately, Billy's timing sucks, because Mary was just about to start college somewhere she could be herself, rather than part of a group, and now that's over.

(It strikes me as weird that Hoppy tells Mary she's got to adjust to being stronger, because she's not sharing the power with 5 other people - her siblings - but somehow Billy only had enough power to send to one of them.)

So Mary ends up back at home, looking after her siblings (because their adoptive parents are missing.) Instead of going to Vassar, she going to Fawcett Community College, 'the most soot-covered campus in the country.' She's fighting giant crocodiles and weird shadow guys with phones in their chests, and dealing with Internet jackholes griping about not wanting a girl superhero in their town.

Campbell's take on Mary is that she's the planner, the one who tries to prepare and cover all the angles. It makes her the responsible one of her siblings, but also means she gets thrown off her game by unexpected stuff, and that it's easy for things to get inside her head. When Hoppy appears inside her bag with a message from Billy, she tries to tell him no thanks, she just wants to be a normal college student, forgetting she's having an argument with a rabbit in a crowded lecture hall. When she can't stop a giant, magic crocodile and flees from reporters, all the comments and jokes on social get to her. Even more so when one of the mystery bad guys can turn those words into a sort of magic weapon against her.

Shaner gives Mary a wide range of expressions and body language, and can make her arguing with a rabbit look almost normal. Most of the bad guys are just human-shaped shadows with a glowing rectangle in their chest, but it actually works very well as a contrast to Mary. For all their talk about how much better they are, they hide themselves, while Mary's out there in broad daylight, bright colors, face uncovered for the whole world to see. The criticism she gets hurts, but she takes it, while these goobers she's fighting would no doubt insist it doesn't matter, but they hide from it.

By the end of the mini-series, Mary's family is back together (minus Billy), so I guess she's not going back to Vassar. Then she gets a vision of some warning from Billy, as something was going to happen related to that Lazarus Planet event. Which, again, I didn't read, so I don't know what the result of that was.

Forces Weak and Strong at Work

Good try, very comforting.

Volume 1 of The Terrifics, titled Meet the Terrifics, is initially a get the team together arc. Lemire manages that by having Mr. Terrific's company bought up by Simon Stagg while Terrific was off doing something involving other dimensions. Stagg's presence means Metamorpho's there, as well as that Stagg will be messing with some science he doesn't understand. Namely, a door to the "Dark Multiverse".

Plastic Man was involved in the multi-dimension stuff, so Terrific brings him along. Except Plas has been in some sort of comatose state for 5 years, until the otherwordly energies wake him up. Lemire's going for a more volatile version of the Fantastic Four, and having Terrific (and Batman, apparently) basically keep Plas around for all that time, making no attempt to find something else that might awaken him, or locate anyone who might care about Plastic Man, is certainly Reed Richards at his worst.

A signal picked up through the doorway takes those 3 into the Dark Multiverse, where they find Phantom Girl (or a Phantom Girl, at least) stranded on a giant corpse, along with the machine sending the signal. She's able to bum a ride back to the right dimension, but understandably wants to go home. As does Plas, and Terrific just wants to study these readings and figure out who "Tom Strong" is. Metamorpho's arguing with his girlfriend Sapphire about what a crumb her dad is.

So Lemire concocts the idea that dark multiverse energy has bonded them, so they can't be more than a mile apart. Then he throws together a few other threats to basically force them to actually do stuff, since otherwise each of the four seem content to sulk otherwise. The end of the trade reveals a mysterious figure in a metal mask, who promises he'll find and kill Tom Strong first, nyah nyah. It feels like the pacing got wonky, because the end of issue 6 starts having multiple full-page splashes, one after the other. The last 11 pages have 23 panels total, so I don't know if Lemire intended more struggle for the cast before they triumphed, or Dr. Dread's monologue was supposed to last longer, but something definitely feels off.

The book has 3 pencilers in 6 issues. Ivan Reis is gone by the end of issue 2, replaced by Joe Bennett for the fight with the War Wheel in issue 3. Then Evan Shaner handles issues 4 and 5 before Bennett returns for issue 6, which is the second part of a story about an entire town being slowly turned into Metamorphos.

Bennett's art can at least lean in the same general direction of Reis', though Bennett's characters are bulkier and drawn with a much busier line. A lot of hatching and trying for extra texture, especially on Plastic Man and Metamorpho. Reis' Plastic Man is very smooth and almost artificially clean, while Bennett tends to draw him with sharper angles and joints, almost like his version is trying to mimic having knuckles or actual goggles on his face, rather than the goggles being part of him, which I assume is what's going on.

Shaner's work doesn't look a bit like either of the others, keeping his characters much cleaner and simpler in design and look. None of the artists seem to do a lot with Metamorpho's ability to change shape, but I guess with Plastic Man (who basically never holds one form or set of proportions for more than a panel) it feels redundant. Nathan Fairbairn colors Shaner's issues with brighter, more sharply defined tones than Marcelo Maiolo does for Reis and Bennett. Maiolo may be going for something closer to realistic coloring and shading. They both seem to work for the artist they're paired with.

Lemire writes Metamorpho as gruff and sarcastic, bickering constantly with Plastic Man, who is basically never serious. Mr. Terrific just seems exhausted by everyone else's presence, and whenever he's not barking orders, it feels like he's talking out loud to himself more than any of the others. Phantom Girl is alternately petulant and impatient, frustrated that when she tries to turn solid, she disintegrates whatever she touches. She's the youngest, so you see the guys each trying to help in their own way. Plas tries to keep her spirits up, Terrific gets a journal she can use without destroying it so she can interact with something.

It does feel like a book that's struggling to hold itself together, and not just because of the shifting art teams. Dread has to reveal himself to goad Terrific into pursuing him, by presenting Tom Strong as an answer to Terrific's questions. Lemire's version of Holt seems mostly interested in Tom Strong because he doesn't know who he is or how he encountered the giant creature floating in the void. He just wants to pull apart a mystery, but there isn't a sense of why the others would care, except they seem to figure Terrific is the best chance to break this bond between them. So they could just refuse to go until he fixes it. He can't go more than a mile without them, and he doesn't seem to really want them around anyway, so why not focus on that first? Prioritize!

Saturday Splash Page #92

 

"Elemental Imbalance," in The Terrifics #5, by Doc Shaner and Jeff Lemire (storytellers), Nathan Fairbairn (colorist), Tom Napolitano (letterer)

Starting in 2018, and I guess spinning out of one of those Metal or Dark Multiverse event things I did my damnedest to avoid, this is sort of a "Fantastic Four in the DCU" book, though Lemire has to work a little to bring together his chosen cast.

Mr. Terrific's company was bought up by Simon Stagg while Terrific was off in the Dark Multiverse or something. Holt shows up to meet with Stagg about it, finds him using Metamorpho as some sort of probe to explore said Dark Multiverse. I'm going to try and make that the last time I use that phrase in this post. It's mostly another way for Lemire to throw the cast into different worlds.

Stagg fucks it up, Holt busts out a comatose Plastic Man, who wakes up from a reaction to the energies being thrown around, and keeps Mr. T and Metamorpho from dying as they get sucked in. They find the corpse of some giant, and run into Phantom Girl from the Legion of Superheroes. Or a young girl from the same planet, a thousand years in the past, I guess. When they make it back to Earth, they find the energy won't let them get more than a mile apart. So they might as well deal with other problems while they're stuck together.

The problems don't waste any time showing up. They're attacked by a War Wheel, then a town in Michigan suffers an outbreak of Metamorphoing. That giant corpse they found had a beacon left by Tom Strong, so Mr. Terrific's determined to track him down. In the middle of that, he's targeted by a Dr. Dread. My first thought was it was the Dr. Doom knock-off from the Extremists that fought the Justice League in the '90s, but no, it's someone else entirely. I tend to have issues with Lemire's, let's call it leisurely, pacing in some of his other things I've read, but he keeps the ball rolling here.

The cast stick together in large part for lack of better options, even after the artificial constraint is gone. Phantom Girl finds she's been away from home much longer than she thought, and finds it more stifling than she recalled after a few adventures. Plastic Man had been in a coma for 5 years (5 years?!), so reconnecting with his kid doesn't go great. Metamorpho gets turned back into Rex Mason, but just like Ben Grimm, can't quite believe he's good enough for Sapphire Stagg that way.

Mr. Terrific's the most resistant, as Lemire writes him as extremely isolated. All this, the mystery, the energy holding them together, it's just getting in the way of his research. Tom Strong, who has a full life of action science, but also a family of adventurers, a talking gorilla pal, a robot butler, all that jazz, acts as a sharp contrast with Michael Holt, who had his own company and a skyscraper research lab, occupied solely by him.

The biggest issue the book has over Lemire's 14 issues as writer is the lack of a consistent artist. Ivan Reis is the first go, but Jose Luis is already drawing 5 pages by issue 2. Joe Bennett draws issue 3 and 6, with Shaner handling the two in-between. Then Dale Eaglesham for two issues of trying to find Tom Strong, but Jose Luis draws another issue before that arc's done. Then three issues by Viktor Bogdanovic, before the last two issues by Bennett.

You can sort of handwave the shifts in art style with the jumping between universes, although it's rarely a 1:1. Shaner draws the first issue of the Metamorpho story, but Bennett finishes it, for example. It doesn't kill the book. Jose Luis is adaptable enough he can draw close to either Reis or Eaglesham's to minimize the obviousness of the shift. Bogdanovic's rougher, more sharply squared off figures are the most out of place compared to the others. But it doesn't help it, either. Again, I could try arguing the shifts represent the quartet struggling to come together as a team, when they're even trying, but that would require the art team to stabilize when they finally choose to stick together.