Braving the gauntlet of Big Two events, prestige format risk-takers, off-the-radar indie releases, and a non-stop avalanche of floppies is DoomRocket’s HOT PRESS. This week: Alan Moore & Gene Ha’s Top Ten, quick James Gunn/DC thoughts, and the Bloodlines debut of noted cool-guy Argus.
by Jarrod Jones. Hey, team! Crazy busy this week, so this will be a quick one. Or quicker, as far as HOT PRESS goes.
Oh, before we get started: I’ve begun my search for new writers for DoomRocket! If you have strong critical chops and a flair for pithy pop culture commentary, send an introduction with some writing samples to my email: ja****@********et.com.
Anyway, let’s talk about stuff.
Top Ten is a comic that has overwhelmed me in the past. It’s dense while also being relatively simple in concept, a work by a team of creators who know their business and are here to flex. One of those creators also happens to be Alan Moore, and it’s among some of his final comic book work, so there’s also a nice thick layer of metatext in this, to boot. Happy to report that I finally sat down with this beast and read it cover to cover. It’s great; check it out if you ain’t yet.
Some thoughts on Top Ten follow. Naturally, thar be spoilers.
Top Ten, set in the deco-fabulous, future-shocked city of Neopolis, follows the comings and goings of the 10th Precinct as its police manage the bustling burg’s endless parade of super-science-robo-peoples and their various foibles. It’s an ensemble; a recruit called Toybox (she uses a small armada of robot toys to enforce the law) is employed as a focal point for the first issue to help us navigate the 10th Precinct and its police. But other characters—like the stoic, diamond-hard Harry Callahan-type Smax, the talking dog in an advanced exoskeleton Sargeant Ceasar, and my favorite, the agonizingly single but take-no-shit Jack Phantom—are so richly defined that they could easily host their own comic series. The book lingers on these characters in short bursts, but Moore and co-creator Gene Ha conjure tantalizing personal details in their dialogue and body language that you begin to build entire structures of their lives between the panels. The character work is magic in this book, it really is. Not to mention efficient.
The way the comic jumps from one set of characters and their whole thing to the next is where I initially got stuck on Top Ten—this sucker moves. There’s a rhythm to the book that requires rapt attention; if you miss a single beat, you’ll likely get lost in the reprise. Even with the first batch of issues firmly held in my mind (I’ve tried reading this twice before), I would come across story beats that’d catch me by surprise, to the point where I’d have to re-read entire issues to grasp what was happening. Maybe that’s because I’m dumb, or maybe Top Ten is a dense book. (“It can be both!” he cried defensively.)
I know I’ll reread this someday, and when I do, I’ll probably fall right into the glory of Gene’s panel work (he did pencil and inks over Zander “Kaijumax” Cannon’s layouts). I’ll submit to the actual hundreds of comic and pop culture references tucked into the multiversal periphery of the book. I caught a lot of them this time around—like, for instance, the “Beetles” band that’s just off-model versions of Blue Beetle, the Spider-Man villain Beetle, a Yellow Submarine Ringo Starr, and Beetle Bailey—but I know I’ll discover even more now that I’m on better footing with this series. Top Ten seems designed for additional rereads, and the unique brand of poignancy Moore, Ha & Cannon have tucked into its infrastructure will make those rereads that much more rewarding.
As for the late-career Moore stuff: Top Ten is a cop book, sure, but it’s also a superhero book—”science-heroes” in the parlance of the series—and, if you know anything about Alan Moore and where he’s at with superheroes (or even comics) these days, there’s quite a bit to glean from this. Especially in the last issue, where the deeds of a pantheon of heroes multiversally known as the Seven Sentinels (the Justice League, they’re the Justice League) are exposed as an elaborate hoax to cover up the fact that they are, in actuality, a heinous pedophile ring. How the Batman analog faces justice is crazy, and the craven way the Superman analog meets his end is shocking, considering Moore’s history with the character.
But here’s where the metatext gets bonkers: DC bought the Wildstorm imprint in 2000 and inherited most of Alan Moore’s Image Comics work in the bargain, a full decade after the writer swore never to work for DC again. This might explain the chaotically subversive take on the Justice League Moore worked into the finale, and that DC would publish the last issue of Top Ten without intervening editorially on all the unsubtle shade Moore stuffed in this says one hell of a lot more about DC than it does Moore. And guess what: DC’s gonna publish it again, in omnibus form! Amazing.
The final issue of Top Ten is the least of the bunch—it’s still good, even great—because it’s doing too much at once, right at the end. It plants seeds for the various spin-offs that followed (like the Smax miniseries and the standalone ogn The Forty-Niners), wrapping up twelve issues of intricate story and cramming in a boisterous “fuck you” to DC in the bargain. It’s the extra-concentrated version of Top Ten—complex, funny, achingly human, gross, and awesome in scope—yet it leaves me wanting to read so much more of this. It’s sad to me that we’ll never get the chance to read more of this with Ha, Cannon, and Moore together at the wheel. I suppose that makes Top Ten precious.
– I’m at least two weeks late talking about this, but I think that the big James Gunn/DC news is pretty cool. (I wrote about it some for another outlet, so it’s not like I’ve been ignoring the news.) If nothing else, it will be interesting to see how folks outside the realm of cape comics receive these adaptations of more esoteric superhero fare over yet another slate of the tried and tired. More Superman and Batman movies are coming, of course, there would be, but Gunn’s particular vision excites me—those Guardians of the Galaxy movies are the best Marvel has made, I’m telling you—and I’m pumped by the prospects of “a James Gunn-scripted Superman movie.” I’m not thrilled about Warner Bros. attempting another shared DC universe to compete directly with Marvel Studios; the first Zack Snyder-led attempt didn’t work for many reasons, one of them being the sheer insistence of its existence. (Remember WB’s original DCU film slate?) Hope springs eternal, and it has to; what we have right now from DC and WB is downright grim. Speaking of which…
– I have to get this off my chest: that new Flash trailer looks like serious junk. I know Gunn is saying it’s the best superhero movie he’s ever seen (real Company Man rhetoric, right there), but eh? This? Flashpoint in movie form and about five years after The CW did it? (Also: Flashpoint?) I know a lot of folks my age are squeaking with glee over the return of Michael Keaton as Batman, so I’m certainly not speaking on behalf of my generation when I say this, but: stuffing a 70-year-old man into a rubber Bat suit to massage our nostalgia for two cool movies from (gasp) over thirty years ago is the saddest thing to me. I don’t feel that same charge as others when Keaton says things like “I’m Batman” or “multiverse”; I just feel my age. Those action shots with a computer-generated Batman ’89 don’t get me hyped, either. I could be wrong, and The Flash could be my new trash, we’ll see. But as it stands, phew! Open a window.
Note: For part one of this series, click this. Part two? Click this. If you want to read our third burst of Bloodletting, right here.
THE ISSUE: Flash Annual #6, “Undercover Angel” (“Outbreak, Part Four.”)
THE TEAM: Mark Waid (writer), Phil Hester (pencils), Aaron McClellan (inks), Adrienne Roy (colors), Ken Bruzenak (letters). Edited by Brian Augustyn. Published by DC.
THE GIST: Keystone City has a new masked hero: Argus, an undercover fed whose infiltration of the mob has resulted in a boost of superpowers courtesy of a bite from a Bloodlines beasty. Linda Park, investigative reporter and paramour of The Flash, dabbles in a bit of flirtation with our edgy new vigilante as he learns the ropes. And while Wally West isn’t all the way stoked about the new guy in his town, that’s fodder for a later story.
NEW BLOOD: The fourth chapter of Bloodlines introduces us to Nick Kovac, a federal agent embedded inside the Keystone City mob for long enough that he’s finally had his cover blown. Just before a mobster named Lou puts two in Nick’s skull—and, remember, this is a comic book—a space alien with a hunger for spinal fluid comes bursting through a window and puts an end to any further pretense that Flash Annual #6 is a crime drama. Lou is kaput and Nick is hospitalized.
As we’ve established in this read-through, a bite from a Bloodlines alien isn’t always fatal; it can trigger a dormant metahuman gene inside the victim, bestowing in them latent superpowers. For Nick, fate is very kind to him and his profession: among his various abilities, which include enhanced speed, strength, and other such things, Nick develops the ability to become invisible when he’s cast in shadow and he can also perceive the infrared and ultraviolet spectrums. Handy powers to have when one is a super-sneaky vigilante type, no doubt.
DC really tried to make Argus happen. After this thrilling debut, Nick popped up in Showcase, an anthology-style DCU title that pushed peripheral characters to the forefront, only to go on and headline his own 6-issue mini-series. Aside from a few additional appearances in The Flash and a pop-up in the Waid-scripted villain event Underworld Unleashed, Nick’s post-Bloodlines life has been sporadic and a bit rough. (See FUN FACTS.)
It’s a shame Nick didn’t catch on; he’s DC’s Daredevil and that kind of owns. Phil Hester’s initial, pre-Big-Eyball design for Argus is slick (lots of straps; I like straps) and features distinctive shapes that mold shadows around him incredibly well. (Check out this cover gallery for the Argus mini to better appreciate how well Nick used to strike an iconic figure.) I realize that Bat-books don’t focus on street crime very often these days, but if there’s space at all for Argus in contemporary DC, I’d suggest tossing Argus in Nightwing as an antithesis to Dick Grayson’s squishier approach to crime-fighting. Pepper a bit of a rigid by-the-book philosophy into Nick’s war on crime, sit back and watch the sparks fly. Bring back Argus, that’s what I say!
BEST BIT: The issue’s opening sequence, which is padded with glorious mob innuendo and not-so-veiled threats between Nick and the Keystone mobster Lou, sets a mood for Kovac’s sudden ascent to crime-smashing vigilantism. It also establishes that Nick is a bit of a smartass in the face of adversity, which rocks.
WORST BIT: This entire issue is good reading, so to split hairs for a second let’s direct our attention to one bit that puts a pause on the Nick Kovac melodrama to touch on what was going on in the ongoing Flash series at the time. “The Return of Barry Allen” saga was in its mid-run—it is very good, and you should read it—and while I appreciate how serious DC was about keeping its continuity in line at the time, the catch-up sequence that ensues between Linda and Wally (who’s barely in this annual, it should be said) amounts to two pages of filler.
FUN FLASH FACTS: I kept writing “Nicky Kovac” in this write-up instead of “Nick,” which seems to imply that I’ve become more fond of Argus than I was anticipating; Venev is the Bloodlines alien who gives Nicky his love bite; jumping ahead in Argus’ future, poor Nicky lost his eyes in a metahuman organ theft ring in the pages of JSA Classified; he got better (I think); The Combine, the criminal organization Nicky’s investigating in this issue, is revealed to be an alien arms manufacturer; The Combine gets sorted out in later issues of Darkstars; Maybe Geoff Johns liked Argus because he showed up in Infinite Crisis for a minute, which was nice while it lasted.
DOES IT RIP? For sure. As these origin stories for New Bloods go, this is the most cohesive of “Outbreak” so far. One part crime saga, one part dopey DC alien event, a slick example of how Phil Hester conjures atmosphere and sculpts characters from his granite edges, this issue is good.
NEXT UP: New Titans Annual #9, wherein Bloodlines creeps Pritor and Lissik venture down to New Orleans for some grub (and I’m not talking about the gumbo), we get a big helping of Arsenal’s new duds (and new ‘tude), and Anima makes the scene.
That’s all I got for this week. Read any good comics lately? Drop them in the comments or write me: ja****@********et.com.
More HOT PRESS:
HOT PRESS 1/26/23: New Superman, a DoomRocket Update, and more Bloodlines
HOT PRESS 8/11/22: The Netflix-Sandman is here, and Bloodlines bleeds once more
HOT PRESS 7/7/22: Thor thoughts, Amazing Spider-Man praise, and mild Bat-doubts
