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Elementals: The Natural Order 1988 (TPB) 160 pgs.

Written by Bill Willingham, Michael Wolff, Jack Herman. Illustrated by Bill Willingham, with Dave Johnson, Mike Leeke, Bill Cucinotta, Rick Rankin. Inked by Rick Rankin, Bill Anderson, Bill Willingham.
Colours/letters: various.

Reprinting: Justice Machine Annual #1 (the Elementals back-up story), Elementals #1-5 (1983-1984)

Rating: * * * * (out of 5)

Number of readings: 2

Published by Comico

Four people mysteriously return from the dead with superpowers that reflect the four elements, in order to combat a modern wizard -- with his own super-team, the Destroyers -- who's intent on a world-shattering agenda.

Going into this trade paperback, I didn't know what to expect. I knew  nothing about the Elementals and was unfamiliar with the work of creator Willingham, and I still subscribe to the (perhaps old-fashioned) notion of regarding with skepticism anything not published by the Big Two, Marvel and DC. Not that I haven't read good stuff by independents, or that Marvel and DC can't disappoint, but there's a baseline of professionalism with Marvel or DC that isn't guaranteed with the various "smaller" companies.

Well, my fears were quickly put to rest. The dialogue is good, even clever, as is the characterization -- happy-go-lucky heroine Fathom was particularly effective, and even the bad guys have some complexity.  Willingham's art -- the poor cover notwithstanding -- is very good, with a nice eye for composition, shadow, mood, etc. In the writing and art (and colouring and lettering), it's easily as good -- and often quite a bit better -- than a lot of Marvel and DC stuff.

The story is an odd mix of alternative and mainstream elements, with occasional profanity (maybe three or four times in 160 pages), and the "thou shalt not kill" rule of mainstream superhero comics is less inviolate...although, conversely, when the Elementals kill, it's a heat of battle thing, and the characters struggle with the morality of it -- there's none of the cold-blooded ruthlessness of a Wolverine or a Punisher. In other ways, Elementals: The Natural Order is very much a fun, mainstream superhero comic, with colourful costumes, the team's interplay, glib humour, and flamboyant action. It reminded me, particularly in the squaring off against the Destroyers, of the X-Men circa the late-'70s/early-'80s.

The Elementals is a delightful blend of the off-beat and the cozily familiar.  Much of the action takes place on the villain's island domain (vividly coloured in lush greens -- bad guys or no, you'd want to vacation there), removing the story from the urban landscape of most comics, and because the Elementals have nothing to do with Marvel or DC, there's no baggage, no fictional "Universe" that has to be incorporated, no "guest stars" or references to previous stories. You can relax and enjoy it knowing you don't need a "required reading" list to understand what's going on. The in-jokes are pop cultural, like Vortex singing the theme to the TV series "The Greatest American Hero", or references to the movie "Jaws". The characterization is at once original...and evocative without crossing over into being derivative. There are clever things: like villain Behemoth, a super strong, invulnerable bully...who comically is rife with sundry phobias, or the effectively chilling way one of the Destroyers, who the reader dismisses as the weakling of the group, turns out to be one of the more deadly.

The minuses? You knew there were some, didn't ya?

The story is pretty action heavy, which is fine, I wasn't bored, but there's a sense the fights are crowding out the potential for story -- it's a little too linear in spots, lacking twists and plot complications to justify the length. The story introduces questions, such as who resurrected our heroes, and what's the villain up to -- but when the answers come, they're kind of shrugged off nonchalantly, so that you're a page or two on before belatedly realizing there's been a "revelation". And Willingham gets some art assistance as the story moves into the climax... unfortunately, the art from the pinch-hitters is more uneven.

How well this represents the Elementals overall, I don't know -- whether it remained of comparable standards in subsequent issues. Some references I've come across to the Elementals remark upon its violence. I wouldn't have said this is that violent -- there's plenty of fighting, and it does get a little nastier toward the end -- so maybe the series moved more in that direction later. Another hard-to-define weakness is in the fall-out: after reading Elementals: The Natural Order, I might pick up a copy of the Elementals comic (well, a back issue, since I think it's defunct) -- and I might not. Yet reading The Power of Shazam, for instance, or JLA: The Nail, at least temporarily re-generated an interest in those titles. The fact that Elementals: The Natural Order didn't fire quite the same enthusiasm hints at some sort of weakness, somewhere.

Still, taken on its own, The Natural Order was a surprisingly enjoyable read.

Original cover price: $13.95 CDN./ $10.95 USA.

Showcase presents the Elongated Man 2006 (SC TPB) 560 pages

Written by Gardner Fox, John Broome. Pencils by Carmine Infantino, with Murphy Anderson, Sid Greene, Gil Kane and others. Inks by Joe Giella, Carmine Infantino, Sid Greene, and others.

black & white. Letters: various.

Reprinting: stories from The Flash #112, 115, 119, 124, 130, 134, 138, Detective Comics #327-371 (1960-1968)

Rating: * * * * 1/2 (out of 5)

Number of readings: 1

Published by DC Comics

When Marvel introduced its Essential TPBs, and DC -- eventually -- followed with its Showcase Presents collections, the idea was to collect consecutive runs (20 issues or more) of hard to find, older comics in economical black and white. But the Elongated Man never had his own, self-titled comic (well, until a 1990s mini-series). Instead, he appeared in the pages of the Flash comics a few times as guest star, before landing a solo back-up spot in short stories in Detective Comics...a couple of times graduating to the lead feature when he would team up with the comics' regular star, The Batman. So instead of simply collecting an old comic, the editors here had to do some hunting, to present the consecutive early Elongated Man appearances.

And you know what? There oughta be a law against having this much fun.

Ralph Dibny has, perhaps, one of the most implausible origins in comics. Fascinated with carnival side show contortionists as a boy, he discovered they all enjoyed a particular beverage made from a rare plant. Distilling its essence into an even purer form, he developed extraordinary malleable abilities. I mean, it's a bit of a stretch -- pun intended -- to get from a carnival contortionist to someone who can squeeze his head (cranium, brain, and all) through a key hole! But once you get past the unlikely explanation, there's a lot to enjoy.

Firstly, there's a nice mix of tones. The Flash appearances are good ol' super hero adventures (from a less gritty era of comics) with some costume foes (The Pied Piper, Captain Cold) and sci-fi (with more than one alien invasion). And the two Batman team ups are straight ahead action-adventure tales. While Elongated Man's solo tales are meant to be mystery tales, opening with some puzzling incident that gets his "mystery sniffing" nose twitching. Ralph is independently wealthy and so he and his wife Sue live their lives as if on permanent vacation, each story taking place in a different local (occasionally a different country). While not ignoring the greater DCU (there are occasional guest stars) the stories are somewhat isolated from it, as the tone is meant to be more realistic with few costumed foes in sight.

Setting the super powered Elongated Man against normal bad guys might seem like an unfair match. But in a way, this isn't meant to be a suspense-thriller where you wonder how will our hero survive. Rather, it is meant to be a fun exercise in the bizarre, as we see what freakish contortion he'll use to nab his adversaries...and also a fun exercise in puzzlement, as the mysteries he investigates are not simply "who robbed the bank", but unusual incidents -- from a crook who tears up the money he's just stolen to something as innocuous as a man who seems just a little too particular about the car he gets from a rental agency. And if the solutions don't always live up to the questions (some solutions being positively goofy in their implausibility) at less than a dozen pages, it's easy to forgive. The mysteries are intriguing enough to get you turning the pages.

And the very brevity of the tales is part of the appeal -- just right when you're settling into bed and don't have time (or consciousness) to read a full comic.

The character was created by John Broome, who wrote most of the Elongated Man's early Flash guest appearances, but it's Gardner Fox who writes the lion's share of his solo adventures. And there's a wit, and cleverness to the writing that I don't necessarily associate with Fox in general -- you could almost believe that he was having a blast writing these adventures. I've had some ambivalence about Fox, because of his redundant use of captions (describing the hero swinging his fist at someone...when the picture shows us that). There were times where I was half-tempted to just skip over the text captions (but you never know when the caption will, indeed, provide extra info). And the contrast between him and Broome is pretty apparent, as everytime I would read a story that was less heavy handed with the captions...it would turn out to be Broome. Yet Fox did modify his style, as toward the end of this collection he starts being restrained with his use of captions, showing more faith in his illustrators to convey the action.

The vast majority of these stories are drawn by Carmine Infantino, who originated the character in the Flash. Like with Fox, I could almost believe that there was something about the strip that really ignited Infantino's creativity. I tend to have mixed feelings about Infantino, but I really enjoyed his work here, he seems almost to revel in a chance to portray a more realistic world of regular people in regular clothes (Ralph excepted) and his art helps add to the feeling of a more down to earth flavour. And when other artists occasionally join in, they tend to also be of a relatively realist style, with the likes of Murphy Anderson and Sid Greene (who also inks some of the other stories) and Gil Kane, with one off efforts by Neal Adams, Mike Sekowsky and Irv Novick. I never really considered myself a Novick fan, but he seems more than ideally suited to the flavour of the series and it's a shame there weren't more stories by him.

Of course, the vary "realism" means that there's actually a slightly unsettling aspect to Ralph's abilities that I'd never really noticed with the similarly powered Mr. Fantastic or Plastic Man.

There's a whole tone to the solo short stories that hints at a little more...sophistication, at least compared to then contemporaneous comics. As mentioned, there are no garish costumed villains, and there's some fun quirks to the characterization of the Ralph and his wife Sue, some amusing byplay, that one doesn't associate with a lot of DC characters at the time (Marvel, maybe). Even the fact that Elongated Man had dispensed with a secret identity adds a unique flavour to the stories as he is essentially supposed to be a celebrity, easily identified wherever he goes. And he revels in it. Ralph is a noble good guy, but there is a certain vanity fuelling his adventures -- again, a human character quirk you don't necessarily expect from a Silver Age DC hero. The fact that he developed his powers out of a fascination with carnival entertainers suggests a character who is a showman at heart.

I suppose some fans took exception to Ralph not hiding his secret identity, as it flies in the face of all the other heroes who insist they need to work in anonymity. But, as I say -- Ralph wasn't really playing in the same sand box as the other super heroes. (And, as a kid, that also is what made him interesting to me -- that he was the exception to the rule).

Perhaps what makes the stories charming is that Ralph is, himself, a charming hero. No dark and twisted origin, no tragic motivation. He discovered the formula that allowed him to stretch...simply because he thought it would be cool. And he investigates puzzling mysteries because he loves a puzzle. In a way, he's the dilettante of the super hero set. In one story where he is told Green Lantern's secret identity, he then asks that the knowledge be erased from his mind. Why? Because, he says, there's no fun in simply being told the answer to a mystery.

Ironically, reading a few old Justice League comics where Ralph was part of the team, you realize that in a way, the character loses something portrayed as just another super hero. Ralph is less a super hero than a talented amateur detective who, for all his bizarre (and impossible) stretching, plays best in a realist setting. Heck, in the story where Green Lantern guest stars, Green Lantern barely appears in costume, as if they felt a costumed hero would kind of break the tone.

In recent years, Ralph and Sue have been particularly badly served by DC Comics, starting with Brad Meltzer's Identity Crisis in which Sue was murdered and it was revealed that she had been raped by a super villain years before. Subsequently, I think even Ralph was killed off (I think I read somewhere that he and Sue are now ghosts).

With all respect to Meltzer: who reads these old, light-hearted stories about an affable married couple -- with a slight hint of, say, the Thin Man movies -- and says to himself, "You know what's missing? Sue needs to get raped! Oh, yeah, and murdered, and her body mutilated! Yeah, that'd be soooo kewl! That'd make these stories really rock!" For all the goofiness, the improbable events, I think these stories were written with a breezy sophistication that must've whizzed right over Meltzer's arrested adolescent head.

Though, ironically, it was precisely as a kind of rebellion against Meltzer and DC's current creative regime that I decided to pick up this collection on a whim...and was more than pleasantly rewarded by that impulse!

This isn't the entirety of the Elongated Man's solo stories, and although later period tales I've read were certainly enjoyable (and I have no idea if there'd be enough to fill up a second Showcase volume), I think there's just an extra level of something to these earlier Fox-Infantino tales.

If you're looking for some charm, you don't have to look much farther than this collection.

Cover price: $16.99

Excalibur 1987 (SC GN) 48 pages

Written by Chris Claremont. Pencils by Alan Davis. Inks by Paul Neary (and Mark Farmer).
Colours: Glynis Oliver. Letters: Tom Orzechowski. Editor: Ann Nocenti.

Rating: * * (out of 5)

Number of readings: 2

Published by Marvel Comics

This graphic novel kicked off yet another spin-off series of the ever expanding X-Men franchise. The story takes place during one of the frequent periods when the world believes the X-Men are dead. Sharing in this misapprehension are X-Men Nightcrawler and Kitty Pryde, who are hanging out on Scotland's Muir island, grieving over the "loss" of their team mates and trying to figure out what to do with their lives. Also grieving, separately, is England's super hero, Captain Britain. But the return of former X-Man Rachel Summers (Phoenix II) from some other dimension, with various characters in hot pursuit, brings the characters together (along with Captain Britain's mutant girlfriend, Meggan), resulting in the characters banding into a new super group, Excalibur, by the end.

Written by then-X writer, Chris Claremont, and drawn by risng star Alan Davis (a British artist who had drawn Captain Britain's solo adventures), Excalibur went on to a reasonably successful run as a kind of British branch of the X-Men. It was often viewed as the lighter side of the grim X-Men, apparently, with stories that tended to be more whimsical and humourous than the parent mag. That's not as obvious here. Certainly once the fights happen, there's a little more lightness in spots, but the initial part of the story, with grieving characters gnashing their teeth, is pure X-Men angst.

But ultimately, Excalibur: The Special Edition (sub-titled "The Sword is Drawn" inside) is a competent but undistinguished read. Davis' art is nice, and Claremont does a perfectly competent job of writing, well, in the earnest Claremont style. But nothing really succeeds in leaping off the page at you -- there are no great scenes, no powerfully written exchanges. Claremont falls into the trap (as he often did) of layering on his verbiage, his introspection, without anything really igniting or distinguishing itself. And the plot is rudimentary, as Claremont could be, with long scenes of characters talking, followed by just kind of big action scenes without a lot of plot twists or turns.

The foundations of the story are kind of nebulous, too.

Because this is tied into the X-Men mythology, I'm not sure what prior knowledge the reader is expected to bring with them. Rachel Summers had apparently disappeared months before -- O.K., I got that as it was explained. But she shows up, being pursued by creatures controlled by someone called Mojo, as well as being hunted by a separate group of inter-galactic bounty hunters (apparently familiar from earlier Captain Britain adventures) who are also after Rachel. But, guess what? By the end of the story there was no explanation for who Mojo was, or why the bounty hunters were after Rachel. Presumably that would be dealt with in later issues of the regular series, or in one of the subsequent prestige format Excalibur graphic novels (there were more than just this one, including one called "Mojo Mayhem"). Or maybe we were supposed to know the answers from previous X-Men/Captain Britain stories. Either way, as a stand alone graphic novel...it leaves you kind of going, huh?

The newly formed Excalibur beats off the bad guys, then get together and agree to keep alive the X-Men's dream of a world where humans and mutants can live in peace -- even though the adventure here had absolutely nothing to do with mutants or the persecution of such. It's an end scene that seems more intended to just cement the new series' connection to the X-Men than as anything that stems organically from the story.

Excalibur doesn't end on a cliffhanger (the villains are, at least temporarily, sent packing) even as it provides little explanation for what transpired. It's no more than a comicbook origin issue, and not a "graphic novel" as the format implies. If you can find it cheap (I got it for a couple of bucks, Canadian), and are a fan of Claremont's X-Men days, or Excalibur, it'll help to kill a few minutes, but otherwise, it's nothing to actively seek out.

Original cover price: $4.25 CDN./ $3.25 USA

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