On the twelfth day of Christmas, Santa sent four blokes in trenchcoats to take me on a magical mystery tour...

The Books of Magic #1-4
by Neil Gaiman John Bolton, Scott Hampton, Charles Vess, and Paul Johnson




The Phantom Stranger, Dr. Occult, John Constantine and Mister E take Tim Hunter on a magical journey through DC's mystical world with appearances by Dr. Fate, Zatanna, Deadman, Etrigan, Titania and others along the way...

In the late 80s I was really getting into DC's mystical heroes-Doctor Fate, Phantom Stranger, Madame Xanadu, Zatanna and Spectre mostly, and I was an early adopter of Sandman and had become a big Gaiman fan, so when this series was announced, I was all in and so hyped, and when it came out, it did not disappoint. It was simply, everything I ever wanted in a comic book at that time. And with all that lush painted art by Bolton, Vess and others, it was something I could revisit time and again and never become visually bored, and well I could revisit a Gaiman tale most any time and simply be engrossed in the telling, so this was a series that had a profound impact on me at the time and became a perennial favorite. And since this is about favorite team ups, this one lands in the top spot.

-M

And on the final day I give you....

!. Archie Meets the Punisher



1994

With all of the inter-company crossovers happening in the 90s, the most ridiculous, no paper, had to be (by far) Archie Meets the Punisher. Some of these had already been a stretch....X-Men and Star Trek? But; nothing matched the idea of the wholesome world of Archie Andrews meeting the violent world of Frank Castle. This had trainwreck written all over it. I was prepared to skip it, until I saw that the writer was Batton Lash, of Wolf & Byrd, Counselors of the Macabre. That put an interesting wrinkle into things. So I bought it and damned if it didn't turn out to be the most fun crossover of the 90s, for my money.

Joining Lash were Archie stalwart Stan Goldberg and Marvel's John Buscema and Tom Palmer. The Marvel guys handled Punisher and Goldberg handled the Archie gang. Punisher is hunting a killer, called Red Fever, who just happens to bear a resemblance to a certain red-headed, freckle-faced teenager. Castle traces him to Riverdale and promptly mistakes Archie for the killer. You can guess the rest, though the actual story will surprise you.



This is pure fun and came about because Marvel; EIC Tom DeFalco cut his teeth at Archie and when the idea was pitched jumped on it. While crossovers between Daredevil and Batman or Batmanand Spawn were making bigger noises (and disappointing stories), Archie meeting the Punisher turned out to be a classic. It also set up the premise of Aerchie meeting other characters and celebrities and the next thing you know, Archie is running from Predators and jamming with KISS.

Yeah, Noto's work here has a lot to do with my love for this book; it has a real sense of grit and you feel like when the characters hit each other that the punches not only have real weight behind them but they'll also have actual physical consequences .

1. Batman and Captain America (DC and Marvel, 1996)
“Batman and Captain America”
John Byrne

As cynical, world-weary and dark as many of us (like me) become over the years, we’re still ready to get caught in a mug’s game, hoping against hope that the beauty, charm, and innocence of whatever or whoever it was we fell in love with as a kid still beats pure and warm at its heart.

For me it was baseball, football, basketball (Hell, sports in general), American history, old movies, and of course, comics that lifted me, comforted me, reassured me, and sometimes inspired me. Maggie Thompson and who knows how many others have told us that the Golden Age of everything is 12, but they always forget to add that Golden Ages don’t last very long. Very quickly I realized that, like Santa Claus, much of what I knew about all the comforting pursuits and interests of my young life were elaborate hoaxes, the products of PR departments, mythologizers, and mercenary dispensers of prime-cut bushwa.

As most of us do (Thank you, Eve), I swapped innocence for knowledge and was all the better for it. However, comics remained less corrupt than those other avatars of culture, perhaps because back in the late 60s when I was coming of a bit of age, comics were still on the fringe. High school kids didn’t boast about reading them or collecting them. Trying to impress a girl you liked by suddenly dropping in “By the all-seeing Eye of Agamotto” into the conversation wasn’t going to get you bupkis. It was more likely to get you a lipcurl, an eyeroll and a walk-away tout de suite.

Now this is not to say that when the comics “grew up,” I ran a way under a pile of Timmy the Timid Ghost comics. I loved it. Loved that Green Lantern and Green Arrow were doing the Easy Rider Cultural Nightmare of the Month tour. Loved Batman’s return to the shadows. Loved the New Wave of artists: Adams, Steranko, Barry Smith. Later on loved Miller’s Daredevil and Dark Knight, Moore and Gibbons’ Watchmen.

But somewhere along the line, comics seemed to lose that sense of unself-consciousness that had powered them for decades. Suddenly the world of comics was ashamed of its past, of the relentless enthusiastic goofiness that was its essence. The embarrassing past had to be retconned, retold, written out of existence with the ruthlessness of the dystopias I’d read about in 1984 and Brave New World.

Already too long a story short, I saw mindless violence where others saw for adult entertainment; I saw poor writing and a lack of imagination where others saw cutting-edge post-modernism; and I saw a lack of remembering where you came from where others saw sophistication.

Which brings me to Batman and Captain America, one of those bright spots in the darkness that is not only a superb example of a comic book story, but is also a celebration of all that is exciting, artistic, and most importantly, endearing about comics.

You all know the premise and the story. John Byrne is at his admirable best in balancing a love for the innocence and enthusiasm that beat at the heart of comic books with the more polished techniques of writing and art of contemporary comics. It is the “Silverado,” the “Raiders of the Lost Ark” of comics, a loving appreciation of all that super-hero comics can be.



You all know the premise. The score of tropes that Byrne weaves throughout the story? Of course you’ve read them before, probably hundreds of times. But in Byrne’s hands those tropes aren’t tired, they aren’t simply tossed in as ingredients in a recipe for the archetypical comic. Just like clichés, tropes are examples of truth true, and Byrne, like all the great artists, allows us to see that truth anew because of the drive, verve and skill he brings to his storytelling, yes, but mostly because Byrne loves the source material.



If you were too young to have known much about the Golden Age of Comics, this story will give you a crash course in its high points.

If you grew up reading Golden Age tales as reprints, you’ll love the way Byrne polishes their rough edges without mocking them.

And if for whatever reasons you’ve lost faith in the art form, and specifically the genre of superhero comics, Batman and Captain America will renew your faith.

1. Conan and Elric

Conan le barbare #1 (Éditions Héritage, 1972, reprinting and translating Conan the barbarian #15-16, Marvel, 1972).



Back in the day, in the late 70s, this comic was one of those unreachable treasures that we dream about with no real hope of ever holding them in our hands. The French version of Conan the barbarian published by Éditions Héritage in Quebec had a low print run, and nobody (really nobody) ran a business selling older issues. The best we latecomers could hope for was to land one of a series of collected books that were not reprints as such but rather a bunch of unsold issues (either four or nine) glued together under thin cardboard covers. What would appear very odd today is that such collections could share a cover but not have the same contents, and so when you found a pile of them at the local newsstand you had to leaf through all the copies to see what comics each of them contained! But I digress.

For Conan #1, however, no such chance… The earliest Conan I found in such collections was issue #2. (Heck, issue number 1 was so old and rare that it even had the “PS” corner logo that predated the better-known “EH” one from Héritage. “PS” were the initials of the printer, Payette & Sims.)

Still, I knew the book existed; we could see thumbprints of it in certain house ads. And this legendary comic seemed to feature Elric of Melniboné, a character whose adventures I knew about but could not read anywhere, since the few translated Elric stories available were out of print in those days.

Such mystery, such wonder on that cover… I didn't even begrudge Elric his tall pointy hat that Dave Sim made fun of in the pages of Cerebus; it just gave the character a very distinct look from other S&S heroes. (The pointy hat actually comes from the covers that artist Jack Gaughan painted for Elric paperbacks).

Luckily, very luckily, I became good friends with a fellow who shared my love of American comics (he’s the same one who introduced me to John Byrne, by the way!) and knew someone else who had that comic and was ready to sell it. God bless him! That was a good day indeed!