I bought this in back-issues not too long ago but haven't read it yet. No longer sure what gave me the idea I wanted to read it now, to be honest - maybe I was  curious about Milligan, a writer I've long heard of but haven't read much. I should get to it soon.

That's interesting because I would have thought this would have been more likely to be the case in the early 80s or 90s than in the early 70s. But I suppose perhaps there was a brief (in retrospect) creative downswing at Marvel around then, between the time when Kirby left and Stan Lee stopped writing and before the new wave of talent with creators like Gerber, Englehart, Starlin, etc came along.

DC Direct Currents #19 (Books shipping in August, 1989)



The cover feature this month is the new Shadow series by Gerard Jones and Eduardo Baretto. Silly me hadn't realized that the Helfer and Baker series had finished, but then I cottoned onto the fact that Direct Currents ran solicitations for issues #20-22 despite the fact the book was called with issue #19. I believe The Shadow Strikes! was a return to more traditional Shadow stories. I've always had a hankering to read it despite the fact that I little interest in The Shadow as a character. The series lasted 31 issues, which is a decent run for a property that always seems to get canned. 

Inside, Peter David is back with a new Star Trek series (until he quits again over creative differences.) There's also a new Star Trek: The Next Generation comic. I used to watch the show, but was never really attracted to film and TV adaptations in general. It's penciled by Pablo Marcos, though, which is interesting. 

There's a collection of some Joe Kubert Hawkman stories to build off Truman's Hawkworld. I haven't gotten around to reading any of Kubert's Hawkman stuff yet. One of these days. Lastly, there's Forgotten Realms, another DC/TSR collaboration. 

No interview this month. Boo! The cover of the month is a pretty cool Batman cover. The back cover is a random cover of Big Book of Fun Comics from 1936, which is considered to be the first comic book annual. Doesn't have much to do with the content inside. The editor must have been having a  rough month. 

I liked The Shadow Strikes! quite a bit.  Great art by Eduardo Barretto and a much more traditional take on The Shadow than Chaykin's and then Helfer and Baker.  

I thought Chaykin's Shadow was okay, but wasn't wild about some of the updating and the shoehorning in of his own porn tastes (the Shanghai brothel and the bondage scenes with the missile that the villain films, to send his extortion demands). Hated Helfer and Baker. Too drastic a departure and too much dark and violent to appear edgy. I had so ignored the series, by that point, that I missed out on the launch of Shadow Strikes!, when it debuted and mostly only paid attention when they did the Doc Savage crossover, where Doc tries to capture him and treat him in his sanitarium, with experimental surgery. I have the material and ought to actually read it. I still think the 70s material and Mike Kaluta and Gary Gianni's Dark horse work are the apex of the comics material, though Matt Wagner has handled it well in recent years.

I could never get into Next Generation or subsequent Star Trek series and was indifferent to the comic adaptations and extensions. I read the odd original crew adventure; but that was it. I preferred classic Trek, warts and all and its greater sense of adventure than the later stuff, with overly-PC, utopian outlooks, or cherry picked elements from other sci-fi properties, like swiping the premise for Babylon 5, after JMS p[itched it to Paramount and they rejected it. Never cared for the utopian idea of the Federation, as I couldn't buy into mankind solving its problems in 300 years, vs the Babylon 5 premise that man took his problems into the stars and added new angles to them, through contact with alien races. It didn't help that Roddenberry's fingers were all over the first season and you soon realized that he wasn't the driving creative force in the original. That plus the long scenes of them sitting around a conference table, decided what to do, then some techno-babble miracle solution (possibly involving Wesley Crusher or Data, or both) in the last 10 minutes. Original Trek tended to keep the debates shorter and more mobile and were better about setting up the weak spot in the alien threat. Better writers, too. I did watch more Next Gen than any of the other series, though. I also tended to skip Next Gen books, in favor of original crew. I did read Peter David's Q-Squared, where it is revealed that the Squire of Gothos was part of the Q Continuum, which made perfect sense, given his abilities in the episode.

The only reason for the Lois Lane cover (an imaginary Mr and Mrs Superman story, long before the Earth-2 wedding) would be the move of getting Lois and Clark engaged, but that is about a year or so down the road. Maybe the decision had been made, at that point and they were giving everyone a clue. Or maybe that's where the dart landed, when they were choosing a cover.

I read Legion in spurts, going back to Superboy & the Legion of Super Heroes #229, 1977. Circumstances prevented me from reading every month, but I accumulated short runs (in part due to the Whitman 3-packs) and read it consistently from the prelude of The Great Darkness Saga through the climax and then issue #300. I did rediscover it in the Baxter series, in college, when Steve Lightle and Geg LaRocque were each drawing it (separately) and followed it for a bit. I liked Giffin's work on it, up through that and tried the 5 Years later; but, I could never get into it and never made it very far. At one point, I bought up the first year and tried again, but still never made it very far. The darkness of it was a factor; but, I think it was mostly the changes to the characters just didn't click with me. The next time I tried to reconnect was Legionnaires and when Waid was writing the reboot. Didn't last long, again. I'd have to say that Paul Levitz was my favorite Legion writer, with Giffen & Mahlstead on art (and Lightle and LaRocque & Mahlstead, not far behind).

I was aware of Giffen's method, after reading an interview with him in another format. He would do the thumbnails and them project them on a lightbox, for layouts, if memory serves. Chaykin used to use index cards and write scenes and then sometimes shuffle them around, to put together a story. From what I have read, a lot of artists who wrote their material often did thumnails as their first draft of things. Makes sense.

I went to Heroes Con, in 1992, just before getting out of the military and coming home and the whole Legion office was there, including Giffen and the Bierbaums. Giffen was as squirrelly as you would expect, but also seemed a bit introverted, trying to compensate by cutting up. The Bierbaums were a very nice couple. I went with a friend, who was a much bigger Legion fan than I was, so he spent more time with them, while I spent more time talking to Dave Dorman, about the Kubert School, since I had applied there. Ended up nt being able to swing the money, after being accepted and the rest is comics' loss.