Diversions #22 from Blue Moon Comics

"Diversions" is one of my favorite modern day ongoing comic book series, as one could tell by persuing this very blog.

However, even a favorite can come out with an installment (episode, issue, album, etc) that lands a little "softer" than most. 

Getting right to it, here's the cover to Blue Moon Comics' "Diversions" #22:

Now, the cover itself is right up my retro alley, if you don't mind my phrasing, there. It's colorful, dynamic, well-composed, and it's got nice, big dramatic word balloons on it! High marks, as usual from this series, I say.

The intro page, or "frontispiece" as some call it, is also excellent; continuing a very welcome trend of giving the super-talented Dana Black free reign to tease the reader with all the exciting contents of the latest issue:

As for the contents themselves; this time around, I had some (more or less minor) problems with every story in the book.

The opening "Max Miracle" tale is possibly the strongest in the book in some ways, especially in the raw, unhinged "Silver Age" flavor of it all; it's actually almost got a Golden Age level of craziness to it, which I am a fan of when it's done right.  However, the main character is drawn to look like a teenager throughout, and I seem to recall him looking more like a "Doc Savage" or "Tom Strong" sort of hero in his previous appearances. Other than that, the art by Dell Barras is great, with clear storytelling that keeps you up to speed with the breakneck pace and crazy ideas that whiz by you over the course of the 8-page proceedings.

I also wish that Max Miracle's powers were explained a little more; maybe some details on just who the "five other heroes" he is apparently made up of are/were, and why/how they ended up combined into one being (apparently across all realities), etc. And while I see where writer Lloyd Smith is coming from, I would have liked to see a more consistent approach to the matter of Max Miracle's personal pronoun(s). Max uses "we" self-referentially at times, but "I" at others times, and the narration refers to Max with the singular "he" but also says that Max "is/are" the only "being(s) on FF420 with certain powers. Again, I can see why these terms were used, but they didn't seem to have a consistent application, which resulted in pulling me out of the story a bit every time.

The story itself left me scratching my head a little, too: Max needs to essentially steal a rare object from a formidably protected location, and is even confronted by a seemingly immortal guardian while doing so. However, it's never clear why the object needs to be hoarded so jealously, when there seem to be tons of them just sitting at the bottom of a stream, and Max just needs one of them to save an entire planet. 

Again, I mostly enjoyed this one, but found I had to re-read it a few times, and each, those minor quibbles bugged me a little bit more. Also, the name of the planet "FF420" seemed like an easter egg, but when I looked up Fantastic Four #420, I discovered that it referred to the fourth issues of Jim Lee's "Heroes Reborn" reboot of the series, of which I could think of nothing worth remembering...

Up next is "How to Win Friends and Influence People" or "Toom! Son of Toombora!" by the aforementioned writer/artist Dana Black. In his third outing as solo auteur in this series, Dana takes yet another experimental approach to the storytelling; using mostly just two panels across each of the 8 pages that are allotted to his tale. 

While Dana's experiments worked very well for me before, this time around, it just really didn't. Each page is its own "vignette," featuring a large image of the child-monster named TOOM engaging in misguidedly destructive antics, and some human character in a smaller panel commenting on their history with the titular titan.

It's all extremely well-drawn, colored, and composed, and Dana's talent for dialogue even made me chuckle out loud right on the first page. I even caught his own "cameo" in the story, which was a fun Easter Egg for those of us in the know. 

However...it just didn't "add up" to feeling like a story to me. It's all incredibly cool to look at, even amusing to read, but I kind of wanted more of a narrative through-line, which is perhaps my fault and no one else's.  I am looking forward to having my physical copy delivered, as these page sin particular will be so cool to look at "in person."

The next feature, "Per Aspera Ad Astra," which means "through hardship to the stars," was unfortunately something that just didn't appeal to me at all. In fact, its message seemed more than mildly misogynistic, with a bunch of men running a death gauntlet to win a woman's hand in marriage, only for the sole survivor to be killed as well when he could not produce the "password." A wealthy man then rolls up in an expensive car and recites the password, which is "One Million Dollars," and he is then allowed, well, "possession" of the female human "prize." The woman is treated like an object, and will only approve of the man who values her in the most materialistic fashion. I honestly would rather lose these nine pages of the issue and still pay the same price for it, honestly.

Ending things on a (much) more positive note is the second chapter in the ongoing revival of "Mercury: the Hero Rises" story, and I am pleased to say that I am very much still engaged and looking forward to more of this story about legacy and the very nature of heroism. My only nitpick here has to do with the fasct that the original hero is said to have been dead for 20 years at the time of this chapter. I thought that the other "heroes" were already running around murdering "bad guys" in chapter one? This sort of thing has now been going on for two decades? And Xenos is only picking a successor for his old pal Mercury now? It seemed that this only needed to be happening a year at most after the events of chapter one to me.

So, yes, this was one of the weaker issues of "Diversions" in my opinion. REMEMBER, though, that this one of my favorite series, and I only TRULY disliked one offering between these two covers. I said when I re-started blogging about comics recently that I would not be beholden to act as the "press release" center for other people's work, but I do admit that is perhaps hardest to write even slightly negative remarks about something you otherwise enjoy. Especially at length. 

And this has been a long post!

I hereby release you to do things more worthy of your time!

(TO BE CLEAR: I mostly enjoyed this issue, and am still a Blue Moon Comics "Luna"-tic, eh?)

Recent Reading Roundup!

 TUROK SON OF STONE #50:

I have admired this cover from afar for a over two decades now, since the first time I saw it posted in some online list of "all-time crazy comic covers" or some such thing.  After finally pulling the trigger on buying a copy, I was very pleased to find that the awesome cover sits atop a downright excellent issue of Turok, too! Whenever I looked back on this cover over the years, I always a) reminisced about how much I liked reading the Whitman reprints of Turok as a kid, b) lamented how this issue was never one of them, and c) amused myself with how radically inaccurate the hungry hungry T-Rex is drawn on this cover. Yes, that's all part of the charm, and you'll get no argument from me. However, now that I've actually READ the issue, I know that it's NOT a T-Rex that's depicted on the cover to begin with, but a completely unique, "previously unknown" creature! Long story short, T-man and Andar accidentally unfreeze this unique "Honker" AND her eggs from their stasis at the bottom of an icy lake. The duo takes a grim but surprisingly ecologically-minded approach to the situation, opting to kill the mama dino AND destroy her eggs because the "modern" Honkers of the Lost Valley would never deal with this new predator that they had evolved without for so long.  Okay, but Turok...what if that ledge shielding the lake from the sun had collapsed when you and Andar were nowhere near it?  Nevermind! Doesn't matter! An indisputably awesome cover and seriously great story = Early X-Mas, and also the longest commentary on any one issue you'll get in this post! 

GHOSTLY TALES #61:

This one surprised me twice: First, because the cover had me bracing for some typically racist shenanigans, but surprised with a tale about the arrogant white invader getting what's coming to him, and Second, because the (excellent cover) was rendered by someone other than Steve Ditko, when the story it advertises was very clearly illustrated by Ditko himself.  Pretty sure that's first time I've see a Charlton Ditko story "covered" by another artist. The rest of the issue was "eh."

GHOST MANOR #15:

On the other side of the coin, we have this issue, where two out of the three stories within are illustrated by Ditko (nice!), including the cover story! As epic as that cover appears though, the short tale attached to it felt more like a Gold Key "Grimm's Ghost Stories" tale, with a "happy" "was it all a dream" style ending. The opener "Search for a Victim," also drawn by Ditko is a far better (and grimmer) offering.

HERCULES #5:

This "Sergius O' Shaugnessy" (Denny O'Neill) written and Sam Glanzman illustrated visual feast gives us a VERY altered version of the mythical encounter between Hercules and the Queen of the Amazons, casting Hippolyta and straight up evil and ruthless. Convenient, that. Still, a blast of an issue.

HERCULES #11:

This one is written by Charlton's human story factory Joe Gill, but still thankfully illustrated by the masterful Mr. Glanzman.  I say thankfully, because even thought it's not a BAD issue, it is marred by either Joe (I'm inclined to believe) or Sam (because he was also apparently the letterer, despite some separate pseudonym being added to the credits) adding very "Batman '66" style campy "exclamations" in and around some of the panels, the worst of which being the words "Hot! Scorching! Fiery! Yeah!" between two panels of Herc walking across the desert.  Ugh.

GHOSTLY TALES #63:

While I love this cover, the story it represents ends up being a clunker, largely due a twist ending that seems to come out of nowhere because...it does! If one little piece of the main character's history was revealed before the end, it would have worked SO much better. It also contains lines like "The weakling...fainted like a woman!" Other than some decent artwork, the rest of the stories didn't bowl me over, either. Sigh. But it's not like this was the worst comic book of this Recent Reading Roundup...

SCARY TALES #40:

Because THIS was the worst comic book of this Recent Reading Roundup! Have you always wondered what would happen if Jack Kirby and Neal Adams created a "Gatchaman" style superhero series with largely flavorless or downright unlikable protagonists? And not only that, but such a thing was only ever brought into this world by someone at best amateur talent who THOUGHT that what he was doing, and only had a weekend to do it?  Well, look no further!  I'll give 'em this: the giant ro-beast-like monster-bot of "The Devil's Organist" actually comes pretty close to hitting that target. Otherwise, this is a tragically bad comic book story, and its placement in THIS series is just bewildering.  Welp. Guess we'll have to get BEYOND it...

BEYOND THE GRAVE #17:

Another rather late Charlton offering (1984!), this issue kicks off with a great 9-pager by Cuti and Staton that features an agoraphobic stand-in for a certain Lovecraftian author that is both fun to read and pleasant to look at! What a concept! This is followed up by an 8-page "scared straight in the swamp" tale illustrated by Steve Ditko ("sort of" the cover story) that does not disappoint, and "The Empty Room" wraps it all up with a haunted house tale by Gill and Newton that might not have the strongest ending, but is a fun, creepy, nice-looking affair all the same. A solid issue of a Charlton Horror Anthology Title (CHAT), indeed! We're coming down to the Final Three now, folks!  Can we keep it together??

GHOST MANOR #22:

Our last issue's cover might have only had a thematic link to its cover story, but the one you see above could practically be a panel from that story blown up and slapped on the front of the book! It's not, but it definitely fits right in with "Mr. Beazely's Ghosts," the final tale in this issue, also by Gill and Newton, who anchored our preceding "Ghost Manor" outing. It's a good tale, too; a 9-pager about a overzealous caretaker and the couple who plot to unseat him from his prized property. Before all that, the issue kicks off with "A Shocking Tale," a Gill and Ditko joint about an another overly zealous sort, this time an electric-chair-enamored executioner who gets a different sort of "charge" than the one he was after. Thatt one leads into "Crawling Death," in which a holy-rolling snake handler discovers the price of greed and betrayal in one of these types of comics. Another really solid CHAT!

HAUNTED #18:

At first I mistook this cover for Tom Sutton's work, but one look at those space helmets will tell ya: this is a Joe Staton job! And a pretty great one at that! This ish opens with "The Survivor," an odd little -pager illustrated by Ditko that deal with near future (2155) space travel, self-serving betrayal, and, reminding you that this is comic from 1974, mysterious Asian mind-swapping techniques. "Final Operation" is a 7-page saga written and drawn by the great Wayne Howard (of Midnight Tales!), telling the all-too-timely here in 2025 tale of a super rich man willing to pay ANY PRICE for immortality, and our cover story comes along at the end with "Film Freak," by the fan-favorite (It's me. I'm the fan.) team of Cuti and Staton. In that one, a man who's become progressively more and more "lost" within his love of science-fiction finds out just what his long-suffering has planned for him now that she's had enough. That doesn't hit close to home at all, does it, nerds?

(BARON WEIRWULF'S) HAUNTED (LIBRARY) #35:

This far-more-recognizably Staton cover is followed right up another Cuti-Staton cover story called, much like it is on the cover, "The Egg." It's a fun little 8-pager about a kid who brings home something he finds on the beach that nearly causes the end of the world but ends up smelling delicious instead. Confused? You'll have to read it to fix that, effendi! Riding on the heels of the opener is "Invincible," an 8-pager with Don Heck-esque art about a Wizard in medieval-ish times who's grown sick of getting second billing behind all those jocks-I mean, Knights. It's not bad, but it's interesting more for its unusual premise than its actual ending. At the end, we all treated to an All-Sutton 6-pager called "A Budding Evil," about a gruesome (and sexist!) gardener who winds up fertilizing his own fiendish foliage. A 1-page treatise by Cut and Newton on "How to Become a Werewolf" rises at the very end to enlighten us about the less cinematically popular ways in which legend would have one achieve a lycanthropic state. Not a bad one to end on!

And yes, two of the stories from that issue at the end were reprinted from comics originally published in 1971. I'm not gonna bother with such details in these posts for the most part. To paraphrase a movie I never really watched: "It's Charl-ton, Jake."

That's it for this Roundup, folks!