158 The Silver Age Teen Titans Omnibus

This book is pure, unadulterated joy.  Plain and simple.  The original Teen Titans stories.  Nick Cardy artwork.  Everything good in the world all wrapped up in a beautiful package.

The book collects about 900 pages of Teen Titans comics.  The Brave & The Bold appearances, the Showcase books, the first 24 issues, a Brave & Bold Batman team up and the whole run of the first Hawk & Dove book.

It so much fun revisiting these cheesy as hell stories.  The first half (or more) are just so god awful, they're good.  The book was clearly a victim of it's era, but it was also written to appeal to 8 year olds, who I'm sure looked down on these scripts as being too juvenile.  LOL.  About half way through the book, the stories start taking a more serious vibe, written less for 8 year old and more for a general comics audience.  These are the stories I loved the best.  The Bronze Age Omnibus will have more of this type of story in it, which I'm so looking forward to revisiting.  

Teen Titans has been my favorite series ever since the first issue I bought.  It was #44, the revival issue.  I was living in Bethel, CT at the time and that is my strongest memory of the entire time I lived there.  Discovering this book.  I was probably 8 or 9 at the time (wait, I just googled it.  I was 10.)  It left a lasting impression in my head, 41 years later.

The Silver Age Teen Titans Omnibus

Writer: Bob Haney, Steve Skeates, Neal Adams, Steve Ditko, Mike Friedrich, Gil Kane, Len Wein, Marv Wolfman

Artist: Nick Cardy, Gil Kane, Irv Novick, Neal Adams, Steve Ditko, Bruno Premiani, Bill Molno, Lee Elias, Bill Draut, Sal Trapani, Jack Abel, John Celardo, Wally Wood

DC Comics

133 Justice League Of America: The Bronze Age Omnibus Vol 1

I'm dying.  Or at least it feels like I am.  I woke up Sunday feeling under the weather.  Monday was bad enough that I told work I wasn't coming in Tuesday.  It's now Friday and I still haven't gone back to work.  I think I'm on the verge of kicking this finally.  But as I've sat home sick, I've been reading.  Because there hasn't been anything else I've felt up to doing.  The first thing I grabbed was this beauty.  850 pages (give or take) of Bronze Age JLA goodness.

This volume picks up roughly where the Archive books ended, so I'm happy for the continuity of the reprints.  Black Canary has just left Earth 2 and joined the JLA.  It's been fun watching her in these comics most of all.  She developed a superpower but is having no luck controlling it.  In a couple issues she practices her canary cry, but with no luck.  Later on, her canary cry gives her psychic powers (which were quickly forgotten about).  Most of the use of her actual canary cry takes place in the Green Lantern book.  In this run of JLA, with the exception of her botched attempts at it, she uses it only once in a blink-and-you-miss it scene.

Otherwise, this was a joy to read.  The book has two running themes, I've noticed.  The front half of the book has a ton of stories about the ecology, the environment, civil rights, that sort of stuff.  The second half, however, is all about pure super-heroic action.  I guess I never realized how much I loved Len Wein's contribution to the series until I reread these stories.

I have nothing bad to say about this book.  Nothing.  It's a pure joy, plain and simple.  So much Dick Dillin beauty, too.

Justice League Of America: The Bronze Age Omnibus Vol 1

Writer: Denny O'Neil, Mike Friedrich, Len Wein, Robert Kanigher, Gardner Fox

Artist: Dick Dillin, Neal Adams, Murphy Anderson, Ross Andru, Nick Cardy, Carmine Infantino, Gil Kane, Mike Sekowsky, Joe Giella, Dick Giordano, Bernard Sachs

DC Comics

021 Batman Arkham: Man-Bat

Another Batman Arkham volume.  So soon after the Poison Ivy one, too.  Like the other volumes in this series, it collects stories about one particular Batman villain.  I use villain loosely here, because I don't consider Man-Bat a real villain.  He started off as a good guy and has slowly, over time, lost more and more of his sanity and humanity and has become closer to an adversary (not villain) to Batman.

This is one of the best volumes of the Batman Arkham run, if you ask me.  Maybe it's because there are fewer Man-Bat stories to choose from.  Maybe it's because I fucking love Man-Bat.  Maybe both.  But the stories in this book at pretty great.  Starting with his debut (drawn by Neal Adams!!), continuing on to his extremely short lived regular series (two whole issues), adding in his mini-series (which ran longer than his regular series!) and other appearances.  This was a lot of fun for me to read and I powered through the entire thing in one sitting.  My attention span isn't that big, so that's a real statement for me to make.

My one big gripe with this book is the story from Secret Origins written by Jan Strnad.  In it, Man-Bat's story is retold pretty much as it happened, but Strnad added in a piece to tie Man-Bat's backstory in to Batman's backstory that I feel is completely unnecessary.  Suddenly Bruce Wayne and Kirk Langstrom had met as children and Bruce remembers him to this day.  Stupid and unnecessary.  Distracting.

I'm not too keen on the New 52 version.  More specifically the fact that Francine Langstrom is a villain from the get-go.  Again, stupid.  He had a perfectly good backstory that shouldn't have been fucked up by the New 52, but tptb let it happen anyway.

All in all, this is a keeper.

Batman Arkham: Man-Bat

Writer: Frank Robbins, Gerry Conway, Martin Pasko, Jan Strnad, Chuck Dixon, Dan DiDio, Frank Tieri

Artist: Neal Adams, Steve Ditko, Pablo Marcos, Kevin Nowlan, Flint Henry, Quique Alcatena, J.G. Jones, Scot Eaton, Dick Giordano, Al Milgrom, Ricardo Villamonte, Eduardo Barreto, Nathan Fairbairn

DC Comics