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Grave Concerns

Zombie comic book series wants Eugene’s braaaains

This originally appeared in last week's Eugene Weekly, the February 16 issue. I angle for EW's cover story now and then, which is not to say I always land it, and I was honestly sort of surprised when my editor Rick Levin lobbied to put this particular story on the cover. I certainly didn't write it with that in mind. It does seem to have struck a bit of a chord, though, as more folks than usual have sought me out to tell me they liked it. Evidently the Association of Alternative Newsmedia was diggin' it, too, as they posted it to their top stories for the week.

Many thanks to Chris Roberson and Michael Allred for the interviews!

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Eugene can be a contradictory place. Some find numerous opportunities here, seeing Eugene as a community full of music, culture, good food and outdoor adventure. Others characterize the city more prosaically, as a nice place to live, but maybe a little … lacking in diversions.

Count cartoonist Michael Allred in the former category. “Growing up in Roseburg, Eugene was always the exciting place to go,” he says. Allred, creator of the independent critical-darling comic book Madman, moved on to college in Utah (where he met his wife, comic-book colorist Laura Allred) and eventually lived for a time in Eugene. He later relocated to various points all around the country, and even to Europe. But Eugene always held a special place in his heart.

Now Allred is the artist of a comic book series that is not only set in Eugene, but also embraces the line our city walks between the everyday and the extraordinary.

Published by DC Comics’ imprint for adults, Vertigo, iZombie follows the adventures of Gwen Dylan, a UO dropout who hangs out in a diner, makes her living digging graves in an eco-friendly cemetery and who just happens to be an undead zombie.

Gwen, helped along by her friends Ellie the ghost and Scott the were-terrier (yes, you read that right), solves supernatural mysteries, eats the occasional brain and dodges an ancient order of monster hunters … all punctuated by routine trips to the diner for chocolate and coffee.

Comparing his work to a cross between Archie comics and Scooby-Doo, iZombie series writer and New York Times best-selling author Chris Roberson, who lives in Austin, Texas, says that balancing the mundane and the fantastic sides of Eugene is one of his goals. Roberson’s stories cleverly subvert the standard monster-movie formula by showing how the undead spend their down time.

“It’s almost required that the moment that someone becomes one of these supernatural beings, they become angsty,” Roberson says. “If I became a werewolf, I’d still be the person I am now, I’d just have some personal hygiene issues once a month, or have some self-control issues.”

Roberson, who has never visited Oregon, relies in large part on online street views to inform the sense of place inherent in his writing. But his collaborator Allred just moved back to Eugene after a stint on the Oregon Coast. Having one half of the creative duo based in the city where the story is set has its advantages.

Besides advising Roberson on details of Eugene geography and daily life, Michael Allred incorporates real Eugene landmarks into the comic’s illustrations, which are in turn brought to colorful life by Laura Allred.

In the Eugene of iZombie, vampires troll for dates at the Downtown Lounge. A UO science lab is used as a staging ground for communing with extra-dimensional beings. The Shelton-McMurphey-Johnson mansion at the base of Skinner Butte doubles as the home of a centuries-old Egyptian mummy. And the diner where Gwen and her spooky friends hang out is modeled on Fins Drive-In in Springfield.

Continue reading "Grave Concerns" at Eugene Weekly.

Oregonians Getting Graphic

Graphic Novels by Oregonians, for Oregonians

This annual roundup of all things comicbookical originally appeared in Eugene Weekly's December 15 "Winter Reading" issue.

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What is it about Oregon that makes our state such an incubator for the creative imagination? Is it the natural beauty? The fresh food? The history of pioneering exploration and countercultural experimentation?

Whatever that X factor may be, it isn’t limited to genre or form: Out in the wider world, our fair state has a reputation as a mecca for creators and fans of comic books and graphic novels. So it comes as no surprise that three of 2011’s noteworthy works of sequential art were crafted by Oregon residents. Taken together, these three books (all of which are more appropriate for teen and grownup audiences than they are for kids) demonstrate the breadth of talent and creative impulse inherent in the Beaver State.
 
The leader of the pack is the charming Dear Creature (Tor Books, $15.99), written and illustrated by Jonathan Case. It’s a surprisingly gripping effort for a graphic novelist early in his career.

Case’s hero is Grue, a sea monster with the heart of Romeo and the appetite of Jeffrey Dahmer. Grue loves capturing and eating the young couples that hang out (and make out) on the beaches of a small town in midcentury Southern California. Inspired by Shakespearean verse he discovers floating in bottles in the ocean, Grue vows to curb his proclivities and devote his life to love, beauty and locating the person transcribing the words of the greatest writer in the English language.
 
At the heart of Dear Creature is the interplay of base desire and reasoned response. Grue’s entertaining quest to identify the sender of his Bardic bottles somehow makes time to comment on B-movies of the 1950s, Cold War hysteria, prejudice, immigration and the enduring powers of art and romance.
 
Another graphic novel dealing in large part with a menace to a coastal shoreline is Oil and Water (Fantagraphics, $19.99). But this book couldn’t be less like Dear Creature, tonally or in execution. This nonfiction work is written by Oregonian columnist Steve Duin and illustrated by comic artist Shannon Wheeler of Too Much Coffee Man.

Oil and Water follows a group of real-life, concerned Oregonians (including a couple of Eugeneans) who visit the devastated Gulf Coast in the wake of last year’s Deepwater Horizon spill. Upon hitting the Southern-fried states, the small band of Northwesterners witnesses firsthand the consequences, ecological and economic, of the disaster. Encountering church ladies, wildlife rescue volunteers, shrimp boat captains and even a voodoo practitioner, the trip becomes personal as the protagonists encounter a culture shock that parallels the environmental shock they see in ruined marshes and oil-slicked coasts.

The Burning Bush

Big Love, Smallville, and Messianic Fiction

The spring of 2011 marks the finale of two television series that have been keeping me company for several years, each of which I feel a little misty at the thought of letting go of. Beware, traveler: herein lie spoilers for Big Love and Smallville.

The protagonists of the two programs hardly seem similar, at a passing glance. Big Love's Bill Henrickson is a fundamentalist Mormon polygamist, a family man, and an entrepreneur. Smallville's favorite son, Clark Kent, is a monogamist of undetermined Protestant stock, single, and searching for the right career.

  

But scratch the surface a little (with Kryptonite, if you must), and it's easy to see how the two characters have more than a passing resemblance to one another. Even beyond generalities one could draw regarding each program's implicit statements about the American Dream, for example, each continuity's set of thematic elements mirrors the other so well, in fact, you'd think the writing teams were each cribbing from the Aarne-Thompson Tale Type Index. (And heck, if one subscribes to the Campbellian monomyth theory, as does your humble host, the popular wisdom is that we're all cribbing from it, all the time, simply by being part of our own culture.)

The Secret Identity

Both Bill Henrickson and Clark Kent protect double lives, secret identities. The lies and deception that these two men, each of whom purports to rely on values such as honesty and forthrightness, are born of their iconoclastic and idiosyncratic natures. Bill is forced to hide his family life away from the American and mainstream Mormon publics that will castigate him for his lifestyle choices, while Clark must obfuscate not only his abilities, but his very species, in order to lead a normal life and to facilitate helping others.

Tricks are for Kids

Graphic Novel recommendations for 2010

A month late a dollar short in cross-posting. This originally appeared in Eugene Weekly's December 16 "Winter Reading" issue.

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The year’s crop of comic books and graphic novels presents a couple of noteworthy projects that are fun for the whole family, and two that are decidedly just for grown-ups.

Juan Díaz Canales’ and Juanjo Guarnido’s lush and noirish Blacksad collection (Dark Horse, $29.99) falls into the latter category. This single-volume collection of comic albums, originally intended for the European market and now produced in translation by Oregon-based publisher Dark Horse, simultaneously celebrates and lampoons the American detective genre, using anthropomorphized animals as stand-ins for human characters in shades of Art Spiegelman’s famed Maus. These aren’t comics for kids; the adventures of titular feline detective John Blacksad feature all the sex and violence of dime-store private eye paperbacks, lushly rendered with a Disney-like eye for detail and an admirable fidelity to the craft of building a fictional world. 

Like Blacksad, Wilson (Drawn & Quarterly, $21.95), the first original graphic novel by Daniel Clowes (Ghost World, Art School Confidential), is titled after the surname of its protagonist. And like Blacksad, Wilson is an incredible and affecting work. That’s where the comparison ends, though. The title character is a middle-aged, bloviating blowhard of a loser who loves his dog (sort of), accosts unsuspecting coffee shop patrons (always) and, weirdly, gets wrapped up in a kidnapping plot. Each page is presented as a separate comic strip, with a separate episode title and a distinct art style, bricks in the single storyline house Clowes is constructing. The usual Clowes levels of ennui, disaffection and misanthropy are on full display, blended with just a slight touch of nausea. So laugh along with Wilson as he tries to grow up and get his shit together. Or not. Whatever. He’s a Dan Clowes character.

Full-color Sunday adventure comic strips are the forerunners of modern superheroes. Combine this with the fact that Wednesday is the traditional day of the week that comic book stores release new issues, and you have the handsome new hardcover Wednesday Comics compendium (DC Comics, $49.99). This thing is massive, well over 11x17 inches, and, in combining work by indie darling creators like Paul Pope and Oregon favorite son Michael Allred with superhero stalwarts like Joe Kubert and José Luis García-López, the sprawling project convincingly replicates the Sunday morning comics-reading experience. The stable of DC characters is also diverse, from headliners like Batman and Wonder Woman to niche characters like Sgt. Rock and the Metal Men. There’s a bit of innuendo and a bit of violence, de rigeur for superhero comics. The price tag is a bit steep, but DC has really hit a home run with this project, producing a meaty helping of comics that straddles that elusive middle ground between the reading (and interest) levels of the YA and adult reader. And hey, the titanic thing would look darn stylish under the Christmas tree.

But the real winner for tykes this year is The Golden Collection of Klassic Krazy Kool Kids’ Komics (IDW Publishing, $34.99), an encyclopedia volume-sized collection of comic books and comic strips reveling in their immaturity and aimed squarely at children. These comics, spanning from the 1850s to the 1990s, are Looney Tunes-style zaniness, a pure and uncut sugar high reminiscent of chugging the milk left over after a helping of your favorite chocolatey breakfast cereal. There’s not a whole lot here for adults, beyond those grown-up comics history geeks who will enjoy seeing early work by the likes of Dr. Seuss, Steve Ditko (The Amazing Spider-Man), Dan DeCarlo (Archie) and Mort Walker (Beetle Bailey). But that’s OK. Just think of the book as the printed equivalent of a secret clubhouse, and let your kids go on believing you’ve forgotten the secret handshake.

Tough Choices

Graphic Novel recommendations for 2009

From the December 10 issue of Eugene Weekly. Sometimes I write about topics other than comic books, I swear. But hey, if they want to keep paying me to write about this sort of flotsam, who am I to argue?

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In the three years I’ve been writing this annual graphic novel review roundup, I’ve never had such a difficult time choosing which books to cover. 2009 produced an amazing wealth of material, particularly in the realm of graphic narrative journalism and nonfiction.

A standout comic of 2009, The Photographer: Into War-Torn Afghanistan with Doctors Without Borders (First Second, $29.95) is the true story of Didier Lefèvre, a Parisian photographer embedded in 1986 with
an international aid convoy as it crosses on foot into Afghanistan to treat the medical ailments of mountain villagers. It’s a dangerous adventure, one in which opium dealers and tribal gang lords paradoxically provide refuge from airborne Soviet patrols, corrupt rural cops and harsh winter conditions. Even as Lefèvre is disheartened by the complicated web of strange bedfellows, religious division and sparse mercies of Afghani politics, he simultaneously achieves a grudging respect for the cultural and geographic idiosyncrasies of the troubled countryside. Illustrated comic book panels by Emmanuel Guibert are intercut with “panels” composed of Lefèvre’s stunning black and white photography, advancing the story in a wholly original way and even making a low-key statement about the nature of comics’ graphic storytelling.

In A.D.: New Orleans After the Deluge (Pantheon, $24.95), another graphic story presenting a specific moment in history, cartoonist Josh Neufeld reconstructs the Hurricane Katrina experiences of six real-life New Orleans families. Some flee the city, while others remain defiantly in their homes. Some barricade themselves to protect property and livelihood as others seek an ill-fated shelter in the Morial Convention Center. As in The Photographer, salvation is discovered in the most unlikely heroes, while those sworn to protect become one of the problems they’re assigned to relieve. The affecting subject matter is never maudlin in Neufeld’s hands, never feels ill-treated by the comics format. Sentiment that could easily devolve into a moribund, jingoistic chest-thumping is kept invigorated by stories of struggle for survival that are by turns saddening, thrilling and triumphant, but always engaging.


From a serious tale of world affairs to something that’s anything but, Toronto cartoonist Kate Beaton’s Never Learn Anything from History (TopatoCo, $18) gives world history the “Fractured Fairytale” treatment. Think of Beaton as the brainy kid who sat in the front row of your high school history class, who also happens to be wicked funny. Beaton finds dry-witted humor and more than a little cuteness in a petulant Napoleon, a meeting of Garfield the U.S. president and Garfield the cat and even the 1981 attempted assassination of Pope John Paul II. These comics aren’t for kids: Marie Antoinette advises one homely attendant she’d be better off as a hooker, and an arrow-to-the eye at the Battle of Hastings elicits some rough language. But adult history buffs will discover plenty of wiseass in-jokes in this charming collection.

Continue reading "Tough Choices" at Eugene Weekly.

Dusting Off the Golden Lasso

An Oregon writer makes Wonder Woman relatable

It's fun interviewing someone famous, or at least famous enough to have fans, even when their fame leads to complications. This article, which I wrote for the December 3 issue of Eugene Weekly, is the product of attempts over many months to convince the intensely private Gail Simone to allow me to interview her. Guess now I have to find a new professional goal.

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Since her inception in 1941, Wonder Woman has been a symbol of freedom and democracy, a totemic 1970s feminist touchstone, a piece of bikini-clad eye candy and an icon of gay America.

What the foremost female superhero hasn’t been, particularly, is relatable, at least not for the legion of mostly male superhero fans who support the comic book industry. When the Amazon princess wasn’t being used for gratuitous T&A, she was portrayed either as a man-hating harridan or a cipher for blandly apolitical gender equality. Wonder Woman always seemed to work better as a symbol than as a character.

Happily, that’s changed. In an era in which parent company DC Comics is fostering iconic runs by star writers on some of its flagship titles — Grant Morrison on Batman, Geoff Johns on Green Lantern — Diana Prince (the heroine’s secret identity) has been quietly flourishing under the pen of Oregon native and former hairdresser Gail Simone. And though some women have tackled the character in the past, notably in a short-lived stint by novelist Jodi Picoult, it is Simone who holds the rather surprising title as the first female regular writer in Wonder Woman’s history.

“We have a different conception of feminism than was written in [Wonder Woman’s] conception,” Simone said in October at a panel for the UO’s Understanding Superheroes conference. And while the writer is certainly capable of writing a good, old-fashioned, politics-free superhero fight, Simone’s social messaging makes her work compelling. “I can’t write a story that doesn’t have some of that, somewhere,” she says.

Simone will discuss “Gender and the Superhero” in an appearance on Wednesday, Dec. 9, at the UO, likely touching on her work on Secret Six and Birds of Prey, both comic series that incorporate well-rounded characters of both genders, the latter detailing the exploits of an all-woman team of superhero espionage agents.

Even as her star has risen swiftly, Simone continues to live a quiet life on the Oregon Coast, far from fan culture. “I always wanted to be a writer to some degree,” she says, but the goal “just didn’t seem attainable, somehow.” She graduated from high school early and received a scholarship to study English and theater at the UO, but “life intervened,” and Simone wound up at a Springfield beauty school.

While managing her own salon, Simone began writing for online comics fan forums and soon attracted attention with her superhero humor column “You’ll All Be Sorry,” which led to work on The Simpsons comic book and then on Marvel Comics’ darkly humorous Deadpool. “It’s one of the amazing things about the Internet,” Simone says, “that kind of democratic notion that you can live in a town with no decent Chinese food and still be read each week all over the world.”

Continue reading "Dusting Off the Golden Lasso" at Eugene Weekly.

Say, you attended a conference, right?

Why yes, Johnny. Yes, I did. A few more words on the University of Oregon's recent "Understanding Superheroes" academic conference. I'll try to keep this post Teen Titans-sized, and not one of the Justice League-length diatribes of my last couple of superposts.

Perhaps my favorite of all the conference events I've attended to this point (yes, there are more upcoming; this conference and its schedule of attendant events are massive), was the panel "Being and Super-Beings: Existentialism, Temporality, and Eschatology." I knew I was among my own when I met a dapper Ph.D. student from UC Davis name Kane (or Caine?) who was dressed to the nines in a natty shirt, blazer, and Blue Lantern ring. I also met a wheelchair-bound comics expert from Tacoma who works for Twomorrows Publishing, who not only amused me with the tale of one Halloween when he won a costume contest dressed as a motorized Sherman tank, but recognized in me a kindred spirit when he realized he didn't have to explain the meaning of the phrase "Cei-U".

Both panel presenters were excellent. Professor Beth Davies-Stofka of Excelsior College spoke on the connection of superheroes and religion, arguing that comic book heroes are not the "modern day mythology" (yawn) fanboys make them out to be, but rather are representative of humanity, the religious themselves. Reading Comics and New York Times-published author Douglas Wolk also spoke about a connection of gods and men, helping this dubious nerd locate a logical through line in Grant Morrison's sprawling, metatextual Final Crisis storyline featuring DC Comics' so-called "Fourth World." (How could I never have noticed that the Omega Effect symbols on Darkseid's gauntlets on the cover of issue #4 form a "DC"? Jeez Louise.)

Both of the presenters were gracious and engaged in taking questions after their respective presentations, even when I pushed Wolk a bit to defend what I believe to be substandard work from Morrison. Davies-Stofka and her husband were also great fun to hang out with for the rest of the weekend.

The week prior, at one of the earliest conference talks, UO law professor Dominick Vetri, spoke about the complicated legal struggle of Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, the creators of Superman, to regain control of their golden goose after a rash adolescent decision to sell the character to DC Comics for $130(!) in 1938. Vetri spoke at length about the legal ins and outs of the case, a superhero-style "neverending battle" that has risen, phoenix-like, from its own ashes countless times over seven decades...and which, believe it or not, is still taking place as I type this, long after the principle actors have all passed along to that great comics bullpen in the sky.

Professor Bummer's Tenure Track

I have a new nickname. Or deejay name. Or maybe it’s a superhero name: “Professor Bummer.” The moniker was bestowed on me by Matt Fraction, writer of the comic books Iron Man and Casanova, at the comic creators panel, a part of the University of Oregon’s “Understanding Superheroes” academic conference that ran a week ago on campus in conjunction with the Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art’s exhibition Faster Than a Speeding Bullet: The Art of the Superhero. The conference sported panels with names like "Being and Super-Beings: Existentialism, Temporality, and Eschatology." (Yes, really.)

In fact, I have written previously about the exhibition and conference for local media.

Fraction appeared with fellow Oregonian comic writers Kurt Busiek (Trinity, The Avengers, Astro City) and Gail Simone (Wonder Woman, The All-New Atom, Birds of Prey). In the panel’s wrap-up Q-and-A, I asked the creators what it’s like writing for these sprawling, decades-old mega-storylines, considering that the DC and Marvel Universes have been rolling along since the 1930s and 40s, respectively. I may have asked it a bit bluntly, I’ll allow, as I phrased it along the lines of “…considering that you could stop writing for comics at any time, take a break of 20 or 30 years, and come back to find the same story had been told in your absence?”

Fraction’s response: “I’ve ever thought of my work in such Sisyphian terms. Thanks, Professor Bummer.”

That kind of wit was on display through the whole thing. Prof. Ben Saunders of the UO English department, conference organizer and guest curator of the exhibition, opened the panel with, “I apologize for the less than ideal angle some of you may have of our esteemed guests.”

Busiek: “Head on?”

As often happens when comics geeks and academics gather in real or virtual spaces, much of the chit-chat revolved around the agony and ecstasy of comic book continuity, the sprawling web of interconnected stories that compose a shared fictional universe, the violations of which give fanboys ample opportunity to praise or lambaste creators.

“I think continuity is the devil,” Fraction asserted, his usual timid, reticent self. He went on to explain that, so long as characters and story scenarios operate in a basically consistent manner, he’s happy with his writing.

Busiek, who along with Mark Waid represents perhaps the largest walking repository of superhero continuity lore in the industry, countered with a quote his mis-attributed to John Donne, but which actually belongs to Ralph Waldo Emerson: “A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.”

(Coincidentally, Saunders specializes in Donne and Shakespeare. Reckon he was gritting his teeth.)

“I personally get continuity fatigue,” added Simone.

Affection and Nostalgia

The UO’s Jordan Schnitzer Museum gives comic books a hero’s welcome

This article, which first appeared in the September 24 issue of Eugene Weekly, afforded me the opportunity to sort of wallow in my own special brand of hedonism, thinking and reading and talking at length about comic books.  I can guarantee you I'll be returning to the museum multiple times before the exhibition has concluded, to commune with the spirits of my gurus.  I was also pleased to discover a kindred spirit in the University of Oregon's Ben Saunders, a man who walks the walk in terms of comic book nerdery.  This guy isn't taking advantage of a pop cultural trend; he's advancing an art form about which he has been passionate for decades.

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“Can I touch this?” I ask, gesturing to the 70-year-old magazine sitting on the glass top counter of Nostalgia Collectibles, a Eugene comic book store. Darrell Grimes, the owner of both the shop and the comic book in question, gives his assent, and I lift the object carefully, reverently, as if I’m handling an illuminated manuscript from the Dark Ages.

Even encased as it is in clear, hard, protective plastic, the illustration on the comic book’s cover exudes a kinetic sense of exuberance: a boyishly grinning Superman leaps high above the rooftops, his cape billowing behind him.

This is a copy of Superman #1, published in 1939. Fewer than 200 copies are thought to exist. It’s worth $50,000. The very fact this comic book resides in Eugene makes this city noteworthy, in some circles.

And I’m holding it. For me, comic book nerd that I am, that’s like touching the Holy Grail.

This comic, and the nearly 200 pieces of original comic book art it will soon be joining on the campus of the UO, matter to the dozens, perhaps hundreds, of hardcore comic book aficionados in the area.

But they’re also a point of pride to the citizens of Eugene as a whole, or at least they should be. Because the artwork that has been collected for “Faster Than a Speeding Bullet: The Art of the Superhero,” an exhibition opening Friday, Sept. 25, at the UO’s Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art, is one of the most expansive gatherings of superhero comic book art ever assembled. And it’s not hanging on a wall in N.Y. or L.A. or London, or even Portland. It’s here.

“I do think this is the best museum exhibition of superhero comic art to date,” says Ben Saunders, an associate professor of English at the UO, and curator of the exhibition. “‘Best’ in the sense of broadest, most historically comprehensive,” he continues, “and with a large number of key pieces by key artists from the 70 years of the genre.”

It may sound as if Saunders is bragging about the show he’s assembled. But to be frank, the man has a right to brag: Works are on loan from the Library of Congress as well as from 18 private collectors from around the country.

But this show is about more than just volume. Saunders is an expert on this stuff, and he has taken care to present the original artwork. Originals are created on card stock pieces larger than the comic book pages to which they will eventually be reduced, in a manner that tells a story: not just the thrilling tales of spandexed champions or the story of good winning out over evil, but the story of the creation of a wholly new and inherently American way to tell stories in the first place.

“I went in pursuit of key works by key artists,” says Saunders, who revels in name-dropping from the collection’s impressive catalog: “Not just ‘something by Jack Kirby,’ but Jack Kirby’s cover to [Fantastic Four] #74. Not just Bill Sienkiewicz, but one of his large collage poster/covers from the mid ’80s. Not just Neal Adams, but Neal Adams on Batman.” Care has also been taken, Saunders says, to include “once-influential masters of the form” of the 1940s Golden Age of comic books, “who deserve to be better known.”

Continue reading "Affection and Nostalgia" at Eugene Weekly.

Photo by Todd Cooper.

Kneel Before Zod

What’s fluffier and more appealing for a summer weekend than a Top Ten list?  About comic books, no less?  While Batman arguably has the dubious honor of being hounded by the best rogue’s gallery in comics, Superman’s own collection of world beaters, miscreants, ne'er-do-wells, and extraterrestrial bullies ain’t nothin’ to sneeze at.  Listed here are a top ten of Superbaddies, ranked not by their level of villainy or ability to cause the Man of Steel a kryptonite headache, but simply in the order of my preference.  Ten’s a nice, round number, so apologies in advance to also-rans like Toyman, Mongul, and the Cyborg Superman.  But sorry, no love whatsoever for goobers like Terra-Man and the Composite Superman.

That's right: Inkville is runnin' the geekery straight up, no chaser, this time, so, y'know, forewarned is forearmed, for all you civilians out there.

 

#10  Darkseid

Just thinking of the intergalactic, semi-divine tyrant takes me back to mid-1980s Saturday mornings and Challenge of the Superfriends.  More of a general all-around DC Universe bad guy, Darkseid is a relative latecomer to the decades-old mega-storyline that is DC’s shared universe, but so fully imagined in 1970 by his creator Jack Kirby as the final word in alien evil, that Darkseid has suffered through virtually no rebooting or re-imagining, unlike most major comic book characters.  Some geeks have even posited the guy was an inspiration for Darth Vader, and I can certainly see a resemblance in the supervillain family tree.  Darkseid and his anti-pantheon of evil New Gods were used to great effect last year as street-level gangsters in Grant Morrison’s Final Crisis.

 

#9  Doomsday

One of only two characters from the modern era of comics to make it onto my list, Doomsday is the guy who first got me hooked on this stuff, as the titular murderer behind 1992’s “The Death of Superman” storyline.  The character appeared from nowhere, a being of mystery, and dispatched his Super-foe with such apparent finality, that the teenaged Aaron was quite shocked.  Ill-used by various appearances in the 1990s (seriously, a “Joker-ized” Doomsday?), ol’ Doomie has lost some of his luster.  The character has been given a second lease on his rampaging life, and an actor in a poorly-lit rubber suit to boot, in the most recent season of teen action soap Smallville.

 

#8  Silver Banshee

The only other Post-Crisis character to creep onto my list.  She's also the only woman... Who knew the Legion of Doom had a glass ceiling?  Banshee adds a bit of occult noir to a roster of evildoers who usually like to attack the Big Blue Boy Scout head on in the skies over Metropolis in big purple-and-green rockets. Seriously, how can I not like Silver Banshee?  She's a supernatural, Irish femme fatale, for God's sake!  Banshee can only kill people with her ear-splitting, vitality-draining wail if she knows their names.  That's so weird.  I’m such a sucker for weirdly Byzantine superpowers.  And, evidently, for chicks with skull-shaped earrings.