Best of the Decade #1

I believe that most successful comics recreate Action #1. They can't do this by retelling the exact same story -- readers are already familiar with the legacy of that story. Instead, it's necessary to create for today's reader the same sense of amazement and exhiliration that 1938's comics created, despite the fact that today's reader already expects those qualities as an absolute minimum. The need to out-do what's already been done leads to stories that exceed older ones in trivial ways; for example, the Flash running seven times the speed of light in one early story, then ten times the speed of light in a successive one. Sheer arithmetic alone is not the wellspring of great fiction.

Action #775 was one of the greatest comics ever written, and it did so by establishing a team of villains who had the means and the inclination to bully anyone on the planet around -- a threat that begged for someone to rise up and challenge them. How does a writer make a threat like that work in 2001? In the Thirties, the writer might give the villain whatever pseudoscientific menace came to mind -- a ray beam, say, or mind control powers. It's very hard to be original with villains. Joe Kelly made What's So Funny About Truth, Justice, and the American Way? work on an entirely different level -- he dug into the comic literature of the time and found a real challenge for superheroes -- antiheros. And so, his invention, The Elite, is based on the existing characters The Authority. But instead of competing with the Justice League and their kind at the cash register, and in fans' hearts, The Elite was placed into the DC Universe and became the antagonist facing the representative of all superheroes for all time -- Superman.

In a series of encounters, Superman and The Elite faced brazenly evil opponents in contrasting styles, the contrast keying on whether or not to kill an enemy. This difference of philosophy rapidly escalated into confrontation, with the brilliantly insolent dialogue of The Elite's leader Manchester Black insulting Superman with a passion for antagonism. The action opened when The Elite handled a case in Libya in their own murderous style before Superman got to the scene. Then they were just getting started in Tokyo where their awesome powers dropped Superman from the sky as collateral damage while they massacred another threat. In their third encounter, Superman arrived on the scene first, sparing the lives of alien invaders; when The Elite were about to kill Superman's captives, Superman threw a punch, prompting the challenge of an all-out dual between this Macchiavellian foursome and the Man of Steel.

In their earlier encounters, The Elite had twice gotten the best of Superman with their various superpowers. Lois attempted to talk Superman back from the confrontation on the grounds that he might not win, but found her husband's principles to be unyielding. And as the fight began, things went against Superman from the beginning, leaving him apparently incapacitated. Until, as The Elite tramped on his cape, with the hero's body altogether absent, The Man of Tomorrow launched his counterattack, unseen, with feats of superspeed and power that quickly took them down one by one. When the telepath Manchester Black was the only one left, a bloodied Superman showed up to win the argument after the fight, and it was a win for the entire genre of superheroes. In a face-to-face confrontation, the antihero had no powers left to use, and no argument left to offer. And the mountainous Superman, told that he was living in a dream world, closed with a manifesto: "I wouldn't have it any other way. Dreams save us. Dreams lift us up and transform us. And on my soul, I swear... until my dream of a world where dignity, honor, and justice becomes the reality we all share -- I'll never stop fighting. Ever."

There are no flying men who can lift mountains. But there is a Superman, and he is a dream, and lifting us up is exactly what he does.

Best of the Decade #2

During 2009, I spent a lot of my comic-reading time reading stories from the Thirties forward. By and large, the older stories were formulaic and offered no surprises to readers who remembered how the previous month's stories went. The hero received notice of a problem; he faced the problem; he beat the problem. Repetition of this formula continues to the present day, although by and large, for a story to be interesting, it has to offer something else. In my view, the opening scene of Final Crisis #5 simply carried out this simple formula to perfection, and if the genre were to be summed up in six pages (the typical length of a Thirties story), it would be hard to do better than Grant Morrison's depiction of Hal Jordan bursting free.

The story up to that point was one of unstoppable losses for the heroes. The strongest players in the DCU were either banished, captive, in retreat, or diminished. Darkseid's grip on Earth had been hammered home in issue #4, and the heroes who were holding on showed broken confidence in their defiance. Issue #5 opened with a hero who by definition refuses to acknowledge underdog status. And so Hal Jordan faced a trial whose outcome he had already predicted with, "I'll be fine."

The trial concept was, in fairness to earlier creators, a refinement and retelling of earlier stories. In Green Lantern v2 #11, writer John Broome put Hal on trial on Oa for the first time. Later, Steve Englehart's wonderful story in JLA v1 #140-141 repeated the premise, with the Manhunters in that story serving very clearly the inspiration for the Alpha Lanterns in Morrison's version. In all three stories, Hal was being framed; in all three, he went willingly before the Guardians. And in Final Crisis, Hal was utterly confident that he was to be vindicated by the proceedings.

The last-minute appearance of Guy Gardner and Kyle Rayner turned suspicion to Hal's accuser, the Alpha Lantern Kraken who was hosting the mind of Darkseid's crony Granny Goodness. When she took advantage of her location to try to seize the power of the Central Power Battery, Hal Jordan effected the miraculous turning of the tide that defines superhero comics.

Despite being the only person in the room who did not have the power of a Green Lantern ring, Hal broke apart his green-energy chains and ran across the room to charge the evil god with pure physical intimidation pitted against her power ring. With a head-butt and a left cross, he put the villain on the floor while a veritable squadron of Green Lanterns did little more than watch and defend themselves. For the record, the matchup of fists against Kraken's power ring was the same struggle Batman had lost three issues earlier.

With his own imprisonment suddenly cast off, Hal heard of the predicament of Earth, and the possible universe-destroying threat created by Darkseid's fall. Against the backdrop of the Justice League on the run and the Justice Society under siege -- with Batman and Wonder Woman trapped and Superman sidelined -- the news of Darkseid's conquest was received with awe even by the Guradians. This same threat prompted Hal merely to reach out and accept the most powerful weapon in the universe in his outstretched palm and give a cocked-head promise to kick Darkseid's ass. So the tide of the crisis turned, and in perfect born-without-fear style, Hal showed as much concern for the task of beating Darkseid as he might have shown for removing a raccoon from a garbage dumpster. Sealing the victory, a Guardian declared Hal innocent of all charges and announced that Jordan had 24 hours to save the universe. An interesting quirk of this scene, one I regard as virtually untoppable for its purity, was that it was released for free on the web as the preview for the issue.

Just one scene remains in this countdown, and the only hint I'll give is that it was penned by a writer who hasn't made the list so far.

Best of the Decade #3

The scene that made #3 on my list was all about build-up, and it's not possible to describe what made it work without going into the background.

During the early part of this decade, a tension built with many fans and certain creators at DC calling for the return to action of Barry Allen and Hal Jordan, the Silver Age Flash and Green Lantern who had been in the meantime replaced by various successors. Hal Jordan's return in Green Lantern Rebirth capped a nine-year "death" of his character and made him once again the front-and-center Green Lantern at DC Comics. But not before his return had been teased in Identity Crisis #4. In that scene, Hal Jordan as the undead Spectre was asked by Ollie Queen when he would return and he answered, "I'm working on it." That story was written by Brad Meltzer.

A year later, Hal was back but Barry wasn't and -- remember my refrain that real drama requires an uncertain ending -- there was no guarantee that he would. It was much debated by fans whether he would or should displace Wally West, his one-time sidekick, as the main Flash in the DC Universe, a proposition largely equivalent to whether he would return from the dead. His death in Crisis on Infinite Earth #8 had come with an "out" that writer Marv Wolfman intended to allow Barry to come back -- the fact that he had traveled in both directions through time before his demise, allowing for the possibility that he might appear in present-day stories living on time provided before his sacrifice, with the poignant requirement that he would have to return to die after some arbitrary time alive. That was way back in 1985, but as of 2006, the creators had not taken advantage of Wolfman's loophole except to give Barry very brief appearances that were not proper returns. One of the first teases that he might come back to stay was in Infinite Crisis #4, when a very-much alive Barry Allen, apparently with no time travel required to put him into the story, emerged momentarily from the Speed Force to help his grandson Bart Allen. This set into motion a change of status as to who was the Flash -- installing Bart as the new adult Flash while Wally West disappeared into limbo. An obscure element in Bart's brief series (and one that was seemingly disavowed by the powers-that-be) told us that Barry and other Flashes were alive in an alternate plane of reality. But still, Bart and old-timer Jay Garrick were the only Flashes, with Wally and Barry gone and perhaps never returning.

But Bart's series had a poor reception, and it began to wind down to a finish at issue #13, a fact that was not communicated publicly in advance (in fact, it was obscured by bogus solicits for issues #14 and #15), but was sensed by fans. This coincided with an intriguing and complex crossover between the Justice League series penned by Brad Meltzer and Justice Society by Geoff Johns. The day came when the final issue of this story, The Lightning Saga, was released along with the final issue of Bart's series, and while nothing on the pages of either issue told the reader that they were tied together, in the bigger picture, they very much were. Many of us read the saga of Bart's death at the hands of the Rogues, the top villains who had plagued three Flashes over the years. Without moving from my seat, I picked up JLA v4 #10 and began to read. With Bart's death a fact, it seemed clear that JLA #10 was going to bring an old Flash out of retirement.

Meltzer's conclusion to the story built on the mystery that harkened back to a Legion of Super Heroes story from 1963 in which several Legionnaires put up their own lives as sacrifices to return Lightning Lad to life. The newer story used several elements of the older, such as the handing-out of lightning rods to several Legionnaires and the repeated use of the key phrase "Lightning Lad". The combined forces of the Justice League and Justice Society were determined to stop this sacrifice, perceiving it as suicide. The LSH is uniquely capable, however, and even the JLA and JSA found themselves one step behind the plan as seven Legionnaires dispersed to locations associated with the Flashes and the Speed Force.

As the seconds counted down to the moment that a lightning bolt was destined to strike one of the seven locations, and putatively take the life of a hero, the JLA, the JSA, and readers alike were uncertain of what, exactly, the LSH was trying to achieve. Were they trying to bring back Lightning Lad, Garth Rannz? Or Wally West and his family? Since Bart had just been killed off minutes earlier (in my reading time frame), he seemed an unlikely possibility. But then, while the 21st-century heroes scrambled to stop their successors, the significance of the locations involved began to dawn on some of them. This was the moment of truth. As Batman realized that he was in one of two places where he'd seen Barry Allen's life tick away, the panel reprinted the exact art from COIE #8. Simultaneously, Hal Jordan realized that he was at the lab where Barry Allen had become the Flash in the first place, and the two heroes began to believe that if they succeeded in stopping the LSH, they would prevent the resurrection of their long-dead friend.

And we had to believe it, too. Showing the art from COIE again -- that was a bold move. Drama is about uncertainty regarding the outcome. Suddenly, Batman and Green Lantern froze in their tracks, and wanted to see the LSH succeed. There wasn't much doubt that they would -- someone was coming back. But had DC dared to bring back Barry Allen?

No -- it was a colossal headfake. When the lightning struck, Karate Kid was on the ground in Blue Valley, former home of Wally West, and Wally was alive nearby, along with his wife and kids. How a reader took it came down, perhaps, to how they felt about the Barry-vs-Wally question. I personally took it the way Batman did; pleased, no doubt, that Wally was back, but surprised and upset that Barry was not.

As it turned out, Barry's return was only eight months longer in coming. When it did come, the very fine prose of Grant Morrison and Geoff Johns closed DC Universe #0 in fine fashion, guaranteeing that Barry would be back in the flesh. We now know that the LSH had succeeding in bringing back Bart Allen (himself deserving of the monicker "Lightning Lad"). The creators at DC had already decided to resurrect Barry Allen, but not at that time. I still think in many ways, that was too bad, because while they managed to surprise me, I couldn't imagine a better set-up for his return than the scenes in JLA #10 that seemed to promise his return, but left me only with the consolation that Batman had fallen for the same trick.

At #2, a scene with no surprises at all. A superhero prevails against the odds, and the scene employs every cliche in the book, but is so over-the-top that it defines, for me, this entire genre which is after all about being over-the-top.