Charlton Meets The Multiverse!

I picked up Multiversity- Pax Americana for the very simple reason that I love the old Charlton Action-Heroes and this is as close as we're ever going to get to seeing new adventures featuring those awesome characters.

These characters, created largely under the aegis of editor Dick Giordano were a brief but brilliant attempt to mine the superhero market which blossomed briefly during the Silver Age. Captain Atom and Blue Beetle were dusted off and revamped with new heroes such as Peacemaker, Nightshade, The Question and Judomaster brought along to fill in the ranks.

These characters of course these days are mostly remembered as the inspirations for Alan Moore's iconic Watchmen series and many dismiss them beyond that point. Alas, in this story Grant Morrison, a storyteller with stones, tries to revisit these heroes but clearly through the goggles of the Watchmen variations.

We are invited into a complex story, told by Morrison and artist Frank Quitely, which travels back and forth through time and space with all sorts of visual hijinks, all serving to create some larger mystery and make some larger point. The heroes are not as developed as individuals but merely used as elements of the one-shot story which explores the nature of heroes and justice and how the society can best make use of them.

We get good looks at Captain Atom, a man removed from his fellows by the dint of awesome power and who seems lost inside himself and the universe he sees differently from everyone else. The lovely Nightshade is a very young government agent who seeks to find the right way, but seems out of her depth most of the time. Peacemaker is a man on a mission which makes little sense for most of the story. The Question as always seeks answers regardless, while the Blue Beetle is a loyal government man.

We get glimpses of Sarge Steel and while Rip Jagger the Judomaster doesn't make the cut, his sidekick Tiger is around for a few pages as a member of a superhero unit which has a lot of vintage fun picking out a sobriquet.

The story even has a reference to Charlton's first superhero, the Golden Age Yellowjacket.

(Frank Quitely)

This is a complicated yarn, a mystery which has an answer, but which demands mighty attention from the reader and frankly more than one pass through the material. 

At five bucks for a copy, I guess I should thank Morrison and Quitely for giving me a comic which demands to be read more than once, since the density makes the entertainment value rise.

This is a book any Charlton Action-Hero fan should read, if only to see some vintage imagery and old rather obscure Charlton references hanging around in various panels. It has been collected up a few times. 

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Task Force X - A Collection To Die For!

This is one I've been hankering for. The Suicide Squad always struck me as a terrific notion, a solid team of loyal warriors willing to give their lives to makes sure their mission is a success is compelling stuff and focuses what every soldier really is all about at the core. The willingness to lay down your life for the benefit of others is the greatest service and deserves much more respect than it gets in the modern world. Note that I said the willingness to offer your life, not just take the life of someone else, that's what makes heroes.

(Jess Bright, Dr. Hugh Evans, Karin Grace, and Rick Flag Jr., the team leader)

And few wrote war stories with more vigor than Robert Kanigher. Kanigher joined with the stalwart art team of Ross Andru and Mike Esposito and offered up Task Force X in the pages of The Brave and the Bold #25. The team was successful enough to hold fort for three issues and return for another three appearances but alas did not find the sales success to get their own ongoing comic like so many which appeared in these pages. The notion of brave soldiers bonding together against an impossible menace was picked up in Star-Spangled War Stories when some soldiers were dubbed a "Suicide Squad" of sorts and battled dinosaurs and monsters of other kinds. DC is suggesting these teams are tied together, though the connection is tenuous beyond the names.

Here are the exceedingly evocative covers.

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