Black Hammer: Spiral City by Jeff Lemire and Teddy Kristiansen

I think this is still the most recent Black Hammer collection; it came out last November. It's set in the modern day, and does not feature the series main characters - the group of five Bronze Age heroes stuck on an extradimensional farm, like that dog you had as a child that had to go away, who I've come to call the Moping Crew because their super-team was never named.

Like most Black Hammer stories, it tells superhero stories that the reader will find at least faintly familiar, using its own invented world and characters that are different enough from Marvel and DC so as not to excite the vicious IP lawyers. I wonder if anyone has traced those familiarities: my sense is that some of them are obvious, but I also think there have been many more iterations of these stories since the '70s-80s versions I only vaguely remember.

Anyway, Black Hammer: Spiral City is potentially a new beginning for the series. It's written by series creator Jeff Lemire, with atmospheric, organic art in a variety of styles by Teddy Kristiansen. I have a hard time taking anything Black Hammer seriously, for the above second-hand story reasons, but maybe you feel differently.

It is soon after the Second Crisis Cataclysm. The techno-powered semi-fascist governmental/military group known as Cadmus AIM TRIDENT maintains the peace in Metropolis New York Spiral City. This city is presumably somewhere in the USA, but Lemire has never said where, or referred to any larger government of any kind. Black Hammer stories tend to use "Spiral City" as shorthand to mean "the real world" or "where we live" - Lemire's city has the usual streets and neighborhoods named after dead superhero artists, but there's never been a sense of larger geography, of suburbs and bridges and commuters and airports and so on.

That lack of specificity is used as if it were a strength in the storytelling here: one strand is in a storybook style, about a "kingdom" in which we follow a few iconic characters: a fool and a princess and a knight and a king. The kingdom, of course, is Spiral City itself, which has a mayor but apparently is not subject to any other level of government.

Malcolm Gold is the villain, the "king." He runs TRIDENT, and we know from the first page he's the Luthor-esque manipulator gathering power for his own nefarious aims. (Primarily outlawing superheroes, since that's the most important issue in a superhero story.) Aside from being evil and personally corrupt, he might be a reasonably effective technocratic manager, but superhero stories are never happy with "reasonably effective." He is running for mayor, and we expect he will win.

The fool is Inspector Insector, a bug-headed private detective who is a bit of metafiction - a "forgotten character" from a land of others like him, who never appeared in a "real story" in the "real world" until he bumbled his way into the Second Cataclysm and became part of a story - the Black Hammer story. He could be a fun character in the right kind of story, but his strengths and style are at odds with most of the core elements of the series: he has no powers, is no good as smashing Anti-Gods, and isn't even much good at moping. He wanders through this story as something like comic relief - though his story is sadder than that.

The princess is Helle's Bell, a superpowered pop star at a cusp in her career. She's trying to expand her work into movies, but she's also a young, hot-headed - literally, as with everything in superhero comics: she has fire-based powers triggered by her anger - prima donna who will sabotage her own best chance and be forced to run back to her Spiral City home from the vague land of Hollywood we first see her in.

And the knight is Concretestador, a former guard at the Akrham Spiral Asylum, which Malcolm just shut down with much grinning and twirling of mustache, because we all know comic-book asylums and prisons are just revolving doors to hold antagonists until they're needed for the next story, at which point they will escape easily. Concretestador needs to get a new job, but his skills are particular and the obvious outlets (TRIDENT and its ilk) are run by Malcolm and so don't want anyone good-coded. So he goes back to fighting other supers at the usual underground high-stakes fighting ring.

Meanwhile, behind all this, the general public - as always in superhero comics, a stupid mass of sheep-like morons who can't understand that superpowered people are better and special and their rightful masters - has responded to the Second Cataclysm by turning against all superheroes, on the grounds that alien gods never seem to try to eat planets that don't have superheroes on them.

(The Spiral City centrality issue also means that people talk as if Anti-God was trying to destroy Spiral City specifically, and not the entire universe it was part of - which is how it appeared in the actual story, too, so I can't fault them for that. Come to think of it, perhaps Spiral City is a small, flat, compact universe - that would explain how the evil forces could appear in the sky above during the various Crises Cataclysms at a 1-to-1 mapping; that would never work on any normal round planet.)

Anyway, everyone hates superheroes now: it's that kind of story. The bad guy is about to win a landslide election, take over everything, and outlaw Our Heroes. The plucky Good Guys are outnumbered, overwhelmed, and seemingly have no options left.

Of course they win in the end. Of course Malcolm wins the election but is forced to leave Spiral City, the only real place in the universe, with his tail between his legs. Along the way, nearly every friend Inspector Insector has is murdered by a serial killer, but I guess you can't make a superhero story without breaking eggs.

This is a second-hand story told well. If you've read superhero comics, of almost any kind, any time in the past fifty years, it will all rhyme with things already in your head. I think that's the point. I personally prefer stories that at least attempt to do something new, but I may be in the minority.