Black Hammer, Vol. 1: Secret Origins by Jeff Lemire, Dean Ormston, and Dave Stewart

So this is much more of a conventional superhero thing than I thought it was. Oh, it's pretty good - Lemire is a strong writer, as always, and Ormston does that pseudo-horror look that is nearly a Dark Horse house style (or maybe just rules the Mignolaverse). But I was expecting something quirkier. (Note that Black Hammer is four years old. I had plenty of time to get more details; I just didn't bother.)

It's not clear if this was really a team. No name for the group is given in this first collection. But a half-dozen of the superheroes who used to defend Spiral City have been stuck on a farm somewhere in the middle of nowhere for ten years, after a battle with Darkseid "the Anti-God". They saved the world, and ended up here. The creators don't tell us how or why in this story - I'm sure it becomes clear later.

None of them are Black Hammer. Black Hammer isn't the name of the group either. Black Hammer was another guy, the one who died as part of the whole saving-the-world thing. (Or maybe afterward, discovering that they really can't get out of this small bit of farm landscape with one small town.) The actual hammer he used - this is a superhero comic, so obviously "Black Hammer" is a large Black man who carries a hammer to hit things with until evil is vanquished, because superhero comics are still written for the particularly stupid children of 1938 - is lying on the ground in a field, as if to shame Chekhov into thinking a gun on a mantlepiece could ever be sufficiently obvious.

Black Hammer, the series, is not exactly a pastiche - it's not "doing the favorite superhero stories of my youth, only as if written by a functional adult" like Astro City has generally aimed for, or "I want to tell stories of these existing characters, but the IP owners haven't hired me to do so, so decipher this really transparent code" like a dozen others. The characters are pastiches, though -- most of them very obviously so:

• Golden Gail is Mary Marvel, with the serial numbers crudely altered
• Abraham Slam is the standard WW II strong guy, powered by gumption rather than magic or superscience
• Barbalien, Warlord from Mars is J'onn J'onz lightly run through a Edgar-Rice-Burroughs-inator
• Madame Dragonfly is Madame Xanadu with details changed, your standard '70s horror host with weird and mysterious powers (and a tragic backstory involving accidentally creating a muck-monster boyfriend and eventually losing him)
• Col. Weird is an '80s-style reimagining of Adam Strange, transformed by his journeys through the Anti-Zone into a distracted, ghostly, transitory presence
• Talky-Walky is Weird's robot sidekick, more or less an equal member of the group on the farm

Black Hammer: Secret Origins collects the first six issues of the main Black Hammer series, beginning when those six have been living on "The Farm" for ten years. Some of them may have been aging, such as Abraham (though this is unclear: we don't know when this story takes place and he's been around since 1939 without any powers to keep him young), while Gail has definitely not been aging, which is a plot point.

Speaking of the unclear timeline: Gail and Abe are clearly WWII heroes, with forty or fiftyish years of history behind them. That puts us in the '80s or '90s. Weird and Barbalien are '50s characters with some history as well, Weird specifically a '50s character with a later ('70s or '80s) spin put on him. Dragonfly was probably the "newest" character if we think of them as being part of an established universe. But all of them probably had at least a decade's worth of adventures behind them, and most of them multiple decades.

This is a combination "introducing the team" arc - they each get an extended flashback to show their origins and life back in Spiral City - and examination of how well they're all getting along here on the farm. Abe is doing best: he's making time with a local age-appropriate waitress (ex-wife of the unpleasant local sheriff) and finally gets into her pants during this story. Gail is doing worst: she's stuck in the superhero body of her nine-year-old self and has been repeating the same grade in a crappy rural school every year. Barbalien might be becoming a churchgoer. Dragonfly is mystical and detached, and clearly has Deep Secrets that readers will need to wait to learn. Weird is barely sane at the best of times, fading in and out of reality. Talky is just keepin' on keepin' on.

Near the end, there is a Shocking Event from Outside, and everyone who has ever read a superhero comic will immediately see the next three or four plotlines coming out of that. (Most obviously: Black Hammer II! The sensational character find of whatever-the-hell-year-this-is!)

I'm being pretty dismissive here, because this is all very deeply derivative stuff. Lemire makes that clear in the sketches and other materials collected after the story: there are even '80s DC Universe-style character sheets for all of the major characters (and several who didn't make it in). The derivative-ness is the point. This is a story for people who want more stories about superheroes like these, written by someone who understands how actual human beings talk and drawn by someone who has experienced actual cast shadows, studied the ways clothing actually drapes, and experienced the touch of actual human women.

That is not my particular jam, but I've started this, so I think I'm going to try to read it far enough at least to see how they get back to Spiral City. (And how long Black Hammer I stays dead: my bet is not all that long.) But know that this is very much a "wouldn't it be cool if Jeff Lemire could write <insert character here> without those suits at DC screwing it all up?" book.