This, my dear hearts and gentle people, is that blessed event for the unnamed super-team of Jeff Lemire's Black Hammer comics. [1] (See here for the previous volume and here for the first volume, if you're unfamiliar.) Oh, you may quibble that they have already met quite a lot of other superheroes and villains, fighting and teaming up and generating a lot of Licensable Content. But all of those previous encounters were from Lemire's universe as well; those calls were all coming from inside the house.
For the first time here, someone else deigned to have a play-date with Black Hammer, to let their toys play with the Black Hammer toys, to touch the dolls' faces together to make them kiss. Those heroes are the current Justice League, the someone is DC Comics, and it is a bit like Barbie and GI Joe in the hands of an hyperactive eight-year-old.
The story is Black Hammer/Justice League: Hammer of Justice!, possibly the laziest possible title for this story. (The exclamation point might have taken a moment of thought; thus the "possibly.") It's written by Lemire with art by Michael Walsh and colors by Nate Piekos; I imagine someone on the DC side kibitzed editorially to keep the JL on-brand as well.
Amusingly to me, the Black Hammer gang are still their core '80s incarnations while the JL is the current (I think) modern incarnations. Sure, separate universes don't need to line up their timelines exactly, but wouldn't it be more fun if Lemire had used the contemporaneous bwa-ha-ha era League? Or, possibly even better, the Detroit League? Ah, well.
In any case, the plot is the usual: a Mysterious Someone appears to both teams in their normal milieu (the BH gang grumping on the farm; the JL punching Starro) and swaps their places for making-mischief reasons. In a twist that is never explained, the JL immediately believe they've been on the farm for ten years, and mope about that, but the BH gang are aware of actual reality and spend most of their time squabbling with other Justice Leaguers.
The plot from there is...well, there's that squabbling and moping, which takes up a lot of pages, then the inevitable Reveal of the Mysterious Someone, which is played up big but is one of the few obvious candidates and doesn't really lead to anything, then, finally, as the play-date is ending, all of the dolls need to go back into their respective boxes separately, so they can stay in mint condition for the collector's market. Lemire does throw out what may be a hook for another story, but it would need to be another DC Crossover, so let's hope he gets good grades in school and does all his chores, so maybe there will be another play-date.
At the end of the book, we get what seems to be thirty pages of variant covers for the five issues of this miniseries, and I have nothing coherent to say about that.
I cannot take a single thing about Black Hammer seriously for a second, even while reading it. It is so deeply pastiche that there's nothing substantial about it. If you are less cynical about superhero comics than I am, you may enjoy this on a more normal level. But it's well-done - the characters talk like human beings and are drawn in a solid modern style - so it amusing on whatever level you can connect to it on. Black Hammer is not bad; it's never been bad. It's just deeply pointless and creepily incestuous.
[1] Black Hammer was a guy; he's dead now. His daughter later becomes the new Black Hammer, and another woman who looks very much like her becomes another version a hundred years later. And I think there was one before the main guy, but Lemire hasn't told any stories with the old dead one yet. This is superhero comics; names are just trademarks, and trademarks have to be used or they will be lost.
The team, on the other hand, has no trademark, no identity, since they're drafting on the Black Hammer name and it's far too late to create something new now, ten books in.
No comments:
Post a Comment