Black Hammer: Visions, Vol. 2 by Jeff Lemire and a cast of thousands

Just so you know: I wouldn't pay attention to me about superhero comics. If I wasn't already me, I mean. I read very few of them, soured on the form something like twenty years ago, and think of the whole thing as a claustrophobic hall of mirrors, entirely devoted to never doing anything actually new or interesting.

The fact that, even this long after I paid attention to the form, I can still detect originals with half-decent accuracy is no credit to me: it just means the form is that hidebound and dull.

But I do read some of this stuff - mostly, recently, the "Black Hammer" comics usually written by Jeff Lemire and drawn by a rotating crew. And I read them the way some people watch NASCAR, watching and hoping for the crashes.

Black Hammer: Visions, Vol. 2 is the back half of a project from 2021, in which a group of other creators did one-off Black Hammer-verse stories. Is it "in continuity," you breathlessly ask? I dunno. Seems close enough to me. Probably. But these are stories not written by Lemire, not part of a larger plot, not going anywhere. (Insert my usual snarky comment about the core nature of superhero comics.) I read the first half a few months ago; this is the end.

First up is a Batman and Catwoman Daredevil and Black Cat Gravedigger and Bijou story, written by Kelly Thompson, drawn by Leonardo Romero, and colored by Jordie Bellaire. It is stylish and classy, another story of the big musclebound good guy ensnared by the dazzling, gorgeous female lawbreaker with hidden depths. I suppose we should have assumed Gravedigger had a story like that, since all his originals did, and this is it. It does exactly what it needs to do, and does it well.

Cthu-Lou gets another story, very closely paralleling the other stories he and his daughter have already appeared in, written by Cullen Bunn and drawn by Malachi Ward and Matthew Sheehan. As always, he's the Apocalypse Beast that doesn't want the job, so he gets domesticized, urban, darkly comedic versions of Hellboy plots. Here he foils one particular world-conquering plan of his extradimensional master - mostly in a fit of pique at being interrupted in his beer-drinking, TV-watching existence - as of course he will always do.

We return to the Land of Misfit Toys Limbo Land in a story by Cecil Castellucci and Melissa Duffy that asks the question: "what if Wonder Woman was a forgotten minor villain with the powers of Color Kid?" I'm not quite sure why the inhabitants of what's explicitly the home for characters who are not in stories and not being used are fighting with evil forces, since fighting is the core element of a superhero story. But this is another "isn't it sad to be a character without a story" story, another descendent of In Pictopia.

And last is a dark, gritty neo-western from Scott Snyder and David Rubín. It's the origin of The Horseless Rider, the requisite weird vengeance character of this universe - think Spectre or Phantom Stranger - mixed with one specific vengeance-taking.

Again, all four of these stories are professional and slick and solid...and all are deeply derivative and predictable, like a gymnast doing a good version of a required routine at some Olympic event. I may be the Russian judge here, I admit it. But I do wonder, as ever with Black Hammer, what the point of the whole thing is.