Comic Cuts - 28 February 2020

I've had a good week on the new book, Rocket: The First Space-Age Weekly. I have some 60 pages completed and should have the rest of the book finished in a few days. There's some proofing needed, but I can at least get a printed proof at the same time to make sure all the images work.

There were a couple of things niggling at the back of my mind early in the week – a couple of pages that I wasn't happy with and a bit of additional text that I'd slipped in at the end of the book that didn't sit right. The latter was resolved in conversation with David Slinn who confirmed my suspicions that the late section needed to be moved. This was done on Wednesday and I'm much happier with the results. It did mean that I had to reflow the new text into the layouts. As I use InDesign, all the text boxes are linked, so you pop the text into the first box and it automatically flows through the other text boxes. What it doesn't do is take into account any tinkering you've done to make sure text flows properly around images, for instance. Thankfully it didn't take too long to check everything was working OK.

At the time of writing I'm on the last chapter of the introduction. I still have the actual index and other index material (index of creators, index of titles) to do, but Rocket only lasted 32 issues, so they won't take long. I'm hoping that I'll have everything wrapped up by the time I'm writing next week's column.

I promised last week that I'd have the cover finished and... well, you can see it above. In keeping with Bear Alley's other history/index books about comics, I've used Rocket itself as a template, so this is based on an early issue when the first page of the 'Captain Falcon' strip was just a big panel on the front cover. Because the shape of the book is taller and slimmer than the original comic, I redid the logo; I also brought the rocket itself into the foreground (in the comic itself, it disappears behind the logo). The full title of the book is Rocket: The Fist Space-Age Weekly, but, again, I've mirrored the comic so that the subtitle is in the band across the top.

I'm reviewing the second season of Titans below the pic. There are spoilers, so jump to the end of the column if that's something you don't like.

I approached the first season of Titans with a little apprehension. Coming to it late, I'd seen a lot of negative reviews, but felt that it wasn't quite as bad as it had been presented. I said at the time "Wonder Girl shows promise, and Hawk and Dove, introduced in episode two, have potential. They have problems founded in their troubled relationship and troubled pasts, but they have genuine affection for each other."

Troubled relationships and troubled pasts are the driving force of season two. The climax of the first season (Rachel Roth is trapped in a house behind a force field by her father, Trigon; the Titans gather outside) is dealt with in half an hour and Dick Grayson sets up the group at Titan Towers in San Francisco.

Three months later: some of the Titans (Rachel, Jason Todd, Gar Logan) are getting bored of constant training, especially when they are left out of any action that does come along. Dick rescues a young girl and introduces her to the team, but Rose is, in fact, the daughter of Slade Wilson, a.k.a. Deathstroke. The Titans have a history with Deathstroke and some are still looking to avenge the death of Aqualad five years earlier. Deathstroke, meanwhile, blames the Titans for the death of his son Jericho.

Meanwhile, Cadmus Industries has lost two of its test subjects: Subject 13, also known as Connor, is a genetic splicing of Superman and Lex Luthor in a super-strong teen body with plenty of extras (heat-vision, super breath, etc.) but no experience of the world; and his dog, Krypto. They, too, end up at Titan Towers.

The one thing that everyone can agree on, including the cast and anyone watching the show, is that Dick lives up to his name. He manages to bring the Titans together and drive them apart with his attitude of "I know better than you" and "my rules apply to you, not to me". His heart might be in the right place but it's choked by a layer of overwhelming anger and a thick coating of egocentric twattery. That and he's hallucinating conversations with Bruce Wayne.

That said, the show is a vast improvement over some other superhero dramas in its emotional depth. OK, so some of the characters (notably Jason Todd) still act like horny, angry teenagers but there's a good reason—he's a horny, angry teenager. There's a lot of self-righteous angst and arguments between the characters, and even the closest of friends are driven apart. Some are still trying to find their path, or trying to avoid the path they have found themselves on. For the most part, the balance between action and angst worked well, although I will just say that, if you go out into the world to find yourself and when you do you're a coke-snorting wrestler, you might want to look a little further.