DC: The New Frontier, Volume One

I started reading comic books around 1960, not long after I learned to read. And I’d been getting people to read them to me for several years before that, so my earliest memories of comics come from the late Fifties and early Sixties. It’s not surprising, then, that I found an awful lot to like in the trade paperback DC: THE NEW FRONTIER, VOLUME ONE. Written and drawn by Darwyn Cooke, this collects the first three issues of a miniseries set in that time period, the beginning of what comics fans now call the Silver Age. It features a whole slew of DC Comics characters, ranging from the iconic (Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman) to the obscure (Slam Bradley, King Faraday), and a lot in between from big names like Green Lantern and the Flash to more middle-of-the-pack characters like the Martian Manhunter (always one of my favorites) and the Challengers of the Unknown (ditto).

The story actually begins in the waning days of World War II in the Pacific with a chapter devoted to the final adventures of the team known as The Losers – Gunner and Sarge, Captain Storm, and Johnny Cloud, the Navajo Ace. I was particularly taken by this, since one of the first comic books I remember reading was an issue of OUR FIGHTING FORCES which featured a Gunner and Sarge story. From there Cooke follows his huge cast of characters through the Korean War, the Red Scare, the beginnings of the Vietnam War, and the early days of the Sixties. What makes this story different, as DC’s publisher Paul Levitz points out in his introduction to the book, is that characters from different parts of DC’s stable, such as war and superhero and even Western comics, can now all exist in the same universe and interact with each other. I always like a coherent fictional universe, so this appeals to me, too.

There were a few things that bothered me about this book. For all its nostalgic glories, the story seems to wander around rather aimlessly for most of the way and doesn’t really get anywhere until the very end, which means that this collection serves more as a prologue to Volume Two than anything else. That may be perfectly all right once I’ve read Volume Two. Also, the animation-inspired artwork, while pretty effective in places, is just a little too cartoony for my taste. I would have loved to have seen this story illustrated by someone like Neal Adams or Jack Kirby (the latter of which would have been a good trick, of course, since Kirby is no longer with us). I know it’s the curmudgeon in me, but I’ll just never like today’s style of comic book art as much as I like the style of the Sixties and Seventies. I’m generalizing, of course, there are still some very good artists working in comics.

So overall I had a really fine time reading this collection, and I’d recommend it to anybody who was a comic book fan in the late Fifties and early Sixties. I’m looking forward to reading Volume Two as soon as I can find a copy of it.