Pick of the Week

Written by Joe Kubert, Brian Buniak, & Sam Glanzman
Illustrated by Joe Kubert, Brian Buniak, & Sam Glanzman
Cover by Joe Kubert

Size: 48 pages
Price: 4.99

When we lost Joe Kubert on August 12 of this year, we lost one of the greats of the industry; a true comic book legend. So it was a wonderful and welcome surprise that we got not one, but two comics this week featuring new work by Kubert, both published by DC Comics. One, is purported to be the last story that he ever wrote and drew. The other is the Pick of the Week.

Joe Kubert Presents is a six-issue limited series curated by the man himself before his death. The first issue features four stories, and in-between the third and fourth story there is a little essay by Kubert that explains the project and how it came to be. In it, he says that when he looked around the current comic book landscape he didn’t see a lot of the kind of stories that he was interested in being done by creators he admired, guys who had long since retired but who were still capable of producing excellent work. So when he explained that to former DC Comics President & Publisher Paul Levitz (this tells you how long this book has been in the works; Levitz stepped down from his position in 2009), Kubert was tasked with putting together the kind of anthology series that he would want to read. And so he did.

The first thing you see when you open Joe Kubert Presents #1 is the face of the man himself as he takes a quick break at his drawing table to usher you into the first story like a comic book Rod Serling. And what a first story it is! Two of the DC Comics characters that Kubert is most famous for drawing — probably second only to Sgt. Rock — are Hawkman and Hawkgirl. He chooses to open his new series with a story of the winged warriors of Thanagar rather than the hard-bitten heroes of Easy Company. (Although we won’t stay completely away from World War II, more on that later.) Kubert writes and draws the tale of Hawkman and Hawkgirl’s first arrival on the planet Earth from their native Thanagar. They have been sent to Earth on a fact-finding scientific mission because Thanagar is afraid that now that Earthlings have achieved space flight, that they will spread their hunger and disease and war throughout the other inhabited planets. Simply titled “Hawkman”, this was not only a wonderfully drawn story that featured relevant and real social issues over which to ponder, it made me angry. It made me angry because for years DC Comics has had no idea what to do with Hawkman. They keep trying to reintroduce him into the DCU with “cleaned up continuity” that is, inevitably, much more convoluted and confusing than it was before. This has been going on since I was in high school in the 1990s. That is how long DC has screwed up trying to fix Hawkman. How do you fix Hawkman? It’s simple, and it took a Golden Age master to show everybody how to do it: You just wipe everything away and start over. Really, truly start over. This short story featuring Hawkman and Hawkgirl coming to Earth for the first time and saving an African tribe from polluters is the best Hawkman story that I’ve read in years.

The second story is straight out of the swinging sixties. It’s an Angel and the Ape story written and drawn by Brian Buniak, called “Angel and the Ape”. I don’t know that I’ve ever read an Angel and the Ape story — but I might have, it’s been a long and winding comic book road. I know them mostly from the giant binder of Who’s Who files that I’ve lugged around with me since 1992. She’s a hip blonde chick named Angel O’Day and he’s a talking gorilla cartoonist named Sam Simeon. Together they solve crimes as O’Day and Simeon, Private Detectives. This story is about what you’d expect from a set-up like that. It’s less concerned with being serious than setting up a panel full of jokes, both visual and verbal. This kind of goofy silver age style story was the perfect break before the next two stories, both of which hit you pretty hard.

The third story, entitled “Spit” might be the most startling thing that I’ve read in a comic book in a long while. It tells the tale of a wayward orphan nicknamed Spit who has found himself wandering the docks of a hard-scrabble seaport in search of food for his empty belly and shelter from the rain and cold. Kubert returns to write and draw this story in a style that is raw and emotional. He strips his art down to just the pencils, and not just pre-inked pencils either, but pencils meant to stand on their own with thick, heavy lines and deep shading. The result is art that creates as much tension as the story. It’s a tale filled with hard people who spend much of the time hungry, wet, and dirty and you can really feel it in the art in a way that is purely visceral. Kubert did not need an inker or a colorist, he could do it all with just his pencil.

The final story is raw and powerful in its own way.”U.S.S. Stevens” is written and drawn by Sam Glanzman, an 85 year old World War II veteran who served on the U.S.S. Stevens. Here he tells the story of Seaman Jerry Debbitt, Jr., a young kid out of Kansas who just wanted to work the heavy guns with his idol, Gunner’s Mate First Class Patty Scone. And as so many of these stories go, it’s a sad one. This reads very much like a man who has painful memories of the war exorcising some of his demons at the drawing table. Debbitt doesn’t do anything particularly brave and his story isn’t particularly memorable. In fact, I’d bet there were thousands of Jerry Debbitts during the war. But it’s a sad and poignant tale nonetheless, and the final panel hits you like a punch in the gut.

When Joe Kubert first started in comic books, and for the first few decades of his career, the popular comic book landscape looked more like the content of Joe Kubert Presents than it does now. A superhero story, a wacky private investigator story, the story of an orphan taking a job at sea, and a war story. These days? Well, it’s mostly just superhero stories. And as much as I do enjoy superhero stories, I’m glad that before he left us, Joe Kubert took a look around and decided that there was still some room or just a little bit more.

Conor Kilpatrick
This is how it’s done.
conor@ifanboy.com