Feetal’s Gizz! We’re at the end of this miniseries already? Damn! Time sure flies when you’re writing about a sadistic, alien psychopath, huh? Yep. I remember my first experience with the Lobo character. My brother, SymbiEric, and I were opening up packs of DC Cosmic Cards in my mom’s car after eating out at our favorite restaurant, Giovanni’s Pizza. As we greedily looked through our now grease-covered, newly-acquired acquisitions, one of us came across the Main Man’s card. And after looking at that unique visage and reading the information on the back, I was totally hooked! Anyway, enough about me. It’s time once again for our “hero” to take center stage for the last time. Enjoy, Legions of the Unspoken!
Lobo was finding his vacation time on Revel-7 to be a tad on the boring side. Where was the action? Where was the depravity? Where were the scantily-clad women? Sigh. This was definitely not what the Main Man signed on for. Miss Tribb overhead him complaining and scoffed. Maybe he’d be more comfortable with a destructive riot, some unprovoked murder, etc? Lobo grinned in response. He picked Tribb up under his arm and carried her over to a coat hook on the outside of the room’s closet door. He hung her there, suspended by her collar, and slammed the door to the room shut. He then went on his merry way in search of a communication device. (Man. Respect your elders, ‘Bo. At least iron her wrinkles out before hanging her up. Ha! Damn. This series is making me sick and twisted! I like it!)
At L.E.G.I.O.N. headquarters, Vril Dox paced frantically and slammed his gloved fist into his office wall. How could his plans have gone so awry? Now five parties bent upon Lobo’s demise were about to converge upon a renowned vacation planet and it was all his fault! As he mentally went over his options, a L.E.G.I.O.N. operative knocked on the door. It seemed as if Lobo had hacked the Revel-7’s communications network for the entire planet! Vril switched on his viewing screen. Lobo quickly came into view. He stated his feelings of boredom and announced that the denizens of this world had five hours to evacuate before he began the massacre! The screen went as blank a Vril’s facial expression. Utter chaos erupted on Revel-7 as an entire population tried to evacuate the planet at once! Lobo sat back and enjoyed the show he’d created! (That’s…..friggin’…..awesome! The dude’s a dark genius I tells ya! Oh to only be in my early twenties again and to party with the Main Man. But middle age is just as cool…..sniffle…..)
At that precise moment, the grannies and the truckers both entered the planet’s orbit. They quickly became aware of one another and watched carefully, ready to strike should they suddenly be provoked. Next, Lobo’s little biker fan club arrived on scene. Next were the space police! The truckers weren’t prepared for the sudden appearance of the law enforcement ship and they collided, killing everyone aboard both vessels! The large explosion annihilated the gang of bikers as well! (Well, that went slightly awry, didn’t it? Ooooh! Fireworks of death! Ahhhh!) While the Main Man’s enemies accidentally murdered one another, he stood, blissfully aware of all of this, singing bad karaoke on stage! Then Lobo was stricken with a crisis of conscience. Did he leave the old lady behind and party it up? Did he break his word for the first time in his life? He walked away from his room. He didn’t get far though before he roared some obscenities and returned for his ex-teacher.
The grannies arrived planetside and saw all of the obscene peep shows and porn shops littering the surface! They now had a new mission in life! They opened fire on the buildings! This barrage destroyed the incoming fleet of the dance/theatre company! As more and more of Lobo’s enemies fell from the skies, he admired their explosive deaths, oblivious to who they were or that they were here for him in the first place! (Men! Am I right, ladies? On the sadder side of things…..all of that alien pornography…..lost forever. Sob. Shudder.) The Main Man rocketed past the carnage upon his space-hawg with his complaining passenger in back. Soon after, Vril Dox shut the door to his office and nearly jumped out of his green skin as he heard a gruff voice from behind. Turning, he saw Lobo and his legless captive. When questioned about her missing limbs, he merely replied that women were always losing one thing or another.
Lobo handed over the older Czarnian woman. Vril was then forced to admit that Lobo had done a good job. She did arrive alive after all. Mission accomplished. Satisfied with this, Lobo then marched over to Miss Tribb, took her head in his powerful arms, and snapped her neck! Dox looked at Lobo in shock! Lobo spoke in passing that no-one ever said she had to live after delivery! He laughed maniacally as he left the office. Vril Dox attempted to rub away the instant pain emanating from his temples. (Note: Only one teacher was harmed during the writing of this particular series of articles. )
End.
P.S. The aforementioned trading card. (Oddly missing the Giovanni’s Pizza grease. Go figure.) Thanks for the trade, SymbiEric. Love ya!
Welcome back, Unspokenites! Wow! Are we really almost done with this miniseries? That didn’t take long. I mean, I took forever to write about it, but it’s still almost done. So, what’re your thoughts on this limited series? Leave a comment so I feel all warm and special in my inside-y parts. And now, back to the story…..
To say Vril Dox was angry was an understatement! He had cleverly sent Lobo after the one person that he’d want to murder most in the galaxy, thus stoking his rage so he’d not only murder rivals of Vril’s like the police chief, but take out others of the criminal element like those Lobo-loving bikers. It was all too perfect. If he was lucky, all converging parties as well as Lobo himself would all perish. But no! Now Lobo had to turn up missing! Vril Dox wanted answers! Where in the known galaxy was the Main Man? (Brilliant scheme, but I wouldn’t poke the bear like this. Being on Lobo’s bad side is like calling out a woman on her memory. A death sentence!) Just then, the interested parties began to arrive in an asteroid field. And still, no Lobo!
Elsewhere, Lobo shakes the cobwebs from his head as he struggles to rise to his feet. Looking over, he sees the now-legless Miss Tribb in the corner of this strange room. He holds his pained head as he complains about her not warning him of this obviously hostile spacecraft. Now they had been gassed and imprisoned. This of course started a verbal battle of words that caused the duo to be gassed once again! As Lobo and Tribb lost consciousness this time, cloaked men spoke to one another. “Bee” would know what to do with their prisoners. When they both awoke once again, they found themselves on a stage! There was a sign that read “14th. Annual Orothography Commandos’ Spelling Bee”. Only cloaked monks sat in the audience. One announced it was time for the bee to begin! (Even I’m at a loss for words here…..)
But before the spelling bee could officially start, an elder monk explained to the prisoners on stage that it was their holy mission to bring correct grammar and literacy to the universe. The rules were simple: 1. Spell or die. 2. Spell correctly for your freedom. 3. No gum chewing. 4. All judge’s decisions are final. 5. And no sudden outbursts. (Well, I can definitely see killing someone over obnoxious gum chewing. Some people are annoying as hell as they smack their lips. Grrr! Pass me my meds, Mrs. Symbifan. Ahhhh! Thanks.) The competition begins. As the others spell their given words, they’re executed mercilessly for small mistakes! Lobo does great as he’s given words like “genocide” or “mutilation”. Miss Tribb of course spells her words flawlessly. This goes on until only Lobo, Tribb, and one other being are left! Sensing trouble, Lobo blows in the other alien’s oversized ear! He cries out in alarm! This means death due to sudden outburst! All that remain now are the two Czarnians. Teacher and delinquent pupil.
But the Main Man wasn’t going down without a fight. He proclaimed to the druids that this competition wasn’t fair as his opponent was once a teacher. Outraged at this, Miss Tribb retorted that yes, she was once a teacher. A teacher that he had recently mangled. The next thing he knew, Lobo awoke, suspended in chains, for the crime of harming one who would teach others! Tribb smiled gleefully! (I don’t know. I could think of some teachers from my past that deserve the chain treatment instead! Monsters!) But Lobo had had enough. As the cloaked men took aim, he broke through his chains and paid them all back in spades! He left no-one alive when all was said and done! This was almost a blessing judging by the way that they were mangled!
After Lobo and his disgruntled passenger were free and at a safe spaceport, the Main Man called Vril Dox to check in. He told his boss that they would be late as he was going to Revel-7 for some much-needed rest and relaxation. He then hung up, leaving Vril to wonder where he’d heard of that sector. Suddenly it hit him. Lobo had just given his whereabouts over an unsecured line. Not only that, but Revel-7 was a vacation planet! And when all of Lobo’s enemies arrived after hearing the news, it’d be nothing more than a planet-sized graveyard! Vril groaned. Meanwhile, on Revel-7, Miss Tribb complained like usual, but Lobo just told her to shut it for once and enjoy her Mai Tai! (I’ll take a Shirley Temple. Shaken, not stirred.)
Greetings, Legions of the Unspoken! Emily Scott here with yetanothertantalizinground of telling you about a comic that never got to fully explore its potential! Come one, come all and gather ’round to gasp at the abandoned character development! Marvel at the missing resolutions! And if you’re very brave, try your hand at wildly speculating where the unexplored plot points would have eventually lead!
I kid, but as the links demonstrate, a lot of interesting and worthwhile comics never got the chance see how good they could really get, and each one makes me a little sad and wistful, even as I’m simultaneously glad I got to discover them at all. As fans of, say, Firefly or The Clash will tell you (whether you want them to or not), it can be rough to contemplate what might have been with any art that speaks to you, but as the links also demonstrate, good art goes away abruptly all the time, and there’s no use being histrionic or too sentimental about it. Sometimes you read a fun comic, and then there isn’t any more of it, and it’s a bummer. Such is the case here. So without further ado and sans the gnashing of teeth and rending of garments, let’s cut right to the Chase. (You knew that was coming. Hell, I made it the title of the article.)
Anyone else really want to know what Martian Manhunter is watching?
Chase, a DC comic published from the beginning to not quite the end of 1998, follows one Cameron Chase, a rookie agent with the Department of Extranormal Operations. (Its name calls to my mind the opposite of what it’s meant to. I picture of bunch of agents in suits investigating, like, really normal things. EXTRA normal things.) Its ten issues, mostly written by Dan Curtis Johnson, drawn by J. H. Williams III, and inked by Mick Gray, paint a character who feels very of her time but also slightly ahead of it.
Chase is cynical but determined, brave and unafraid to take action, but flawed in more than enough believable ways to keep her far away from fulfilling any Strong Female tropes. She might not feel quite as novel a character in a time when even non-comic readers know the name Jessica Jones, but in 1998 there was a dearth of female characters in any medium written complexly enough to wear their strengths and their weaknesses equally well, and there’s still one now. I may have gotten some 90s nostalgia reading Chase, but there’s not much about it that couldn’t have just been written today and still feel pretty fresh.
Someone getting kneed in the groin never goes out of style as a reliable source of comedy.
There also aren’t a ton of characters who can slot right in to as many different settings as Chase can, but that’s one of the benefits of a perpetually put out character. She feels just as natural rolling her eyes at Batman or scoffing at the Teen Titans as she does sneering at weird mystical creatures or quipping at an Artificial Intelligence. Her scorn makes her feel relatable in unrelatable situations, where you could see why a detachment from her surroundings would make her a top notch investigator. She has a disdain for the superhero (pardon me, metahuman) world in particular, and her choice to inhabit that world anyway and the ways in which she belongs there more than she knows seemed as though they would have been pivotal emotional conflicts had the title continued.
I am retroactively sad for 15-year-old me that Vampires of Angst is not a real band.
Chase’s first mission finds her in Ohio investigating a case that would fit right into today’s world (well, today’s world if people had superpowers). Jerry, a high school kid sick of getting picked on by a chadbro actually named Chad, is set off by the sight of his crush with his tormentor and unleashes a pyrokinetic blast. Chase and her handler, Agent Sandra Barrett, track Jerry down, and Barrett tells him he will be sent to a training facility for “talented” youth, a decision that does not sit well with Chase. (This is another conflict that seems like it also would have been expanded on in further issues had there been more. There are references to a list generated by standardized testing used to identify children who likely have powers, and in a later issue, you see a newspaper with the headline “Govt. kidnapping super kids!”)
Chad ends up dying from his injuries, and the town shows up to Jerry’s cell out for his blood. Jerry escapes with another pyrokinetic blast, and Chase finds him by correctly guessing that he is heading for his crush’s house. Before Jerry can do any more damage with his abilities, something inside Chase reaches out and dampens Jerry’s fire. Chase decides not to tell anyone how she was able to counteract his powers, considering she is still new to the DEO, has already had an ideological disagreement with how they handle metahumans on her first mission, and has wholly negative feelings about those with powers anyway. And, you know, shadowy government agencies, real or fictional, don’t always have the best track record at handling things they don’t understand particularly well. So probably a good call on her part.
Chase’s next mission sends her off to South America to investigate an Artificial Intelligence called the Construct that had taken up residence in a temple and was a day away from taking over the world’s computer network when the Justice League shut it down. Amanda Waller informs Chase that there is still a heat output in the temple and sends her to investigate with, you guessed it, the Suicide Squad!
This panel tells you just about everything you need to know about how well they work together.
The mission goes about as well as you would expect, with the Suicide Squad amusingly annoying the piss out of Chase, then deciding to go with Plan B (escape) when the conflict between some insurgents and the soldiers holed up in the temple prevent them from accomplishing their objectives. Chase attempts to stop them, which leads to her power-dampening powers flaring up on Copperhead, and she falls down a cliff and ends up in the custody of the soldiers. Those soldiers turn out to be form Soviet Intelligence, who are apparently just kind of bored since the Soviet regime collapsed and scavenging for information in the temple. They stick Chase into the Construct’s interface, since they don’t know what it will do to a human, and she is informed that the Construct has infiltrated the Soviets’ armor with plans to take over the world’s systems next.
Chase does manage to escape with that valuable information after kneeing her captor in the crotch (see above), so it’s not a total wash, but she assumes incorrectly that her next assignment, babysitting the Teen Titans, is a punishment for the previous mission’s failure. Her misconception is corrected by the DEO’s director, Mister Bones, who she discovers is a talking skeleton. (Am I the only one who would read a title that’s nothing but a walking, talking skeleton engaging in mundane bureaucratic tasks to work his way up the ranks?) Bones tells her that a lot of European law and intelligence agencies are suddenly willing to exchange information with the DEO now, and since no good deed goes unpunished, Chase’s reward is to guard just the sort of people she can’t stand!
The real star of this issue, however, is not its titular character, any of the Teen Titans, or even Booster Gold, who shows up seemingly for no other reason than to rag on the Titans for his action figure being better than theirs. No, the real star of this issue for me is the villain, spoiling for a fight, and ready to introduce the world to his new group of henchmen, the Clockwatchers. It’s time (I said it) for the Clock King.
Could he be wearing any more timepieces?
To be honest, there’s nothing beyond a really cool design that makes me like the Clock King so much, and his team gets handled pretty quickly by the Teen Titans and Chase’s still-hidden power. He and his Clockwatchers are mostly played for comedy, which is all worth it for the scene where they squabble about taking the bus:
If this were really New York, nobody would be staring at them, no matter how many guys with clocks for faces were on the bus.
Chase is injured in the fight, and while she is laid up in the hospital, we get the chance to hear a story about one of her pre-DEO P.I. exploits, an encounter which Klarion the Witch Boy. This issue also gives us a closer look at the characters who make up Chase‘s supporting cast, her superhero obsessed sister Terry who has been displaced by an earthquake in Gotham, a vagrant named Knob with a penchant for the paranormal, and Chase’s boyfriend Peter.
I enjoy the way her relationship with Peter is handled because it is a prominent part of her life and interferes with and buoys the rest of her life in realistic ways. So often females characters are entirely defined by their romantic relationships or those relationships are presented as impediments to some mythical idea of “having it all,” so it’s always refreshing to see the situation handled with more nuance. When they bicker, it feels lived in, and the shadow of past grievances can be heard in their words. Peter may flirt dangerously with being something of a useless boyfriend cliche who only serves to, like, hold her back, man, but he always seems to be pulled back before he can cross that line. He may not be crazy about, you know, getting a job, but he proves his worth with some 1337 haxor skills, and when he argues with Chase about her work with the DEO, it feels like the words of someone who truly cares rather than someone trying to keep her down.
But for real, look at that guy. He’d be Mr. November on a calendar of dashed expectations.
Chase’s relationship with her family and the particular nature of her opposition to superheroes is explored in the next issue when she and her sister are stuck on an elevator. Chase is tired of hearing about the stories in her sister’s superhero tabloids and snaps, revealing a tragic past her sister is wholly ignorant of. Their dad, who Terry was lead to believe died in a benign way, was in fact a mask who belonged to a group of do-gooders. He was known as the Acro-Bat, which is both a great and a stupid name. What is just a great name is the moniker of the group of masks he belonged to: The Justice Experience.
Who’s signing the petition with me for a Major Flashback solo title?
It’s kind of hard to blame Chase for being embarrassed by this piece of her family’s past, considering her dad is the only one of his friends who looks like an out-and-out dweeb, amirite? These wannabe heroes got into a fight with a villain group called the House of Pain (You’re hearing Jump Around in your head right now, aren’t you?), and a woman was caught in the crossfire and died. The man who loved her was less than pleased with the Justice Experience, as you might imagine, and he begins to take them out one by one. The comic goes from “Haha, look at these silly vigilantes in their silly costumes,” to, “Oh Jesus Christ, that’s brutal,” real quick when you see the aftermath of his revenge.
C’mon, bro, you could have just gotten a knife or something. Like are you actually eating him? That’s next level revenge.
The Justice Society of America veterans are eventually enlisted to take care of this threat, sparing anyone else from being maybe sort of eaten, but leaving lasting scars of Chase’s psyche. Terry is understandably indignant that no one told her the truth sooner, but she doesn’t hold it against her sister very long. That’s good news for Chase because she will need all her focus on her next mission, which sends her to Gotham, to properly verbally cut Batman down to size, once of my favorite things in the title.
The gist is there is a new drug mutating its users, who now look demonic. The DEO and the DEA have been experimenting with thyroidal mutagens, which only one corporation in Gotham is licensed to use. Chase sees Batman skulking around the place, and when they return together the next day, they discover the doctor who designed the mutagen went missing with the drug in the days after the earthquake. The doctor had been growing increasingly paranoid that the government wanted to steal his work to create superheroes and supervillains. They find two more kids who’ve been mutated, and Batman turns up to stop them. Chase shoots one of them who is about to get the drop on Batman, and he has, what she will later describe in a way that makes her one of my heroes forever, a Bat-Tantrum.
“You’re….welcome?”
I’ve got to go with Chase on this one. I first read this comic right after seeing the second season of Netflix’s Daredevil, and I was so tired of Matt Murdock’s smug sliding scale of morality, that I was happy to see someone pretty sane just take some decisive action without wringing her hands a whole bunch about it. I understand why the taking of a life is a huge moral dilemma in a lot of comics (and obviously in a plenty of real world scenarios), but it seems like it’s usually someone on the Punisher’s level of not ok that you see characters fall on this side of things. Seriously, though, if you ever see a large demon creature trying to rip me apart, you certainly have my permission to do whatever it takes to stop them without spending a lot of time considering if they might be able to be changed back.
The doctor escapes, and the mutagen is recovered, at which point we find out Chase’s presence has been a cover for her real mission, which is to find out if Batman is a lone nut. Since she had previously met him in her first appearance, in Batman #550, she is able to confirm that it is the same man and not a group of men all using the mantle Batman.
Yep, would still read a comic of nothing but this guy smoking and muttering to himself while he does paperwork.
Chase uses the pretense of trying to find the doctor to stay in Gotham, and Peter continues to be marginally useful with hackzor assistance to try and smoke Batman out. He eludes their attempts, at which point we find out it was actually the Oracle they were tracking all along. She warns Batman, who is already aware the Chase is spying on him, which he probably can’t be too upset about, considering he is already spying on her. Oh, those kooky spooks!
Chase attends a party at Gotham Broadcasting, where she uses all her secret agent and private eye skills to come to the startling conclusion that Batman must be the guy in charge of GBC, since Batman has to be using its satellite. Well, in all fairness the guy was standing next to Bruce Wayne. Ok, seriously, in all fairness, that man is the Sentinel, Alan Scott, so it’s not like she was completely off base on the whole him being a superhero thing.
Chase encounters Batman again, where she learns some less than savory stuff about the agent she was working with on the case, and Batman delivers the world’s most hypocritical advice about revenge not healing the death of a parent. At least, it would be the world’s most hypocritical advice if it were actually Batman and not Alan Scott doing Batman a solid.
Even knowing it’s not Batman, I still am getting riled up.
Chase….chases him across the top of some buildings to tell him just how wrong he is, and “Batman” falls through a roof. Chase considers taking his mask off while he’s dazed, but decides not to, saying that her actions haven’t been motivated by hatred but a desire to keep anyone else from going through what she went through. Her proof her intentions are good will be to keep his identify safe. We find out the ol’ switcheroo was Nightwing’s idea to throw Chase off the scent of both Wayne and Scott’s identities, but Batman, of course, has to be the smartest guy in the room, saying that he knew Chase didn’t really want to know but she had to discover it for herself.
And that’s about that for Chase the title, even though Chase the character would make plenty of other appearances in other titles. As I said earlier, I’ll do no bemoaning there’s not more. It was good, I enjoyed it, and you probably would too. Chase has also recently been portrayed on Supergirl by the fantastic Emma Caulfield, so she has been far from forgotten even if her solo title was regrettably short lived. What will hopefully not be short lived is your enthusiasm for the subject of my next article, Valiant’s Magnus, Robot Fighter. How can you not be enthusiastic for something with such a great name? See you then, Legions!
The Unspoken Decade: 90's Comic Book Blog Extraordinaire 