Today, we look at the debut of Christopher Priest and Denys Cowan’s epic redefining run on Steel.
This is “Look Back,” where every four weeks of a month, I will spotlight a single issue of a comic book that came out in the past and talk about that issue (often in terms of a larger scale, like the series overall, etc.). Each spotlight will be a look at a comic book from a different year that came out the same month X amount of years ago. The first spotlight of the month looks at a book that came out this month ten years ago. The second spotlight looks at a book that came out this month 25 years ago. The third spotlight looks at a book that came out this month 50 years ago. The fourth spotlight looks at a book that came out this month 75 years ago. The occasional fifth week (we look at weeks broadly, so if a month has either five Sundays or five Saturdays, it counts as having a fifth week) looks at books from 20/30/40/60/70/80 years ago.
Today, we go back to November 1996 for the brilliant debut on Steel by Christopher Priest, Denys Cowan and Tom Palmer in Steel #34.
After the Death of Superman, former weapons designer John Henry Irons decided to carry on in the example of Superman and built himself a suit of armor and started to fight crime as the Man of Steel, debuting in Superman: Man of Steel #22 (by Louise Simonson, Jon Bogdanove and Dennis Janke) (well, unless you count the cameos in Adventures of Superman #500)…
When Superman turned out to be only MOSTLY dead, Steel decided to drop the Superman shield from his costume, as he felt that it was unnecessary now that the “true” Superman was back…
He received his own series (written by Simonson and Bogdanova, with art by Chris Batista and Rich Faber), with John moving to Washington D.C. to live with his elderly parents and his sister and her children. The breakout character of the series was John’s niece, Natasha. However, the book was not doing well, so Christopher Priest and Denys Cowan were given a chance to dramatically revamp the book, dropping pretty much every plot from the previous book (including the revelation that Steel had superpowers that allowed him to teleport his armor on to him…yes, really) and also only brought Natasha (as the rest of her family went into witness protection) and Amanda, John’s doctor love interest. Amanda got a job in Jersey City and John agreed to move there and get a job there, as well.
He also debuted a new costume that involved the S back into things…
Great design by Cowan, right? Cowan, by the way, was stellar on this title. Not just great moody artwork, but he also did practically every issue of this run! Tom Palmer was definitely a great help in both regards (the moodiness of the art as well as getting it out on a timely fashion, as Cowan often did breakdowns and Palmer did finishes).
Priest has a wonderful sense of humor and it was shown in the series, like when Steel meets the local police presence, who quickly jokes about how she’s going to be part of his new supporting cast, so she’ll probably be kidnapped by one of his villains at some point…
Natasha, meanwhile, befriended a sweet kid named Paul that she re-named Boris as a joke. Their banter was one of the best things about the series…
Priest knows how to do offbeat better than most any other writer out there, and Steel was definitely offbeat. In that same issue, we discover that Steel’s new armor gained flexibility by losing some of its defensive abilities, so bullets really did affect him, and at the same time, his new hammer ended up getting locked into the engine block of a car he was trying to stop, leading Steel to have to have the entire car towed to his home to eventually get it free. We also meet John’s mysterious boss, Dr. Villain, pronounced WILL-HANE, but, well, yeah, he’s a villain…
Think Homer’s boss, Scorpio, in the classic Simpsons episode where Homer finds himself working for a Bond villain.
Meanwhile, there is an excellent flashback sequence in the issue where Steel visits Superman and tells him how he would like to bring back the shield and Superman is obviously cool with it because he’s, you know, not a jerk, but Superman gets in a great line about how he never thought that Steel had a really good reason to ever STOP wearing the shield, so of course he is happy to see him wear it again…
The issue ends with John and Natasha having a moment together and it is quite adorable. This run didn’t last as long as it should have, but I imagine Priest and Cowan knew they were entering a situation where it was going to be unlikely that the book was going to last much longer, but they at least got over a year’s worth of excellent comic stories and I’ll always appreciate that DC let them do this offbeat and awesome comic book.
If you folks have any suggestions for November (or any other later months) 2011, 1996, 1971 and 1946 comic books for me to spotlight, drop me a line at [email protected]! Here is the guide, though, for the cover dates of books so that you can make suggestions for books that actually came out in the correct month. Generally speaking, the traditional amount of time between the cover date and the release date of a comic book throughout most of comic history has been two months (it was three months at times, but not during the times we’re discussing here). So the comic books will have a cover date that is two months ahead of the actual release date (so October for a book that came out in August). Obviously, it is easier to tell when a book from 10 years ago was released, since there was internet coverage of books back then.
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