Written by Gerry Conway, David A. Kraft, and Bob Rozakis
Penciled by Pablo Marcos and Rich BucklerSinestro, Gorilla Grodd, Captain Cold and more star in stories from SECRET SOCIETY OF SUPER-VILLAINS #1-
1510, DC SPECIAL #27,DC SPECIAL SERIES #6, SUPER-TEAM FAMILY #13-14, JUSTICE LEAGUE OF AMERICA #166-168, CANCELLED COMICS CAVALCADE #2and THE AMAZING WORLD OF DC COMICS #11.
Look out, 1970s Earth-1 DC heroes! Here comes a hardcover full of your… well, maybe not greatest enemies, but… well, some are pretty fierce, I guess… I dunno, uh, maybe we should just talk about this after the jump.
Not long ago, former Marvel EIC Jim Shooter got on his blog and posted his recollection of the ill-fated 1980s Justice League / Avengers crossover. The story was originally plotted by Gerry Conway, and Shooter’s comments on that plot lit up his comments sections. In responding to one of the commenters, Shooter himself said: “Gerry Conway is one of the smartest people you could ever meet. He’s also a tremendously skilled and talented writer. He can write brilliantly. Why doesn’t he always do so? I believe that sometimes he doesn’t care and sometimes he thinks it doesn’t matter.” And so, as its latest deluxe hardback archival reprint, DC Comics has brought us one of Conway’s series that must have mattered least: The Secret Society of Super-Villains.
Conway started off as both writer and editor of the book, but by number three, David Anthony Kraft (later to run Comics Interview magazine in the 80s and 90s) had stepped in, and after two issues of him, Bob Rozakis (DC’s “Answer Man” and then-scribe of Superman and Green Arrow backups) took over — only for Gerry Conway to return by book’s end for the final stretch of issues collected here. Three writers in ten issues, all continuing a single plotline, more or less. The Internet would lynch a comic book company for less than that these days. Really, though: if Secret Society is what happens when writers play red rover, then the Internet probably has the right idea.
The idea of villains flocking together and pursuing shared interests — that is, greed and revenge — wasn’t new when Secret Society debuted in 1976. (Marvel’s Super-Villain Team-Up had debuted in 1975, even — and outlasted SSSV by two issues and two years, largely by switching to an annual publishing schedule toward the end of its run.) In the 2000s, the idea of villains unionizing and behaving like governments or corporations was run into the ground mercilessly, between Wanted, Dark Reign, the Society (DC’s Infinite Crisis-era update of this very book), et cetera. Reading these old issues of Secret Society of Super-Villains in that modern context makes the stories seem even more bizarre and inconsequential, honestly.
The entire thing is a house of cards. A clone of the Paul Kirk Manhunter, dressed like a post-disco karate instructor parade float, forms a team of villains — Mirror Master, Captain Cold, a French Star Sapphire, Grodd, Copperhead, the Earth-2 Wizard, blah blah — under the premise of getting each other’s backs and making off like bandits. Manhunter is a hero, though, and mostly seems to be running this enterprise as an excuse to make the villains team up and hurl themselves into situations where they get captured, or something. As plans go, it’s pretty awful — so Manhunter brings in Captain Comet, a then-forgotten (now just half-forgotten) hero, to pose as a villain and help him… do something, anyway. It turns out Manhunter financed this enterprise by getting a small business loan from Darkseid, who takes two issues to show up and demand Earth be handed over to him. It just goes on like this, without much rhyme or reason. Villains come and go. At times, the book tries to position the Secret Society as anti-heroic figures by putting them up against even worse villains; at times, it’s pretty much a Justice League comic guest-starring the Secret Society. None of it is ever particularly coherent, except for the precision parody of Stan Lee in the form of Fourth World hype-man Funky Flashman (second word of dialogue out of his mouth: “marvelous,” of course). That this is a book full of lines like “Don’t you know violence often has a boomerang effect? Especially when it’s directed at Captain Boomerang!” and “So speaks ________!” doesn’t make the medicine go down any easier.
Continued belowWhy exactly Secret Society of Super-Villains needs an archival hardcover is anyone’s guess. The art — by Pablos Marcos and Rich Buckler — conforms to the DC house style of the time, consistently good but almost never great. The writing, as mentioned above, is scattershot at best; reading it all in one sitting, the tonal shifts between, say, Conway’s rapping-with-the-reader over-captioning and Kraft’s more or less total lack thereof can be jarring. As a curiosity, it has some marginal value; fans of any particular villain will probably end up disappointed if they’re buying this just for French Star Sapphire or Mirror Master or whoever their favorite is. The only reason I can imagine for giving it such fanfare is the relative historical importance to the DCU: this is the first significant comic book after Jack Kirby’s temporarily-aborted Fourth World Epic to feature Darkseid and his henchmen. (I refuse to consider an issue of 1st Issue Special significant in any way whatsoever.)
The hardcover collects the first ten issues of the Secret Society of Super-Villains, an issue of DC Special that they featured in, and the relevant content from an issue of The Amazing World of DC Comics — a 70s magazine DC produced about their comics products — that features an entire alternate first issue, scrapped and redone from scratch for the published version. As extras go, that’s pretty neat, but the whole thing seems unnecessarily lavish. The book is printed on very nice paper, but its colors haven’t been remastered much if at all, resulting in a lot of sharp, vivid patches of primary colors. These stories would have worked just as well as a Showcase edition — and all fifteen issues of the book would have fit, too, plus the stuff from the original solicit that didn’t make it in either (refer to the struck-out portions at the top of this post). I could see paying under twenty bucks for newsprint reprints of this stuff, but at forty American dollars, there’s just not enough here to even think of recommending it.
Final Verdict: 5.0 / A well-tuned piano playing an ugly, ugly song
