New Comics Review: Walt Simonson's "The Judas Coin" (2012)

[about_faces]

My favorite new DC release this whole year has been Walt Simonson's new graphic novel The Judas Coin. However, I'm not quite sure how to recommend it to anyone, since my enjoyment is based on several factors beyond the face-value of the story itself. Or rather, the stories themselves. Ahh, yes, you see what I did there! Unless you didn't, in which case, how awkward.



To explain, The Judas Coin's is actually one single epic told through six short stories, each of which are connected by the common focus/mcguffin/"main character" of the titular shekel, which is quite literally one of Judas Iscariot's thirty pieces of silver.


This art and all other sketches used in this reviews are all from Walt Simonson's official fan page.

After Judas' remorseful attempt to return the blood money, the coin became cursed and subsequently got passed on through the centuries, leaving misfortune and destruction in its wake. We get to see six glimpses of this first-hand through the adventures of old-school DC heroes like the Golden Gladiator, the Viking Prince, Captain Fear, Bat Lash, and Manhunter 2070, not to mention everyone's favorite coin enthusiast, Harvey Dent. It's kinda like The Red Violin with obscure DC characters! And that film already had both Nick Fury and Laufey, king of the Frost Giants! Well, okay, Samuel L. Jackson and Colm Feore, whatever.

Most importantly, The Judas Coin is entirely written and drawn by Walt Simonson, one of the greatest writer/artists in comics history. While he's best known for his definitive run on Marvel's Thor, he's also done a fair amount of work for DC, most notably with his and Archie Goodwin's reinvention of Manhunter back in the 1970's.


This still isn't in print, why now?

So yeah, I'd be excited by the prospect of an entire new graphic novel by Simonson even if I weren't already a huge Two-Face geek with the fanblog to prove it. But of course, I am, and thus The Judas Coin became my personal #1 must-read DC release of 2012. The idea of Simonson writing and drawing a full Two-Face story was exciting not just because poor Harvey has been misused in one muddled mess o' mediocrity after another for the past few years, so if anyone could put him to good use, it'd be Walt Simonson. Then again, maybe not. The character is surprisingly difficult to write well, and Simonson doesn't have any experience with Harvey. Well, not unless you count a single cliffhanger page back in 1979!


As you can see in my review of this story from Batman #312, Irv Novick's subsequent work on the actual Two-Face story is great, but it doesn't quite have the same impact.

So yes, I went in with high expectations, and they were generally met and even occasionally exceeded. All in all, I found The Judas Coin to be a rich and wonderful reading experience by a comics master, one that felt both nostalgic and timeless, and the Two-Face story in particular is now one of my all-time favorites. You know I wouldn't say that lightly.

But even still, I'm reluctant to just recommend this book without explaining just why I enjoyed it so much. For one thing, so much of that enjoyment came out of more than just the stories themselves, which were great on their own but were enhanced the more I learned about the obscure characters and their respective DC eras, thus why I devoted an entire, long-winded post to exploring the obscure DC characters who comprise 5/6ths of the book, a post which Walt himself read and shared on his offical Facebook page oh my god holy crap aaaa.


Heh, me and 22 others. Ha. It's funny because I'm a Two-Face obsessive.

Don't worry, though, you don't need to be an expert to enjoy their stories. Simonson does a great job playing these characters up to their archetypes while keeping their canon histories (what little exists) to a minimum, making these stories perfectly accessible and enjoyable. Just speaking personally, though, gaining familiarity with these characters bumped my enjoyment of The Judas Coin up from "really liked it" to "totally loved it." But I can't speak for everyone else, and I worry that the only people who might get something out of it may only be old-school DC fans and/or people who could stare at Walt Simonson's art all day.


Ooo.

That art aspect is, seemingly for most fans, the biggest selling point of this book. Of the reviews I've found, the majority focus expressly on praising Simonson's artwork while giving minimal mention to his writing, as if his plots, dialogue, and characters are all secondary, if not outright negligible in favor of his artwork. This ties into a prevalent mentality amongst many comics aficionados that the artwork is more important than the story. I recall Wizard once explained why artists were more important than writers by saying, "Writing is vital, but artwork is essential."


Of course, that sometimes depends on just WHO is doing the artwork. /cheapshot

This is probably true, but even still, I'll usually take a great story with crappy artwork over a crappy story with great art. Thankfully, Walt Simonson has proven in his Thor run that his writing chops equal his art talents, and The Judas Coin shows him exploring the limits of both through a variety of different styles. This makes sense considering that The Judas Coin was originally intended to his his own issue of Solo. Unless, of course, you've never HEARD of Solo, in which case--how awkward again!--that won't make much sense at all!



A short-lived DC series published back in 2005, Solo was the brainchild of about_faces favorite Mark Chiarello. In the spirit of Chiarello's previous creative project, Batman: Black and White (which gave creators leeway to tell all kinds of cool Batman short stories), the hook of Solo was that each issue would be dedicated to a single comic artist who would be pretty much given free reign to do whatever they wanted within the DCU, and as a kicker, each issue was completely ad-free. This fantastic series has recently been given a much-needed retrospective over at Comics Alliance, which is very worth reading for anyone curious about one of the most ambitious projects that DC ever greenlit.


Fun fact: this cover for Mike Allred's issue was rejected by DC either because of rights issues with the Adam West show and/or because DC "prefers to minimize any and all reference to the Adam West Batman show." In either case, it was replaced with Wonder Girl doing the Bat-tusi.

The artists featured in Solo weren't big-selling hot names like Jim Lee or Michael Turner, the kinds of Wizard-friendly rock stars who can bump up sales just be drawing a cover or two. No, these were artists like Howard Chaykin, Richard Corben, Jordi Bernet, and Brendan McCarthy, "artist's artists" who are unknown even to regular comics readers but are generally revered by those who know them. This was a thrilling prospect that led to creative leaps and bounds rarely seen within mainstream comics, and it even gave me newfound respect for some artist who I'd written off based on the regular DC gig work. For me, I think my favorite issue has to be Darwyn Cooke's, the entirety of which deserves to be reprinted.



But of course, "artist's artists" don't bring in the big bucks, and rotating anthology books are always poison because who wants to commit to a series where every issue is completely different? As such, even with top-notch work from name artists like Cooke, Tim Sale, and Sergio Aragones (whose stories included the autobiographical comi-confessional I Killed Marty Feldman, which I posted at my personal blog several years ago!), Solo was tragically but inevitably cancelled at issue #12. What's worse, there were reportedly several issues still in the pipeline, with people like Jill Thompson and George Pratt (whose Enemy Ace: War Idyll is one of my all-time favorites) having completed full issues that would never see publication! They're probably mouldering in DC's vault as we speak!


Seriously, if you see this book, get it.

The same fate might have awaited the work Walt Simonson began to produce for his own aborted issue of Solo, but thankfully, he was able to rework and expand his stories into a full-blown graphic novel with the encouragement of DC EiC Dan DiDio. Very cool! So with that kind of backing behind that level of talent, you'd think that DC would be pushing this book as a huge deal, right?



Nope. The Judas Coin was quietly released a couple weeks back to little fanfare and less publicity by DC, who didn't even so much as release preview pages on their blog, much less to any other sites for promotion! What the hell?! Why has this master creator's graphic novel--which had been developed with the full support and blessing of DiDio--gone largely unpublicized and unheralded by fans and comics news sites?

I have my own theories, but the simplest answer may be that the legacy of Solo lives on with The Judas Coin. That this isn't your typical mainstream DCnU fare. This isn't a part of any continuity, nor does cross over into anything important happening right now, nor does it even feature anyone who's really popular aside from Batman. What we have here is a standalone graphic novel featuring obscure DC characters (and one Batman villain who isn't nearly as popular as he should be), all written and drawn by a master creator stretching his abilities with different genres and styles all to tell one single ambitious story. But to most comics fans, it "doesn't matter."



What I'm saying is that The Judas Coin is a perfect embodiment of everything that Solo stood for, and it deserves to be celebrated for that, if for no other reason. But as I've said, I actually DO have other reasons for celebrating the existence of this graphic novel, so let's finally start to examine the book itself on its own merits. I know, it's about damn time, right?





The story opens with a four-page origin of the coin itself, which serves as the inert protagonist of the entire saga. I have to say, building an entire story around one of Judas' thirty pieces of silver is a pretty audacious premise, one that's fraught with many pitfalls that could lose some readers right off the bat.



To Simonson's credit, the coin's theological origins have little impact on the rest of the story, serving only as the impetus to kick off the events over the next couple thousand years. All that matters is that the coin is now cursed. But cursed in what way? It's hard to tell, exactly. For some, it brings bad luck, and for others, it encourages betrayal and violence, but the exact nature of the coin's curse is left up to interpretation.



For the first story, Simonson decides to keep the coin relatively close to its origins by setting it during the Roman Empire, specifically in 73AD, shortly after the Year of the Four Emperors. One of the protagonists of this story is Emperor Vespasian, whom Simonson described in this interview as "an interesting guy, an old soldier who rose to power, and as Roman emperors go not a bad guy." I wouldn't know, as my knowledge of Roman history pretty much begins and ends with I, Claudius, both the book and the miniseries. Brilliant as they are, neither of them are exactly wholly-factual, so I leave it to folks like barcavolio and mothy_van_cleer to fill me in.



In either case, this story has Vespasian disguised as a Legionnaire, sneaking past the bounds of him empire and across the Rhine for mysterious purposes. Accompanying him is Marcus, his faithful bodyguard and friend who, at one time, was once known as the Golden Gladiator. Remember Marcus' Who's Who bio and how it was a complete blank slate beyond his origin? Simonson uses that to his full advantage, jumping the character forward long past his gladiatorial adventure days in his six issues of The Brave and the Bold, beyond his rivalry with Cinna (who doesn't even warrant a mention here), and even beyond his romance with Lucia. Even in the one flashback we get to his final day in the arena, he'd already eschewed his golden armor in favor of more standard gladiatorial fare.



While we get scant details added to Marcus' life between what little we already knew in his original stories to the events of The Judas Coin, the few that Simonson provides turns Marcus into a character who doesn't show us how melancholy and lonely his life has became, but he hides it behind a mask of duty. But Simonson doesn't tell us this outright, keeping Marcus' life largely silent until the end of the tale in favor of focusing on Marcus and Vespasian finding themselves caught in a web of lies, betrayal, and death.



I mentioned earlier that Simonson followed the Solo opportunity by illustrating each segment with a different style. For this one, he drew inspiration from Hal Foster as well as an old Dell Comics adaptation of the movie, Helen of Troy, drawn by John Buscema. Because the internet is amazing, you can read the entire comic here to compare! In keeping with that style, Simonson mainly uses conservative grids of five or six panels, giving this story and old-fashioned feel even as its hero is a hero well past his prime, complete with gray hair and a bald spot.



Besides being the best Golden Gladiator story aside from the character's origin, Blood Peace sets the mood for this whole graphic novel more effectively than the Biblical prologue, giving us a full dose of nostalgic adventure tinged with a modern melancholy for many of the characters involved. This carries through into the second segment with the Viking Prince, which instantly hits the reader with stylistic and historical whiplash.


*whiplash!* Ow, my neck! I'd better call Saul!

Whereas Simonson strove to maintain historical accuracy with his Golden Gladiator segment, here he decided to go Full Wagner even though he had tons of Viking reference left over Thor." The main artistic influence he used for this was the French comic artist Philippe Druillet, which gives Simonson's take on Viking Prince a nice combination of Walt's own distinct style through a Métal Hurlant filter. What I found striking right away was the sheer scope of the forest setting, with impossibly massive trees that reduce the mighty warriors to little more than specks huddled around an ember.



With this story, Simonson's art starts to look more like the kind I expect from the man who gave us Marvel's Thor and DC's Orion, where whole pages seem to crackle with so much life that they defy mere puny panels to contain them. This especially kicks in once Prince Jon is abducted by a tribe of Germanic cultists who plan to sacrifice him using an object which apparently didn't travel far from the Germany area since the Roman era:



As that horrible growling scream off-panel indicates, the story from this point on is pretty much just one big rip-roaring action sequence, and while it certainly displays the Viking Prince being more badass than I'd ever seen him, it doesn't quite resemble the character from the stories I've read. Honestly, the whole story reminded me a lot of a Conan comic, which isn't a bad thing by any means, and the result is a rousing story that actually had me utter aloud "Hell yes!" near the end. Although I possibly said "Hell yes!" with more impressed expletives.

This story ends on a note that echoes the ending of the Golden Gladiator tale, touching upon the idea of "Fate," something which is a recurring theme for a certain scarred villain who will be showing up later on. When all's said and done, that's about the only thing to really take away from the Viking Prince story, as excitingly written and beautifully-illustrated as it is. Much the same can be said for the next segment, entitled Mutiny, which is about... well, three guesses.



While this is a story with the awesome Captain Fear, the true protagonist is his mutinous crewman, Bull, whom Fear had whipped for insubordination after Bull rashly murdered a shopkeeper. As a pirate, Bull is everything Captain Fear isn't: greedy, mindless, unscrupulous, and generally a loathsome sort all around. If he has a single gift, it's the ability to rouse the rabble, and when several months go by at sea without a single plunderer-able ship passing by, Bull sees his chance and accuses the Captain of being a "Jonah," who brings bad luck to the ship. Hmm... first Fate, now Luck? This already is a pretty ideal Two-Face story, especially with a truly duplicitous scumbag like Bull.



Of the six stories in The Judas Coin, this is the only one where Simonson did not explain what influence--if any--he was trying to give with this artwork, so your guess is as good as mine. What strikes me is how rough-hewn all of the characters and settings are, reminding me quite a lot of the artwork of Denys Cowan. Mainly, I'm just remembering what Simonson wrote in the notes for his original Captain Fear story in The Art of Walter Simonson about how "I have always loved old sailing ships and drawing them in a story has always been one of my ambitions," so I can't help but feel like much of this story was an excuse to draw a few pages of battles on and within the ships, with Captain Fear along for the ride.



Unfortunately, Captain Fear himself gets the short end of the stick in this story, and even while he does have survive the mutiny, escape Bull's clutches, and retake his own ship, it doesn't feel like he's given much to do as a character. He's just kind of there to move the plot along, and while I liked this story just fine, I can't help but feel a little disappointed now that I'm more familiar with his fascinating backstory.

Regardless, Captain Fear benefits in this story by being contrasted with the more vulgar Bull, showing that while they may both be pirates, it's Fear who distinguishes himself as being the more intelligent and scrupulous (for a pirate) of the two, and it gives us a glimpse as to what makes Fero such an effective leader. As such, Bull entirely deserves to be the one who ends up getting his unfortunate mitts on the shekel.



The final page of Mutiny is the highlight of the entire story for me, and while I won't spoil it for you, I will say that it ends on a visual punchline of a nautical nature (hint: think Rime of the Ancient Mariner) that nicely continues the graphic novel's secondary theme of luck. While it was subtly handled in Mutiny, that theme becomes somewhat more explicit in the next story with Bat Lash, which naturally concerns that classic western scenario: a poker game.



Based on those panels alone, you can probably guess where this story goes, but suffice it to say that poker games in westerns never, ever go smoothly for anyone involved. Whether or not these players are cheaters--as they usually are--they're always sore losers, so you can bet (hurr) that this game is about to go south very quickly. I could describe more of the plot, but frankly, Bat Lash's story, Ill-Gotten Gains, is the lightest on substance. Thankfully, it's easily the most fun story in the whole book, since Bat Lash has an almost Bugs-Bunny-esque ability to dodge crooks and killers of all stripe using his wits and his mouth.



For this story, Simonson didn't stray too far from the character's origins, using Bat's co-creator (and co-creator of Golden Gladiator!) Nick Cardy as inspiration. While Bat's story here is the lightest of the lot, in some ways it's also the core of The Judas Coin, as this was the first one that Simonson plotted out back when he got the Solo gig. "Because it was a coin I thought about Bat Lash and the old West and gambling houses and poker," Walt said. "By the time I was done showering I had written the entire Bat Lash story in my head. It is actually in the book pretty much the way I thought about it initially; it's the shortest story so in some ways it's the simplest. I wrote everything down, but it gave me the core for the series of stories."



Considering who my favorite character is, I would have been very put out of Simonson released this book with all these themes accompanied by that image and then NOT have used Two-Face. Sure, it seems obvious, but long-time readers of this blog know all too well just how many times writers have told stories about duality, luck, fate, scarring, or any of the other core Two-Face themes, only to utterly ignore Harvey in favor of another villain, often one of their original creations. Thankfully, Simonson has a better basic understanding of the character than most, it seems, saying "Once I settled on the Judas coin as my link between stories, Two-Face was an obvious choice."


Note: this one isn't a sketch, but an actual scan, since the story itself is in black and white! Well, mostly.

Before we go any further, I should mention that--unsurprisingly to any of you, I'm sure--there's a lot I want to say about the Two-Face story in The Judas Coin, far more than any of the other stories. But since this review is long enough already and because I want to go into spoilers, I will give my full, in-depth thoughts in a later post. For now, I'll just say that I loved this story and that I thought that it was one of the most interesting, complex takes on Harvey I've seen in recent memory. The author accomplishes this by making Harvey the clear protagonist and driving force of the story, and by having him act without flipping his coin in ways that don't betray the integrity of the character.


Don't worry, there's dialogue in the actual comic.

Simonson enhances this by using a recurring motif of newspaper clippings and magazine excerpts placed on each page to deliver exposition, fill in plot holes, flesh out motivations, and even play into some of those aforementioned core Two-Face themes! He treats Harvey with more understanding as both a character and a metaphor than ANY writer since... well, honestly, I'm hard-pressed to think of anyone else who has ever come close to balancing their depiction of the character in both those ways at once. To top it all off, Simonson distinguishes Harvey amongst all of the other protagonists by actually having him be the only one who really understands what the Judas Coin is!



Beyond the clippings, Simonson even formats the story as a black and white newspaper comic strip, making it so that you have to turn the book sideways to read it! This love-letter to comic strips reminded me of Wednesday Comics, another project spearheaded by Mark Chiarello, but the main reason for it was because Simonson based his art here on that of Simonson chose to model this segement on the 1970's James Bond newspaper comic strips by artist Yaroslav Horak. I have not read any of those yet, but now I'm hungry to check them out. While Simonson does add the occasional spatter of red, this story would have fit in perfectly in a collection of Batman: Black and White (man, whether intentionally or not, Chiarello's influence is all over this!), where it would stand out as one of the greats.



As it is, I'm already happy to include it among my favorite Two-Face stories of all time, although where it would be in the placement has yet to be determined. I'll get on that sometime. So yeah, that was the "short" review. Man, hopefully I'll still have something to say in the full, actual review later! For now, let's tackle the grand conclusion of The Judas Coin, featuring Simonson's wild new take on Manhunter 2070, which he illustrates in a manga style fashioned after artists like Ghost in the Shell's Masamune Shirow and Seraphic Feather's Hiroyuki Utatane. Yeah, not gonna lie, the clash is a little jarring, but it's very cool nonetheless.



For the few of us who remember what Starker looked like in his three original stories, this new blond, young take seems unrecognizable, and it just raises further questions when you consider that this story takes place in 2087, so he's seventeen years older than he was in his last story with the red-haired greenies! I suspected that Simonson did this to keep Starker's look consistent with the manga style, something which he actually confirmed when I asked him about it! With that in mind, I find it interesting that Starker here resembles the way he looked as a young kidnapped slave of space pirates, so if I had to cobble together an explanation, I could buy that the science of 2087 has allowed him to de-age himself to a younger state. Works for me!



Despite this creative liberty, Simonson's Manhunter 2070 story is--along with the Golden Gladiator's story--the only one to directly tie into canon and follow up on events from the comics rather than being just a standalone story! In Starker's case, the villains of this story happen to be the red-haired Greenie girls who left him for dead in his unresolved last appearance, which means that Simonson is giving closure to a forty-two-year-old cliffhanger, one which is good enough to actually improve on the original Sekowsky issues!



Not to cut this review short (haha, it's funny because I'm long-winded and meandering!), I'm going to hold off on talking more about the plot lest I spoil the dramatic impact of the grand finale. What I will at least say that the Manhunter 2070 beautifully mirrors the Golden Gladiator one in several ways. Besides the fact that they are the only two directly tied to their canon, both are fitting epilogues for these heroes at later stages in their careers, tying up loose ends while being weighed down with a melancholic sadness for times past. Once again, this is something which does not become apparent until near the end, right before both stories conclude with fire in some capacity.

It's a sobering note on which to end The Judas Coin, a book which is largely a celebration of bygone eras and lesser-loved characters, and it gives a haunting depth to a book which could just have been a collection of fun, beautifully-illustrated trifles. Heck, it could easily have just been one more example of Nostalgia Run Amok, something which plagues comics these days.

The problem with that kind of Silver Age nostalgia usually is that it's usually passed a dark, violent, XTREME filter of post-Miller Image-era 90's-ness. It's the kind of nostalgia that damages both the eras they purport to lionize all while bulldozing over everything else that came since, resulting in such misguided fodder like giving Barry Allen--once the living embodiment of Silver Age hope and good-natured optimism--a new origin entirely rooted in violence and angst. What Walt Simonson has done with The Judas Coin is to provide the antidote to that poisonous trend in comics while simultaneously pulling off that same nostalgia better than most.

Once again, though, that doesn't make it a book that everyone will enjoy. Not only are the characters too obscure, but it both benefits and suffers from being too odd and unique amongst the usual mainstream fare. This isn't a part of any continuity, nor does cross over into anything important happening right now, nor does it even feature anyone who's really popular aside from Batman. If someone doesn't get anything out of this, I don't blame them. It's the typical comic that your average "gotta get all the issues" fan would pass up because this story "doesn't matter."

But to me, it does. Yes, it's standalone and doesn't impact canon, but it matters. For me, The Judas Coin is a celebration of comics storytelling, not to mention a fitting tribute to DC, to adventure comics of yore, and to Harvey Dent. Much as I'm disappointed in both DC for not promoting it more and the comics media for giving it little notice, I have to remember that there's an alternate universe where this comic sits unfinished somewhere in DC's vault, so I'm grateful that it was released at all.

At the risk of jinxing it by trying to end on a cute note, I'd say that we're lucky to have The Judas Coin. Great, now I'm doomed. Worth it!

If you're interested in buying The Judas Coin, you have several options. As I've said before, I think that the cover price of $22.99 for a slim 94-page hardcover is outrageous. Thankfully, there are cheaper options, with print copies going for $13.77 on both Amazon.com and Barnes and Noble, which also offers it for Nook for $12.64. Other ways you can get it digitally include Kindle for $9.99 (the best deal of them all), and $12.99 for iBooks for iPad/iPhone. Few are talking about this book and DC has done nothing to promote it, so check it out however you can. And if you are willing to spend the full cover price, then hey, go support your local bookstore/comic book shop!