Sho'Case!

Finally DC has a counterpart to the Marvel comics Essentials line-classic (aka old) comics in cheap black-and-white newsprint editions, with lots of comics for the money! I picked up the Metamorpho book yesterday, and a big wet kiss goes out to whomever decided to start the line with underhyped but groovy comics like this! Metamorpho is the usual dopey superhero, but the stories have a verve and energy that make them pop. It's from right around the time that the basic superhero paradigm was no longer a novelty and they had to find fresh ways to play with it without abandoning the basic parameters of the genre; Ramona Fradon, Joe Orlando and Sal Trapini really knew how to illustrate this kind of stuff. It's funny, cheerful, gleefully absurd.