Broken Frontier

Steve Gerber’s Dr. Fate series at last sees the light of day, and it’s important to remember: buying this series will help save Mr. Gerber’s life.

A while back, Gerber was diagnosed with pulmonary fibrosis, a fatal lung disease that is incurable, though it can be operated upon in one way alone: lung transplantation.  Supporting this series gives money to Gerber, who needs all the care and attention he can get while he struggles through this.  Even beyond the transplant, there’s recovery considerations galore, and a consistent need for medical attention to keep the new lungs operating for as long as possible (most successful lung transplant patients have only a modest life expectancy, even after the fact).  Not only is Countdown to Mystery a fantastic book (I’ll go ahead and say that right up front), but buying it means much, much more than just supporting a flush DC or your own long-held entertainment fetishes.  It’s a single comic, guys, and it’s good.  Do yourself a favor and chip in on this one.

Okay, now on to business, sans sympathy:

After the pre-Infinite Crisis minis and spin-offs, the post-IC specials, and a delayed premiere, the long awaited new Doctor Fate at last debuts—a down-and-out ex-psychiatrist named Kent V. Nelson (grand-nephew to the original Doctor Fate), a man abandoned by his family, his friends, his co-workers, now homeless, beaten to a pulp, and tossed into a dumpster where just happens to land…you guessed it…the Helmet of Fate.

Though lest we forget, Gerber’s Fate, within Countdown to Mystery, sits arm-in-arm with a surprisingly compelling Eclipso yarn, penned by Jack of Fables’ co-writer Matthew Sturges.  On the surface, this is just another tale of Jean Loring/Eclipso, a combination of  two characters as arbitrary yet compelling as when Hal Jordan was made into the Spectre, and like that event, it’s an amalgamate persona that has since cropped up again and again while achieving absolutely zilch in terms of character or storytelling potential.  But this offering is a start: Sturges puts out a rewarding Eclipso tale, more so than any seen in years. It’s a story that promises to have an actual impact on the villain, too, and therefore it's one fans can scarce afford to miss.

Looking at the first half of the book, then—Descent into the Psychosphere —Gerber does a marvelous job on sending Kent Nelson through a spiritual kaleidoscope of continuity, re-treading both the recent history of the Helmet of Fate as well as the backstory of the newly presented Nelson himself.  Unlike most reboot first issues of classic characters, wherein the necessary history can bog down all possibility of necessary momentum, Gerber channels his exposition through the character of Nelson himself, thereby killing two birds with one mighty-ass stone—the history of Fate is divulged, and Kent Nelson’s character is showcased in full, both his past and his present, and, most importantly, who and what he current is, both in body and in mind.  It’s a great trick, to expose dry material through a lens of solid and unaffected character color, and you’d think more writers would manage it more often, but thankfully, after all the waiting, Gerber pulls off a fabulous, informative, and—above all else—entertaining first issue of Fate, with the promise of very exciting things to come.

Justiniano is a name known by most comic readers today, and he proves a brilliant choice for the mystical storyline of Psychoshpere, a tale revolving around such disparate elements as multiple dimensions and a destitute loser.  His depiction of the celestial is just as on-the-nose as his gritty take on the current broken lifestyle of Kent Nelson, and when the story turns a corner and dives into borderline-horror at the end, Justiniano once again pumps out pages that flavor the event splendidly.

Moving on to the Eclipso half of the book—Occultation,handled by Bill Willingham’s cohort Matthew Sturges (he’s the new writer on Shadowpact and co-writer on Jack of Fables ).  Sturges, like Gerber, is a guy able to oscillate between sincerity and humor at the drop of a hat, hardly accepting that the two aren’t wholly interchangeable and merely two sides of any story’s coin.  Eclipso, though, is hardly a humor-filled character, and so Plastic Man is recruited to be the initial foil in chapter one, allowing for something more than the undiluted doom and gloom of a standard Eclipso yarn (which generally generates as much honest entertainment value as watching a television evangelist—larger than life and thunderous in approach, yet somehow utterly uninteresting).

There’s an opening sequence with the  new Crispus Allen/Spectre, promising a confrontation between the Wrath of God and Eclipso in the near future, and the cliffhanger ending will have many wanting more (hint: here we go with yet another never-before-revealed secret retconned origin).

Artist Stephen Jorge Segovia is the man on board for Sturges' Eclipso epic, brandishing a polished style somewhere between Leinil Yu and Tom Mandrake.  Segovia is a relative newcomer, having worked on a Witchblade mini and now this, though he’s been around for a long time, working as an artist assist and penciling images for numerous books in his home country of the Philippines—and it shows.  His work is very elegant, highly atmospheric, and eminently readable.  I’d look forward to the next seven chapters of A Syzygy in Plastic for his art alone.

Countdown to Mystery is everything you’d hope for in a new Steve Gerber book, and the Eclipso half is the best treatment that character’s gotten in years.  The twist “secret origin” of Eclipso will take some suspension of disbelief, as do all secret origins (for, if the new information was truth all along, why has no one ever acted as though it were, ever, until now?).  But it’s nevertheless a good twist, and a good companion to what’s looking to be a return to Gerber-greatness, if only for eight issues.  Though let’s hope for more: more, more, more, from both Fate and from Gerber himself.  If it’s anything like CTM, it’ll be well worth it.

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For any who wish to support Gerber in a way beyond buying Countdown to Mystery and petitioning DC to keep his Dr. Fate alive, The Hero Initiative is raising funds to meet Gerber’s needs, and you can donate to them here: http://www.heroinitiative.org/