Jeff Lemire and others’ Black Hammer vols 3 & 4

Jeff Lemire (writer), Dean Ormston (pencils), Dave Stewart (colorist) and Todd Klein (letterer), Black Hammer Volume 3: Age of Doom Part 1 (Dark Horse Books 2019)
Jeff Lemire (writer), Dean Ormston (pencils), Dave Stewart (colorist) and Todd Klein (letterer), except for 46 pages with art, colour and letters by Rich Tommaso, Black Hammer Volume 4: Age of Doom Part 2 (Dark Horse Books 2019)

Early last December I announced that I didn’t want any superhero comics for Christmas. My second son’s alarmed expression made me think I’d spoken too late. But it turns out that he correctly intuited that the Black Hammer series was an understood exception. He knew I’d enjoyed the first two volumes of this series (though I doubt he read my blog post, here, which ended. ‘I’m patiently awaiting Volume 3’). Vol 3 was a Christmas gift from him, and I bought Vol 4 hot off the press.

Black Hammer isn’t so much a superhero comic as a commentary on them. In the first two books a band of superannuated heroes is on a weirdly unreal farm somewhere in rural USA: the last thing any of them remember is defeating the ultimate comicbook villain, the Anti-God. Everything looks normal, they have relationships with people in the nearby town, but they can’t leave. Black Hammer, their former leader, did manage to escape, but is now almost certainly dead. In the second volume, Black Hammer’s daughter Lucy, an investigative reporter, turns up but can’t remember how she got there. She finds her father’s fabulous titular black hammer, she wields it and becomes the all-new Black Hammer. In the final frame of Vol 2, she announces that she remembers everything and knows where they are and then …

… at the start of Vol 3, which is the beginning of the Age of Doom sequence, she vanishes, SHRACK!!

We follow Lucy/Black Hammer’s travels through weird meta-worlds incuding a version of hell and a mysterious castle called Storyland inhabited by characters who could be parodies of Neil Gaiman’s Endless. And we follow those left behind as they try to unravel the mystery. About halfway through this volume the bifurcated paths reunite and the mystery is solved. But the solution reveals that things are actually much worse than anyone imagined. At the end of this volume, a couple of frames after someone says:

without so much as a SHRACK!!, everything goes white.

[In case you’re interested, the characters in that frame are: Madame Dragonfly, mistress of the macabre; Golden Gail, a potty-mouthed adult frozen in an eleven-year-old’s body; Colonel Randall Weird, who knows past, present and future all at once and spends a lot of time on the Para-Zone (don’t ask); Abraham Slam, whose name says it all; Barbalien, Gay warlord from Mars; and Lucy/the new Black Hammer. Missing is Walky-Talky, the robot who intervenes at key moments.]

The next volume, the end of the Black Hammer series (apart from a number of spoin-offs carefully adumbrated in this story, including Sherlock Frankenstein and the Legion of Evil), begins with 48 pages of art by Rich Tommaso, reminiscent of the comicbook art of the 1950s and strikingly different from the moody heroic style of Dean Ormston in the rest. These pages follow the adventures of Colonel Weird in another unreal world, this one inhabited by ‘unrealised characters from never finished stories’. (You can tell the creators had a lot of fun with this story, and there’s potential here for any number of spin-offs.)

Meanwhile, the rest of the crew are back to normal life in Spiral City – a life where they have never been superheroes. One waits tables, one is a guard at the museum reading superhero comics, one is Gay in homophobic Martian society, and one is living with dementia in a nursing home. But thanks to the magic black hammer, a well-placed KRA-KOOM!!, and some intense recriminations, the original group is back together in time to face down one more threat to the entire universe.

I don’t think it’s a spoiler to say that it all works out in the end, in a ‘the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started’ kind of way, with a door left ajar for further adventures of Lucy/Black Hammer.

I enjoyed this a lot. It’s not part of the Marvel Universe or the DC Universe so you don’t have to be a cult insider to follow it and enjoy it. According to Wikipedia, Black Hammer’s crew are going to team up with DC’s Justice League heroes this year, and a film and or TV series is in development, but I’m happy to stick with this odd bunch as they are, in the page.)