Review: Black Adam Vol. 1: Theogony trade paperback (DC Comics)

In tone, there is so little daylight between Christopher Priest’s Deathstroke series and his Black Adam Vol. 1: Theogony that I half expected Red Lion or Arthur Villain to appear (they do not, sadly).¹ But between the anti-heroic star, the wisecracking old star, and the young upstart that Slade, I mean Black Adam, wants to replace himself and then regrets it, Black Adam has Deathstroke vibes from the jump. I’d happily take more than the 12 issues this miniseries has.²

Also like Deathstroke, Theogony doesn’t offer a lot of answers as to what’s happening here, at least not in this first volume, or rather it offers a lot of conflicting answers without telling the reader which is true. There’s a certain amount of forbearance one needs going in to Priest’s recent pieces, not unlike the works of Grant Morrison or Tom King, though I’m happy to offer some patience in exchange for the joy of watching Black Adam unpack the trauma at the core of all his sins.

At the same time, clearly we’re here because of the Dwayne “Rock” Johnson-helmed Black Adam movie. In so far as there was any crossover from movie fans to comics, we’re fortunate that the book they’re offered is one so intelligently written as by Priest (the movie was a satisfactory action flick [see Zach’s review], but Priest’s book is significantly more cerebral). Lest the tonal shift be too severe, however, Priest gets in his obligatory nod to the Snyder-verse, too.

[Review contains spoilers]

I was surprised to see Priest use Black Adam’s New 52 origin here, even if only because I hadn’t expected the New 52 origin to pervade any more than Tim Drake’s did, for instance. Whereas in Geoff Johns' JSA we found a Black Adam who was so angry over the murder of his family that he dealt violently with his enemies — not a villain, per se, but an anti-hero who doesn’t play by the traditional DCU rules — in the New 52, in ancient times Adam killed his own nephew and stole the Shazam powers so as to take vengeance on their enslavers.

[See the latest DC trade solicitations.]

If the end result is the same, the New 52 origin suggests something rotten at Black Adam’s core — not simply that he’s angry over an injustice done to him, but that he’s willing to kill innocents, even his own family, to take revenge for that injustice. Even, notably, the movie didn’t go there, keeping the misdirection of Adam’s origins seeming to parallel Billy Batson’s before revealing the tragic twist, but without Adam having innocent blood on his hands.

Though, again, all is not totally clear. It’s possible Priest works to mitigate that New 52 origin when a faux Batman shows Adam to still be suffering the trauma of the death of his mother well before adulthood and the introduction of the Shazam powers. We’re not meant by any means to forgive Adam for killing a child, but we do get new insight, I think, into what might have been driving him up to that moment.

As well, Adam’s guilt over killing his nephew Aman and the possibility of his own impending death draw him to share his power with his descendent, Malik White, who becomes the so-called White Adam. We’ve perhaps read this story before (see Deathstroke’s Defiance team) and know how poorly it will end, but that makes me no less intrigued. Priest’s gift for gab is as good as ever, with med student Malik running a pop-culture-infused commentary I could listen to for days — it really would be shame if we got out of here without the med student at least passing Dr. Villain in the hallway.

Black Adam — hey, like Deathstroke — is a story told out of sequence, if not even there might be some time travel or future knowledge at play here. Not to mention that Adam is being stalked by what might be ancient gods, might be sentient space dust that he himself inhaled and brought back to Earth, or might simply be a hallucination (Priest has Adam speculate that he’s being “gaslighted” more times than is probably appropriate or a correct use of the phrase).

Not to mention also the mysterious plague that’s infected him (see also space mites or murderous palace intrigue), or power rings that appear and disappear at will — tied to Nth metal, which is tied, as are the gods, to the Dark Multiverse. Which is again to say there’s a lot going on here, and I’ve already made my peace with the idea that we’ll get some answers in the finale, but probably not all of them.

I have thought before that Priest and his various artists are particularly good at splash pages. It’s no secret many a creative team uses a splash page really as a placeholder — one character goes to hit another, we know they’re going to hit, and then the splash page, yup, is just another image of that hit. So it’s worth calling out three good splash pages in the third chapter (because usually three splashes in an issue would be an indication of disaster), drawn by Rafa Sandoval.

First, Desaad of all people is about to kiss Adam, the page turns, and in the splash, someone else entirely is kissing Adam — a splash page that works because you think you know what will happen and it’s something else entirely. That’s followed immediately by a splash of Adam in a hospital bed, flanked by his Wintergreen Shep and Malik — a splash for a scene change, but a scene change wholly unexpected and so worthy of a splash.

Third, Malik goes to resuscitate Adam with a Shazam blast, and on the next page, no pun intended, a splash page of a fully costumed Black Adam sinking down into dark waters. Again, this is a splash page well worth it, a splash that’s sudden and effective and conveys new information because it’s not simply emphasizing what we saw on the page before.

Sandoval does well through most of the book, but Eddy Barrows is as fine a substitute you could hope for in the last chapter. That’s also where Adam fights an armored-up (ultimately imaginary) Batman, in a scene that’s most assuredly supposed to be reminiscent of Batman v. Superman. Now that fans of such things likely won’t ever see Ben Affleck and Dwayne Johnson trading blows on the big screen, Theogony is as close as you can come.

Black Adam Vol. 1: Theogony whets my appetite for Christopher Priest’s upcoming (for me) Superman: Lost; really it makes we want DC to get as much material from Priest as they can. The tone of Priest’s Deathstroke is the tone of his Black Adam; fans of that Rebirth series shouldn’t be missing this.

[Includes original and variant covers]

Rating 3.5

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1. It’s pronounced WILL-hane. It’s French. Also we’re long overdue for a Steel by Christopher Priest collection.  ↩︎

2. Just between my writing this review this past week and now, Bleeding Cool reports DC has cancelled the Black Adam Vol. 2: East of Egypt collection. The report seems pretty definitive but I can only hope this is a delay until a better part of the schedule and not a cancellation entirely (if indeed cancelled, take it as a sign of DC moving on quick from their previous movie-verse). I wasn’t planning to read Black Adam Vol. 2 until after Dark Crisis, but at that point I’ll read the single issues (and do an “Uncollected Editions”) if I have to.  ↩︎