Danger Street (2024)
Reprints Danger Street #1-12
Written by Tom King
Art by Jorge Fornés
Why do I pick up a new Tom King comic if I dislike his work? [1] [2] [3] [4] [5] You might be asking that. The premise for Danger Street is the sort of thing that would naturally hook someone like me. It’s based on First Issue Special, a short-lived D.C. Comics series from the 1970s, in which each issue served as a “pilot” for an ongoing project. The proposed titles spanned a diverse gamut from established but obscure heroes (Dr. Fate, Creeper, and Metamorpho) to reboots of concepts (New Gods, Manhunter, and Starman) to new ideas that used familiar tropes (Atlas, Warlord, Codename: Assassin) to complete weird left turns (The Green Team, Lady Cop, Dingbats of Danger Street, and The Outsiders). King takes all these characters, and attempts to weave a sprawling tale that mixes the epic feel of comics with the grounded takes of more post-modern comics. Like most of King’s work, the concept is far more interesting than the execution.
The story of Danger Street is told by the helm of Fate in the form of a fairy tale. Heroes are framed as knights, young boys as princes, and the powerful entities of the Fourth World as dragons, for example. Why the story is told this way…I wasn’t really sure. The Dingbats are a quartet of boys that mess around in their rural hometown, mainly on Danger Street. Liza Warner (Don’t call her Lady Cop) is the local law who tries to keep them out of trouble. Two strangers are passing through, Travis Morgan (Warlord) and Mikaal (Starman), to meet up with Metamorpho to impress the Justice League and join their ranks. Things go badly and trigger a series of responses from the distant New Gods to the capricious parallel to the Dingbats, a quartet of boy billionaires called The Green Team.
It’s clear that King once again wants to comment on America. The Green Team is juxtaposed with the Outsiders as the extremes of society in the States. The Creeper’s human persona of Jack Ryder is positioned as a far-right ideologue with a TV news program. Yet, one of the “good guys” is Lady Cop because while King wants to be like Alan Moore (and he does very, very badly), he is still a former CIA goon and can’t help but bootlick, which in turn makes him the U.S. anti-Moore in every possible aspect. I’ve gotten to the point where I think King doesn’t even actually understand all the 1980s Brit-penned comics he thinks he loves. He clearly likes the idea of “serious comics.”
There are moments when Danger Street can rise above its often mediocre delivery. Issue 9 is a spotlight on a fight between Manhunter and Codename: Assassin, and it is a very well-paced and structured fight. Because we only have two characters to focus on, we understand the stakes of the battle at the moment. As part of the grander narrative, I was at a loss by the end of this book why most of the characters were fighting each other. There’s some brief exposition to explain Manhunter and his role in things. He was hunting down the members of the Green Team, but why he was doing that is something the book only thinks it can explain in the most complicated.
Who was Atlas, and why was it so world shattering that he died? Your guess is as good as mine. I don’t doubt that King explained somewhere in this overly wordy slog of a comic, but it was not a clearly communicated idea. Because the comic isn’t clear on why that is happening, it becomes more of a guess as to why Highfather and Darkseid would team up and send Orion to Earth to find the person who killed Atlas. I know they were part of the First Issue Special comics, so King included them, but I never felt like all these pieces made sense in this particular stew.
By the end of the comic, The Creeper goes from being the “ogre” of the fairy tale to becoming a “knight” or hero. I can’t explain why that is. He’s framed as a right-wing asshole for the majority of the story, bending the knee to The Green Team when he’s ordered to do so. He has a brief flirtation with Lady Cop, which is supposed to signal some change in his beliefs? It seems King or D.C. didn’t want the story to end without redemption for who is a C-tier character, so he had to make him at least an anti-hero.
My biggest problem with Danger Street was how poorly told the story was. I think King had an initial concept that had potential. Like I said, I love weird characters; seeing them spotlighted can be fun. The problem is that there are so many characters here, many of whom need to be clearly introduced & defined while not lining up 1:1 with their previous incarnations. That means that even if you are well-versed in D.C. Comics lore, you won’t know these versions of the characters, so you will also need a straightforward premise explained for each one, which the comic does not provide.
If you re-read the book, I’m sure you’ll discover clear connections that weren’t in the first read. I would argue that Watchmen, a comic that King wants to make his own version of, is an entertaining, coherent read the first time through. Additional reads will add to your understanding of the world and the relationships between characters. You don’t need to re-read Watchmen to understand the story and how these characters are connected. Even the ending of Danger Street seems like a shrug from King that there’s little purpose or meaning behind these intersecting stories.
This may be my final Tom King read. I have to tell myself that because he has an interesting concept, it doesn’t mean the whole affair will be worth reading. I also don’t know why there were twelve issues. First Issue Special ran for thirteen issues; this story doesn’t spotlight its characters. If each issue had zoomed in on the story from a specific character’s perspective, I think it could have made more sense. Unless you are a Tom King completionist, there’s little reason to spend reading this thing.
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