A Month of Wednesdays: December 2025

BOUGHT:

Batman and Robin: Year One (DC Comics) I think my only real problem with this book is it's "Year One" subtitle. That particular phrase of course entered DC's lexicon with Frank Miller and David Mazzucchelli's 1987 Batman story arc, offering a new and updated origin for the Dark Knight and chronicling the first year of his career. It has since become a commonplace sub-title for various DC origin stories. 

When this 12-issue maxi-series was first announced, I was a little taken aback, as the title suggests it will be the story of Batman and Robin's first year together. Of course, that particular year has already been covered in 1989 Batman arc "Batman: Year Three", 1995's Robin Annual #4 (the theme for that year's annuals was "Year One" origin stories) and 2000's Robin: Year One. (Dick Grayson's first year with Bruce Wayne was also part of 1999's quasi-canonical Batman: Dark Victory, although Dick doesn't actually become Robin until the end of that series, and I'm sure there are other comics that have told this story that I haven't personally read, like 2022's Robin & Batman).

That said, of course, you'll notice that those comics specifically devoted to Robin's fist year are all at least 25 years old now, and there have been a handful of continuity reboots since then, so perhaps enough time has elapsed that it is worth retelling such an oft told story (On the other hand, thanks to the longevity of collections, most of those comics are still readily available for readers interested in that story, so I don't know).

The "Year One" is really just branding here though, which makes me wish DC would have simply come up with a different title for the book (World's Finest: Batman and Robin seems like the obvious one, huh? Maybe something with "Dynamic Duo" in the title?). Unlike Miller and Mazzucchelli's "Batman: Year One", this doesn't seem to cover an entire year, although some significant amount of time does pass, the plot of the book apparently occurring between other early Batman and Robin adventures, some of which are alluded to in montage. 

Still, it's branding that would have led to me skipping the book entirely or at least borrowing it from the library rather than buying it, were it not for the presence of Chris Samnee. I mean, I obviously like the work of writer Mark Waid, as I have read and continue to read a lot of it, but art by Samnee sealed the deal. He's a fantastic artist, adept at every aspect of comic book art, and the perfect choice for a story like this, which involves equal amounts of superhero action, character work and drama featuring the leads out of costume, as well as plenty of non-costumed characters.

Simply put, visually, this is probably the best superhero comic I've read in recent memory, and one of the best-drawn Batman comics I've ever read. 

So, we've talked a little bit about what the book isn't, so what is it...? 

Well, Waid doesn't cover the events that past writers like Marv Wolfman ("Year Three") or Chuck Dixon (Robin Annual #4, Robin: Year One with co-writer Scott Beatty) did, so this can be read as somewhat as a companion to previous Robin origins than a replacement for them. So, we don't see Dick's parents fall to their deaths in front of Dick, we don't see his meeting with Bruce, we don't see how Dick learns Bruce's secret and we don't see Dick becoming Robin for the first time and working with Batman to catch the man responsible for his parents' murder (Although these events are alluded to in dialogue and the occasional flashback panel.) (One thing that originally felt off and wrong to me was the fact that Batman was wearing black rather than blue here, something Waid surely would have known wasn't historically accurate—he is writing an ongoing series set in the late 1970s wherein Batman is still in blue, after all—but that was, as I would find, an intentional choice, and the eventual change in cape colors is addressed over the course of the story.)

Instead, the plot involves a new criminal in town, a former general turned mob boss usually just referred to as "The General" (and yeah, there is already a Batman villain by that name, although I doubt anyone would confuse the two) who is attempting to take over the Gotham underworld by setting the ruling "Five Families" against one another.

While he's not a super-villain, he does have one in his employ, and his ultimate plot is a somewhat sci-fi sounding one, which I won't spoil here. He also seems to be dabbling in mad science, perhaps working with an unnamed Hugo Strange (who is clearly visible in at least one panel) to make "monster men", a term that will sound familiar to plenty of Batman readers (These appeared in 1940's Batman #1, and Matt Wagner later extrapolated that short story into his miniseries Batman and The Monster Men).

And Two-Face, who is sometimes the General's ally and sometimes his enemy, is also rather prominently featured.

That's the superhero business, though. While the new Dynamic Duo are trying to figure out what exactly is going on and bring down the General, Waid and Samnee also spend a lot of time on Bruce and Dick's home life, and dramatize Batman's difficulty in taking on the role of mentor and partner, while Bruce struggles with becoming a good father (Alfred, of course, helps quite a bit in that regard).

Mostly what Waid seems to change in the basic, essential Batman and Robin story is a degree of emphasis. For one thing, he repeatedly underscores the fact that while Dick Grayson might still be a little kid, and thus seemingly far, far too young for crime fighting—as multiple characters, including James Gordon, point out—his unique circus acrobat background means he has been doing serious, almost super-human training ever since he was able to walk. He might not have trained quite as long as Batman had before he donned a cape and mask, but he's quite experienced when it comes to some of the stuff Robin does every night, and far more so than most grown men. (That said, I wish Waid wouldn't have assigned Dick a particular age here—he's said to be 10-years-old—and just left that more vague.)

Waid also, somewhat interestingly, addresses the traditional "ward" vs. adopted son issue. I don't know the original rationale for making Dick Bruce's ward rather than son, nor do I know enough about such legal matters to know if wards are still a thing in real life some 80 years after Robin was introduced, but here it seems that Bruce was in the process of applying to adopt Dick when some of the villain-induced difficulties affected him, and Dick was temporarily taken away. When he is later returned, it seems to be a sort of special case, the court not yet willing to let Bruce officially adopt him. 

I do have one nitpick, which is more of a something-that-nagged-at-me-personally-while-reading thing, than an actual problem with the narrative. The super-villain in The General's employ that I mentioned above? It is—spoiler warning!—Clayface II, Matt Hagen.

A reader could probably guess that when The General starts employing his master of disguise to sow distrust and stoke a gang war, as there's a very early scene where the mysterious figure changes "costume", and it's an instantaneous change, one that also changes his clothes. Further, the cover for issue #5 features Clayface as he appeared in Batman: The Animated Series and, unfortunately, appears in this collection before the master of disguise is revealed to be Clayface, so, in that regard, the comic spoils itself.

Now, Samnee has a great design for Clayface, giving him an extremely creepy featureless mask he wears when he's not impersonating someone else, and the in-comic reveal of his identity is both something of a surprise—as much as it can be, after seeing that cover, anyway—and an effective bit of horror, as Batman accidentally cuts him nearly in half on a cable during their fight, and then is nearly suffocated as Clayface pours himself into Batman's face.

This might actually be the best Matt Hagen comic I've ever read...although it feels wrong to me that he's in it. That's simply because Hagen was introduced in 1961, while Robin was introduced in 1940. In other words, Dick had been Robin for a long, long time before he and Batman encountered Hagen, and while obviously Robin's 80-year career needs to be hyper-compressed in-universe, it feels a bit off to have events so far apart overlap.

Of course, as I said earlier, there have been plenty of canon-altering crises since Hagen's original debut, so perhaps I shouldn't get stuck on Waid's use of the character here; perhaps he's just changing up Hagen's origin and introduction. 

All in all then, a really great Batman comic, and one I enjoyed immensely. 

(Oh, and as I noted on Bluesky while reading, it's an elegant reminder how much better Batman comics are when Alfred is alive and well and them and not, you know, dead, as he apparently still is in the comics set in the current DC Universe.)

BORROWED:

Disney Epic Mickey: The Comics Collection (Fantagraphics Books) You've probably heard the story of Oswald The Lucky Rabbit, the cartoon character created in 1927 by Ub Iwerks and Walt Disney for Universal Studios. The character now seems like a sort of first draft for Mickey Mouse—the original iterations of both characters looked remarkably similar—and, when Universal exerted its control of the character, Disney went on to create his mouse in 1928 (And, apparently, vowed never to work for anyone else ever again). Though Oswald kept appearing in Golden Age cartoons for a while, Mickey quickly eclipsed him and went on to become one of the most iconic characters in pop culture over the last century. 

In 2010, Oswald finally met Mickey in a story heavily reliant on their meta-fictional relationship, the "Lucky" rabbit naturally envious and embittered about essentially being forgotten after a brief stint in the spotlight, while his younger brother went on to unparalleled fame. 

For reasons beyond me, this epic meeting and potent story, with over 80 years of history behind it, occurred not in the medium Disney is best known for, animation, or that which they are probably secondarily known for around the world, comics, but in a video game—2010's Epic Mickey. 

You might not recognize the name Yen Sid, but you will likely recognize his face. He's the sorcerer that Mickey was the apprentice to in Fantastia's "Sorcerer's Apprentice" passage. In Epic Mickey, he has created a place called Wasteland with magical paint on his table top, a place modeled as a sshadow version of Disney Land, and peopled by forgotten cartoon characters like Horace Horsecollar, Clarabelle Cow, The Mad Doctor (from a 1933 Mickey short), Gus and the Gremlins (from a never-made film that later appeared in a Roald Dahl picture book and some Disney comics) and several different versions of Peg Leg Pete/Black Pete. (You'll probably notice that some of these characters have subsequently become un-forgotten, and you may actually be pretty familiar with some of them, especially if you've been reading old Mickey comics like those Fanta has published in their Floyd Gottfredson Library.) And, of course, Oswald himself, and his love interest, a cat who is here given Ortensia name, as she lacked a consistent one in her various cartoon short appearances. 

After Mickey travels to the other side of a mirror, ala his Golden Age short "Thru the Mirror", the mischievous mouse finds himself in the wizard's workshop, and fools around with the paints, accidentally unleashing a paint monster in Wasteland. Sometime—perhaps years?—later, Mickey is captured by that paint monster, referred to as a Blot, a name with some resonance in Mickey adventures, and pulled into the Wasteland.

There, he battles the Blot and its minions using a magic paintbrush that can emit both paint and thinner, potent weapons in a world of cartoons, he engages in a quest to gather pieces of a rocket ship from various locales (which, I assume, accounts for the game's gameplay and objective) and, of course, he meets Oswald, a character he knows nothing of, but who has resentfully followed Mickey's career for decades.

That's all interesting enough, I suppose, but as someone who hasn't played a video game since the NES became obsolete, Epic Mickey wasn't on my radar until Fantagraphics released Disney Epic Mickey: The Comics Collection, a complete, hardcover collecting all of the comics associated with the game, most of which were being published on paper and in the U.S. for the first time here, despite the fact that they were all written by a pretty famous and well-liked American comics writer, the late Peter David.

I have no idea how someone familiar with the video game—or games, I guess I should say, as Epic Mickey was followed in 2012 by Epic Mickey 2: The Power of 2, and it too has a graphic novel adaptation in here—might approach this book. Like other comics based on video games I never played, like some Batman: Arkham comics, the Injustice series and some Kingdom Hearts manga, these comics seem to expand on the story of the games and elide the gameplay, making them something akin to extrapolations rather than straight adaptations.

For someone in my shoes then, a comics reader encountering the Epic Mickey world and story for the first time here, I would recommend approaching this as a curated collection rather than a complete story, as the most dramatic encounter in here—that between Oswald and Mickey atop a mountain of Mickey memorabilia—is of course somewhat blunted and spoiled by the "Tales of Wasteland" short comics that precede it in the collection.

The book also includes a lot of welcome prose features interspersed between the comics, providing context for where the game came from, who the relatively minor and/or forgotten characters in the games are and where they came from and how the comics fit into the story of the game. These features include a foreword by editor David Gerstein, an introduction by game director Warren Spector (and, later, an interview with Spector) and "The Disney Epic Mickey Cast" features by Luc Boschi. 

As for the comics, they include three distinct sections. 

First, there's the "Tales from Wasteland" prequels, a half-dozen eight-pagers by David and artist Claudio Sciarrone starring Oswald and featuring appearances by Horace, Clarabelle, Pete and Ortensia...and what look like cyborg versions of Goofy and Donald Duck, which they kinda are (In actuality, these are animatronic versions of Mickey's friends, which Oswald built himself in order to imitate Mickey's adventures, I guess; while they appear to be in a state of disrepair and are somewhat scary-looking, seeming to thus suggest the characters I've seen in Five Nights at Freddy's books and games and such, they act just like the real Goofy and Donald).

These stories recall older Disney shorts, as Oswald and his Donald and Goofy attempt to, say, clean a huge clock or act as kinda sorta ghostbusters. I didn't find any of them to be particularly strong comics narratives, and they all look and read slightly off. I think it has something to do with the lettering, as the dialogue balloons have weirdly-shaped tails that seem sort of amateurish, and they don't always line-up and interact with one another quite right. I assume this has something to do with the fact that these comics were all originally produced for digital rather than paper release. 

I think the strongest gag that occurs in these is a visual one, from "Oswald The Lucky Duck", in which the Mad Doctor presents our hero with a new invention, a movie camera that can "remake" him for the Silver Screen. At one point, Oswald says how the few people who remember him at all do so as "an out-of-date version of, you know...him."

In the next panel, we see Oswald as Ortensia does at that moment. Standing directly in front of the camera, his long ears laying down and the two big film reels appearing on either side of his head he does indeed resemble...you know...him. 

(Do note the dialogue balloon that I cut off in that image, and how close it is to the dialogue balloon associated with that image.)

That's followed by Epic Mickey: The Graphic Novel, a 64-page story drawn by Fabio Celoni and Massimo Rocca. If I had to guess, I would assume that much of this involves a re-telling of the "story" parts of the game, as it involves Mickey coming to Wasteland, becoming a captive of the Mad Doctor, meeting Gus the Gremlin and learning to use the paint brush as a weapon and then finally meeting Oswald—who had been shadowing him through the earlier scenes—atop the mountain where they have their heart to heart.

Mickey's mission to find the missing rocket parts is discussed, but mostly happens off-panel, and, ultimately, Oswald, Gus and Mickey use the rocket to take on the world-threatening Blot and there's a pretty intense scene involving the final temptation of Oswald.

The story concludes with the pair becoming, "friends, and perhaps more...Perhaps even... ....brothers." 

The art in this comic is much deeper, richer and more detailed than in the "Wasteland" shorts, and the word balloons look and read far better here than they did in the prequel stories.

Finally, there's Epic Mickey 2: The Power of Two: The Graphic Novel, drawn by Fabrizio Petrossi (who drew the recent-ish Scrooge McDuck: The Dragon of Glasgow) and is based by David on the videogame script which is credited to a Brian Freyermuth and a name familiar to most comics readers, Marv Wolfman.

Here, Mickey is summoned back to Wasteland by his new friend/brother Oswald, and the two are now staunchly allies, which admittedly takes a lot of the drama away from their pairing. In this 48-page story, our co-leads and Gus must deal with a gremlin gone bad and the machinations of the Mad Doctor, who has seemingly also gone bad as a result of too many animatronic parts (And, for some reason, all of his dialogue is now presented in song, which seems random; is this how Etrigan fans felt when the demon started rhyming in the '80s?). 

I'm not sure what the gameplay in The Power of Two might have entailed, nor the specifics of the quest, but Mickey is again armed with a big paint brush and Oswald wields a remote control that seems to impact various robot/animatronic enemies they face off with in various locales. Gus again plays a big role, and there are several different Petes presented as foes. 

In fact, on the last page, after the narrator concludes that everything is safe once again, and that Mickey and Oswald could deal with any future challenges that might arise, a handful of Petes gather at the statue of Walt Disney and Oswald on Mean Street and seem to threaten to become a threat in the future.

"Don't listen to that know-it-all narrator," one Pete says. "By the time we're done..." another starts, while a third finishes the thought, "They ain't never gonna know what hit 'em."

I don't know that I would consider any of these great comics or anything, but, for a certain kind of person, the historic meeting of Mickey and Oswald is a pretty big deal, and I'm thankful that Disney saw fit to present it in comics as well as video games, so those of us who don't play videogames could see some version of it for ourselves.

I do think this book is another testament to just what a consummate writer Peter David was. While you and I likely know him best from the hundreds of issues of comic books he wrote during his career, as Spector notes in his introduction, in addition to writing "all the big books" of the comics world, David also did a bunch of Star Trek novels and comics, worked on Babylon 5 and wrote original novels. 

"I loved his work," Spector wrote, "but didn't know how he'd fare with funny animals."

Spector, of course, said he fared quite well, being funny as hell, very fast, and receptive to feedback...even feedback coming from a guy like him, "with no comics experience whatsoever."

Spector is biased, though, so you might be tempted not to take his word for it. But you can take mine; David does a fine job with the characters, and, in the adaptations at least, translating a story meant for one very particular medium into something that still makes sense and is even occasionally compelling when presented in an entirely different medium.

If you're a fan of David's writing, I can't say this is the most representative of his work, but you can definitely hear David in the dialogue, particularly in the jokes which, like a lot of David's, can be somewhat strained groaners, dad jokes delivered here by characters who are older than your grandfathers. 

Here's one I did like though, from a "Tales of Wasteland" short:

Animatronic Donald: No exit! You know what this means?!

Animatronic Goofy: The architect was Jean-Paul Sarte?

Oswald: Woah. That's a pretty intellectual joke, Goofy.

Animatronic Goofy: Well, just 'cause I'm goofy, don't mean I'm ignant.

Animatronic Donald: Ignorant.

Animatronic Goofy: Not that neither. A-hyuck!

 

Masters of the Universe/Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Turtles of Grayskull (Dark Horse Books) My grandmother bought me my first Masters of the Universe action figures for Christmas in 1982, the first Christmas I can remember. For the next few years, I would play with the toys, read the comics that came packaged with them, watch the cartoon, be baffled by the live-action film and even sleep in a bed with sheets and pillowcases depicting He-Man. 

I first heard of Kevin Eastman and Peter Laird's Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles comic book characters in 1987, when the cartoon series and the toy line debuted. Within a few years, a neighborhood friend and I started playing the Palladium role-playing game, which led me to checking out the Mirage comic books, which I quickly became a fan and regular reader of.

In 2024, after I had spent over 30 years of reading comics (and about as many writing about comics), the two multi-media franchises had a comic book crossover.

I was, of course, interested, but braced for disappointment. This particular crossover isn't one that I had previously daydreamed about for years, the way I had Batman meeting the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles or Godzilla fighting the Justice League, but I had been intensely interested in these two groups of characters and their stories at various points in my childhood, and had essentially lived with them somewhere in the recesses of my imagination for my entire life. 

In other words, I was always probably going to be too interested and thus disappointed. (Barring something out-of-left field, something extremely awesome but totally unexpected, something like Tom Scioli's 2014-2016 Transformers vs. G.I. Joe series, a comic about the meeting of two other toy-line buttressed multi-media franchises from my childhood.)

And so I was disappointed, but don't let that discourage you from checking out the trade collection of the four-issue miniseries. 

If, like me, you have some nostalgic affection for both of these franchises, then you'll definitely want to see what writer Tim Seeley and artist Freddie E. Williams II did with them, and how they went about trying to tie such wildly different groups of characters into a cohesive story.

Now while there is no mention of this in the comic itself, it is actually based on a 2024 toy line from Mattel, blending the two toy lines. The result? He-Man-ized Turtles characters, new versions of some He-Man guys and some weird mash-ups, like Mouse-Jaw (Trap-Jaw with Mouser parts) and the two-headed 2-Bopsteady (Bebop and Rocksteady ala Two Bad). 

In that regard, most of the designs the creators are working with here are based on the toys, and Seeley has the somewhat interesting job of integrating them all into a new story. 

Is there a story associated with the toy line itself, explaining the admixture? Probably. According to that link above, the toys were packaged with mini comics—also dawn by Williams, although there's no mention there of the writer—and you can find synopses of them there. One, "By The Power of PIZZA!", seems to set-up how the Turtles and company came to Eternia. 

This comic seems to be rather different though, even if it has the same characters and designs. (I kind of wish Dark Horse would have included the mini-comics stories in the back of this trade though, if only because I'm curious how the stories might compare and contrast, and I'm sure as hell not going to be buying any action figures just to get my hands on some comics.)

Seeley, perhaps following the lead of the toy line, focuses in on the one character that offers the best bridge between the two franchises, Masters of the Universe's "Evil Warrior" Ninjor. Apparently, he was one of the final action figures released in the original MOTU line, which is perhaps why I have no personal experience with him, as I would have stopped playing with He-Man guys by that point (and Ninjor, by the way, never appeared on the original cartoon show; not sure about the later ones).

Still, like most MOTU characters, you can get a pretty good idea of his whole deal by his name alone and, if that doesn't do it, a glance at the character should. He's a ninja, basically. Here, he uses a newfound ability to travel through time and space—more on that in a bit—to travel to Japan and study ninjitsu with Foot Clan founders Oroku Saki and Hamato Yoshi before their falling out.

As to how the two franchises might mix, Seeley makes heavy use of apprentice time mistress Renet Tilley, a Mirage era character who was created for Kevin Eastman, Peter Laird and company's 1986 TMNT #8 (the Cerebus crossover issue), and appeared off and on throughout "Volume 1". She would later appear in a couple of the 21st century cartoons and IDW's "Volume 5".

The book opens with Splinter and April anxiously awaiting contact with the Turtles, who "call" them from Eternia via a magical portal opened by Orko (Don't worry; Orko's actually hardly in the comic at all). Michelangelo then explains in the course of a very text-heavy, show-don't-tell page how they got to Eternia—Basically, Skeletor was buying mutagen from Krang and The Shredder in some kind of weird cross-dimensional deal—and what they have been doing since. 

There are, unfortunately, rather a lot of such talky, info dump-y pages in this relatively short, four-issue story.

After this and the first of the Michelangelo-with-a-He-Man-wig jokes (Not entirely Seeley's fault, I guess, as the action figure appears to have that hair), we get a sequence of the redesigned Turtles teaming up with the MOTU good guys to battle Skeletor, Krang and the mutated Evil Warriors, a sequence that ultimately ends with a big, purple, Hulk-like He-Man joining the fray. Apparently mutated by the Skeletor-magic infused mutagen, he's a berserker behemoth, and kills everyone in a rage. 

The end? No, that's only page 15 of the first issue. 

The sequence does give Williams a chance to cram in a lot of the toy designs though, and cameos from many MOTU characters. The available cast is gigantic, and there's not room for everyone to get much panel-time, not even characters who have toys in the Turtles of Grayskull line, like Leatherhead, or a muted Mer-Man, or "Sla'ker" (a mash-up of TMNT character Slash and MOTU character Fake). 

So, if you're a Snout Spout fan, well, there's good news and bad news. Good news? Your boy does appear in at least three panel. Bad news? He doesn't get any lines, and Shredder chops off his nose in one panel.

Here's where Renet enters the picture. Discovering a "knot" in space time involving the He-Man and Turtle timelines that seems to cause the disaster, she has to try to untangle it, which means keeping He-Man and the Turtles as far apart as possible. 

This proves challenging though, as they seem destined to meet. At one point, she tries to solve the problem by sending the Turtles to Eternia, where they team-up with Man-At-Arms and Teela to infiltrate Snake Mountain, and He-Man to Earth, where he studies ninjitsu with Splinter and then teams with him, Casey Jones and April to take on Shredder and company. 

Complicating matters is Ninjor, who had previously stolen Renet's scepter. At the climax, everyone ends up on Eternia, Ninjor mutates himself into a humanoid dragon (this is another cue taken from the toy line, it seems) and the big, purple mutant He-Man again makes the scene. 

Will our heroes suffer the same fate they did in the first issue, or will they be able to restore He-Man to normal, defeat Ninjor and get everyone back to their home world...? You probably don't need to read the comic book to know the answer to that, although there are certainly pleasures to be had in doing so.

Seeley seems to be attempting to draw a parallel between the Turtles and Prince Adam as regular teenagers who should be able to live normal lives but are, instead, thrust into the roles of protectors and heroes, the fates of their worlds resting on their shoulders. Theirs is a fate that has a hint of tragedy, and causes regret in their respective father figures, Splinter and Man-At-Arms. 

Does it work? Eh, I don't know. It's honestly hard to see Prince Adam as a teenager given that, as per the original cartoon show, he looks exactly the same as the "adult" He-Man, the only thing changing here when he transforms being his clothes (On the original cartoon, He-Man also had a deep tan to distinguish him a bit from  the more fair-skinned Prince Adam, but color artist Andrew Dalhouse gives Adam and He-Man the same complexion). (In this regard, among many others, I thought the 2002 He-Man and The Masters of the Universe cartoon was superior to the original, as its Adam was notably younger, smaller and skinnier than the He-Man he transformed into.)

Still, it's nice that Seeley tried to make this toy box comic about something, rather than just drawing lines between the existing dots. 

The part of the book that produced the most friction for me was, unfortunately, a rather foundational aspect. While the He-Man and the Masters of the Universe characters all seem to pretty consistently be those from the original '80s cartoon and toy line, deferring to the former over the latter in terms of characterization, I honestly couldn't tell you which version of the Turtles Seeley and Williams were using for this crossover. 

In some aspects, it seems to be the version from the original cartoon series and toy line, which is a fair choice, as the fact that they are characters with an old cartoon and toy line is what they have in common with He-Man and company. 

And so the Turtles are color-coded (although they don't wear their initials on their belts, as in the cartoon and toys), April wears a yellow jumpsuit and is a TV reporter for Channel 6 news, there's a panel featuring the Turtle's "Party Wagon" van parked in the sewer, Shredder is costumed as in the cartoon and is working with Krang and the version of Leatherhead we glimpse is that from the cartoon. Oh, and there's also a cameo by the Neutrinos. 

Other cues suggest that these are meant to be the original Mirage comics Turtles, though. Not only is Renet there, but Casey Jones seems to be a close ally of the Turtles (as I recall, he was barely in the original cartoon) and the seems to have at least some affection for April ("You got some competition for my heart here, O'Neil" he says upon hearing Teela threaten Skeletor in the final issue). Most tellingly, here Splinter was a pet rat kept by Yoshi who mutated into human/rat hybrid (as in the comics), rather than Yoshi himself (as in the cartoon).

And then there's this whole strange sequence from the second issue, which is an extended riff on the events of 1986's Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles #6, wherein the Turtles were captured by Triceratons and forced to fight in televised gladiatorial games.

The creators obviously spent some rereading that issue to recreate its events here. The establishing shots of the space base are the same, the Turtles wear the same little breathing devices, the four members of the Triceraton "All-Star Team" wield the exact same weapons...hell, Seeley even has the same ad for the same sponsor, "Space Jooz", "the swill of champions" (It looks like Seeley even attempted to use the same Triceraton announcer offering color commentary on the fight, although forgot a letter; in TMNT #6, he was "Zed Lakin", whereas here he's "Zed Larkin").

The sequence was, obviously, a lot of fun for me personally, as I could pull my yellowed, crumbling copy of 1990's The Collected Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Vol. 1 off the shelf and spend a bit comparing and contrasting, but it certainly confused the issue of which Turtles are supposed to be participating in the crossover (And this wasn't just an extended homage, as its explicitly stated that this is a rematch between the Turtles and the All-Stars—even though I was pretty sure Leonardo killed one of 'em during their first match). 

Seely kinda sorta attempts to address this all at one point, with Renet narrating about the Turtles:

We've literally traveled to the past and the future and across the universe. Like, multiple times! In multiple universes!

I know the world around them is fluid and thin. It's permeable to high strangeness. They cross over other paths all the time.

It's a decent attempt, but I don't think it quite works. 

Still, I had some fun with the book. And it's well crafted. Is it good, though? Well, not really, but sometimes being fun is enough for a comic like this.

The Question: All Along the Watchtower (DC Comics) Writer Greg Rucka didn't create the character Renee Montoya—the Gotham City policewoman was created for Batman: The Animated Series—although he's the writer who did the most and best work on the character, first in his Detective Comics run, then in Gotham Central and then in 52. Over the course of that last series she became The Question, replacing the dying original, Vic Sage. 

Alex Segura seems like a good writer to take her up as, like Rucka, he is mystery novelist who also writes comics. 

His miniseries The Question: All Along the Watchtower (not a fan of that jokey sub-title) expands on the character's current status quo, mentioned briefly in Justice League Unlimited: She is the head of security on the League's new sprawling satellite base, the headquarters of a super-team so big it seemingly includes every superhero in the DC Universe. (As a police officer and a superhero, she's a good fit for the gig, the only other hero with that same background I can think of being the Golden Age hero The Guardian Jim Harper, whose clone served the head of security role for Cadmus in the 1970s and '90s). 

As such, she is essentially the lone sheriff of a sci-fi city full of superheroes. How big is her beat? Well, at one point Wonder Woman refers to the League as consisting of "hundreds, if not thousands" of superheroes, which seems like a pretty high estimate to me. I mean, the various encyclopedias of DC heroes that are occasionally published aren't that long. I'd guess more like dozens, if not scores of superheroes.

In this series, we learn a little bit about how Montoya came to get to this job. (As to how she lost her previous gig, as Gotham's police commissioner, it's mentioned in passing, but not to such a degree that I can tell you much about it.) Apparently, Batman attempted to recruit her, but it was Superman who sealed the deal. Then, when she arrives on the Watchtower, it's Wonder Woman who briefs her and introduces her to her support team: Blue Beetle, the other Blue Beetle, Animal Man and Batwoman. 

In addition to a place that big just needing some kind of security or police presence, the Trinity are apparently all worried about some threat to and within the Watchtower, something that none of them seems to be able to figure out, and that they think Renee's unique mind is best suited to get to the bottom of. The bulk of this series, then, is about Renee trying to figure out this mystery.

Perhaps disappointingly given Segura's background as a writer of mysteries, this book doesn't really function as a mystery. That is, despite Renee saying that the clues were there in front of her the whole time, it's not something that, say, a reader might be able to solve themselves before the reveal (Which I fully intend to spoil in a bit, so fair warning). 

That's because Segura doesn't really play fair here, the supervillain behind the infiltration of the Watchtower exhibiting brand-new super-powers never before associated with him. 

Montoya is presented with a strange, attempted murder in her apartment aboard the satellite: A Challenger of the Unknown is found mauled near to death by some kind of space lynx, security footage showing Batwoman having led the animal to the room and let it in. Batwoman of course professes no knowledge of her actions, and readers will of course be inclined to believe her; it soon becomes apparent that the villain is able to mind-control Leaguers.

And who is this villain? 

Why, it's Cyborg Superman, of course!

This mind-control ability is sort of hand-waved past. Apparently, he's been in the Phantom Zone—the JLU has been using the Phantom Zone to imprison villains—but he has discovered some way to manifest outside the zone, some way that I think has something to do with a device on the back of his neck? This manifestation and/or the zone seem to be killing him, though? And it also mutated him, giving him the new mind-control power? Oh, and also the zone is leaking...? 

Before he dies from however he's dying, the Cyborg Superman wants to take the League and the Watchtower out with him. Having taken over the minds of Montoya's above-mentioned support staff—and League bartender Nightshade and armory stock manager The Bulleteer—The Question is more or less on her own against Cyborg Superman and his henchman The Eradicator. (The cyborg's mind-control comes and goes, so sometimes her allies are with her, and sometimes they are against her; there are other heroes on the satellite, but they are mostly disabled either by the mind-control or the cyborg's control of the satellite itself, its walls stretching out as if made from liquid metal to entrap them).

The Question is, somewhat unfortunately for a reader like me, rather continuity heavy. Segura does a fine job handling the main character and presenting her new life, but I couldn't tell you with 100% certainty the last time I saw either Cyborg Superman or The Eradicator—it would have been at least two reboots ago in the case of the former—nor did I have any idea where they might have been left before Segura picked them up to use here. 

I was pretty shocked to see the original Question, Vic Sage, show up in the fifth issue of the mini-series/chapter of the trade, as, last I knew, he was dead...which was the whole reason Renee was The Question now at all (I looked it up to see how Sage came back to life, and, at least according to Wikipedia, he just appeared hale and hearty in the pages of 2019's Event Leviathan—which I did read, and reviewed in this column, but I apparently I forgot about his appearance there...? The two Questions both appeared in an issue of Rucka's Lois Lane limited series; maybe his resurrection was explained there?)

Oh, and at the climax, Renee takes confronts Cyborg Superman head-on, saying in one panel focusing on some kind of Green Lantern ring on her finger that she's "always prepared." 

Where did she get a Green Lantern ring, and why does it look so...off? (Rather than the regular GL symbol composed of a circle between two horizontal lines, it bears an image of a lantern, akin to that on Alan Scott's chest, and in which shape his ring was made.) The ring is mentioned in passing earlier on in the story—Chekov's power ring?—when The Eradicator asks Bulleteer for "the ring once belonging to the fool Malvolio." 

I had to look that guy up, too. He apparently appeared in a Hal Jordan story from Action Comics Weekly in 1988...and has never appeared again. 

As a rule, if I have to consult the Internet more than once while reading a DC trade paperback to figure out what's going on, I think the script could probably have used another draft before proceeding to the art stage.

A few other nitpicks:

•In retrospect, I'm not entirely sure why Cyborg Superman didn't mind-control The Eradicator but instead seemed to have made a deal with him in order to forge an alliance. I wondered this especially given how often The Eradicator questioned him, and how often he resorted to threats and violence against his ally. There is some mention of the mind-control being hard to maintain in certain states, but then, at the climax, Cyborg Superman's Plan B is to hijack the minds of the entire League and sic them on the Earth, so I don't know.

•Related, why didn't Cyborg Superman also just take over Montoya's mind...? I mean, we obviously wouldn't have a story if he did, but the question nagged at me because, as the series progresses, he seems to take over everyone but Montoya.

•Can Animal Man now control animals, in the way that Aquaman can control sea creatures...? That seems to be the only power he exhibits in the series. It was always my understanding that his power was to adopt the abilities of animals, as Vixen does, but, again, I'm a few reboots behind when it comes to Animal Man's status quo. Anyway, here he is shown as managing the JLU's menagerie of alien animals—assisted by Tawky Tawny, in a lab coat—but rather than mimicking some weird, fantastical abilities by some weird, fantastical space animal, he simply leads them in a stampede at one point.

•Is Pantha alive now, too? She cameos in one panel and is one of the several quite unexpected background heroes I noticed, as I didn't think she was around anymore (The other was what appeared to be the original version of The Shining Knight). Did a bunch of dead heroes just get un-killed during one of the continuity-altering events, like Geoff Johns' goofy-looking Watchmen comic or Dark Nights: Death Metal or Dark Crisis on Infinite Earths or something...?

All that said, I think Segura handles Renee Montoya well enough, and if this isn't a story I particularly liked, it's not hard to imagine him telling a better one at some point in the future. (One aspect I did like, which is inherent to the JLU concept, is the use of relatively minor, book-less characters, and cameos from more-or-less forgotten heroes, like here Mark Waid and Phil Hester's New Blood hero Argus and Keith Giffen's The Heckler, the latter of whom appears in not one but two different panels!).

The art, by Cian Tormey, is quite good, and if Tormey's Watchtower looks a bit under populated compared to Dan Mora's in the first arc of Justice League Unlimited, it's not the always dark, abandoned-looking ghost satellite that Mike Perkins drew (If "drew" is the right word for his reference-heavy, photo collage-looking art) in Justice League: The Atom Project. 

In fact, for all my questions and nitpicks, The Question: All Along the Watchtower is unquestionably—ha!—better than The Atom Project, as far as limited series emanating from JLU go. (If you want to read a shorter and more concise review of All Along the Watchtower, written by someone who, unlike me, seems to be totally up to date on the goings-on of the DC Universe, I would recommend, as always, you check out Collected Editions, which reviewed the trade here). 

Walt Disney's Donald Duck: This Looks Like a Job for Duck Avenger! (Fantagraphics) I regret to report that I didn't much care for this book from Fantagraphics' "Disney Originals" line, a French import from writer Nicolas Pothier and artist Luc "Battem" Collin. I also regret that I'm not entirely confident that I can articulate why, exactly. I wonder if I just have a hard time connecting with comics featuring Donald Duck's superheroic alter ego, Duck Avenger, as the 2019 Duck Avenger Strikes Again similarly left me cold. 

The book is certainly a handsome production, as are all of Fanta's Disney books. It's only 56-pages long, but it's an oversized hardcover, 9.6-inches wide and 12.6-inches long, making for a beautiful presentation of Batem's artwork.

And that artwork is pretty great. Batem's style strays fairly far from what one likely sees in their head when they imagine Disney art. He sticks to the classic designs obviously, but his style is quite loose, with a thin line and a remarkable degree of movement in panels, movement accentuated by lots of action lines. 

The book reads like a collection of a comic book miniseries, which, based on the covers in a little gallery in the back, it seems to be. There's an overarching plot that runs through the entirety of the book, but it's made up of short, discrete stories with their own conflicts.

As for that overarching plot, it is this. Uncle Scrooge is in danger of losing Flaunt It magazine's annual prize for the country's top earner to his rival rich duck, John D. Rockerduck. In order to put himself over the top, Scrooge decides to start charging his nephew Donald Duck rent and if he can't, well, Scrooge will just have to kick him out.

This would in itself be a big problem in most Donald Duck narratives, but here there's an additional wrinkle, as in this storyline Donald is also the Duck Avenger, and his Avenger Lair headquarters full of all his gadgets, weapons and crime-fighting whatnot is beneath his house. If Scrooge repossesses his house, then his secret identity will no longer be secret, and his career as a superhero over.

The only way to save himself is to get a job. Now, Donald getting new jobs seems to be a pretty evergreen Donald Duck story, based on how many times I've seen comics about just that in Fantas' other Donald Duck comics, so the superhero angle here doesn't seem entirely necessary, although I suppose it gives it a bit more urgency. (If Donald's superhero career is new to you, don't worry; the inside front cover presents "The Duck Avenger Backstory" in six panels and accompanying sentences explaining it.)

In the first chapter, Donald fails at a series of jobs, until he decides to confront Rockerduck as the Duck Avenger and convince him to make a donation to a "charity" that is actually Scrooge, saving his uncle's Flaunt It prize. Unfortunately, Scrooge has decided he likes the idea of rent, and so Donald has to keep looking for work for the rest of the book.

In the second chapter, Donald, wearing his Duck Avenger costume and pretending to just be Donald Duck-in-a-borrowed-Duck Avenger-costume and not the real Duck Avenger whose secret identity is Donald Duck, competes in a weird butter delivery challenge in order to get a job with a butter company.

In the third, he gets a job as a night watchman at an art museum, only to have to don his costume when the Beagle Boys break-in.

And, in the fourth and final (and weirdest) issue, there's a heat wave in Duckburg and a strain of frozen zombies on the street, which seems to have something to do with an unlikely alliance between Scrooge and Rockerduck...but things aren't exactly what they seem. On the last page, Donald finally lands a day job he's quite well-suited for. 

Much of the humor in the proceedings seems to be of the wordplay sort, with lots of alliteration, acronyms and, in one curious instance, the owner of a fan company who accentuates the "air" sound in his dialogue ("Life is unfair!", "I think I need to see my doctair!" and so on). Given that I am assuming this was originally published in French, I am curious about just how much work went into the translation—credited to Jonathan H. Gray—to make such wordplay work in English.

Anyway, it's not a bad comic by any stretch of the imagination. I don't think one can really go wrong with any Disney comics from Fantagraphics, or from anything Fantagraphics publishes at this point in general. I just didn't love this one like I have a lot of their other Disney comics (Granted, the ones I've read the most of are from their Carl Barks Library and thus are among the best American comics ever produced). 

If I had to guess, I think it might have something to do with the fact that because I've come to associate Donald Duck as an everyman character, it's a bit too much of a jump for me to see him as a superhero. That, or because of the dated nature of his brand of superheroics and the era of Batmania and super-spies it seems to be riffing on (the Duck Avenger persona first appeared in 1969, after all). Or because I just read so many goddam superhero comics already (gestures at my blog in general) that seeing the genre intrude on one of the non-superhero comics I read feels wrong to me.

Spider-Man: Kizuna Vol. 2 (Viz Media) The first volume of Spider-Man: Kizuna had almost immediately followed into such a strict, repetitive format that I wasn't sure I needed to keep reading in it. After a chapter explaining how Spider-Man met imaginative young manga artist Yu, how Spidey became a ghost or spirit, how the two could now fuse into Spider-Man Kizuna and how they could use Spidey's webbing like a 3D printer, each of the chapters that followed involved the Green Goblin giving a "villain badge" to one of Yu's classmates that turned them into a little kid version of a classic Spider-Man villain, Spidey and Yu stopping them, and then Yu befriending the kid once he or she had returned to normal.

Still, I was a bit curious where the creators might have been going with this, so I decided to stick around for at least one more volume. I'm glad I did, as this second volume breaks the pattern of the first immediately, and never falls back into it; I guess that was just to establish a cast of supporting characters for Yu. 

In the first two chapters, we meet Ginta Takoya, a super-genius who is technically in Yu's class, but is so smart he no longer needs school, and is busy in his lab all day. His bowl cut and the mechanical tentacles that emerge from his backpack (you can see one on the cover above), mark him as a kid version of Doctor Octopus. Indeed, he does adopt the persona of "Kid Ock," but not through a villain badge from the Goblin; rather, he constructs his own, artificial badge as part of an experiment, but the results are the same: Conflict with Spider-Man Kizuna, defeat, ultimately friendship with Yu. 

That's followed by a chapter in which Yu wants to start training to be a better hero himself, not just when he's fused with Spidey, and ends up encountering The Wrecking Crew (These don't seem to be kids empowered by villain badges, but just regular old adult villains; given that artist Hachi Mizuno draws every character pretty much the same size, regardless of whether they or kids or adults, it can sometimes be hard to tell the age of characters). 

And then one in which we return to the classmate-becomes-villain-becomes friend formula, when Yu's fiends accompany spooky girl Rororu Kirisaki on a ghost hunt, and she is transformed into Tiny Mysterio (Keep an eye out in the crowd scenes of ghosts for cameos by Man-Thing and Jeff, The Landshark...and, now that I'm looking more closely, I see ghosts suggestive of Doop, Mojo, Orrgo, H.E.R.B.I.E. and M.O.D.O.K. too...and a tiny little confused-looking Ant-Man in the bottom of one of those panels).

Finally, the Goblin unleashes a pair of giant dragons on the city, slightly goopy looking ones whose designs suggest Venom (definitely) and Carnage (maybe). The Goblin refers to the first of them, the Venom-esque one, as "Orochi", referring to the legendary dragon Yamata no Orochi. (Interestingly, in the recent manga Spider-Man: Shadow Warrior, that's the name applied to a symbiote derived from Venom.)

While these last chapters seem to be a climax of sorts, with the Goblin even offering an explanation of his plan thus far and suggesting to its all lead up to the release of the dragons, there's still some significant stuff yet to resolve...like, for example, that Spider-Man is a still a ghost. I assume they will have to bring him back to life at some point before the series ends, right? 

The series' third volume is scheduled for release in April. 

REVIEWED:

Cabin Head and Tree Head (Tundra Books) When I first came across this book, I was struck by a wave of deja vu, as I was certain I had read a Scott Campbell comic featuring weird guys named after the things sitting atop their heads before, but I couldn't recall wear. Was it a mini-comic purchased at a convention? A small-press graphic novel? Ultimately, I found it, in 2007 anthology Flight Vol. 4. 

I re-read that original 14-page story, entitled "Igloo Head and Tree Head", and it made for some interesting comparing and contrasting. The art is quite different, despite being recognizably Campbell's in both instances, and the some of the same story beats and even bits of dialogue from the original showed up in the first story in Cabin Head, which is an anthology of several short stories featuring the various "head" characters. 

The most obvious difference is, of course, that Igloo Head has become Cabin Head. I wonder why. In the original story, the fact that the thing on Igloo Head's head is made of ice is a plot point. Tree Head has his tree cut down by a tiny little lumberjack, and the pair go to town in search of a hat shop, so Tree Head can find something to cover up his now embarrassing head (He doesn't want to be referred to as "Stump Head"). During the trip, they get a little too close to a house head whose house is on fire, and Igloo Head's head igloo melts.

I am curious if Igloo Head becoming Cabin Head in the new version has something to do with ethnic sensitivity...? After all, "igloo" is a far funnier word than "cabin", so it would seem preferrable (Not to tell Campbell how to do his business, which he is quite good at, but I would have suggested "Bungalow Head" over "Cabin Head"; both are domiciles for people, but "bungalow" is a funnier word than "cabin" too, isn't it?).

Perhaps Campbell didn't want to use a type of structure so associated with a particular group of native people...? (Two of whom appear at one point, fleeing the melting igloo). I don't know; that's just a guess. 

Another change I noticed was the appearance of Canoe Head, who appears in both stories. In the original, his head looks like the sort of canoe one might see Native Americans using in an old Western and, indeed, there are two little Native American characters with naked chests and headbands seated in it, paddling (Canoe Head's only dialogue is clipped in a way that might suggest broken English, or might be meant to suggest that he is in a big hurry, which he is). In Cabin Head, Canoe Head's canoe is now a more modern-looking one, and it contains a single little white man, who is dressed like a camper.

Anyway, I reviewed Cabin Head and Tree Head here. And, if you happen to have a copy of Flight Vol. 4 sitting on your shelf, I found it an interesting exercise to flip through it, and see just how many of its contributors have gone on to produce kids' comics and/or picture books of varying degrees of popularity since, including Graham Annable, Vera Brosgol, Jon Klassen, Lark Pien, Dave Roman, Raina Telgemeier, Joey Weiser and contributor/editor Kazu Kibuishi.

Star Wars: Path of the Lightsaber Vol. 1 (Viz Media) Okay, so perhaps another Star Wars comic series is the last thing anyone needs, but at least Kenny Ruiz's manga, set between The Last Jedi and The Rise of Skywalker, has a unique focus. As telegraphed by the title, the book seems to focus on the iconic Star Wars weapon, as series heroine Nioka discovers an ancient one aboard a High Republic-era ship and decides to keep it and learn to use it, despite not being a Jedi or being able to use The Force. While there are definitely some generic characters, like the villain cast in the Darth Vader mold, I enjoyed a few of the supporting characters, like the villain's hench...object, an Imperial probe droid that keeps initiating its own self-destruct sequence every time it fears it disappoints its master, and Noika's old-timer partner, who seems to be an Endor truther ("'Furballs against Imperial troops'," he says at one point, "Nobody buys that."), which are two words I never thought I would type in that particular order.  More here. 

Bookshelf #11

Here it is, my smuttiest bookshelf! And yes, it's all manga. And most of it is from Seven Seas Entertainment. Is that a coincidence? Perhaps!

A large chunk of it consists of comics from a brief yuri phase, with varying degrees of explicitness and seriousness. These include Doughnuts Under a Crescent Moon, a workplace melodrama; NTR: Netsuzou Trap, about high school friends who cheat on their boyfriends with one another; most of Citrus and one volume of its sequel Citrus+, a mostly serious series about the relationship between two school girls who are polar opposites...and also stepsisters and, finally, one volume apiece of The Conditions of Paradise, Bloom Into You, Days of Love at Seagull Villa and Nameless Asterism, none of which I remember much of anything about (Actually, that last one had a fairy complicated crush triangle at its center that seemed intriguing, but, like a lot of manga I sample, I ended up losing track of it immediately). 

The beautifully drawn Stravaganza also has a flirtatious romance of sorts between two women in it but that isn't the focus of the book. Instead, the focus is on a kingdom's masked queen, who sneaks out of her castle to go on adventures. A medieval fantasy, it vacillates between silly comedy and intense action, the story of kingdoms under threat by terrible monsters gradually taking over the narrative. There's also a lot of nudity. I borrowed the first volume from the library and liked it enough to buy the next two...but never bought the now out-of-print first volume, which is why you only see volumes 2 and 3 up there. Pretty much all of the manga series I own are similarly incomplete. 

Next to that? Don't Meddle with My Daughter, a deadpan parody of American superhero comics. Manga-ka Nozomu Tamaki answers the question, what if a superhero comic was made for grown-ups and were permitted to openly indulge in sexual content, rather than just having the comics creators try to sneak their personal fetishes into mainstream narratives based around what were once considered children's characters...? It's not very good (although I did give it three volumes worth of chances!). If a superhero comic for grown-ups with frank discussion and occasional depictions of sex stuff sounds appealing though, I'd recommend Adam Warren's long-running superhero sex comedy Empowered. Don't Meddle is more explicit when it comes to nudity, but, as I said, it's not very good, while Empowered is pretty excellent. (Or, at least, the volumes of it that I read were all excellent; that's another series I completely lost track of.)

Finally, we have a pair of will they/won't they heterosexual romances set in high school. 

Mari Taiyou's Gal Gohan stars an outgoing high school gyaru/"gal" who various circumstances lead to being the first and only member of a constantly flustered young male Home Ec teacher's new cooking club. Over the course of ten volumes, our gal Miku constantly teases and flusters her handsome teacher, who always gallantly resists any and all temptation, and the two gradually, genuinely bond over the art of cooking...and, of course, fall in love. Though they don't actually get together until after she graduates, I suppose it's a fairly problematic story given the power dynamic and the valid perception of grooming—even though Taiyou always has Miku as the aggressor and her teacher denying her—but I found it engaging enough to read the whole thing. At ten volumes, it's a pretty perfect length for this kind of romance, being long enough to be substantial and display the characters' feelings occurring to them and deepening over time but not going on so long that it's obvious the creator is erecting roadblocks just to keep the series going.

Finally, on the far right is Don' Toy with Me, Miss Nagatoro, starring serious, studious, shy and introverted art clubber Naoto Hachiouji and his junior, first-year student Hayase Nagatoro, who presents herself as loud, confident, aggressive and more sexually experienced and worldly than the boy she calls "Senpai" (even if it's all a bit of a front). It starts out as a sort of oil-and-water affair, Nagatoro mercilessly teasing Hachiouji at every opportunity, but, the more time they spend together, the clearer it becomes they have genuine feelings for one another, although these are almost always masked by falling into their original teasing dynamic. 

I read the first 11 volumes and then switched to borrowing it from the library. I really like the way it looks on the shelf, thanks to the varying colors of the spines, which I feel is relatively rare among manga collections these days, as they tend to favor a uniform trade dress and thus stick to a single color scheme. 

Unfortunately, the library system's purchasing of the series grew a little erratic, and they missed a few volumes, so I haven't read any new ones for a bit and then forgot exactly where I left off with it. Checking Amazon, it seems like they're up to volume 20 now. Perhaps it's just as well; this is a case in which the series has kept going long, long after it was clear the characters liked one another and that each knew the other liked them, but artificial circumstances keep getting introduced to keep them from becoming a couple, here in the form of a kiss bet which requires each character to accomplish a big goal in their lives. 

Oh, and you might also notice a few random prose books lying atop the shelf, there because I didn't have anywhere else to put them (all the space on my actual bookshelves is devoted to comics). These are Our Angry Eden: Faith and Hope on a Hotter, Harsher Planet, David Williams' book about the climate crisis and how Christians could and should address it; The Big Book of Japanese Giant Monster Movies: The Lost Films, John LeMay's book about dozens of intriguing-sounding monster movies that were planned or started but were never actually made; and Betty and Veronica: The Leading Ladies of Riverdale, Tim Hanley's extremely readable book about the two female points of comics' most famous love triangle (I recently read and wrote about this last book, by the way, and plan to post my review here sooner or later).

Revisiting 2005's Day of Vengeance

As you've surely noticed, reading the first half of John Ostrander and Tom Mandrake's 1992-1998 The Spectre via November's omnibus collection piqued my interest in the character, and I became especially curious about how DC proceeded to use him after the Ostrander/Mandrake series, given the pretty perfect ending he received at its end.

As DC hasn't collected every one of those appearances, and some of those that the publisher has collected aren't readily available in library-borrowed trade, I've been pretty much just reading what I can find, in whatever order I can find it. 

Now I come to the 2005 miniseries Day of Vengeance, one of four miniseries the publisher launched as lead-ins to 2006's Infinite Crisis, each of which dealt with a different aspect of the DC Universe. This one covered DC's various magical and supernatural characters and prominently featured The Spectre and Eclipso.

While I was curious to revisit it in light of Ostrander and Mandrake's take on those two characters, I was also curious if, like those last arcs from JLA that I recently reread, the book now reads better at the remove of a couple of decades, when one isn't reading it in regular installments as a part of an unfolding story, with the various expectations that can entail. 

While I have the six-issue miniseries in singles, I opted to borrow the 2005 trade from the library. That includes a not-very-good three-issue arc that Judd Winick and Ian Churchill did in the Superman books that doesn't seem entirely necessary, as well as some fun bonus features. 

I've opted to go with random thoughts and bullet points, rather than something more formal, so feel free to skim. 

•I had completely forgotten until I started rereading Day of Vengeance here that it was drawn by Justiniano. If you're not familiar with that name, it belongs to a very talented artist who did a great deal of admirable work for DC Comics between 1999 and 2010...and, in 2011, was arrested for possession of child pornography. He plead guilty and was sentenced the following year. 

How do we assess the work of a comic book creator who has committed such a heinous crime? Well, while it's certainly possible for two things to be true at once—that is, that Justiniano could draw comics very well and that he is a bad person who is responsible for something terrible—in general, I'm inclined to ignore the work of such creators. 

I don't think DC will even give you the option of spending money that might in any way support Justiniano at this point, as I'm fairly certain nothing he drew for them has been collected since his arrest, which seems fair. After all, no publisher would want to be associated with such a person. 

But regardless of buying work Justiniano has drawn, should we even read it? Should we write about it? I don't know that I have a good answer. I think it's a discussion worth having, especially as there are now a good handful of mainstream superhero comic book creators who have done terrible things that have victimized others. 

For today anyway, I'm going to go ahead and write about this collection and try not to focus on Justiniano's contribution to it any more than I have to. 

•The single most impressive part of this collection is the one to which no name is attached, and thus I am unsure who produced it. 

That would be the 16-paragraph prose piece entitled "The Nature of Magic" that starts on the title page, preceding any of the comics content. It is, in essence, the history of magical beings and the practice of magic in the DC Universe setting, from the point of creation to the rise of Gemworld following cosmic events in "what humans called the 15th century."

The opening few paragraphs blend ideas from comics across decades from various writers on quite different books, like Jerry Siegel's "The Voice" from his 1940 "The Spectre" strip, Jack Kirby's "The Source" from his 1970s Fourth World comics, Marv Wolfman's Destiny from 1972's Weird Mystery Tales, and elements from Neil Gaiman's Books of Magic and The Sandman, Grant Morrison's JLA and John Byrne's Genesis, all from the 1990s. 

And on and on it goes, a coherent, consistent cosmology created piecemeal over many years by many hands, but here presented as a whole. It's both a remarkable bit of synthesis by whoever wrote it, and an eloquent example of what is so appealing and so unique about the two main comics "universe" settings, those of DC and Marvel, and how they evolve writer by writer and story by story over many years. 

•The Judd Winick, Ian Churchill and Norm Rapmund three-part story "Lightning Strikes Twice" that is collected here is pretty unnecessary to the events of Day of Vengeance. Sure, it includes a bit about a black diamond shard of The Heart of Darkness finding its way into Jean Loring's cell in Arkham Asylum and reveals that Eclipso would take her as a new host, but then, the first pages of Day of Vengeance tell us that too. 

Still, I guess there's no reason to complain about getting more comics in your collection, is there? (This whole 200+ page collection only cost $12.99, by the way. These days, thirteen bucks would only get you, what, three DC comics...?)

•"Lightning Strikes Twice", which originally ran through an issue apiece of Action Comics, Adventures of Superman and Superman, centers on a fight between and Eclipso-possessed Superman and Captain Marvel...as did 1992's Action Comics Annual #4 (Collect 1992's annual event, Eclipso: The Darkness Within, I say!). 

Here, we open with Bruce Gordon doing action movie stuff in South America, the wizard Shazam having Captain Marvel standing by on the Rock of Eternity and a disembodied Eclipso trying to maneuver closer and closer to Superman in Metropolis, somehow manipulating various civilians to take their own lives very publicly and violently. 

Eventually, Eclipso eclipses a S.T.A.R. Labs doctor, who strips to her underwear and then suits up in a LexCorp battle suit specifically modified for Superman-fighting (It fires red sun energy, and is built with a kryptonite alloy). Plan A seems to be to duke it out with Superman, pissing him off enough that Eclipso can use the diamond shard aboard to eclipse the Man of Steel.

When that fails, it's time for Plan B, secretly eclipsing Lois (she isn't drawn with an eclipsed face or red eyes, nor does she speak in Eclipso's purple-rimmed dialogue balloons), having her snipe at Clark in their apartment until he loses his temper, and then press the diamond to his forehead, finally giving Eclipso possession of Superman again.

Then, in the final chapter, it's finally time for the eclipsed Superman vs. Captain Marvel rematch, as Eclipso wants Marvel as his new host. They knock one another around a bit, Marvel resorting to the same move he used against Superman in Kingdom Come, shouting "Shazam!" and positioning himself so that the magic lighting strikes Superman, over and over.

As Winick runs out of pages, Shazam himself appears to blast Superman with lightning. And then the then host-less Spectre appears and...does something. The art is kind of confusing, but it seems The Spectre does something to pull Eclipso out of Superman. 

The Spectre and Shazam have a brief, portentous chat, during which the Spirit of Vengeance says something that seems like it might be important when reading the curious events of Day of Vengeance, wherein his actions don't actually make a whole lot of sense:

Without a host, my memories fade in and out. Only my instinct survives. 

My purpose. 

And the diamond? Well, the narration isn't really much clearer than the art on this point. After The Spectre tells Shazam that it has "disappeared again...pulled away by hate," Winick writes the following in white boxes that appear on the penultimate page: "The black diamond was taken by something or somebody."

However it got there, it ended up in Jean Loring's padded cell in Arkham Asylum, where Eclipso has apparently taken over her mind. The last page of the story is a splash, showing a smiling Loring in a gray Arkham jumpsuit, her facial features making it clear that she has been eclipsed. 

•Say, do you think Jean Loring being committed to a home for the criminally insane is supposed to be an admission that the nonsensical plot to get back together with her ex-husband—by murdering Sue Dibny, taking out a hit on Jack Drake and threatening Lois Lane—was crazy...?

•I was kind of surprised at just how horny Churchill's art is in this story arc. There are only three female characters in the whole story, if you want to count Jean, who only appears in a single panel. The others are Lois Lane and S.T.A.R. Labs scientist Doctor Jeanine Tracey.

When Lois is introduced, she's shown striding though the office of the Daily Planet, dressed in a tight-fitting shirt showing lots of cleavage, and a skirt with a slit that goes almost to her hip. Later we see her in her apartment, and she's wearing a tight-fitting babydoll t-shirt and a pair of skimpy panties (Clark, meanwhile, is fully dressed).

When we first meet Dr. Tracey, she's sensibly dressed in a pantsuit and coat, but she will spend the remainder of the story in a strapless bra and panties (I guess you have to strip down to your underwear in order to pilot this particular make of LexCorp battlesuit...?)

•When Eclipso possesses someone in this comic—Jeanine Tracey, Lois Lane, Superman, Jean Loing—Churchill employs the visual signifiers introduced back in 1992's Eclipso: The Darkness Within. That is, their face bears a bluish "eclipse" symbol, their eyes turn red, their ears and teeth get pointy. He also adds an additional flourish, giving them weird, somewhat alien-looking ridges on the sides of their faces and their foreheads. It reminded me a little of the way vampires look in Buffy the Vampire Slayer, although they're not really all that similar in appearance. 

Somewhat frustratingly, Churchill doesn't always draw an eclipsed person with all of these signifiers, as in the case of Lois Lane mentioned above. In that case, I think it was to keep the fact that she was eclipsed from the reader as much as from Superman, although it got me wondering...Do you think the various signifiers are just there for the benefit of the readers, or do Eclipso's victims literally transform like that within the world of the comic, so that, say, Superman can tell at a glance whether Lois Lane has been eclipsed or not...? 

I've been wondering about this off and on (the same day I reread Day of Vengeance, I read the trade paperback Eclipso: Music of the Spheres), as the various "rules" as applied to Eclipso seem to change story to story.

Here, for example, he seems to be driving various civilians to kill themselves, although they don't appear as if they are eclipsed (nor do they seem to ever be exposed to a black diamond), and, in the case of Tracey, he seems to be goading her into a particular action before he finally does take over her body. 

While the suicide scenes are quite heavy in narration, they don't ever explain just what Eclipso is doing or how, which is, obviously, the sort of thing that can irritate a reader like me.

•Between the end of "Lightning Strikes Twice" and the beginning of Day of Vengeance, the collection includes a three-page prose feature. Under the heading "The World of Heroes and Sorcerers", there are five paragraphs devoted to explaining the existence of numerous super-people on Earth today and recapping the plot of Identity Crisis, concentrating on Jean Loring, who, as we just saw, was possessed by the hostless Eclipso while imprisoned in Arkham.

"So begins the story," the first section ends, "but first let us introduce you to the dramatis personae..."

The rest of the three pages is devoted to the six main characters, those that would later star in Shadowpact: Blue Devil, Enchantress, Nightmaster, Nightshade, Ragman and Detective Chimp. Each of them get a long-ish paragraph detailing their biography and history, including their current status quo.

This seems pretty valuable, given how relatively minor some of these characters are (For example, this was the first time I had ever read anything featuring Nightmaster—that I actually remembered him in, anyway. He was introduced way back in 1969). 

Actually, not all of the six heroes get all that thoroughly explained here. The entry for Detective Chimp just says "Bobo tells his story better than anyone, and you'll find it four chapters in." Indeed, while writer Bill Willingham will allude to events in the other characters' lives throughout the series, Detective Chimp is the only one who gets an entire passage of the comic devoted to retelling his origin and history.

•One imagines that Willingham, like the writers of the other "Countdown to Infinite Crisis"-branded miniseries, was given a few particular plot points by editorial before he ever sat down to write this story. Not only does it feature DC's magical and supernatural characters, but it also seems to be working through a particular checklist, in order to get certain characters to certain places and accomplish certain events, moving a bigger mega-plot forward so that Geoff Johns could resolve certain things in Infinite Crisis, and some books that followed that event series would have something to work with that seemed like part of a bigger DC Comics story (For one fairly minor example, original Blue Beetle Dan Garrett's mystical scarab artifact is shown being thrown from the Rock of Eternity to El Paso, Texas...where we know it will be found by Jaime Reyes, who will become the third Blue Beetle in the 2006 Blue Beetle series).

As for that checklist, it seems to include 1.) Presenting a host-less Spectre as a serious worldwide threat (again, I guess, following Johns' own 1999 Day of Judgment, which only ended upon The Spectre getting a new, heroic host), 2.) Killing off of the wizard Shazam and destroying the Rock of Eternity, setting up a new, dumb and ultimately very temporary status quo for the Marvel Family and 3.) Setting up an ongoing series about a magic team in the DCU, something DC seems to have been continually flirting with since at least 1995's Underworld Unleashed: Abyss—Hell's Sentinel, if not earlier. 

I'm not sure how successful this was, long-term. Sure, the new Blue Beetle has managed to stick around, starring in four different ongoings of various lengths in the years since, but as for the other changes wrought by the events here?

Well, The Spectre got a new host during Infinite Crisis, recently killed-off Gotham City Police Detective Crispus Allen, but he never got his own ongoing series, just a three-issue Infinite Crisis Aftermath-branded mini, and when DC rebooted their line a few years later, Jim Corrigan was again the Spectre's host. 

The Judd Winick-written 12-issue maxi-series The Trials of Shazam had Captain Marvel wearing a white costume and changing his name to just "Marvel" to replace the wizard, while Captain Marvel Jr. changed into a red costume and started going by the name "Shazam" (Which, now that I type it out, sounds exactly backwards, doesn't it?). Johns and co-plotter/artist Jerry Ordway undid these changes three years later in the pages of JSoA (And, two years after that, the New 52 rebooted and reset the Marvel Family's status quo yet again anyway). 

And while the Shadowpact did indeed get their own series, it only lasted 25 issues (For comparison's sake, the Gail Simone-written Secret Six, which spun out of Day of Vengeance's sister series Villains United, lasted 36 issues, only ending when DC rebooted their whole line in 2011). The magic hero team concept would return in the New 52 though, with different creators and a different line-up, under the title Justice League Dark. That book lasted over 70 issues across two series. Maybe what DC magic hero team needed to thrive was the "Justice League" branding...? Or, perhaps, to feature former Vertigo characters like John Constantine, Swamp Thing and Black Orchid...? 

•This is the plot of Day of Vengeance. Eclipso has taken over Jean Loring, giving her a dramatic make-over that includes a black "eclipse" symbol over her face, and a costume featuring a bustier/corset with lots of cleavage. She then seduces—the comics' word, not mine—the still host-less Spectre, who was shown to be wildly out of control, punishing even the most minor of offenses severely, as in one case in which a boy who stole who stole six dollars from his mother's purse is caught in a wave of coins (It's unclear whether or not the kid survived).

Here's the part that doesn't quite make sense. Eclipso, The Spectre's enemy stretching back millennia, manages to convince him that in order to eradicate all evil from the world once and for all, he need only destroy any and all forms of magic, from magical locales to magic-users (Never mind that the Spectre's raison d' etre isn't to wipe out evil, but to "confront" it and, at least in all the comics I've ever read, punish the murdered dead). 

So, the Spectre then begins waging a war on magic in the DCU, wiping out hundreds of magic-users. These are, of course, mostly unnamed characters. The only IP DC seems to sacrifice here is minor Firestorm villain Black Bison and, at the end of the book, Shazam (Both have since returned to life, of course). 

As for the "big guns", Spectre takes them out without killing them: Doctor Fate is entrapped in his helmet, Madame Xanadu is blinded and The Phantom Stranger is turned into a mouse ("I don't think even you could kill me, Spectre," The Stranger says during their fight. "I doubt the universe would allow it.")

A bunch of magical heroes gather/hide out in Nightmaster Jim Rook's inter-dimensional bar for just such a clientele, The Oblivion Bar (As does Animal Man; Willingham must have a generous definition of magic). Eventually, Nightmaster, his bouncer Blue Devil, Nightshade and Detective Chimp all decide to step up and tackle The Spectre head-on, joining forces with Ragman and The Enchantress, who have just escaped a fight between The Spectre and Blackbriar Thorn (Oh, I guess he dies too, but he's shown already growing back to live before this series ends).

The half-dozen heroes confront The Spectre in Budapest, where he's throwing down with Captain Marvel (Throughout this series, Spectre mostly just zaps energy bolts and throws punches, rather than using his powers in imaginative or visually interesting ways, so the multi-issue Spectre/Marvel fight isn't really much of a read). 

While Detective Chimp and Nightshade go to recruit a character that the former thinks can actually vanquish The Spectre, Enchantress borrows magical energy willingly donated by volunteers around the world, channeling it into Captain Marvel and, ultimately, making him a giant (See the cover at the top of the post). (And yes, this did remind me of Goku creating his spirit bomb during his fight with Frieza on Namek in Dragon Ball Z.)

Temporarily vanquished by Marvel's powered-up punches, The Spectre flees, carrying the wounded Eclipso with him. 

For round two, Detective Chimp's stratagem is employed: Black Alice, a character introduced by Gail Simone, Joe Prado and Ed Benes just previously in Birds of Prey, uses her meta-human ability to temporarily steal magic powers to completely drain The Spectre.

The only problem with this is, of course, without a host, The Spectre is pretty much nothing but magic powers, so when Alice takes those away, he's nothing but a formless ghost, which the Shadowpact is unable to affect in anyway, their attacks going right through him. He again flees, but this time without Eclipso; Nightshade had used her powers to create a portal to an orbit around the sun, through which they had thrown Eclipso.

Finally, The Spectre goes to the Rock of Eternity to duke it out with Shazam. During their battle, the Rock explodes over Gotham City, showering the world with magical debris, and seemingly scrambling the world of magic to such a degree that a full-time magic super-team will be needed to deal with it going forward, as opposed to the ad hoc unions of magical characters that had been semi-regularly popping up in DC Comics over the last decade or two.

The book ends with the Shadowpact vowing to stay together, but, as for the threat of The Spectre and other fall-out of his attack, that won't be addressed until Infinite Crisis proper. I am not rereading that.

•As stated previously, Day of Vengeance opens with Jean becoming Eclipso's host. Here, that is much more involved than was shown in "Lightning Strikes Twice." There's a good two and a half pages of argument between Jean and Eclipso; we're not privy to what he seems to be saying to her through the black diamond in her cell, only her responses to him which, oddly, sound kind of dirty at times ("And what do you expect in return?" she asks at one point, followed later by, "Oh, no, I could never do that! What kind of woman do you think I am?" and "Because I was raised better than that--that's why!").

Anwyay, once Eclipso finally eclipses her, a seven-panel sequence depicting a painful process, she is transformed, and, pointy-ears and eclipsed face aside, doesn't look much like any of the eclipsed from the previous story...which, in this collection, is, like, five pages ago.

Also, her dialogue bubbles don't have a ring of purple around them, seemingly suggesting that she's talking in Jean's own normal, human voice, rather than in Eclipso's distinct voice.

•Willingham's take on Ragman, who narratees much of the first issue, is a distinct one. While we would have last seen him in a 1998 Batman arc—which you and I have just seen quite recently——here he's not only not resistant to taking the lives of evil people but seems to regard doing so as his job. "Once upon a time I used to be a superhero," he says, "Now I'm just the guy who picks up the trash."

In this scene, "the trash" refers to a man who apparently murdered his wife and business partner. Ragman chases him down, throws him around, enwraps him in the rags of his cape, and then ultimately sucks the man's soul out of his body to become another rag in his suit of souls, leaving behind a desiccated husk. 

Here, Ragman seems to be intimately familiar with each and every rag/soul in his suit, able to recall their name, their crime and their willingness to help him, by lending them their strength. His power seems to correspond to the number of souls in his suit, and, when he needs to lift a large tree trunk to save someone trapped beneath it, he narrates, "I take energy from dozens...And when that doesn't work, I increase the enlistment to hundreds."

•As to how Eclipso is able to convince The Spectre to attack magic, well, that gets explained (or as explained as it ever is), in the second issue. We listen in as Eclipso talks directly to The Spectre in purple narration boxes, referring to him as "Darling" and "Handsome."

When The Spectre lays eyes on Eclipso and hears his/her name, he says only that it sounds familiar. Willingham than has Eclipso expound on The Spectre's confused state, referred to by Winick in "Lightning Strikes Twice":

I know you're a bit confused these days, right? Old memories all a jumble?

It shows.

Not your fault, though.

This is the first time in ages you've been without a human host. Someone to anchor you to this reality. 

I'm here to remedy that. 

Eclipso isn't going to be his new host, although that might be a bit more believable, if one spirit of divine retribution can indeed host another ("I have my own part to play, in the grand scheme of things," she answers, when he asks if Eclipso is to be his new host). (Of course, what would make the most sense would simply be to have Eclipso eclipse The Spectre. Then The Spectre's evil actions could be explained as his being controlled by an evil entity, rather than this talk of seduction and belief that magic is the source of evil.)

Rather, she says she has been sent by "the higher powers" to advise him and give him direction.

That conversation, and Eclispo's thoughts, are shared with readers in a scene wherein The Enchantress channels Eclipso, speaking his thoughts aloud to her new allies. Eclipso boasts that her logic "is subtle, but flawless." "Law and order are all about following the rules," Eclipso-through-Enchantress says, "And magic is all about breaking the rules of nature."

Maybe. I think there were better ways to "sell" this conflict which, again, I think was dictated to Willingham rather than being entirely his own invention, and perhaps another would simply be the host-less Spectre deciding that magic was a sin in the eyes of God, an unnatural usurpation of God's dominion over the world and its workings. After all, there are passages in the Bible forbidding witchcraft and other forms of magic and divination, and certainly for centuries now the church has associated magic with the devil and dark powers.

Anyway, Willingham continues to make it weird. The first words we hear Enchantress speak when the scene shifts to her are "I'm doing it...I'm actually seducing The Spectre." And, a few panels later, after mentioning how lonely The Spectre has been without a host and how happy he is that Eclipso has befriended him, she says, "And oh, the new feelings I've woken in him! He wants me in more than just a spiritual sense."

I...don't like to think of The Spectre as a sexual being at all, but I suppose DC has done something similar before. 

At any rate, the recent Spectre omnibus includes a panel wherein Madame Xandadu says something cryptic about how, in the past, "both natures of The Spectre fed me the tantric power by which I maintained the spell," and the art shows her with her hand on the grim face of The Spectre, next to another image of her happily embracing a shirtless Corrigan. (She seemed to be referring to the events of the 1987-1989 Spectre series written by Doug Moench, which I've never read, but heard a bit about.)

And in 1999's Day of Judgment, a caption refers to Madame Xanadu as, in part, "former lover of The Spectre", again likely referring to the Moench series. 

•Hmm, all this talk about magic being the root of all evil aside then, could Eclipso have really seduced The Spectre simply by showing interest in him...and showing so much cleavage? That's something the old Eclipso never had, anyway. 

If Jean wanted to get back together with The Atom, maybe she should have tried putting her boobs in his face, rather than that whole murder-his-old-coworker's-wife stratagem...

•Rex The Wonder Dog makes an unnamed cameo, appearing in a panel of the origin story that Detective Chimp shares with Black Alice's dad ("On our circuit was a show in rural Florida, where a doggie pal of mine led me to the Fountain of Youth," he says in a brown narration box with a magnifying glass in the corner, while the art shows a still-naked Bobo and a white dog drinking from a pool). 

If DC had only released a complete collection of the 1986-1990 Secret Origins series, maybe Bobo wouldn't have had to take up so much of this mini-series telling his story.

His origin was told in 1989's Secret Origins #40, the infamous all-ape issue featuring one of the greatest covers DC has ever published. Andy Helfer and Mark Badger were responsible for that Detective Chimp origin story, although it sounds pretty different than the one presented here (The Fountain of Youth story appears to originate in a story from 1981's DC Comics Presents #35). The issue also included origins of Gorilla Grodd and Congorilla (on the motorcycle). 

I've been meaning to devote a post to how badly I wish DC would collect that Secret Origins series for a while now. Maybe they can do so in a couple of DC Finest volumes in the near future...? Sure, continuity has changed repeatedly since the last issue of the series was published, and thus many of the specifics of those stories might have likewise changed, but there's a real who's who of talent involved in those comics.

•Excuse me, Captain Marvel? You have too been in a bar before. I saw you there. You ordered a milkshake. Remember L.E.G.I.O.N. '91 #31? The "War of the Gods" tie-in where you fell on top of Lobo and, despite your resistance, you eventually fought him until you were teleported away again? That was totally in a bar. I mean, it was a space bar, sure, but it was still a bar...

(If you, dear reader, missed that particular barroom brawl, which was drawn by Barry Kitson and appeared under a cover by the great Dan Brereton, DC collected it in 2015's Shazam! A Celebration of 75 Years, which is a pretty good book to have on your bookshelf.)

•Okay, so as stated above, Eclipso-in-Jean-Loring's-body was teleported to "a perpetual, non-decaying orbit around the sun."

Now, as far as I knew in 2005, sunlight was Eclipso's one great weakness, and exposure to sunlight would drive him out of the whatever body he happened to be in possession of. Had that changed somewhere between 1992 and 2005...? (I don't think it did, as I had read all of his appearances between The Darkness Within and Day of Vengeance, but I suppose it could have in, say, JSA, and I just don't remember). 

Anyway, I'm pretty sure that as soon as the eclipsed Jean Loring appeared in orbit around the sun, Eclipso should have been driven from her body, and she would have then immediately died by virtue of being in the vacuum of space.

•After Day of Vengeance concludes, with a cliffhanger ending of sorts, it's dangling plot threads eventually picked up on in Infinite Crisis, Day of Vengeance: Infinite Crisis Special #1 and Shadowpact (Oh, and the previously mentioned Blue Beetle, I guess), the trade includes a few more features. There's a cover gallery (Churchill drew the "Lightning Strikes Twice" covers, while Walt Simonson drew the Day of Vengeance ones), Justiniano's character designs for the eclipsed Jean Loring and Enchantress, and two pages that offer a character key for all of the cameos in the first Oblivion Bar scene.

Justiniano filled these scenes with plenty of original character designs, but there's also a ton of extant DC characters, like Jennifer Morgan, Arion, Black Orchid, Witchfire, Janissary and The Ghost Patrol...it was a fun scene in the comic, rewarding one scanning the background and seeing which characters could be recognized, and it was equally fun to have the "answers" to the scene in the back like that.