A Month of Wednesdays: April 2026

BOUGHT:

Supergirl Vol. 1: Misadventures in Midvale (DC Comics) I was genuinely worried about this one. 

As long-time readers likely know, Sophie Campbell is one of my favorite artists—and, increasingly, comics storytellers—and she has been since I first came upon her work about 20 years ago now. Since then, I've read and enjoyed (almost) everything she's done, from her personal stuff like Wet Moon and Shadoweyes to her work on various franchises and extant characters, some of which were already favorites of mine (Kevin Eastman and Peter Laird's Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Toho's Mothra), others of which I was completely ambivalent about (Rob Liefeld's Glory). So obviously I'm going to read anything she works on...especially if she's writing and drawing it. 

But there are few DC characters I am less interested in than Supergirl (Probably just the Legion of Super-Heroes. Or the WildStorm characters, if any of those guys count as DC characters now; they seem to come and go from DCU continuity). 

I attribute this to what the publisher was doing with the character around the time I started reading comics. At that point, John Byrne had (understandably, I suppose) wanted to streamline the Superman family for his post-Crisis reboot, so that Superman was the only surviving Kryptonian and, as a workaround, the post-Crisis Supergirl was actually...shape-shifting sentient protoplasm in the form of Supergirl...? And then in the late '90s that "Matrix" Supergirl merged with a human girl? And became some kind of angel, with flame vision and fire wings...? Not sure how any of this actually simplified anything, as "Superman's cousin from Krypton" is pretty damn simple in comparison.

Subsequent reboots, like Jeph Loeb simply reintroducing Supergirl in 2004  as if the "Matrix" version/versions had never existed*, only repelled me further, as reboots usually do, and I basically just steered clear of Supergirl as much as possible, although I've obviously read plenty of comics in which she appeared (Probably less than I could count on one hand that actually had the name "Supergirl" in the title, though). Similarly, The New 52 reboot didn't interest me at all. This avoidance of the character extended backwards in time, too, so I've never even read her original Silver Age adventures, despite my fondness for that era of Superman comics in general. 

(I did watch the first season and a half or so of the live-action TV show starring Melissa Benoist, so I know there's potential in the character; I also liked the later version from the DC Super Hero Girls franchise, the one with big arms and short hair).

Why am I saying all of this? I mean, aside from the fact that that I tend to go on and on when fewer words would do, and I have no editor or word limits here? Well, the basic point is this: I love Sophie Campbell's comics, and have no interest at all in Supergirl comics, so Sophie Campbell doing a Supergirl comic is sort of...fraught for me. 

I mean, I want to support Campbell in all she does, obviously. But what if I hated it? I've never written a bad review of a Campbell comic before!

Well, as it tuns out, I need not have worried. Campbell's Supergirl, which is colored by Tamra Bonvillain, is a triumph. 

Not only is this the first time I ever cared the least bit about the character, it's one of the best superhero comics I've read in recent memory and, importantly I think, it is both new-reader friendly and all-ages. I think you could give this trade to pretty much any reader, regardless of age or background with the character or the DC universe in general, and they would be able to understand it easily, and, more importantly, enjoy it. (Reading it reminded me quite a bit of Marvel's The Unbeatable Squirrel Girl and the earliest Ms. Marvel comics, although I think the latter required a bit more foreknowledge of that universe's characters and history, what with the Inhuman origin and Carol Danvers being Kamala's hero.)

I think it helps that Supergirl's post-Crisis continuity is so convoluted and crazy, and that DC has rebooted their own damn continuity so many times since Infinite Crisis, that, at this point, there is essentially no continuity, and so Campbell seems rather free to proceed almost as if she's working on a brand-new character, only nodding to the characters status quo previous to this book (She apparently lived in Metropolis?) and picking and choosing what she wants to reference or include from the character's past. 

Perhaps surprisingly, a lot of this seems to be from the Silver Age and Bronze Age (at least as far as I can tell). Several characters that I thought were new here, I later found by googling them, are actually older, more obscure pre-Crisis ones, reinvented rather than taken out of mothballs, so that they feel new and thus, I imagine, read like Easter eggs to long-time Supergirl fans.

It also helps that Campbell couches the book in Superman lore rather than Superman continuity. That is, most of the Super-stuff included is of the sort that is 1) among the most fun and 2) the sort of stuff most people would probably already know from pop culture or can at least easily intuit. Stuff like Kandor, Krypto, Streaky and Titano, or that Luthors are usually bad guys or that kryptonite is the weakness of Kryptonians and so on.

Misadventures in Midvale collects the first six issues of the series, about four and a half of which are drawn by Campbell, while the two guest artists are deployed rather strategically (Supergirl is barely in the fifth issue, which features a pair of adventures by two teams of Super Pets; Paulina Ganucheau and Rosi Kampe each draw one of those adventures. The action of the sixth issue is split between the real world and Supergirl's dreams/mind; Campbell draws the IRL stuff, while Kampe handles the stuff in the character's head). 

The first issue opens with a sort of day-in-the-life of Supergirl—defending Metropolis from an original villain named Princess Shark, shrinking down to patrol Kandor—before her parents ask her to visit them in Midvale, Supergirl's old hometown. 

When she arrives there, though, she finds something's quite wrong: Midvale has a new Supergirl that they've adopted as their hometown hero, and there's already a girl named Linda Danvers, her old secret identity, living in her old house with her parents. What's going on? 

Well, that's the question that the first three-issue story arc addresses. Our Supergirl is branded "Phonygirl" as she tries to get to the bottom of the new, not-her Supergirl/Linda Danvers. She's aided by Krypto, Streaky and Lena Luthor, who has quite conveniently just moved into a "secret lair" on the edge of Midvale (And who, I am guessing, is mainly in this book due to the character's role and popularity in the live-action TV show, where she was played by Katie McGrath; I haven't read most of the character's comics adventures, but I don't think she's been seen in quite a while, nor all that tightly tied to Supergirl). 

During the course of the adventure, we'll meet a new Super Pet—the faux Supergirl's apparently Kryptonian rabbit, Kandy—Titano will attack and get a radical makeover and new name, and a blast from a gun powered by black kryptonite will transform Supergirl into the evil (and not very smart) Satan Girl...and similarly affect Krypto (although he doesn't seem to change his name). 

Oh, and there's also a montage where Supergirl tries on various old and potential costumes, a scene evocative of one from one of the earliest episodes of the TV show. Thanks to Lena, she will eventually gain a new way of suiting up into her current costume, which involves a magical girl-esque transformation sequence.

In the fourth issue, Supergirl, Lena and their new friend, who all seem to be roommates now, go to a goth club (a sequence of which reminded me quite a bit of that from Campbell's TMNT where Jennika takes the guys to a rock club in Mutant Town). There they end up fighting a new version of an obscure Supergirl villain, who I only know previously existed because the very specific name given to him—Howard Pendergast—led me to google it on a hunch. 

The fifth issue, as mentioned, features the Super Pets (I think Ganucheau, whose work I'm familiar with from her story in TMNT: Black, White and Green, her cute original graphic novel Lemon Bird Can Help and illustrating Magdalene Visaggio's Girlmode, is more compatible with Campbell's than Kampe's, which looks off compared to everything that preceded it). 

And finally, the sixth issue has the girls—who have now added another new friend—trying to celebrate Halloween, while Supergirl's dreams are haunted by the villain Nightflame. This is the first issue that really seems to reference past Supergirl continuity in a way that might be construed as alienating. Essentially, Nightflame presents Supergirl with a series of her worst memories, and Kampe draws panels referencing particular points in Supergirl history, only a few of which I recognized (Interestingly, this sequence reinforces the conception that the current Supergirl is the original Silver Age one reborn, as her memories include being abandoned to an orphanage by Superman and being killed in COIE, as well as later stuff involving that weird skimpy costume she wore in Superman/Batman, the Red Lanterns and stuff I wasn't familiar with...like Krypto bleeding profusely from arrow wounds, which Bluesky told me was from a Tom King story?). (In Campbell's defense here, one really only need know that these images refer to specific bad or traumatic events Supergirl's past, and not exactly what is going on or what issue they came from).

As fun and as new reader friendly as the book is, one of the things I particularly appreciated was Campbell's portrayal of a superhero as, like, a genuinely good person. Supergirl is obviously involved in some fights, but she shows a great deal of sympathy for her enemies and is quite gentle with them (this we're shown on the very first page, as she deals with Princess Shark), and empathizes with their plights and, in the case of the first arc's main villain, what it is that drove her to her bad acts.

This is best illustrated in a three-page sequence in Supergirl #3, where Campbell draws Supergirl triumphantly grabbing the villain by the collar with one hand, while her other is hauled back into a fist, as if she's about to deliver a knock-out blow. The villain certainly expects one and looks concerned and scared as she reflexively flinches. But then you turn the page and see that Supergirl has pulled her foe into a hug.

The other refreshing aspect is just seeing Campbell's art applied to DC super-comics. If you've read many of Campbell's comics—um, at least those featuring human casts rather than mutant animals—she has always demonstrated a great and compelling range of character designs in her comics that are all too rare in the superhero genre.

I mean, most superhero comic artists—even many of the greats—tend to draw character "types" rather than specific characters. Like "big, buff man" and "attractive young woman" and so on. All too often, the women in superhero comics tend to look identical to one another and are really only distinguishable by their hair color or style and the clothes (often costumes) that they are wearing.

Not so in a Campbell comic. Here, all of the young women characters look distinct from one another. Even Kara/Supergirl, who is probably the most default superheroic/conventionally attractive character has a particular face and a particular body, and it's nothing like that of the other characters.

Kandorian Lesla-Lar, for example, has a thin, upturned nose and a slightly pointed chin. In Kandor, she's tall and slim, but under the sun's yellow rays, not only does she gain muscle, but she also gains Power Girl-esque curves, becoming statuesque and busty, with notably curvy thighs that distinguish her from the shorter, slimmer Kara.

This is the case with the other principal women as well, like Lena and new character Luna Lustrum, who Campbell gives a slim build, a prominent nose, big eyes and a notably sloping forehead. (Luna is a strikingly beautiful and original character too, probably the one that stands out the most in the series so far).

I can only wish that more mainstream supercomics took this much care to draw female characters that seem so distinct and so real—even though I don't think "realistic" is likely a word that many would apply to Campbell's style, in terms of her rendering. 

It's for this reason that I hope Campbell is able to stick with both writing and drawing the title for as long as possible (and hopefully longer than she managed to do both on her TMNT run). In fact, if being able to do both makes making deadlines impossible (and or means she has to start keeping an unhealthy, punishing work schedule), well, I would rather the book become a bimonthly or quarterly than see Campbell retreat to just writing and drawing the covers while another pencil artist takes over, but hey, that's just me.

At any rate, Campbell's Supergirl? It's a really great comic. Check this trade out if you haven't already. 

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By the way, do you remember the apparently now-defunct site Project: Rooftop website, where artists would share their redesigns of superhero costumes? After reading Campbell's Supergirl book, where she seems to have settled on the costume you see on the cover above for the character, one that evokes elements of several different incarnations of the character, I was curious to revisit Campbell's rather more radical redesign from 2009 or so.

While I couldn't find Project: Rooftop proper anymore, Campbell's design survived in posts about the post in which artists redesigned Supergirl:

I love the short cape, and there are obviously elements of this costume that are unique to this design, like the color scheme, the off-the-shoulder top, and, I think, the little yellow five-sided diamond-shapes all over, which I imagine are meant to be Super-symbols.

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BORROWED:

Batman/Superman: World's Finest Vol. 8: 20,000 Leagues (DC Comics) I'm afraid I wasn't terribly enamored with the latest collection of Mark Waid's Batman/Superman team-up title, which I attribute in part to the somewhat muddy art of Adrian Gutierrez, who draws most of these seven issues**, although I don't think Waid is entirely blameless here. Although he writes all of the characters involved well (and includes lots of bit of DC Comics mythology that I like), and though he has some interesting, insightful thoughts within the stories here collected, overall, none of them are particularly compelling as stories. 

There are three separate stories total here, two three-issue arcs broken up by a done-in-one. Let's take them each in turn.

The first is the title story arc "20,000 Leagues," which finds Superman, Batman and Robin joining Aquaman (who was quite conveniently hanging out on the surface world with them at the start of the story) in Atlantis, where the heroes must deal with a strange plague turning the people of Tritonis (these are the Atlanteans who resemble traditional merpeople, being human from the waist up and fish from the waist down) into rampaging, red-eyed zombies. That, and the plague's fallout: The King of Tritonis blames the people of Poseidonis (Aquaman's hometown) for spreading the plague and he is about to initiate a civil war over the matter.

As it turns out, Superman has something of a personal stake in these events, as his ex, Lori Lemaris, hails from Tritonis, and is currently married to its king Ronal (Complicating things is the fact that their marriage isn't going great, so Lori finds herself drawn towards the more attentive Superman during the proceedings).

The plague and civil war both turn out to be part of the machinations of a supervillain, of course. 

In a pretty clumsy cliffhanger for Waid, that villain is revealed on the last page of the first issue of the arc. In the last panel, Batman narrows his eyes at him, while Robin says, "Batman.. ...Who the hell is that?"

The comic doesn't tell us, and I didn't recognize him due to what I am assuming is a rather radical redesign here. Did readers have to wait a whole month to find out who this weird-looking plant creature is? (I see his name is on the cover of the next issue and is the first line of dialogue in that issue). 

It's The Floronic Man. 

He created the fungal plague and sowed suspicions between the two cities to incite a war as part of his plan to take over the world's oceans, which host an abundance of plant life, some of which seems to be imbued with magic, thanks to its proximity to Atlantis, I guess.

Swamp Thing is also involved but doesn't get a whole lot to do.

The most interesting bit of the story is Ronal talking about his feelings of inadequacy, being Lori's husband and knowing that her first love was pretty literally the most perfect man on Earth. 

Well, there's that, and the idea that Aquaman is a baseball fan, something that comes up briefly at the beginning of the end of the story; between, Waid has the Atlanteans and Aquaman himself addressing the issue of the King of Atlantis spending so much time away from home with the surface heroes, which Waid seems to resolve by having Aquaman argue that by saving the world with the Justice League, he is also saving his subjects in Atlantis. 

There are a couple of points where I had a hard time seeing in Gutierrez's art what the script seemed to be saying, but the bigger problem is the plethora of what look like digital effects (I'm not sure if these are drawn into the art by Gutierrez or by color artists Tamra Bonvillain and Matt Herms). Because most of the action is underwater, it's somewhat dimly lit, and the panels are all filled with bubble effects. There are also some bright, lightning-like effects to suggest magic, and these additional layers of visual information, on top of the art, sound effects and dialogue bubbles and narration boxes, seems to overload and overwhelm the pages to me.

Also, Gutierrez gives Ronal and Aquaman similar haircuts, which are only a shade different in color (Ronal's hair is slightly redder), and I wish they didn't look so much like one another throughout.

The done-in-one is one of the occasional mixing-and-matching of the Batman and Superman supporting casts that Waid offers in this series, this time with the old guy co-workers of the two heroes, as Perry White and Jim Gordon are both guests on a Metropolis podcast with a new character who Lois Lane says "ranks number one among the dude-bro demo."

They're not arguing long before a giant monster attacks, and Clark Kent and Bruce Wayne, both of whom are there to support their respective friends, go into action in their heroic identities. Batman is in a giant robot battle suit, which he introduces to Superman as a little something he's been working on ("You have the coolest hobbies," Superman says when he sees it).

You know, at this point I think I've lost track of how many giant robots Batman has piloted over the years (But the one Kelley Jones drew for him in Gotham After Midnight, which was essentially a giant punching machine he rolls out in order to fight a giant-sized Clayface, is still my favorite).

This issue is fine. While I don't love the art here, especially the use of what look like manipulated photos to stand in for Metropolis in the backgrounds, it's short and stuffed with action. 

There's a fun three-panel sequence where Bruce Wayne flirts with Lois just to needle his friend Clark/Superman, and it is of course satisfying to see a hero of dude-bros in handcuffs being led into a police van at the end (Gutierrez gives this character muscular arms, a clean-shaven bald head and a dark beard, so that he has a passing resemblance to Andrew Tate). 

The final story here is the three-issue "Bizarro World Tour." Superman, Batman and Robin are teleported to Bizarro World, which is in the throes of a mysterious plague (Yes, that's two plagues in one collection!). The disease turns the usually backwards Bizarro's normal, and crowds of the unaffected chase and attack those that are infected (Because the "backwards" response to an infectious disease is, of course, to get as close to those who have it as possible, rather than to keep a safe distance, right?).

After Robin, who seems to have little to no experience with Bizarros here, navigates the chaos in scenes evocative of horror movies, the three heroes of our world eventually meet Bizarro World's Bizarro #1 and Batzarro, both of whom have been infected, and are now totally normal, rational-thinking players (Although they still look like grotesque fun house mirrors of the genuine articles).

Again, Waid has some interesting riffs on the premise of his story. The way in which the heroes come up with a cure for the plague is genuinely inspired, the revelation of where it came from and how the person responsible finds himself slowly succumbing to his own Bizarro-ification and keeping a diary of it is fun, and there's an oddly touching bit where Batzarro explains to Robin that the plague isn't the "cure" he thinks it is, that, to them, it is a sort of mental illness, and that "whatever this disease is, it's twisting the perspective of thousands of innocent beings against their will." 

That said, the impetus for the plague's creation, and the ultimate problem both worlds' World's Finest teams must address comes from Waid thinking about Bizarro World in realistic terms and applying physics to the idea of a cube-shaped planet. It's smart, but makes me uncomfortable, as this is superhero comics—and superhero comics based on silly ideas from the crazy Silver Age—and there's only so much logic that one can comfortably apply. I mean, why wrestle with how a cube-shaped planet might exist in the real world instead of just shrug and think "Who cares? It's comics." I mean, it's not like the title has yet to address how Superman flies, for example. 

This arc isn't underwater, of course, so there aren't a bunch of bubbles in every panel, but I still found the art a bit too murky-looking—Is it so dark-looking on Bizarro World because darkness is the opposite of light, perhaps?

All in all, despite its many bright spots, I didn't find this particular volume as fun or as engaging as some of the previous seven. 

Komi Can't Communicate Vol. 37 (Viz Media) I've been expecting, even dreading this moment for quite a while now—ever since protagonists Komi and Tadano confessed their feelings for one another and started dating actually, which seems like forever ago—and it's finally here, the very last volume of Tomohito Oda's Komi Can't Communicate. 

Obviously, I'm a fan. I've read 37 volumes after all, which is somewhere in the neighborhood of—oh jeez—10,00 pages. So, I'll definitely be sorry to see it go, and will miss my occasional visits to a Japanese high school (I've been filling the Komi-shaped hole in my reading list with the oddly-named Skip and Loafer, which is cute, dramatic and funny, but with a much more...normal student body than that of Komi's school). On the other hand, though, the narrative definitely seems like it was ready to end. 

As I suspected off and on, the series ends with Komi, Tadano and company graduating from high school...and Komi making her 100th friend, one of the big drivers of the series' action. In that respect, Oda probably couldn't have kept it going too much longer anyway. There's a final, eight-page 500th chapter, in which we check in on Komi and Tadano in college, and I suppose it's possible we could have gotten at least a few more volumes detailing the pair and other characters as college kids (not unlike the last few volumes of Haikyu!!, where Haruichi Furudate gave readers a "flash forward" to Hinata and company's post-high school years, a weird but fun way of showing us how the characters all end up), but, as I said, the series seemed like it was starting to wind down many volumes ago, when the central will they/won't they question was resolved (the did, obviously).

Indeed, even in this last volume, Oda seems to be marking time, with several side stories that aren't directly involved with the Komi/Tadano relationship, Komi's quest for 100 friends, or the end of high school...or even wrapping up the stories of various supporting characters. 

And so, in this volume, Komi and Manbagi attempt to get their driver's licenses, with mixed results (their instructor is the leather and spike-clad older sister of one of the weirder-looking kids in their class). 

There's a whole chapter devoted to ranking the various penis sizes of the boys who visit a public bath (The word "penis" is never mentioned, but Son Totoi, the perverted student who looks like the Buddha for some reason, suggests, "Every situation involves a hierarchy. Even amongst friends. How about we... ...rank ourselves by size." If you're curious, Tadano is in the middle of the pack, number five of the nine in attendance.)

And he masked group, identified to one another only by letter, although readers know who each of them are, gather once again to share their various romantic, but remarkably chaste, fantasies one last time.

And there's a surprisingly touching chapter devoted to Komi's friendship with Ren Yamai, the rabidly perverted girl with an over-the-top sexual attraction to Komi. Here, they meet in Komi's room, and Komi haltingly asks Yamai why she likes her as much as she does, to which Yamai replies completely honestly, after first telling her something she thought Komi might want to hear: 

No, that's all lies. 

It's because you're beautiful. 

That's the only reason.

I don't care about your personality. I just want to lick your face and body all over...and nestle between your beautiful hair and neck... ...and squeeze your divine calves and get scratched by your pretty fingernails.

The exchanges that follow, in which Komi thanks her for her compliments and honesty and tells her what she admires about her, and Yamai thinks about the positive impact Komi and her friendship has had on her, is actually quite touching, and actually rather redeems one of the weirder, more off-putting characters in the series, who has thus far been a mostly one-note character whose often perverse sexual interest in Komi has always been played for laughs. 

Speaking of sexual, the very last page suggests strongly that Komi and Tadano are, as first-year college students, going to take that big step. The sequence, which follows the pair on a date, ends with a deeply blushing Komi suggesting, "Maybe I don't... ...need to go hom tonight. We don't... ...need to wait any longer, right?"

A long way from being so shy and socially anxious she couldn't speak to Tadano but had to write what she wanted to say to him on a school chalk board. 

If you haven't been reading, I'd definitely recommend trying the series out. In my experience, the best way to read a good manga series is once it's over, so that if you get really into it, you get the instant gratification of being able to read the next volume as soon as you finish one, and don't have to wait months between installments. 

REVIEWED:

Feo The Chupacabra (Abrams Fanfare) As someone who has read and written extensively about cryptozoology and cryptids (more on that at some point in the future, I hope), I was planning on using this paragraph to explain that the Chupacabra, contrary to this book's story, a relatively recent invention, appearing in 1995 (and almost certainly inspired by the movie Species). But when I actually sat down to write the review, I ended up mentioning it there; the graphic novel, by contrast, is set in the 1950s, and a blurb from Sergio Aragones mentions him having grown up in Mexico hearing about the monster. As I also write in the review, though, the protagonist, in telling a story about the Chupacabra, mentions artistic license, which I guess is a way the creators asking for it themselves.

Anyway, if you like quality cartooning, old-school monster movies (and/or Abbott and Costello) and cryptids, then this is pretty much your ideal graphic novel. More here. 

The Greenies (Henry Holt and Company) Despite the title, the catchier name that one of the characters' comes up with for their school's Enviro-Club, this book's environmental content is more or less incidental to the plot. That plot? New girl Violet knows next-to-no one at her new school, save for her very different Kris, and due to a series of unlikely circumstances including first day detention and a club no one wants to join, ends up finding a circle of friends. It's pretty fun, and rather well made, but probably more for young readers than it is for an all-ages audience. More here. 

My Journey to Japan: Escape to Yokai Mountain (Tuttle Publishing) I had a great deal of fun with this one, which is full of useful information about various aspects of Japan, while also an easy enough read that you could handle it in a single sitting. Cartoonist Matthew Loux embeds a sort of guidebook to Japan inside a comic book narrative about a pair of Western kids and an exiled Kappa with teleportation powers journey to the top of the titular mountain. There, they regularly meet different yokai, and end up taking little side quest field trips, during which the yokai in question will teach them about some aspect of Japan: Its castles, its temples, its food, its trains and so on. I actually recommended this book to a couple of "civilian" coworkers, one of whom has been to Japan in the last few years and one of whom is going there next month. More here. 

*According to Mark Waid and company's New History of the DC Universe, the Supergirl introduced in Superman/Batman is actually the reincarnation of the original Supergirl who died in Crisis on Infinite Earths, which I found...odd, as, if you go back and read any comic featuring her from the last 22 years, I don't think anyone's ever so much as suggested that before, did they? Certainly not in her earliest appearances in the mid-00's.

**The fine print on the title page mistakenly says that the book collects eight issues, #35-38 and #40-43. In fact, #38 is not collected here. It and #39 are both part of the "We Are Yesterday" story arc and were thus collected in the previously released Justice League Unlimited/World's Finest: We Are Yesterday. 

Catching up on Now That We Draw

I enjoyed the first two volumes of Kyu Takahata and Yuwji Kaba's Now That We Draw (reviewed in this column and this one) enough that I wanted to keep reading it. 

The premise is quite fun. High school classmates Uehara Yuuki and Miyamoto Niina are both aspiring manga artists trying to break into the industry, and their shared dream seems to be the only thing they have in common. Uehara is quiet, friendless, socially anxious and at the absolute bottom of the social hierarchy, the kind of person one might expect of wanting to be a comics artist, I guess. Meanwhile, Miyamoto is bubbly, outgoing and gorgeous, the kind of girl all the boys at school have crushes on. 

Both of them are told by the editors they submit their work to that they have the same problem: Neither seems to know much about romance or relationships, despite trying to make comics on the subject, and it shows in their work. So, Miyamoto proposes a solution. They will pretend to date one another in order to gain experience. Remarkably, Uehara is extremely reluctant, despite how hot Miyamoto obviously is, in large part because he's so shy as to be terrified, and partially because he doesn't want to hurt Miyamoto's social standing at school with their classmates.

Naturally, as they pretend to date (mostly when no one's looking), they begin to develop feelings for one another, but the creators quickly move from Miyamoto pushing Uehara into rapidly playing out a series of rom-com cliches to the two diligently working on their manga and cheering one another on. By the end of the second volume, both get jobs as assistants...for attractive artists of the opposite sex. Takahata and Kaba have to throw up some roadblocks to keep the protagonists achieving a happily ever after too soon, right? 

I placed a hold on the third volume of the series, which was actually released in October of last year, when it was still on order by one of the libraries in the consortium my home library belongs to (I think I've mentioned before that the consortium consists of 40 libraries throughout northeast Ohio; only a single one of them had ordered a copy of volume 3, though). Then I forgot about it, assuming it would show up when the book was released.

Well, last month I noticed that not only had volume 3 come out, but so too had volume 4, and volume 5 was due in the summer. (Meanwhile, that third volume I had placed a hold on is still showing up as "on order" on the library's website.) So, I gave up and decided to simply buy the next two volumes rather than borrowing them. (This is, by the way, why I almost never have a complete series of any manga; like, if I stick with Now That We Draw through its conclusion, I'll be missing the first two volumes...unless I go back and buy them before they go out of print, I guess.)

Perhaps it's just as well. While I'd obviously rather read a comic for free rather than pay for it, and, as you've seen for yourselves, it's not like I need any more comics filling up my house, this series has a tendency to highlight Miyamoto's chest on the covers (see the one below, for example) and, now approaching 50, I feel a little weird being seen in public carrying or reading books prominently featuring a school girl's breasts on the cover, you know? 

As the fourth volume opens, the kids are finishing up their submissions to a newcomer manga contest—which involves a scene where they meet in an empty classroom over the summer to take photo reference together, of things like unbuttoning one another's shirts or leaning in for kisses and suchlike. 

As they ready for a school festival, in which their class will be putting on a cosplay cafe (which gives Kaba plenty of opportunities to draw fan service of Miyamoto in various skimpy costumes that she tries on in front of Uehara at a store), they hear the results of the contest. Uehara's manga has been accepted, while Miyamoto's has been rejected. 

Throughout the festival, she puts on a brave face, but Uehara, who at this point seems to know her better than anyone, realizes she's really hurting and he ultimately manages to get through to her. At the climax of the second chapter (or "plot" as they are labeled here), they both say very dramatic things about their feelings for one another. "I like you!" Uehara declares...and then immediately backtracks, amending it to, "No...Um...!! I...I like your manga!! That's what I meant!!" A few pages later, she very seriously tells him that she doesn't mind if everyone at school sees them together at the festival and thinks they're boyfriend and girlfriend...and then, after a few silent panels, decides to add, "Just kidding!!"

The night seems to awaken something in Miyamoto, though, as she has a romantic dream about Uehara, and finds herself confused, even baffled by the fact that she realizes that she actually seems to, like, like-like him. 

There's a very funny scene where a friend of hers shows her a copy of the latest issue of Loveteen magazine, featuring some handsome boy celebrity on the cover, and she thinks, "My type...I go for guys like this!!" 

She then looks back and forth between the idol on the cover and Uehara in the back of the room, secretly reading manga behind a textbook, and realizes, "They're totally nothing alike!! There's, like, not a single thing they have in common!!"

Much of the rest of the volume then switches focus to Uehara and the popular, professional manga artist he's working as an assistant to, a gifted teenager who is extremely quiet and detached, to the point that she barely talks to, or even makes eye contact with, her editors. In fact, Uehara seems to be the only one she will communicate with at all.

Here, we find out why. It turns out the artist, Shioiri Ren, is actually a friend that Uehara had met way back when he was still in daycare. He was super-enthusiastic about manga back then, to the exclusion of all else, which is where we get this great panel from Takahata and Kaba:

Ren is a quiet little girl who doesn't own a TV, and the other kids don't play with her. Little Uehara tries to convince all the other kids to read his manga, but no one seems interested, until Ren takes him up on it (She points to the word "love" in a panel of the manga they're reading, and says that's her name; a footnote says that the kanji for "love" can also be read as "Ren"; at any rate, little Uehara takes to calling her "Love-chan.")

So, it turns out Uehara had actually introduced his current sensei to manga all those years ago! (As to why he didn't recognize her, she moved away suddenly, and only just recently returned to town...now with darker skin, short, dyed blonde hair and an accent).

After Uehara helps her out with meeting a tough deadline (which involves him skipping school for an all-nighter and all-dayer) and with dealing with the aftereffects of her watching a very scary movie, we get an extended flashback sequence, after which Uehara finally recognizes Ren as his long-lost friend from childhood.

So, Miyamoto now seems to have a rival for Uehara's attention and affection...! Not that Miyamoto knows for sure that she even wants his attention and affection, of course. But still! Ren and Uehara seem like...like destiny, don't they...?! (Also, though technically a year older than Uehara and Miyamoto, Ren is very small and petite, and actually looks like she "fits" with Uehara in a way that the tall and leggy Miyamoto does not; in fact, in the next volume, someone will see Uehara and Miyamoto on a fake date together and ask her if Uehara is her little brother). 

In the fourth volume, the leads start interacting more with their senpai in the field of manga...and their rivals in the field of romance. 

In the opening chapter, Miyamoto invites Uehara on another date—another fake date, for their manga—this time to a theme park, hoping that doing so will help her discover once and for all if she really likes him or not. 

To her chagrin—and my amusement and thus, I assume, that of many readers—she finds him frustratingly cute and attractive throughout. At the beginning of the outting, he tries on a pair of novelty cat ears that a park worker hands them (the name of the park is Yomineko Land), and she finds him so freaking adorable that she gets extremely pissed off about it (This sequence reminded me a bit of Manbagi's earlier reactions to Tadano in Komi Can't Communicate, where her attraction to him would manifest in bursts of anger at him). 

Later, she visits the Newcomer Awards ceremony, where Uehara is being feted among the other young manga artists...as does Yumemei Gasaki, the handsome young man who Miyamoto is working as an assistant for, and Ren/Love-chan. At one point, the four all end up talking to one another briefly (I think I got Miyamoto's senpai's name right there; he is usually referred to in this volume as either Yume-kun or Yume-sensei, depending on who is talking to him).

Then, Ren decides she needs to update her wardrobe, which consists of an oversized hoodie, and, at the mall, she runs into Miyamoto, who delights in finding new outfits for the doll-like manga-artist; she takes her under her wing and shows her a good time, seemingly unaware that the whole reason Ren wants to find a cute new outfit is to impress Uehara.

And then, finally, all four of them end up going on a road trip together, ostensibly so Yumemei can do location research for his manga (He seems to have ulterior motives too, though; for example, he has actually read Uehara's manga, and thus knows something Miyamoto does not, specifically that Uehara has based his heroine so much on Miyamoto that he's basically made her his protagonist). 

There, they visit a temple and, in another manga trope, they visit a hot spring together, where we learn that Yume-sensei is much more well-endowed than Uehara. Though nothing is drawn on the page of course, there's a panel of Uehara peeking at him, followed by one of him freaking out, thinking "Are you kidding me?!", with an image of a wooly mammoth in the background. Then Uehara glances under his own towel, and there's a cute image of a cartoony baby elephant trumpeting "Barrooom". (Oddly, I read this manga about the same time that I had read the last volume of Komi Can't Communicate, where an entire chapter is devoted to ranking Tadano and some of the other male characters by penis size.)

As for the girls, their bath and hot spring scenes are pretty fan service-y, probably the most fan service-y of any part of the series so far, and when Miyamoto notices Ren checking out her breasts, she says, "I trust you Ren-Chan-Sensei. You can touch them." This leads to about a page and a half of Ren groping Miyamoto with a look of intense concentration on her face. 

It's not all horniness, though, as the girls get to talking, and the book ends with an intense cliffhanger. Ren asks Miyamoto point blank how she feels about Uehara, neither of them aware that Uehara is just on the other side of a fence from them, and can apparently hear their conversation!

Now That We Draw Vol. 5 comes out in July, and Vol. 6 in December. It looks like neither of these two are overly boob-focused on their cover images, and Ren makes her first cover appearance on volume 6. 

Bookshelf #28

This week we move on to a new set of bookshelves. This cheap little white rectangle was once a set of drawers for what I assume was meant to be a children's bedroom, which I had purchased from Target in Columbus in the early aughts but now, like all flat surfaces in my home, it has become a place to store comics and graphic novels. It's got four shelves, and they are not too terribly big, so they don't hold many comics. And the comics that fit in it have to be fairly small ones.

As you tell at a glance here, this was, at one point, where I was storing the volumes of Fantagraphics' The Complete Peanuts series that I had purchased (the other volumes I own, and other Fanta Peanuts comics, are on a shelf we looked at a while back). In addition to five volumes of the series, there's a trade paperback version of the first volume, that collecting strips from 1950 to 1952, so I guess even though there are many, many volumes I don't have, I have the first volume in two different formats...? (This is one of those series I wish I had been more diligent on keeping up with).

Aside from Peanuts, there are three other books on this shelf. 

On the far left, there's Fredrik Stromberg's 2005 The Comics Go to Hell: A Visual History of the Devil in Comics, a heavily illustrated book about comics rather than a comic itself (I'm pretty sure it's stuck here rather than with other prose books about comics simply because of its little size). On the far right is a minicomic version of Archie Goodwin and Walter Simonson's 1979 adaptation of the original Alien movie, which was first published by Heavy Metal (If I recall correctly, this minicomic came as part of a big, fancy collection of the Aliens movies that the library had purchased, but as it wasn't practical to circulate it with any of the DVDs, it went into an up-for-grabs pile along with the stickers and posters that sometimes came with such sets) . And laying across the top is Drew Weing's Set to Sea. 

Perhaps of greater interest, or at least providing more material to talk about, are the stacks of little books atop the shelf. This is my collection of tiny little books. 

Here, I'll spread them all out on a table so you can see what they actually are...

Quite a variety, huh? (Although now that it's too late, I realize I probably should have put a comic book in there to provide scale, so you could see just how small these books really are).

The only comics-related books here are the Masters of the Universe mini-comics, the only half-dozen or so I had saved since I had originally acquired them, packed with the original action figures, in the early 1980s. 

Actually, the first of these, entitled "The Vengeance of Skeletor", bearing a 1982 copyright and carrying the signature "Alfredo Alcala" on the cover, is a little storybook rather than a comic, as Mattel must have switched formats at some early point. That particular story is pretty interesting because it predates the cartoon series. Many of what we now consider to be the familiar aspects of the basic He-Man story had yet to be solidified at that point, and thus this story contradicts the later lore.

The other five, from 1982 through 1984, are all comics, though (And were thus probably the first actual comics I had read, outside of the funnies in the newspapers). Only two of them have actual credits listed in them, and both of these are by writer Gary Cohn and artists Mark Texeira. The most recent of the minicomics, "Grizzlor: The Legend Comes Alive", has Bruce Timm's signature visible on the cover and in the last panel. If you're interested in these, Dark Horse collected all the Masters of the Universe mini-comics in a massive 1,200-page hardcover, He-Man and the Masters of the Universe Minicomic Collection Vol. 1, which I started reading when it first came out, but have yet to finish. 

There are also a half-dozen "Penguin 60s" books. These are slim, sixty-page paperbacks that the publisher released on the occasion of their 60th anniversary in 1995. I'm not sure if Teenage Caleb was collecting them, or just buying ones he was interested in, but it looks like I have ones featuring the work from J.M. Barrie, Geoffrey Chaucer, Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Mark Twain, plus one devoted to President Franklin D. Roosevelt's fireside chats and one entitled Three Tales of Horror, which was comprised of three short stories by Edgar Allen Poe, Ambrose Bierce and Robert Louis Stevenson.

Each of these cost a mere 95-cents, so I imagine I was impulse-buying them at the counter of the Waldenbooks in the Ashtabula mall at the time. Now, thirty-one years later, I kinda wish I would have bought all of them, as that's a great deal for quality literature in such an appealing format. 

Unfortunately, the orange spines are all rather faded, and the pages are rather yellowed, especially at the edges, so I guess I probably didn't store them as well as I could have over the course of the last three decades. 

Speaking of bookstore impulse buys, that's certainly why I have in my possession tiny little books Unauthorized Posh Spice in My Pocket, a little collection of what I would guess are wire service photos of my favorite Spice Girl paired with facts about her (I posted about this on Bluesky, where I guess you can get a sense of just how small it is), and a doll-sized 190-page retelling of Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, by writer David Blair and illustrator Graham Evernden.

There's a decent amount of religious books, most of which I must have acquired in grade school (This being a comics blog, there's rarely ever an occasion to discuss faith, religion or philosophy here, but I'm a currently only sporadically practicing Catholic, meaning I rarely go to church, but I did attend Catholic schools kindergarten through college and I got all my sacraments).

There are a pair of tiny books entitled My Mass and My Holy Communion, both of which are children's instructional books about their subjects (Both of these, I see, say "Caleb from [my sister's name]" in a grown-ups hand-writing on the inside front cover, so I assume these were First Communion gifts "from" my little sister, who would have been in first grade at the time). 

There's a book on praying the rosary entitled Pray the Rosary, which may have also been a First Communion gift, and it looks like it may have come with a rosary at some point. 

And there's a Miniature Stories of the Saints Book III, which is filled with one-page biographies of various saints on one page with an illustration of the saint on the facing page (And which also has a water stain on the back of it, a thing I've been conditioned to notice after years of working in a public library). 

Oh, and there's a little green book from Gideon's International: The New Testament of Our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ with Psalms and Proverbs.  I believe a street evangelist of some sort had handed me that  in downtown Columbus at one point, and it seemed like a good thing to hang onto for reference, although, now that I think of it, I'm not sure if I've ever actually consulted it, as I generally just use the Bible I'm most familiar with, the one I had to buy for one of my college courses (That's a battered copy of The New American Bible, copyright 1987, if you're interested in such things).

On the top row in the picture above, you may notice two books with small titles sandwiched between the book on the saints and the book about the mass, each of which has a cover image of fields of flowers. One says Life's Journey on the cover, while the other says Comfort. Both have copyrights from something called the Salesian Mission of St. John Bosco and are from 1981 and 1983. I'm not sure how they came into the possession of my grandmother, but I remember her always having such little booklets lying around her house when I was little. They are collections of prayers and inspirational thoughts, all illustrated with anodyne images of nature or quaint buildings, with no people or religious figures ever appearing in them. She died from breast cancer at just 58, when I was only eight years old, and these are among the few things of hers that came into my possession (along with a rosary). I confess that I've never really read anything from these books, and, in fact, this is the first time I've touched them in years. But I've kept them more as talismanic connections to her than anything else (That grandmother, by the way, bought me my first He-Man toys for Christmas when I was five, so some of those MOTU minicomics are actually from her too).

Finally, there's a copy of City Lights Books' "Pocket Poetry Series" presentation of Allen Ginsberg's Howl and Other Poems (I went through a brief Beat phase in the second half of the nineties, before I decided that comics were a better medium than poetry) and a copy of Retrospective: Guy Maddin, a brochure published in conjunction with Ohio State University's Wexner Center for the Arts' 2002 Guy Maddin retrospective, which was awesome, and which introduced me to the work of the extremely quirky and gifted filmmaker. Here, you should go watch his Heart of the World short film on YouTube right now. A frenetic silent film-inspired disaster epic about the end of the world, an unlikely love triangle and the power of love and cinema (and/or art in general), there's hardly a better way to spend six minutes. 

On Crimson Hero Vols. 1-3

I so thoroughly enjoyed Haruichi Furudate's 45-volume Haikyu!! that I thought perhaps I should try giving another sports manga a shot, despite my complete disinterest in any sports of any kind in real life, and my inexperience with that genre of manga (Before Haikyu!!, the only other sports manga I had read was Prince of Tennis, although I tapped out after just the first few volumes). 

Mitsuba Takanashi's 2003-2011 Crimson Hero seemed, at least in one way, a potentially good candidate to fill the Haikyu!!-shaped hole in my heart, given that it too was about high school volleyball.  As quickly became apparent, though, the titles are very different, despite revolving around the same sport.

And that really shouldn't come as a surprise. Haikyu!! is a shonen manga (or "boys' comic", targeting adolescent boys) that ran in Weekly Shonen Jump. Crimson Hero is a shojo manga (or "girls' comic", targeting adolescent girls) that ran in Bessatsu Margaret, published by Viz Media first in their Shojo Beat magazine and then on their Shojo Beat imprint. 

Because of this, comparing and contrasting the two Japanese high school volleyball comics makes for an interesting demonstration of the differences between shonen and shojo. 

The main characters of both series have an overwhelming love of and drive to play volleyball, tackling any and all obstacles that might appear to keep them from doing so. But that's about where the similarities end.

Haikyu!! reads very much like a fight comic masquerading as a sports comic, the majority of the pages devoted to the various team vs. team competitions, and while most of the characters are quite compelling, they are mostly defined through the lens of volleyball, elements of their personal or inner lives coming up in a way that relates to the sport. We get glimpses of their family lives but, more often than not, these are only in passing. 

And in terms of interpersonal relationships, these too are mostly confined to those of teammates and rivals...which, sure, blossom into often lifelong friendships, but the manga concentrates on the characters as volleyball players. The relationship at the core of the book, that between Hinata and Kageyama, depicts them as something of soulmates engaged in an ideal relationship in which each gives the other exactly what they most need and want (even if it takes them hundreds of pages to realize it) and improving them both exponentially but, again, that's in terms of their volleyball playing. 

As for romance, Haikyu!! is fairly—and admittedly, almost frustratingly—devoid of it, a few characters' crushes on Karasuno High's beautiful manager aside (This may explain the world of ships associated with the property; I mean, I'm not the sort of fan who cares about such things in the comics I read, but even I found myself thinking that, say, Sawamura and Yui would make a cute couple, or that Tanaka and Amanai would, but, alas, almost all of the boys in Haikyu!! think of nothing but volleyball, their one true love, a handful of exceptions aside, and even those romances occur off-panel, the few couples simply introduced as already couples, their courtships left to the imagination). 

By contrast, in the first few volumes of Crimson Hero, there's relatively little action on the court, and when we do see volleyball being practiced or played, it's never at the epic, hundreds of pages of length games that fill up Haikyu!!'s collected volumes. The action in Takanashi's depiction of the game isn't as intense, dynamic, inventive or thrilling...but then, that's not really the focus of the series either, at least not like it is in Hakyu!!, in which the reader is often in the position of a spectator.

Many more pages are devoted to protagonist Nobara Sumiyoshi's home life and school life, and the many obstacles she must confront just in order to play volleyball at all. She has significant off-court conflicts to face and overcome, and Takanashi focuses on the character's inter-personal drama. 

There is also a degree of romance, although this early in the series, it's more along the lines of hints of it, as characters find themselves seeing one another in new lights or experiencing their hearts skipping beats or feeling the stirrings of jealousy. Within the first three volumes of the 20-volume series, there's what seems to be the beginning of a love triangle.

Finally, Crimson Hero's premise depends on a degree to Nobara's family running a ryotei for generations, which she is expected to take over as mistress of one day. 

I was not familiar with the term, and, looking it up, I'm still not sure I understand exactly what it is. The back cover copy refers to this as an "old-fashioned Japanese restaurant", and, on first mention in the manga itself, the translation defines it as "a high-class Japanese dining establishment," although there seems to be a sexual element to it as well, at least an implied or suggested one, rather than an element proprietor or patron would ever actually effectuate physically. 

In this manga, though, one ill-behaved rich patron will introduce a degree of sexual menace a few volumes in, groping a woman at the ryotei and seemingly sexually threatening Nobara's little sister, who has taken on Nobara's expected role of "young mistress" of the family establishiment.

At the very least, working there and/or eventually running the place definitely will involve Nobara performing a sort of exaggerated traditional femininity...and that is definitely not Nobara, a "tomboy" who is, in the series' first three volumes, repeatedly mistaken for a boy and, as previously mentioned, cares more about volleyball than, well, pretty much anything else. 

Being American and having no familiarity with the whole concept of the ryotei seems to be something of a stumbling block for me when it comes to Crimson Hero, though. 

So, 15-year-old, first-year high school student Nobara is expected to grow her hair out, wear a kimono and essentially be the definition of a girly-girl to work at her family's restaurant/hotel/whatever. She would prefer to leave that to her little sister, though. When the series opens, it's Nobara'sfirst day at Crimson Field High School, a private school she chose specifically because she heard their volleyball team is strong enough to go to nationals.

Things go badly.

First, her entering the girls' bathroom leads to a shriek, and so a very tall, spikey-haired fist-year boy grabs her by the collar and slams her into the door, thinking she was some kind of pervert. Apparently, both he and the girl who screamed when Nobara walked in thought she was a boy.

"First day of school and already peeking into the girls' john, huh?" the tall boy says to her.

When she protests that she's a girl, he gropes her chest (which is accompanied by a "SMUSH" sound effect), and replies, "Oh?! So you are... ...barely."

She proceeds to punch him ("CLONK"), knocking him down and leaving a bruise on his face.

This is Yushin, and he is on the school's boys' volleyball team. Later, his fellow first-year and teammate Haibuki tells him that it was his own fault that he got punched, as "Anyone can see she's a girl." It turns out that Haibuki knows exactly who Nobara is, though, as he had seen her play volleyball before. 

"At the junior high preliminaries in Kanagawa... ..she was the one who kept scoring points even though her team sucked," he says. (It will take a while, but we'll eventually learn that Haibuki knew her when they were in grade school, and he was a fan of hers, encouraging the then much taller than him Nobara). 

Nobara's first day only gets worse from there, though. She soon learns that what she heard about Crimson's volleyball team referred to the boys' team, not the girls' team. And, in fact, the girls' team had just recently been disbanded, at the request of a parent, one that had made a "generous donation" to the school. 

That parent? Nobara's own mother.

In response, Nobara runs away from home, and, with the help of her aunt/the school nurse, she manages to secure room and board at the school. She just has to serve as the dorm mother at the Crimson Field Volleyball team dorm, where she will have to cook and clean for five guys, including Yushin and Haibuki. 

That keeps her at school, but what about volleyball? Well, she takes it upon herself to rebuild the girls' volleyball team, but no sooner has she convinced two of the former players to join her then she finds that someone at school has been defacing her fliers, writing "losers" on them. 

She immediately suspects the boys team and confronts their captain (And not for the first time; previously, she had demanded they let her play on the boys' team, only to be thrown out of the gym).

"I challenged you to a game!" she says in the penultimate scene of the first volume, slamming a defaced flier on the desk in front of the team captain. "We'll see if the girls' team is really made up of losers!!"

That's a pretty strong cliffhanger, right? Certainly enough to make me want to pick up the next volume!

The second volume opens with the challenge, and the captain agrees to it, for reasons of his own. The terms? They will play a game of three-on-three to 25, with the net set for the girls' height (There's another thing I didn't know about high school volleyball; the height of the net varies, depending on whether boys or girls are playing). If the girls manage to score a single point, they win, and, therefore the captain has to allow Nobara rebuild the girls' volleyball team and quit calling them names. ("You make sure it never happens again!", she says). But if the boys win? Then she has to give up on rebuilding the girls' team for good.

The captain chooses a trio of first years to play Nobara and her two potential teammates, including Yushin and Haibuki. He instructs them: "If you guys want to become regular players... ...don't even think of holding back against the girls."

And they do not. In fact, Haibuki, who is the first of the boys to serve, aims a devastating jump serve directly at Nobara. And he keeps doing so, hitting them at her so hard that one knocks her down, and another draws blood when it hits her in the face. 

Given that this is only the second volume, you can probably guess whether or not the girls are able to score a point on the boys, although Takanashi certainly keeps the match suspenseful, with the boys managing to get all the way to 24 points before Nobara and her team manage to score their point through a combination of tenacity, teamwork and a bit of trickery.

The match turns out to be a good recruiting tool, too, and the rest of the volume details Nobara's attempts to hit the magic number of six she needs to start a team, as she aggressively seeks to recruit Tomoyo Ousaka, a former junior high volleyball prodigy who quit the game after an injury. And, for added drama, is Haibuki's ex-girlfriend.

 

Finally, we get to the third volume. Nobara has a team and she has a game. There are now a few new challenges, like managing to hold a team made up of very different personalities, strengths and levels of experience and dedication together...and somehow finding the money necessary to pay for uniforms and club fees when she's been cut-off by her mother.

The biggest conflict, though, involves her little sister, who has been playing the role of "young mistress" that Nobara is supposed to be playing. During a visit by a politician and his "playboy" young son (he's the one who gropes a worker, as mentioned above), he apparently took a liking to Nobara's sister, who we're told is a third-year in junior high (So, 14?). The son asks her on an omiai date (which is the sort that can lead to an arranged marriage), and, for some damn reason, she accepts for the good of the family business (No idea why her mom thinks this is a good idea, though).

From the lobby of the hotel they are meeting at, Nobara's sister gets cold feet, and calls her for help...two hours before Nobara's first game! Can she find her sister and save her and make it back in time to play...even with Yushin's help? 

Is the sister in peril..? It's definitely implied. The politician's son is definitely a creep, telling her how much her family owes his and that, therefore, "you understand... ...that you shouldn't make me angry." When she says she's not feeling well, he tells her "Up close, you're as pretty as a doll. Know that? Don't ruin it by talking." 

When he reaches for her, she gets up to leave, at which point he grabs her by the arm, saying "I don't recall saying... ...That you had my permission to leave!"

And when Nobara arrives, via a flying kick to the guy's face, Nobara repeatedly calls him a pervert in the exchanges that follow. 

At this point in the story, Crimson Hero seems to find a new equilibrium, Nobara promising her family she will devote herself to the family business....after high school, when she's done playing volleyball. In the meantime, her little sister will continue to fill in for her. 

The focus then seems to be realigning a bit towards volleyball—their first real game occurs in this third volume, and in shocking contrast to Haikyu!!, the game takes up less than a single volume rather than, you know, 2-6 volumes—and, perhaps, romance, as it becomes increasingly clear that both Haibuki and Yushin have feelings of some sort for Nobara. And, despite her repeatedly professed complete ignorance and inexperience when it comes to all things romantic, she's starting to have confusing feelings of her own. 

Given how relatively difficult it was to find some of these volumes, I'm not sure if I should continue with the series or not, or even if I will be able to, but I must confess I am now quite curious if Nobara will end up romantically involved with either boy and, if so, which one. Certainly more so than I am with how her team will fare against the clubs from other schools. 

But then, Crimson Hero seems to be about Nobara and her personal life as much as—well, actually more than—her life on the volleyball court. 

Two posts on Armageddon: Inferno is probably at least one post too many, huh?

Three things that occurred to me while rereading Armageddon: Inferno the other day that I couldn't really easily fit into that last post...

1.) Hey, I know all these guys now...! When I first read Armageddon: Inferno in 1992, as a child of 15, I knew most of the characters...at least the superhero ones, anyway. 

I mean, I had watched television before, so of course I knew of the likes of Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman and The Flash (Although I don't think I had yet realized this Flash was a different one in the costume than the other guy). And having read a handful of the Armageddon 2001 annuals (including the bookend specials) the previous year and having been in a comics shop on a semi-regular basis by then, I had a decent lay of the land of the DC Universe, and thus who knew Waverider, Lobo and Martian Manhunter were. And I wasn't shocked to see that Green Lantern was some guy with a bad haircut and comically large boots instead of the guy from The Super Powers Team cartoon. Hell, I could even identify Power Girl, Troia and the modern Hawkpeople, even if I couldn't tell you what their whole deals were, like, who exactly they were and where they came from (Fun fact: I still can't! Have any of their origins been settled in the last 34 years?).

As a teenager who used to check out copies of the Overstreet Price Guide from the public library just to look at the titles and names of characters and creators (There weren't a whole lot of comics in the libraries back then), I also knew the various Golden Agers who made up the Justice Society of America (well, maybe not Sandy the Golden Boy) and most of the other players in the book; not sure if I recognized Sgt. Rock's name from the guide, or from the closing credits of the original Predator movie, where Shane Black's Hawkins is shown reading an issue of his comic. 

Still, this particular miniseries introduced me to several characters, like Jo Nah/Ultra Boy from the Legion of Super-Heroes, World War I's Enemy Ace Hans von Hammer and World War II heroes Gunner, Sarge and Pooch and Johnny Cloud, The Navajo Ace.

Most of those guys were minor enough that even now, after decades of reading DC Comics, I still haven't read many stories featuring them, and those that I have tend to be ones in which they just make cameos or are name-dropped. (Enemy Ace is an exception though, as I've read hundreds of pages of his adventures at this point, thanks to a Showcase Presents collection (as well as a few other appearances, including miniseries War Idyll and War in Heaven). (Oh, and I'm sure there have been plenty of Ultra Boy appearances since 1992, but for the most part I try to avoid Legion comics; for whatever reason, they just seem intimidating to me.)

This recent re-read of Armageddon: Inferno hit completely different than the series did when I had originally read it. Back then, I was still just dipping my toes into the DC Universe, whereas now I have spent years and years swimming in it and plumbing its depths. This time around, not only did I know all these guys' identities, but in most cases, I now know all about them, what their stories were before John Ostrander wrote them into this time-travel series and where they would go afterwards. Likewise, the names and careers of creators like "John Ostrander" and "Tom Mandrake" and "Art Adams" and "Walt Simonson" are pretty well known to me.

So, this time I was really able to appreciate the comic as something of a Who's Who in the DC Universe by way of a fight comic, and the all-star nature of the creative team.

I even recognized the cameos by The Unknown Soldier and Mademoiselle Marie, who I guess Luke McDonnell drew in that second panel above, although the rendering is awful rough. (The tank also resembles The Haunted Tank, although without a ghostly Civil War general floating around it, I can't be 100% sure that's what McDonnell meant to draw there, or if it's some random American tank with a star on it).

2.) I know the prices of goods and services rise over time, but still...!  I was shocked to learn that each of these issues only cost $1.00. I could have sworn comic books were $2 or $2.50 when I had started reading them. I just checked dc.com, and it looks like the average comic book of theirs today is still $3.99 for 20 pages, which is what they cost when I stopped buying single issues and switched to trades a few years back (I had to double-check, because with the price of everything else seemingly going up in the last five years or so, I couldn't be sure comics weren't even more than $4 a pop now).

While it is not at all surprising that comic books cost a lot more today than they did in 1992, I still thought it worth noting that dang, you could really get a whole four-issue, 88-page mini-series back then for the cost of a single, 20-page chapter of a story arc today (plus an extra penny).

I can't imagine being a 15-year-old in 2026 and going into a comic shop and thinking to myself, "Yes, I would like to spend $3.99 on this issue of Batman, which, if I understand how comics work correctly, will get me one-fourth or one-sixth of a single story." I mean, not when I can get...well, let's see the page-count and price of the last manga volume I bought...about 200 pages for $14.99 on a different shelf of the shop (Or a big box bookstore or online, I guess).

3.) Oh yeah, comics used to have ads in them, didn't they? I have now been reading comics in trade format for so long now that I forgot what it's like to see ads in comic books. And in the last comics I was reading, the ads were mostly house ads for other books from DC or Marvel or IDW or whoever the publisher of the particular book containing them was. 

It was therefore something of a novelty to read this series in back issues pulled from a long box (It's never been collected in trade, which is how I generally revisit old comics now) and to see any ads at all, let alone the specific ads of 1991. 

They offer a rather interesting window into who DC and the companies who purchased the ads thought must be buying comic books at the time, too. As far as I can tell, it seemed to be kids...and some adults who were comic book fans and/or collectors.

Just out of curiosity, I took note of all the ads in here. The one above was the most surprising, I thought, as that sort of page filled with a checkboard of a bunch of small ads, complete with an ad for a Charles Atlas body and live sea horses, is something I would have guessed would have been in Silver and Bronze Age comics, rather than something from the early '90s. 

Anyway, Armageddon: Inferno contained ads for movies (Cool World, Encino Man and Honey, I Blew Up The Kid, plus one for the video release of Frankenweenie), candy (Three Musketeers, Skittles and Starbursts), collectible cards (Score and Upper Deck's Major League Baseball cards, Fleer's basketball cards, "The Official Trading Car of Super Bowl XXVI" and some kind of parody baseball cards called "Flopps"), videogames (Super Smash TV, Super WrestleMania, Kid Chameleon, Krusty's Fun House, Top Gear and the Game Genie), upcoming comics conventions (John Byrne, Moebius, Tom Lyle, Steve Bissette and more in Boston! Rob Liefeld in New York!) and back issues (East Coast Comics, Mile High Comics, Twin City Books, Kingpin, American Comics & Entertainment), plus Palladium role-playing games, Topps' Batman Returns souvenir magazines, Wyler's drink mix, Estes brand precision rockets and Kiss' Revenge album. 

Oh, and one for the Constitution of the United States from the Ad Council which, if you mailed-in for it, would get you a free informational kit including your very own copy of the constitution.

I suppose the presence of such ads is what helped DC be able to sell these things for only a buck back then.

As for house ads, they were fairly few and far between relative to the DC comics of the past few decades. There was one for Justice League Spectacular #1, another for "The Blaze/Satanus War" in the Superman books, one for the four-book Superman line with a blurb from Comic Buyer's Guide, and another for DC Comics Cosmic Cards ("From Clark Kent to Hell-Bent" the ad read, showing a picture of a Superman card and Lobo card), one offering subscriptions to 31 different DC books (ranging in price from $12 to $21),  and a half-page black-and-white ad for imprint Impact Comics' The Web #10 and The Crusaders #1 (I wouldn't mind DC collecting their Impact books, if they could straighten out the rights, nor would I mind stumbling upon some of those series in a discount back issue bin).  

None of the ads for particular books mentioned the names of the creators involved with producing them. 

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By the way, when Googling something for my post about Armageddon: Inferno, I stumbled upon this five-year-old post at Steve Mollmann's Sciences' Less Accurate Grandmother blog, if you'd like another take on the miniseries. I seem to have liked it far more than he did. I was heartened by the fact that he chose to illustrate the post with one of the best sequences, that in which Simonson draws Enemy Ace gunning down a pterosaur. I didn't include that in my post, but only because I had already posted it on Bluesky. 

On 1992 miniseries Armageddon: Inferno

If you happened to find a copy of 1992's Armageddon: Inferno 2001 #1 in a back issue bin today, you would have no idea that the story it would begin, one that would span four monthly issues, was a fairly pivotal one in the history of the first superhero team, the Justice Society of America.

The logo and title link it to Armageddon 2001, DC's1991 crossover event storyline that spanned some dozen annuals and two bookend issues and centered on the new hero Waverider travelling back in time to try to determine which superhero would become a despotic masked villain in his future.

And, of course, the image on the cover of the first issue prominently features Waverider...as does the corner box, a sure indication of who a book's star is meant to be. The Justice Society, meanwhile, wouldn't make the cover until the fourth and final issue.

Even once one starts reading the series, it doesn't seem like it's meant to be any sort of Justice Society story.  They are briefly mentioned in the second issue, when Superman suggests to Waverider that their old headquarters is no longer in use, and thus could make for a good place to host a gathering of superheroes. Other than that, they don't appear until the third issue.

Rather, the focus of the book seems to be to gather a whole bunch of DC's most popular characters, as well as some fan-favorite ones who might have been out of the spotlight for quite some time, and a murderers' row of artists to draw them. 

In fact, that seems to be the major selling point of the book, and the JSoA's return from the limbo they had been stuck in for a half-dozen years or so is somewhat incidental.

Writer Jon Ostrander and primary pencil artist Luke McDonnell spend only nine pages setting the whole adventure up, moving quite fleetly to introduce the premise. 

Waverider follows a disturbance in the timestream to a strange ritual in a Wyoming desert, where a dozen diverse people summon an extra-dimensional entity they call Abraxis. A bolt of lightning seems to split the sky, but rather than fading, it remains, and the slit of energy opens into a titanic staring eye. This is, a voice in a red-rimmed, tail-less dialogue balloon declares, Abraxis.

Abraxis plans to conquer this dimension by transforming his twelve supplicants and empowering them as his "daemen" servants. He will then send them in groups of three to four different points in time, where they will build for him giant "simulacra" which he can then inhabit. To aid them in their work, he will give them armies of "husks", hordes of all-black figures that evoke the shadow demons of Crisis on Infinite Earths. 

Realizing that his own time-travelling shenanigans—in either Armageddon 2001 or its sequel mini-series Armageddon: The Alien Agenda—seems to have allowed Abraxis to breach the wall between dimensions, Waverider realizes that means he can also stop him.

Using his time powers, he finds the locations in time and space the daemen have went to and then finds the precise heroes he will be able to send to these battlegrounds without causing irreparable harm to the time stream.

They turn out to be about whom you would expect, many of the primary heroes of the DC Universe circa 1992, including the most popular heroes, although Ostrander also includes various period heroes from the past, characters that don't turn up all that often in DC Comics, and a couple of oddball choices, current heroes from points in their own past or, in one case, the future.

The adventures of each of the four teams, which are essentially just fight scenes against the daemen and husks, are each drawn by a different artist, including some big names that one might think would have been featured a little more prominently on the cover, but then, maybe in 1992 comics were still more event-driven and character-driven than artist driven...? (Or DC thought so, at least...?)

Each team is announced on a full-page splash by the artist who will be drawing the sequences featuring them, which I'll scan and share here.

First, there's Arthur Adams drawing present-day heroes Superman, Wonder Woman, Martian Manhunter, The Flash (Wally West), Power Girl (here wearing her worst costume, the yellow and white one) and Donna Troy (Here going by "Troia", and rocking the shorthair and short skirt look). This team is being sent to a future that I think appeared in a Superman comic I never read. (You know, this line-up wouldn't make a half-bad Justice League if you gave them one more hero to hit the magic number seven...)

Second, Michael Netzer draws World War II-era heroes Sgt. Rock and Easy Company, Johnny "The Navajo Ace" Cloud, the team of Gunner, Sarge and Pooch (although on first mention "Gunner" is spelled "Gunnar") and the modern day Thanagarian Hawkman and Hawkwoman (here outfitted in what I believe are their Hawkworld costumes). This team will fight their battle during World War II, so it's a short commute for most of them.

Third, Walt Simonson draws Orion, Lobo, Green Lantern Guy Gardner, Enemy Ace (!!!) and Starfire in dinosaur times (As you stare in appreciation of Simonson's take on these various characters, do note the zig-zag of reddish orange in the lower left corner; that too is part of Starfire's weird hair trail). 

And, finally, Tom Mandrake draws Batman, The Spectre, a plainclothes Jo Nah/Ultra Boy from the Legion of Super-Heroes, a Firestorm "from his earlier years" and The Creeper "from the recent past"; this team is sent to the recent past. 

The second half of this first issue features Mandrake's sequence, which lasts 11 pages. Its event will be repeated in each of the other three sequences not drawn by McDonnell.  

1.) The heroes will gather. 

2.) Ostrander will do a decent job of introducing most of them in a way that feels quite natural to them. (Case in point, Starfire is in the midst of using her energy bolts to keep Lobo and Guy Gardner from fighting one another when Orion boom tubes in with the line "I have the word--it is battle!" And then Hans Von Hammer appears, dueling with a huge pterosaur while brooding about "the killer skies"; Enemy Ace doesn't really interact with the superheroes at all and, interestingly, thinks they and the bad guys and the prehistoric reptiles are all part of a nightmare he's having).

3.) They will fight the daemen, each of which Ostrander seems to have done far more work on than was probably necessary, given that this series is the only place they will ever appear, as he gives them each a civilian name, backstory and motivation for selling their souls as well as a new, demonic name and a super-power of some sort that makes them a threat to the heroes they face. I suspect the designs for each of these villains was likely provided by the artists, given how much they seem to reflect the stylistic sensibilities of whoever is drawing them (My favorites are Mandrake's Zhazor, who looks vaguely  Nazgul-like and throws bolts of flame; Netzer's Feth Sudol, who can transform himself into groups of different scary black animals; and Adams' Arquol, who can transform into a variety of cool vehicles; Adams' Inztuk has a somewhat generic eye-beam power, but his design, featuring a Styracosaurus head atop a humanoid body, is pretty cool). 

4.) Abraxis will inhabit the simulacrum. (Abraxis is also a pretty great design, which every artist draws the hell out of; he's a black-colored giant with diabolical horns and fangs that looks a little like Chernabog from Fantastia's "Night on Bald Mountain" sequence blended with a Thanos-like supervillain). 

As you can probably imagine, each of these extended fight sequences are great, and it's hard to overstate how fun it is to see these particular artists drawing these weird groupings of characters, most of whom seem to have been chosen by asking the artists which characters they might most like to draw (In fact, I wonder if that's how Ostrander went about assembling the characters to be featured). 

By the third issue, The Spectre sends a duplicate of himself to confront Waverider in the timestream to tell him the plan doesn't seem to be working, and suggest that they throw another group of heroes at Abraxis in his home dimension, thus stretching the demon/supervillain's attention across five conflicts in two different dimensions to further weakine him.

When Waverider says that he has already recruited all of the heroes he can without endangering the timestream, The Spectre volunteers a group of superheroes who area already outside of time and space: The Justice Society of America, who are still in some limbo dimension fighting Ragnarok from the events of 1986's Last Days of the Justice Society of America. 

Ostrander also writes a sequence from the point-of-view of one of the natives on Abraxis' home world, a hairy hominid that looks like he could be an ancestor to modern homo sapiens. Because Abraxis feeds on souls, he basically treats the native population of his world as cattle, their reproduction providing him with new souls. They are ruled by their most base instincts, and have no real concept of things like bravery, selflessness or heroism...at least, not until the Justice Society appears and awakens a light within them.

Dick Giordano pencils the Justice Society sequences in the fourth issue, so there's one more name to add to the who's who of this particular art team. 

That final issue includes four more splashes from Adams, Mandrake, Netzer and Simonson, each showing their assigned team of heroes battling Abraxis and his minions. These echo the splashes from the first issue, but each is a little stronger, I think, as it shows the heroes in triumphant action, rather than simply posing for a group shot. 

They are all great, but this one's my favorite:

As I noted on Bluesky when I was rereading this, I love that image of Orion manhandling the poor daemon's face. And Abraxis' melodramatic, operatic posing. And, especially, Guy's boots. I don't think anyone has ever drawn Guy's old giant boots better than Simonson does here. 

Naturally, the good guys win, and Abraxis is defeated, never to threaten the DC Universe again (Which is maybe unfortunate, given what a cool design he has). The modern-day heroes are all debriefing in the JSoA's old HQ, where they had met prior to embarking on this mission, when Superman laments the fate of the Justice Society, and Flash says, "Jay--all of them--deserve better!"

"You're correct, Flash," a voice says from off-panel. It belongs to Waverider, who appears suddenly, and the Justice Society materializes right behind him.

"It would be small thanks to such heroes as they to consign the Justice Society back to limbo," Waverider says. "That is why the daemen now fight the eternal battle of Ragnarok and the Justice Society is here instead."

The last panel is a big one, filling most of the last page, and in it, McDonnell draws all the modern day heroes from the series chatting with the newly returned Justice Society. Ostrander pens four narration boxes, the last of which reads, "Every once in a while, the good guys actually win."

The very next month, DC would launch a new ongoing Justice Society of America series by writer Len Strazewski and pencil artist Mike Parobeck, though it would only last ten issues before being cancelled. That book has never been collected, and I've never been able to find it in back issue bins, so I've never actually read it (and I keep hoping DC will collect it at some point). 

As for Waverider and the Armageddon-branding, well, the character would remain a mainstay in the DC Universe, but never got his own series again, and was mostly employed when a narrative called for time-travel or a character to explain time travel. Following the previously mentioned Armageddon 2001 and Armageddon: Alien Agenda, this was the last time DC used that title and/or logo. Inferno has never been collected...and neither have those other Armageddon books.  I know I've said this repeatedly before, but I hope DC will eventually collect Armageddon 2001 into a couple of DC Finest collections...maybe they can throw the sequels into one of them.