I don't really want to talk about 2003's JLA/The Spectre: Soul War, but I do want to talk about how Batman and Hal Jordan finally make up

I was such a fan of Grant Morrison, Howard Porter and John Dell's JLA that I continued to read the series long after their run concluded (I kept reading until the very end of the book, in fact) and to pick up most if not all of the JLA-branded spin-off one-shots and mini-series. Some of these were good, many of them were not. 

One that I had put in the "not" category was 2003's two-issue JLA/The Spectre: Soul War, which, in 2026, I remembered nothing about other than the fact that I didn't like it at the time and that it featured the Hal Jordan Spectre, not the Jim Corrigan one. 

In the spirit of revisiting later JLA stories from the remove of twenty-some years in addition to having read or re-read a bunch of Spectre comics lately, it seemed natural enough to give Soul War another try. 

The series was written by J.M. DeMatteis, who had written Hal Jordan-as-The Spectre meeting with the JLA in 1999's JLA #35 as well as the entirety of the 2001-2003 fourth volume of The Spectre, the one starring Hal (In fact, Soul War was released the same month as Spectre #25, the third-to-last issue of the series; given that, I wonder if this mini-series was planned as a mini-series, or if the cancellation forced DeMatteis to repurpose a planned Spectre story arc here). 

Joining DeMatteis were pencil artist Darryl Banks and inker Paul Neary. 

This series came out in January and February 2003, the same month as JLA #75 and #76, just after the Joe Kelley, Doug Mahnke and Tom Nguyen team had completed their "Obsidian Age" epic. Therefore, a real stickler might have a hard time trying to orient the particular Justice League line-up that appears in DeMatteis' miniseries with the goings on in JLA. 

That's because the team here consists of the one from Mark Waid's run, the Big Seven plus Plastic Man, although Aquaman had been MIA for a while by that point. 

Complicating things further, Green Lantern Kyle Rayner is drawn wearing his new, terrible, Jim Lee-designed costume seen on the cover of 2002's Green Lantern #151 (the one with the dog collar) in Soul War. He had started wearing in the pages of JLA by the ramp up to "Obsidian Age", but that was a good year since Aquaman had been on the team, having been "killed" during the "Our Worlds At War" event (Actually, he was shunted into the prehistoric past; "Obsidian Age" was partially about a rescue mission to find him, although he wouldn't rejoin the team again until somewhere around 2004 arc "Syndicate Rules"). 

Wait, I guess I'm that sort of stickler, huh?

Anyway, enough set-up. I don't really want to discuss the series at great length, or at least not in great detail, because I still don't like it...although it's not a terribly objectionable comic in any particular way, and we've certainly gotten many, many far worse Justice League comics since its release. 

It's just very much of a piece with DeMatteis' Spectre, and indulges in quite a bit of sometimes heady, psuedo-scientific New Age-y concepts, a sharp 180 from the more simple, black-and-white Spectre of volume three (A likely result of Hal and DeMatteis trying to turn the Spectre from the Spirit of Vengeance to the Spirit of Redemption). I

t's also awfully wordy, the first page of each issue making me blanche and, inevitably, wait a few days between reading issue #1 and #2.

It's also not much of a Justice League story. Of the eight Leaguers, most of them are more-or-less irrelevant to the proceedings (This is in sharp contrast to DeMatteis' own JLA #35). The Flash, Aquaman and Wonder Woman get a few lines apiece, but hardly do much that demands their presence in the story at all (There is a panel or so in which Wonder Woman's lasso of truth play a role, I suppose, and one instance where Aquaman uses his telepathy to give J'onn's a boost). For the most part, they could be replaced by pretty much any other DC character, as they are there just to make this seem more like a JLA story than it might were they not.

Additionally, Plastic Man is fairly superfluous. He appears in many panels and gets a lot of lines—more than the three heroes I just mentioned—but he is mostly limited to dumb jokes, jokes which aren't really funny or insightful enough to truly serve as comedy relief, and jokes which all of the other characters more-or-less ignore, as if they aren't even aware he's around. (There is a short sequence in the second issue where, Hal's narration tells us, Plas is best suited to combat in the "imaginal" realm of the mind that has become the setting, as he is used to immediately, effortlessly transforming himself, and thus, better than any of the heroes understands "the fine line between mind and manifestation"; this was a good eight months or so before Kelley would make a similar point about Plas' imaginative, almost instinctive transformations making him perfectly-suited to a shape-changing battle with a Martian at the climax of the "Trial By Fire" arc in JLA).

Otherwise, DeMatteis really could have just used Superman, Batman, Kyle and maybe Martian Manhunter here and the story wouldn't change much, aside from maybe being a bit shorter and tighter. This is, really, the story of how Batman finally came to accept Hal Jordan as a hero again after the events of "Emerald Twilight" and Zero Hour and nearly a decade of being a relentless critic of the Justice Leaguer-turned murderous supervillain-turned Spirit of Vengeance Redemption.

That's the bit I want to focus on here.

But first, let me briefly summarize the story that DeMatteis embeds Batman's finally coming around within.

Earth is being invaded by alien giant monsters, and the Justice League is trying to fight them off. The twist here is that the alien invaders aren't from outer space, but rather from deep within the minds of humanity, somehow manifesting from within the consciousness of the population and, at times, taking god-like shapes pulled from the collective unconscious. They also have a rather unfortunate name: The Trans.

The Spectre is joining the League in their fight, in the most literal way possible. He meditates for a few pages on the nature of Superman's character and then, as The Trans are dissolving The Man of Steel, he steps in and fuses with him, becoming a giant Spectre/Superman hybrid that blasts the Trans monster away with eyebeams.

He then moves on to Batman and the sequence repeats. A two-page spread shows the process also occurs with Aquaman, Green Lantern and Wonder Woman...sort of. In the case of Diana, Hal doesn't directly fuse with her, and seems to either empower a bunch of Amazon warriors, or perhaps divide into several green-cloaked Amazons...? The art, which is usually strong and clear, can't explain exactly what's happening here like DeMatteis' Hal narration can. It makes me curious if the writer or DC were somehow reluctant to have Hal-as-Spectre take on a female form, if only for a panel here...

In a meeting around the table in the Watchtower, Batman suggests all nine of them "merge with the Spectre--creating an amalgam being capable of defeating these trans-creatures." (I wonder if DeMatteis would have used that particular word were it not for the DC/Marvel crossover event, and instead went with "hybrid" or "composite" or "gestalt"...? At any rate, it was a safe bet that superhero readers were by this point quite familiar with the word "amalgam"...)

The resultant amalgam being is pretty dumb-looking, calling to mind Marvel Comics' and Combos' Combo Man. 

Though that's good for a few pages, Martian Manhunter finally realizes the Trans can't be beat on the physical plane. A little investigation into memories of a world the invaders have conquered later, The Spectre instructs Superman and Flash to build a device with eight beds at super-speed, and then The Spectre will temporarily kinds sorta kill the League, allowing them to fight the Trans on their true turf, "the realm of pure consciousness."

"Physical force is useless in this...soul-war we're fighting," J'onn says, saying the title of the comic book out loud.

That's the end of the first issue. The second begins with our heroes in the new setting, where each of them is immediately seduced by potential paradises of their minds' own making. We get glimpses of some of these, but not what it is that makes Batman...or, at least, his consciousness or soul or whatever, which is here shaped just like Batman, smile and cry at the same time ("What Batman saw...what he created out of his buried wounds and longings...is not for me to share," Hal narrates). 

Batman is able to shake these fantasies off, though. There are many, many pages of battle in this mental plane, but the Trans eventually takes everyone out of the fight...except for Batman, who argues with them by fighting them, and eventually seems to win, punching them out. (This is very much a Batman-is-the-best kind of story).

When the Trans are seemingly defeated, The Spectre finds that the machinery keeping the League in suspended animation has been sabotaged by a human agent of the Trans (a TV psychic introduced in the first four pages of the series) and, to bring them all back to life, he has to sacrifice his "existence"; this means the League awakens while Hal is drifting in a "non-place" towards complete oblivion.

The heroes won't let this occur to Hal, though, and J'onn suggests that since humanity's belief in the League helped them defeat the Trans (somehow, I can't claim that I picked up everything DeMatteis was laying down here), perhaps their belief in Hal can now save him. 

So with the TV psychic, an actual medium who was able to channel The Trans, they all sit around the meeting table and hold hands, a ring-generated crystal ball that Kyle created to be "a focal point for our collective unconscious" in the middle of the table.

Here Banks' imagery is evocative of Mike Sekowsky's iconic cover of 1963's Justice League of America #21, depicting the original Justice League seeming to conjure the Justice Society in a seance around a crystal ball. (Which was certainly no accident).

The plan seems to be working for a few panels, but then stops, and when Aquaman demands of the psychic to explain why, she sadly says there was a "weak link among you....one mind, one heart that didn't believe."

Wonder Woman and J'onn look immediately to Batman, who Banks draws standing up, his hands flat on the table, shadow completely obscuring his face, even the white triangles of his eyes.

Batman explains:

I can't give--what I don't have. 

The Hal I knew and respected--the Hal I called friend...died--a long time ago. 

Let him stay dead. 

Just as J'onn begins to argue that the fate awaiting Hal is now far worse than death, Batman screams in pain, as something Hal had implanted in his brain and called a "parting gift" earlier in the story is activated. Batman begins to rationalize what he's seeing, but a voice tells him that the pain is the result of his own resistance, and that his heart knows what he's seeing is true.

The voice is that of his mother, and his parents appear before him (Although Banks draws Thomas Wayne clean-shaven, so maybe it's not them...or maybe there are no mustaches in Heaven, I don't know).

Martha Wayne explains that the vision Batman saw of them in "imaginal space" earlier, that deepest desire that Hal said in narration he couldn't share with the readers on Batman's behalf, was a trick, which is why Batman was able to see through it and save the League from their own individual false paradises, but that this vision really was real, The Spectre answering Batman's "deepest prayers."

Rising from the floor after the episode, Batman demands everyone circle around the table, join hands and try again, and this time he shouts into empty space at The Spectre. I'll quote it at length here:

If we can't reach him--it's because Hal is still clinging to his guilt and shame!

It's because he believes he DESERVES an eternity of non-existence! Well, I don't Jordan! I don't!

Listen to me, Hal--I was wrong about you!

You were the best, the brightest, among us! And when you fell--it...rattled me--and it made me wonder:

If a man as good and decent as you could go wrong...what hope was there for the rest of us?

But I see now--that one of the reasons you were reborn as The Spectre--was to give all of us hope! I see now--that you're more of a hero than ever!

And it works. Hal reappears, and Batman takes his old friend's hand, saying he meant every word of what he said, and ending with "Welcome home."

It's not the last word of the comic. The Flash says "Whaddya know? Bats is smiling! Almost." And Hal's narration concludes with "And 'Almost'... ...is good enough for me." 

But it might as well be. For all the weird-ass gobbledygook on the mental plane or within "the imaginal" or wherever this soul war was fought, this is the real development of the story, DeMatteis—and DC—finally resolving the enmity between Batman and Hal that has defined their relationship for about a decade, from the end of Hal's life to his afterlife. 

Re-reading this scene today, I'm curious if Geoff Johns had read this series or not. Most obviously, Johns' 2004 Green Lantern: Rebirth included a big, blunt, clumsy retcon that more or less excused the atrocities Hal committed as Parallax (the whole possessed by a space god thing) and, if I recall correctly, he even added a twist in explaining why it was The Spectre had bonded with Hal. 

In the process, Johns retroactively changed, or perhaps a better term would be that he overwrote, the work of previous writers of Hal Jordan going back years, including that of Ron Marz, Dan Jurgens and others. Because Johns kept writing Hal and Green Lantern books for so long though, and did so much work on the mythology (mythology I suspect was cut short by the New 52 reboot that he himself had kinda sorta initiated with Flashpoint), I think it ultimately worked, proving a clever way to thread the needle of Hal's journey from hero to villain to hero again make sense, for all of Marz's Hal stories to remain canonical but to let the character off the hook for his heel turn. 

But I wonder how it might have affected DeMatteis' work on the character as The Spectre. (As I've said before, I didn't read most of that series, and the issues I did I did mostly because Norm Breyfogle had drawn them). 

At the very least, Soul War doesn't seem to have factored into Johns' take on Hal Jordan, as Johns went right back to writing Batman as being highly suspicious, even hostile toward Hal. 

Of course, Soul War, like a lot of those JLA spin-offs I kept compulsively buying, has never actually been collected into trade which, I've increasingly begun to think, could be an indication of whether or not DC considers a story canonical, or, at least, how important the publisher might regard a story. 

I suppose that may change at some point, it's not hard to imagine DeMatteis' Spectre getting its own omnibus for example, but for now at least, this is a story only available to those who were reading DC Comics in 2003...and those, I suppose, who can find it in back issue bins or on Amazon. 

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 I wanted to share two particular images from this story with you before I go. 

First, when The Spectre joins the League around their meeting table in the first issue, he is fairly giant, towering above them all.  Batman sasses him—"Do you think you could possibly come down to our level--or are you just too far above us?"—and Hal apologizes, shrinking and changing from his Spectre form into that of Hal Jordan.

Notably, here Hal is still looking more middle-aged than his peers, and he's wearing that dumb bomber jacket that I hate. 

My hatred of it is perhaps irrational, and might just tie to the fact that I dislike Hal Jordan as a character but, I don't know. It just seems to give off this Baby Boomer, divorced dad, mid-life crisis vibe to me. Maybe that's not fair—Hal is, or was, literally a pilot after all—but rather than looking cool, it's always struck me as lame but trying too hard to look cool. 

I've long associated the jacket with Geoff Johns—I think he had Hal start wearing his dad's jacket after his dad died in a plane crash?—so I was kind of surprised to see it here. Was DeMatteis (and/or Banks, I suppose) the first to put Hal in such a jacket? Was it present throughout that volume of The Spectre? Or was Hal wearing it back when he was still Green Lantern the first time?

I don't know. But I still think it looks lame. 

My favorite image from the whole adventure is also from the first issue. When The Spectre imports the League into his own psyche, where they investigate Hal's memory of an alien world that has already fallen to the Trans, they are attacked.

Hal is being taken by the Trans, and Batman leaps to his rescue, at one point reaching up to grab the giant Spectre by the cape and shake him awake.

I don't know, I just like that image of a tiny little Batman shaking a giant by the lapels...

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Is this my last post on The Spectre for a while...? Maybe! I confess that while writing this, I read a synopsis of the first issues of DeMatteis' Spectre, which featured guest-appearances by Batman, Superman and Zauriel, and now I'm curious to revisit those. Reading JLA #35 and the interactions between Hal-as-The-Spectre and Zauriel did make me curious about their relationship.

 I think I have them in a longbox somewhere...

Bookshelf #15

This week's shelf is the one devoted to books from the publishers First Second and Toon Books. I know I said last week that that shelf might be my most reviewed shelf—that is, the shelf containing the most books that I reviewed professionally—but I think this shelf is even more reviewed. In fact, I'm pretty sure I reviewed every single book on this shelf for one venue or another (Many of these books are actually review copies provided by the publishers; if you look closely, you can see the publishing dates on Paul Pope's Battling Boy, Faith Erin Hick's Nameless City and Natalie Riess and Sara Goetter's Dungeon Critters, so those ones at least were advance review copies). 

Considering the shelf now, I don't think there's a single book on it that isn't pretty excellent in one way or another, nor is there a book I wouldn't recommend (Like Fantagraphics from last week, First Second and Toon don't really publish any bad books, at least not in my experience). 

In the Toon stack, which are laying like that because I ran out of book ends, there are a trio on top that are more horizontal in format than vertical, and thus their spines aren't facing out. If you're curious, those are James Sturm's Birdsong, Thereza Rowe's Hearts and Lilli Care's Tippy and the Night Parade. 

That time Detective Chimp accidentally discovered the Fountain of Youth, in DC Comics Presents #35

When I first read the Bill Willingham-written miniseries Day of Vengeance back in 2005, it was one of the first time I had ever encountered the then rather obscure DC character Detective Chimp. As we saw when revisiting  the series a few weeks ago, during the proceedings Detective Chimp, also known as Bobo T. Chimpanzee, reveals his origin story to another character. The story he told covered the time between Bobo was kidnapped from the wild to how he became an alcoholic following the failure of his detective business, explaining how he gained the ability to speak and why he has lived so extraordinarily long in the process. 

I didn't know it back in 2005, but Bobo actually had a couple different comics published in the 1980s that we might consider his secret origin, a back-up strip in 1981's DC Comics Presents #35 and a story in 1989's Secret Origins #40 (the notorious all-ape issue, the one featuring one of the publisher's best-ever covers). The story Willingham has Bobo tell in Day of Vengeance is something of an extrapolation of that in DC Comics Presents. 

Now, I hadn't read either of those in 2005, nor had I before I reread Day of Vengeance just recently, so I just took Bobo's word for it that he was telling the unaltered, unvarnished truth, but, having determined those other origins were out there, I figured I might as well check them out. Today we'll look at DC Comics Presents #35. 

Now DC has collected that particular issue of the Superman team-up series before—first in 2013's Showcase Presents: DC Comics Presents: Superman Team-Ups Vol. 2, and then in 2021's Superman's Greatest Team-Ups—but, to my dismay, they had only collected the feature stories from the book, the ones featuring Superman and a guest-star, and not the "Extra!" back-ups, some of which seemed to be "Whatever Happened To..." stories featuring Golden Age or extremely obscure characters. 

It turns out DC did collect the DC Comics Presents back-up in the pages of 2023's Detective Chimp Casebook, which collects Bobo's original adventures from his back-up strip in The Adventures of Rex The Wonder Dog in the 1950s, but, a few days before I found that, I had managed to track down a copy of DC Comics Presents #35 proper, in full color and with the "Whatever Happened to Rex the Wonder Dog?" back-up feature.

Its story is rather different than the story Willingham had Bobo tell in Day of Vengeance (and not just because it doesn't include the ape eventually developing alcoholism and becoming a regular in an interdimensional bar for magic-users). But it clearly served as inspiration, its key event proving pivotal in Willingham's version...which has long since become the relevant one, as Bobo started appearing regularly in DC comics over the course of the next 20 years.

The thrust of the eight-page "Whatever Happened to Rex The Wonder Dog?"seems to be to explaining just how it is that Rex, the canine hero who had fought with distinction in World War II, could conceivably still be around in 1981, some 36 years after the end of the war. Dogs just don't live that long, after all.

The strip is the work of writer Mike Tiffenbacher and artist Gil Kane, but the guy telling the story, directly to the readers as it turns out, is one Sheriff Case, Bobo's human partner from his 1950s adventures.

"Hi!" he says, looking out at the reader, straight through the fourth wall, holding aloft a newspaper with a front-page story about Rex. "Remember us-- Sheriff Case of Oscaloosa County, Florida, and my 'special deputy' Bobo--known far and wide as the famed Detective Chimp?"

"If you do," he continues, "you may also remember the fella in this picture--Rex, The Wonder Dog!"

He's not just saying that because he assumes that, if you know one obscure animal hero from 30-year-old DC Comics than you're likely to know another, but because Bobo's strip ran as a backup in the Rex series for years. Interestingly enough, though Rex's was the original book's cover feature, and it's his name in the title of this short strip, Bobo actually plays a bigger role in this particular story. 

The Sheriff goes on to say you/we might be wondering how it is that Rex is still around all these years later, a question he will be answering here. It all began, he says, with Bobo's "latest obsession--to become Rex's biggest fan."

This Bobo, it should be noted, is far different than the one we've seen in the DCU throughout the last two decades, in books like Shadowpact and Justice League Dark. For one, he's nude. For another, he has a bushy white fringe around his face, a detail meant to show his extreme old age at the point of the story's beginning. And, most dramatically, he can't speak English but instead communicates through a series of ape-like noises, like "chk-chk-wagh!" and "whk-whky-Fiit!" 

While his chimpanzee vocalizations are presented "out loud" in dialogue balloons, their translations appear in thought balloons below them, letting readers know what Bobo means when he chatters something. When Bobo eventually meets Rex, the two seem like they might be able to communicate with one another telepathically, or through some sort of shared animal language, as they "think" in English at one another. 

I've gone back to scrutinize their conversations with one another in this strip a few times now, and I'm not 100% sure they are meant to be talking to one another, or if Tiffenbacher is just showing us what each thinks, and they are essentially "talking" past one another. There's no real instance, for example, of one asking the other a question and that question being answered, and some of the times one of them addresses the other in their thoughts, it's not necessarily clear the other "hears" them. 

At any rate, they do seem to be able to communicate with another to a degree, as they have an exchange at one point and, near the climax, formulate a plan together. 

As for Bobo's newfound Rex fandom, the first page of this highly economic story shows us Bobo working on a Rex scrapbook in one panel, and then watching a Western starring Rex while wearing a cowboy hat hanging from a string around his neck. The fact that Bobo watches a Rex Western seems to be why he wears a cowboy hat throughout most of the story (well, one reason, anyway; the other will become clear shortly) and to think/talk in Western slang throughout, calling Rex "Marshal" and "pardner" and their opponents "owl hoots" and "sidewinders". 

(The image of Rex in the Western shows him riding on a horse, not unlike he did on the cover of Rex #35, although riding a horse is really one of the least impressive feats he performs on the covers of his series. I've long wanted DC to collect those Rex comics so I can see what's under all those magnificent, often bonkers covers, but a small part of me does wonder if it's better not to see the actual stories, as, unread, those adventures will always be so wild and crazy, and I can never be disappointed if the interiors fail to live up to to what imagine they might be like.)

Rex and his human, Danny Dennis, are performing at a local circus benefit, and Bobo "begged" to go, so he and Sheriff Chase do. so. Bobo was so excited to see his idol, who he identifies on the poster outside the tent by pointing and saying "Whee-Plp! Rxxx! Rxxx!", that he apparently accidentally paid his admission with "his lucky liberty dollar."

During Rex and Danny's four-panel highwire act, in which Rex does a handstand, the sheriff says it was clear that Rex was "showing the sad passage of time", and, indeed, Rex loses his footing and falls, although Danny throws him a rope, which he grabs in his mouth and swings down to safety, the audience thinking it was all part of the act .(When my dog started to get old, she had trouble with stairs, and I can't imagine her walking a tightrope or swinging from a rope; of course, she was just a regular dog, not a wonder dog). 

Backstage, the two animal stars and their humans meet, and Rex gifts Bobo with a yellow collar reading "Rex" as a souvenir. But then the wonder dog smells "the scent of evil" and goes off in pursuit, his nose to the ground. The curious Bobo follows him, while the sheriff is pulled away to deal with a crime: Two men had just made off with $10,000 in charity receipts!

Rex is, of course, on the scent of the men and Bobo, finally realizing that he lost his lucky coin and that it must be in one of the men's bags, follows. They jump aboard the thieves' getaway boat and lie low until the boar arrives at "the Atlantic island of Bimini". 

Once there, Rex continues to track them, until the animal heroes are set upon by an alligator. Rex leaps to wrestle it, thinking, "One of my old tricks--but it usually works!" (Consulting the cover gallery of The Adventures of Rex the Wonder Dog on comics.org, again, I see Rex tangled with crocodiles on the covers of #6 and #34.)

Rex wondrously chases the reptile away, but is hurt in the process, and lays on his side looking, Bobo thinks, "like I do after too much popcorn!" He decides to get water for Rex, and finds a pool that tastes "funny--but good!" Bobo fills his cowboy hat with the water—see, that's why he's wearing that hat in this story!—and takes it to Rex, who drinks and then continues to rest and recover.

When some time has passed, not only has the pain from Rex's injury gone, he thinks, but so too has the stiffness in his legs (and, readers may notice, so has the white fur on Bobo's face). Rex then tracks the thieves to their shack hideout, and then he and Bobo start wrestling one another, barking and chattering as they do. 

When the bad guys come out with their guns drawn to investigate the racket, our heroes grab their guns from them, and then Rex headbutts them both into their speedboat. With Bobo at the wheel and Rex guarding the thieves, they head back toward the mainland. On the way, they are met by the sheriff and Danny in a boat of their own.

Later, when Bobo starts acting hyperactive in a way he hasn't since he was a baby, the sheriff has Bobo checked out by a doctor, who informs him that Bobo is a perfectly healthy, 18-month-old chimpanzee.

"Bobo and Rex had done what the explorer Juan Ponce De Leon couldn't--" the sheriff tells us on the last page of the story, "They'd discovered The Fountain of Youth from Indian legend! Rex and Bobo actually are younger!"

And what did they do with their newfound youth? Well, Bobo seems to have kept acting as the sheriff's unofficial deputy, and following Rex's spectacular career from afar, as Danny grew up to be Lieutenant Colonel Daniel Dennis and eventually landed on the moon, with Rex accompanying him and becoming "America's first wonder dog on the moon!"

As for the magical water of the fountain granting Bobo immortality and the ability to speak to all living creatures, including human beings, in their own language, that doesn't come up in these couple of panels, but the differences between this story and that told in Day of Vengeance could be accounted for by the changes to the timeline wrought by Crisis on Infinite Earths or Zero Hour. 

Between this issue and Day of Vengeance, new, original stories featuring Bobo seem to be few and far between, limited to the aforementioned issue of Secret Origins, a couple issues of DC's uncollected (and maybe not canonical) DC Challenge and, post-Crisis, cameos or guest-appearances in The Outsiders, Animal Man, Green Lantern, The Flash, Guy Gardner: Warrior and Martian Manhunter Annual #2 (the "JLApe" event tie-in). I read a couple of these (Animal Man, the Martian Manhunter Annual and maybe that particular issue of Warrior), but don't recall seeing Bobo in them now...but then, I didn't know the character back when I would have read those. 

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So that's some 30 paragraphs about the eight-page back-up in DC Comics Presents #35. Are you more interested in the feature story than the doings of some animal stars from the 1950s? Well, let's discuss that here now too, albeit it as briefly as possible, given the length of this post. 

I was at least somewhat interested in this issue's Superman team-up, as it was with Man-Bat, still in his monster hero era, and I had just recently read one of his Batman Family adventures (the Etrigan, The Demon team-up, covered here). The 17-pager was the work of writer Martin Pasko, penciller Curt Swan and inker Vince Colletta. 

(I do kinda love "The Chriopteran Crusader" as a nickname, although it clearly wasn't as catchy as "The Caped Crusader".)

Interestingly, it revolves around Rebecca, the young daughter of Kirk and Francine Langstrom, who we saw being born in that Man-Bat/Etrigan story. While she didn't end up being a demon, she did have a problem: She can't seem to fall asleep, as her hearing is so sensitive she's always picking up noises, which the Langstroms theorize may be a result of the bat-serum they had both taken in the past so altering their chromosomes that they passed a mutation on to Rebecca.

If Rebecca can't fall asleep, of course, she will die, so Kirk does the most rational thing he can think to do in order to find a cure: He takes his family from Gotham City to Metropolis, takes the formula that turns him into a humanoid bat and then breaks into S.T.A.R. Labs to rummage around and see if they've discovered anything that might be able to help his daughter.

He's in the midst of being attacked by security robots—which Swan has drawn endearingly old-school, so that they look like handle-less lawnmowers or vacuum cleaners with long, bendy tentacles terminating in claws. 

Seeing the ruckus with his super-vision powers, Superman decides to join the fray because of the monstrous nature of the intruder, but once he arrives, smashing through a window some poor bastard at S.T.A.R. is just going to have to replace, he proceeds to help the breaking-and-entering Man-Bat destroy all of the robots. 

Maybe Superman just hates robots...?

Having reverted to human form, the shirtless Kirk stands just-so in order that a dramatic shadow falls across his head, presumably obscuring his identity—although given Superman's vision powers, surely he can see him just fine, shadow or no.

Kirk finally introduces himself, and then takes Superman to the hotel where he is staying with Francine and Rebecca and explains their problem to him. Superman thinks he might have a solution, a machine he found on an alien world that can "rearrange the molecular structure of organic material!"

Convenient! Superman takes the Langstroms with him to his Fortress of Solitude, but soon two unexpected visitors join them, the original Atomic Skull and his new assistant, a shapely woman in a costume that matches his.

I didn't recognize this Skull, who has a skull symbol on his chest and flies around in a charming skull-shaped ship, in addition to having a skull for a head, which he partially covers with a yellow cowl. He can shoot some kind of brain blasts at Superman and is associated with a skull-themed criminal organization. I guess I am more familiar with the second Atomic Skull, the one with a more Ghost Rider-y design.

During the battle that ensues, the Skull shoots Superman with the molecular-rearranger, which results in the Man of Steel only being able to use one superpower at a time. That's still more than enough for he and Man-Bat to be able to attack the Skull's skull-ship. Once aboard, the pair of heroes find out just why the Skull wants the alien device so bad.

Apparently his partner and girlfriend Felicia is actually a panther he had evolved though his experimentation into a beautiful woman. I would say this is super-weird, but then, a big cat who becomes a beautiful woman is a plot point in 1932's Island of Lost Souls, the first Hollywood adaptation The Island of Doctor Moreau too, so...

Anyway, things go badly for the bad guys. Struggling with Man-Bat while in the process of devolving, Felicia accidentally fires the ray at herself, turning her back into a normal panther, and the Skull himself falls out of a hole in the hull of the crashing skull-ship. Superman is able to right the ship, but not to catch his plummeting foe; he's able to fly after him but, thanks to the Skull shooting him with the ray, he can't do so at the super-speed he would need to be able to catch him before he hit the ground.

So Atomic Skull dies (or at least seems to), Felicia turns back into a cat and Superman and the Langstroms are finally able to turn the ray device on little Rebecca, curing her of her super-hearing induced insomnia. 

The end. 

On 1999's JLA #35

I can't remember being annoyed by September of 1999's JLA #35 being the work of a guest-team, bumping writer Grant Morrison and artists Howard Porter or John Dell and forestalling Morrison's ongoing Justice League story for a month.

Maybe that was because, at that point, we JLA readers had been acclimated to issues from guest creators. 

For example, January's #27 was from guest-creators Mark Millar and Mark Pajarillo (that was the JLA and the reserves vs. Amazon done-in-one, a sort of spotlight on The Atom). That was followed by Morrison, Porter and Dell's four-part "Crisis Times Five" (the JLA/JSA/Captain Marvel story arc). And then we got two more issues from fill-in teams, with Mark Waid, Devin Grayson, Pajarillo and Walden Wong handling JLA # 32 (in which the team investigates the "No Man's Land" situation in Gotham) and the same creative team (minus Grayson) also handling JLA #33 (in which the team investigates a faux Bruce Wayne). The "regular" team was back for #34 (in which Green Lantern gets swept up in a prison riot at Belle Reeve), but it was beginning to look like we were getting at least one fill-in issue between each complete story by Morrison and company. 

It might also have been because that September's Day of Judgment event felt so much like a JLA story that I felt like I was getting more JLA that month, not less. (Batman, Superman, Green Lantern and Zauriel played big-ish roles in the main Day of Judgment series, while Martian Manhunter and Wonder Woman also appeared).

Looking back now though, JLA #35 looks like a rather unwelcome interruption of Morrison and company's Justice League epic. In issue #34, "The Ant and the Avalanche", New Gods tell the League the long-foreshadowed apocalyptic threat is finally arriving, and the cliffhanger ending reveals that Lex Luthor, the villain of 1997-1998's "Rock of Ages" arc, has now aligned himself with Prometheus, the villain who single-handedly took on and took down the newer, bigger Justice League in 1998's JLA #16 and #17. 

What could these two be up to, and who else might be on the "new Injustice Gang" Prometheus mentions...? How might it tie into the prophesied threat? Readers in 1999 had to wait not one but two months, not getting a resolution to that cliffhanger the following month, but instead a story by J.M. DeMatteis and Pajarillo about Hal Jordan, a character who had never appeared in this particular title, and how he was dealing with being the new host of The Spectre. (The side-quest nature of this story is particularly apparent when encountered in a collection of JLA today;I re-read it in a library-borrowed, 2000 collection entitled JLA: World War III, where it is sandwiched between the aforementioned "The Ant and the Avalanche" and the five-part "World War III" arc, the latter of which was both the climax and the finale of Morrison's run). 

According to comics.org, DeMatteis and Pajarillo's JLA #35 was released on September 29, 1999, the very same Wednesday that Day of Judgment #5 and Day of Judgment Secret Files and Origins were released. So, depending on which order one read them in that week, this is either the first or second appearance of Hal Jordan as The Spectre following the events of the main Day of Judgment series (And though the cover of this issue brands it as a Day of Judgment tie-in, it is, according to a footnote, set after the events of the series, so, like the Secret Files and Origins special, this too is a sort of epilogue). 

The story, entitled "The Guilty", opens with a two-page sequence in which "the camera" seems to be zooming in from a longshot of a city street from far above, down to a troubled man in a yellow shirt and blue pants in front of a toy store, all the other people passing by depicted only as silhouettes. Green narration boxes make it clear that the words in them are supposed to be the thoughts of Hal Jordan, and that he is, apparently, the man in the yellow shirt.

I wouldn't have recognized him, honestly. He looks far younger than he did in Day of Judgment, his build is thinner, and colorist Pat Garrahy gives him a very light brown hair, far lighter than he usually has. Honestly, he looks more like Ralph Dibny than Hal Jordan. Given the events of the story, though, this could be either Pajarillo and Garrahy rendering him a bit off-model, or it could be intentional.

Anyway, as the suffering Jordan narrates about how he can't stop being flooded with darkness and evil, he finally cries out in anguish, assuming the form of The Spectre, a white-skinned giant wearing not just the customary green hooded cape and gloves, but also a green mask evocative of Jordan's old Green Lantern uniform (As is hinted at on Porter's cover at the top of the post, the design for the new Hal Jordan-as-The Spectre hybridizes Hal's Green Lantern outfit with The Spectre's get-up).

Suddenly, the JLA's resident angel Zauriel swoops down to look Hal in the eye, his flaming sword already drawn:

Is there a problem?

Your howl of grief across the ethers--drew me here through the sheer force of your thought. 

It slowly dawns on Hal that he knows Zauriel—they met in Purgatory in Day of Judgment, and, prior to that, a time-travelling Jordan from the past met Zauriel in the 1998 "Emerald Knights" arc Green Lantern, but I'll be damned if I can remember if Past Hal kept his memories of this adventure in his future, or if they were power-ringed away before he got sent back, so as not to screw with the timeline (As far as I know, "Emerald Knights" is also the first time Hal Jordan actually met Plastic Man, too, but I may be wrong on that; do correct me if I am). 

Hal's dialogue, presented in green-tinted dialogue bubbles with lines suggesting fire, meant to imply The Spectre's spookier-than-human voice, makes it quite clear he's struggling with being bonded to The Spectre-Force. The new Spectre and Zauriel go back and forth a bit about the latter having forsaken Heaven for life on Earth, with The Spectre seemingly intent on punishing Zauriel for doing so.

Then a bunch of Leaguer's appear, Superman saying "That'll be enough, Hal--" to presage their dramatic appearance. Assembled here are Superman, Martian Manhunter, Batman, Green Lantern and Plastic Man. Together with Zauriel, they would make up the half-dozen Leaguers who are featured in this story.

It's an interesting mix, as Superman, Batman and J'onn have known Hal about as long as anyone and served on Leagues with him before. Zauriel is there for obvious plot purposes, standing as he does between Earth and the divine realm that birthed The Spectre. Green Lantern Kyle Rayner has a complicated history with Hal, having had to repeatedly fight him while also trying to live up to his legacy ("Emerald Knights" is one of the relatively few times Kyle and Hal shared a story where they weren't fighting, actually). And as for Plastic Man, well, his particular past is salient for one scene DeMatteis writes later.

Among the other eight Leaguers, Aquaman, Wonder Woman and then-Flash Wally West might seem conspicuously absent, given Aquaman co-founded the League and served on it for years with Hal, while Wally and Wondy were his colleagues on Justice Leagues during the multi-Leagues "International" era between the end of the Giffen/DeMatteis era and the start of JLA. (Remember, in post-Crisis, pre-Infinite Crisis continuity, Wonder Woman wasn't a founding Leaguer, nor even in Man's World throughout the entirety of the Satellite Era). 

During a brief argument with Superman, the still-giant Spectre returns to a human form, and then tumbles out of the sky, eliciting a fun panel in which J'onn, Kyle and Plas all shout "I'll get him!", but Superman beat them all to the catch, thanks to his super-speed. 

To their shock, they don't recognize the man in Supeman's arms at all. "If Hal Jordan is the new Spectre--" Plas starts, before Batman finishes his sentence, "Then WHO is THIS?"

Taking the unrecognizable Hal back to the Watchtower, the narration makes it clear that not only do none of them recognize him as Hal Jordan, but he appears completely differently in the eyes of each of them (Pajarillo helpfully draws six completely different-looking men the same yellow shirt in a series of panels; one of them, the one Plas sees, is a Black man). 

Zauriel interrupts the questioning, takes a good hard look at the man he sees, and then explains:

Our inability to recognize him-- is part of the ordained plan for The Spectre's mission on Earth. 

Jordan is dead...The world believes him dead...and though he's been given the semblance of a human form, no one-- --not even those who knew him best-- will recognize him now.

Though Zauriel somehow seems to fix that for his fellow Leaguers, he stresses that this is just temporary, and that "For reasons known only to The Presence," Zauriel's name for God, once Hal leaves the Watchtower, the Leaguers will only remember him as The Spectre, not as Hal Jordan-as-The Spectre. 

I didn't like this development when I initially read this comic. Not only did it seem to violate one of the established "rules" of The Spectre that I had previously read about—everyone seemed to recognize the dead Jim Corrigan as Jim Corrigan when he was The Spectre—it seemed counter-productive. What, after all, was the point of making the long-lived DC character Hal Jordan the new Spectre if DC was only going to obscure that identity from everyone in the DCU anyway? Would stories of Hal Jordan possessing The Spectre's god-like powers in the modern DCU be all that interesting if only the writers writing his adventures and the readers reading them knew who he actually was?

It seems like DeMatteis must have changed his mind about it too...if this aspect was his idea, and not an editorial edict. About a year and a half after this issue was published, DC would launch a new volume of The Spectre, with DeMatteis writing it. (I wonder now if DC and DeMatteis knew the latter would be writing the series at this point or not.) But by 2003's JLA/Spectre: Soul War two-part mini-series, the League all knew that Hal was The Spectre again. 

Hal resumes his Spectre form, and there's a bit of debate among the assembled men. Superman tells Hal he's a good man, while Batman argues, "As far as I'm concerned, Jordan stopped being a "good man" when he turned on the guardians. When he killed-- and kept on killing."

Hal again discusses how his new, supernatural senses are overwhelming him:

If only you could see--what I see! What this...thing I share consciousness with makes me see: The demons! The guilt!

Humanity's shame and sorrow! It's festering jealousy--and murderous rage!

After Plastic Man interrupts him—"Let me get this straight: Before you were dead--now you're the all-powerful Spectre--and you're kvetching about it?"—we get to the heart of the comic.

"All men--no matter how pure they may appear--are guilty!" Hal says, spreading his cape like a matador. "Every soul on Earth is a potential target of The Spectre's divine wrath!"

Superman scoffs, saying he doesn't, he can't subscribe to such a philosophy, at which point Hal-as-The Spectre starts using his powers to illustrate his points, giving Pajarillo lots of intense imagery to work with. He shows them the time Superman executed the Phantom Zone criminals, the instance in which he actually took a life—there's no asterisk or footnote, but I believe this happened during John Byrnes run, right?—and how guilty Superman felt about it.

Batman cuts in, and then The Spectre turns on him, noting how many people have suffered due to Batman's arrogance, and that there's a small part of Batman that wants to kill his enemies, one he may eventually act on—should The Spectre attack Batman now, or wait until he's crossed that line? (Batman's refusal to ever kill, even the likes of The Joker, makes him maybe a poor example to subject to The Spectre's scrutiny; I wonder if it might have been better for DeMatteis to use the harsher, more violent Huntress, or perhaps warrior characters like Wonder Woman or Aquaman, although, to be honest, I don't recall if any of those three had actually killed anyone by this point; I feel like Peter David had depicted Aquaman killing at least one alien invader earlier in his run, but I'm no longer positive.)

Hal goes on to accuse Kyle of fearing being corrupted by his power and lashes out at Zauriel when he again mentions The Presence.

It is at this point, Plastic Man joins the conversation, transforming into an easy chair and sweeping Hal off his feet with a "Siddown a minute!"

As a Plastic Man fan, I should note that DeMatteis does a pretty fine job of the character in a sequence of less than a half-dozen panels. While Morrison had an even-handed, nuanced approach to Plastic Man as a true hero despite his jokes, in general, most of the other writers to handle the JLA during Morrison's run just played Plas as a source of usually lame jokes, his shape-shifting abilities employed to contort him into visual punchlines. 

(For one example of Morrison's take on Plastic Man from the very collection I am reading this issue in, in the first chapter of "World War III", Zauriel said that Heaven has decided Earth will surely end during this particular threat, and that the angels are already planning the architecture of a new universe. Plastic Man's head turns into that of a chicken, and notes that if Heaven has given up, maybe he and Zauriel should as well, to which Zauriel responds, "I haven't given up...and neither will you when it comes to it, Plastic Man." He's right! They both play their parts in saving Earth and the universe from the new Injustice Gang and Mageddon.)

Plastic Man explains that he too had been in the position Hal has been in, a bad guy who was seemingly killed and then got super-powers (Although there's an obvious difference in scale, here; Eel O'Brien, as his surname is spelled here, was a rather cartoonish gangster pulling robberies and heists, while Hal was an honest-to-God cosmic supervillain with a considerable body count who, at one point, unraveled all of time in space in order to recreate it in his own image). 

"Believe me, when the fates offered me a second chance--I took it!" Plas says. "But did I mope and moan about it? Nuh-uh! I decided to have fun with it! If I was gonna live my life over, it was gonna be--YOWCH!"

Pajarillo's art is a little confusing here—I'm sure the script couldn't have been all that clear, given what's going on—but Hal interrupts Plastic Man by ripping open the back of his head, where he finds Eel hiding:

You hide behind a mask of arrogance and flippancy--

--but there is another face that lies behind that vapid grin! A man who preyed on the weaknesses of others! An all too common criminal--

--named "Eel" O'Brien!

Again, pretty sure it's spelled "O'Brian," but whatever. The Spectre's beat is evil, sin and vengeance, not spelling.

Here we get a glimpse into Plas' mind, wherein he reveals that he faces "the darkness" of his soul constantly, that he knows every rotten thing he's ever done and been face-to-face with his own guilt, but that he likes his "mask of frivolity." And, when he finally meets his maker, as Hal phrases it? "I'll take my chances that he's just a tetch more forgiving than you are!" Plas says.

Hal seems to really lose his shit at this, at which point J'onn loses his, screaming "Enough!" in big, bold red letters "both verbally and telepathically".

Using his powers, J'onn transports all seven of them to a scary-looking plane of fire and stalagmites and weird architecture. 

"Back in Hell?" Kyle asks; he and Superman having just been there in Day of Judgment. "After a fashion," Zauriel replies. He seems to be the only one who knows where J'onn has taken them—mentally, if not physically—although Batman figures it out a moment before Hal does, and before DeMatteis and Pajarillo reveal it to us.

After a four-page fight through a bewildering hellscape, they meet an extremely ordinary-looking middle-aged man and his wife, sitting in easy chairs and listening to a radio show in a cramped cave. An aggressive Hal confronts the man and is shocked to see that "the scared light" shines within him. 

Who is this guy, and where are they?

The place was The Joker's mind, and that guy was the light of God within The Joker.

Here's J'onn's explanation of what they all just saw:

Do you see, Hal? Even there--in the most corrupted of human souls--

--lies a spark, however small, seeking hope, seeking love-- and yes--

--redemption.

...

Perhaps you've been projecting your own guilt, for your own transgressions--real and imagined--onto everyone else.

You're not seeing us, Hal. You're seeing yourself reflected back at you--through the prism of the Spectre's wrath. 

...

I learned, long ago, not to underestimate the human race... and their capacity to rise above their limitations. 

Too bad about that "ordained plan" that means everyone will be unable to recognize Hal Jordan now that he's The Spectre, or else maybe Martian Manhunter could have continued to counsel him in his new career, and his efforts to wrestle the Spirit of Vengeance into a Spirit of Redemption. 

On the last page, The Spectre grows giant again, and he floats through the ceiling out into space, saying that the men he's leaving are "still the best friends-- --I ever had." Presumably he was speaking just of J'onn, Superman and Batman, as he, like, just met Zauriel and Plastic Man, and his relationship with Kyle seems...well, "friends" doesn't seem like the right word at this point in their personal history, does it?

As for the League though, they've already forgotten him, as Kyle gets the last word among them. "Sure hope we helped him--," he says, "--whoever he was."

The last image in the book is of Hal-as-The Spectre, impossibly gigantic and semi-transparent, seeming to hold the Earth itself in his hands, as he ends his narration with something I don't think we see regularly in super-comics: A prayer.

"Lord.. ...let me be worthy," he thinks. 

After this issue, the League goes on to face Mageddon in "World War III" in the pages of JLA, after which writer Mark Waid would take the reins from Morrison (and Zauriel would fade into very occasional guest-star status). Waid would, in one of his handful of arcs, get into Plas' head in a way similar to what DeMatteis did here, with the hero lamenting his life of crime and facing the temptation to steal again once Plastic Man and Eel O'Brian are split into two separate people. 

While I wasn't particularly annoyed by this book back in 1999, I don't think I appreciated its virtues, either. I don't know that it's necessarily the best Hal Jordan story or anything, but in just 22 pages, it does manage to fit interesting portrayals of Zauriel, Plastic Man and Martian Manhunter. 

Bookshelf #14

This week's bookshelf is my Fantagraphics shelf...or, to be more precise, my Fantagraphics-books-that-aren't-Disney-collections shelf, as those are currently all stuffed onto another bookshelf entirely.  

To the right are, obviously, the various Peanuts collections, including three volumes of The Complete Peanuts, four of the little gift book-esque books that Fanta released following 2012's similarly-sized  Charlie Brown's Christmas Stocking and Snoopy vs. The Red Baron, which, as the title suggests, is a collection of the strips featuring the World War I flying ace's many battles against his archenemy.

There are also a pair of non-Fanta Peanuts books, both from Boom's Kaboom! imprint, which has (or at least had) the license to produce new Peanuts comic books. 

The first of these is 2018's Peanuts Dell Archive, collecting stories from the comics books of the 1950s and 1960s by Chales Schulz and others. These are obviously not Peanuts at its best, but they are certainly interesting, seeing some of the earliest non-Schulz Peanuts work, as well as seeing the characters feature in stories that are longer than even the Sunday strips of the newspaper could allow. \

The other is 2015's Peanuts: A Tribue to Charles M. Schulz, a 65th anniversary celebration of the strip, the characters and the man by a wide variety of other artists, including Patrick McDonnel, Mo Willems, Lincoln Pierce, Evan Dorkin, Roger Langridge, Paul Pope, Stan Sakai and others. Again, not great, but interesting...even fascinating, as seeing characters so associated with a single artist's vision translated into the styles of others can often be. (Unfortunately, this book is really wide and juts an inch or so over the edge of the bookshelf, so it mildly irritates me every time I look at it.)

If you're curious why I don't have more Peanuts on my shelf, I do have more volumes of The Complete Peanuts upstairs on another bookshelf (As I've mentioned previously, although I've been living in my current home for a little over a year now, I have not attempted the arduous task of reorganizing all my bookshelves into something that might make more sense). I don't have as many as I would like though; as with Fanta's Carl Barks and other Disney library collections, I wish I would have bought each new volume as they came out and thus had a complete collection, rather than putting doing so off and then falling hopelessly behind. Maybe one day. 

On the left you'll find more-or-less random books from Fanta, including works from Julia Gfrorer, Jason, Lucy Knisley, Benjamin Marra, Katie Skelly, Steven Weissman and a few others. The majority of these books are by the late Richard Sala though, who is one of my all-time favorite artists. These include The Bloody Cardinal, Delphine, The Hidden, In a Glass Grotesquely, Mad Night, Poison Flowers & Pandemonium and Violenzia & Other Deadly Amusements. That's not everything—Phantoms in the Attic is shelved elsewhere due to its large size, and Peculia, the first work of his I had read, is upstairs with the older comics. 

Considering this shelf now, I think this might be the most reviewed of my bookshelves. That is, the majority of these books are ones I ended up reviewing professionally (that is, somewhere other than my blog). This, I suppose, says something about Fantagraphics: They make great books worthy of discussion and recommendation, and for a more general audience than the floppy publishers of the direct market. 

An extremely belated review of All of The Marvels

All of The Marvels (Penguin Press; 2021) Despite practically vibrating with excitement as I read it and eager to talk to somebody about it as soon as I finished, I wasn't entirely sure if I should write about Douglas Wolk's All of the Marvels or not. 

As readers of this blog know, I generally write about everything I read or experience, especially if it's a comic book or somehow comics-related, something that, at this point, is less a vocation or a hobby and more of a habit—and, perhaps, not even necessarily a good habit.

This book, despite my initial understanding of it, turns out to be a work of literary criticism that attempts to reckon with the half-million page, 60-year mega-saga of Marvel's inter-connected comic book stories that, in Wolk's framing, are telling a single story, the biggest one ever told. As I read, I quickly realized that Wolk's book wasn't an argument for that way of looking at Marvel Comics, nor a detailing of the mad experience of reading their comics in a way that no one was ever meant to read them, nor a history of any kind (although various chapters address all of those things).

Rather, this was Wolk writing about the comics themselves (at least thousands of the tens of thousands he read), which, of course, meant that writing about All of the Marvels would mean that I would be writing about someone writing about people writing comics (And by "writing comics," I guess I actually mean creating them). 

Obviously, the book should and has been reviewed in various places, but I felt a little weird about doing so myself, as criticism of criticism seemed like a weird, more academic sort of ouroboros writing than any I've ever really engaged in before. 

Still, be it a bad habit or not, I'm going to proceed, urged on by, if nothing else, a desire to let any of my readers who haven't already read All of the Marvels know exactly what it is, and to recommend that they take the time to read it. 

Instead of a more formally organized piece, I'm just going to share a few random things about the book below, and I'll try my hardest to be brief (Which isn't easy for me, given the limitless space of the Internet and my lack of an editor). 

•So what took me so long to read this particular book, aside from the usual forces of procrastination, too many comics competing for my attention and my tendency to prioritize reading stuff I can get paid to write about versus reading stuff for fun...?

Well, two things. 

First, as you can tell by scanning any month or so of EDILW, I'm a DC Comics partisan (Though I read a handful of Marvel comics earlier and a stack of trades later, my time as a Marvel reader was basically 2000-2015 or so, and my familiarity with the publisher's 20th century comics limited to what I was drawn to in the Essential collections, which tended to be the 1970s monstrous superhero stuff, as opposed to the more straightforward superhero stuff). 

This book's claim that the stories of the Marvel Universe shared setting represented the biggest story ever told felt immediately, obviously wrong to me. Because, obviously, the DC Universe is far, far older, however one wishes to date the creation of the two settings. (By the debut of the character or feature these settings would grow out of? Superman debuted in 1938, the Fantastic Four in 1961...and, if one would prefer to start the Marvel Universe back to the debut of the original Human Torch, that's still a year after Superman. By the point at which the characters began crossing over on a regular basis? DC's Justice League of America debuted in in 1960...not only is that about a year earlier than the FF, but Stan Lee has repeatedly explained that he creation of the FF was in direct response to the success of DC's JLoA...I just recently read a version of his telling of this story in his introduction to the 2008 trade paperback collection of JLA/Avengers).  

I've heard the argument made (not by Wolk, but by others), that the DC mega-saga doesn't really "count" in the way that the Marvel mega-saga does because of DC's occasional attempts to reboot their own story, most dramatically in what we call the post-Crisis period of 1986 or so and the New 52 publishing initiative of 2011 (and probably a good half a dozen other times as well). But of course, those reboots are themselves part of the story, as each follows some big cosmic event where god-like entities meddle with the fabric of time and space, rewriting the fictional reality. There's never been a hard DC reboot that wasn't the result of a story; in those examples I just mentioned, these were Crisis on Infinite Earths (there had to be a crisis for there to be a post-Crisis, naturally) and Flashpoint, respectively. 

That said, Wolk addresses the existence of the DC Universe almost immediately in his book:

That sense of shared experience, of seeing dozens of historical threads and dozens of creators' separate contributions being woven together, is a particular joy of following the Marvel Universe (with a capital U), as both the company and the readers like to call it. The Marvel story is not the first or only one that works like that—DC Comics, Marvel's largest competitor, and other comics publishers have adopted the "universe" template too—but it's the largest of its kind.

A footnote then explains that DC was "slow to integrate" their comics into a coherent fictional world, and mentions the reboots. I am not necessarily convinced by this argument, and there are better ones to be made, like the fact that, since 1961, Marvel has been more deliberate about their shared setting, or that it's smaller, tighter-knit group of creators gave it a more distinct vision, or that Marvel's current pop culture cache makes it the more important universe at this point. That said, Wolk's book isn't really written for people like me, and I think that paragraph and attached footnote does the job of explaining why he wrote a book about Marvel's super-story rather than DC's. 

Also, I confess that, when I first heard about the book, I kind of assumed it was one of what I usually think of as "stunt memoirs," where a writer does something rather crazy for a year or so and then writes about the experience. Think A.J. Jacobs' 2007 The Year of Living Biblically and its ilk. 

I thought this, of course, because reading all of Marvel's comics is insane...maybe even more so than trying to follow the various laws of the Bible literally in the modern world. Wolk notes that, when he would talk about the project with others, more than one person brought up Bob Burden's Flaming Carrot character, whose origin involved reading 5,000 comics in a single sitting to win a bet and going crazy in the process.

•So if it's not what I assumed, what is All of the Marvels? Well, after a few chapters explaining what makes Marvel Comics such an unusual and worthy epic, the particulars of Wolk's methodology and pre-answering questions readers not already steeped in the comics medium and superhero genre might have, the book takes shape.

Wolk breaks out various threads of the overarching Marvel story and devotes a chapter to each. Within  those chapters he details their salient aspects, major themes, cultural significance, impact on the publisher and industry and medium. He does so with a keen eye and imaginative (but convincing, even compelling) readings that make a sort of sense of these improvised mega-stories that were never intended to make sense.

So, for example, in his chapter on Spider-Man, he defines its particular literary mode ("It's a bildungsroman, the story of how a youth becomes an adult"), and makes sense of it as a repeating cycle, in which Spider-Man Peter Parker achieves a form of adulthood or resolution to his lifelong conflicts, only to be knocked down again and have to start all over (And yes, Wolk does reference the Itsy-Bitsy Spider here). 

One might think of the real, true story of Spider-Man ending with, say Steve Ditko's departure from Amazing Spider-Man, or perhaps Stan Lee's, but Wolk manages to make it all make sense as a cohesive story, up until where he left off reading it (I should note that the Spider-Man story did reboot itself in the manner of any post-Crisis DC comic in the "Brand New Day" period, discarding a swathe of its own continuity). 

In addition to Spider-Man, which is the second such chapter of the book, Wolk tackles, in order, The Fantastic Four, Master of Kung Fu, The X-Men, Thor, Black Panther, the "Dark Reign" period, Jonathan Hickman's Avengers/New Avengers/Secret Wars storyline and, finally, Ms. Marvel Kamala Khan and The Unbeatable Squirrel Girl. 

Why those particular threads of the Marvel story? It seems to be a mixture of their importance to the overall narrative and what Wolk liked the best or thought the best-made. (He admits as much in the chapter on Master of Kung Fu). Pop cultural significance doesn't seem to have had much to do with it. (You'll note the lack of Marvel Cinematic Universe important comics and characters like Iron Man, Captain America or The Guardians of the Galaxy, for example, or Deadpool or, most notably, The Avengers, who are only represented in that one specific writer's particular iteration of them.) 

The Hulk is perhaps the most conspicuous in his absence, given how long the character has been around and how relatively popular he has been at various points. One supposes that, had Wolk a bigger page count, we might have seen chapters on The Hulk or Daredevil.

In between those chapters are shorter interludes, devoted to such things as Lee, Kirby and Ditko and their working relationships or timelines of monsters, U.S. presidents and pop music in Marvel Comics. One particularly interesting such interlude temporarily reorients the entire Marvel saga around a single character, Linda Carter, who first appeared in 1961's Linda Carter, Student Nurse by Stan Lee and Al Hartley, and would go on to star in 1972's Night Nurse and, later, appear as a superhero ally in the 21st century. 

The book ends with a 23-page appendix entitled "Marvel Comics: A Summary," which essentially summarizes the entirety of the Marvel mega-saga. It's basically a smart comics critic's all-prose version of the old Marvel Saga, or, perhaps, Mark Waid and Javier Rodriguez's 2019 History of the Marvel Universe. It's great. 

•One extremely useful term Wolk uses throughout, which I have been struggling not to use myself as I wrote about his book until I could get to this point, is "sequence." He uses it instead of "title" or "series" or "story" or "run," words we might see and use much more often when discussing superhero comics, all words which tend to fall short when taking a very long view of a narrative like Wolk does throughout the book.

For example, Brian Michael Bendis' work on Spider-Man in the Ultimate line (which would eventually become the Ultimate Universe). It spanned multiple titles and series, and, though one could look at it as a single story, it is, obviously, composed of hundreds of individual stories. The term "sequence" is a more precise one than any of those others to describe that unit of a long Bendis-directed Spider-Man narrative.

It's especially useful when talking about, say, long-lived characters like The Fantastic Four and Spider-Man or narratives that are otherwise hard to define (like Hickman's multi-book Avengers/New Avengers/Secret Wars, or the not-really-even-a-story-per se "Dark Reign" status quo). 

•Wolk is very, very nice to the creators he writes about. Given the date of publication, he was writing before a few of those mentioned were revealed to be bad people (Warren Ellis) or actual monsters (Neil Gaiman), but, even beyond that, I was impressed with how kind he was to the work of many creators, never referring to anyone as a hack (at least, not anyone he names).

Some examples? During the "Dark Reign" chapter, he mentions Alex Maleev's use of photo reference to create Secret Invasion: Dark Reign #1. He writes in a footnote that, "He apparently uses photographic models for most of his characters, which is why Namor, whose facial features are usually drawn as not exactly human, looks really wrong for most of this issue."

That instead of, say, pointing out that Namor looks like Phil Collins doing very poor Namor cosplay, or comparing and contrasting "good" use of models, like that of Alex Ross, to Maleev's use of them. (Looking at those panels again, I think I see more Robert DeNiro than Phil Collins in at least one of them...)

In that same chapter, he talks about the virtues of Mike Deodato's art, and even reprints a four-panel sequence of his Norman Osborn, who looks like Tommy Lee Jones with some sort of weird virtual reality hairstyle super-imposed onto his head (That is because, of course, Deodato was giving Osborn the hair style Ditko originally designed him with, a hair style that no one has anymore and, in fact, no one under the age of 70 is likely to have seen in real life). He talks no shit about Deodato there at all!

Or, in discussing "One More Day", the controversial storyline in which Spider-Man sold his marriage to the devil in exchange for a continuity reboot, a footnote simply reads, "As far as I can tell, nobody, including the creators, likes 'One More Day.' [J. Michael] Straczynski briefly intended to have his name removed from it." 

He didn't even use the words "dumb" or "stupid" when talking about that story...!

•As I often do when reading prose, I thought in the back of my mind a bit about my own writing while reading this. I suppose I did so more than usual, given this was writing about comics.

One thing that struck me is the fact that I, and, I think, most of the people who write about comics regularly online, tend to concentrate on comics as single units (either single issues or, in my case now, trade paperback collections), and to write about them as they're coming out.

This makes sense, of course. Timeliness has always been an important factor in what gets written about, and at least part of the point of a review is to help guide a work's potential audience, to either encourage them to read or watch or play something (if it's good), or to warn them away from doing so (if it's bad).

Certainly, my focus on EDILW has long been on covering new comics (even if, in some cases, they are just new to me), something I imagine comes from the fact that I started writing for newspapers, with film reviews accounting for much of my writing. 

Wolk's book, though, offers a pretty strong argument for waiting a few years (or decades) before writing about monthly comics, as such a long-view allows one to see things in them that one can't if they're occupied with covering them as they whiz by every week or month or year. 

I know some folks do cover comics in this way, of course (Tegan O'Neil comes to mind, for example), but it seems a relative rarity.

Of course, the vast majority of comics criticism takes place on the Internet (I think there's still a little in magazines and newspapers, at least those few magazines and newspapers that still exist), which certainly lends it to dealing with what's most timely, rather than, say, what was coming out in 1965. 

Perhaps the best way to look at 20 or 30 or 40 or 50-year-old comics are in books like Wolk's (Um, are there other books like Wolk's...?), but it certainly gave me something to think about in terms of comics criticism.

John McCrea's Ragman in 1999's Day of Judgment Secret Files and Origins #1

As I happen to have read a few Ragman appearances lately and discussed the way the character was drawn by Kelley Jones and Michael Golden, I thought it might be worthwhile to linger on the way he appears in "The Destiny Dilemma", the lead story in 1999's Day of Judgment Secret Files and Origins special. The story was written by Scott Beatty and, more relevant to our discussion here, drawn by John McCrea (Andew Chiu shares the "inkers" credit with McCrea, and Tom McGraw handled the colors, although I should probably note here that I'm not sure they were reproduced 100% faithfully by the library scanner I used for this post). 

McCrea hails from Ireland, and his earliest work was in the British comics industry, including work on Judge Dredd and related characters in the early '90s. It was on one such story that he first collaborated with Irish writer Garth Ennis, with whom he would develop a long and fruitful partnership.

By the year this story was published, McCrea had collaborated with Ennis on 18 issues of the writer's 1993-1995 run on The Demon, and the pair were about four years into their five-year run on Hitman, which I still think is both one of the best comics DC has ever published and one of my favorite comics they have ever published. Ennis and McCrea had also published a four-issue mini-series from Caliber Press called Dicks. 

What all of those comics have in common, aside from McCrea and Ennis, was that they were all rather unique genre stories, ones that celebrated their genres while simultaneously taking the piss out of them. The DC work, at least, was delicately balanced, so that those comics were full of serious character work and parodic comedy elements. A single issue of, say, Hitman might have heart-wrenching drama, gut-busting gags and superior action telling, while also managing to riff on superhero comics tropes and one or more of Ennis' favorite oddball films. (Dicks, on the other hand...well, let's just say I wouldn't use the words "delicately balanced" to describe it.)

So, this story was interesting not just because it was an opportunity to get an extra 22 pages of McCrea's art, but also because it gave us American readers a then-rare opportunity to see McCrea drawing a script from someone other than Ennis (he would go on to do plenty of great work without Ennis in the 21st century, of course) and because here McCrea was drawing a DC super-comic that was completely straight, with no real humor elements to it.

He, of course, knocked it out of the park. 

As bad as that scan of two-page spread above is, what with the line down the middle of image, distorting Madame Xanadu's lovely face, you can see how good his art is here. We're going to concentrate on Ragman in this post, of course, but do note his massive, intimidating version of Blue Devil, and the menace and mystery of his Phantom Stranger, a single white dot on his shadowed face for an eye, and even the hint of menace about Zatanna's half-shaded face, a bit of visual foreshadowing for a twist I will soon spoil. (Oh, and while it's not quite apparent here, he also draws Sentinel, who by this time had lost his unnatural youth and vitality to resume something closer to his biological age of a man in his seventies, as an old man. Sure, this Alan is still handsome and stands up quite straight, but he also has a visible paunch and wrinkles, and his muscles weren't straining to break out of his costume.)

That double-page splash accounts for pages two and three of the story. Sentinel Alan Scott has awoken in a field and he soon stumbles upon the so-called Sentinels of Magic: Doctor Occult, Ragman, Madame Xanadu, Zatanna, Blue Devil, The Phantom Stranger, Faust and the new Doctor Fate, Hector Hall. It's a rather weird group, full of vastly different characters designed by different artists from comics throughout DC's history, but I think it's worth noting that even among a group of such unusual figures, McCrea's Ragman still stands out as particularly strange.

He certainly looks the scariest of the bunch, about as tall as Blue Devil, but thin and awkward looking, seemingly all hood and cloak, with only shadow where his face or much of his body might be. One thing I really like about McCrea's take on Ragman is that, in many of the images, it looks as if Ragman might be all suit and no body; that is, in many panels he looks like a living suit of rags, rather than a living person wearing a suit of living rags. You can see it here in his exaggerated thin-ness, the length of his limbs, and the way his gloves look far too big for his hands (Speaking of thin, check out Zatanna's legs; her ankles look like they belong to a bird rather than a woman. Certainly, McCrea's art has a cartooniness to it, even in this, a serious story). 

These heroes have been gathered for a mysterious purpose, but standing in their midst is the Spear of Destiny, the legendary weapon that once pierced the side of the dying, crucified Jesus, was passed down from conqueror to conqueror and, in the DC Universe, was used by Hitler to keep America's superheroes at bay during World War II and is now both cursed and the only weapon capable of hurting The Spectre.

As The Spectre had just gone on a rampage that threatened the world and the afterlife and then received a new, perhaps unreliable host, these heroes have to decide what they should do with the spear. 

During their discussion, Ragman's rags—which, remember, are each evil souls and their job is to seek out more evil souls to add to their number—are pulled towards the spear.

Our heroes decide on a course of action, and they begin to unite their magics to deal with the spear. Note Ragman's huge, melodramatic gesture there. 

There is a complication, though. That's not really Zatanna, but a villain who took her form to infiltrate the group. Alan Scott identifies the villain as The Wizard. There's an interesting bit where The Wizard essentially rips out the Zatanna shape, a rather weird bit of imagery, given that The Wizard is apparently a bit bigger than that super-skinny Zatanna McCrea had drawn. 

The villain uses the spear to battle the heroes for a bit, but ultimately Faust, whose lack of soul makes him immune to the spear's curse, snatches it from him, Blue Devil punches him out and then Ragman's rags go into action:

Here, Ragman's rags suck The Wizard bodily into his suit, as opposed to how this very process is shown playing out in the later Day of Vengeance, wherein Ragman sucks the soul out of a victim's body, leaving a desiccated corpse behind.

Now, how does this square with 2005 JLA arc "Crisis of Conscience", in which The Wizard is very much not a rag in Ragman's suit of souls? (And I think he had some JSA-related appearances between these this story and "Crisis of Conscience" as well?). Don't ask me; I am not a DC Comics editor. 

Anyway, with The Wizard finally dealt with, the heroes continue with their plan, using their magics to bind the spear and throw it into the sun, where it can only be retrieved if all seven of them gather again and agree to do so.

Then they all put their hands together like a high school sports team right before a game as Alan shouts "Sentinels of Magic!" (as seen in the previous post on Day of Judgment), and that's about the last we see of McCrea's Ragman, aside from his very distinct silhouette as he walks toward a glowing portal created by Doctor Fate. 

In the last four panels, we see The Spectre Hal Jordan debrief with The Phantom Stranger, and Hal explains that he had gathered the Sentinels here to give his friend Alan the means to destroy him, if need be, as a fail-safe.