A Month of Wednesdays: October 2026

BOUGHT: 

Dracula Book Three: The Count (Dark Horse Books) In some ways, the third volume of Matt Wagner, Kelley Jones and Jose Villarrubia's Dracula series is the most interesting. That's because it is devoted to the character's time in London in the late 19th century and thus covers the time of the "real", original Dracula story, that told in Bram Stoker's 1897 novel...and retold over and over again in what now seems like countless adaptations. 

How then would they differentiate their telling of this part of Dracula's long life from all the others...aside, of course, from the fact that this one features Jones' idiosyncratic art and thus, visually, wouldn't look a damn thing like any previous Dracula retelling?

Well, as Wagner points out in his afterword, one interesting aspect of the original novel is that, once the action shifts from Transylvania to London, we don't actually see all that much of Dracula. And because of the epistolary nature of the novel, we actually get to hear from almost every character in the narrative except for the title character himself. As well covered as Dracula's time as "Count Dracula" in London might be in pop culture, then, there is a surprising amount of room for Wagner and company to maneuver, and, though there are more specific beats for this volume of the comic to line up with than in the first two, it too in an extrapolation, in which the creators fill in the blank spaces and shadows of Stoker's novel.

Now, if you've read Dracula, or seen any of the more faithful adaptations, then you know the story, and you know some of what he is up to: Buying property, shipping crates of dirt, driving Renfield crazier by his presence, menacing Lucy and Mina, being hunted by Abraham Van Helsing and the men who love the women. 

But given how much Dracula has been built up in the previous two volumes, established as a ruthless ruler, a powerful sorcerer in league with Satan and a long-lived monster, surely he's got more on his agenda than drinking blood from the throats of a couple of English ladies, right? 

Indeed, Wagner's Dracula seems engaged in an ambitious scheme to conquer the city and, with that as a foothold, perhaps the whole of the British Empire...and through, it, maybe even the world...!

Doing so involves many machinations, not only the property buying, the acquisition of servants and the pose of a foreign aristocrat, but also his marrying into greater wealth and title and making thralls of powerful businessman, who boast to "the Count" in a sitting room of a men's club that they are the true power in the nation. (Indeed, in one such club, he even suggests marrying Queen Victoria: "Your celebrated monarch--Victoria--has been famously widowed for over twenty years now. Who knows...perhaps she is of a mind to take a new husband?" It's not clear if he's joking or not, but one of the bankers he is speaking to certainly regards it as a joke). 

Interestingly, the heroes of the novel—Van Helsing, Jonathan Harker, Dr. John Seward, Quincey Morris and Arthur Holmwood—spend much of the book beneath the notice of Dracula (The women, on the other hand, gets plenty of attention from Dracula). To reflect this, Dracula himself barely ever speaks their names (Van Helsing being an exception), and, in the comic themselves, Jones barely draws them, and we never really see their faces.

Though aware they are slowly circling him, Dracula seems to regard them as bumbling nuisances...which is fairly inspired, as when The Count nears his climax, these small men completely beneath his notice are soon frustrating his plans, as he has to set aside his city-conquering in order to fight for his very survival. All of a sudden, it seems, this handful of nobodies have chased him from one bolt hole to another...and ultimately out of London, as he races back to his castle, with Van Helsing, Lucy and the others giving chase across the continent (In this latter sequence, he narrates from within a coffin, his senses, his powers and his connection to Mina giving him an idea of what is going on outside it).

In this telling, then, Dracula's defeat at the hands of Van Helsing and the others can be read not only as modern men respecting the old ways of superstitious and religion to defeat an ancient evil...but also due in part to his own arrogance (And, given that the Wagner/Jones Dracula is the story of Dracula himself, it's fitting then that even this is used to characterize the protagonist).

The very end of the book is particularly dramatic, as he lays in his box, waiting for the sun to set, as the men battle his followers, and, on the last page, they pull off the lid and raise their weapons above him. It's some cliffhanger, especially since we know that there's going to be a fourth book, The Undead, so Dracula's story obviously doesn't end exactly at the point that the novel did. 

There are some interesting takes on vampire lore in here, particularly a sequence in which Dracula sits for a portrait with a desperate, starving, seemingly half-mad painter who is frustrated that his attempts to paint the vampire all fall apart at a certain point, what is mean to be a realistic portrait devolving into abstraction (This, Dracula theorizes, is an extension of the fact that he casts no reflection; apparently, his likeness can no longer be captured in any media...including art).

Jones, of course, has no trouble capturing this powerful, amorphous Dracula, and in this volume he presents what must be a good half-dozen or so bravura images, striking portraits of one of literature's most fascinating villains that sear themselves into the memory.

My favorites include him exiting the Tower of London, silhouetted in the darkness and casting a long shadow on the wall, while a horde of rats seem to pour of him; a panel showing him entering the open window of a club in the form of a mist, here moving with the purpose and velocity of a rocket; the mist reassembling itself into a human form in his clothes, the red glow of his eyes resolving first; a double-page spread in which he assumes a Man-Bat-eque form and takes flight over Victorian London (above); crawling down from the roof of a building towards a window, his preposterously large, billowing cape clinging to and smothering the building.

I hope you guys are reading this series. If not, I would recommend doing so. 

I was quite intrigued to read in Wagner's afterword that he says, "We have at least one more volume to go in our tetralogy of graphic novels and, as readers and fans of Stoker's masterpiece must surely be asking...where does it all go from here?"

Note the words "at least," and that a sort of house ad from The Undead on the last page says, "The Blood-Drenched History of the Vampire Lord Continues in Dracula Book Four: The Undead." Continues and not concludes, huh...? So maybe Wager and Jones' Dracula will last a little longer than originally advertised...

The Spectre by John Ostrander and Tom Mandrake Omnibus Vol. 2 (DC Comics) This 800+-page hardcover collection of the second half of Ostrander and Mandrake's 1992-1998 series came out on October 20th, and I haven't had time to read it in the last 17 days. In fact, I've only read the first issue collected within, despite how excited I was about it...! So, I'm afraid I won't be able to review it here, and I am just listing it because it is a comic book I bought in the month of October. 

You probably don't really need a review of it from me at this point though, do you? I mean, based on the first volume, it seemed this Spectre run was one of the best DC ongoings ever published...or at least one of the best I ever read. I have to assume the second half is pretty good.

I will note that, unusually for a hardcover collection of any kind, let alone a gigantic compendium like this, the omnibus has a gimmick cover. Like the previous volume (and a handful of issues of the original series), there's a glow-in-the dark cover. Charge it up in the light for a bit and then take it into a completely dark room, and you can see The Spectre's skeleton glowing. So too can you see the skeletons of all of the characters on the front, a crowd that includes everyone who attended The Spectre's funeral for himself. The logo on the spine and the back cover also glow in the dark. 

BORROWED:

Marvel: Black, White & Blood and Guts (Marvel Entertainment) I'm pretty curious about the backstory of this four-issue miniseries, a limited palette anthology along the lines of previous character-specific black, white and red/"blood" series Marvel has published in the past few years...only here they've added the word "guts"...maybe because one of the stories uses green and orange instead of red/"blood"...?

I wonder if this began on the ruins of a planned but abandoned Blade: Black, White and Blood series, as five of the 13 stories are Blade stories. The only other characters who repeat are The Punisher (who appears in two stories), and I suppose The Hulk and Doctor Strange, who each star in a story of their own, and then reappear in the final story, a Defenders story that, oddly enough, is set in 1979, sliding timeline be damned. 

And so the book is about half Blade, half random Marvel characters, including Iron Man (or at least his cursed armor), Thor, Hit-Monkey and the above-mentioned characters. The result thus feels a little...off, too Blade-y to be a branded "Marvel" as it is. It's easy to imagine separating the Blade stories out and adding some more to make for a Blade series and then adding some other stories featuring other characters to make for a general Marvel series.

Well, whatever.

The reason I brought this book home from the library at all was that, curious about the title and cover (Like, why is Hulk's hair so damn long?), I flipped through it and noticed John McCrea art...which, further investigation revealed, was for a story by Garth Ennis. Obviously, I was curious about a new story from the creative team behind Hitman (and Dicks, a run on The Demon, Hulk: Smash, Tangled Web: The Thousand and parts of The Punisher and The Boys).

This one is black and white...and green, orange and red, and thus, I wondered, if it is the reason they added "and Guts" to the title. 

Sometime in a fairly terrible-looking future, a gang of barbaric, Mad Max extra-looking guys stage gladiator fights in what's left of a stadium. 

Their star is apparently what's left of The Hulk, a gory green head and torso with a gaping head wound, opaque eyes, sharp teeth and intestines he works like tentacles, tearing apart his foes and feeding their body parts into his own mouth.

He is colored green, as is his dialogue (In this the story is like Jeffrey Brown's all-ages Hulk Teach graphic novels). That dialogue mostly consists of a garbled, guttural version of his catch phrase: "ULG SMAAAAAHHH", which he says over and over.

When we first meet him, he seems to be in the process of dismembering zombified Avengers Captain America, Thor, Iron Man and the Ms. Marvel/Warbird version of Carol Danvers, which suggests that maybe this is set in some kind of zombie apocalypse future. This would explain the state of The Hulk too, I guess. 

One day, a mysterious big, tough-looking guy with a machine gun slung over his shoulder appears, carrying a high-tech cannister. He wants to challenge The Hulk with a "Guy I know," a guy who lives in the cannister.  Out of it slithers a huge glob of orange slime—colored orange, of course—in which float a pair of big, blue, staring eyes. It too repeats a phrase over and over again: "UHZ KLOBRUN TUHM".

The mysterious man grabs one of the bad guys and throws it toward the orange creature to demonstrate its abilities. It promptly absorbs the man, graphically melting him. 

So, as you've probably figured out, this The Hulk vs. The Thing...as you've never seen them before!

(If Hulk got into his current state via zombification, what's up with The Thing...? Well, the stranger says he found him in a "research center up north...looked like they'd been experimenting on it, before the place was overrun by the dead.")

As for the mysterious stranger, there are clues to his identity, one big one of which is, of course, the creative team, but he's finally revealed on the last page, where the color red finally appears:

I do like McCrea's jagged, ragged version of his logo, which is true to the spirit of it while looking different enough to create some space between it and the more standard version, which has since been co-opted for stickers people put on their trucks and patches that real-life bad guys wear. 

The Blade stories are fairly generic, despite the obvious talent poured into them, each basically presenting him as a freelance badass monster killer who finds himself being plugged into different scenarios. 

Of these, Al Ewing and Kev Walker's "The Trail" is mildly interesting in its conception of a fitness app created by vampires to monitor and select the most desirable victims (and it includes what seems like a one-panel reference to the original Blade movie).

I also enjoyed Anthony Oliveira and Javier Pulido's story involving a community of monks-turned-vampires and a visiting werewolf (Visually, this was by far my favorite story in the collection, mostly because I so dig the style, but there are several great-looking stories within, including the Blade stories drawn by Devmalya Pramanik, Ho Che Anderson and Luke Ross). 

Ty Templeton provides two pages of "Sunday Scaries," which puts Marvel characters into comic strips in the style of familiar artists: a Winsor McKay style Little Namor in Sleepyland (Wait, why is the Avenging Son taking a bath underwater?), a Mr. Natural-style Mr. Fantastic and Nick Fury's Battle Buddies, which renders the Howling Commandos characters in a Mort Walker style. 

These aren't exactly scary or horror related, or even bloody...the only blood appearing in the final panel of Battle Buddies, wherein Junior Juniper is lying in a pool of blood. (I wonder if these came from some other project too.)

The weirdest story of them all though is that Defenders story, written by Victor LaValle and drawn by Bruno Bull. As I said, it is set in 1979—the last hours of 1979, actually, as it is New Year's Eve—and has the team of Dr. Strange, The Silver Surfer, Namor, The Hulk and Valkyrie dealing with demon-caused madness in New York City. (An editor's note stipulates that this takes place before Defenders #125, which came out in 1983...I would say that seems extremely unimportant, but I suppose any readers reading this story who were also reading Defenders 43 years ago will know why this is important).

Saving the day hinges on The Hulk's ability to sew, which is not a skill I would have associated with him, and there's a bit of a gag to the ending...although even that seems pretty out-of-date at this point, as it comments on the nature of the 1980s, which I imagine many Marvel readers today might not even have been around for.

Anyway, wherever this comic came from, however weird it is, there are some bright spots to it. 

Marvel Dimensions (Abrams ComicArts) Over the course of the last few months, I've been thinking a lot about the dearth of Marvel graphic novels currently available, particularly relative to DC's perennial selection of evergreen titles. Defining "graphic novel" as an accessible, novel-length complete story between a single set of covers, well, check your local bookstore or go online, and you'll have plenty of DC books to choose from, while Marvel's offerings are mostly just collections of runs of their serially-published comics. 

The timing of this release seemed interesting, then. Marvel Dimensions, written and illustrated by Alex Ross, is a complete, standalone graphic novel that would seem to tick all of the boxes....except, I suppose, for one. You see, it's not actually a Marvel book. 

I mean, yes, its pages are filled to overflowing with Marvel heroes and villains—much of the publisher's character catalog, I would guess—and it's even got the word "Marvel" right there in the title, but it is actually published by Abrams' Abrams ComicArts imprint, the latest in a line of such books featuring Marvel characters*. Like their kids comics, it seems Marvel has decided to simply farm out the production of graphic novels to other publishers.

I find it a curious move, personally, but it is probably a smart one, one that will presumably get the book into the hands of more readers and, hopefully, keep it in print and available for a longer time. It certainly has the potential to become the sort of evergreen book one could put in the hands of curious readers for years to come, the sort that DC seems to have plenty of and Marvel hardly any of.

Dimensions is an extremely...interesting book, one that is perhaps more weird than it is great, but one that caters to Ross' talents. It took me a while to really get into it, for reasons that will become clear shortly, but, by the final third of the book, I was having a blast with it, and found myself repeatedly pausing, lifting my glasses up and holding the page close to my eyes to scrutinize a tiny background character in the corner of a panel here or there (Like Ross' Kingdom Come, this is a book that could use a character key in the back...at least for a more casual Marvel reader like me; I assume the more experience you have with the publisher's comics history, the more you will get out of the redesigns of the characters who go unnamed and have no dialogue).

The book is narrated by someone in the Watcher's house on the moon who, it won't be revealed until page 41, is actually a curious-looking robot, a humanoid with a transparent body through which one can see a rather old-timey looking mechanical skeleton and staring, expressionless red circles for eyes.

"My name is Aaron," he introduces himself (to the reader? Not quite), "I've been called The Machine Man." 

The Watcher, he says, "drafted me to continue his duties when he was no longer able to perform them."

The proceeding 40 pages account for the first third of the book. These are two-page origins of various Marvel characters, each broken into a fairly strict format, with a long panel across the top of both pages in the spread, and then a strip of more vertically oriented panels below it. These are all painted, seemingly recreations of particular panels from the character in question's own comics (a reader will note that all of the clothes and technology seem to be appropriate to the era in which the characters were originally created, so mostly the 1960s). Prose narration tells the story of these origins, although they are mostly superfluous, as the visuals are strong enough on their own (and, if you're very familiar with Marvel from comics and other media, you know most of these stories anyway).

The narrator of these origin stories is different in each example, and almost never the character being featured. Instead, they might be sidekicks (Toro and Bucky tell the stories of the original Human Torch and Captain America, for example) or foes (General Ross on The Hulk, J. Jonah Jameson on Spider-Man, etc.) or even unexpected quarters (Hawkeye on Black Widow, Namor's mom on her son, etc.)

If you've read Ross and Paul Dini's JLA: Secret Origins, then you've already read a DC version of this passage of the book. 

At the time, I found this all fairly tedious, and actually stopped reading partway through, waiting a few days to pick the book up again. Now having read the final two-thirds of the book, I can sort of understand why Ross engaged in this section, as it establishes a "baseline" for how the "real" Marvel Universe and its characters should be (and, in this respect, the book is not only perfectly accessible to any reader but, perhaps a little too accessible). 

Still, I question some of the inclusions; Black Widow seems an outlier among the more popular characters and seems to be here because the Marvel movies so elevated her Q-rating, but she is one of a handful of characters who are barely in the next two-thirds of the book, and so it's not like a reader needs to know who she is exactly. (This is true of others, too; Namor appears in a single panel. Daredevil gets a few. I don't recall seeing the original Human Torch at all. And so on.)

Machine Man then spends a few pages talking while observing flat panels that seem to show Earth history...and then dynamic, angled panels that seem to show alternate timelines and, well, dimensions (You'll recognize "Days of Future Past", Deathlok, The Squadron Supreme, the War of the Worlds' tripods that will appear in the story of Killraven, etc.).

He then introduces the second third of the book, a variant world that is "fundamentally opposite" of the Marvel Universe, which he probably too-cutely calls "The In-Verse." This world is introduced to readers via a 34-page comic book, printed at standard comic book size, with a different paper stock than that of the rest of Dimensions, and drawn rather than full-painted. This is bound within the greater graphic novel. 

This is basically Ross giving the Marvel Universe it's equivalent of DC's Earth-3, a world gone wrong where all our familiar superheroes are now supervillains. And this means that not only is Ross giving these new characters new bad guys names, but he's also completely redesigning them, giving some of them new powers and tweaked stories and rebuilding a world around them.

It is, of course, awesome.

Bruce Banner/The Hulk, for example, now works hand-in-hand with the United States military. He goes by the name "The Reactor", and rather than trying to keep his gamma-irradiated other identity trapped within his human body and psyche, he lets it out to serve as a weapon. As the comic opens, we see Banner being dropped like a bomb into a city, and a gigantic, green Hulk exploding like a mushroom cloud out of him...before Banner sucks back in all the deadly radiation. (Later on, we'll see The Reactor at more normal Hulk size, but seemingly made of energy, and with a little, limp Banner visible floating within the center of him.)

The Fantastic Four are now The Unknowables, and, in one of the book's cooler and most inspired redesigns, Benjamin Grimm is now The Blot, an energy being who has the same basic look as The Thing, but he is now entirely composed of Kirby dots. (Reed, Mister Unknown, is incredibly terrifying, the true nature of his cosmic ray-induced mutation not revealed until a climactic moment in the final third's battle; the "Midnight" version of FF is going to have to try awfully hard to beat this, I think). 

Ross proceeds to introduce the evil Avengers (1st Strike), the evil X-Men (The Exalted), the evil Daredevil (The Inquisitor) and the evil Spider-Man (Spider-Menace, whose costume is colored differently, but otherwise looks just like the regular Spidey; an acknowledgment by Ross of the perfection of the Spider-Man costume...or that we've seen so many goddam variants over it over the last decade or so there's little new to do with it?). 

In doing so, we learn of an ultimate weapon of sorts being held in The Dark Dimension. This is The Ultimate Nullifier, and all of these teams want it...as do others. Not all of the In-Verse's Marvels get named, but we get intriguing glimpses of this world's Spider-Woman (dressed all in fishnets), She-Hulk (like her cousin, a green being of energy) and Iron Fist and Power Man (the former with a cool, dragon-inspired look) and plenty of others. None of these get named and seem to basically be Easter Eggs for those that recognize them.

Their existence (and that of others) reminded me a lot of Kingdom Come (I never read Earth X, which seemed similarly filled with redesigned superheroes, so I'm not sure if this is true of that book as well or not). 

The very first time I read Kingdom Come, I didn't recognize many of the players, and hardly any of the background ones. Each time I returned to the book, having read more and more DC comics between each reading, I "got" more of them though. I assume younger and newer readers might find this book similarly rewarding over the years, should Abrams keep it in print.

After the last page of The In-Verse comic, a splash featuring Master X leading The Exalted and a captive Spider-Menace in pursuit of the Ultimate Nullifier, the story resumes in the bigger, fully-painted format. 

This final third is basically just a big-ass fight scene, some 30 pages of Ross' redesigned Marvel character catalog duking it out, each panel crowded with figures, including tiny ones worth looking for and discovering (Look, there's a black-feathered Howard The Duck! Is that a magic-using Punisher...and is he a good guy or a bad guy here? And so on).

As The Exalted and 1st Strike face one another, more and more players arrive (Like evil Namor and his evil Defenders, or "The Underlord and his fellow Aggressors") and posture, Ross gives us what we've been missing so far, finally bringing on the bad guys...who are here, of course, the good guys.

And so good Doctor Doom and Magneto spring their trap, and a whole army of heroic versions of Marvel's villains attack the army of villainous versions of Marvel's heroes for what is probably the biggest superhero battle I've seen since Kingdom Come. 

Ross keeps escalating, as more and more powerful reinforcements and other players show up—Good Thanos! Evil Phoenix! Not-sure-if-they're-good-or-bad Silver Surfer and Galactus!—until there's nowhere left to go and the book ends.

In this respect, it is, at the end, a pure toybox comic, with Ross playing with all the action figures he has access to here, but what makes this a lot more fun than similar such toybox comics is, of course, Ross has gone and redesigned all of those action figures. These then are bespoke, homemade action figures he's smashing together.

Some of the redesigns are great. Like, there's really no reason for this Mysterio, who is never named, never has any dialogue, and only appears in the background of a few panels, to look as cool as he does. One imagines that Ross has notebooks full of sketches and background stories behind his werewolf Moon Knight, his armored looking Man-Wolf/Stargod, his Adam Warlock (I think?) who looks like a human Infinity Gauntlet and so on.

As with Kingdom Come, seeing all these cool designs and wondering who these guys are and what their stories might be is like lightning to the eyeballs of the reader, setting the imagination ablaze. It seems almost a waste for Ross to have done so much creative background work for a big fight scene—although there are gestures regarding the meditation on good and evil, and a surprise ending that attempts to elevate the book beyond its component parts—although seeing DC revisit many of the characters from Kingdom Come over the years convinces me that it is better to let one wonder about the heroic Green Goblin than actually hear his story (Or, worse, see him team-up with the 616 Spider-Man to fight Norman Osborne or whatever). 

So yes, this book is weird. Behind a completely generic cover that gives a reader no indication of what might be within, we find three different comics: a Secret Origins of the Marvel Universe, the introduction of a Marvel Earth-3 and a fight comic in which characters from Ross' sketchbooks duke it out.

Ultimately, I had a blast. Is it good comics? Sure. Is it great? In some ways. But the words that I keep coming back to are weird, unusual and fun. And those are great words for a comic book to suggest, if you ask me. 

Shinobi Undercover Vol. 3 (Viz Media) I enjoyed the first two volumes of Ippon Takegushi and Santa Mitarashi's series about teenage super-ninjas going undercover at a Japanese high school that I was happy to pick up the third one when I saw it at my library. 

The series follows the socially awkward but seemingly unbeatably powerful Yodaka, who has been assigned as a bodyguard to cute classmate Aoi, who doesn't know she is the target of evil ninja and is surrounded by good ninja protecting her from them. The pair became unlikely friends, and he seems to be genuinely falling for her.

In this volume, a rival for her affections appears, the incredibly, disconcertingly good-looking Makoto Yuki, who "is so handsome all the girls are going wild," and is the sort of manga character who emits sparkles. Though the newcomer is one of the good ninjas, and thus on Yodaka's team, the pair come to blows over Aoi, the new ninja demonstrating an unusual ability to stretch like Plastic Man, wielding their arms like whips. 

After Yodaka is surprised by an element of the newcomer's identity, however, they make peace. 

Then all four of the school ninja go to investigate the bad ninja base, only to find themselves in a trap, facing off against two more fantastical enemies.

In this volume, the school stuff seems to recede quite a bit, as does the focus on Yodaka's poor social skills and the running commentary from "Op," the voice in the good ninjas' earpieces. That, of course, is what I found the more fun and interesting parts of the series and, without that, what we have is a fight comic.

Sure, the creators make each new opponent a threat that is as imaginative and unique as formidable, but it also makes for a repetitive, predictable narrative.

REVIEWED: 

Film Nerds (Putnam) When Ami starts middle school, her life feels like it's falling apart. This is because she finds herself separated from her best friend Ivy for the first time since kindergarten...as well as all of her other friends. Shy and awkward, she struggles to make new friends in her classes, and soon her sole "happy place" seems to be working with Ivy on their movie. Meanwhile, she keeps her social troubles secret from Ivy, afraid she'll lose her if she finds out how unpopular she has become. The graphic novel—which, curiously, is not the first one I've read about middle-school friends making a movie together!—is the first graphic novel from cartoonist Sofia Warren. You can't tell by reading it; it's pretty good. More here. 

GalaXic Baseball League Vol. 1 (Viz Media) A thousand years in the future, the Earth sport baseball has swept the galaxy, becoming not only the known universe's pastime, but also a proxy for war. The planets that win the most baseball games also get favored trade status. Despite inventing the game, Earth has been unable to keep up with the advances and abilities of various alien teams, and, in fact, they've been doing so poorly of late that it seems like they won't even be able to field a team for the 3026 team. The Earth team's new manager, a brilliant inventor and former CEO, has an audacious solution: She will simply build a time machine, travel back to 2026, abduct that year's legendary Major League Baseball players, and manipulate them into playing for her. 

Even if you're as ignorant of professional sports as I am, you will probably recognize the names of some of these players. That's because they are all real MLB players, whom manga-ka Acky Bright has plopped into his narrative. 

I had a blast with this vaguely Space Jam-ish manga, and I suppose it would be even more fun for kids (and/or manga-reading grown-ups) who know who all these guys are. More here.

*These include Patrick McDonnell's The Super Hero's Journey, Chip Kidd and Michael Cho's The Avengers in The Veracity Trap!, Kevin J. Anderson and company's Doctor Strange: Endless Nightmare, Ross' own Fantastic Four: Full Circle and John Byrne's fan comics X-Men: Elsewhen. I've only read and written about a few of these. You can find my review of The Super Hero's Journey in this post and The Veracity Trap! at the top of this post. 

G.I. Joe, A Real American Hero Pt. 12: #46-48

G.I. Joe, A Real American Hero #46 (1986)

Art by Rod Whigham and Andy Mushynsky

•The previous issue of Larry Hama's G.I. Joe series was a pretty intense, action-packed one, and the title isn't going to let up at all until the landmark issue #50, as several new prominent characters will be introduced (some of whom change the very make-up of Cobra), Joes fight their way into Cobra's base, a Cobra agent fights his way out of The Pit and then we get the biggest battle of the series so far, featuring (almost) every one of the by this point many, many Joes.

As we saw in the last issue, Snake Eyes and Storm Shadow have finally learned the name of the man responsible for murdering The Hard Master (it was—40-year-old spoiler alert!—Zartan), and now they will stop at nothing to get their revenge. (Just look at how Mike Zeck drew Storm Shadow's eyes on the cover above; I would not want that guy looking at me like that with a sword in his hand.) Meanwhile, Zartan has kayoed Rip Cord and begun impersonating him, while dressing the unconscious Joe in his own clothes, and Hawk has sent a Joe team to infiltrate Cobra Island and retrieve Rip Cord.

•While last issue's ending was pretty equivocal about whether Zartan or Rip Cord won their hand-to-hand fight after their long-range duel, this issue's opening splash dispenses with the suspense: Zartan won and had assumed the identity of Rip Cord—which is, this issue, apparently being spelled as all one word again—with his holographic equipment. He ultimately strips the Joe of his uniform, and dresses the unconscious Rip Cord in his own clothing, sticking that odd little cowl he wears atop hid head.

"Can't have two Ripcords on Cobra Island, can we?" Zartan says aloud to himself. "No, it's far better to have one wounded and unconscious Zartan bleeding in the sand... ...And one wounded Ripcord, anxious to be recovered to by his fellow Joes and returned to the safety of headquarters for proper medical attention!"

•Inside the Terror Drome, Crimson Guardsman Appel shows off the Firebat to Cobra Commander. This was a little red aircraft that came with the toy line's Terror Drome playset (along with its red and silver clad pilot, referred to as "AVAC"...which apparently stands for Air Viper, Advanced Class, and is a role, rather than a name). 

Appel talks up the vehicle quite a bit while laying out all of its features—including the fact that it is so advanced that it doesn't actually need a pilot—to which the Commander responds, "Really, you carry on as if it were your own child."

The Firebat and its various features will be of importance to the story shortly, of course.

•Hama leaves Cobra Island long enough to check on the Joes back at the Pit. The newly promoted General Hawk returns and mentions "his new set of battle togs." These correspond to what his first action figure, not released until 1986, was dressed in. That action figure, by the way, came packaged with a helmet; you can see Hawk holding it under his arm in the that last panel. In the cartoon, he was always wearing it...maybe because it was cheaper to animate the characters if they never changed their appearance at all, or maybe because, as I've noted before, Hawk and Duke look so much alike. 

•The Joe team that has infiltrated Cobra Island for the dual purpose of rescuing Rip Cord and doing some surveillance consists of Flint, Spirit and the just-introduced characters Quick Kick and Alpine. Hama is nice enough to have their mission involve some mountain-climbing, which is of course Alpine's specialty.

Their surveillance involves the Terror Drome, which they can't quite make sense of, and a very big vehicle covered by a huge tarp. We won't see what's under that tarp this issue, but it appears to be the Cobra Night Raven, a big, black airplane from the 1986 line that included a smaller vehicle that could detach from it and came packaged with a Strato-Viper action figure. 

•Meanwhile, Appel finds the unconscious "Zartan", who is, remember, actually Rip Cord, on the beach, and hurries him back to the Terror Drome. "Take it easy, you slimy shape-changer!" Appel tells him once he's on a wheeled gurney. "You're going to be all right!"

It is then that he makes a discovery. "Zartan" is still clutching something he apparently tore off of "Rip Cord" during their struggle on the beach:

Realizing that not only is this actually the Joe who his daughter was involved with, but that Cobra Commander has been keeping him in the dark about Candy's whereabouts and thus stringing him along, Appel helps Rip Cord into the cockpit of the Firebat. 

Rip Cord protests that the Joes assaulting the Terror Drome by this point wouldn't hurt him, but Appel tells him it's not the Joe team, but Storm Shadow and Snake Eyes, and they are after Zartan...whose clothes Rip Cord is currently wearing and, because Zartan's a shape-shifter, he could easily take on Rip Cord's face, so the ninjas might not be convinced tha Rip Cord really is Rip Cord. So, Appel decides the best course of action is to just shoot Rip Cord-dressed-as-Zartan off the island in the Firebat which, remember, doesn't even need a pilot. 

•Snake Eyes and Storm Shadow have landed in a borrowed Rattler, and hit the ground running, taking out Cobra agents left and right and they storm the island in search of Zartan. They knock out the soldiers that meet them at their plane, they attack the air traffic control tower (above), they fight their way into the Terror Drome where a technician raises blast shields to act as cover ("Cover?" Storm Shadow says, "There is no cover... ...when you deal with ninjas!") and then head straight for Cobra Commander's quarters. 

The Commander, seeing them on a monitor, is dismayed: "That inexorable ninja...finally found out who killed his uncle, and he's brought along Snake Eyes to share in his revenge!"

Tomax, Xamot and their Crimson Guard form a human shield around The Commander, just as the two ninjas blow open a sealed door and Whigham poses them much like Zeck does on the cover.

"I want him," Storm Shadow says. "Give him to me."

The Commander quickly gives up Zartan, who he tells them is on the floor below. During the process, he excuses his own role in the assassination of The Hard Master, saying that Zartan had done the deed in order to prove that he could.

Is this true...? We'll find out more details in issues to come, but it seems good enough for the ninjas, who leave the Commander and take off after Zartan. 

•Maybe it's just because I grew up with the cartoon rather than the comic, but I was a little surprised about just how many Cobra soldiers these two kill in the process of trying to get to Zartan. I mean, I guess Snake Eyes gunning Cobra soldiers down makes some amount of sense, but Storm Shadow cutting them down with his sword or shooting them with his bow and arrow...? These guys were his allies and co-workers until not that long ago...even if he had only joined Cobra in order to learn who had assassinated his uncle in the first place. 

•It turns out Appel was right to fear the ninja wouldn't wait to make sure the "Zartan" they were after was the real Zartan or not, as Storm Shadow charges the Firebat, intent on cutting "Zartan" down in the cockpit. Appel steps between them, and Storm Shadow instead seems to kill Appel with a ZASH of his sword. 

Just then, Snake Eyes tackles Storm Shadow as the Firebat launches like a rocket. 

"I could have got him!" Storm Shadow cries. "The blast would have killed me... ...but I could have got him!"

•So that's what happened to Rip Cord-dressed-as-Zartan, but what of Zartan-dressed-as-Rip Cord...? Well, after some fighting of their own, the Joe team sent to rescue him manage to do so, get back to their raft and make it out to sea. Spirit notices some inconsistencies between the wounds on the man they think is Ripcord and the damage to his uniform, but they don't suspect it's actually Zartan in disguise. 

G.I. Joe, A Real American Hero #47

Art by Rod Whigham and Andy Mushynsky

•Okay, so Rip Cord, wounded and dressed like Zartan, was rocketed off Cobra Island to safety in a Firebat by Professor Appell. And Flint and his rescue/reconnaissance team managed to make it to sea, with who they think is Rip Cord (but is actually Zartan in disguise). But there's still a Joe left on the island: Snake Eyes, who, along with Storm Shadow, managed to fight his way into the heart of Cobra's Terror Dome base...and must now fight their way back off of the island. 

Their attempts to do so, and the Joes' attempts to help them and the Cobra attempts to stop them, will comprise the entirety of this action-packed issue.

•The Joes make it to the WHALE hovercraft (It's been a while since we've seen it, but that's WHALE as in Warrior Hovering Assault Launching Envoy, and it seems to be a favorite of Hama's, as it shows up more often than many other Joe vehicles in the series do). 

Once he's aboard, Doc begins to prep Rip Cord for evacuation...and Zartan temporarily reverts to his own face, complete with the diamond shaped makeup or mask...

Amusingly, Doc is hardly suspicious at all that the man in front of him seemed to take on the appearance of an enemy agent known as a master of disguise. 

•Meanwhile, one of those big transport helicopters Cobra uses in the comics—but that have no toy or cartoon equivalents—returns to the island, carrying Destro, The Baroness, Doctor Mindbender, Buzzer and a cargo that Mindbender is worried about. 

They target the WHALE, but Cutter and company get the first shot in, sending the helicopter careening towards a crash-landing...right on top of all the planes in the airfield that Storm Shadow and Snake Eyes had just arrived a..

Seeing all of the planes destroyed, the pair then turn and instead head for the shore. 

"Down to the beach!" Storm Shadow shouts. "If we can't commandeer a plane, we'll settle for a boat!"

•Time to introduce some new toys!

The ninjas manage to take a Cobra Hydrofoil and launch it, still fighting with the Eels aboard it. The Eels? These were Cobra's red and gray clad frogmen, and their action figures came armed with harpoon guns.

Hawk orders a pair of Devilfish attack boats into the water. These were vehicles from the 1986 line and were orange on the box art (and the cover of this issue), but are colored green within the comic. 

Piloting them this mission will be the two "newest Joes," who Hawk says are "the most qualified for this mission": Beach Head, a ski-mask wearing Ranger, and Wet-Suit, a Navy SEAL.

Meanwhile, Dr. Mindbender and some Eels board the water attack craft that were the cargo he was so worried about earlier. These are Cobra Hydro-Sleds, and are basically the equivalent of the Devilfish, although they are piloted from a prone position rather than a seated one. The toys were Cobra red and blue, but in the comic they are a solid blue gray. (Do note Cobra Commander talking shit about Major Bludd's literary abilities in the panel above; his disdain for Bludd's poetry is one of my favorite ongoing bits in the comic).

•Storm Shadow and Snake Eyes get thrown overboard during the battle and engage in acts of extreme bad-assery. Storm Shadow fights Eels underwater. Look at all the blood being spilled!

•And Snake Eyes fights a fucking shark. 

These are some pretty badass panels, although as awesome as Snake Eyes fighting a shark with a knife may look, I think it's still not quite as cool as Stalker fighting a crocodile with a knife while rattling off its scientific name way back in G.I. Joe #13. 

That's because one expects Snake Eyes to do the coolest shit, like fight sharks with a knife, whereas Stalker is just an ordinary elite soldier, and not a super-ninja. 

•Snake Eyes kills his shark and gets to safety atop a Devilfish. Storm Shadow and the Eels surface and turn their blades on all the sharks now swarming them.

"Fight hard, Eels!" Storm Shadow tells them. "Even if you live through the sharks... ...you'll still have me to contend with!"

Hawk tries to comfort Snake Eyes preemptively, putting his hands on his shoulders and telling him that Storm Shadow is just too far away and there are too many sharks. 

But nothing is impossible for a ninja!

Storm Shadow struggles to the shore...only to meet The Baroness.

And the exhausted ninja takes three bullets to the chest. His death here is only the more dramatic given all what he had just managed to survive. (And note Whigham's depiction of the silent Snake Eyes' reaction, his right hand curling into a claw of pain at the sight).

•Given what a momentous event that scene contained, one would think this would have been a good place to end the issue, but there are actually two pages left, in which we check in on Rip Cord-dressed-as-Zartan and Zartan-dressed-as-Rip Cord.

The Dreadnoks pull the semi-conscious Rip Cord out of the Firebat when it lands at the Springfield airport. Hearing him mutter "C-Candy," they promise to get him some nice candy..."and grape soda, too!"

Meanwhile, Zartan is loaded onto a VAMP that speeds him towards The Pit. Fortunately for the Joes, he's still unconscious from the drugs Doc gave him, and thus when he wakes up inside their secret base, he won't know exactly where it is or how to get there...not unless he manages to escape, of course.

G.I. Joe, A Real American Hero #48 (1986)

Art by Rod Whigham and Andy Mushynsky

•Were you perhaps holding out hope that Storm Shadow wasn't really dead...? Don't, Hama says at the beginning of this issue. The first page splash has Dr. Mindbender, Destro and The Baroness checking Storm Shadow's body, and we see his lifeless staring eyes. Then Destro checks for Storm Shadow's pulse and is unable to find one (Maybe because he's wearing metal gauntlets over his fingers as he does so...?).

They discuss just how dangerous ninja are, and adept at playing dead, and Destro throws some shade at The Baroness. "I assume that was The Baroness' rationale for killing an exhausted, unarmed man," he says. 

The death of the scene is leveled with some sex, as the splash features a nice view of The Baroness in her fetish gear-inspired costume and, as you can see above, the next panel uses her curves to frame the actual action being depicted.

•So, if you've just killed a ninja, how can you be sure he's dead...? Do you burn the body? Cut off the head and put a stake through the heart? Dr. Mindbender doesn't, as he is interested in Storm Shadow's "good genetic material."

Hmm, what could Dr. Mindbender want with genetic material, I ask myself, as if I have never seen the original G.I. Joe cartoon series...

•It doesn't take Zartan's trickery too long to be detected in The Pit. Doc looks at his blood under a microscope and realizes his blood type doesn't match Rip Cord's. It takes far longer for the Joes to catch Zartan, though...in fact, most of the issue. That's because Zartan uses his powers to continually shape shift into the form of other Joes, leading to a lot of running around, mistaken identities and fun visuals (When neither disguised as a Joe nor invisible, Zartan appears in a pair of ripped striped pajamas, with this mask/makeup on; in those images, he looks an awful lot like a pissed-off Nightwing in pajamas). 

•And in Springfield, the not too-terribly-bright Dreadnoks are completely unaware that the guy they think is Zartan is actually Rip Cord. When he awakes to find Buzzer, who, remember, had kidnapped Candy, he hits him with a bedpan ("KA-BONGGG!") and starts beating him, ranting "He took my candy!"

The Dreadnoks still thinking he's talking about candy-with-a-lower-case-"c", of course. 

Thinking that Zartan has gone mad, they decide to spring him from the Springfield hospital and take back to their New Jersey hideout.

•On the road, they stop for grape soda and chocolate ice-cream floats at a diner. I've never been a fan of grape flavor, and I don't think I've ever had grape soda, let alone paired it with chocolate doughnuts (the Dreadnoks' favorite snack) or chocolate ice cream.

Were any of you who might have read this comic as children ever inspired to try grape soda and chocolate doughnuts...?

By this point, Rip Cord has recovered his wits and suggests they all head back to Springfield. 

•This issue includes what at first seemed like a pretty big introduction to me. While the Joes are busy chasing Zartan around The Pit, a big, strapping guy in camouflage with a duffel bag slung over his shoulder arrives at the motor pool. 

This is the first appearance of Sgt. Slaughter. 

Now, Sgt. Slaughter was an unusual G.I. Joe character in that he was actually a real person: Robert Rudolph Remus. The Slaughter character was created for his professional wrestling career, and his trademark look consisted of a opaque sunglasses, a wide-brimmed hat and a little mustache.

I have no idea how exactly he ended up in the G.I. Joe cartoon and toy line (and, thus, the comic book); there were a few other real people who were made into Joes in the toy line, but Slaughter was the only one who was also on the cartoon. 

There, he was a major player, playing a particularly big role in the "Arise, Serpentor, Arise!" mini-series that kicked off the second season, and the real Sgt. Slaughter acted as a live-action host to the cartoon after that.

In the toy line, his action figure was released in 1986, either as a mail-order exclusive, or packaged with the "Triple T" tank (Those three T's...? Tag Team Terminator). This was a little white tank that basically looked like a big metal easy chair with huge treads on either side. According to his file card, Slaughter was the team drill sergeant.

In 1987, he got his own little sub-team, Sgt. Slaughter's Renegades, who came in a three-pack, and were introduced in 1987's G.I. Joe: The Movie, which Slaughter also played a sizable role in. 

Then, in 1989, after I had quit paying attention to G.I. Joe, Hasbro released a "Slaughter's Marauders" team. This consisted of a new Sgt. Slaughter figure and five previously released figures with new coloring: Barbecue, Bazooka, Footloose, Low-Light, Mutt and Spirit. (Oh, and Junkyard and Freedom, although their colors hadn't changed at all). In this respect, the team was basically the same as the Python Patrol and Tiger Force sub-teams...which we'll get to eventually in the comics.

His introduction in this issue is pretty cool and certainly presents his arrival as somewhat momentous. In the first panel in which he appears, his face is dramatically obscured by his duffel. Above, we see some Joes hassling him, and, when it seems like they might come to blows, his response is simply to grin. 

When we next see him, he's standing on a floor littered with four Joes, holding their heads and groaning. (When they tell him what's going on with Zartan in th Pit below, he tells them, "On your feet, soldiers," and lifts a pair of them up by their collars.)

At the risk of getting ahead of myself here, I'm kind of surprised that we don't see much of Slaughter after this issue. He'll show up again in issue #51 and...I think that might be his last appearance...? 

As of the time I write this, I have finished Image Comics' G.I. Joe: A Real American Hero Compendium 3, which means I've read through issue #113 of the series (and all of the spin-off Special Missions), and Slaughter doesn't appear in any of those that I remember. I suppose it's possible he shows up in one of the last 43 issue of the series, but, if so, he doesn't make any covers.

Likewise, the Renegades and "Slaughter's Maruaders" never seem to show up.

Now, Hama seems to have dutifully written everything from the toy line into the comic he was presented with, no matter how silly it might seem (I'm thinking here of the G.I. Joe and Cobra space shuttles, for example, or the Cobra Pogo Ballistic Battle Ball vehicle, or this one particular character who even the other characters continually comment on how weird he is). Looking at the covers of issues I've yet to read, I see Megatron from The Transformers will show up, which means at least one giant alien robot is in the series.

But Hama apparently did draw some lines...some of which will seem arbitrary. He never included Cobra-La, for example; these were characters from a bizarre, prehistoric civilization that were the villains in the movie (and, like the Renegades, were sold as a three-pack). That's perfectly understandable, as their presence would seem to break the whole premise of Cobra that he had already established (As well as warp the narrative, pushing it rather far into hard horror and speculative fiction). 

For some reason, Hama also never included the Cobra flight pods (AKA "Trubble Bubbles"), one-person vehicles that were pretty cool-looking and maybe a bit on the futuristic side, but not as fantastic or weird as some of the vehicles into the comics. They were quite commonplace in the cartoon, too, which I suppose is why their absence in the comics seem notable. 

Anyway, I wonder if Hama barely using Sgt. Slaughter meant that he wasn't a fan of the character. Or if he didn't like the Robert Remus or his schtick. (According to Wikipedia, there was some stolen valor-related controversy around his wrestling gimmick, as Remus never actually served in the military). Or if, perhaps, it was uncomfortable or otherwise impractical to use a character who was also a real person (Like, did Remus have to sign off on his likeness and dialogue in each issue or something...?)

•It's ultimately Slaughter who stops Zartan. The shape-changer escapes into the ventilation ducts, fighting his way up them with Gung Ho right behind him the whole way. ("You can't win you know...my strength is quite...inhuman," Zartan says, before kicking the Joe in the face. Gung Ho responds, "It takes more than a kick in the face to stop the U.S.M.C.!!")

On 1997's Green Lantern/Flash: Faster Friends

This two-issue series, which was originally released as Green Lantern/Flash: Faster Friends and Flash/Green Lantern: Faster Friends, was collected in Flash by Mark Waid Vol. 6. That's where I pulled the image at the top of my post about the DC Plus specials, and, since I had already checked the collection out, I figured I would give the story a reread. 

The idea is definitely a fun one, a sort of team-up of two different team-ups, the original Flash Jay Garrick and the original Green Lantern Alan Scott (then de-aged and still going by the codename Sentinel) and the then-current Flash Wally West and then-current Green Lantern Kyle Rayner. 

And each over-sized, 48-page issue was written by the writers of the Flash and Green Lantern ongoings, with Ron Marz scripting the first part (Green Lantern/Flash), which was (mostly) narrated by Kyle and Mark Waid and Brian Augustyn scripting the second (Flash/Green Lantern), narrated by Wally. 

While the action revolves around an alien invasion rooted in an adventure of the Golden Agers in the 1940s, the series is really about the relationship between Wally and Kyle. In their previous meetings, the two young legacy characters didn't get along, with Wally resentful of Kyle essentially being randomly handed the ring and role and rather quickly accepted, while he had spent most of his life superhero-ing (and had to work hard to prove himself when he took over for Barry Allen), and Kyle resentful of the resentment.

This take on their relationship was interesting, especially at the time, because it was such a reversal of expectations, as Barry and Hal Jordan (and Jay and Alan) were always perceived to be friends (Similarly, when Marz and others wrote team-ups between Kyle and Green Arrow Connor Hawke, the original Green Lantern/Green Arrow dynamic was reversed, so that the new Green Lantern was the hothead and the new Green Arrow the cooler of the pair). 

The Kyle/Wally relationship gets explained and explored here, and the older guys point out that, despite what most people believe, they didn't like one another when they had first met and had only gradually grown to be friends. The implication is that this Flash/GL team will also become close eventually, but they'll get there.

They're not there by the end of the series, but I thought it interesting to note that, a few months after this series concluded, the pair seemed to be pals in the pages of JLA, as Grant Morrison had them playing a ring-generated game and gossiping about their co-workers in JLA #5:

While there was initially some static between the pair when they first encounter one another in JLA fighting members of the Hyperclan, they seemed to get along well in that series, likely on account of the fact that they were both the youngest members of the team and the two legacy characters who had never served on a League with all of the big names on it (Wally was in Justice League Europe for a while during the JLI era, of course, but that wasn't quite the same as this incarnation of the League).

So, the somewhat complicated plot of Faster Friends, which the writers seem to take some pains to differentiate from your average alien invasion one, revolves around an alien referred to as "Alien X". With big, bulging eyes and a head shaped like a brain, he seems like a typical old-school sci-fi movie conception of an alien. 

He had apparently arrived on Earth in the 1940s, and the U.S. government asked Alan and Jay to team-up to capture him, which they did...although they now realize that blindly doing what the government asked, and assuming an alien was hostile just because it was an alien was wrong. 

At any rate, they handed Alien X over to the government, and then Alan hid the alien's ship...from both the alien and the government. Over the course of the next 50 years, the feds poked, prodded and experimented on Alien X, who, despite his powers, lay there and took it, because, as he eventually explains, his lifespan is so long compared to that of the humans that a few decades being experimented on were nothing to him...until, he discovers, whatever they were doing to him over all that time eventually gave him a form of cancer, and he now had little time to live.

So, he breaks out and, using his mental powers, captures Jay and Alan in order to force them to reveal the location of his ship. The men's wives, Joan and Molly, call in their successors, and soon Kyle and Wally are racing around the arctic (in the splash page above) and bickering (that other page above).

Eventually, the four heroes confront Alien X, who forces them to fight one another, and then he takes his own life and dooms Earth as a final act of revenge, summoning a numberless, insatiable horde of extradimensional aliens (which look a bit like ankylosaurs to me) to overrun the world.

(By the way, any idea who that guy fighting alongside Wonder Woman in the second panel might be...? I asked Bluesky, but to no avail. My best guess is a mis-colored Damage, but Damage would be an odd one out among Superman, Wonder Woman, Aquaman, Martian Manhunter and Captain Marvel, right...?)

In an attempt to stop the invasion, Kyle and Wally leap through a portal to the invaders' home dimension and, despite being told to stay on Earth and rally the Justice League and other heroes, the old timers soon follow suit.

The majority of the second issue takes place on the world of the invaders, where Wally and Kyle find themselves mysteriously scrambled—Wally's mind is in Kyle's body which is in Wally's costume, and vice versa—a rather on-the-nose plot point which forces them to literally walk a few miles in one another's shoes.

Near the climax, the four heroes find themselves facing off against the mother/queen of the alien horde, and have an ethical debate about how to save the world without killing her. 

The alien menace is presented as a kind of malignant cancer that will overtake victim planets, like Earth, and when the Flashes and Green Lanterns attack the giant organism that is the queen, they compare themselves to a sort of cancer attacking it. 

As you may have noticed, the cancer runs throughout the story. And there's one more instance, too. When we first meet Jay in the first issue, he rescues a woman and her baby from a tree falling on them...and then kneels and clutches his heart until the pain passes. Apparently, this mysterious pain has been coming and going for a while now and, when he checks in with a doctor, he learns that his "hypermetabolism" has been eating away at him for months, and now he's undergoing "a complete cellular degeneration." 

He will, he tells the others, be dead by morning. Spoiler alert: He will not. 

I'm kind of curious what went on behind the scenes with this story, and how much time there was between when the scripts were finished and when the books were actually released. That's because the first issue has five different pencilers—Bart Sears, Andy Smith, Jeff Johnson, Ron Lim and Tom Grindberg—and two different inkers, Mark Pennington and Bill Anderson.

Despite being familiar with some of those pencil artists, and the fact that they have pretty distinct styles, it's not always entirely clear who drew what, a fact likely attributable to them sharing inkers (I think Sear drew the prologue, and that the splash page atop the post is Lim, but I'm not 100% on this). 

Meanwhile, the entirety of the second issue is drawn by a single art team: Pencil artist Val Semeiks and inker Chip Wallace.

Predictably, the first issue is kind of all over the place, and the style isn't too terribly consistent from scene to scene, but things get better looking in the second half. I'm a big fan of Semeiks' work. A frequent collaborator of Alan Grant's in the early '90s, he drew Grant's run on The Demon and much of the Lobo ongoing, and he would actually draw a pretty decent chunk of JLA-related stories during Morrison's run, including the Morrison-written JLA/WildCATS and DC One Million, the very fun Len Kaminksy-written, body-swapping one-shot JLA: Foreign Bodies and the Tom Peyer-written JLA/JSoA crossover DC 2000*.

For me, rereading this today, it was something of an exercise in nostalgia, revisiting the DC Universe as I used to know it. I do wonder what the story might read like to someone reading it for the first time today, given how much things have changed, now that Barry Allen and Hal Jordan are alive and have resumed their superheroic roles, so that Wally and Kyle are now both a Flash and a Green Lantern among a whole family or corps of such heroes, among so many other changes (Like Alan's costume, code name, age, sexuality...and clean shaven, beardlessness...)

You know, having just reread this, now I kinda want to re-read the 1998 Green Lantern/Green Arrow/Flash crossover "Three of a Kind," a three-part crossover with a triptych cover teaming Kyle, Connor and Wally...even if that would mean reading comic by both Chuck Dixon and Mark Millar in 2026...

*I'm a big fan of his particular series, in which Peyer plays with the superhero trope of heroes being visited by a team of dark heroes from a twisted, dystopian future and must fight to stop that future from ever coming to pass...although here the heroes are the Justice Society of the 1940s, and the "future" they want to prevent is our present. I think it was particularly fun in that it came right on the heels of Morrison's DC One Million, which its title and cover deliberately echo, and, of course, that DC put Semeiks on pencils for it. It doesn't look like it's been collected anywhere yet, which is too bad; definitely worth picking up if you find it in a back-issue bin, though.