A Month of Wednesdays: January 2026

 BOUGHT: 

New History of the DC Universe (DC Comics) After Marv Wolfman and George Perez completed their 1985-1986 Crisis on Infinite Earths series, which collapsed DC's small constellation of parallel Earths into a single world, they teamed on the two-issue History of the DC Universe. This not-quite-a-comic was inspired by the old Time-Life History books, according to Wolfman, and featured paragraphs of his prose over big illustrations by Perez.

From the remove of about 40 years, their task was actually a fairly simple one. The new, post-Crisis Earth basically just folded Earth-2 into Earth-1 with relatively few other additions (Earth-S's Marvel Family, for example).  And because there was already something of a natural dividing line between Earth-2 and Earth-1, with the former being home of the Golden Age heroes and the latter the home of the Silver Age and later heroes, it wasn't too difficult to meld them into a sensible history (Hawkman's history aside, I guess), the main casualties being the few duplicate characters (Superman, Wonder Woman, Batman and Robin) and the JSoA/JLoA crossovers. (It no doubt helped that Roy Thomas had already placed the majority of characters from other publishers, and thus Earths, into DC's Golden Age in his All-Star Squadron).

For the modern sequel to History of the DC Universe, the Mark Waid-written New History of the DCU Universe, the task is infinitely more difficult. Not only does Waid have to work in 40 more years of history (which likely explains why this series is four issues instead of two), what a 40 years. There was the minor timeline tinkering of 1994's Zero Hour (the final issue of which featured a timeline that performed a similar function to the original History of...), there was 2006's continuity-altering Infinite Crisis and them some 20 years of messing with DC's timeline, continuity and multiverse, the latter expanding, contracting and changing, with the work of other imprints and publishers like Vertigo, Milestone and WildStorm coming and going.

There was also the matter of Flashpoint, which lead to DC's most drastic reboot ever, The New 52, which recreated a new universe without a History of... or timeline to let readers or even DC's writers know what was canon anymore. That was followed by a whole series of meta-stories about DC continuity, complicated enough to make one long for the pre-Crisis universe of alternate Earths designated by letters and numbers.

I eventually got so much that I stopped paying attention (I didn't read the dumb Watchmen crossover story, Doomsday Clock, which seems to have attempted to explain the post-Flashpoint mess...of course, Dark Knights: Death Metal did too, so...I guess I'll just be over here on Earth-Shruggy Emoticon). But Waid? He not only had to read all those damn stories, understand them and synthesize them into a story straightforward enough to told in a relatively short prose-and-illustration series of floppies (In this effort, he was seemingly assisted in his research by Dave Wielgosz).

So DC has needed a book like this for some time now. I've long since concluded that any time a writer wants to do a COIE-like continuity rejiggering crossover event, they should also have to follow it up with a History of... series, for the benefit of readers as well as for their fellow creators, or, at the very least, a Zero Hour-like timeline. I think, say, Geoff Johns would be a lot less cavalier about rewriting the history of the DC Universe every five years or so if he knew he would have to do so much homework afterwards, you know...? 

Of course, if anyone could write a history of the DC Unvirse at this point, it would be Waid. Hell, he had just recently done it for Marvel in 2019's History of the Marvel Universe, with artist Javier Rodriguez.

 (For what it's worth, I think that Marvel Universe history was much better made and a much more enjoyable read but then, the Marvel Universe hasn't spent decades on stories about changing its own continuity; the only real tinkering I can think of at this point was the "One More Day" story, in which Spider-Man sold his marriage to the devil for a continuity reboot, and maybe the invention of the fictional Siancong War, which acted as a "floating" conflict to replace historical ones like Vietnam, so that war veterans wouldn't be nailed down to a particular time and could "slide" with the rest of the sliding timeline).

The collected New History includes an introduction by Wolfman, which is where I learned his inspiration for the original History was the Time-Life books, and in which he shares some background info about his work on that, while blessing Waid and company's new book. I have to imagine it was written with something of a sense of relief that he didn't have to write this history, tracking changes that are "nearly impossible" to keep abreast of. But, as he says, "Fortunately, those of us who write and draw comics are known to be masochists, and we live for diving deep into our characters, their loves and powers, and their often-convoluted life." 

To say nothing of those of us who read the damned things...!

For Wolfman's original History, he used his creation Harbinger as the more-or-less unnecessary narrator, the premise being that she was herself noting what the universe was now like after Crisis, which Waid has his narrator refer to as "the great crisis" throughout.

That narrator? Barry Allen, who tells us that, in his day, he "probably saw more of the Multiverse—past, present and future—than anyone who ever lived." Given that he was dead, or at least MIA in the Speed Force, for about 30 of the 40 years since the great crisis, he seems an odd choice, but Waid has written him as someone who was consciously exploring the Multiverse in the past. 

Although, as with Harbinger, I don't know that we need a narrator. Barry only physically appears on the first and last pages of the series, sitting down at his desk to write and then getting up to visit a comic shop. The only way Barry narrating really seems to impact the history as it's told is having the narrator say "I" and "we" throughout; there's not really much room for Barry to editorialize on the events. 

Now, the big difference between New History and the original History (and, I suppose, the Marvel history Waid wrote) is that Waid isn't teamed with a single artist the way Wolfman had Perez (and Waid himself had Rodriguez for the Marvel one). 

Instead, Waid is working with a whole League: Doug Mahnke, Todd Nauck, Jerry Ordway, Howard Porter, Hayden Sherman and Brad Walker all provide art for some passages and Dan Jurgens pencils and Norm Rapmund ink a passage. The various artists work with seven different colorists. 

Now, I like all of those artists individually, and they are all great artists. Based on their styles and their resumes, you can probably guess which eras each was responsible for. I think any one of them would have been a decent choice to draw the whole damn thing, and I do kind of wish there was a single artist could have done so, if only to give the book, and thus DC history, a consistent look, and make the book something of a style guide as well as a history.

Of those involved, I think I would most have liked Allred to draw everything—like artist Steve Rude, I think Allred draws the most pure superhero art—although arguments could certainly be made for Ordway or Jurgens as drawing definitive versions of heroes. Thinking about who today's DC equivalent of George Pereze might be though, I suppose that would be Dan Mora, although he's got no shortage of work to keep him busy. I would also have liked to see Chris Samnee draw the whole DCU, but at least he provides a swath of it on the hardcover's dustjacket (Mora, by the way, draws four character portrait style variants, featuring Wonder Woman, Batman, Flash Wally West and Superboy Jon Kent). 

Now I would like nothing more than to go through this page by page and comment on various aspects of it, including who is not included (No Red Bee?!) and who is (Orca, The Whale Woman?!), whether and how Waid resolved various continuity conundrums (Hawkman, Donna Troy, Power Girl, The Legion of Super-Heroes, Supergirl) and the answers to questions that have changed in various reboots (When did Wonder Woman debut, for example, and did she found the League or naw?). But I don't want to make this post any longer than it might otherwise be, so I won't even linger on my own particular favorite characters (I will note that Plastic Man here debuts in what would have been DC's Silver Age, on a page with Zatanna, Eclipso/Bruce Gordon and Animal Man, so somewhere in the mid-1960s, our time, consistent with the first DC-published Plas comics; as with Zero Hour, then, he debuts after Elongated Man here, but it's clear he's a "modern age" hero rather than a Golden Age one, as the original History implied).

I'll resist the urge for now but may return for a gigantic post on the book in the near-ish future.

I will note that there probably could have been one more pass by editorial, as there are places the art seems off, if not wrong, the most egregious being on a penultimate splash page devoted to today that references the ongoing DC K.O. event. The narration mentions that "the resurgence of the League heralded a new era—and some new looks," specifically saying "Batman updated his appearance following a clash with Hush," but Howard Porter and the colorist gives us what looks like Batman's "No Man's Land" era costume. The shape of his bat symbol looks like his new, current costume, but the coloring looks to be black with blue highlights, rather than the brighter blue he's been wearing. 

Otherwise, I think the book is fairly readable, and certainly fun to look at. As the story of a whole universe, I found it interesting that things just get more and more complicated as they go on. When we first enter the age of heroes in the 1940s through the 1960s (well, books published in the '60s, anyway), it's mostly a series of debuts of heroes, but as we get into the '80s and '90s, it's death, resurrection, new legacy characters, a universe-altering crises. 

Waid manages to make a certain sort of sense out of it, but this is in part by ignoring some efforts entirely (There's no mention of Convergence, for example, and Jon Kent's birth is moved to the year of 52; no idea how he got to be a pre-teen between then and the Rebirth-branded era), and all that work poor Peter Tomasi did to reconcile the New 52 Superman and with the pre- and post-Flashpoint Superman, a riff on the classic Superman Red, Superman Blue concept. 

Although I think there's really only so much that can be done. For example, I just read this about a week before typing these paragraphs, and if you asked me know who was the Flash at any point between 2006 and 2026, which Flashes were alive, dead or lost in the Speed Force or to continuity, I couldn't tell you. It seems a lot of the changes since The New 52 are something akin to "a wizard did it," but here, it's "Doctor Manhattan did it."

Perhaps less exciting than Waid and company's story is what follows it in the collection, the 56-page "New History of the DC Universe Timeline" written by Wielgosz, which I personally found more interesting, in that it is so much more thorough (There's the Red Bee!). Rather than original art, it is illustrated by images taken from the comics referenced and, usefully, each event referenced is followed by the title and issue or issues in which it originally appeared. 

The only way I would improve upon it is to list artists credits, at least those of the pencil artist, below each of these image, akin to the way a news magazine would list a photo credit. I recognize a lot of the artists, but if this book becomes an evergreen one, it would nice to have credits for newer readers to follow artists they like.

Similarly, I don't think there is a good way to actually do it, but I kind of wish the main story had footnotes or endnotes that similarly could direct a reader to a particular story point and credit the creators responsible for it. That is, this is unquestionably a celebration of DC's characters, but it would be nice if it similarly honored its creators. 

Oh, one more point that may be of interest...at least to some readers. Because the DC Universe setting has been so unsettled for so long, Waid doesn't even really even attempt to lay out its future, despite Barry's first-page boast of having seen so much of it. 

Instead, there's a single two-page spread on the third-and-second-to-last pages of the book, drawn by Sherman, with panels in the shape of concentric circles. Barry is cryptic here:

That brings us to now. Tomorrow, of course, remains unforseen.

I'm joking. Having traveled extensively in time, I've seen all sorts of tomorrows.

Yes, despite every effort to put it right, our timeline still ripples on occasion, but there will always be constants.

Great disasters. Long eras of peace. Fearful futures, futures utopian. Super-villains. Superheroes who carry on our legacy--not just a few, but an entire legion.

That last bit is above a longshot of three silhouettes, seemingly two males and a female, that are likely meant to suggestion the LOSH founders. It's the closest we get to a visual reference to the LOSH, while we see the likes of a couple of Time Trappers, Reverse Flash, Abra Kadabra, Kamandi, Batman Beyond, the 853rd Century's Justice Legion A, Wonder Woman's daughter Trinity and Mark Russell and Ben Caldwell's version of Prez, among others I didn't entirely recognize. 

The timeline is far more generous with the future, offering three and a half pages under the heading "The Many Tomorrows of The DCU...", which includes an introduction of the fluid nature of the future, while noting "many possible futures—and future beings—have been encountered over the years."

Included are everything from Jack Kirby's O.M.A.C. to Future State, Dan Jurgens and company's Armageddon 2001 to Geoff Johns' grown-up Teen Titans "the Titans of Tomorrow" and various incarnations of the Legion of Super-Heroes. 

For fans of DC Comics, this is probably the best book the publisher has released since Jimmy Olsen's SuperCyclopedia. Although less a valentine and more a book report, it's filled with some eight decades worth of characters, concepts and stories, offering long-time readers and fans something to obsesses over and quibble with, and new readers a guidebook to what is probably the biggest and most complicated stories ever told.

Oh, and if, like me, you start by flipping through to see if one minor character or another was included (The Invisible Hood was, but the Red Bee wasn't?!), then take solace that they more than likely appear in the timeline and/or one of Scott Koblish's four insanely complete-looking variant covers, featuring hundreds of characters by era, and, in the back of this book, keys pointing to which character is where (Although it seems Koblish left the Red Bee out of the Golden Age one...)

BORROWED:

Batman-Santa Claus: Silent Knight Returns (DC Comics) It's not hard to imagine how the 2024 Batman-Santa Claus: Silent Knight series ended up with the sub-title it did, as writer Jeff Parker and/or someone at DC decided to do a Christmas-y riff on Batman's Dark Knight nickname; plenty of past Batman comics have similarly extrapolated titles from the idea of Batman as a knight. 

So, when it came time for a sequel, Silent Knight Returns, alluding to The Dark Knight Returns, was the obvious title. Indeed, first issue artist Lukas Ketner draws a panel in which Santa and Robin leap into action, striking iconic poses from DKR. And Pete Woods' variant cove for the fifth issue similarly has Santa in a famous Batman pose from DKR. 

I was so sure that the sub-title was a DKR reference that, when the sequel series was originally announced, my first impulse was to take to social media and make a joke about how disappointed Brian Kent must have been when he heard DC was publishing a book entitled Silent Knight Returns, and it was not about him. 

Kent, of course, is the secret identity of the relatively obscure-ish medieval hero The Silent Knight, who was often the cover feature of The Brave and the Bold in the 1950s, and has since mostly been relegated to cameos in time-travel stories (Mark Waid and George Perez teamed him with Superman in an issue of the 2007-2010 Brave and the Bold).

That sub-title did give me pause though; what if it ends up actually featuring The Silent Knight? There was at least a chance, right?

Well guess what?

Kent turns out to be the villain here.  As with the original Batman-Santa Claus, the series seems poorly named, as it's not really a Batman story so much as a Justice League or DC Universe in general story. Both Zatanna and Robin get far more panel-time than the Dark Knight does. DC probably should have gone ahead and called this Santa Claus: The Silent Knight Returns, or maybe JLA/Santa Claus, but then, one imagines Batman's name in a title helps move the needle when it comes to comics shops ordering books, huh? 

So yes, Brian Kent, The Silent Knight, returns, appearing as a creepy, floating, empty suit of armor, a somewhat redesigned version of what he wore in the fifties. When he touches a victim with his sword, he drains away their life force, leaving behind a desiccated corpse. 

He's attacking some poor folks in Egypt's Valley of the Kings, when a group of seven Justice Leaguers arrive to confront the seemingly haunted armor. This is an interesting group, as it is the basic Big Seven configuration of the League (only with Robin in for Martian Manhunter), but not the original line-up. So, in addition to Robin, we get Superman, Batman, Green Lantern (John Stewart), a Wonder Woman (Nubia), and Aqua-person (Mera) and a Flash (Thunderheart Irey West...who I actually had to Google, I'm so out of the week-to-week goings on of the DCU; the last time I remember seeing her, she was Impulse II).

When the battle goes badly for the League, Batman sends the kids away at super-speed, but only Robin makes it out. Given the magical nature of the business, he goes to Zatanna for help, and, while muttering to himself near her Christmas tree, he inadvertently summons the big, burly, warrior version of Santa Claus introduced in the previous year's Silent Knight. 

The action then divides onto two parallel tracks. The Leaguers find themselves trapped in a weird dimension space they can't escape, and must contend with various monsters there, while Zatanna, Robin and Klaus investigate a sigil of the Knight's, and end up at a conveniently-timed solstice party featuring a whole bunch of DC's magical types (Baron Winter, Felix Faust and Gentleman Ghost all get speaking parts, but this is definitely one of those scenes where it's fun to scan the backgrounds for familiar characters). 

The most important guess turns out to be Jason Blood, who knew Kent back in Camelot, and explains how the heroic knight has become what he is today, the result of a quest, a curse and a fairy castle.

With Jason's worse half Etrigan, a trio of completely random heroes summoned by Zatanna's spell seeking allies (Mary Marvel, Metamorpho and Robotman Cliffe Steele) and Klaus' warrior elf wife Ulah, they join the other Leaguers and this crisis worth of heroes end up fighting an amry of monsters, storming the Knight's weird castle and, ultimately, saving the day.

It's all quite fun, although more than a little random. I mean, I like Mary Marvel, Metamorpho and Robotman, for example, although I have absolutely no idea why they are here, and they don't actually contribute anything that, like, any other heroes couldn't have (or that the Leaguers already introduced into the story couldn't).

Well, there is one exception, I guess. At one point, in order to distract the Knight, Etrigan transforms back into Jason Blood, who appears in a full suit of armor with sword and shield, and challenges Kent. 

"Where did he get that armor?" Superman asks, and Parker and whichever of the last issue's artists drew this panel answer thusly:

There's also some fun business with Etrigan throughout. Parker's approach to his rhyming depends on the scene (he rhymes more often than not, but there are still a few instances of not). I enjoyed watching the other characters call him out for failing to rhyme, or for rhyming poorly.

(The coloring may look a little weird at the bottom of those panels, but that's because of the fog in the realm the action there is set.)

While I didn't love the climax, in which Kent is defeated but not redeemed and restored to a pre-curse, heroic nature, over all this was a rather fun, Christmas party of a comic book adventure. DC just needs to do a better of job of matching their titles to their content, I think (See also last month's Batman and Robin: Year One, as I said pretty much the same thing about that). 

There's also a two-page epilogue during which the heroes are invited to a party by Klaus and Ulah, similar to the ending of the previous Silent Knight. During this sequence, Batman and Superman give a gift to Santa, which shows just how unlimited the Justice League is these days, and sets up an avenue fo any future Justice League/Klaus adventures. 

Komi Can't Communicate Vol. 36 (Viz Media) According to Wikipedia, this is the penultimate tankobon of Tomohita Oda's series, which it appears will indeed end with Komi (and Tadano, and their classmates) graduating high school and Komi completing her series-long goal of making 100 friends.

This volume is almost entirely set at Komi's grandmother's house in the country, where Komi has brought Tadano for an intense study camp, hoping to help him do well enough on his entrance exams that he can get into the same university that she has already been accepted to. 

The cast is thus much smaller than that in most of the previous volumes. I think my favorite gag might be Komi's little cousin, whose idea about what makes a cool boyfriend (driving a motorcycle, for example) doesn't match what she sees in the extremely normal-looking Tadano. But she ultimately witnesses his kindness, his politeness and attentiveness and willingness to help Komi, and she sees why her gorgeous but quite cousin so likes Tadano: Dating him is a little like having a butler, isn't it? 

I'll miss getting new volumes of this series when it ends but, at the same time, I think it's gone on about as long as it can at this point, given that Tadano and Komi have consummated their mutual crushes by dating one another, and how much Komi has changed over the course of the series. Now it is only through the eyes of new characters or strangers in which we see the dual nature of the title character—that is, someone who looks so cool and collected on the outside, but is always freaking out under her perfect exterior—that powered so much of the earlier volumes of the series. 

Titans Vol. 4: Terminated (DC) The fourth collection of the current Titans ongoing, and the second by writer John Layman and artist Pete Woods, continues a trend I've found disappointing. Specifically, the tendency of the creators to "play the hits", or at least cover songs of the hits, pitting the team against their traditional foes. Original writer Tom Taylor offered a riff on Brother Blood and bad Tamarneans, and then Trigon. Layman's last volume had Deathstroke organizing Clock King and Mammoth into a villain team, and this volume he adds Terra to the mix. 

On the plus side, Layman concludes his storyline about Deathstroke's team's attack on the Titans, curiously named "The Crime Syndicate" after the evil opposite JLA from another world (Even more curious, Woods' cover for #25 homages Frank Quitely's for 1999's JLA: Earth 2, which reintroduced the Crime Syndicate after a long absence, and includes the words "dark reflections", even though none of the members of this Crime Syndicate are dark reflections of any Titans in any way, shape or form).

My hope then is that Layman will now do something a little more interesting and original than the 41st Titans vs. Deathstroke story, but it looks like the next volume will be devoted to DC K.O. tie-ins, as the last pages of this volume's last issues have Beast Boy and Cyborg returning to their HQ to find some grim-looking Justice Leaguers with Donna Troy and then telling them that the end of the world is night, while there's a "To Be Continued in DC K.O.!" tag at the bottom of the page.

He does do a few interesting things in these issues, though. The first four issues are devoted to the Crime Syndicate plot, a conflict at least partially solved by the Titans' compassion towards their enemies (in addition to Beast Boy's reading of the bad guys' team as a herd of animals). The last two feature Beast Boy and Cyborg visiting the current Doom Patrol, which the former was of course once a member of and, while the latter doesn't have any real connection in the comics, he was a part of the team in their recent-ish live-action TV show. 

The book opens with Deathstroke in a bacta tank from Star Wars, healing from having died or whatever in the pages of Dark Crisis on Infinite Earths, a story I've decided to just skip entirely, having read too damn many DC crises about the goddam multiverse and continuity tweaks over the course of the last 20 years. Terra, who is wearing a new-to-me costume and is evil again I guess, rescues him, and then the plot just picks up as if Deathstroke hadn't died between volumes. (I forget what's up with Terra at this point; is she the original, back to life? The one from Team Titans, gone bad? Or was it revealed at some point that those two Terras were the same Terra...?)

There are two real battles between the teams, with the Titans losing round one (which seemed rather unlikely to me, given their numbers and powers, but Layman tells us this is because the presence of Terra being a surprise, and distracting Beast Boy at a critical moment) and then winning round two. Much of the focus is on the Amazo-based android character Vanadia introduced in Taylor's run, who was created as a Titans killer, defeated, but then rebuilt by Cyborg. Proving much more powerful than any of them expected, the Titans are trying to make her a member, but are leery of her in the field (In the end, she decides to forsake humanity completely, and travel the universe; she mentions perhaps visiting "a race of sentient computer beings known as The Technis" that she discovered in Cyborg's memory files." Given how contact with the Technis ultimately turned out for Cyborg in the late '90s, I'm surprised he didn't say anything about it to her. 

This section also features an unlikely appearance by Orca, playing the role of generic threat that occupies the heroes briefly. Woods draws her much taller and less round than her co-creator Scott McDaniel designed her (while also locating her dorsal fin from her back to the top of her head, giving her a mark shark-like appearance), but I guess this is consistent with her appearances in the Nightwing title. 

I found the two-issue Doom Patrol team-up much more interesting. A smaller, "breather" story of the sort that often appear in super-team books between bigger, higher-stakes arcs, as mentioned, this one is about Beast Boy and Cyborg and the Doom Patrol. They are sent away for some r-and-r by Donna and Raven while the rest of the team (and Wonder Woman and The Flash Wally West) repair their damaged base, as the encounter with Terra and the loss of Vanadia seemed like things that might take emotional tolls on the pair.

Well that, and Beast Boy says he wants to check in with Beast Girl, whose animal powers have grown more like his during the weird power scramble that followed Absolute Power. They find Beast Girl and Negative Man are MIA, though, apparently trapped on an island full of big, weird purple monsters, and so they join Robotman and Elasti-Woman on a rescue mission, where they ultimately fight lots of monsters and encounter what I guess is the closest thing to an archenemy Beast Boy has, The Zookeeper. 

Guest artist Max Raynor handles the art on these issue, and Chris Burnham provides the covers, making the book look appropriately Doom Patrol-y. During the adventure, Robotman and Cyborg have a little heart-to-heart about being men who are now mostly mechanical, and Cliff offers some compelling advice, and a new way to look at their dual nature. 

I thought this story was fun and engaging enough that it made up for my relative disinterest in the Deathstroke story. 

REVIEWED:

I got a real Lumberjanes vibe from John Claude Bemis and Nicole Mills' Rodeo Hawkins and the Daughter of Mayhem, the title characters of which are something between a female version of Peter Pan and the Lost Boys and a multiversal girl gang, their number including a character named Bug Bear who, for all intents and purposes, seems to be Chewbacca wearing all-pink and a pair of sensible boots. They are trying to save the last Sidney Poblocki in the multiverse from The Paladins, well-meaning but overly ruthless heroes who want to kill him in order to save the multiverse from a terrible threat. It's quite fun. More here. 

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. 

*********************

 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...

************************

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. 

***************************

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.