Is this the first appearance of the Spear of Destiny in DC Comics? (1977's Weird War Tales #50)

One particularly interesting bit of New History of the DC Universe's timeline was the mention of the Roman centurion Longinus "using his spear to pierce the side of Christ on the cross," illustrated by two Dick Ayers and Alfredo Alcala-drawn panels. 

The first shows a longshot of three men on crosses (so, Jesus and the two thieves). The second is a medium shot depicting Longinus with his spear raised at the foot of the cross, of which we only see Jesus' feet in shadow. Yellow narration boxes are in both, referring to Jesus as "Christ" and "our dying savior."

Presumably timeline writer Dave Wielgosz included that entry because it is the origin of the Spear of Destiny. Indeed, the entry includes the sentence, "In future years, the weapon becomes known as the Spear of Destiny."

While the spear appeared in stories like John Ostrander and Tom Mandrake's volume of The Spectre, 1999's Day of Judgement and the lead story in JLA Secret Files and Origins 2004, its greatest import in the history of the DCU was that it was a powerful magical artifact that Adolf Hitler wielded during World War II. His possession of the spear was used as a retroactive explanation for why the Golden Age heroes (be they from Earth-2 or, later, the 1930s and 1940s of the shared, post-Crisis DCU) didn't just fly across the Atlantic and put a stop to the Nazis in couple of hours. 

(I feel like I've read stories featuring at least two different versions of the spear's ability to keep the likes of Superman, The Spectre and Doctor Fate at bay; in one, it erected an impenetrable forcefield over the European theater of the war, while in the other, if heroes got too close to it, it would allow Hitler to take control of them, and wield their considerable powers against the allies. If any of you guys know when the spear was first used as a retcon explanation for why the JSoA didn't fight in the frontlines during WWII, please let me know; I am assuming this was a Roy Thomas thing, likely from All-Star Squadron...?)

Regardless of exactly why Weilgosz included Jesus' crucifixion, I was excited to see it, as it establishes Jesus as a real historical figure with at least some literal magical properties, rather than something more equivocal, as one might find in a book about our universe's Jesus. 

And while DC comics may allude to Jesus, there's usually a degree of separation between the characters or action and Jesus as a historical figure. One quite famous attempt to include Jesus in a DC comic book story was scrapped at the last minute in 1989...although I guess they are finally going to publish it sometime this year.

But Weilgosz's mention of Jesus here, in the context of this timeline, suggests Christ is as much a DC character as, say, The Silent Knight or Tomahawk or Balloon Buster or Black Orchid or Ballistic. I find that interesting. Interesting, if not entirely surprising. As I've noted previously, what Douglas Wolk said about the Marvel Universe in his All of The Marvels also seems to apply to the DC Universe. That is, that there, all mythologies are apparently literally true. And that, obviously, includes Christianity. 

For that reason, I was quite eager to see the comic from which those panels featuring Longinus at the foot of the cross that were used to illustrate the mention of Jesus came from, as they seemed to indicate a retelling of the crucifixion story, which would obviously need to include Jesus as a character, right? Thankfully, the New History timeline also includes notations of which particular comics the events it refers to occurred in. This story of Longinus and the spear was from 1977's Weird War Tales #50, published the same year I was born!

Unfortunately, the issue, like so much of the 124-issue, 1971-1983 series, hasn't been collected (Although I think it would have been a perfect candidate for the old Showcase Presents, black-and-white phonebook-like format...maybe some of it will end up in future DC Finest collections...?) DC doesn't often collect their comics in ways that reflect my own personal reading habits of following particular tangents or falling down particular rabbit holes like, say, collecting all the comics featuring the Spear of Destiny into a single omnibus, for example.

So, it took some doing to track a copy of this issue down. To my surprise, when I finally did, I found that the panels used to illustrate the crucifixion in New History of the DC Universe weren't taken from a comic book retelling of the crucifixion story but rather appear in a sequence illustrating someone else telling a story about those events. So here again is an example of Jesus appearing in a story being told within a story, a level of narrative padding or distance built into a comic seemingly featuring him.

In other words, here is yet another comic which suggests that Jesus is real, but only shows him to us from some distance, acknowledging Jesus without ever exploring him as a character.

The story is entitled "--An Appointment With Destiny!", and it is a 17-pager written by Steve Englehart, and pencilled and inked by the aforementioned Ayers and Alcala. The cover, by Ernie Chan and Vince Colletta, depicts a startled American G.I. being menaced by a skeleton in a German helmet wielding the spear. (Skimming the series' cover gallery on the Grand Comics Database, Weird War Tales seems to suggest that there were an awful lot of skeletons fighting in WWII.)

The story opens on April 30, 1945 in Adolf Hitler's bunker. With a Luger in hand, the Fuhrer shouts to his assembled advisors in English that the Allies are in Berlin, and their shells have begun to shake the bunker:

The end has come for the Reich, and me! But fear not, my loyal and faithful friends!

Another will scale the heights we failed to reach! Wait for him, after I am gone! Wait for--

--AN APPOINTMENT WITH DESTINY!

He and Eva then leave the room and shut the door ("What we must do is not for others' eyes!"), and two big, red "BAMM" sound effects are heard through the door. 

Suddenly there's an explosion, and in charge a pair of American soldiers, their dialogue exchange introducing them as Walker and Baxter. They seem to know exactly what they've found too, calling the bunker "the chief rat's nest!" and mentioning snatching "Uncle Adolf" before "the Russkies" arrive. 

There's a brief, bloodless firefight that takes up all of one panel, and when they question the last surviving Nazi, he says that Hitler is gone and, portentously, "Now, we shall all await--the coming man!" 

No sooner does Walker find the bodies of Hitler and Eva Braun—rather tastefully posed and free of blood; DC did still abide by the Comics Code Authority at the time of publication, after all—than he catches sight of another man out of the corner of his eye, a fleeting figure that seems to be wearing a military uniform under a reddish-brown fur coat, with a World War I-era helmet on its head.

The figure flees, and Walker gives chase, climbing into the ruined but deserted streets of Berlin. 

Out of nowhere, a spear flies, and lands bloodlessly in Walker's chest. He falls to his knees, clutching the wooden shaft, and then to his back, surviving just long enough to hear the speech about the weapon delivered by the mysterious figure:

On this day, the Spear of Destiny has brought death to Adolf Hitler, the greatest man our race has ever known!

You could scarcely have been spared.

Death comes to all who encounter this spear. Death--and power!

Power to stir men's blood, and raise a cry of battle! Power to stride unheard through rubble, and kill with unerring accuracy! Yes, and power even stranger than that!

Power--and death!

Which will I savor first, eh?

I-- the coming man!

While delivering that last line, the figure seems to rise into the air, as if he is about to fly away—another strange power of the spear's, perhaps?—or maybe Walker is just starting to lose it as he dies. Throughout these panels, though the "Coming Man" is presented in medium shot looking directly at the reader, his identity is still hidden, his face shaded by the rim of his helmet in two panels, and he appears only in silhouette in another. 

Baxter eventually finds Walker, and hears his comrade's strange story, a story that Walker claims he was only able to tell because the power of the spear kept him alive until he could tell someone. Promising Walker he would get the Nazi that killed him, Baxter sets off in search of the Coming Man.

He finds a trail of footprints in the snow that start out of nowhere, presumably made when the Coming Man came back down to ground. He encounters some Russian soldiers who order him to fall in with them, but he flees—"I've gotta see a man about a spear!"—and they fire on him.

He manages to escape but not without being wounded. Using a stick as a crutch, he carries on, following the trail to a castle outside of Berlin.

Within, he's greeted first by a Chinese servant named Fong, and then the German master of the castle, an aristocrat with a monocle named Baron Kragen, and, finally, Ilse, Kragen's fetching young daughter (I assumed Kragen is a bad guy, perhaps even the Coming Man, upon his initial appearance, simply because he has a monocle. Does anyone other than a bad guy ever have a monocle in a comic book story?)

With the war over—"We Germans are as happy to see this madness end as you are," the Baron says—he offers Baxter his hospitality, and Ilse dresses his wounds. At dinner, Kragen notices Baxter eyeing his missing left hand, and then tells him how he lost it to a tiger and, after Baxter's none-too-subtle questioning, he discusses the history of the Spear of Destiny:

Here is where those panels in the New History timeline are taken. As you can see, they are illustrations of Kragen's story about the spear being told to Baxter. 

The next tier of panels from the page traces it the spear from ancient Rome to the sights of a young Hitler: 

And here we learn that the spear became a powerful magical artifact. Apparently "any warlord who held it knew greatness", although they would eventually die themselves (Of course, everyone dies eventually, so I'm not sure what kind of curse that is meant to be). Alexander the Great, Napoleon "and many others" are named as men who have possessed the spear before Hitler. 

The story of the spear out of the way, Baxter again makes his suspicions that Kragen is the Coming Man known, and Kragen makes it known that he was only being so hospitable because he suspected Baxter of being an advance scout for an American force. 

Downed by poison administered via his fork, Baxter awakes in a cell, beyond the bars of which Ilse and Fong come to...taunt him? Deliver exposition...? She explains how Germany's "first attempt at world domination" (WWI, I guess) had failed, and now this second attempt has failed as well. But that Hitler and her father had "come to terms" previously, so that if Hitler failed, Kragen would inherit the spear and begin the third attempt.

Baxter snatches Ilse through the bars and threatens to kill her unless Fong releases her (He addresses Fong derisively as "Fu Manchu", which seems pretty racist; on the other hand, he does have a moustache referred to as "the Fu Manchu", so...maybe not...?).

Baxter finds a sword in the castle, and with it in hand searches for the Baron, ultimately finding him talking to himself atop a castle turret.

"The Aryan dream will rise again!" Kragen screams at the end of his little three-panel monologue, giving Baxter the opening to reply, "'Cause it's full of hot air, Baron!"

They fight, the Baron employing his laser gun hand and proclaiming himself a "bionic man" (remember, though set in the forties, this was written in the seventies, when that world had cachet) and "the wave of the future!"

The fight lasts about a page, during which Baxter is able to snatch the spear from the Baron's hands—er, hand, I guess—and plunges it into his stomach ("Gott im Himmell! I--I am murdered!"). Now it's Baxter's turn to make a bit of a speech ("You were fightin' the next war, but I had to finish this one!"), after which Ilse, one of the straps of her dress now broken off, charges Baxter with a dagger, and he impales her on the spear. 

With tears in his eyes, Baxter's wonders, "Could it be this peace we fought so hard for--won't last forever", but before he can even pronounce a question mark, Fong cuts him down with a volley of machine gun fire from behind. (So Baxter obviously won't live to see 2022, when Russia invaded Ukraine setting off another land war in Europe, or 2025, when the Trump administration and its allies began their attempt to introduce a new, dumb version of fascism to the United States).

Here are the last two panels:

For the story's protagonist Baxter, it's obviously a tragic ending, with him ultimately losing his life while making the realization that even a peace as hard-fought as World War II's may be doomed to be temporary. 

It's interesting how Englehart frames the Spear of Destiny as a sort of artifact that inspires war wherever it goes, drawing a direct connection between the spear falling into a Chinese man's hands and the culmination of the Chinese Communist Revolution in 1949...connecting it to the wars that followed it until the present of the 1970s, from the Korean war to Vietnam. 

Englehart further tries to predict the next global hotspot, the Middle East or Africa. 

Now, when Englehart wrote this story, he definitely wasn't thinking about DC comics continuity, as in 1977 the DC Universe wasn't nearly as coherent a shared setting as it would later become and, I have to confess, I have no idea which "Earth" in the DC multiverse their war comics (and many of their other non-superhero genre offerings) were meant to be set on. The more popular characters from their war comics—Sgt. Rock, The Unknown Soldier. The Haunted Tank, etc.—would eventually meet with various DC heroes and share adventures, suggesting they did indeed exist in the DCU (and both History of the DC Universe and New History of the DC Universe suggest their adventures ocurred in the DCU shared-setting).

But Englehart's seems to at least partially line-up with the history of the Spear of Destiny that John Ostrander wrote in a 1994 four-issue arc of The Spectre. In Spectre #21's "Troubled Waters," the spear goes from Longinus (depicted by artist Tom Mandrake standing at the edge of the giant eye socket of a giant skull upon which there are three crucified men in the distance, the artists play on the fact that Chris was crucified at Golgotha, Latin for "the place of the skull") to Saladin, then St. George, then Hitler.

After the war, though, rather than falling into Chinese hands, it is found in Berlin by the Russians, and spends years in the collection of "a high-placed Soviet official". Eventually, supervillan/terrorist Kobra gets his hands on it, and then U.S. operative Nightshade steals it from him, delivering it to Sarge Steel. 

No one in the U.S. seems to actually possess it, though; rather, it ends ups lost in a Washington, D.C. warehouse until a special operative assigned by the then-president Clinton finds it and gives it to Superman.

So it would seem that the main difference between Englehart's 1977 predicted future of the spear and Ostrander's 1994 history of the spear would only contradict one another as to where it was between World War II and whenever Kobra got it, which wouldn't really be too hard to reconcile (For example, it could have gone to China and been in Asia between the end of WWII and when the Soviet collector acquired it). I'm murky on when exactly—like, what decade—it would be when Kobra had it, though; according to The Spectre, it was right about the time the JSoA entered Ragnarok, which I guess would be in the 1980s...but I'm not sure whether those events still "happened" or not in current DC continuity (New History remains very, very vague about Justice Society history).

At any rate, the spear spent about a decade in space (The Spectre put it in orbit in 1994's Spectre #22, then the heroes recovered it to sue against a rogue Spectre in 1999's Day of Judgment before the Sentinels of Magic sent it to the sun in its aftermath), and the last I saw of it was the lead story in JLA Secret Files and Origins 2004, but it looks like it's last, still in-continuity appearance may have been 2009 Final Crisis tie-in miniseries, Final Crisis: Revelations...? 

Hmm... Maybe after I finish reading all of Detective Chimp's appearances, I can start tracking the Spear of Destiny trough DC history...

Bookshelf #20

It probably won't take you long to figure out the contents of this week's bookshelf. To the left, my Star Wars comics with spines. To the right, my Dynamite and Boom books (plus a few random books that would maybe be better off shelved on this bookshelf from many weeks ago now). 

On the Star Wars side, you'll notice a couple of comics from best Star Wars publisher Dark Horse (Star Wars Tales Vols. 2 and 4 and The Crimson Empire Saga) and a couple from current Star Wars publisher Marvel (Star Wars Vol. 1, Star Wars: Darth Vader Vol. 1, Star Wars: Vader Down), but the majority of that side of the shelf is devoted to Dark Horse collections of Marvel's 1970s and '80s Star Wars comics, via the A Long Time Ago... omnibuses (and a single Wild Space volume). These omnibuses I bought in a panic when I heard Marvel was getting the license back, as I was afraid they either might not collect the original comics, or do so in a way I didn't care for. 

Of course, Star Wars is so big that, like some other licenses Disney now owns, the franchise is apparently too big for Marvel alone to handle, and so there are a couple of other books, from IDW (Star Wars Adventures Annual 2019, featuring a Jaxxon cover by Stan Sakai; Star Wars Adventures: Return to Vader's Castle, featuring art by EDILW favorite Kelley Jones under a cover by EDILW favorite Derek Charm), Viz Media (The Legends of Luke Skywalker: The Manga) and Yen Press (Lost Stars). 

Looking at this assortment on the shelf now, I regret not buying more of the Dark Horse collections, as I don't really care for the way Marvel seems to be collecting and publishing them now (In continuity-specific "Perfect Collections"). At the time, I just assumed whoever had the license would keep everything in print in one form or another and readily available from the library, this being the perennially popular Star Wars and all, but that doesn't seem to be the case, as I found while trying to read the post-Return of the Jedi, "New Republic"-branded material. Not only was much of it not available from the library systems I belong to, but a lot of it was also out of print.

I probably also should have bought more of the kid-friendly Star Wars Adventures collections from IDW, as those tended to be much better (and, visually, head and shoulders above) what Marvel has been cranking out at too-fast-for-me speed. 

On the other side of the shelf, you'll note that collections of Dynamite's The Boys dominate. I did start reading the series when it was originally serially published on DC's WildStorm imprint (I mean, it was Garth Ennis writing superheroes, of course I would!), I soon decided it would be better read in trade...and then never actually bought any trades. I did finally decide to read it via these omnibuses relatively recently, when I realized that the TV show was actually going to be rather popular, and this was likely a comic book that civilians in my real life would actually ask me about. While far from Ennis' best, I thought it worked pretty well, and it probably read better all at once as I read it, rather than 20 pages at a time here and there over the course of years. (The conversations I have had with fans of the show quickly made me realize that it doesn't stick too closely to the comics at all.)

The other Dynamite book there is Lords of The Jungle, which teamed Tarzan with Sheena; I haven't mentioned here in a really long time, but I am intrigued by the original, Golden Age version of the character and, while I've checked out more modern comics featuring her here and there, what I really want is a big collection of her original adventures. 

As for the Boom books, there are some pretty great kids books on their "Boom Box" and "Kaboom" imprints (Ryan North and company's very clever Midas Flesh, Roger Langridge's Abigail and the Snowman, Caitlin Rose Boyle and company's Jonesy and a volume of Adventure Time, which was then being written by North). There's also a King Kong book I didn't really care for, a Power Rangers book I got because Kelly Thompson co-wrote it and I used to be in love with the original Pink Ranger and Judas, which I found quite intriguing). 

Finally, there's a tri of completely random books: Oni's Terrible Lizard, a Cullen Bunn-written adventure I got just because it had a dinosaur (I'm not really that hard to sell a comic book to); Legendary's "We'd like this to be a movie, please"-looking The Tower Chronicles: GeistHawk, which featured an unlikely creative team composed of people I like in writer Matt Wagner and pencil artist Simon Bisley (It never did make it into a movie, did it? I'm now not even sure if they made a second volume); and, finally, Moonstone's The Black Bat, a black-and-white reimagining of the intriguing pulp hero that kinda sorta inspired both Batman and Marvel's version of Daredevil (I don't recall caring for it although the cape on Tom Grindberg's cover looks neat). 

And that covers all of the bookshelves on the ground floor of my house, mostly containing books purchased or gifted to me by publishers between 2011 and 2024 or so. Starting next week, we'll head upstairs for even more bookshelves full of even more comics, dating from 1991 to 2011 or so.

A Month of Wednesdays: February 2026

BOUGHT:

Mothra: Queen of the Monsters (IDW Publishing) If I didn't already know that Sophie Campbell was a kaiju fan from her past social media postings, it would certainly be evident from her script for last year's Mothra miniseries, the first American comic book to star a Toho monster that isn't Godzilla nor have his name in the title.

It's not just the various characters and other elements from Toho's Mothra films and other monster movies used here. Rather, Campbell seems to draw inspiration for particular aspects from particular Japanese monster movies, mostly from the 1990s.

For example, her human protagonist Mira resents the title monster for her family's deaths in a kaiju battle, like the girl in 1999's Gamera 3: Revenge of Iris. This other monster is a brand-new, original kaiju named Antra who "was originally created by the Earth itself" to defend it, but ended up battling Mothra, not unlike Battra in 1992's Godzilla vs. Mothra. Antra has tiny little fairy priestesses of her own, who upon their initial appearances look like goth, bad guy versions of Mothra's Shohbijin, recalling Belvera, the bad fairy from the 1996-1998 Rebirth of Mothra trilogy. And, at one point, there's a time travel trip back to dinosaur times where we see prehistoric Mothra caterpillars, as in 1998's Rebirth of Mothra III.

Which isn't to suggest that this series is in anyway derivative of any of those films. Rather, Campbell seems to rather deftly pull inspiration from those films (and the Toho catalog in general), transmuting a love of Japanese monster movies into an original comic book adventure, one that reads like the ultimate Mothra movie...albeit one that plays out on paper rather than a screen.

A long time fan of Campbell's, I was somewhat disappointed to learn that she wouldn't be drawing her first kaiju comic as well as writing it, although that disappointment immediately evaporated when I saw who she was collaborating with: Matt Frank, perhaps the ideal kaiju comic artist. And Campbell does provide some art; in addition to some of the covers, she draws short sequences in some of the comics and she seems to have worked closely with Frank on some of the character designs, a few of which look so much like the work of Campbell it's almost surprising to learn that she didn't draw them in the comic. 

The tale opens with Mothra, looking much like she usually does in Toho's films, battling Antra, a scene in which Frank's coloring has a lot of grays and lighter, washed-out colors, save for characters he wants to visually pop, like the monsters, and twin sisters Mira and Emi. 

Mira's family dies in the battle, and the world seems to end; this is a flashback, and, in the present, we see a grown-up Mira living in the hollowed-out skull of one of Antra's "drones", smaller versions of itself, scavenging in a ruined cityscape for survival, and fighting off the remaining drones with a slingshot (Her target practice involves shooting at little figurines of kaiju; one of these, who we only see part of in a panel, seems to be Godzilla; that's the big guy's only appearance in this book, which, by the end, will turn out to be fairly full of Toho's other monsters). 

And then her twin sister Emi, who apparently survived the Mothra/Antra battle 15 years ago, arrives, dressed in a red halter top, loincloth and body paint and carrying the Shobijin in a backpack. This version of the Shobijin is a rather unique one; the tiny beauties have bob haircuts, pupil-less eyes and feathery, moth-like antennae. Letterers Nathan Widick and Darran Robinson have a fun way of trying to convey their habit of speaking in unison, too; their dialogue bubbles are a deep pink with white type, and each bear two long tails that intertwine with one another, as if braided, before pointing to the heads of the characters talking.

By the end of the first issue/chapter (which I actually read when it was first released, thanks to Hoopla), Emi and the fairies have prevailed upon Mira to join them on a magical mission to save the world. Essentially, the fairies want the human twins to act as some sort of super-sized Shobijin, and using their song magic, travel back in time to the Mesozoic to recover a Mothra egg to bring back to the present. 

They succeed, as revealed in a spectacular double-page splash, Frank drawing dinosaurs and other prehistoric reptiles that suggest the designs of Rodan, Titanosaurus, Gorosaurus and Anguirus. And in a surprising cliffhanger ending, two scary-ish, goth-punk looking Shobijin join the familiar ones, and are introduced as the "handmaidens of Antra."

The story moves fast. After a short prehistoric adventure, involving a Mesozoic Mothra caterpillar with its own prehistoric Shobijin, our heroines secure an egg and are able to travel back to the present...or at least pretty close to the present, as they arrive during the Mothra/Antra battle 15 years ago. They didn't come alone, though, as Megaguirus dragonfly monsters follow them through the portal, joining the fray, and turning the tide against the modern Mothra, who Antra ultimately defeats/defeated and kills/killed. (Megaguirus, by the way, hails from 2000's Godzilla vs. Megaguirus, where its origins similarly involve a prehistoric giant dragonfly coming through a portal; while that was the monster's only film appearance, it's shown up in IDW comics before, and its bug-like nature obviously makes it a fitting opponent for Mothra).

So now what? Well, Mira and Emi's new Mothra egg hatches, revealing what is by far the cutest Mothra caterpillar ever. Our heroines try to return to the present day, but overshoot, which gives a big panel in a dystopian future where a Mechamothra (another original character of Campbell's and Frank's) is shown battling a pair of three-headed dragons (One, grayish in color and with forelimbs, is apparently Rebirth of Mothra's Desghidorah, the other is presumably the familiar King Ghidorah...although the background and foreground also show Ghidorah-like one-headed dragons). 

Eventually, our heroes make it to the right time period, and the new caterpillar weaves a cocoon, from which she emerges with a big "CHEEERNT" sound effect as the biggest, fluffiest, cutest Mothra I've ever seen, complete with a mane (see the cover above). 

Mothra's not yet ready to tackle Megaguirus, renamed as "Omegaguirus" at one point, so our heroines begin to train Mothra. This involves a battle with Antra arranged by the pair of handmaidens, and then a bravura sequence in which Mothra tackles a whole series of "sparring partners" pulled from the Toho catalog: Titanosaurus, Anguirus, Gabara, Baragon, Rodan and Varan, Manda and, most surprising to me, Maguma, who, unlike all of the others, has never actually appeared in a Godzilla movie before (And while I haven't yet read every IDW Godzilla comic—I am working on it, though!—I don't think Maguma has previously appeared in any of those, either). 

Who is Maguma? Well, Toho's 1962, Ishiro Honda-directed sci-fi film Gorath, about efforts to move Earth out of the path of a runaway star, features a scene where a giant, walrus-like monster emerges from the South Pole to cause trouble for the heroes. Like Manda then, who first appeared in 1963's Atragon, Maguma is something of an incidental monster from a Godzilla-less Toho sci-fi movie. Unlike Manda, who became absorbed into the Godzilla franchise with 1968's Destroy All Monsters, Maguma didn't later become a Godzilla character.

And why is this? Well, when Gorath made it to the U.S., it was stripped of its Maguma scenes, apparently because the monster looked too silly. (Maguma didn't make it into 2004's Godzilla Final Wars, the jukebox musical of Godzilla movies either, but the runaway star Gorath is mentioned).

You can see some images of Toho's Maguma here. Suffice it to say that Frank's version, who only appears in two panels, is infinitely cooler, more menacing and more realistic. As with all of Toho's monsters, Frank manages to adhere to their basic designs while animating them with a unique lifeforce, as if he were drawing the "real" versions of the monsters that the film studio was attempting to translate into a movie using the special effects technology available to them. 

Ultimately, Campbell and Frank's Mothra powers-up in an unusual way, is renamed "Gemini Mothra" and, thanks to the monster vs. monster training montage and the song magic of Mira and Emi, is able to defeat the book's final boss monster, giving humanity a chance to restart the world. Heck, even Megagurirus seems to get a chance to start over, as an unexpectedly cute, baby version of it emerges at the end. Our heroines will apparently be able to raise it right, just as they did their Mothra.

This might sound weird, given that Godzilla is not even in the series, but this is one of my favorite Godzilla comics to date, devoting as it does a smart script and page after page of gorgeous art to the characters and concepts of the Japanese giant monster movie. 

Runaways: Think of the Children (Marvel Entertainment) Marvel's Runaways haven't been on my radar for quite a while now—I just checked, and it looks like the last collection of Runaways was released in 2021—but I happened to stumble upon this new trade collection of a 2025 mini-series on Amazon the other day. As I have been reading the team's adventures for well over 20 years now, I figured I should add this to my shelf as well.

It's not evident from the trade paperback's cover, but the content makes clear what spurred this particular return to the characters by their last writer Rainbow Rowell: Marvel's One World Under Doom event (The event's logo ran along the top of the covers of the serially published issues). As one member of the book's ensemble cast is a renegade Doombot, it certainly makes sense to check in on the team and see how he (and they) are being impacted by One World Under Doom. 

This was the first time in memory I really appreciated the "Previously" recap on the inside front cover of a Marvel book, as I had completely forgotten where Rowell had left the team when the series was cancelled five years ago. Chase is in the future, Karolina is in space, and Nico is trying to hold the rest of their found family together in their most recent base (The Hostel) and supporting them by working at Trader Joe's Traitor Jim's (Why would anyone use the word "traitor" in the name of a grocery store? Unclear).

Now a squadron of Doombots are apparently scouring the world for errant Doombots—of which there are more than a few—telling the lost members of their flock "It is time to come home to Doom" and, if and when they resist, threatening, "In pieces, if necessary."

They eventually get to the Runaways' Doombot, named "Doombot", or, as he refers to himself, "Doom" (Although the cyborg Victor Mancha, Doombot's best friend, keeps urging him to take on a new name). Rowell does some interesting and fun stuff with this Doombot and the concept of identity, as he both thinks of himself as Doctor Doom himself (and often speaks that way), but simultaneously knows that he is a rebuilt and somewhat reprogrammed robot duplicate of the real Doom, who he is conscious of being a completely different entity.

Doombot tells Victor more than once that he embraces this duality and, indeed, as Rowell writes Doombot, he certainly seems to hold these two contradictory ideas simultaneously and be able to easily navigate the duality in conversation and in relation to the other characters, as frustrating as it may be to Victor.

I hesitate to say that this is Doombot's story, even if the driver of the action involves Doctor Doom's other Doombots coming to return him home to Doom, and "our" Doombot and the Runaways resist them, alternately fighting and running from them. The climax involves a small army of Doombots—at least 20, according to one panel—launching an assault on the Runaways, who end up fighting for their lives against this overwhelming force.

That hesistance is because there's plenty of attention spent on most of the characters, as Chase and Karolina both return. So too does Alex. Most of that attention is devoted to Nico and Gertrude, as the latter coaches the former to pursue the use of magic, despite the fact that in a previous arc she had lost her Staff of One, the (corrupting) traditional source of all her magical power. (Molly seems to get particularly short shrift, as does Gib; Gib basically just fills out blank spaces in some backgrounds...in one case, one of the two artists who draw the series seem to have forgotten to draw Gib at all in a pivotal panel, and it's briefly unclear whether or not he was magically teleported along with the rest of the team or left behind.)

Programmed with Latverian and pro-Doom propaganda, Doombot has adopted the care of the children that make up the team as his raison d'etre, repeatedly spouting the Latverian virtue of tending to the well-being of children. As fun as the insights into this particular Doombot's kind of complicated psychology is, it's even more fun watching him react to the news about Doctor Doom who, in One World Under Doom, has apparently succeeding in kinda sorta conquering the world through magical force and a charm offensive, naming himself global emperor. 

Doombot seems to turn on the television to watch Doctor Doom every chance he gets, responding "Indeed" and "Sensible" to the TV as Emperor Doom makes an address. It is only at the end that Doombot, realizing the inevitability of Doom and the fact that by resisting his fellow Doombots he's actually endangering the children he has elected to care for, that he decides to sacrifice himself, voluntarily leaving the team in order to return to Doom's fold, even though he realizes this likely means he will be reprogrammed, and lose the autonomy he now enjoys.

Of course, things don't work out quite that way, despite a rather emotional goodbye letter in which he perhaps coldly, robotically rattles off his assessment of each member of the team and what he prescribes for them. By the time he leaves, the army of Doombots has engaged the Runaways in what seems like a fight to the death...and the world has learned the whole truth about Emperor Doom and turned on him, leading to villain's off-panel downfall (I assume there was also a big fight involving lots of superheroes too, though).

In short, part of the source of Doom's newer, increased magical powers seems to involve the harming of children, in direct conflict with what Doombot believes...in fact, because that propaganda was programmed into his very being, "believes" probably isn't even a strong enough word for the degree to which such pro-Doom propaganda makes up Doombot's reality. It's certainly far more core than the actual action of Victor Von Doom. 

Rather conveniently, Doombot happens upon a small-looking demonstration in which protestors chant "Down with Doom!" and burn Doctor Doom in effigy. He then stumbles into an electronic store where he sees a news report about how "the longtime villain was draining the souls of Latverian children to fuel his many global endeavors." 

Doombot talks to himself as he witnesses the television news report:

It cannot be...

In Latveria nothing is more precious than our children.

Every child is a child of Doom.

I...

I...

I AM NOT DOOM!

I obviously don't know about the rest of One World Under Doom, but Rowell finds and exploits some pretty obvious parallels between the events of the Marvel Universe as described here and our own world, in which a genuinely bad guy is in charge, has convinced a significant portion of the (American) population that he's a good guy and reinforces his righteousness through a steady stream of television propaganda.

I mean, just as Doombot nodded along, agreeing with Doom's every utterance during an address, certainly plenty of our fellow American nod along in agreement to what they hear on the TV news. 

I suppose then that it is with a degree of wish fulfillment that Doombot can see a single news report, accept it as the truth, and reject the propaganda that has led to his support of Doom and has, in fact, informed his very being.

I mean, in the real world, our propaganda-programmed, bad guy-admiring fellow Americans would simply say news that their leader and idol is, in fact, a bad guy and is, in fact, harming children, is fake news, and suspect the media of manufacturing lies, maybe using AI to smear their leader. I mean, our villain has alleged to have sexually abused children by some witnesses whose reports are in files of the Epstein investigation that have been released so far (and, at the very least, he had been long-time friends with two people convicted of sexually abusing children) and his administration has kidnapped, imprisoned and deported children. And yet, some 30% of his followers still support them.

If only more Americans were as persuadable as this robot duplicate of a comic book supervillain...

BORROWED: 

Spider-Man & Wolverine Vol. 1: The Janus Directory (Marvel Entertainment) I suppose the pairing of two of Marvel's most popular characters is the main selling point of this series for most readers, and while that didn't hurt any when I was considering reading the book, it was the presence of artist Kaare Andrews that drew me to the book. 

Andrews is a very talented artist and storyteller, and he has an impressive range, able to work in a variety of different styles. He is particularly adept in this sort of unhinged '90s style, which he employs here, which can be a lot of fun to read; I saw a lot of Todd McFarlane, some Jim Lee and Erik Larsen and even a bit of Capcom (in Wolverine) while reading this, and much of the imagery is so over the top that it's clear that Andrews is doing something of a bit, as if there's an almost sarcastic edge to the '90s-ness of the art. 

Quite surprisingly, though, there are also a handful of what can only really be considered art mistakes in the book, ones that often follow almost immediately on something that's meant to be funny. (I say surprisingly because Andrews is such a good artist, as well as being quite experienced at this point and hell, this is Marvel; editors really should catch little panel-to-panel continuity things, right?). 

Clearly, Andrews is drawing like this on purpose, but he wouldn't also be doing a bad job on elements of the art on purpose too, would he? This isn't some extremely elaborate meta-commentary on both the excesses and overall quality of '90s Marvel comics, is it? One that writer Marc Guggenheim and the editors and publishers are all in on?

Here, let me give you some examples.

In the first issue/chapter, Peter Parker is on a coffee date with some lady who is not Mary Jane at an outside table (I am most certainly not up on Spider-Man continuity these days, so I have no idea what's going on with Peter's love life). A very Jim Lee-looking Logan simply appears astride a motorcycle right behind Peter, telling him he needs his help right this second. Wolverine speeding up to their table and apparently screeching to a halt inches away, so suddenly that he might as well have teleported? That's funny.

And then, at the bottom of the page, Logan speeds away with Peter behind him on the bike...and Peter and his date have a whole conversation of some half-dozen exchanges as the heroes drive away from her on a motorcycle, the string of alternating dialogue balloons looking like something out of an old issue of Spawn or, like, any Brian Michael Bendis comic.

Later, Wolverine and Spider-Man battle villains in a secret base. In one panel, the bad guys raise comically large guns that are almost perfect rectangles; the weapons aren't so much big in the way that the guns Cable used to tote around were big, but they are each about as long as the villains toting them are tall. Again, that's pretty funny.

But then, on the next page, a very Erik Larsen-y looking Spidey dodges what appears to be a girder thrust from off-panel at him, complete with a sound effect ("SSHHMM") and the hero taunting the villain who apparently tried to strike him with the object ("Nyah nyah, missed me"), but in the next panel, the villain is revealed, and their hands are empty. What was it that just almost struck Spider-Man, and how did the villain try to hit him with it if not with his hands? I dunno. 

One more.

Near the end of the book, Andrews draws a female character I have never heard of (but whom seems to be of some great importance to Spider-Man), and he draws her with both her breasts and butt jutted out to such an exaggerated degree that her spine is a perfect curve; she seems to be in the shape of a comma. Here, again, Andrews seems to be be making fun of the style he's imitating.

In the next panel, she fires a series of shots into the prone villain she has just downed, holding the gun in her left hand. In the very next panel after that, we get a close-up of her holding the smoking gun...but it's now in her right hand.

Again, I have no idea what was going on here, but such mistakes, while perhaps minor, are awfully frequent for a single story arc and are extremely distracting. 

But let's talk about Guggenheim's story, shall we? Though it's entitled The Janus Directory, it could just as easily be called The Story's Maguffin or Two Random Words. It's just a plot device brought up and mostly dropped after the first issue, save for a bit in the denouement which resolves the big revelation and conflict driving the arc, resetting things to normal.

The connective tissue between the two characters that Guggenheim explores here is one that seems obvious enough that I'm kind of surprised no one else has done so before. (Or maybe they have; I guess I wouldn't know either way). Logan's long, pre-superhero life included a lot of mysterious work as a mercenary, intelligence agent and wetwork, right? And Peter Parker's parents were super-spies before they died, leaving Uncle Ben and Aunt May to care for him, right? (Um, unless you believe Mark Millar, I guess?)

Well, what if Logan and Peter's parents had crossed paths back then? And what if it was Logan who was responsible for their deaths? Huh? What about that?

Guggenheim rockets through the set-up. By page three, an old spy associate (Bill Branscome? Ring any bells for anyone else?) has told Wolverine about the Janus Directory, "a master database of the world's double agents," which came into possession of SHIELD before they disbanded (SHIELD disbanded? I could really use some asterisks and footnotes here, Marvel!), making it the "intel equivalent of a loose nuke."

For reasons of plot convenience, Logan turns to Spider-Man for help (Actually, I think Wolvie says at one point he needs a computer guy, and Spidey being a nerd in his contact list is enough to qualify him). The heroes arrive at a secret SHIELD base in New York, and they are immediately beset by villains Kraven the Hunter, Omega Red and Mysterio (The latter's illusions blending the heroes' traumatic memories, so that Wolverine digs his way out of a grave and watches Green Goblin kill Mariko, while Spider-Man is crucified on an X and runs around snowy Canada in his underwear and Weapon X-style helmet, and so on).

When Spidey finally gets to the keyboard and has access to the directory, he decides to check out the final transmission of his parents, and here he sees Logan with a knife aboard their plane before it crashed. OMG! Logan killed Spider-Man's parents?!

This, obviously, leads to a fight. 

Spidey kicks Wolvie from behind and then crouches over the prone X-Man, his muscles bunching up in such a way to make him look deformed, vowing in a red-rimmed dialogue balloon "...I'M GOING TO KILL YOU."

That's the end of the first issue. So yeah, pretty good cliffhanger!

The fight occupies the entirety of the second issue, which includes a double-page splash you have to turn the book on its side to look at properly. The pissed-off Spidey has the best of it for a while (Unfortunately for them both, because Logan's memories are so fucked-up, he can't outright deny that he didn't kill Peter's parents, because he himself doesn't know for sure that he didn't). Is this because Spider-Man really could take Wolverine in a fight, or because Wolverine is holding back? Unclear.

Wolverine stops holding back, however, when Spidey punches him so hard that he dislocates his jaw and hurls him into something that explodes, and he emerges with a broken jaw, a pretty gross series of images by Andrews showing his limp lower jaw wagging beneath his mouth, his tongue lolling around, and apparently in a berserker rage.

(I had to see it, so now you do too.)

Things then start to go Wolverine's way for a bit, and the one-issue fight finally ends when Wolvie seems to impale Spider-Man on his claws, shoving his fist into the web-slinger's gut hard enough that the claws come out of Spidey's back. End issues two. Again, pretty good cliffhanger!

Let's here pause to consider the question that Guggenheim raises with this issue: Who would win in a fight, Spider-Man or Wolverine? 

It's a question I never considered before, having not been into Marvel comics at the age in which that might be a thing I would think or care about. Doing so now, I think Spider-Man should defeat Wolverine pretty easily, right?

The main problem seems to be how to maneuver them into a fight at all, and, perhaps, how to sufficiently motivate Spidey to fight as hard as the deadlier, more vicious Wolverine, but, well Guggenheim has already done that here. 

Even given Wolvie's current more amped-up healing factor and assuming he now has some degree of super-strength, as would be necessary to lug around those metal super-bones of his, Spidey is stronger, faster, more agile and has his spidey-sense. Also, he can attack with his webbing from a distance, meaning he could wrap Wolverine up and incapacitate him pretty much as soon as the fight starts, right? 

(So, how wrong am I? I have to assume that over the decades these two have fought once, or twice or twenty times before. Who usually wins when they fight?)

Guggenheim and Andrews seem to cheat a bit here, though, making Wolverine strong enough to simply tear his way out of Spider-Man's webbing (Again, am I in the wrong here? Wolverine's not supposed to be that strong, is he?). I mean, I'll definitely buy that Wolvie's claws can cut through steel-strong webs, but he shouldn't really be able to do that if he's all cocooned up like a mummy, right? Here he simply rips free of head-to-toe webbing. 

Anyway, back to the plot. After Wolverine seemingly kills Spidey in a rage, the third issue/chapter opens with them in the Savage Land. Spider-Man's wound is now dressed and his red-and-blue suit has been replaced with his black costume ("Believe me, if I wanted you dead, you would be," Wolverine says by way of explaining how it was that running Spider-Man through with his claws didn't kill him). And Wolverine is now dressed in his brown and yellow costume with the big red belt.

Why? Well, because those costumes are pretty cool, I guess? And so are dinosaurs? So why not have them in the Savage Land in their old costumes? 

For the remainder of the series, they will fight villains at various locations (Doctor Octopus joins the fray at one point) around the world, teleported from place to place, all at the behest of a new villain with a light saber and the presumably intentionally dumb name Dreadshadow (He's also a cyborg, naturally). He's organized all of this as part of an extremely expensive plan to get his revenge on Wolverine and Spider-Man for something they inadvertently caused that I won't spoil. That, and because he wants to prove a point. 

Dreadshadow is ultimately killed by Teresa Parker, who is apparently Peter's sister...? (I actually shared the panels of her stabbing and shooting Dreadshadow to death above). She first appears in the second-to-last issue, wearing Wolverine-like clawed gloves, toting a gun that fires special Wolverine-killing bullets, and wearing a costume that changes pretty dramatically between the fourth and fifth chapters/issues (In the fifth issue, Andrews draws her with some sort of metal breastplate that looks more like she is wearing a steel bra outside her union suit).

This particular discrepancy isn't completely Andrews' fault, though. The fourth issue has a guest artist, Gerardo Sandoval, who inks his own work alongside Victor Nava. 

He does a fine job and matches Andrews' energy and over-the-top style (I particularly like the way he draws the "ears" on Wolverine's mask, as rather than being static, they bend a bit depending on Wolverine's actions).

Still, he's not Andrews, and, given that I was reading this to see Andrews go nuts with the awfully random-feeling plot elements Guggenheim challenges him with, I was a little disappointed to find a fill-in. (Also, issue #4 of a new ongoing series seems fairly early for a fill-in, doesn't it?).

Oh, and if you're worried that maybe Logan did kill the Parkers, rest assured that the footage was manipulated, and Spider-Man was just being an easy mark, as Guggenheim wanted a big Spider-Man/Wolverine fight. There are further ramifications, too, but they are for Teresa Parker, who I didn't even know existed, so they don't feel like a big deal to me personally, but perhaps they will for Spider-Man fans...? And/or Teresa Parker fans...?

While there are obviously some issues in this book, and it's not as good as it could be—and should be—it is still a lot of fun. I laughed a couple of times, and I had a good time with Andrews' art. I don't know that it's worth paying $17.99 for, but it's definitely worth seeing if your library has a copy. 

REVIEWED: 

Calamity Before Jane (Toon Books) Following his 2023 Paul Bunyan, cartoonist Noah Van Sciver tackles another legendary character from American history, this time telling the story of the woman we call Calamity Jane...and the stories she told. More here. 

A Kid Like Me (HarperAlley) The protagonist of Norm Feuti's graphic novel about a middle-schooler struggling to fit-in and be cool when starting over at a new school faces an additional challenge far beyond his control: He's economically disadvantaged, and his relative poverty is all the more strikingly apparent as he encounters kids from wealthier backgrounds. More here. 

Wrong Friend (First Second) Charise Mericle Harper's graphic memoir (?) about a young girl named Charise who gets suddenly dumped by her best friend, and then has to start over, looking for a new BFF. As with the earlier Bad Sister, Harper here reteams with artist Rory Lucey. More here. 

Isn't this the exact thing people used to argue was necessary in order to save the comics industry...?

I've been blogging about comics here at Every Day Is Like Wednesday for about 20 years now but even before that I used to read about and very occasionally talk about comics online, mostly on the DC Comics message boards and the handful of comics news sites that were around at the time. One thing I used to hear said an awful lot back then was that the one thing that could save the comics industry* would be if publishers could just get their books back in grocery stores and drugstores, where they could be seen and purchased by kids and other new readers, thus growing the market beyond those that already patronize their local comics specialty shops.

Well guess what I saw in the checkout aisle at the grocery store?

Shelved among the latest issues of People and Woman's World and, um, some books of word searches was a magazine simply entitled Justice League, the cover featuring a Jim Lee drawing of the New 52 League (note the presence of Cyborg, and Superman's lack of red briefs) and the words "Four acclaimed comic book stories by all-star writers and artists!"

I was surprised to see it there, although I suppose I shouldn't be. I had previously seen similar magazine format collections of reprints focused on Batman and Superman in the same store, although those were in the magazine section, rather than right here in the checkout aisle, where a kid could presumably spot it and ask his or her parent if they could get it.

This was for a very long time Archie Comics' whole business model, selling digest collections of their comics in grocery store check-out lines and, according to Tim Hanley's book Betty and Veronica, it was a model that helped save the publisher when the comics market was contracting and specialty shops started to replace newsstands and spinner racks as the places that people bought comics. 

Of course, this collection costs $14.99, which seems like a fairly steep price for an impulse buy, although I suppose that's about what magazines tend to cost these days. (There weren't any Archie digests on sale there to compare it to, but according to the publisher's online store, one of their upcoming digests costs $9.99 for about 100 pages). 

Comics readers will likely find that price point pretty high, though, as that's $15 for only 84 pages of comics, all of them reprints. That price is approaching trade paperback level. I mean, Justice League Unlimited Vol. 1: Into the Inferno, the latest trade paperback collection featuring the Justice League, costs $17.99, and that collects six issues, or about 120 pages.  

I did ask my sister if she would buy a $15 magazine for my nephew if he asked for it in the checkout line of the grocery store, and she said she would, as she encourages any kind of reading. Given that this is a survey of just one parent though, I can't be sure how representative she is of the average parent. 

So, what are the four acclaimed stories by all-star writers and artists collected within? A quartet of timeless, evergreen done-in-ones? Ha ha, no don't be silly. Rather, they are the first issues from four different Justice League titles from the last 30 years or so, and I couldn't discern the logic for the order in which they appear; they are neither chronological (that is, oldest to newest) nor reverse chronological (newest to oldest). 

Also, somewhat surprisingly, though the magazine is magazine-sized rather than comic book sized, the comics pages within have been blown-up or reformatted in anyway. They're at comic book page-sized, they just all have wide borders that fill up the rest of the extra space. 

Anyway, here's what $15 will get you at the grocery store...

Justice League Unlimited #1 (2025) by Mark Waid and Dan Mora This seems to be a smart, even obvious choice, as this is the first issue of the current Justice League title, one that's only about a year old at this point (DC has only published one, maybe one and a half collections of it so far, depending on how you want to count Justice League Unlimited/World's Finest: We Are Yesterday).

It introduces various plot elements that won't be resolved for a while (the mysterious villain team Inferno, for example) and it ends on a fairly potent cliffhanger (with point-of-view character Airwave confessing to the readers in a narration box that he's only joined the Justice League in order to kill them all). But, at the same time, the first half or so of the issue pretty thoroughly introduces the premise of this particular Justice League book, that of a massive, army-like super-League consisting of pretty much every superhero in the DC Universe.

The early scenes, in which Airwave arrives on the new team's new satellite Watchtower headquarters, is chock-full of appearances by various heroes, making this story a pretty strong introduction to the breadth of the DC Universe. Skimming through the book again as I pound this post out (I had previously reviewed the first trade paperback collection of the series in this column), I counted over 50 heroes appearing in some fashion, including those you might expect in a modern Justice League comic (Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman, a The Flash), some less likely candidates (Firestorm, Black Lightning, Star Sapphire, a Kid Flash) and some pretty deep cuts (Tuatara, for example; he doesn't just cameo, but is name-dropped as well, as Red Tornado sends him off on an off-panel mission with a few others). 

The issue, and the next five, are collected in the aforementioned Justice League Unlimited Vol. 1: Into the Inferno, which was then followed by Justice League Unlimited/World's Finest: We Are Yesterday. Other characters and concepts introduced in these 20 pages are followed up on in various spin-offs too, like Challengers of the Unknown, The Question: All Along the Watchtower and Justice League: The Atom Project. The JLU title is still ongoing, and the last issue to ship as of this writing seems to be #16.

I have some concerns about JLU—mainly that the book seems to offer a status quo rather than a story or stories, and, increasingly, that it's meant to serve as a bridge between various big event series like Absolute Power and DC K.O.—but in terms of quality, that first issue was solid. 

There are certainly worse creators a new DC reader could choose to follow after this series than Waid and Mora, too. The former has decades of quality series and miniseries on his resume (including various Justice League-related books), and Mora is one of the best artists drawing super-comics for DC at the moment...or drawing them for anyone else, for that matter. 

Justice League #1 (2011) by Geoff Johns, Jim Lee and Scott Williams I was a little surprised to see this one in here. Not just because this was the first chapter of The New 52 version of the Justice League's origin and the New 52 continuity has since been rebooted away (Although according to New History of the DC Universe, this story, or at least some version of it, still happened in current continuity, it just would have had to happen fairly differently). No, I was mostly surprised because it's not really much of a Justice League story. Despite the whole team appearing on the cover, the issue itself is basically just a Batman/Green Lantern team-up; the only other Leaguers to appear at all are Superman, who is one panel, and a pre-Cyborg Victor Stone, who is on a couple of pages.

This issue (and the story arc it is a part of) has been collected and recollected several times now, starting with 2012's Justice League Vol. 1: Origin (There have also been deluxe, "Absolute" and "Unwrapped" editions since). This iteration of the title would last 52 issues, with Johns writing the first 50 of them (Lee would draw two arcs, the first one and "The Villain's Journey"). 

As I was a Justice League fan, I wasn't exactly enamored with this story or this run (or the New 52 in general), which jettisoned DC comics history/continuity to offer a new "Ultimate" style reboot. 

Johns' greatest strength as a DC writer was his ability to finesse thorny continuity into things that mostly made sense, solving the storytelling problems that occurred when various writers over the decades took turns on the characters, synthesizing past, sometimes contradictory stories into something that felt natural, even intentional. The New 52 stripped him of that, of course. 

Lee is, obviously, a pretty great artist, and this arc was a decent showcase for him—although the number of splash pages in this first issue is striking and, if you happened to have bought the issue in 2011, annoying—but he's not the best character designer, and the New 52 Justice League notoriously had him redesigning some of the best and most iconic characters in history. I mean, can one really improve on Superman's costume? No, but Lee tried and, well, you can see what that looked like. (Even the costumes he left mostly alone, like Carmine Infantino's Flash costume and Gil Kane's Green Lantern costume, were given more, fussier lines.)

And, again, because The New 52 continuity is now over, I'm not sure there's a whole lot to really recommend this iteration of the Justice League book to new readers. Although if you are a Jim Lee fan, then there are at least two trade collections of him drawing a Justice League you might want to check out.

Justice League #1 (2018) by Scott Snyder, Jim Cheung and Mark Morales The Scott Snyder-written iteration of the Justice League book spun out of his Dark Nights: Metal event series and Justice League: No Justice miniseries, and his line-up seemed to be an in-comics re-creation of the that in the old Justice League cartoon series, with Hawkgirl, Martian Manhunter and Green Lantern John Stewart rejoining after pretty long absences from each. (You'll note Cyborg is on the cover, and, in this issue at least, he is presented as a member of the current team, while John is called in as a secret weapon at one point; Cyborg will pretty immediately leave this "main" league, joining the splinter team in the spin-off Justice League Odyssey, while John will essentially replace him on the team.)

In this issue, the already formed Justice League, headquartered in the Hall of Justice, fight a long-term scheme of Vandal Savage's, the heroes keeping in touch via J'onn's telepathy while they fight against Savage's armies on various mini-missions. Each is assisted by a guest-star or two—Green Arrow, Adam Strange, Plastic Man, Mister Terrific, Swamp Thing, etc.—although these do little more than cameo. While the League staves off that threat, it's actually Lex Luthor and his new (rather small) Legion of Doom that ultimately confront Savage. 

Meanwhile, a mysterious threat from beyond the Source Wall streaks like a comet towards Earth, space-time swirling "like road dust" behind it, while various other cameos look on (The 853rd Century's Justice Legion-A, Kamandi, a Monitor, The Quintessence).

Like the previous issue collected in the magazine, this issue has been collected and re-collected plenty of times; I just re-read it in a library-borrowed electronic copy of Justice League by Scott Snyder Book One The Deluxe Edition. 

Snyder's run, which featured a few fill-in issues from writer James Tynion IV and art from a whole bunch of different artists, lasted about 39 issues. The title continued for another 36 issues though, with writers Robert Venditti, Simon Spurrier, Jeff Loveness, Joshua Williamson, Brian Michael Bendis and the team of Andy Lanning and Ron Marz all following Snyder, some of them writing enough issues to constitute a "run", others only writing a story arc. The title was then cancelled with issue #75, as part of the lead-up to Williamsons Dark Crisis on Infinite Earths. 

I read all of the Snyder issues (and the rest of the title more sporadically), so I guess it was good enough that I never dropped it. It was well-written, and the art was never terrible (although it would have been nice if Snyder had a true, regular, consistent partner on his run). What is both noteworthy—and really weird—about Snyder's run is that it is essentially just one big, long story arc, about the Justice League fighting the Legion of Doom (Luthor, Grodd, Sinestro, Black Manta and Cheetah...The Joker, who is in this first issue, would leave almost immediately) over fundamental forces of the universe, and the direction that the universe was to take...towards justice, or towards doom. 

Snyder also introduced some cosmic beings that played into his own messing around with the nature of DC continuity and the multiverse.

It had its moments (most of them revolving around Starro and Jarro), but, seen from the remove of years, it now seems a lot like an ongoing series devoted to marking time, acting as a bridge between Snyder's Dark Nights: Metal and his Dark Nights: Death Metal. Because of that, I can't really remember the specifics of any single issue or arc within the overall narrative, nor have I ever been tempted to revisit it. 

JLA #1 (1997) By Grant Morrison, Howard Porter and John Dell The final issue collected in here is the first of the Morrison/Porter/Dell JLA, which took the then novel (if obvious) approach of re-teaming the Justice League's founders (with the legacy versions of The Flash and Green Lantern taking the places of their then-dead predecessors). It was the first time that some version of these seven heroes had starred in a Justice League title together since the early 1980s, and thus seemed pretty fresh, new and exciting then.

I do wonder how readers seeing this comic for the very first time might react to certain aspects of it. Would they know who this Kyle Rayner character was? Would they wonder at all about Aquaman's design, with the gladiator armor and harpoon hand? Or why Superman has a mullet? Or perhaps why Martian Manhunter seems so nude?

The issue opens with a UFO landing on the White House lawn. Out of it steps a golden, caped man named Protex and his superhero team The Hyperclan, who say have come to save the world and deal with all of its problems...even if they do so in a much harsher way than any Justice League ever has (At one point, they execute supervillains tied to posts with their eyebeams; Porter draws one of them to resemble Marvel's Wolverine). They are met by Superman, and he and various other heroes aren't so sure about the Hyperclan's methods or promises of quick fixes to long-term problems.

At one point, mysterious assailants assault the then-Justice League America's satellite base, knocking it out of the sky, and forcing Leaguers Metamorpho, Ice Maiden, Obsidian and Nuklon to a desperate gamble to save their own lives (Metamorpho, who transforms himself into an escape capsule, dies in the process, or at least seems to die in the process; his funeral is then held in JLA #5 but, like all superheroes, and like Morrison hints during the funeral, he will eventually get better).

In this first issue, all of the incoming Leaguers appear, except Aquaman, who will be reluctantly drafted into the brewing fight against the Hyperclan in JLA #2. Superman, Green Lantern and Wonder Woman (who was leading the previous League, the team who flee the satellite, in Justice League America, the title that JLA would replace) get the most panel time, while Martian Manhunter and Batman get the least, the latter showing up in the last five panels, and uttering "HH!" for the first time.

(I love how Potrter poses Batman there, melodramatically stalking around, gesturing like a vampire; this is pretty consistent with how then Batman artist Kelley Jones was drawing him.)

Frankly, I could talk about this title, and this particular story arc, for thousands of words, but that's probably enough for this post. 

This issue, and this arc, has also been collected and recollected over and over. If you've never read it and would like to, basically just look for any book with "JLA", "Grant Morrison" and a "1" on the cover. 

Morrison's run would last through issue #41, with maybe a half-dozen fill-in issues, and include JLA/WildC.A.T.s (did I spell that right?), original graphic novel JLA: Earth-2 and event series DC One Million.  Porter and Dell drew most of it, with fill-in artists needed here and there to meet deadlines (These include Oscar Jimenez on #8 and #9, Mark Pajarillo here and there and, surprisingly, the likes of Greg Land and Gary Frank, among a few others). 

Morrison was followed by Mark Waid and Joe Kelly on JLA, which would ultimately run 125 issues, and, after Kelly's run, the book became an anthology series with rotating creative teams until it was finally canceled in 2006 as part of the events of Infinite Crisis. 

I am likely prejudiced and influenced by nostalgia to some degree, as this was my first introduction to the Justice League, but Morrison and company's JLA was (and is) one of my favorite comic book runs ever; revisiting it now and then, I still think it holds up as one of the best superhero comics ever.

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Previous to the comics portion of this magazine, there's a two-page introduction by a Jim McLaughlin, under the headline "Top Heroes. Top Talent." It's maybe 500-800 words, tops, and seems to do a decent enough job of offering a sort of elevator pitch to the Justice League concept and then introducing the writers, pencil artists and concepts for each of the issues included. The thesis seems to be that the idea of the Justice League was to unite the best DC characters into one book, which naturally produced the best comics by the best creators.

It's a decent piece given its brevity and I wouldn't argue with its main points, publisher boosterism aside, although I will nitpick it (I also would have attached the names Gardner Fox and Mike Sekowsky when mentioning 1960's Brave and the Bold #28). I mean, you know how wordy I am; I would struggle mightily to produce a piece that hit all these points in so few words.

The parts I found most interesting, maybe even revealing, were the ways in which McLaughlin described the writers and pencillers.

Mark Waid isn't just "one of comics' most acclaimed and award-winning scribes," but he is also "the scholar, the teacher." And Dan Mora? Well, he's "a 30-something hotshot who burst out of Costa Rica to become one of comics' most dazzling talents almost overnight." (Overnight, I guess, if you don't count his pre-DC work for the likes of Boom, although you should count it; it's also great!).

Upon relaunching the League for the New 52, Geoff Johns was "writer and executive producer of DC's The Flash TV show and Wonder Woman movies", rather than one of super-comics' most popular writers, who then had a decade of experience writing most of DC's biggest heroes, teams and events, and had even managed to make books starring less-than topline characters like Hal Jordan and the Justice Society into hits. (As for the New 52, that was "a groundbreaking slate" of comics "that grabbed both critical acclaim and massive sales success." Sales? Sure. Acclaim? Eh...the fan press sure like Scott Snyder's Batman, but I'm having trouble thinking of many—or any—critical darlings among that mess. Refresh my memory, if you do.)

Scott Snyder's run on Batman was also "groundbreaking", according to McLaughlin, and Jim Cheung is an excellent draftsman. Together, their book—which Cheung didn't last all that long on, intentionally built a lineup to "echo" that of "the smash-hit Justice League animated series."

And finally, we get to Grant Morrison, "a madman-with-a-plan writer who cut his teeth on DC Imprints books." (McLaughlin also refers to Morrison as "he" here, rather than Morrison's preferred pronoun "they", which I can definitely relate to, as EDILW readers have repeatedly had to call me out for doing so here and on Bluesky; still, it's probably embarrassing to do so in print, rather than online, where it's so easily fixed).

I found the "DC Imprints" phrase...weird. Yes, Morrison wrote some Vertigo books (And why not just say "Vertigo" instead of "DC Imprints", with a capital "I" in "Imprints"?). These included Sebastian O, The Mystery Play, Kill Your Boyfriend and Flex Mentallo. But before that, Morrison had written Animal Man and Doom Patrol (Morrison's runs on each title concluding before these books were absorbed into the new Vertigo imprint in 1993, although certainly Morrison's work helped establish the Vertigo aesthetic). And, of course, there was Morrison's earlier Batman work, the original graphic novel Arkham Asylum and the Legends of the Dark Knight arc "Gothic" (the latter of which was collected into a trade paperback, back when such collections were relatively rare). That's just the DC stuff, though; prior to that Morrison "cut his teeth" (or "their teeth") on comics in the UK, of course.

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Anyway, it's nice to see that DC Comics' Justice League comic is finally taking its place in the grocery store checkout aisle, alongside such other important pieces of American pop culture, like, let's see here...

...ground beef, Sydney Sweeney's breasts and Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce's "epic" romance, I guess. 

*And by "comics industry", I think they just meant "the direct market" or "DC and Marvel as publishers that release series as floppies once a month".