The Justice Society vs. Hitler and The Spear of Destiny, Round One: On 1977's DC Special #29

In discussing what seems to be the first appearance of the Spear of Destiny in the DC Universe in 1977's Weird War Tales #50, a couple of you pointed me towards that same year's DC Special #29 as the first time the spear played a part in the story of the Justice Society. Over the decades, the magical properties of the spear were used as a retroactive explanation—that is, a retcon—of why it was that America's many powerful superheroes didn't directly enter World War II, with nigh omnipotent characters like The Spectre or Doctor Fate subduing Germany and capturing Hitler over the course of a busy afternoon.

The special was much easier to find than I originally worried, as it was collected in the back of 2006's Justice Society Vol. 1, which contained the first half of the 1976-1978 All-Star Comics series (It looks like it was also collected in 2011's Showcase Presents: All-Star Comics, one of the too-many Showcase collection I unfortunately missed, and 2019's All-Star Comics: Only Legends Live Forever).

Entitled "The Untold Origin of the Justice Society of America", the 34-page, oversized story was the work of writer Paul Levitz, pencil artist Joe Staton and inker Bob Layton, with Neal Adams providing the cover, in which the Justice Society battles Valkyries while the greatest comic book villain of the Golden Age rants and raves in the foreground.

While the Spear of Destiny does feature rather prominently in the proceedings, and while it does evince magical powers that give Hitler some military advantage over America's superheroes, Levitz does not use it as any sort of explanation for why the JSoA didn't serve on the frontlines of the war, so that aspect of the spear in DCU history must have been introduced sometime later. 

It's also worth noting that this "Untold" origin of the Justice Society seems to contradict their actual origins from 1940's All-Star Comics #3 and the earlier issues of the series in several ways...which I only know because DC recently collected those comics in a pair of DC Finest: Justice Society of America trades.

First, there's the line-up. The Golden Age Batman and Superman are here involved in this adventure, whereas they were honorary members in the original comics (In a fun peculiarity, whenever a JSoA member got their own title, they were essentially promoted to "honorary member," leaving behind the also-rans of the Society; Wonder Woman was an exception, but then, she served as the Society's secretary, and thus wasn't active in each of their adventures). Meanwhile, Johnny Thunder, who was present from the first, even if he had to wait a few issues before he could earn an official chair at the team's round table, is here MIA.

Second, here the team's origin is prompted by President Franklin Roosevelt, who sends a trio of heroes on a mission into wartime Europe, and others join in various ways as the adventure unfolds. In the last pages, Roosevelt suggests they stick together as a team. 

Of course, in the original comics, the team seems like more of a social club devoted to swapping stories, and the war had no influence over their first banding together. They would soon go on various missions at the behest of the government, though (as soon as All-Star Comics #4, in fact), and they did all temporarily resign to join various branches of the armed forces (in All-Star Comics #11), an army general asking them to stick together in their superhero identities and form "The Justice Battalion of America." (Here, Hawkman suggests they form "a special super-batallion," [sic] but Superman corrects him, saying "we're not part of any army" and that "we fight only in the cause of justice...and that'll give us our name...").

With that out of the way, let's see how Levitz had reimagined the formation of the Justice Society, over 35 years after Gardner Fox and company had originally assembled them, and, in particular, how he made use of the Spear of Destiny.

I suppose I should also not that, this being 1977, this entire story is set on DC's Earth-2, the alternate world where the publisher's Golden Age comics all really happened, and where the original, Golden Age versions of their heroes continued to adventure on into the present day (Crisis on Infinite Earths would later collapsed Earth-2 into a single DCU, where the Golden Age heroes passed the baton onto the Silver Age heroes, and the likes of Superman, Batman and Wonder Woman were all modern-day heroes, their Golden Age iterations erased from continuity). That said, this story—or at least a slightly altered version of it—still existed post-Crisis, as Roy Thomas, Michael Bair and Bob Downs would re-tell it in 1988's Secret Origins #31, stripping Batman and Superman out of the proceedings...along with a few other alterations. (We'll take a look at that story in a future post). 

The title page features a crowd of over 20 heroes, the entirety of the Earth-Two Justice Society, with Red Tornado Ma Hunkel and the other Red Tornado in the back, and the likes of Power Girl, Skyman and Robin-with-yellow-pants in the foreground. 

In the upper left corner, Levitz pens a green narration box setting the stage:

In the winter of 1940, Adolf Hitler abandoned plans to invade England! To this day, no one knows why--no one but the ten heroes who battled across two continents to ruin those plans--and give birth to a legend!

One stormy night in 1940, a British agent named Smythe meets with President Roosevelt (who Staton gives a huge, pumpkin of a head, its size seemingly magnified by the tininess of his little glasses), telling him that he has reliable information that Hitler plans to invade England, and that he's been sent to ask for America's help in repelling the Nazis.

Roosevelt responds:

As God is my witness, you know I want to help...but I am the president of this great nation--not the king.

And I have promised my friends, the American people, that I would not lead them into war--not unless we were attacked!

How quaint that all sounds today! An American president acknowledging the limits of his powers, specifically saying he's not a king. An American president who feels honor bound to keep his word regarding not entering a war to the people who elected him. An American president who realizes he can't just enter a war because he wants to. 

Roosevelt has something of a compromise, or a workaround, to suggest to Smythe instead, though: Sending some of the "costumed heroes" who have appeared all over America in the last few months, men who are "more powerful, more daring than ordinary mortals."

Across his desk he slides a half-dozen photos of some of these guys, including the likes of Green Lantern, The Flash, Doctor Fate and, um, Batman, who I guess is technically more daring than ordinary mortals but, well, he's not the secret weapon I'd send to stave off an enemy army if I had my pick of Golden Age superheroes...

But what do I know?

A week later, Batman answers the bat-signal to find Green Lantern, The Flash and Smythe waiting for him in Commissioner Gordon's office. Maybe Smythe decided to call on Batman because, though lacking in super-powers of any kind, he is the easiest superhero to get a hold of...?

The trio are sent to a castle in Scotland, where advance men for the Nazi invasion are based. The heroes bust them up, but the aren't counting on the presence of an "experimental...murder machine!", a big, green robot with a swastika on its chest that kerShlams Batman into unconsciousness. Then The Flash bounces off of the robot at super-speed and strikes Green Lantern, rendering them both unconscious as well. 

The first use of superheroes in World War II does not exactly get off to a great start, then.

We then find the heroes in Berlin, where they stand atop a high wall, bound at the wrists and ankles, while Adolf Hilter himself plans to unmask them and publicly execute them, using "the ancient Spear of Destiny that a Roman soldier used on Christ himself!"

 It's unclear why The Flash's speed powers are no use to him when it comes to escaping such bonds, nor why Green Lantern can't use his ring to break free (It's not like he's in a wooden stockade or anything). Levitz never explains this, either. 

Regardless, Doctor Fate and Hourman appear, the former having seen Batman and company's capture in a crystal ball, and then picked up the latter on his way to Berlin. "I have need of your power!" Fate said by explanation to the Man of the Hour; granted, Hourman has more power than Batman, but wouldn't The Spectre of Superman have been a better get...?

As the newcomers free their fellow mystery men, Hitler grips the now-glowing spear and shouts.

"Then you Amerikaners are doubly fools," he starts: 

For you shall now only pay with your lives--

--you shall not stop the blitzkrieg that strikes Britain!

This I swear by the mystic spear and by all that is holy to Germany!

There's a flash of lightning in the sky, and a loud "Kulthoom," apparently the sound of thunder. Doctor Fate yells a warning at Hitler: "Madman--put down that talisman! You are unleashing forces beyond your ken--or your control!"

But it's too late. Through the power of the spear, Hitler has inadvertently summoned the Valkyries, "the sword-maidens of the Germanic war god, Wotan." Staton's women warriors seem to hail from a Norse mythology more like the one Jack Kirby drew for Marvel than that of our world. The fierce-looking women, each astride a winged white horse, wear tight red and green uniforms that suggest superhero costumes, the necklines plunging to their waists, showing off lots of cleavage. 

Fate leads the heroes into battle against the women, a battle that "rages overhead like a tempest", despite the fact that most of the heroes can't fly like Fate and Green Lantern can. Maybe Fate's magic is keeping the others airborne...? (In one panel, Staton does draw a tornado beneath The Flash's feet, though, so maybe his speed was able to generate a swirl of sufficiently powerful wind to keep him aloft...)

Meanwhile, Germany's invasion fleet closes in on England, and so Fate unleashes four magical tendrils that stretch across the Atlantic to pluck defenders from America. These turn out to be The Sandman, The Atom and Hawkman (Hawkman's helmet looks off to me; it's not the weird, screeching bird face mask he wore in the Golden Age All-Star Comics, but looks more like that of the Silver Age, Thanagarian Hawkman; did the Golden Age Hawkman ever wear such a mask? Like all things Hawkman, I have no idea). 

Somehow, this trio seems to help turn the tide on the beaches, despite the fact that all three are basically just above average regular guys, likely in better shape and more experienced at punching people out than the average G.I. would be, but otherwise not bringing all that much to the battle.

I mean, Hawkman's power is that he flies (He doesn't even bring a mace to this fight). The Atom's is that...he works out a lot...? And The Sandman? Well, his gimmick is that he puts gangsters to sleep and leaves them poetry...at this point, he's still in his suit, hat and cape instead of the purple and yellow tights he would later change into, but rather than a gas gun, here he throws sand at his foes, sand that seems to have a soporific effect.

At any rate, together with British military (and I have to assume the British military did most of the work), the three American heroes are able to repel the invasion...at least for a panel. With dismay, they realize that they had only turned back the very first wave, and that a whole fleet is on its way. 

But then the fourth hero Doctor Fate had summoned across the sea makes his appearance, first as "a sinister shadow against the moon," and then taking his more familiar form, that of "The astral avenger known only as...THE SPECTRE!"

The Spectre descends from the sky as a giant, wades through the English Channel, which reaches only to his waist, and sinks the fleet singlehandedly. 

At one point, he scoops a defiant Nazi officer up in his giant hand and looks directly at him, seemingly breaking the man as he does so: "Admiral Wilheim von Krupp looked into the eye of The Spectre this night... And all he saw was death!"

The Spectre's brief battle against the German fleet takes up only two pages, but there's one panel that is of particular interest. Levitz's narration reads, "Like the Angel of Death among the Egyptians, he visits each and every ship..."

That's an evocative image, of course, and a pretty intriguing metaphor. I can't help but wonder if John Ostrander had read it when it was originally published, or if he had encountered in when doing research for his 1992-1998 series The Spectre, which revealed that the "astral avenger" wasn't simply a powerful vengeful ghost, but was in fact the embodiment of God's own wrath. Indeed, in The Spectre #14, The Phantom Stranger tells us that The Spectre was literally the angel of death that went among the Egyptians in the Exodus story. 

If Ostrander did not read this scene in this particular comic book, though, he definitely read it in Secret Origins #31. In 1994's Spectre #20, an elderly Johnny Thunder tells a story of the first time he met The Spectre, when they were fighting "a holding action against a German invasion fleet that was in the English Channel." Johnny's story is only five panels, the first of which is a splash page showing a gigantic Spectre ankle-deep in the channel, holding aloft a German ship as if it were a toy. The remaining four panels show a German officer looking The Spectre in the eye, in which he sees the image of a skull. This retells a scene from both DC Special #29 and Secret Origins #31, although here it's a little more deadly sounding: "All them Germans that looked The Spectre in the eye--they all died screaming, you know that? Every one..." (Of course, Johnny Thunder wasn't present for the battle in the channel in either previous telling of that story, but then, by the time he's telling it, his memory had started to fail, so perhaps he was confused about the first time he had met the Spectre...or if he himself was even at the channel that day.)

Back in Berlin, the heroes finally beat back the Valkyries, and the furious Fuehrer grabs nearby underling Professor Stauffen by the lapels, demanding that he send their experimental long-range bomber to attack America immediately, despite the fact that the U.S. wasn't yet officially at war with Germany, and that the bomber was one of a kind, its early deployment risking the whole program.

Hitler is unmoved: "Set a course for Washington, D.C.--I want the Amerikaner president and capitol destroyed!"

As the plane takes off, the Valkyries reappear around it, acting as, in Levitz's words, "an unholy honor guard." The heroes, who have by now all gathered on the beaches of England, see the accompanying Valkyries pass nearby on their way across the Atlantic, and again they clash in the skies (Batman, Hourman, The Sandman and The Atom are carried aloft on a Green Lantern ring-generated platform, while Staton again draws The Flash with a little tornado beneath his feet as he runs in the sky). 

Even with The Spectre's help, the two sides seem evenly matched, and they fight all the way across the ocean and into the airspace above Washington, the heroes never able to overcome the warrior women and get their hands on the plane.

In the last panel on one page, something seems to catch Green Lantern's eye below. "Look--leaping up from the press building--" he starts. 

A turn of the page reveals a striking splash, depicting Superman soaring up into the air and breaking fist first through the Nazi plane (with men parachuting to safety in the background, presumably to assure readers that Superman had not, in fact, just killed the plane's crew). In the upper left corner are two big words in bold red, the last two words of Green Lantern's sentence: "It's Superman!" That last word is the character's familiar logo.

After destroying the plane, Superman then catches the massive bomb it was carrying (With a big blue "OOF!" on the Man of Steel's part). 

The Valkyries fight on, though, and one manages to leap through a window into President Roosevelt's office. She takes aim with her spear, and from its tip leaps some kind of energy beam. Before the beam can strike the president, though, The Atom leaps in front of him, taking the blast himself.

After this, the Valkyries disappear again, and Roosevelt asks after "the little fellow" who had just saved his life, as the wounded Atom, his costume ripped at the chest, is being cradled in Hawkman's arms. 

"F-Fine, Mr. President," The Atom manages. "Don't you know--you can't split an atom?"

Well, not yet Al, but they're working on it...!

It is here that Roosevelt says it would be a shame to split this group up, as "you'd make a snappy army regiment!"

Superman immediately replies that he doesn't think that's possible, while The Spectre disagrees, almost quoting Shakespeare to the Man of Steel: "More things are possible than you know, Superman--"

Doctor Fate finishes The Spectre's thought: "--And this one is necessary--if we are to battle the great evils I see in the days ahead!"

It is here that Hawkman suggests the formation of a "special super-batallion" [sic], and Superman corrects him, giving the team it's official name, which appears on the last page of the story, a splash featuring all ten heroes posing with their hands on their hips or their arms crossed...well, all except The Atom, who still looks a little worse for wear after taking a blast to the chest. 

Now, as to why these heroes didn't just return to Europe the next day to take care of the Nazi threat, or do so when the U.S. officially entered the war the following year, this story never offers an answer. It would be up to future stories by later writers to explain how in a world where the likes of The Spectre, Superman and Doctor Fate could fight for the allies that the war lasted as long as it did. 

Bookshelf #22

This is my original Dark Horse shelf, and some of these trades are pretty old at this point. The first of these I purchased was Predator Vol. 1, which you can see between the Adam Warren Dirty Pair books (one of which I now notice is actually from Eclipse, not Dark Horse) and the Tank Girl collection. That trade collects the first of Dark Horse's many, many Predator miniseries, originally released in 1989; the trade was released in 1990, and I would have bought it a year or two later, from a Waldenbooks at a mall. 

Not only was it my first Dark Horse comic, it was among the first trades paperbacks I had ever bought. I continued to read Predator comics off and on, but usually in serially published comics-comics, rather than trade; if you scrutinize the spines here, you'll note the only other Predator comics on the shelf are the 2018 collection Predator: Hunters and Predator Omnibus Vol. 4. (If you look at the numbers on those omnibuses, you'll see they are pretty random; at this point, I can't remember where I got them, but, based on those numbers, I assume they were second-hand purchases from Half Price Books, or bought at a it-would-be-crazy-not-to-buy them discount at a shop sale or at a con; as with Marvel's Essential and DC's Showcase Presents collections, I kind of wish I would have bought all of those Dark Hose omnibuses when they were on sale, especially the Predator and Aliens ones). 

While there's a rather wide variety of characters and creators here, best represented on the shelf is Little Lulu by John Stanley. I love that comic, and I loved Dark Horse's presentation of it in these smaller-sized trade paperbacks. If I recall correctly, as I had done with some manga series, I read all of the earlier volumes that my library happened to have on the shelf, got hooked and then started buying the new volumes when they were released, which accounts for the weird numbering of those on the shelf here. Not sure how I missed volume 16 there, though.

There's one book there that's not a comic, and that's the slim volume lying atop Predator: Hunters. That is Hallelujah Anyway by poet Kenneth Patchen, a 1966 full of his "picture poems", which married his poetry with his artwork (You can see why this might be appealing to someone who would also grow to love comics).

A high school English teacher had originally introduced me to Patchen, through a copy of this very work, and Patchen was for a long time one of my favorite poets and my favorite writers in general. He definitely influenced me when I was young and wrote poetry...something I eventually gave up on, as there didn't seem to be any money or much prestige in the writing of poetry.

Not that there's much in writing about comics either, of course... 

Two Justice League stories of note from the pages of Secret Origins

I wish DC Comics would get around to collecting the 50-issue, 1986-1990 Secret Origins series, perhaps in an omnibus or two, or a couple of DC Finest collections. And I hope they do so before I manage to track down all of the issues of interest to me before I find them in back-issue bins or on Comixology. (Oh, and I just found that a bunch of the stories featuring Golden Age heroes collected in 2017's Last Days of the Justice Society of America trade.)

I recently read two issues, 1988's Secret Origins #32 and 1989's Secret Origins #46, both of which feature stories starring the founding members of the Justice League of America...or at least the post-Crisis founders, meaning that Black Canary had replaced Wonder Woman in the line-up (This version of the team is the one that starred in Mark Waid, Brian Augustyn and Barry Kitson's 1998 maxi-series JLA: Year One; it was the canonical original line-up between 1985-1986's Crisis On Infinite Earths, which removed Wonder Woman as a founder during the publisher's first major continuity rejiggering, and 2005-2006's Infinite Crisis, which restored her status as a founder). 

Now, one of the things that fascinates me about this volume of Secret Origins is the covers, which more often than not depict the characters whose origins are featured within interacting in some way, even though they do not actually do so within. This often means the covers suggest unlikely team-ups, like Adam Strange and Doctor Occult or Black Lightning and Miss America, or unlikely match-ups, like Green Lantern and Poison Ivy or Animal Man and Man-Bat. My favorite is, of course, is Ty Templeton's cover for Secret Origins #30, depicting a Plastic Man/Elongated Man meeting of sorts.

Because of this, I expected Secret Origins #32 to contain origin stories for both the original Justice League of America and the Justice League International, given that both teams were on the cover. As it turns out, however, the entirety of the issue is filled with a 38-page origin for the JLoA, and the JLI is limited to the cover appearance*. 

The story, entitled "All Together Now", is the work of Keith Giffen, Peter David and Eric Shanower, providing the plot, the dialogue and the art, respectively. Gardner Fox also gets a credit for "Story", as this story is a retelling of he and Mike Sekowsky's 1962 Justice League of America #9. 

In Gardner's original, Snapper Carr arrives at the Happy Harbor headquarters to find the Leaguers preparing for a party to celebrate the anniversary of the team's founding, and they relate their first case to him, in which they faced off against bizarre alien creatures from the planet Apellax, each of which was wildly different from the next, and had the strange ability to transform victims into the same material as them (stone, wood, mercury, yellow bird, etc.)

In the Secret Origins version, this adventure isn't presented as a story within a story, but simply as a story. It opens on Apellax with the same basic backstory, although in this version the Apellaxians are all more-or-less identical, and the strange shapes they take on Earth are presented as special "battle forms." 

Each of these end up encountering a different superhero, the five on the monitor on the cover. These five heroes all convene at the site of a sixth Apellaxian, and work together to defeat it. There is a seventh one that Superman deals with, although he does so off panel, and he himself is barely in the story.

The main difference here is that Black Canary has replaced Wonder Woman, of course, and that Batman, who only plays a very minor role in Fox's story, is completely MIA. Giffen also switches the alien battle forms around a bit. Here Aquaman fights a mercury creature rather than a glass one, while Canary fights the glass creature rather that the mercury one that Wonder Woman had originally fought. This is presumably because Black Canary's canary cry power is a good fit for fighting a shatter-able glass creature.

Interestingly, David's script, most of which involves the heroes thinking or talking to themselves, has each character express the desire for allies of some kind at one point or another. 

"It would be so nice to have friends, comrades, who I know would accept me as I am," Martian Manhunter thinks while assuming his green-skinned form and flying away from the police station he works at in his disguise as human being John Jones. 

"Speaking as a newcomer, I'd love the idea of working with more experienced people," Black Canary tells the others on the penultimate page. (This adventure apparently occurs during her very first patrol as the new Black Canary; that's a heck of a first day on the job.)

Aside from the way the story rewrites a classic one from decades prior, this story is mostly of interest because of Shanower's superior artwork. It's as stately as that of Sekowsky, but much more realistic while also being a great deal more dynamic.

Shanower shows a particular facility for expressions, and there are several panels I lingered over just to admire the way he showed, say, Hal Jordan reaction when he realizes his opponent is yellow, or J'onn J'onnz pondering the reaction of civilians who lay eyes on him in his Martian form, or Flash slapping himself on the forehead when he realizes something. 

It's really some of the best Justice League art I've ever seen.

A few more things seem worth noting. In the original, after they defeat the wood Apellaxian, the heroes all travel to Greenland, where Superman and Batman are fighting a diamond Apellaxian. There, Batman suggests they form "a club or society", to which Flash responds, "A league against evil! Our purpose will be to uphold justice against whatever danger threatens it!"

Here, the heroes learn that there is a final Apellaxian in Antarctica, and arrive to find Superman dusting off his hands while standing above what looks like a pile of ashes, having apparently just defeated the alien. As they approach the Man of Steel though, he takes off without ever even acknowledging them. David's thought balloons let us know what's going on inside his Kryptonian noggin:

Just my luck! Lois was about to give poor Clark a tumble--and suddenly I had to make excuses and fly off!

If I hurry, I might still be able to salvage this--

I guess the implication is that he is so distracted thinking about Lois that he doesn't notice the other superheroes over his shoulder, but I'm not sure I buy that. How does a guy with super-hearing and super-vision not notice the big green guy, Green Lantern, and three other colorfully dressed characters being towed in a big, glowing green orb...?

"He didn't even notice us!" Flash says in the panel after Superman departs. "Bet the 'S' stands for 'Snob.'" Aquaman defends Superman, though: "Oh ease off," he says. "He probably had something really cosmic on his mind."

Nope. He's just thinking about his work crush. 

The scene reads a bit awkwardly, and I imagine the story would be improved had Giffen just left Superman out of it entirely, given that the Man of Steel wasn't going to end up joining the others in forming the Justice League.

Instead, Green Lantern flies them back to a city, and Flash proposes they form a team, during which David makes what seems like a rather customary Peter David groaner of a joke:

On the final page, a splash, they settle on Justice League of America, and a broadly smiling Hal Jordan asks, "Do you think anyone else will join?" That's the image at the top of the post.

If you've never read this story before, do take a moment to scrutinize the heroes floating in the sky above, their presence apparently meant to answer Hal's question.

In addition to Batman, Green Arrow, The Atom and Snapper Car, we see the heroes who will join during the "Satellite Era" (Hawkman and Hawkgirl, Elongated Man, Zatanna, Red Tornado and Firestorm) and the "Detroit Era" (Steel, Vixen, Gypsy and Vibe). Even The Phantom Stranger, whose membership status has always been a bit equivocal, is pictured. 

As no one from the post-Legends League is up there, it seems clear that the creators have drawn a bright line between the Justice League of America and the Justice League International (Even if the JLI first appeared in a book called Justice League, before the book changed its name to Justice League International...and then changed it again to Justice League America).

There are two pretty notable characters missing: Superman and Wonder Woman. 

Given that Crisis changed continuity so that Diana didn't come to Man's World until right then, in the late 1980s, it of course makes sense that she's not there (I guess in the post-Crisis, pre-Infinite Crisis continuity, Wonder Woman didn't join the Justice League until 1989's JLI #24, after which she was on Justice League Europe for, what, one issue...? She would rejoin the League around 1993, though, and stick with the team until the JLA relaunch, during which she was of course a member).

And Superman? Well, I never read John Byrne's Superman comics, but based on this comic, it would appear Superman was never on the Justice League of America, at least in the post-Crisis, pre-Infinite Crisis continuity, and thus I guess he didn't actually join any incarnation of the Justice League until Dan Jurgens took over Justice League America in 1992...?

Oh, and if you're wondering what the current status of the Apellaxian invasion/founding of the Justice League is today, in 2026, after more continuity reboots than I can easily recall, well, according to Mark Waid's New History of the DC Universe, sometime after the events of Geoff Johns and Jim Lee's 2011-2012 Justice League #1-6, "The Justice League wasn't formalized as a team until a subsequent alien invasion from the planet Appellax caused J'onn J'onnz, a.k.a. Martian Manhunter, to step into the limelight and brought Dinah Lance, the Black Canary into play when she assumed the costumed identity of her mother." (The timeline in the back of the collection also places JLA: Year One in continuity, saying that Wonder Woman, like Batman and Superman, would rejoin the team sometime later, after its "formalized" founding).

This story has only been collected once, and so long ago that finding that collection probably isn't any easier than finding this issue. That collection was 1990's Secret Origins of the World's Greatest Super-Heroes trade paperback, with the extremely fun Brian Bolland cover showing Superman, Batman, The Flash, Green Lantern and Martian Manhunter, posing in the background in their heroic identities, while their civilian secret identities interact in the foreground. 

That trade, by the way, was 150 pages and sold for just $4.95, if you need a good reminder of how much things have changed since 1990. 

As for the JLoA story from Secret Origins #46, it is one of three from an interestingly thematic issue of the series, telling the origins of various superhero headquarters: The League's original Happy Harbor base, the Titans' T-shaped Titans Tower, and the Legion of Super-Heroes' original crashed rocket ship-looking base. 

I'm only going to address the Justice League story here, as that's the only one I've read so far (I have a hard time working up any interest at all in the Legion or this iteration of the Titans, even though I know the Marv Wolfman/George Perez run on the team is widely regarded as the best; I will point out that the Titans story features artwork by Vince Giarrano, which is in an entirely different style than that he employed during the '90s on Manhunter, various Batman comics and other works, more David Mazzucchelli than Rob Liefeld or Erik Larsen. Oh, and the LOSH story is the first appearance of Arm-Fall-Off-Boy, by the way). 

The thing that most interested me in this story was that it was written by Grant Morrison, and was thus Morrison's first Justice League story, written eight years before JLA. Prior to this, Morrison's only DC work was the earlier issues of Animal Man and Doom Patrol and Arkham Asylum. Members of the JLI made appearances in Animal Man and Doom Patrol (Buddy Baker was briefly in Justice League Europe, remember, and Blue Beetle and Booster Gold show up in Doom Patrol #28, with more heroes appearing in #29, cover dated after this issue of Secret Origins), but this was Morrison's first story in which the League were the featured characters. 

Morrison could hardly have asked for a better collaborator, as the artist for the story was the legendary Curt Swan, here inked and colored by George Freeman. The art is thus, unsurprisingly, gorgeous, and the Justice League has rarely looked better (Stylistically, Swan and Freeman's Justice League art is fairly similar to that of Shanower in the first Justice League story discussed in this post). 

The 14-page story opens with a splash page depicting a bizarre milieu: The Justice League battling their own costumes. The scene recalls classic, Silver Age DC Comics, like the team battling their own weapons on the cover of JLoA #53 or, more directly still, "The Battle Against the Bodiless Uniforms from JLoA #35 (The empty costumes also reminded me of The Invisible Destroyer from 1959's Showcase Presents #23).

After the title page's splash, we open in Central City, "Some years ago," where Barry Allen is literally pushing a particularly hot-looking Iris West out of his apartment while making a lame excuse; in reality, he's running late for "the first real meeting of the Justice League of America." 

Once his Flash costume pops out of his ring, however, it displays a quite creepy life of its own, pausing long enough to laugh "HA HA HA" and then streaking away at super-speed; Barry dons a spare costume and gives chase, following it to Rhode Island, where the rest of the nascent League is assembled, their similarly animated empty costumes encased in a green force bubble created by Green Lantern (All had spare costumes save Aquaman, who is there naked, except for a pair of black swim trunks; "This was the best I could manage," he shrugs. Hell, it works for Namor!).

The others fill Flash in on what's they have found out so far—namely that the costumes seem to be inhabited by alien minds that want something in the mountain—which saves time, as this is a rather short story. 

To find out what's going on inside the mountain that the aliens may be interested in, Flash plans to vibrate into it, but just before he can do so, the costumes break free of the force bubble, the Flash costume's yellow boots apparently kicking through it at super-speed.

Meanwhile, no sooner does Flash vibrate into the mountain than a mysterious voice, the same one that appears in sketchy blue boxes like the one that said "But first...tell me your story" on the opening splash, greets Flash and starts telling him its story.

This unfolds over eight horizontal panels across two pages, and the voice is apparently that of the mountain itself, speaking in purple, poetic dialogue of its origins in the Pre-Cambrian, and what followed over the millennia, a highlight of which is a strange alien vessel that disgorges even stranger aliens during dinosaur times.

Finally breaking free, Flash relays that the mountain is a sort of giant stone computer storing information that can be released via vibration, and he does so in what reads exactly like the sort of dialogue one could expect from the Morrison of the late-'90s. Morrison had apparently already found a distinct, even signature voice. 

The mystery solved, the team uses their powers to unlock visual memories of the aliens landing all those millions of years ago, the possessed costumes abandoning the fight to silently watch the images of their long-dead people. ("They've come here to pay their respects to their dead," Flash explains). 

As to why the aliens chose to inhabit the Leaguers' costumes, well, Morrison never gets to that. Nor is it explained why the Flash's costume has his super-speed powers.

The team obviously decides to make this mountain their headquarters, though, and the mountain again narrates, this time flashing forward to the League's time there, and noting that now, whenever "some small creature" passes through it, the animal will "unlock the lattice memory" within it, temporarily generating ghosts of the Justice League, the mountain's memories of their time within it replaying themselves.

I can't imagine what readers in 1989 might have thought of the story. Were they happy to see the "real" League again, after years of first the Detroit League and then the JLI? Were they irritated about the retconned version of the League, now absent Batman, Superman and Wonder Woman? Did they think Morrison's story clever and smartly written...or pretentious?

I don't know. I liked it. It essentially reads like a sci-fi ghost story tied to deep Justice League history, one that, as I noted, evokes the Silver Age while being told in a modern, more sophisticated style (itself a very Morrisonian thing). And, again, it's obviously gorgeous looking. 

Somewhat surprisingly, this story doesn't seem to have ever been collected anywhere, which is another good argument for DC to work on some sort of Secret Origins collection. 

*The founding of the JLI iteration of the Justice League the previous year was probably still new enough that there was no real reason to re-present its origins in this title. Notably though, the three issues that followed this issue were devoted to individual heroes from the JLI, three origins per issue. So, Mister Miracle, Green Flame (not yet Fire), Icemaiden (not yet Ice), Captain Atom, Rocket Red, G'Nort, Martian Manhunter, Max Lord and Booster Gold's origins were all told in Secret Origins #33-35, all of which featured connecting covers by pencil artist Jerry Ordway and inker Ty Templeton. As for JLI regulars Blue Beetle and Guy Garnder, their origins had already been told in Secret Origins #2 and #7, respectively.

The suspiciously familiar secret origin of Rex the Wonder Dog (From 1990's Secret Origins #48)

Rex the Wonder Dog first appeared in 1952's The Adventures of Rex The Wonder Dog #1. The cover featured the title character dragging an unconscious woman by the collar of her shirt, while an injured man grips a tree, urging him to get her to safety. Flames and smoke fill the background. In the lower right corner, there's a yellow box full of the following words: "Introducing a new hero--Rex the Wonder Dog in exciting stories of danger and courage!"

Was one of those exciting stories of danger and courage an origin for the wondrous dog? I don't know, as I have never read that comic. Nor have I read any of the Rex stories from the 45 issues of the title that followed before it was finally cancelled in 1959. That's not because I'm not interested in them, of course. I mean, look at those covers! Who wouldn't be interested? Rather, it's because DC has yet to see fit to collect and republish them, although I continue to hold out hope that they will do so before I die. 

If Rex never received an origin story in his own book—and he might not have, given that he seems to be a relatively normal dog, rather than masked and costumed person with superpowers—he did get one in 1990's Secret Origins #48, which the publisher might have greenlit because Rex was making a rather unexpected guest appearance in the pages of The Flash around then. 

The eight-page story was the work of writer Gerard Jones*, pencil artist Paris Cullins and inker Gary Martin, and it is entitled "The Birth of Rex the Wonder Dog." When it was originally published, it would have sounded awfully familiar to any comics readers familiar with Captain America. Read today, some 15 years after the release of Captain America: The First Avenger, it will likely sound awfully familiar with far more people (Although, having been written by Jones, chances are it won't be read today or at any point in the future, not unless you can find a copy of this comic in a back issue bin).

Jones isn't a bit shy about writing a Captain America parody for Rex's origin story, referring to the fact fairly directly at a few points, as in the panel above. (And, notably, Jones uses the word "wonder-soldier" repeatedly and interchangeably with what likely would have sounded more natural in either the 1940s of the setting or today—"Super-soldier".)

The mode is thus quite comedic, Jones and, one imagines, many of his readers finding the idea of a heroic dog with as many amazing feats to his name as Rex inherently funny...even if amazing dogs like Rin Tin Tin, Lassie or Green Lantern's pal Streak (who eventually earned top-billing over Alan Scott off the cover of All-American Comics# 99 in 1948) were a relatively prevalent in pop culture in the early- to mid-20th century. 

Cullins follows suit with highly cartoony art. As you can see in the first page of the story, at the top of the post, Cullins seems to both homage and lightly parody Golden Age comics, and his human characters after that first page are cartoonier still. 

Rex, for example, often thinks in terms of pictograms here (not unlike Mark Waid would have his Impulse regularly do later that decade), and when the scientist who developed the super-soldier serum, er, wonder-soldier serum is murdered, Cullins lets us know he's definitely dead by drawing crosses for his eyes (this, despite all the blood from his chest wound pretty clearly communicating that he wouldn't live to see the end of the strip).

Cullins' Rex also appears with a degree of heroic exaggeration in one panel, with his expressive black eyebrows and a toothy smile of white, human-looking cartoon teeth.

Lieutenant Dennis of Libertyville leaves his son Danny playing with his little white puppy Rex to attend a meeting at what he announces is "the secret lab" about "some new super-soldier project." 

There, a Dr. Anabolus explains with drawings how he has developed a wonder-serum that can turn 97-pound weaklings into Charles Atlas-like wonder-soldiers, which, once they made enough of them, would allow the Allies to wrap up the war quickly. The only catch is that the serum is untested, and he can't find an animal subject to test it on, as the U.S.O. is drafting and training "all the animals it can find" to entertain soldiers overseas. 

And obviously they can't go straight to human testing, as "Only a lunatic would test this on a human being fist."

Dennis volunteers his son's puppy, and soon he returns to the lab with Danny and Rex, passing an obvious Nazi spy posing as a guard on the way in ("Oh...oh, Ja ja! I am der new guard.") 

The puppy gets the shot, and he suddenly becomes a full-grown dog, one who Cullins gives bulging dog muscles. 

Also, Rex's thought balloons have now progressed from containing just pictures and symbols to sentences of dialogue. 

(While the story is obviously a comedy, I wonder if it's telling of where superhero comics were at that point that Jones seems to feel the need to explain Rex's wondrousness at all, here with a Captain America-like super-serum giving him enhanced physical and mental abilities, rather than just allowing for the fact that maybe Rex is just a particularly great dog capable of doing things like swinging on vines, riding horses, operating parachutes, fighting dinosaurs and the other feats seen on the covers of his book from the 1950s).

The Nazi who was posing as a guard then appears, replacing his American-style helmet with a German-style one, and he then shoots the doctor dead, next aiming his Luger at Danny. Rex leaps to the boy's defense, savagely but bloodlessly taking down the enemy agent. As with Timely/Marvel's Captain America then, here the special serum results in only one unique hero, rather than an entire army of them.

As Dennis, Dany and Rex walk off, the lieutenant makes an oddly specific prediction for what the future will hold for them:

Danny says that's a bunch of "hooey", but Rex, like the readers, knows better, and the last panel shows him winking at the reader like Clark Kent, the words "The Beginning" beneath it. 

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

As long as I've got my hands on a copy of Secret Origins #48, I might as well discuss the rest of the comic, too. 

As you can see from the cover, Rex's secret origin was just one of four that were included in this issue, the others being those of Ambush Bug, Stanley and His Monster and The Trigger Twins (And, as a note about as big as the logos and credits for any of the characters within says, Batman and Robin do not appear anywhere within the comic; they're only on artist Kevin Maguire's cover as props in an Ambush Bug gag). 

Like the Rex story, three of the other features are comedies, while one is a pretty straightforward melodrama. You can probably guess what's what from the characters included.

The feature story is a 15-pager by Ambush Bug's creator Keith Giffen (handling the plot and pencils), Giffen's frequent collaborator Robert Loren Fleming (handling the script) and inker Bob Lewis, with Cynicalman creator Matt Feazell contributing one page (and getting a "special thanks" credit). 

I wonder if Giffen were reluctant to tell this story or not. At any rate, Ambush Bug is presented as reluctant to star in it, or at least to reveal any kind of origin, as the plot, as loose as it is, essentially revolves around the character trying to avoid being in an origin story of any kind, while under pressure from the National Bureau of Origins to do just that.

To that end, the story is full of several suggested origins and feints toward origins, although the true origin of Ambush Bug is probably that revealed in the title for the story, and it is basically the same origin of every comic book superhero: "We Thought Him Up."

An NBO agent visits Ambush Bug in his room/cell at the Roscoe P. Sweeny Memorial Home for Forgotten Cartoon Characters, and he tells our hero that he is "required by law to declare a credible origin story... ...or one will be provided for you!" 

To pressure him, the agent holds up a picture of Mr. Bug's missing child/sidekick, his doll Cheeks. This sets Ambush Bug off on a journey to find Cheeks, a more-or-less random, meandering story that includes an encounter with a Lord of Order, a trip to Heaven, the Feazell-drawn interlude that seems to suggest Ambush Bug's origin as a doodle in young student Irwin's algebra notebook, an appearance by Vril Dox from Giffen and company's L.E.G.I.O.N. series and parodies of  Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and Batman's "I shall become a bat!" origin.

Note the words "Big Fat Freakin' Frogs" in the style of the TMNT cartoon logo; does that make this the very first iteration of that one meme based on this installment of xkcd, decades early, or nah?

This is then followed by the Stanley and His Monster story by writer/artist Phil Foglio and inker Keith Wilson, telling the story of how little boy Stanley Dover met the big, pink, furry creature with tusks that Arnold Drake and Win Mortimer created as a back-up strip in The Fox and Crow in the 1960s. This being 1990, this short eight-page story is Foglio's first Stanley and His Monster story; he would go on to write and pencil a four-issue mini-series in 1993.

In this short story, Stanley's monster, who, as was the case in the late 1960s, still looks like something that Jim Henson and his friends might have created, is "one of the nameless lords of the sixth circle" in Hell. As a demon, though, he has seemingly lost his way, no longer being cruel and pitiless, but rather showing mercy to the condemned and generally trying to make Hell a nicer place to spend eternity (He is "responsible for those loathsome 'Have A Nice Day' stickers appearing everywhere," a demon tells Lucifer Morningstar).

Yes, Lucifer. Interestingly, Foglio's two pages set in Hell feature the realm's rulers "the Triumverate", introduced in Neil Gaiman's** Sandman #4 from the previous year. If you recall, the Triumverate consisted of Lucifer, Beelzebub and Azazel the Abomination; artist Sam Kieth drawing them as a handsome blonde man, a giant green fly monster and a discorporate field of eyes and teeth, respectively.

Foglio draws them about the same here, although his Lucifer wears a shirt and pants (He has to wear a shirt, as it will be revealed there's a "Have A Nice Day" sticker on his back) and Azazel looks a bit more solid and a bit more red. Oh, and while Beelzebub is portrayed as a big green fly, upon first mention Lucifer calls him "Belial"...although later he calls him "Lord of the Flies," and Foglio has him speaking with a buzzing lisp and, in one panel, drinking from a cup labeled "Guano Whip."

It certainly seems like the fly guy is meant to be Beelzebub and not Belial, then. What accounts for the mistake? Well, that same year, in the just-launched new volume of The Demon written by Alan Grant, Etrigan's father Belial replaced Azazel on the Triumverate, so it's possible in trying to keep consistent with other DC comics, either Foglio or an editor messed up the exact makeup of the Triumverate. 

Still, how strange to imagine DC once caring so much about book-to-book continuity that a silly, cartoony comedy short in an anthology like this would honor the goings-on of a horror/fantasy series for mature readers! 

Anyway, to punish the Monster, he is exiled from Hell to Earth, where Lucifer assures his co-rulers that the hateful, fearful humans would soon drive the goodness out of him. Indeed, the monster is immediately made miserable on Earth, as everyone runs and screams as soon as they see him...everyone, that is, except Stanley Dover, a lonely little kid looking for a playmate.

The two become friends, with the Monster moving into Stanley's house, when the boy asks his parents if he could keep the "giant red talking dog with tusks" that he had found. They of course say yes, assuming he was talking about an imaginary friend.

The final story in the issue seems like it might have given readers a bit of whiplash, after three comedic stories, two of which had highly cartoony art. This is writer William Messner-Loebs and artist Trevor Von Eeden's story of the Trigger Twins. 

Like Rex, the Twins were once-successful characters that had by 1990 become something of a DC Comics trivia question. Looking them up, I see that they appeared in All-Star Western between 1951 and 1961, which is obviously a damn healthy run (Interestingly, that book was previously All-Star Comics, home of the Justice Society, but became a Western as the popularity of superheroes waned in the years after World War II). They made the cover on a fairly regular basis, too.

The Twins were created by Robert Kanigher and Carmine Infantino and their schtick was that one of them was a sheriff and the other civilian, and it was the civilian who was the better gunfighter of the two. Being identical twins, though, the superior marksman would often impersonate his brother. 

They were apparently so little-seen after the end of their All-Star feature that I think this is the very first time I've actually read a story featuring them, although I suppose it's possible they cameoed in one of those comics where all of DC's Western heroes might have appeared, like, I don't know, 1994's Guy Gardner: Warrior #24 or 2006's Justice League Unlimited #19 or 2017's  Scooby-Doo Team-Up #28. By contrast, I've read a handful of comics featuring Chuck Dixon and Graham Nolan's modern-day Trigger Twins, criminals who first showed up in a 1993 chapter of "KnightQuest" (They are prominently featured in 1997's Robin Annual #6, part of that year's winning "Pulp Hero" suite of annuals). 

In wordy but efficient fist-person narration, Messner-Loebs takes us from Wayne and Walt Triggers' birth until the point at which Wayne impersonates Walt for the first time. 

During the Civil War, the more shy and retiring Wayne discovers his phenomenal facility with firearms, killing nine members of a Confederate patrol that came upon the brothers before the rest of the patrol, seeing how quickly he took down their compatriots, "plumb gave up." 

The more outgoing Walt, took credit and, after the war, continued to coast on his unearned reputation as a quick-draw "gun hawk." When circumstances lead to him being made sheriff and having to face off against a whole gang of bandits, however, Wayne disguises himself as Walt and blasts through the bad guys, a pretty amusing sequence of panels in which Wayne's narration rattles off the colorful names of all the guys he kills, like Pegs the Swede, Mexican Luke Dagle and Stinky Porker and, eventually, "several whose names I do not know."

*A once prolific writer of comics (DC's Justice League and Green Lantern comics, Mailbu's Prime) and writer about comics (Men of Tomorrow), Gerard Jones pleaded guilty to possession of child pornography in 2018 and has since served a prison sentence for his crimes. I know I mentioned this the last time I had occasion to write about Jones, but it would seem wrong to not do so when discussing his work.

**While never confessing to nor being convicted of a crime like Gerard Jones was, Neil Gaiman was accused of sexually assaulting several women over a period of many years in a 2024 podcast. In 2025, New York magazine published a gut-wrenching article about the accusations against Gaiman that was posted online at Vulture.com. It's hard to read, and it is, in 2026, now impossible to write about Gaiman's comics work without an asterisk.

Bookshelf #21

Now here is an interesting selection of comics! Atop a small bookshelf in my old, childhood bedroom you'll find various trade collections and original graphic novels from several different DC Comics imprints from the first decade of the 21st century. Of those imprints three were discontinued, although one of them was recently revived. The contents of these books are all over the place in terms of style, genre and audience, the one thing they all have in common being that they are small, digest-sized trade paperbacks, presumably published in that particular format to appeal to the emerging audience of manga readers who were used to reading comics in tankobon-style collections rather than stapled 22-page floppies.

The only real exception? Rick Veitch's 2006 original graphic novel Can't Get No, a bizarre 300-page black-and-white 9/11 book from Vertigo that read like an illustrated poem, the protagonist's experiences communicated more directly through the imagery than the words. A horizontal rectangle that's five-and-a-half-inches tall and about seven-and-a-half inches wide, it's only one of the books pictured here that deviates from the digest size.

Let's take these books left to right. 

The first two are both from DC's now long-defunct Paradox Press imprint, Max Allan Collins and Richard Piers Rayner's Road to Perdition and John Wagner and Vince Locke's A History of Violence, both of which were adapted into feature films. 

Then we have Superman Adventures Vols. 1-4, collecting issues from the 1996-2002 series based on Superman: The Animated Series (Yes, Superman Adventures was a DC comic based on a cartoon that was based on DC comics). The stories in these collections are written by Evan Dorkin, Sarah Dyer, David Michelinie and Mark Millar and feature art from Terry Austin, Bret Blevins, Mike Manley and others, the various artists all working in with the designs of Bruce Timm and hewing to the style of the TV show. 

While far from his most famous work, these are without a doubt the very best comics Mark Millar has ever written, and I don't think it's particularly close, either. You may suspect that I am kidding or perhaps exaggerating so as to cast aspersions on Millar's body of work, but I am being completely sincere; these are good comics. 

These stories are all set in the publisher's "animated universe", but are technically DC comics proper, rather than belonging to an imprint. Two of the four do bear the then-current Johnny DC logo that was on many of their kids comics back then, and the $6.95 digests all say "Suitable for ALL AGES" and "Don't Miss these other great Cartoon Network Collections from DC Comics!", beneath which are listed Justice League Adventures, The Powerpuff Girls, Scooby-Doo and "Cartoon Cartoons!"

Next? A plain old DC Comics collection: 2005's Secret of the Swamp Thing, which collects the first ten issues of the original 1972-launched Swamp Thing series by Len Wein and Bernie Wrightson. I have no idea why the publisher decided to collect this run in this format, as the smaller size hardly flatters Wrightson's detailed work, and I don't really see anything about the then rather straightforward monster comic that might suggest it would be of interest to young manga readers. I snapped it up though, and it was my first exposure to pre-Alan Moore Swamp Thing. (I haven't read any of DC's "Compact Comics" collections, as so far they have only collected books I already own, but I just checked, and I guess this 21-year-old Swamp Thing collection is only slightly smaller than those.)

That's followed by some Vertigo comics. There's Jill Thompson's manga-style Sandman spin-offs Death: At Death's Door and The Deadboy Detectives (the first of these is particularly great, and an ideal gateway for manga readers into the Vertigo "universe" of mature reader fantasy comics, though I fear that, like everything associated with Neil Gaiman in anyway, it's fatally tainted at this point), a collection of the 2004 miniseries My Faith in Frankie by Mike Carey, Sonny Liew and Marc Hempel, the last of whom handled the covers (I remember liking this at the time, but 20+ years later, all I really remember is how fond I was of the art) and the aforementioned Can't Get No.

Finally, there are five books from the extremely short-lived (like, 2007-2008 short-lived) imprint Minx: The Plain Janes, Clubbing, Good As Lily, Re-Gifters and Water Baby. That's just under half of the dozen Minx books that were published, each chosen because I liked one or more of the creators involved (All these years later, Sophie Campbell's Water Baby is the one that I remember the most clearly). 

In retrospect, what's interesting about this line of books was that it demonstrated DC attempting to reach a particular market (YA readers) with a rather particular type of book (that is, more straight literature or popular fiction than the genre stuff they usually publish) but then giving up almost immediately. The types of books Minx was producing are now quite prevalent, although publishers like First Second and the imprints of the big publishing houses are the ones producing those comics now. 

One bad thing and one good thing about picture book A True Wonder: The Comic Book Hero Who Changed Everything

I've read a handful of these non-fiction picture book biographies of certain comic book creators and/or their greatest creations before. Writer Kirsten W. Larson and artist Katy Wu's A True Wonder: The Comic Book Hero Who Changed Everything (Clarion Books; 2021) obviously focuses on Wonder Woman. I found two things of particular interest in it: one good, one bad.

I should note that this is more a biography of the character than it is her creators, starting by introducing Wonder Woman, then turning to comic books, then her famous 1972 Ms. magazine cover, then her 1975-1977 TV show and finally her 2017 feature film, with several pauses to focus on broad changes for women in American society and Wonder Woman's ability to inspire women in the real world.

It opens with a two-page spread with three comic book-like narration boxes, the first two featuring quotation marks (It won't be clear to most readers until the last page's source notes, but the words in quotations are taken from a story in 1942's Wonder Woman #1, which actually came along about half a year after Wonder Woman debuted in Sensation Comics #1):

"As lovely as Aphrodite—as wise as Athena—with the speed of Mercury and the strength of Hercules—

she is known only as Wonder Woman, but who she is, or whence she came, nobody knows!"

Until now!

Dominating the foreground Wu's version of Wonder Woman, rendered and costumed in a way that is quite visually (and, one imagines, legally) distinct from the DC Comics character, an athletic, black-haired beauty who seems to be made of pastel light and cartoon stars, only the vaguest suggestion of any kind of costume beyond a trailing red ribbon. (We'll talk more about Wu's Wonder Woman a bit further down.)

Behind her are the four Greek mythological figures mentioned.

From there we cut to "America, 1941" and what appears to be a comic book studio, in which we see a half-dozen handsome, even pretty young men in business attire all looking like drawings based on clip art search results for "business guy." They don't really look all that much like they came from the 1940s; indeed, no one's even smoking!

Two of them are busy at drawing tables, one leans over one of the artists, three gather around a drawing of a caped strongman labeled "He Boy." On the walls are colorful images of various Supermen, and an open box is full of a comic labeled "Zoom Man."

"The comic book industry is dominated by white men," the first narration box says. And, indeed, there are free-floating labels with arrows pointing out that all the characters on this page are "white men." (One says "Another white man" and another "Also white men.")

This is a) true, with so few exceptions so as to prove the rule and b) weird, because as you and I, comic book fans, are well aware, Wonder Woman is also the creation of white men: William Moulton Marston and H.G. Peter...although you wouldn't know that Peter had anything to do with Wonder Woman, given that he's not mentioned at all in the story. This is the bad thing. 

As the story unfolds, important players behind-the-scenes of Wonder Woman's comic book career (and, later, TV and film careers) are highlighted with baseball card-like boxes depicting their images, names and some details about them.

The first of these come on pages seven and eight, and feature Marston and his wife, Elizabeth Marston. After a spread showing how much kids loved comic books and that grownups were worried about the violence in them, we cut to the Marstons' home, where Bill is deep in thought in an easy chair, while Elizabeth stands nearby, cajoling him, "Come on, let's have a Superwoman! There's too many men out there."

For that suggestion alone (that's all the role she plays in this book, anyway), she gets a baseball card, but Peter does not. In fact, he's left completely out of Wonder Woman's creation story, as the next spread features Marston with a briefcase and sketch of Wonder Woman. Of where she came from, Larson only says, "Inspired by the idea of a female superhero, Bill proposed a new comic book character, one who would be a good influence on children—Wonder Woman."

And then it's to the offices of All-American Comics, where M.C. Gaines okays the idea, and gets his baseball card. So, both Elizabeth Marston, who suggests a woman hero, and Gaines, who okays the hero, are pivotal parts of Wonder Woman's origin, but not the guy who drew here? There's a step missing here, obviously.

Peter's omission gets only more annoying as one reads on, given that other key figures named and "carded" include associate editor and "Wonder Women of History" writer Alice Marble, Marston's assistant-turned-ghostwriter Joye Hummel, Ms. cofounders Gloria Steinem and Joanne Edgar, television actress Lynda Carter and the Wonder Woman film's director Patty Jenkins. 

Now, certainly these folks all contributed to the evolution of Wonder Woman as an important character in American pop culture, and they all played roles of various degrees in helping maintain or increase her popularity, but none of them helped create Wonder Woman the way Peter did. Imagine, if you would, a book about Marvel's Incredible Hulk that includes the contributions of Stan Lee, Martin Goodman, Lou Ferrigno and Ang Lee, but never mentions Jack Kirby.

Because Peter didn't just come up with Wonder Woman's basic look and costume. He drew all of the Wonder Woman stories in both Sensation and Wonder Woman, covers included, as well as her newspaper comic strip (granted, with assistants helping on much of the background inking), from Wonder Woman's first appearance in 1942 until his own death in 1958. That's Wonder Woman's entire Golden Age career (outside of the Justice Society strips, I suppose, although I noticed when reading the earliest JSoA stories in DC Finest collections recently that Peter even drew some of her initial stories there). 

That means Peter designed and co-created not just Wonder Woman, but also Hippolyta and the Amazons, Steve Trevor, Etta Candy and the Holiday Girls and just about everyone Wonder Woman villain you can think of (Unless you want to be cheeky and say, I don't know, Veronica Cale).

And, as we now all know—we do all know this now, right?—drawing the art in comics stories isn't a simple act of illustration, but another form of writing, just writing with pictures rather than words. Marston is the creator who obviously gets talked about the most, given how colorful his personal life was, how interesting his psychological theories were, and how he used Wonder Woman to try to popularize those theories, but Peter is just as much Wonder Woman's father as Marston was. 

So that seems like a pretty big omission on Larson's part, and one that makes me question everything else in the book. 

After the 34-page story concludes, there are two pages devoted to short text features in the back. One is entitled "The Origin Story...Of This Book," and details how Larson was a Wonder Woman fan as a child (thanks to the TV show), and notes that seeing the 2017 film made her wonder where Wonder Woman came from, which is how this book came about. She notes that she wasn't a comic book reader, which will seem obvious after reading the book.

The other page is entitled "The Women of Wonder Woman". It's only five paragraphs long, but it lists seven women, their names all in bold. It is, interestingly, here that Peter gets his only mention:

Wonder Woman's looks, created by artist Harry G. Peter, may have been inspired by Olive Richard, who lived with Bill Marston's family, had dark hair, and wore signature cuff bracelets.

"Lived with Bill Marston's family," you say? Huh. I wonder if there's anything more to that story, maybe something less likely to make it into a children's picture book? Notably perhaps, this is Richard's only mention in the book, as well. 

Anyway, the decision to omit one of Wonder Woman's creators from a story about Wonder Woman's creation is the bad thing, and, perhaps, a fatal flaw in this book. 

Now, what is the good thing?

Well, I was kind of fascinated by how Katy Wu draws Wonder Woman throughout the book. I am, quite obviously, not versed in copyright or trademark law (If you know me at all, you'll know I'm not terribly well-versed in anything useful; pretty much just comic books, and, to a lesser extent, giant monster movies and cryptozoology). 

But I would have thought that, this being a work of non-fiction about Wonder Woman, it might have been free to use Wonder Woman's likeness throughout. Certainly, the previously discussed With Great Power and Along Came a Radioactive Spider by Annie Hunter Eriksen and Lee Gatlin were full of accurate images of Spider-Man and other Marvel superhero characters (as well as a few others, like Fawcett's Captain Marvel). 

I've never read it, but, working in a library, I've definitely seen and handled What Is the Story of Wonder Woman?, one of those Who HQ non-fiction books for kids in which the subjects have big heads on the covers, and that Wonder Woman is wearing her traditional costume on the cover. 

Regardless, Wu opts to draw a Wonder Woman who looks like Wonder Woman if you squint, or from far away...at least at a few points in the book (Her other take on the character is more interesting, I thought).

You see this almost-but-not-quite-Wonder Woman version of Wonder Woman on the cover. She looks a bit like a fully colored thumbnail version of herself. Yes, she's got the read bustier with a bit of gold at the top, the blue shorts, a tiara and bracelets, but the details are missing: There's no star on the tiara, no eagle or "WW" on the bustier, no white stars on her shorts (I would have thought that Wu could have gone ahead and used a version of the eagle on Wondy's chest, as I thought the reason DC changed it to the "WW" symbol in the first place was because they learned they couldn't trademark an eagle...?)

This version also appears on the faux covers of Wonder Woman comics kids happily hold aloft on one page, and striding like a giant in the background on a page labeled "Present day," where she is missing her tiara (and facial features) but does hold a glowing golden lariat.

More interesting, I thought, was the Wonder Woman Wu drew on the first page, one that seemed more idea than character, made of something insubstantial, a black-haired being of fluid, shimmering red and blue light. In that image, she is trailing a solid if sheer-looking red ribbon, a motif that appears throughout the book, as if a literal manifestation of the thread of her story. 

On two pages devoted to a readers' poll of who should "serve alongside Hawkman, Johnny Thunder, and the others" in the Justice Society, we see this Wonder Woman seeming to explode out of a ballot box,  a fist raised in victory. She's more solid here, with flesh-colored skin and silvery rather than golden bracelets, but her costume is part red and part blue, partially obscured by the ribbon, and stars abound.

The very next page has a panel of her in this costume, the bustier seemingly changing from blue to red and back before readers' eyes. And then later, on the page devoted to the debut of her TV show, Wu draws an image of Wonder Woman hanging from a helicopter's landing skids and she's outfitted similarly to the way she is on the cover, although here she seems to wear a golden belt and her shorts have a golden trim, and while her boots are comic book-accurate in design (at least circa 1977, with the point at top and the stripes), the colors are blue and gold rather than red and white. Again, the ribbon plays a big part, drawn entering the page from one side and exiting on the other, while it entwines Wonder Woman's not-quite-right costume, as if to artfully obscure it.

As much as I liked Wu's attempts to draw Wonder Woman in a way that was recognizable but off enough not to make any DC or Warner Bros. lawery's fingers twitch, I think there were also some funny attempts to draw generic superheroes.

There is, obviously, that scene in 1941 with all the white men, where the various heroes all look like the kind one might find in a child's birthday card, or a coloring book, or a clip art file that comes up when searching "superhero", all capes and generic chest symbols (I assume she could have used a faux Superman here, a caped, dark-haired strongman in red and blue, just leaving off the trademarked "S" symbol? She probably also could have used some public domain heroes, although maybe the creators didn't want to suggest a specific studio or publisher in that image.)

Where it gets positively ludicrous is a drawing the Justice Society:

You know, J-Man. And H-Man. And G-Man. And the other guy.

Surely there was a better way to draw the JSoA without violating any trademarks, perhaps drawing them all in silhouette...? I don't know. I just find it funny to see the words "Justice Society" (and then the names Hawkman and Johnny Thunder) juxtaposed with those images, as if the artist read the script and was like, "Justice Society, huh? So, just some random group of vaguely superheroic looking guys, then!"

Now that I think about it, maybe J-Man is supposed to be Johnny Thunder and H-Man Hawkman...? (And maybe G-Man could be Green Lantern? He's got a cape like Alan Scott and he is wearing green! Maybe this is the JSoA of an alternate Earth in the old DC multiverse, like Earth-W or something...)

Anyway, A True Wonder is interesting enough to look at, in part to see an artist wrestling with drawing one of the most iconic of superhero characters when they aren't permitted to use any of the specific iconography, but if you, like me, care at all about where comic book superheroes actually come from, its excision of H.G. Peter from the story of his own greatest, most lasting work is sure to irritate. 

For more of Katy Wu's art, visit here or here.