Some non-comics books I've read recently.

Flywheel, Shyster, and Flywheel: The Marx Brothers' Lost Radio Show (Pantheon Books; 1988) What an unexpected treasure this book was. I forget exactly how I came across it. It was either mentioned in Noah Diamond's Gimme a Thrill: The Story of I'll Say She Is, The Lost Marx Brothers Musical, and How It Was Found (BearManor Media; 2016), or it came up in a library catalog search for Diamond's book (You'll note the titles share the words "Marx Brothers" and "lost"). 

The book consists of the scripts for the 26 episodes of a 1932-1933 radio show starring Groucho and Chico Marx entitled Flywheel, Shyster, and Flywheel, wherein Groucho played lawyer Waldorf T. Flywheel and Chico played his shiftless assistant, Emmanuel Ravelli (The show was originally, briefly called Beagle, Shyster, and Beagle, until a real lawyer named Beagle complained).

While radio was of course extremely popular at the time, the industry wasn't in the habit of recording each episode of each show for posterity, and so Flywheel was never recorded. Hence the show being lost. As to how it was found, the scripts were submitted to the copyright office of the Library of Congress, where they were put in storage...and apparently unearthed by this book's editor, Michael Barson. 

As to why it was just Groucho and Chico, well, Harpo's silent schtick obviously wouldn't have translated to radio very well. It's possible to imagine him in the show, I suppose, making the occasional honk on one of his horns to let the audience know he was there, but his character would have mostly been talked to and talked about, with the actor not actually having much of anything to do. (As for Zeppo, he was technically still part of the act at that point, but I guess they didn't need a regular straight man for the show.)

That means the entire show was, for the most part, like the occasional Groucho/Chico scenes from the Brothers' filmography. Lots of wise cracks and lots of puns—the latter usually followed immediately by Chico declaring "That's a some joke, eh?", preempting groans. The book may just constitute the longest and most dense example of Marx Brothers humor, certainly of the verbal variety. It's also among the densest comedies of any kind I've encountered, with almost every line of dialogue containing a joke of some kind; they are not all great jokes, mind you, but they sure are frequent. 

The basic law office premise lasts for a while, but as the show goes on, more and more often the characters find themselves in different situations and settings, some vaguely related to the legal business, others not so much (taking a walking trip vacation, going camping, stowing away on a cruise ship ala Monkey Business, etc.). 

It is thus a rather unusual sort of situation comedy, one in which the particular situation rather frequently changes, while the characters remain the same; it is the characters, after all, from which the humor emanates, rather than the particulars of the situation.

And for anyone who has seen much of the Marx Brothers' filmography, the characters here are extremely familiar. Groucho and Chico, of course, don't play Flywheel and Ravelli so much as they play Groucho and Chico, the same characters they play in all of their films. (If one hasn't seen any of their films, I wonder what they would make of the scripts in this book, as familiarity with the Marx Brothers' work makes it easy to imagine them physically in the stories of the show and to hear their voices in one's head; of course, if one wasn't a prior fan of the Marx Brothers, I'm not sure that one would even have any interest in reading this book.)

Some of the jokes will also sound awfully familiar to Marx Brothers fans. Again, the show was on the air from 1932-1933, which means after their Broadway success and their films The Cocoanuts, Animal Crackers and Monkey Business, during the same years as Horse Feathers (1932) and Duck Soup (1933) and before A Night at The Opera (1935) and A Day at the Races (1937).

Some specific jokes heard in their films, both those released before the radio show and those released after, show up, with whole sections of The Cocoanuts and Animal Crackers being repurposed for the show, accounting for about two and a half whole episodes. (If you've seen those films dozens of times as I have, these episodes of the show will read somewhat tediously, although it is interesting to see the familiar routines slightly tinkered with, as with new stand-ins for the films' characters appearing, or with Chico assuming lines previously spoken by Zeppo or, more oddly still, Groucho himself.) 

The show works both ways, though. While jokes from some films are repurposed here, some of the specific gags used in the show appear in later films...and an entire film seems to have been based on the scenario of an episode of Flywheel. 

In one episode, Flywheel and Ravelli take over the management of a failing department store for one of their clients, who goes on vacation and leaves it in their care. This, of course, tracks pretty closely to the premise of 1941's The Big Store, wherein Groucho and Chico's characters are also named Flywheel and Ravelli, respectively. 

Though the Marx Brothers are, of course, immortal in the world of comedy, not all of their jokes are timeless, and this show contains some that have aged especially poorly.

The Brothers' treatment of women in their comedy is well known and, perhaps, even notorious. There's only one recurring female character in the show, Flywheel's secretary Miss Dimple, who is mostly there by necessity. When she's not serving as the occasional straight woman to bounce gags off, she's there to set the scene and move the plot along. Most shows open with her at her typewriter answering a phone; in the later episodes where the Brothers' characters are in a setting other than the office, she answers the phone and tells whoever is on the other line that they are not in, and where they are, setting up that scene.  

Almost all of the other women to appear are Margaret Dumont stand-ins (sometimes quite literally, as some of these characters take on her role from the sequences lifted from The Coconuts or Animal Crackers). They are of course subjected to barbs about being old, unattractive, overweight, lacking in intelligence or otherwise undesirable, the inherent cruelty of these jokes somewhat mitigated by the class differences between these ladies, who are inevitably rich society ladies, and the Brothers' characters, who are (here, especially) low-class, poor and even criminal (Especially Chico's Italian immigrant persona).

There are a few rather unfortunate, even ugly sections of racial humor too, of the sort that never really made it into the movies (two examples to the contrary to follow). There are two sequences that make some fun of Indian characters, and by "Indian" I mean both those from India (as in one episode where the characters are thrown off a train in their nightshirts, and are thus mistaken by a society lady as Indian spiritual leaders in their ceremonial robes) and Native Americans (as in a scene from an episode where Flywheel and Ravelli go camping and have an "Indian guide" named Chief Pain-in-da-Face). One joke in the latter scenario, a pun based on smallpox, actually shocked me.

There are also a few more fleeting racial jokes, including one about a Native American and another that refers to the yellow skin of Japanese people. 

The most interesting of them all, however, is a Groucho joke that echoes a rather notorious punchline of his from Duck Soup. 

After mentioning he may have been a little "headstrong" to another character in that film, he continues: "But I come by it honestly. My father was a little headstrong. My mother was a little arm strong. The headstrongs married the armstrongs and that's why darkies were born."

The reference to "darkies" here often comes up in discussions of the Marx Brothers' more controversial humor and whether it could be racist or not (The other scene pointed to by critics? The brief scene in 1937's A Day at the Races where they smear grease all over their faces and try to blend into a crowd of Black characters. There are certainly some other cringe-worthy moments in their oeuvre, but these two seem to be the most cited).

It's not hard to see why Groucho's reference to "darkies" would be offensive, especially coming as it does following a line about two families mixing, suggesting miscegenation. In fact, it seems the only way to read it. For years it was censored during television rebroadcasts of the film. 

The actual reference is probably lost on most people hearing it today (and long was to me until I read more about the Marx Brothers in adulthood), but Groucho was, rather nonsensically, referring to a now mostly forgotten popular 1931 song, "That's Why Darkies Were Born." That song, by the way, sure sounds pretty racist, its lyrical content evoking the problematic image of the happy slave. It was also originated in a Broadway revue where it was performed by a white singer in blackface.

The reference may still be racist, of course, but, at the time, it wasn't as completely random as it now seems.

Anyway, Groucho again makes a reference to "That's Why Darkies Were Born" in one of the Flywheel episodes. In this particular scene, Flywheel and Ravelli are acting as movie producers, and they pitch a scenario about a young woman's tragic story to a studio man named Blitzen.

CHICO: Boss, da rest of the story comes to me like a flash. Da wife, she feelsa very bad. She goes into mourning. She sits in da house all day long playing da piano. 

BLITZEN: In mourning and she plays the piano? 

CHICO: Well, she plays only on da dark keys.

GROUCHO: Certainly. That's why dark keys were born.

The joke doesn't really make any sense unless you're familiar with the song, as the radio audience of the time would have been. Today, it makes no sense, as the phrase isn't at all common. In fact, I only recognized it as a joke at all because I've read so much discussion of the Duck Soup reference. 

The Monster's Bones: The Discovery of T. Rex and How it Shook Our World (W.W. Norton and Company; 2022) As the sub-title states, David K. Randall's book is about the discovery of the first  Tyrannosaurus rex skeletons in 1900 and 1902, and naming of it in 1905. But it's a 235-page book, so it covers a lot more ground than that.

Randall bookends his novel-like non-fiction story meditations on "the monster" of the title, a prologue set at the American Museum of Natural History, and an epilogue about its place in our culture. 

Between them, is what is essentially the biography of the man who discovered those first skeletons in Wyoming, Barnum Brown, who led a big, bold life full of exciting adventures that spanned the last decades of the 19th century and most of the 20th. Travelling the world in search of dinosaur fossils and those of other prehistoric creatures, a writer could hardly ask for a better subject. 

And it also contains quite a bit of set-up, retelling the story of European science's discoveries of the true age of the Earth and of the first dinosaurs and other prehistoric animals, and the gradual grappling of such concepts as deep time and extinction after centuries of accepting the Bible's Book of Genesis as authoritative.

Thus, readers who have previously read books on the early years of the discovery of dinosaurs and early paleontology will encounter plenty of old friends within this story of Brown and the T. rex, a diverse set of historical characters that includes Mary Anning, P.T. Barnum, Edward Drinker Cope, Arthur Conan Doyle, Georges Cuvier, Charles Darwin, Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins, Thomas Henry Huxley, Charles Knight, Othniel Charles Marsh, Richard Owen and more...even Merian C. Cooper and Willis O'Brien, both of whom we will get to in a bit.  

While all of that is quite interesting, Randall's focus remains on the life of Brown and the discovery of the T. rex, the latter put in the context in various philanthropists and museums racing one another for bigger and better dinosaur bones to exhibit to the public, a race which initially seemed focused on the huge sauropods...until Brown found the biggest carnivore that ever lived. 

In this respect, Randall's book is both a thorough, well-written and quite readable retelling of the story of humanity's discovery of the dinosaur that is simultaneously the story of Brown and his most historic discovery.  

Quite surprising to me, as I neared the end of the book, I found that it dovetailed with something I had spent a lot of time thinking and writing about over the course of the last few years, the giant monster movie. See, for all his other accomplishments, Brown also advised "a former newspaper cartoonist turned marble cutter named Willis O'Brien." 

Today we know O'Brien for his later career, as a film special effects maestro who bought the title character and his dinosaur neighbors to life in 1933's King Kong. 

In 1914, O'Brien wrote to Brown for advice on dinosaurs, and the latter advised him on the subject, for what became O'Brien's The Ghost of Slumber Mountain, which Randall says was "the most realistic dinosaurs yet displayed on film" and was also the first time that a T. rex was "a screen villain."

O'Brien would later bring dinosaurs to life for 1925's The Lost World (in which Arthur Conan Doyle's allosaurs from the book are replaced with a T. rex) and then Kong, which famously featured the giant ape battling a T. rex. 

While Randall doesn't say so in his book, I think it's safe to say that the T. rex played an integral role in the development of the giant monster genre, given its prominent appearances in foundational films King Kong and Lost World...and, as I've read in another book during my research of giant monster in film, the T. rex also played a role in the development of the character we now consider the genre's standard-bearer. Along with the stegosaurus and the iguanodon, the bipedal T. rex, especially the upright standing one conceived and popularized artist Charles Knight, was an essential element in the creation of our old friend Godzilla. 

The Paranormal Ranger: A Navajo Investigator's Search for the Unexplained (William Morrow; 2024) In some parts of the world of paranormal investigation, a witness who has had multiple sightings or encounters can sometimes raise a red flag. After all, if creatures like Bigfoot or mysterious flying vehicles with inhuman pilots are so rarely seen, what are the chances that a single individual may do so twice, thrice or a half-dozen times?

Stanley Milford Jr., a retired Navajo Ranger who had spent over 20 years in law enforcement before writing The Paranormal Ranger, is one such individual who has had many encounters of various kinds. 

He has seen UFOs and, as a child, experienced unusual, equivocal phenomenon in his house that he attributed to the supernatural. He also saw what he believes was a skinwalker running alongside his car one night, and, years later, a strange, shadowy entity that confronted him while he was sleeping. He saw Bigfoot. An investigation into a haunted office building yielded plenty of activity, including a strange phenomenon that followed him around for years. And, most troubling to me, one night he awoke paralyzed in his bedroom to find a creature meeting the classic description of a "Grey" alien standing at the foot of his bed, apparently after it had examined him (He noticed his clothes were on inside out after the encounter).

That's...a lot, even spread out over a lifetime. But does Milford having experienced all of that himself necessarily provide reason to doubt him? Well, he was actively investigating the paranormal throughout much of his career, and if one goes looking for Bigfoot and ghosts and aliens, is it really that unusual that one will eventually find them? 

Among his other law enforcement duties, Milford and his partner Jon Dover pretty much accidentally became his department's go-to investigators of paranormal activity, a sort of real-life, southwestern Native American answer to The X-Files. 

Apparently, at one point an older woman had called the rangers regarding a Bigfoot sighting on her property—the creature apparently stepped into her sheep corral and walked off with one of her sheep in its arms—and the rookie officers sent to follow-up with her didn't treat her particularly well. She ended up filing a complaint with the department about them.

During a meeting, Milford writes that the chief stressed the proper behavior of Navajo Rangers as public servants. "From now on, reports like this are going to be investigated properly, and you two guys," he said, pointing to Milford and Dover, "are going to oversee these cases."

So this was their first investigation of the paranormal, following up with the woman, searching her property for signs of the creature and, above all else, making sure she felt heard, believed and cared for. 

Many other such investigations would follow, Milford breaking them up by subject throughout the last two-thirds or so of the book ("The San Juan River Bigfoot", "Cryptids, Curses and Cons", "The Old Man and the UFO", "The Window Rock Haunting"). 

Not all of these yielded tangible results for Milford. In fact, in some cases, he is relating the sightings or encounters of others that he investigated well after the fact, and what they did afterwards. In the case of the San Juan River Bigfoot, for example, they launched a large manhunt—er, Bigfoothunt, I guess—for the creature multiple people in the area had seen repeatedly, but no one from law enforcement managed to lay eyes on the creature, nor come up with any more compelling evidence than the same sort of incidental evidence typical of such searches. 

In the case of "The Old Man and the UFO," they mostly just listened to his amazing story, about a UFO landing near his house, and its occupants seemingly searching for something around his property. 

I'm of two minds when it comes to believing Milford, as I so often am when I am reading books about the paranormal, particular of UFOs and aliens, which, for whatever reason, have always scared the hell out of me.

Part of me wants to believe him. He certainly sounds reasonable and sincere and, after all, giving one the benefit of the doubt seems to be the polite thing to do. Besides, Milford repeatedly stresses that part of the reason he wrote this book, and part of the reason he shared his own encounters with the paranormal (particularly in the case of the being in his bedroom), is that so often people who have had such experiences feel particularly troubled and alone, feelings that are only compounded by the fact that no one seems to believe them (and/or they fear no one will believe them), and he wants to stress that this is not the case. In other words, these things really happen to people, and their experiences and feelings are valid.

Another part of me though, a selfish part, wants to dismiss the experiences of Milford and some of the witnesses (again, particularly in the case of the being in his bedroom), because I don't want such sanity-strainingly terrifying experiences to be real. I don't want anyone to have to suffer such otherworldly fear and helplessness, and the thought of it happening to me fills me with an overwhelming dread. (I confess that, for the first few nights after reading that passage about the invader in Milford's bedroom, I was a little nervous going to sleep, repeatedly opening my eyes and glancing to the foot of my bed.) 

For that reason, I sincerely hope that Milford didn't actually have that experience, and perhaps instead had been suffering from sleep paralysis accompanied by a particularly vivid scary dream (He does mention sleep paralysis in that chapter but dismisses it as an explanation for what happened to him). 

Essentially a memoir centering on his own, personal encounters with the paranormal and his professional investigations into that world, The Paranormal Ranger tells of Milford's childhood, his parents' divorce leading to him being raised in two worlds, the more heavily Navajo world of his father (with its attendant superstitions and beliefs and practices regarding the supernatural world) and the more Western world of his mother, his early interest in law enforcement and his journey to qualifying for a career in it, and then, ultimately his experience with the paranormal, much of it secondhand, some of it firsthand.

One gets the sense that Milford probably has many other stories to tell (and thus other books in him), as this book focuses on only a handful of the more colorful investigations, in several broad categories of the paranormal.

Interspersed throughout Milford's life story at regular intervals are tales from the Diné Bahaneʼ, or "Navajo Emergence", a creation story that details the people's journey through several worlds. This will take on greater relevance in the final chapter, "Theories of a Navajo Ranger", wherein Milford outlines his own, personal unified theory of the paranormal. 

Essentially, he believes the universe consists of multiple dimensions occupying the same space, and that these dimensions can intersect with one another...or at least that particular entities can travel between these dimensions. 

This would explain how Bigfoot, for example, can seem to come and go without necessarily having the same sort of physical presence of other animals, or necessarily leaving the same sort of evidence behind that they do. In fact, Milford uses his own personal sighting of Bigfoot, in which the creature is unquestionably there in front of him, but then suddenly disappears, as an instance that solidified the idea for him in this chapter.

This theory is, of course, not a unique invention of Milford's, but his culture's creation story as well as his own experiences have reinforced this, and contributed to his current worldview, that, when it comes to the paranormal "there is no line," and that it's not so much a matter of belief, but of reality.

"Clearly, something in our human culture has gone wrong," he writes.

These paranormal events—UFO visitations, Bigfoot sightings, and hauntings—are happening at unprecedented rates for a reason. I have come to see them as a wake-up call for humankind—an awakening. Our planet is in crisis, multiple countries are at war, we have mass drug-overdose epidemics, and so many people are suffering. We must recognize how out of balance our world and lives are, how grotesque our treatment of the earth and one another is. And we must live better. We must do better. We must come back into balance with our environment and find clarity of purpose.  

I'm unsure to what degree I agree with this assessment, as, for the most part, it sounds like something one could have said about our planet at any time in the last century, maybe century and a half or so (Although it is true that the earth is in greater danger than ever before now, thanks to global warming and the climate crisis).

But then, I haven't had the experiences Milford has—thankfully; hopefully, I never will—and trying to find meaning in them seems to be a natural, healthy response. 

Given Milford's personal perspective, both as a Navajo and as a member of law enforcement, his take on the various phenomenon discussed in the book is particularly interesting and his book offers something of a new point-of-view not commonly written about realms of the paranormal, be they cryptozoology, ufology, ghosts or witchcraft. 

Weirdumentary: Ancient Aliens, Fallacious Prophecies, and Mysterious Monsters from 1970s Documentaries (Feral House; 2025) Well it's probably not hard to figure out what attracted me to this book. I mean, just look at that cover!  The title of the book or the subject of the book could have been just about anything, and I would have still paused to investigate given the presence of a Bigfoot-like silhouette...and that's before we even get to the old-timey UFO and the pyramids!

Writer Gary D. Rhodes tackles a very specific, but surprisingly large, genre of documentary film, that addressing some aspect of the paranormal, a genre which seemed to boom in the 1970s (And likely had a lot to do with all of the Bigfoot sightings of that decade). 

Though the credulousness of the filmmakers and the rigor with which they approach their chosen subject varies wildly from film to film, they are all essentially taking the posture of telling a "true" story. That might mean investigating or interrogating a subject, or it might seem to take the form of revealing something, but in each case, audiences were meant to at least take the possibility of the reality of something incredible like, say, aliens visiting Earth thousands of years ago to influence human development, or that there's something in the North Atlantic off the coast of Florida that endangers planes and ships, or that an unrecognized species of large, hairy humanoids might roam the wilds of North America.

Rhodes himself is not very credulous, and his writing in this sort of field guide to a particular type of film is filled with jokes about the subjects, questioning the likelihood of their reality and questioning those that may believe in them. Despite the often jocular tone, though, Rhodes is obviously a knowledgeable fan, and he's incisive in his analysis, admiringly discussing the gravitas of some celebrity hosts (Orson Welles, Rod Serling, William Shatner, Leonard Nimoy), the sometimes impressive quality of the cinematography and the effectiveness of the music (In some instances, his references to a film or series' music were compelling enough that I found myself seeking taht music out online to hear it for myself).

In his introduction, Rhodes talks a bit about his thought process for what to call these movies, and how he landed on "Weirdumentary"; apparently, he had considered "Crockumentary," which, in addition to having the benefit of rhyming with the word documentary, offered an assessment of how reliable they might be, but decided it was a little too judgmental. 

The book offers a brief look at some 45 weirdumentaries, from 1970's Chariots of the Gods (based, of course, on Erich Von Daniken's book about ancient aliens) to 1981's The Man Who Saw Tomorrow (about Nostradamus and his prophecies).  

Rather than tackling the films chronologically, Rhodes breaks them into sub-genres that he explores in chapters devoted to each, including ones on prophecies, the Bermuda Triangle, monsters, speculative (often Biblical) history, ancient aliens and UFOs (And yes, those last two each get their own chapters).

Each gets a full-page illustration, of either a poster or image or images from the film, and then at least a page's worth of a write-up. 

The format thus encourages flipping-through and grazing perhaps more than reading straight-through. That, coupled with its size—it's eight-by-eleven inches—makes it a good coffee table book, or perhaps one you leave in your car or bag and turn to when you need something to read in a restaurant or on a lunch break or something.

The section I was most interested in was, of course, that on monsters. And here "monsters" just means the Himalayas' Abominable Snowman or Yeti, North America's Bigfoot or Sasquatch and Scotland's Loch Ness Monster. Other than that popular triumvirate, the only monsters mentioned in these films seem to be the Fouke Monster (which, of course, mostly sounds like a Bigfoot-type creature, save for some reports of three-toed tracks) and a couple of North American lake monsters. 

What a change from today, when cryptid creatures are apparently numerous enough and well-known enough that they can fill books, command a TV series like 2007-2010's MonsterQuest and the likes of Mothman are now pop culture icons (I think it was when Build-A-Bear started selling Mothman plush toys that I realized the West Virginia monster had officially gone mainstream).

In addition to the official weirdumentaries that account for the bulk of the page count, Rhodes begins his book with a chapter on what I guess we'd consider the proto-weirdumentary. These stretch back as far as 1923's Is Conan Doyle Right?, and include a discussion of the extremely unsavory-sounding but apparently quite lucrative 1930 pseudo-documentary Inagi, which involved a passage in which gorilla-worshipping African natives are said to sacrifice human brides to gorillas (A film which may or may not have had some influence on King Kong; it certainly seems like Inagi could have been one of the films in the back of Merian C. Cooper's mind while imaging his plot...or, perhaps, on the minds of the studio executives who greenlit Cooper's woman-imperiled-by-a-gorilla film). 

The book also includes a comic book connection that surprised me (despite, I noticed later, it being noted right there on the cover; I guess I was distracted by the Bigfoot). Weirdumentaries contains a lengthy foreword from Stephen Bissette, who is a film critic and scholar with particular affection for and expertise in weird low-budget horror films and Vermont films...although we know him best as a great comic book artist, having drawn much of Alan Moore's seminal run on Swamp Thing and created the masterful dinosaur comic Tyrant (Soon to be resurrected in an oversized collection, apparently).  

I was born in 1977 and thus missed what Rhodes dubs weirdumentaries the first time around, although I certainly saw (and was scared by) some of these in TV rebroadcasts and, curiously, played for us in grade school in the 1980s. I clearly remember the In Search Of... episode on the Loch Ness Monster, anyway (And I distinctly remember seeing something that discussed the Kecksburg UFO incident, but looking it up now, I think that might have been an episode of Unsolved Mysteries, one of the TV series that seems to be pretty directly descended from the weirdumentary).

Therefore, I was quite thankful to find this book, and to now be able to benefit from Rhodes' work. I might not have been around for the genre's boom decade, but at least now I have a catalog of sorts to guide me in pursuing its more interesting entries.    

Bookshelf #16

This week's bookshelf is the last of my bookshelves on the first floor to be filled with DC Comics collections, all of which I would have acquired between 2012 and 2024 here. We've already looked at shelves containing DC manga and kids comics, Batman comics, Superman comics and those of some of the bigger DC heroes.

This one features a few books collecting solo series of more minor characters (The first chunk of Paul Levitz and Sonny Liew's 2015-2017 Doctor Fate series, the short-lived 1995 Black Lightning series launched by Ohio's own Jenny Blake and Eddie Newell, Garth Ennis and John McCrea's 1993-1995 run on The Demon, etc.), some team books (mostly Justice League books, but there are a few Justice Society and Suicide Squad collections and, rather randomly, the New 52 incarnation of Gail Simone's Secret Six and 2014's Teen Titans: Earth One Vol. 1), some collections of crossover event series (Zero Hour, Underworld Unleashed, Final Night, Forever Evil) and a whole bunch of miscellaneous comics (the first two volumes of the based-on-a-dumb-video game Injustice, Hanna-Barbera-related comics like Scooby-Doo Team-Up, Future Quest, Walter Simonson's 2012 original graphic novel The Judas Coin and a good number of those seasonal anthologies with spines that DC was publishing at the time etc.).

If you're surprised to see any of these books here, some of which are collections of series I read in singles and did not care for (Geoff Johns' New 52 Justice League, Injustice, The New 52: Futures End), I should note that those and a few of the others here came from DC directly, during a relatively short period in which they would send me review copies.  

Looking at the shelf now, I find myself wishing that DC would have collected Alan Grant's run on The Demon that preceded that of Ennis and McCrea, that they would have continued collecting Justice League Task Force after that first volume (the series doesn't get really good until it jettisons the rotating writers with rotating casts and Christopher Priest takes over, making it simply one more Justice League ongoing) and, as I've said many times before, that DC would collect their annual events like Armageddon 2001, Eclipso: The Darkness Within, Bloodlines, Pulp Heroes and so on into DC Finest collections like they did with Crisis on Infinite Earths and Zero Hour (even if it would take a few volumes to collect all of the bigger events). 

A Month of Wednesdays: January 2026

 BOUGHT: 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

BORROWED:

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

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

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

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

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

Well guess what?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

REVIEWED:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Batman explains:

I can't give--what I don't have. 

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

Let him stay dead. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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