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. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

--AN APPOINTMENT WITH DESTINY!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

You could scarcely have been spared.

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

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

Power--and death!

Which will I savor first, eh?

I-- the coming man!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Here are the last two panels:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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