Would you buy a collection of DC's 1996-1997 Plus books...? Do you think DC would publish one...?

The previous post began with a brief discussion of the 1997 one-shot Supergirl Plus #1, an over-sized book pairing the title character with Mary Marvel. Despite how unpleasant that particular book's subject matter was, reading it did remind me of DC's Plus line of books. These were a series of team-up books published in 1996 and 1997, each of which was a fairly substantial story (around the size of an annual) pairing the title character with another character, the logos on the cover making it look like the title was, for the Supergirl one, for example, Supergirl Plus The Power of Shazam! Or, for the Flash one, The Flash Plus Nightwing, from which I took the panels above (They're drawn by Eduardo Barretto and Gerry Fernandez).

As I said, I had only read a couple of them when they were originally released and generally enjoyed the ones I did. Looking into it, I see there were a lot more of them than I remembered, and I was now pretty curious about the ones I had left on the racks while shopping for new comics at Books Galore in Erie, Pennsylvania 30 or so years ago.

The majority of them have not been collected. In fact, only the previously mentioned Supergirl Plus, Flash Plus and Superboy Plus #1 have been collected, in books devoted to Supergirl, The Flash and The Power of Shazam. 

That, of course, means if one wants to read any of the other Plus books at this point, one has to track them down in back issue boxes or online. DC could make reading them much easier though. They could always collect them altogether. I'm not sure what one might call such a collection. Maybe DC Plus or DC Comics Plus...? 

Let's imagine DC does decide to do so. What would such a collection include? Well, here's a rundown of the various Plus books...

Azrael Plus #1

By Dennis O'Neil and Vince Giarranno

I didn't read much of Denny O'Neil's 1995-20003 run on the Azrael character, which spanned 47 issues of Azrael and then 54 more issues under the updated title Azrael: Agent of the Bat. Just the first issue, the disappointing Tommy Monaghan team-up and issues that were parts of crossovers like Underworld Unleashed or "Contagion". This special thus wasn't on my radar at all...in fact, I didn't even know it existed until a few days ago.

The selling point is no doubt O'Neil writing The Question again, after his well-regarded, 1987-1990 run on a Question ongoing with artist Denys Cowan, but that was before my time. I would have been more interested in the presence of artist Vince Giarranno, an incredible stylist I have mentioned repeatedly on the blog before (The cover of the one-shot was penciled by Barry Kitson, who penciled the regular Azrael series). 

I actually found a copy of this available online and ordered it...even though the cost of the shipping was greater than that of the book itself. So, I'll probably be reviewing this one soon-ish. 

Green Lantern Plus #1

By Ron Marz, Scott Kolins and John Lowe

I did read this team-up between then GL Kyle Rayner and The Ray, two characters with somewhat similar powers who were also relatively young men. Here they team-up against Doctor Polaris. I don't remember much beyond the cover though, which tells me it wasn't that great (Like, I didn't read it over and over like I did some comics from those years). But I also don't remember it being poorly made, either. I generally enjoyed Marz's GL comics, which I found satisfying if not always inspiring. 

You probably can't tell—I certainly couldn't!—but apparently George Perez inked that cover. 

Robin Plus #1

By Brian Augustyn, Mark Waid, John Royle and Rob Leigh

It looks like this was the last of the Plus specials published in 1996. I always liked seeing DC's various—and, at that point, still relatively new—teen heroes meeting and teaming up. This was 1996, remember, which means it was a couple years before Young Justice: The Secret #1 and the ongoing series teaming Robin, Impulse, Superboy and others on a monthly basis. Again, I don't remember much about this one. The cover is penciled by Mike Wieringo, though that was the extent of his contributions here. 

Batman Plus #1 

By Devin Grayson, Rodolfo Damaggio and Robert Campanella

Was this the best of the Plus specials that I read...? I have to assume so, as it is the one I remember best. I liked that it features what seems a fairly random team-up and the book cemented my admiration for the work of writer Devin Grayson and my affection for the Roy Harper character. This takes place during the brief-ish period in which Roy was just wearing some body armor in lieu of a costume (Between the purple get-up in New Titans and the hat-less "Red Arrow" costume that Dan Jurgens gave him in Teen Titans). 

Set during the time in which Green Arrow Oliver Queen was dead, I remember Grayson having Batman saying something along the lines of "I miss him too, Roy" at one point, in response to Roy's bad attitude toward his friend Dick Grayson's old mentor throughout. I don't think it was until that point that I even recognized the real hook of the book, which was that it featured Batman teamed up with another hero's grown-up former sidekick. And one that was resentful that he had lost his own mentor while Batman was still around.

Catwoman Plus #1

By Chuck Dixon, Anthony Williams and Andy Lanning

Okay, so I am just posting these by the year in which they came out, and then alphabetically, rather than the order in which they were released. 

This one is, obviously, an attractive package: A fully-painted Dan Brereton cover featuring Catwoman at her...Jim Balentiest and a buxom goth girl. 

That goth girl, as the cover says, is Scream Queen, part of the titular rock band in the short-lived, 1996 series Scare Tactics. DC apparently tried to promote the Len Kaminsky-written, Anthony Williams-penciled series by pairing the book's characters with more popular ones in a series of four Plus books, each with a Brereton cover. It obviously didn't work, as Scare Tactics ended up only lasting12 issues anyway. (My belated apologies to Kaminsky and company for not buying it; while the book looks like something Present Caleb would enjoy reading, College Caleb had much less time and money to spend on comics). 

The lead story was only 27 pages, and but it followed by an 11-page story by the Scream Tactics creative team. This was the case for all of the Scare Tactics-related Plus books.

The Flash Plus #1

By Mark Waid, Brian Augustyn, Eduardo Barreto and Gerry Fernandez

I liked this one a lot, too...starting with the very cool, very dramatic cover. I believe it was this issue that I first learned The Flash Wally West's best friend was Nightwing Dick Grayson; having read so few Titans-related books, I pretty much never saw the two in the same comic for very long (I was far more used to seeing Wally paired with Green Lantern Kyle Rayner, who was initially quite cool on, though, being the two young, legacy members of the JLA after Grant Morrison, Howard Porter and John Dell relaunched the book, they were often paired together and gradually seemed to become friends). 

In the story, Dick Grayson and Wally West embark on an annual road trip, but end up having to suit up as Nightwing and The Flash to solve a murder mystery and save the world from an alien inasion.

As noted above, this one actually been collected. It appears in Flash By Mark Waid Vol. 6. 

Impulse Plus #1

By Len Kaminski, Anthony Williams and Andy Lanning

Impulse apparently graduated from being a guest-star in someone else's Plus special to getting his own. This is obviously another of the Scare Tactics specials, pairing the young speedster with someone named Gross-Out. The regular Scare Tactics creative team handled the team-up portion, which also has a back-up like the other of the Scare Tactics-related Plus specials.

Robin Plus #2

By Chuck Dixon, Len Kaminsski, Anthony Williams and Andy Lanning

One of only two examples of a #2 for a Plus book, this one paired Robin with the werewolf character from Scare Tactics. The creative team seems ideal for the book, as it is the regular writer of Robin's series plus the regular creative team of Scare Tactics. 

Sovereign Seven Plus #1

By Chris Claremont, Derec Aucoin, Roger Robinson, Dexter Vine and others

I was actually surprised to find out this even exists. 

Sovereign Seven was a title starring an original superhero team created by Chris Claremont and Dwayne Turner...and, unusually for DC characters, the team was also owned by Claremont and Turner. Which likely explains why you don't ever see them anymore (And/or why Geoff Johns never brutally killed them off in a crossover event). 

Their title lasted 36 issues, which is honestly about three times longer than I had thought it had. I only read a single issue, #26, which guest-starred "Hitman" Tommy Monaghan (and made that fact rather obvious on the cover, with members of the team dressing in sunglasses and green coats like Tommy). It was, if I recall correctly, terrible. (Although, to be fair, most Hitman appearances not written by Garth Ennis were pretty terrible; I think the Resurrection Man crossover might have been the exception that proved the rule.)

Anyway, here they team with the Legion of Super-Heroes, who I am almost as uninterested in as I am the Sovereign Seven. I guess if DC really were to try to collect their Plus books, they would have to negotiate with Claremont and Turner if they wanted to include this in it. Or they could just not include it. I wouldn't mind, personally. 

Superboy Plus #1

By Ron Marz and Andy Smith

The cover makes it look like the title of the book is Superboy Plus The Power of Shazam!, the second half of the equation being the actual title of the Captain Marvel book of the time, but Superboy here teams up with Captain Marvel, Jr., not Captain Marvel or the rest of the Marvel Family. 

I honestly can't remember if I read this one or not, which doesn't seem like a very good endorsement of its quality, but then again, that was almost 30 years ago. I suspect I did; it certainly seems like something I would have bought at the time, and I do have vague memories of these two teen heroes interacting.

Apparently, this cover connects to that of Supergirl Plus #1. 

Superboy Plus #2

By Len Kaminski, Anthony Williams and Andy Lanning

I don't much care for this Slither fellow's look—are reptile people dreads worse than white people dreads are nah?—but I have to imagine he looks better painted by Daniel Brereton than he might look depicted by others. But I don't think even Brereton's brushes can make that outfit work (Look how cool Brereton's Superboy looks, though!).

This is the last of the Scare Tactics-related Plus books....at least alphabetically, as I've been listing them there. 

Supergirl Plus #1

By Peter David, Mike Manley, Bret Blevins and John Nyberg

I already discussed this one, obviously. Honestly, if DC did decide to collect all of their Plus comics but decided to leave this one out, I wouldn't blame them. I doubt they would though, as they so recently published it in DC Finest: Supergirl: Body & Soul. 

In addition to that DC Finest: Supergirl volume, it was previously collected in 2023's The Power of Shazam! Vol. 2 (along with Superboy Plus #1) and 2016's Supergirl Vol. 1, making this the most collected of any Plus book.

Superman Plus #1

By Tom Peyer, Bernard Chang and Bob McLeod

Here's another one that I don't remember even existing, but given that it had the Legion of Super-Heroes on the cover, I wouldn't have been interested, which might explain my having no memory of it. Tom Peyer's a pretty great writer, though, and I was able to follow and enjoy his use of the then time-lost Legionnaires in Supergirl Annual #2 (Well, most of them do little more than cameo, while Brainiac gets the majority of the panel-time).

The above cover is by Chris Sprouse, by the way.

Wonder Woman Plus #1

By Christopher Priest, Brian Augustyn, Mike Collins and Tom Palmer

Like the Azrael, Sovereign Seven and Superman specials, this is another one I don't think I knew even existed. It's an interesting character pairing, and now I'm having trouble recalling Wonder Woman and Jesse Quick ever appearing together; I feel like she replaced Wally on the League very briefly at one point (not in JLA, but in The Flash) where they might have, but I'm coming up blank on any particular interaction between the two. 

Wondy looks a little wonky on Mike Collins' cover above, but I would be interested to check this one out. Priest is obviously a great writer (Augsutyn is credited with a plot assist, so presumably Priest did the lion's share of the writing), and neither of these are characters I think I've seen him write before.

So, adding up the page counts for all of these stories and their covers, would mean a trade collecting them would have to be at least 492 pages long. If DC decided they didn't it was too complicated to collect a Sovereign Seven team-up in there, then that would knock it down to 453 pages. That seems like an awfully big page count for a trade paperback collection...although they could easily fit them all in a DC Finest collection. Although if they did so, I can't imagine what they would call it: DC Finest: Plus...? Or would they go with the title of the first story, as they seem to do with some of their DC Finest collections, and it would end up being something like DC Finest: The Anger, The Terror and The Question...?

Considering these comics as a whole, though, I wonder if they are perhaps just too much of their era for DC to consider collecting them...? I mean, all of these characters are still around in some form or another (Well, not those from Sovereign Seven and Scare Tactics, I guess), but the vast majority of them no longer star in their own books, or are even the prime heroes with that name.

For example, instead of being the only Green Lantern and the only Flash, Kyle Rayner and Wally West are now both one of many. Tim Drake was retiring from superhero-ing in the last story featuring him that I read, but even before doing so he was a Robin, not the Robin. That version of Supergirl has been replaced by the Kara Zor-El version...and I thought maybe retconned away, but I think Sophie Campbell is bringing Matrix back in the pages of Supergirl soon-ish. Those particular incarnations of Mary Marvel and Captain Marvel, Jr. would rebooted away in The New 52; Mary's back and active, although I'm not sure what they're even calling Junior these days. 

That said, Superman, Batman and Wonder Woman are obviously all still around and all still starring in a book or three or six (even if Bats and Wondy dress a bit differently now), and Nightwing and Catwoman are also still stars (Do note Nightwing's shaggy hair above, though, and Catwoman hasn't worn the purple costume in forever now). 

As for the creators, there are a lot of great ones involved here, but I think Mark Waid might be the only one among those above that one might consider a name, sells-a-book-just-by-being-attached-to-it. Maybe Preist, too, I suppose. I'm not so sure about Claremont and the late O'Neil and David; do books they've written still have a lot of currently in today's market...?

Anyway, I would certainly buy a DC Finest collecting all of these between a single set of covers. But then, I (quite obviously) don't speak for the entire market. 

I don't actually want to discuss Supergirl Plus #1, so let's instead look at a Final Night tie-in and Supergirl Annuals #1-2

Gail Simone and company's story from the Summer of Supergirl anthology—which was collected in Supergirl Vol. 2: Hometown Horrors, a trade I reviewed in this column—was about the first meeting of the current version of Supergirl and the current version of Mary Marvel. Reading it made me curious about a previous story about the first meeting of a different version of Supergirl and a different version of Mary Marvel, 1997's Supergirl Plus. 

There weren't all that many Plus books, but I thought they were a pretty fun idea, oversized one-shots featuring a team-up of a popular character plus a sometimes less popular one (There were a whole round of them featuring the cast from the short-lived monster rock band book Scare Tactics, for example). I recall liking the handful of them that I had read (Batman Plus featuring Arsenal by Devin Grayson and Rodolfo Damaggio, Green Lantern Plus featuring The Ray by Ron Marz and Scott Kolins, The Flash Plus featuring Nightwing by Brian Augustyn, Mark Waid and company, and so on). 

I had never read Supergirl Plus, but I rather vividly recall a friend of mine talking to me about how insane it was. A fan of the Supergirl TV show, she went looking for Supergirl comics during its first season on the air, and this issue was one that she found. That it featured another young female superhero just made it all the more appealing. In her words, it was about Supergirl and Mary Marvel teaming up to fight a child molester at the mall.

As I said on Bluesky the other day, I had assumed she was kidding. Or at least exaggerating. 

She was not. 

Seeing that DC had fairly recently collected the one-shot in DC Finest: Supergirl: Body & Soul, I ordered the trade from the library, and was excited to dig in, as the lead story, the team-up, was written by the writer of the Supergirl title at the time, the great Peter David, and it featured pencil art by Mike Manley and Bret Blevins, with Jon Nyberg handling the finishes. It looked great.

But yeah, it's about a child molester targeting Mary Bromfield at the mall...and Supergirl and Mary Marvel don't team up to fight him, but end up fighting one another for most of it. First physically and then, later, taking opposite positions on how to deal with the alleged molester.

I say alleged because the book itself never clarifies whether or not the man, a police officer who is friends and colleagues with this version of Supergirl's policeman father, had sexually assaulted Mary or not. We see him approach Mary Bromfield and put his hand on her shoulder. Then we see Mary Marvel attacking him, saying he tried to assault a young girl. 

As to what happened between those two scenes, we get Mary's telling and the man's telling. The basic events line-up—suspecting her of shoplifting, he takes the young Mary out of the mall and to his car, she escapes and runs away—and even the dialogue is close if not exact in both tellings. In Mary's, he's depicted as lascivious and she says she touched her before she manages to run away. In his telling, he's completely professional throughout the entire encounter.

Before reading it, I was planning on reviewing the story for a blog post. But having now read it, I don't want to. It was just too weird and too dark and too unpleasant. 

I don't want to speak ill of the recently dead David, an unquestionably great writer who has produced an incredibly revered an influential body of work, including several series I quite enjoyed. 

I don't want to quote and try to parse the dialogue.

I don't want to scan an image of the middle-aged police officer licking his lips as he pushes Mary into the car in her telling of events. 

And I just plain don't want to spend an hour or two thinking about the subject matter, honestly. 

Maybe I wouldn't have minded doing so as much in the late '90s, when it was originally published, or in the late '00s, when I launched my blog, but not now, when there is a man adjudicated of sexual assault and accused of at least 20 more sexual assaults in the Oval Office, when there is an apparently whole of government effort to cover up the Epstein files, full of stories of adult men preying on minors, which is being led by the current Attorney General of the United States, and not when the story of a horrific rape at Cornell University is in the news, a story that has provoked a grotesque, inhumane backlash against the alleged victim and a defense of the young men who raped her (and other young men who were told about the events in real time and yet did nothing to stop them). 

Now, that 29-year-old comic book story is technically well-written. And it is quite well-drawn. 

But it's weird as hell that DC Comics published it. 

We, the readers, never find out what exactly happened, whether the man did attempt to sexually assault a child or whether Mary had misinterpreted the situation (The ending, showing the man alone in his car and bursting in to tears suggest he likely did assault her...although it's also possible to read it that he was so upset over the fact that he was accused at all that he broke down). 

But the story presents us with one superhero who may have been mistaken about whether or not she was sexually assaulted in Mary Marvel. And another superhero, the one whose name is on the book, torn between whose word to take, and ultimately deciding that the legal process must play out to determine whose version of events is actually true (A technically, legally correct opinion, I guess, but why would the writer maneuver her into this position at all?). 

That Supergirl learns that Mary Bromfield and Mary Marvel are one and the same by the end of the story, and that Mary is thus hamstrung from pursuing justice through the legal system because she also wants to preserve her and Billy Batson/Captain Marvel's secret identities, doesn't seem to factor into Supergirl's thinking at all.

I guess I said more than I meant to say about it, but there's a lot more I could say. 

Let's leave it at this: What a weird fucking comic book story this is.

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Instead of a full discussion and dissection of the Supergirl story I picked up this collection in order to read, let's instead focus on a few other points of interest in it, tie-ins to various DC Comics events of the time. 

This volume collects the first 18 issues of the 1996-2003 Supergirl series, all written by Peter David, plus Supergirl Annuals #1-2, the aforementioned Supergirl Plus #1 and a short story from Showcase '96 #8. Flipping through, I noticed that meant a tie-in issue to the 1996 Final Night crossover event and annuals from the "Legends of the Dead Earth" and "Pulp Heroes" theme years. 

I have at this point read almost none of this iteration of the Supergirl book; two issues for sure, maybe four at the most. (Scanning the cover gallery on The Grand Comics Database, I think I only read 1999's #38, a Zauriel team-up and a Day of Judgment tie-in, and 2001's #63, a Batgirl team-up and a Joker's Last Laugh tie-in, which was collected in last year's DC Finest: Batgirl: Nobody Dies Tonight. It's entirely possible I also read #36 and #37, which were part of a crossover with Young Justice, but, unlike the issues of Young Justice in which Supergirl appeared, I have no memory of them).

If I understand correctly, this Supergirl series started out being about the post-Crisis Matrix Supergirl, a being made of synthetic protoplasm with psychokinetic powers who took the shape of the dead, pre-Crisis Supergirl, a being who then somehow bonds with a dying human girl named Linda Danvers in the small town of Leesburg.

And that is about all I know, really. 

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I liked the Final Night crossover in general. The main, four-issue series was written by Karl Kesel and penciled by Stuart Immonen and the plot involved the threat of Earth's sun being extinguished by a Sun-Eater, something from a 1960's science fiction comic that had since become part of the DC Universe. Its name tells you what it does.

While the mini-series follows the superheroes' valiant efforts to save the sun, the day is ultimately saved by a bit of deus ex machina from Parallax Hal Jordan, who seems to expend all of the energy he has amassed in the previous years doing so...and gives his life, giving the character a noble (and ultimately rather temporary) death after his previous heel turn.

What was different about the storyline, and what made it of greater interest to me, was how hopeless things eventually got, with parts of the main series and many of the tie-in issues featuring not just the heroes trying to stop the Sun-Eater or deal with the threats of the sun going out and the Earth starting to freeze but also visiting their loved ones to say goodbye. For all the DC Comics stories about the world almost ending I've read, this was the rare one in which the actual end of the world seemed imminent enough for characters to react as if this was actually it (My favorite tie-in was Hitman #8, in which the only mildly super-powered Tommy Monghan and his hitman social circle barricade themselves in their favorite bar and tell one another stories as they wait for the world to either end or for the superheroes to sort things out as they usually do). 

DC released a collection of the main series, a Parallax one-shot tie-in and the issue of Green Lantern dedicated to Hal's post-event funeral in 2021. I enjoyed Final Night every time I've read it. The tie-ins haven't all been collected together before, and you're most likely to find them in trade collections of the title they appeared in. The Supergirl one, for example, is in this volume DC Finest. 

Now, it's actually not much of a tie-in. If this were a comic with the Crisis On Infinite Earths branding rather than the Final Night branding on the cover, we'd call this a red skies issue. Of course here, the sun has gone out, and so the skies are black...and snowy.

Given that this is only the third issue of a new ongoing series, however, I suppose we can forgive David for not completely committing to the crossover event, and instead doing the bare minimum to do so (Of course, if memory serves, David's Final Night issue of Aquaman was rather half-hearted in its connectivity to the crossover as well, with the cover depicting Aquaman's harpoon hand breaking through the ice of a frozen ocean, while the inside mostly had the characters going about the story David had presumably already written for them, likely altered to involve the sun temporarily going out and the ocean's surface freezing). 

Supergirl is in Leesburg and trying to keep the populace calm while everyone is understandably pretty freaked out. There are riots in the streets and fires everywhere. In the opening scene, Supergirl is in a church, facing a crowd that soon turns violent and, when she realizes one of her old powers doesn't seem to be working and it's not as easy to escape as she thought, many of them attack and start beating her (Don't worry, she's fine; her invulnerability is working as always).

Soon, her/Linda's father appears with some other cops in riot gear and calms the mob down.

Meanwhile, Linda's mom is driving slowly around town in a car with a loudspeaker on top, encouraging people to meet at the church for prayer and counseling. She's soon attacked by rioters.

Before long, it's clear that the rioting isn't the natural result of panicked people facing the literal end of the world, but that they seem to be...devolving...?

They are. This is thanks to a talisman called The Heart of Darkness, according to recurring character Buzz, who tells Supergirl its spell only works when there's an eclipse of the sun. Or, as here, when the sun seems to be in the process of being eaten. 

So that's the only real connection to Final Night. Were this not a crossover to the event, David might have only needed to change a line of dialogue here or there. Of course, as is, the sun going out provides a good fakeout for the rioting, with readers suspecting one rationale, before learning what's really behind it. 

On the final pages of the issue, Supergirl discovers who it is that has the talisman and is thus behind the madness afflicting her town, endangering her parents and the death of a friend's brother: Gorilla Grodd.

While I obviously was in the dark about the ongoing Matrix-and-Linda-are-now-one plot and this Buzz character and the off-panel, seemingly demonic entity he converses with in one scene, everything else was easy enough to follow and is as well constructed as one might expect from a Peter David comics script.

One could complain about the "red skies" nature, but, again, this is only the third issue of a new series, and David understandably prioritized making it more of a Supergirl issue than a Final Night tie-in. It might have been interesting to see what he might have written if Final Night fell on, like, the twenty-third issue of the series, or if DC had given him a story in a special Supergirl tie-in or an anthology to deal with her reaction to the sun going out/the world ending. 

I was quite surprised by how much I liked the art, as it was penciled by Gary Frank. When I think of his work, I tend to think of his many collaborations with Geoff Johns, on the likes of Superman various Superman books, and Batman: Earth One, the New 52 Shazam! and so on, where his work is very realistic, and quite full of fussy little lines that can lean toward what I personally perceive as a sort of ugliness. 

I suppose it's possible his style evolved between his work on Supergirl and his work on Action Comics a decade or so later, but I have to assume some of the difference comes down to the inking. This Supergirl art has all of the virtues of Frank's work, including his solid characters and realistic style, but it looks far smoother and cleaner than his later Johns collaborations. This issue of Supergirl, he is inked by Cam Smith. 

Of course, there's at least one point wherein that realism is something of a detriment. His Gorilla Grodd looks way too much like a real gorilla in this issue. In fact, it seems as if Frank used photos of real gorillas for reference, as this Grodd's face lacks the spark of intelligence, and he's missing his shaggy sideburns. He also doesn't have any attributes to suggest he's something more than the gorillas you might see in the zoo; he has no elongated skull, no big pot belly, no upright stance, no expressions. (I should note that Grodd looks more Grodd-y on the cover of the next issue, though.)

Oh, and he also looks really, really small, about the size of a real gorilla, I guess, rather than the towering brute he usually is (In all except one panel, where he seems to have suddenly grown about five times as big, and dwarfs a prone Supergirl, who was taller than him in previous panels). 

Having done years in the blogosphere and online comics news sites, I suppose it's also worth addressing the subject of Supergirl's skirt and shorts here, huh? This Supergirl costume, as Frank draws it, has a really, really small skirt. In fact, it's so short that I realized early on that I think it's meant to be more of a decorative element than a garment. That is, it makes sense to think of Supergirl's costume as a blue bodysuit with a skirt wrapped around it for a splash of red color, rather than the skirt being something meant to conceal what's beneath it (There's a panel early on, for example, where Supergirl plunges straight down from the sky, and her skirt naturally flies straight up and one sees that she's basically wearing a long-sleeved one-piece bathing suit, rather than a top and skirt over a pair of underwear or shorts.)

Er, except on the cover of this issue. There it looks like Frank just drew her bare ass under the skirt, and the colorist later added tiny blue shorts under it (The blue color is there, but there's no black line designating where the artist would have drawn the shorts ending and her legs beginning).

Now, how exactly Supergirl manages to save Lessburg from Grodd isn't revealed until #4, which I did not read, but I did flip through it pretty thoroughly, looking at the drawings of Grodd and Supergirl, and interestingly/depressingly, once Supergirl falls under Grodd's mental thrall and thus temporarily becomes bad, she naturally starts dressing in sexier clothes.

As you can see on the cover for #4, she changes into a crop top and leather pants with cut-outs along the sides. (Also, her hair suddenly gets much curlier and seems to have much more body than when she's in her normal "good" frame of mind, for some reason.) I suppose this is another example of the men who make superhero comics designating that a heroine has gone bad by having her start dressing sexier or in fetish gear (Hellfire Club Jean Grey, Sue Storm's Malice personality, Supergirl on Apocalypse in Superman/Batman, Countdown's Mary Marvel, etc.).

Again, I didn't read that issue, just flipped through it, so I don't know if Supergirl explains why she decides to change clothes (and tease out her hair!) now that she's being psychically dominated by a telepathic super-ape...or if Grodd made her change clothes and, if so, why, as it would be weird for Grodd to be interested in women in leather, wouldn't it...?)

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By 1994, DC had abandoned their summer annual events, in which each series' annual was part of a big crossover event storyline, and they had instead moved to doing standalone annuals all organized around a shared theme. The theme for 1996 was "Legends of the Dead Earth", explained thusly:

Earth is dead.

Those who once might have called it home are long scattered to the endless stars.

But in that scattering, on a thousand different worlds, by a thousand different ways...

Earth's greatest legends live on. 

What, exactly, did this mean...? I'm not entirely sure, having only read a single one of these 25 annuals (That would be Doug Moench and Vince Giarranno's Batman #20, purchased because I so liked Giarranno's over-the-top art; it was no great shakes, but it did let Giarranno redesign Batman and his supporting cast, giving us a furry version of Catwoman and a Scarecrow with the head of a crow. I wouldn't mind reading more of these now though, should DC decide to collect them into some DC Finest collections...although I would hope they would do Armageddon 2001, Eclipso: The Darkness Within and Bloodlines first).

It seems to be that all of the annuals were sort of Elseworlds stories ("Elseworlds" was actually the theme for the 1994 annuals), with the scope narrowed so that they had to be set in the far-flung future, which seems to have translated into science-fiction legacy versions of the heroes of 1996.

The Supergirl annual contained three stories, and thus three different versions of Supergirl...or, I guess, two different Supergirls and a story of a third. That translates to a 22-page lead story and two eight-page back-ups. (That's 38 pages total, for just $2.95!)

The lead story is "The Surrogate" by writer Chuck Dixon, pencil artist Ron Wagner and inker Bill Reinhold, and it's the one that corresponds to the cover. It involves a sort of clever sci-fi mining operation, in which a scientist in the employ of a mining company straps unwilling human subjects into chairs and puts a special apparatus on their heads that allows them to control big, metal, shape-changing humanoid mining avatars in an incredibly hostile environment that no human being could possibly survive.

These are all big, squarish-looking entities that visually suggest more machine-like versions of Marvel's Mindless Ones, and the shape-changing is apparently limited from the wrist down, so they can turn their "hands" into whatever tools they might need. The scientist and mining people refer to them as "Tooljerks."

One such unwilling subject for the procedure is a young blonde woman named Cryssia, whose parents used to tell her stories of Supergirl when she was a little girl. Something goes wrong (or right, I suppose) with the procedure, however, and the machine that would allow her to control her Tooljerk loads too much of her into the avatar, and she is therefore able to control it more completely than she should be able to, and rebel against the safeguards put in place.

She immediately transforms it into the shape of Supergirl, drawing an S-shield over its breasts, and then attacks and destroys the whole mining operation before heading off into space (On the cover, this Supergirl is silver in color, while the one within the book is golden...and thus looks an awful lot like a prototype for Superman Kal-El as he appears in the 853rd Century in DC One Million). 

It's a fine and direct, if simple, story, and one that probably didn't need all 22 pages to tell, but Wagner's art is fun, and he makes good use of the extra space to draw cool stuff. 

The first back up is "The Legend Lives On", by writer Barbara and Karl Kesel, with pencils by Dick Giordano and inks by George Perez (That's quite an art team for a back-up in an annual!). Well, this is the first back up in this particular trade, anyway; on the table of contents for the annual, the back-ups are reversed.

This features four sexy space ladies in various skimpy costumes; two look human, one is clearly Tamaranean and another is orange with antennae, and thus appears to be the same species as that one guy from the Legion of Super-Heroes (She's referred to as half-Durlan at one point). 

They find the fifth member of their crew dead in the cargo hold of their space ship, and she seems to have been in the process of drawing an S-sheild on the floor when she died, which they assume means she was trying to identify her killer.

This leads to a discussion of the Supergirl legend, which is interestingly and amusingly garbled, no doubt the result of a centuries-long game of telephone in the telling. (The most interesting bit is a panel that refers to her being active until "the time of the Legion of Titanic Heroes", in which we see this story's gloved version of Supergirl amid a group that seems to consist of Robin, Nightwing, Donna Troy, Red Star and Starfire (and someone I don't recognize) wearing what look like matching, Legion versions of their costumes. Legion Robin looks pretty cool, actually!)

Anyway, the women quite paranoidly accuse one another of being a murderous Supergirl in disguise, laser blasting each new suspect until the whole crew is dead from one cause or another, and the Kesels give us a twist, stinger-style ending that explains what exactly happened in the story. 

Again, there's not much to it, but it's a solid bit of storytelling, with pretty much perfect art for a superhero comic.

Finally, there's "Shootout at Ice Flats," written by Joe Lansdale and Neal Barrett Jr., pencilled by Robert Teranishi and inked by Stan Woch.

This is basically a Western, even if set in a small town on a distant planet, it's familiar-looking society full of familiar objects from our time that the characters don't seem to completely understand...or even recognize. Young, blonde schoolmarm/sheriff Eileen Garrett gets her butt pinched in a bar by a literal cowboy, a humanoid bull*, and she slaps his wrist and knocks him down with her weapon, a ruler.

He says his sister will get her, and Eileen and the bull-man's cow sister do indeed have a showdown. Eileen gets an unexpected surge of power from a good luck talisman that her mother gifted her the night before, a star with an S on it that she says came from Sardine Girl, presumably another joke about how the Supergirl legend has gotten garbled over the centuries. 

Again, nice art (I'm not familiar with Teranishi at all) and a light story. Probably the lightest of the bunch, actually, but it's not so bad as to cancel out the good that came before it. I didn't find any of the jokes particularly funny. The minotaurs in a western setting is probably the most inspired gag but, by this point, I had seen it before elsewhere. 

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

After "Legends of the Dead Earth", the next year's annual theme was "Pulp Heroes", in which creators were apparently invited to put DC's heroes of 1997 into various "genre" stories from the pulps that preceded comics, like Westerns, romance, detective, action adventure and so on. They also all had painted covers.

Still a relatively poor college student, I didn't buy or read that many of these the year they came out that weren't attached to ongoings I was already reading (JLA, Hitman, Aquaman, etc.), but, in the years since, I have found several in back issue bins, and I don't think I've read any that weren't at least pretty good. (Looking over the list of 23 annuals now, I think I've read 10 of them; again, this line of annuals would make for a great set of DC Finest collection!)

("Pulp Heroes", by the way, was the last of the line-wide annual themes or crossover stories; 1998 and 1999 were limited to JLA and some of the ongoings starring members of the League, for the crossover stories Ghosts and JLApe. Then in 2000, there was "Planet DC", which introduced international heroes and characters, but there were only a handful of these annuals and, after that, DC seemed to have given up on the idea of annual events of any kind.)

Now, these stories weren't Elseworlds-like reimaginings of the title characters as pulp-style heroes, but rather in-continuity, DCU stories within a particular genre. For the most part, they tended to still be superhero stories, and the degree to which they embraced the assigned genre varied from book to book (Two of the "Weird Western Tales" books I recall, for example, were the Hitman and Robin annuals, in which writers Garth Ennis and Chuck Dixon sent Tommy Monaghan and Tim Drake West for adventures involving shootouts and other elements familiar to the genre).

Supergirl Annual #2 was a "Young Romance" title, but the men who made it—and yes, all of the writers and artists involved in the annual's two stories were men—basically just present us with superhero stories with elements of romance to them. Certainly the romance elements of the lead story, by Tom Peyer, Anthony Castrillo and Jordi Ensign, are more-or-less bolted-on, the nods to the genre coming on the cover, and a pair of splash pages of Supergirl and the time-lost Brainiac 5 kissing while melodramatic narration fills too many boxes with their thoughts.

The back-up, a 17-page story by Chuck Dixon, Greg Land and Prentis Rollins, is actually more romance than superhero, depicting as it does a pair of teenagers yearning after their respective crushes and ultimately becoming a couple, but it's still a superhero comic. 

The Peyer-written lead story is entitled "Secret Hearts" (Although the cover calls it the more confessional sounding "I Lied For Love!"). In it, Linda Danvers finds that things in Leesburg are going crazy in a very Silver Age-y kind of way, the precise sort of wackiness that, when seen in a Super-book in the '90s, generally meant Mr. Mxyzptlk was responsible.

For example, her mom is about to prepare dinner, and water shoots out of the stove top. Her dad puts his key in the ignition to start his car, and his car immediately starts shrinking. At the hospital and police station, things are just as weird: An IV bag full of hummingbirds, a cop de-aged to a child and so on. 

Linda eventually calls Clark Kent for advice (Having read so little of the book, I'm not clear on the pair's relationship, but Linda tells her she's "Mae" on the phone, which I guess was their name for Matrix when she wasn't Supergirl, "Mae" being short for "Matrix.").  She needs someone smart to help her figure out what's going on, and after demurring that "most of the geniuses that I've met are pretty nasty characters," Superman directs her to "the smartest person on Earth" at the moment, the Legion of Super-Heroes' Brainiac 5 (As you guys know, I'm pretty ignorant of the LOSH and their goings-on, but this seems to be during the point in the 1990s when a group of teenage Legionnaires were temporarily stranded in the present day DC Universe).

Brainiac, who Peyer establishes is already smitten with Supergirl, as he apparently a thing for strong blondes, is happy to help her investigate, but taps out when he realizes the cause seems to be magical rather than scientific (And, for the record, it's not Mxyzptlk).

Here's where the lying for love comes in. 

"I really hate to do this," SG narrates, before she lays her head on Brainiac's shoulder and says, "Oh, Brainy... ...what am I going to do?"

That seems to be enough seduction to get Brainiac to overcome his aversion to magic and continue to help her against his better judgement. The cause and solution to the madness is basically super-science gobbledygook with perhaps a shade of meta-commentary to it, but the pair ultimately save Leesburg, come clean with their feelings for one another and how they were both dishonest in an attempt to get what they want. And then they share a kiss. 

Again, not reading this volume of Supergirl, I'm not sure if anything ever comes of their apparent mutual attraction and the potential of a romance promised by sharing a kiss, or if this is more like the Batgirl/Superboy kiss in Batgirl #41 that seems to have never been referred to again. Scanning the cover gallery on The Grand Comics Book Database again though, it doesn't look like Brainiac or the Legion reappear in Supergirl for the rest of the run. 

The back-up, "Object of Desire," follows a pair of teenagers at a pizza place in Leesburg. The boy is a Supergirl-obsessed delivery driver with a terrible haircut reminiscent of that of Damage's (The story opens in medias res, within a daydream of his in which he's a dumb-looking, '90s Image Comics-esque superhero saving his girlfriend Supergirl from a giant robot). And the girl is a waitress who has a crush on him, despite the terrible haircut.

He happens to see Supergirl fly over on her way to deal with a dangerous emergency, and he follows...only to end up in deadly peril. In fact, he would have died...were it not for the fact that the waitress with a crush on him had also followed and was able to bring emergency workers to him in time to save his life. 

Having thus been saved by a girl he knows in real life, he henceforth only has eyes for her. A fact attested to when Supergirl again flies above him in the last panel, and he doesn't even notice.

Supergirl is in this, but it's not really a Supergirl story, so much as the story of the two pizza shop kids.

It's actually kind of cute, and not the sort of story I would have associated with Dixon. Also, this still being the '90s, Land's art still looks like something human hands might have drawn (although his style is growing increasingly more realistic, making this story look somewhat of a piece with that of Frank's art on the ongoing), rather than random photos found online and manipulated in Photoshop.

 **********************

By the way, the very next issue in this DC Finest collection following the second annual is Supergirl #14, the cover of which brands it as part of DC's Genesis crossover event series. Like Final Night, Genesis was composed of a mini-series, with issues of the publisher's various ongoings devoting tie-in issues to the storyline.

Shouldn't I also read and write about this issue too, then...?

Ha ha ha! No, of course not! There is a key difference between Final Night and Genesis, and that is that Genesis is not good. 

Written by John Byrne, this 1997 mini-series revolved around a "Godwave", a Source-spawned wave of energy that created gods as it passed over the universe and then, on a second pass, created superheroes...in a somewhat nebulous, ill-defined way, given that DC's scores of superheroes all have vastly different origin stories that an hardly share a retroactive root cause.

I read the main series and some of the tie-ins, but I was never really sold on this core premise, and some of the tie-ins with the Genesis-branding on top didn't really tie too directly into the events of the mini. For example, the Batman issue just had the hero dealing with a feeling of unease, as the Godwave not only bestowed particular super-powers, but also feelings of confidence and inspiration and faith that lead guys like Bruce Wayne to dress up in costumes and fight for justice, I guess...? 

So yeah, I'm not reading an issue of Supergirl that ties in to Genesis, but if that sounds like something you're into, feel free to do so and let me know what you think. 

*If you're wondering, as I did when I saw this, the Ryan Browne-created cartoon Wild West C.O.W.-Boys of Moo Mesa debuted in 1992 and thus predates this.

G.I. Joe, A Real American Hero Pt. 11

G.I. Joe, A Real American Hero #43 (1986)
Art by Rod Whigham and Andy Mushynsky

•This issue's cover by Mike Zeck and John Beatty is an interesting one, as it is maybe the first "symbolic" cover of the series so far, depicting a hooded skeleton with a machinegun blasting away (And, in that respect, looks a little like one that might have appeared on an old issue of DC's Weird War Tales, which regularly featured skeletons).

Having now read the issue, I see that the skeletal figure above is meant to be a Grim Reaper or Death-like figure, but, because its robe is colored red instead of the traditional black, that's not as clear as it could be. Also, because Larry Haman's G.I. Joe narrative includes red ninjas that dress pretty much like this, I assumed that the image might have been in reference to them rather than some sort of personified death. 

•The issue opens right where the last left off. In front of the Vietnam Memorial, the Cobra Crimson Guardsman code-named Fred II is holding Stalker and Snake Eyes at gunpoint, and he's just made a dramatic revelation: He used to be Wade Collins, a member of their Long Range Recon Patrol that they had left for dead during the Vietnam War. What a small world, huh?

Much of this issue is thus devoted to Fred/Wade telling the two captured Joes what happened between the time Stalker saw him take a machine gun blast to the chest in Vietnam and now, after he ushers the pair into his car, keeping his gun on them from the back seat while Snake Eyes drives. 

I found this all rather interesting, despite the rather preposterous coincidence (and there will be several more such coincidences revealed in the years to come, showing how various Joe and Cobra characters crossed one another's paths during Vietnam and its immediate aftermath). 

That is mainly because, as I've mentioned before, Cobra doesn't really have a clear, articulated reason for being, a shared goal of the sort one would think necessary to inspire so many people to join the organization. 

By this point in the series, we've only gotten a few vague hints of what binds Cobra together from Cobra Commander's occasional speeches and glimpses into his origins. So far Coba mainly seems to a pyramid scheme inspired by vaguely libertarian-sounding talking points, a pyramid scheme that somehow went from selling cleaning products to becoming an independent military whose budget must rival that of the United States and the Soviet Union...and has just become its own nation state.  

Fred/Wade's story is the first time we hear any member of Cobra explain how and why they joined.

Wade had a rough time of it after Stalker and the others left him for dead. He survived the AK-47 blast to the chest that Stalker had thought had killed him. He was found by "the NVA regulars" (there's no footnote here, oddly, but he's referring to the North Vietnamese Army), who dug out all the bullets ("They didn't have much in the way of anesthesia...") and held him captive for two years. 

When the war ended, he returned home...only to have a hippie spit in his face in a San Francisco airport, and his wife's lawyer meet him there with divorce papers. And it gets worse. He couldn't get a job ("I found out that the captains of industry weren't too keen on hiring vets," he says "We had a bad reputation, they said...")

This is the passage that deals with his discovering and joining Cobra, presumably in Springfield:

As you can see, it's pretty vague. Wade says he believed, but never mentions what about the organization, exactly, that he believed. 

From what little writer Larry Hama gives us here, it seems as if that what Cobra provided was acceptance and a sense of community, both of which he felt he had lost after the war. It's easy to imagine that someone who was a prisoner of war so long, or felt that his fellow soldiers had somehow betrayed him, might want a degree of payback against the United States and its army, and might therefore join a terrorist organization opposing the U.S., but he doesn't ever articulate that here. (Likewise, as a former soldier who we can assume was pretty damn elite—he did serve with Stalker, Snake Eyes and Storm Shadow, after all—Wade would have been an attractive recruit to a paramilitary organization, but, because this is Wade telling his own story, we never hear why it was that Cobra might have wanted him.)

•Meanwhile, several other storylines intersect, as various characters move towards Springfield. 

The fan belt in the stolen truck Candy Appel ejected Buzzer from has given out, and she accepts a ride from the guy with the spiked coffee who had dropped The Soft Master off in Springfield. When they realize "the little oriental fellow" left his suitcase in the car, they circle back towards Springfield in order to return it to him. 

Billy, still wearing a black gi with a white belt, has been riding towards Springfield with some nuns who drop him off ten miles outside of town. The spiked coffee guy ends up picking him up too. 

Candy has just called out the driver out for drinking and driving—"That coffee you've been drinking isn't just 'laced with brandy'--it's mostly brandy!"—and, as they argue, Billy has a vision of impending death, giving us an image of The Grim Reaper to echo that on the cover:

•As for Buzzer, after parting ways with Candy, he rode the rails back to Springfield, and there he runs into Firefly and Scrap-Iron, the latter of whom is making his first appearance in the comic and gets perhaps the most perfunctory introduction of any Cobra agent so far:

"Say hello to Scrap-Iron!"

Scrap-Iron was released as part of the 1984 line, and I recall him being a pretty cool action figure (Even if he didn't have too much to do in the cartoon). He's another figure that my best friend at the time had. He was Cobra's "anti-armor specialist" and was dressed in Cobra blue and red, although he had his own costume and gear that separated him from the masses. 

His action figure came with a little missile launcher with two red missiles. (You can see he and Firefly setting it up just after the 40 second mark of the opening sequence of The Revenge of Cobra mini-series, just before Mutt and Junkyard appear to knock them down and then Blowtorch sets it on fire).

•How fast is The Soft Master...? Well, previously, Destro had said he could move too fast for Destro to see. Here, after he discovers who it was that had really killed his brother The Hard Master, we see The Soft Master making for the exit as Cobra agents posing as Springfield's municipal police force enter the station, and Whigham and Mushynsky draw him not unlike the way someone might draw The Flash for the Distinguished Competition:

He even makes a "whiz" sound when he runs!

I've heard it said before that the G.I. Joe toys/cartoons/comics of the 1980s were a recruitment effort for the United States military. Maybe they started out that way, but, the longer I read the comic, the more it becomes clear that while, sure, they make the people who serve in the military seem pretty cool, they're still not nearly as cool as ninjas are.

If anything, I think the G.I. Joe toys/cartoons/comics of the 1980s were a recruitment effort for ninjas. 

•The various storylines finally intersect quite violently at the climax. The Soft Master is speeding out of town in a stolen police car, pursued by Buzzer, Firefly and Scrap-Iron, and he manages to lose them by maneuvering around a speeding train in the nick of time.

At that same moment, the car containing Billy, Candy and the drunk driver are barreling towards the train in the opposite direction. There's a struggle for the wheel, and their car ends up crashing into the railroad crossing signal, instantly bursting into flame.

The Soft Master goes back to save them, but Scrap-Iron has climbed up a telephone pole in able to survey the damage on the other side of the train and fires his missiles.

The first strikes The Soft Master directly; we know he's fast enough to dodge a missile, but he intercepted it in order to save the people in the burning car. 

But it was all for naught anyway, as the second missile takes out the burning car. The Cobra guys didn't know who was in it—and presumably wouldn't have blown it up if they knew Cobra Commander's son Billy was.

Now, characters in superhero comic books have a tendency to escape death and/or come back to life after actually dying on a fairly regular basis, but these seem to be some pretty permanent deaths, right...? Surely we've seen the last of The Soft Master, Candy Appel, Billy and The Drunk Driver in the pages of G.I. Joe, A Real American Hero. I can't imagine anything happening in future issues to contradict this at all. 

•There is one more scene after that of the civilian characters being blow up, though, so the issue doesn't end on a down note.

Rather, Wade-turned-Fred shows up on the doorstep of his house, with Stalker and Snake Eyes behind him. He gives a sincere little speech to his fake, Cobra-assigned wife and kids, telling them he is quitting Cobra and going on the run, and how much he enjoyed being a family with them. To his surprise, they feel the same way, and the four of them decide to go on the run and live the rest of their lives as a real family. 

G.I. Joe, A Real American Hero #44 (1986)

Art by Rod Whigham and Andy Mushynsky

•This is the first issue of the series I had read when it was originally released since 1984's #2. I don't remember where or why I bought it, and it's certainly possible it was a gift because, as I've probably mentioned before, as a child most of the comic books I read were ones that my mom or grandmother bought for me to read when I was home sick from school. If eight-going-on-nine-year-old Caleb did buy this for himself, I imagine it probably had something to do with the Lady Jaye, one of my favorite characters from the cartoon (and something of a cartoon character crush of mine) being on the cover. That cover artist Mike Zeck drew her shirt unzipped below her breasts might have also been a factor. 

•Boobs! A motorcycle! Gunplay! A robot driving a semi! What grade-school boy could resist such a comic book cover!

•I can't tell you how many times I must have read this issue as a child, but I am assuming it was a lot, as rereading it 40 years later, I was somewhat surprised to realize I remembered it so well, including particular images, lines of dialogue and events that happened within.

•A very solid done-in-one, the issue features Lady Jaye taking a group of new Joes on one final training mission in the desert outside Las Vegas before they move from the "provisional" to "official" roster. Between the five of them, they are driving three different vehicles from the toy line which are here being introduced to the comics readers.

Meanwhile, a bald, buff, mustachioed, caped and monocle-rocking mad scientist is trying to convince Destro and The Baroness that Cobra should buy a couple of his inventions, robot soldiers and "creeper-bombs", the latter of which, when detonated, cause the instantaneous growth of thorny, entangling vines that further emit a strong pollen that works like a knock-out gas.

Coming across the Joes, the evil scientist decides to use them as test subjects. While they are knocked out by the pollen, he strips them and their vehicles of their weaponry, transports them to a maze of junked cars and then sics more robots carrying the spore bombs on them.

•As for the introductions, Jaye is driving the Silver Mirage motorcycle (sans sidecar). The new Joes are Bazooka, Crank-Case, Heavy Metal and Airtight, and they are riding in the AWE Striker (which stands for All-Weather and Environment) and the Mauler MBT (that's Mobile Battle Tank). 

The Crank-Case figure came packaged with the former, and Heavy Metal with the latter. Bazooka, as his name suggests, was a missile specialist who carried a bazooka in battle, and the green and yellow clad Airtight was a "Hostile Environment" specialist who came with a gas mask of sorts. (The latter two appeared more frequently on the cartoon than either of the former two; Bazooka seems particularly prominent in my memory. He was often paired with Alpine, who we haven't met in the comic book yet, and he was characterized as being very, very dumb.)

The mad scientist is Dr. Mindbender, who would go on to become quite prominent in both the cartoon and the comics, although amusingly it doesn't seem like his name was quite settled on by the time this issue saw print. Repeatedly he is referred to as "Dr. Brain-Wave", although he is referred to as Dr. Mindbender in two instances.  

Finally, his robot soldiers were B.A.T.s (Battle Android Troopers). Black and yellow in color, these had blank, T-shaped "faces", a clear chest revealing circuity within and their action figures came with interchangeable hands and weapons, including a claw, torch and gun. 

While androids might seem a little too futuristic for a military-themed comic book/cartoon/toy line, one of the franchises' occasional flirtations with science-fiction and fantasy, their utility was obvious, especially in the cartoon, where no one ever seemed to get very badly hurt, let alone killed. After all, being robots, these were enemy soldiers that could regularly get shot and blown-up...without any human beings being killed in the process (I always assumed this is why the Foot Soldiers in the original Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles cartoon series were robots, too). 

While the G.I. Joe comics rather regularly showed Cobra soldiers getting gunned down or blown up, here Hama realizes the military application of robot soldiers, and when we first see them in the story, they are performing a suicide mission, running straight into the Joes' vehicles while wearing creeper-bombs on their backs. (Hama also takes advantage of the Joes having robot foes to depict them being destroyed in ways that would probably have been too gruesome were they human soldiers, though; at one point, for example, the Joes manage to trick a tank piloted by a B.A.T. into a car-crusher.)

•This panel contains a musical reference, in case you needed evidence that this comic was indeed from 1986.

•This may just be nostalgia speaking, but the overall quality of this issue coupled with the fact that it is a standalone story makes me think this one would be a great candidate for a "best of" collection of Hama's Real American Hero. 

G.I. Joe, A Real American Hero #45 (1986)

Art by Rod Whigham and Andy Mushynsky

•Ace is flying a surveillance run over Cobra Island in his Skystriker, with Ripcord in the backseat (Here, his name is spelled "Rip-Cord"; like a lot of Joes with two syllable names, his seems to be spelled different ways at different points. According to the action figure packaging shown on thetoycollectorsguide.com, it's two words, "Rip Cord", whereas the text discussing the figure on the same site calls him "Ripcord," one word. Anyway, sorry if I misspell some of these guys' names constantly). 

One thing they see but can't quite make sense of is "a circular thing near the east shore." This is the Cobra Terror Drome, a circular base that was released as a playset as part of the 1986 toy line. In comics, the base was "modular" like the Joe base and could be easily transported and erected. The Terror Dromes would play a fairly sizable part in the ongoing comics storyline, as Cobra sold them to client states around the world for their own mysterious and nefarious purposes.

After recapping his whole deal to Ace in a rather natural sounding dialogue exchange—remember, he was kinda sorta dating Candy Appel, whose father turned out to be a Crimson Guardsman and who, as far as he knows, escaped Joe custody in the company of Buzzer—he ejects himself from the jet and parachutes down to Cobra Island. This was not part of the official plan.

•In a Wahington D.C. hospital, General Hawk is meeting with General Austin, who is still recovering from a heart attack...and what looks like a pretty bad case of Norman Osborn Hair:

(Speaking of hair, Hawk seems to have grown his flattop out, so he doesn't look quite so identical to Duke anymore.)

The pair were talking about what a hard time they were having getting intel on Cobra Island and, at one point, Austin wished aloud that they had a man on the island, despite having been forbidden by their higher-ups to insert someone.

Later, Hawk gets a phone call telling him that Ripcord had went rogue and parachuted onto the island...at which point Austin realizes Hawk had put Ripcord in that plane instead of any other Joe specifically because he expected him to jump out to investigate the Appels, given his personal investment (Also, as Ripcord's name suggests, he's the team HALO jumper and his specialty, conveniently enough, is jumping out of airplanes).

Hawk clarifies that he did expect Ripcord to jump, but not to do the surveillance himself: "Now that Rip-Cord has broken security, we are forced to sending a covert team in to bring him back and who knows what kind of nifty photographs and maps they'll bring back with them?"

•In the canteen they share with the chaplain's assistants at Fort Wadsworth, Flint introduces Snake Eyes and Spirit to two new Joes: Quick-Kick and Alpine, whose areas of expertise are silent weapons and mountaineering, respectively. Both of these guys would play pretty big roles on the cartoon, bigger than they do in the comics.

The pair, still dressed in generic army guy dress-up clothes rather than their eventual Joe uniforms, comment on Snake Eyes and Spirit's attire. They will shortly adopt their own personalized uniforms, of course, but it's interesting to hear Quick-Kick of all people commenting on anyone's uniform. The most scantily-clad of all the Joes, Quick-Kick's uniform was a pair of pants, a sash, a headband and...that's it. 

Speaking of fashion, that first panel above is the official debut of Snake Eyes' new costume, accidentally previewed on the cover of #41. There's a better look at it later on this same page, which you can see below:

I like this costume a lot. It's definitely my favorite of the...four (?) different costumes Snake Eyes would wear at various points in the series. 

Of all the characcters who get new costumes throughout the series, I'm pretty sure that, following The Baroness' upgrade, this is the last good redesign. (I'm on the fence about Hawk's new costume, as both it and his original costume are both so generic and boring.) Most of the others—Roadblock, Cobra Commander, Destro, Storm Shadow, Stalker, Scarlett—would get new costumes ranging from not-very-good to godawful in the years to come, but I guess that is to be expected, as Hasbro would continually redesign the characters in order to sell new action figures of them.

•If you read the dialogue of the chaplain's assistant that Snake Eye's snatched that paper from, he was in the middle of complaining about the "motor pool guys" (G.I. Joe is, of course, a secret team, and their cover is that they work in the motor pool...although Snake Eyes' get-up sure doesn't look like that of a mechanic). Specifically, he's noting the way they dress and that they are always armed. I guess it is weird that Snake Eyes is wearing a bunch of grenades in the cafeteria, huh...?

•Oh, as for the unusual message he was talking about that caught Snake Eyes' attention...? It was apparently a coded one meant for Snake Eyes, sent out by The Soft Master in Springfield and naming the killer of The Hard Master. Snake Eyes takes it and rushes directly to Storm Shadow's NYC water tower hideout. 

•The pair of ninjas borrow a Rattler from a nearby safehouse and make their way towards Cobra Island. During the flight over, Storm Shadow reveals the killer's identity to the reader. I know it's been 40 years since this issue came out, but, if you haven't yet read the series and don't want to be spoiled, stop reading until you read this issue, okay...?

Here we get the reveal...

It was Zartan...!

•While it might look coincidental within the context of the book, Hama was no doubt intentionally foreshadowing this reveal when he had Zartan pick up his old bow and start stalking the island, looking for the intruder who parachuted in. 

There's an extremely intense confrontation between Zartan and Ripcord, as they try to pick one another off from afar. Zartan has a compound bow with a listening apparatus to help him locate the camouflaged Joe in the dark, while Ripcord has a starlight scope on his gun.  

Eventually, both resourceful men resort to trickery, with Zartan using his "chameleon" abilities to disappear while Ripcord has him in his gun sites. That's followed by a cool scene of an invisible Zartan stalking through the mud, in which the artists draw only his footprints appearing and we get the sound effects of footfalls, and the there's a hand-to-hand battle. 

On the very last page, we see Ripcord triumphant...or do we...? His melodramatic dialogue is just vague enough that it's not clear if this is meant to be Ripcord or Zartan-disguised-as-Ripcord.

•What an awesome issue.

•Oh, but wait! Even more stuff happens! 

Back in D.C., General Austin promotes Hawk, giving him a couple more stars and naming him the "Commander in Chief of the G.I. Joe team!" 

And then the Joe team that Hawk had previously alluded to sending to Cobra Island to rescue Ripcord (and maybe do some unofficial recon on the way) inserts. This team includes Flint, Spirit, Alpine and Quick-Kick, the latter two now dressed (or, in Quick-Kick's case, undressed) like their action figures.