On 1994's Justice League America Annual #8

Why am I writing about this particular comic this particular week? Well, because I had just read it for the first time. And as to why I just read it, well, having briefly mentioned 1991's Armageddon 2001 crossover event the other day, I thought about trying to track down the many annuals from the event I had never read, and started with Justice League American Annual #5; I couldn't find it, but I stumbled across this one instead. Given that its cover featured a League of A-listers—and this was from the period when the Justice League/s generally featured an A-lister or two among a bunch of C-listers—I was curious to read it. 

Now, this annual is from 1994. After a few years of the annuals all being part of a big crossover event story—1991's Armageddon 2001, 1992's Eclipso: The Darkness Within, 1993's Bloodline—DC switched to doing annuals that weren't connected by a particular storyline, but instead united by a theme. This was the first year of those thematic annuals, and the theme, as you can see from the cover above, was Elseworlds, DC's updated version of their old "Imaginary Stories", wherein the comics presented alternate universe takes on the characters. 

(The Elseworlds annuals would then be followed by Year One annuals, Legends of the Dead Earth ones set in alternate futures, and Pulp Heroes, after which point DC's line of annuals contracted greatly, so that only a handful of books got annuals. As I do every time I bring their annuals up, I would like to again state my wish that DC would collect all of these, preferably into DC Finest volumes. In terms of quality, the Pulp Heroes seemed to be the best of all of these, but then, I've only read all of the sets of annuals piecemeal over the decades, and there are plenty I've yet to track down).

This annual consists of two stories, the 46-page cover story and an eight-page back-up; I assume it is the latter that will be of greater interest to readers today, given the characters and light tone. And while a couple of bits of dialogue probably wouldn't have been published as is today, this second story is more evergreen and less, well, nineties looking than the former.

Both are written by Dan Vado, the Slave Labor Graphics and Alternative Press Expo founder who was, at the time, one of the several Justice League writers. He wrote Justice League America for a time, and then the unfortunately titled Extreme Justice (Which, from what I've read from back issue bins, is not as bad as it sounds...nor as bad as the art on the first issues certainly suggests it is). 

The lead story was penciled by a Norman Felchle, whom I have never heard of, and inked by Jon Stokes and a Rich Rankin (the latter of whom I don't think I've ever heard of either).  The back-up was drawn by Evan Dorkin...although he's credited as Evan DokinO, for reasons that will become apparent when we get to the story. 

Neither the credits nor the Grand Comics Database entry credit the cover artist, but I think it's safe to assume that it is Howard Porter, right? His style has changed a bit over the decades, but those poses all seem like pure Porter, don't they? 

And, as you can see, that cover features a Justice League with some big guns (and Hawkman), albeit they are all slightly off: Wonder Woman's hair is the wrong color, Superman's wearing gold armbands and The Flash looks like Darkstar Ferrin Colos. What goes on...?

Well, this Elseworlds story is a little like a Marvel "What If...?", the particulars of the question being "What If...Felix Faust Destroyed the Original Justice League and a Century Later a New One Rose to Oppose Him?" I guess that doesn't quite fit on a comic book cover, though, so maybe a Marvel editor of old would have been able to think of a shorter, punchier way to say that.

But yes, we open with the original Justice League: Superman! Batman! Wonder Woman! Green Lantern Hal Jordan! The Flash Barry Allen! Martian Manhunter!

Where's Aquaman? I do not know; he's never mentioned. And as for Wondy being there instead of Black Canary, who, in the DC timeline as it existed in 1994, was a founding member of the League while Wonder Woman was not, well, this is an Elseworlds story, right?

Apparently, Faust—who here lacks his old headdress—has very publicly challenged the Justice League, and they answer his challenge, arriving at what looks like a huge crater. They are immediately set upon by what Superman calls demons, and they chatter with one another during the fight; the demons aren't really a great threat to them, but they do keep them busy.

I was tempted to complain that Hal is able to use his ring against them despite the fact that they are yellow, but then I remembered this is an Elseworlds story...so maybe this Hal's ring worked against yellow...? Seems an odd choice though; they should have just colored the demons any other color. 

When the demons retreat, J'onn follows them in an attempt to locate Faust, but it is just then that the villain springs his trap. Calling on the powers of Abnegazar, Rath and Ghast (you know, the traditional Justice League villains The Demons Three), Faust summons a magical mushroom cloud that FWA-KOOOOMs the Justice League to death:

(Note their bones in the last panel on that page above; gnarly!)

Now empowered by demons from hell, and without the Big Seven Six to oppose him, the immortal Faust quickly conquers the Earth and, as he approaches the 100th year of his reign, he's starting to get a little bored, having never been able to recapture the high of killing the Justice League.

This new world looks oddly high-tech for one ruled by a wizard, but perhaps that is because Vado and Felche want to demonstrate the fact that is now somewhere in the latter half of the 21st century. (That said, Faust hasn't changed his look up, nor have his henchmen, who wear generic helmets, visors and armor that make them look like goons that the Image heroes of the 1990s might have fought.)

In this new, apparently utopian world, the only resistance to Faust comes from The Children of Justice, lead by Doctor Jonas, and old man with a flowing white beard who looks a bit like the Wizard Shazam and dresses like a superhero, wearing a cape and tights, with breifs over them. He goes around telling stories about the old, dead Justice League and how much Faust sucks, aided by totally normal, non-costumed and non-powered guys with familiar names like Ted Kord and Ralph Dibny. When we first meet Jonas, there's a Jimmy Olsen questioning his anti-Faust rhetoric.

Jonas and the Children are doing more than spreading stories, though. They are also conducting metagene experiments, and end up creating a new Justice League, consisting of new versions of the dead Superman, Wonder Woman, Batman and Flash, as well as a Hawkman and a Red Tornado. 

These have familiar sounding secret identities. The new Superman is Perry Ross, for example. And most of their costumes look like those of the originals, albeit with a variation here or there, like Supeman's armbands, or Wonder Woman wearing thigh-high boots. The more dramatic makeovers are those of Hawkman and the new Tornado.

Hawkman's costume is basically just a helmet, a pair of underwear and a bunch of straps that somehow make him look more nude than if he didn't have the straps, while Reddy's redesign is so radical you probably wouldn't recognize him as a Red Tornado until he started shooting tornadoes from his hands (It Looks slightly Deadpool-ish, doesn't it...? Or maybe Red Tool-ish...? Although Red Tool is supposed to be a Deadpool analogue, so maybe it's the same thing...)

Is this new League going to be enough to stop Faust, who vows to capture them and execute them on the 100th anniversary of when he killed the original League...?

Well, I mean, of course they are, but in order to keep it interesting, Vado has one of them turn out to be a traitor working with Faust, you probably haven't forgotten that Martian Manhunter has been alive all these years (and, apparently, taking his sweet time in attempting to bring Faust to justice), and then the good guys get some completely unexpected help from a rather out-of-left field source to finish off the bad guys.

(Spoiler warning for a 32-year-old comic, I guess...?)

The art, for better or worse, seems very much of its time. When Felchle draws the original Justice League, they have an unusual thickness or stoutness that reminded me of the way Mike Sekowsky drew them in their original adventures, but the more one reads on, the more awkward all of the figures look. Their heads often seem just a little too small, their limbs and hands too big. 

As I said, I'm not familiar with the artist—the credits on the GCD indicate that he's worked for Slave Labor, and collaborated with Vado on DC comics The Griffin and The STAR Corps and he has a couple of Marvel books to his name—but I have to wonder to what extent he was drawing in his own personal style, and to what extent he might have been trying to draw in a style that was popular at the time, which I suspect was behind a lot of the weirder comics art of the early to mid-90s.

Take, for example, this establishing shot of Faust's headquarters within the White House: 

(Also, let's stop to appreciate the fact that even in a comic book story about a dystopian future where a literal supervillain rules the world, the creators didn't imagine said villain would tear down the east wing of the White House.)

See the giant guns the goons guarding the White House are carrying? The one on the left, colored all blue, looks like the sort of over-sized gun we might expect to see Marvel's Cable or an Image guy toting around. But the one on the right, the red one? It looks ridiculously large, not like a gigantic rifle, but a cartoonishly large pistol. 

This panel is one of the many (many, many) examples of "extreme" art from DC Comics during this period where I suspect the artist might have been drawing at least somewhat sarcastically. That is, is Felchle here drawing guys with big guns because that's what the story calls for, or is he, perhaps, parodying comics where guys carry big guns...? 

It's not clear, really. In this panel, he does seem to be having a laugh at the extremes of '90s art, but, given that it's the only instance of such exaggeration within, it probably isn't likely. 

The art in the back up is, perhaps unexpectedly, straighter and more realistic looking at this point, even though Dorkin has a reputation of a cartoonist who draws funny comics.

Entitled "Attack of the O Squad!!! Or, What If They Staged an Invasion and Nobody Came?", the premise of the story is borne of the realization of just how many Justice League villains have names that end in the letter "O". Starro, Amazo, Despero, Kanjar Ro...you get the gist. 

This story is divided into two narrative strands. 

In one, the members of a Justice League sit around their base, bored out of their minds and, every time we check in with them, they are talking about how bored they are or attempting to do something to stave off boredom. An Elseworlds League, this particular line-up isn't one that ever actually existed: Wonder Woman, Martian Manhunter, The Flash, Blue Beetle, Booster Gold, Red Tornado and Hawkman.

In the other strand, Starro has gathered all of the Justice League villains whose names end with "o" mentioned above, along with other such villains as Sinestro, Bizarro, Chemo, Titano, Metallo and Professor T.R. Morrow, all of whom wear little "Hello My Name is..." nametags (If one of those villains jumped out of you as not belonging, don't worry, that's part of the story). 

Not content with just using all those guys, Vado also has Starro start to explain the absence of other such "o" villains: 

Alas, five of us are absent! 

I could not reach Deconstructo, nor Professor Ivo. Muto's ex-mate knows not where he is, and Eclipso seems to answer his phone half the time.  As for--

Here, Morrow interrupts Starro: "Hey! Don't any evil girls' names end in 'O'?"

Indeed, this villain team-up is a real sausage fest. 

Now, the problem with villain teams is that because they are inherently comprised of a bunch of unscrupulous people who never trust or respect one another, they collapse when the villains turn on one another. For some reason, the various Injustice Gangs and Legions of Doom never think to wait to start betraying one another until after they defeat the good guys. 

The O Squad is speeding towards Earth in a gigantic spaceship of Starro's, a rather cool design from Dorkin, which is hidden in a meteor shower. It is apparently effective camouflage, as the League hasn't noticed them, and so The Flash is channel surfing at super-speed, Reddy is wandering around with one of those paddles with a ball attached to it by a rubber band and so on.

When they begin to bicker about who will get which part of Earth after they conquer it, the team-up is on the verge of dissolving...until Starro calls in a lawyer to help them divvy up Earth equitably. But once they all sign "the evil document," they noticed that Morrow spelled his name with a "W" at the end (On his name tag, his name is "T.O. Morro").

Soon, everyone comes to blows and, as if things weren't bad enough for the bad guys, another sometimes Justice League adversary whose name also ends with an "O" appears. 

It's all great fun, and I particularly enjoyed Dorkin's take on the villains, all of whom appear to be in their original, Silver Age designs (Dig the forehead on Sinestro, too!). 

I am quite fond of this particular take on Starro, where he is a giant starfish that walks around on two of his arms, and, despite how alien he might look, he still talks and acts like your standard issue supervillain. (This Starro reminded me of Scott Snyder's Starro in 2018 miniseries Justice League: No Justice, although this story predates that one; now I wonder if Snyder had read and was perhaps inspired by this back-up...)

Perhaps my favorite bits were a particularly crass character referring to Chemo as "a punch bowl shaped like a fat guy," and this panel, wherein we see some of the little, face-hugging Starros holding pens:

Oh, and J'onn dismissing War of the Worlds as "anti-Martian propaganda" made me smile too. 

(As for the bits I don't think would have appeared were this written and published today, at one point Wonder Woman refers to Evil Star's Starlings as "those midget henchmen" and Bizzaro is excited when he thinks he is being "gypped".)

I wasn't terribly happy to see Cleveland used as a punchline...

...but otherwise, this was a very fun story with lots of little pleasures to be had, and Dorkin fills the panels with visual gags that reward one for poring over them. 

While DC has yet to collect all 1994's Elseworlds-themed annuals together, some of them have been collected here and there and this particular annual was collected in this year's Elseworlds: Justice League Omnibus. 

Bookshelf #44

This week's shelf—the second-to-last shelf!—is my Vertigo shelf. And it was exclusively Vertigo books for many years, although I recently stacked a few piles of non-Vertigo DC books atop it, as you can see. 

There are two basic organizing principles at play here. The first is size and the second is writer. The former are organized biggest to smallest (with some exceptions at the very end there), and the latter are organized by what I considered their relative importance to the Vertigo line.

So, on the far left we have the biggest book, the original graphic novel Mr. Punch by writer Neil Gaiman and artist Dave McKean. And I guess I should just say right here that there's rather a lot of Neil Gaiman comics on this shelf. But the fact that I bought a lot of his work in the late '90s and early '00s should not be misconstrued as an endorsement of him as a human being or that I am at all okay with the very terrible, gut-churning actions he is accused of taking against several different women. To my knowledge, he hasn't yet been convicted of anything in a court of law, and the American justice system has a tradition of individuals being innocent until proven guilty, but the allegations made against Gaiman are serious, credible, damning and nauseating. 

Yes, Gaiman has had an enormous impact on the publishing industry's embrace of the graphic novel/trade paperback format and on mainstream comics in general, and yes, his work has proven something of a cornerstone of the post-Crisis DC Universe, and no, I don't think one can argue that Gaiman isn't a skilled, imaginative and influential writer. It doesn't matter. One should not buy his work, and DC (and Marvel, and any other publishers who have works by him in their catalogues) should stop selling it.

I've struggled with whether or not to keep the work of his that I've bought or not. For other, similar comics writers, it has been easy enough to rid their work from my bookshelves. Like, for example, I didn't have much Warren Ellis on my shelf to begin with (I read Transmetropolitan, Planetary and The Authority via library-borrowed trades, and thus never had them on my shelves), and what little I did have didn't seem "important" in anyway...that is, not stuff I might ever conceivably need to look to as reference in anything I planned writing on in the future (Although I still end up discovering books with his name on them here and there; you can't see it in this photo, for example, but one of those DC 100-Page Spectacular mini-trades is of Jack Cross, which he wrote. I forgot it even existed until I was taking this picture). 

Gaiman's a little different, though. I found myself referring back to "Season of Mists" earlier this year when discussing the post-Crisis fate of the Justice Society of America, for example, and, even more recently, the Green Lantern/Superman: Legend of the Green Flame prestige format book he wrote when mentioning Superman's previous visits to Hell in regards to Justice League Unlimited: DC KO (in this column). 

I do expect to have to refer back to Sandman and probably Books of Magic in the future, in a book I hope to start writing in the next few years.

Anyway, back to the bookshelf. 

Mr. Punch is followed by the great Kyle Baker's album-sized Cowboy Wally Show and King David and thean a pair of hardcovers: Hans Rodioff, Enrique Brecca and Keith Giffen's Lovecraft and Brian K. Vaughn and Niko Henrichon's Pride of Baghdad.

That ends the bigger-than-usual books, and leads into the books collected by writer. 

These are:

•Alan Moore (V for Vendetta, Saga of the/Swamp Thing, both of which DC published before Vertigo actually existed, but were later collected under the Vertigo banner; which makes sense, as Hellblazer was a spin-off of Moore's Swamp Thing, and Sandman had a bit of connective tissue via Matt Cable)

•Neil Gaiman (The Sandman, Sandman: Endless Nights, Black Orchid, Books of Magic)

•Grant Morrison (Doom Patrol, Animal Man, The Invisibles: Bloody Hell in America, We3, Vimanarama)

•Peter Milligan (Shade, The Changing Man: The American Scream...DC actually just collected this whole series in a pair of omnibuses, which I really wanted to buy but, well, comics are expensive, and I wasn't as interested in reading the series in full as I was in so many other comics competing for my dollars...)

•Garth Ennis (John Constantine: Hellblazer: Fear and Loathing and Dangerous Habits, Preacher, Unknown Soldier and War Stories Vol. 1)

These are all pretty great comics, and, I think one could argue, among the better superhero comics ever published...even if some of these characters seem to push the boundaries of what might be considered a superhero, although many of them started with a character from previous superhero comics, or, in the case of Preacher, stars a character with super-powers.

I quite fondly remember reading all of these, particularly Preacher. These I read in my first house in Columbus. I would pick a volume up on a Wednesday and, when I got to the end, want to return immediately to The Laughing Ogre to get the next volume. On more than one occasion, I would end up going back to the shop that very afternoon for the next installment. 

The rest of the shelf of Vertigo comics includes some pretty well-known works from well-known creators, but more one series apiece rather than a series of series. 

These are Bill Willingham, Marck Buckingham and company's Fables Vols. 1-7 (I don't recall how many volumes the series ran, but I lost interest once the disappointing identity of The Adversary was finally revealed), Vaughan, Pia Guerra and company's Y: The Last Man Vols. 1-8, Andy Diggle and Jock's The Losers: Ante Up (Speaking of Diggle, his Swamp Thing: Bad Seed with artist Breccia is stuck at the end of Moore's Swamp Things), Paul Pope's 100%, Peter Milligan and Javier Pulido's Human Target: Strike Zones, an advanced reader copy of Steven T. Seagle and Teddy Kristiansen's It's a Bird... (Which was then, and perhaps still is, the only Superman Vertigo book), Dave Gibbons' The Originals, Harvey Pekar and Dean Haspiel's The Quitter and, finally, Scott Snyder and Rafael Albuquerque's American Vampire Vol. 1. 

The stacks set atop these books? Well, on the left is what I believe is a complete collection of Gotham Central, but, because they were collected variously at different times, my collection includes Vol. 1, Vol. 2, another Vol. 2, Vol. 3 and Vol. 4. 

On the right are a couple of random trades—Geoff Johns and Francis Manapul's Superboy: The Boy of Steel, Keith Giffen and company's Booster Gold: Past Imperfect, John Ostrander, Luke McDonnel and company's Suicide Squad Vol. 1: Trial by Fire, Batman: Joker's Asylum Vol. 2—and then a whole bunch of DC's 100-Page Spectaculars.

These are a series of weird, slim books that seem to be a hybrid between a traditional comic book and a trade paperback. They had spines, but they also had ads and they sold for $7.99. They tended to collect or republish specials or story arcs that just weren't long enough to fill a traditional trade collection, but might otherwise seem worthy of one.

It looks like I've got 11 of them here, and they are all cover-dated 2010 or 2011. They are, in alphabetical order Batman: Dark Knight, Dark City (by Peter Milligan, Kieron Dwyer, Tom Mandrake and Dennis Janke), Batman: Gotham Noir (by Ed Brubaker* and Sean Phillips), Catwoman: Guardian of Gotham (by Doug Moench and Jim Balent), Green Lantern: Fear Itself (by Ron Marz and Brad Parker), Green Lantern: Willworld (by J.M. DeMatteis and Seth Fisher), JLA: The Age of Wonder (by Adisaki Tantimede, Galen Showman and  P. Craig Russel), Metal Men (by Keith Giffen, J.M. DeMatteis and Kevin Maguire), Night Force (by Marv Wolfrman, Gene Colan and Bob Smith), Shazam (By Jerry Orrdway, Peter Krause and Dick Giordano) and Son of Superman (by Howard Chaykin, David Tischman, J.H. WIlliams III and Mick Grray). Plus the aforementioned Jack Cross by Ellis and Gary Erskine.

As you can see, it's pretty much a who's who of creators who have worked for DC before, and a lot of comics that might have fallen through the cracks for one reason or another. Of these, Dark Knight, Dark City is probably the most consequential, a story in which The Riddler dabbles with the occult, although he is actually a pawn of sorts to a literal demon that dwells beneath Gotham City, and has been influencing its development over the centuries (I believe both Morrison and Snyder's runs either alluded directly to it...or at least played with similar ideas).

Oh, and if you've never seen the art of the great Seth Fisher, and extremely promsing artist with a very distinct style who tragically passed away way too soon, well, you'll want to read Willworld...or any other work of his you might be able to find. (He also drew Vertigo Pop! Tokyo, Fantastic Four/Iron Man: Big in Japan and a Legends of the Dark Knight arc collected as Batman: Snow.)

The ones I'm most tempted to reread though are probably the Catwoman one, an Elseworlds positing a heroic Catwoman protecting Gotham from an evil Batman, and Green Lantern: Fear Itself, which features Kyle Rayner and Alan Scott. Revisiting that Metal Men looks well worthwhile, too. 

*Another comics writer who has been accused of being a horrible person. 

So, where does one start reading X-Men comics...?

A few months ago my nephew, who was then 13 going on 14, sent me a text asking if I could get him some Batman comics from the library where I worked, and he provided a list: Year One, Arkham Asylum, The Long Halloween, Hush, Dark Nights: Metal and Dark Nights: Death Metal. 

Older and/or more cynical readers might criticize Jeph Loeb's writing and elements of the Dark Nights books, but it's a solid list, and I wondered if he found it as a list of best or most popular Batman books somewhere online (I thought The Dark Knight Returns was notable absent from it, and I was a little surprised to see Scott Snyder's multiverse "crisis" series on there instead of Court of Owls). 

But as the guy being charged with finding those books? Easy peasy. They are all popular, fairly evergreen, in print and readily available through many different libraries in our system. Additionally, I had read all of them and was thus quite conversant in them; if my nephew liked any of them and wanted to know what to read next, or wanted more Batman (or other comics) from any of the creators, I could recommend other books until he was sick of hearing me talk.

A few weeks ago, I got a much scarier text from my sister/his mother: "The boy is interested in x men comics...Can you borrow some x men?"

Now, if you've been reading the site for a long time, you probably know that I have read some X-Men comics in the past...the huge cloud of "labels" on the right of the blog shows that I've used that label on 43 posts before (UPDATE: And, as I just noticed, 16 for "the x-men"...my labeling system is far from useful, I imagine). Still, I am far from what you might call a fan of the franchise...or even much of a knower-about-er. Like, I'm certain I know more than my sister—I know there's a hyphen between "X" and "Men" for example—but that is probably the comics franchise I know the least about, and most dread being asked to recommend books from (I used to think the Legion of Super-Heroes was even scarier, what with all the continuity reboots, but this recent-ish post from Mike Sterling convinced me that it was actually much simpler than I thought). 

In addition to reading so relatively few X-Men comics though, the franchise is just so...big. Launching in 1963, it is decades younger than Batman, but, there are just so many characters and, by the '90s, so many different titles and what seems, from afar, a rather convoluted number of alternate futures, from which characters occasionally come to join the cast. Additionally, the franchise seems to be one that (perhaps apropos) has many permutations. 

That is, as much as Batman comics may change over the years, from era to era and creator to creator, it's still essentially the same basic story of a superhero and or his sidekick/s defending a single city from criminals, the tone being more mutable over the decades than anything else.

Not so with the X-Men...and their many related X-teams and solo series spin-offs. 

Maybe a year or so ago, a co-worker had asked me to suggest some X-Men comics to him. Asking him some preliminary questions about his interest, he said it started with some Marvel video game (Rivals, I think...?) which led to him watching the first season of X-Men '97 (He was 25 or so, and thus never saw the original cartoon series that '97 was a continuation of).

I spent a chunk of the rest of our shift thinking about it and occasionally searching the library catalog, and I ended up telling him that my personal favorite was Grant Morrison and company's New X-Men run (which, in addition to its quality and new reader friendly take, has the advantage of being relatively limited in size, and thus a more manageable run than some of the more famous runs), but that Joss Whedon and John Cassaday's Astonishing X-Men is probably the best place for him to start (Again, new reader friendly and short and distinct enough to be manageable).

 I further suggested he just put "X-Men" and "Epic Collection" into the catalog and look for covers with characters he liked or titles that sounded familiar...between the physical books and Hoopla, I think the library has all of the X-Men Epic Collections, and these seem to feature the characters from the cartoons prominently.

(Correct me if I'm wrong, but I've always thought the original X-Men series was a sort of amalgam—a word I learned from comics!—of storylines from Chis Claremont's long run with the then-current Jim Lee costumes and designs and the cast of the '90s comics, and thus there weren't comics that perfectly reflected the cartoon...)

I spent more time considering what to recommend my nephew, though. 

Now, I am old enough that I did watch the original 1992-1997 X-Men: The Animated Series...or, at least, the first few years' worth of it (I was 15 in 1992, and by the time I got to college I didn't spend much time at all in front of televisions). In addition to my appreciation of the theme song, I mostly found it hilarious, particularly the over-the-top, melodramatic voice work and the handful of extreme accents. (I laughed pretty much any time Rogue or Gambit said anything, and I was a big fan of what a friend of mine referred to as the "exertion" noises that Professor X would make when pushing his psychic abilities or in some kind of psychic distress). 

This wasn't my first exposure to Marvel's merry mutants, though, as I still distinctly remember their appearance on the 1981-1983 Saturday morning cartoon Spider-Man and His Amazing Friends (For whatever reason, the part I remember best was that Iceman and Firestar were imprisoned in rooms right next to one another, and their efforts to use their powers to try to escape meant they were inadvertently hurting one another). 

While I'm pretty sure I borrowed a copy of God Loves, Man Kills from the Ashtabula library as a teenager, back when there were, like, maybe 20 books of comics in the library, most of which were comic strip collections, I didn't really read any X-Men comics until around 2000, which is 1) When I finally started reading Marvel comics regularly, as they started hiring some of my favorite DC writers and publishing their Ultimate line, 2) When the first X-Men film was released and, related, 3) When Marvel seemed to make a concerted effort to sell X-Men comics to people who weren't already X-Men fans.

And that, I suppose, is why I am poorly suited to recommend X-Men comics; all the comics I read tended to be ones tailored for people who did not like the X-Men of The Animated Series or the Capcom fighting game or whatever (And I always thought Jim Lee's costumes kind of sucked; sorry, millions of X-Men fans who disagree with me...!)

Anyway, these are the X-Men comics that I've read regularly, why I read them and why I thought they might not be quite right to recommend: 

•New X-Men (2001-2004) By the point this book launched, Grant Morrison was my favorite comics writer, and responsible for JLA, which was and still is one of my favorite superhero comics. So, the idea of he and his JLA: Earth-2 collaborator (and Batman: The Scottish Connection artist) Frank Quitely reinventing the X-Men for people who don't read X-Men comics...? That was more than enough to get me to try an X-Men comic...but I also liked that, at the time, Morrison was giving interviews slagging off aspects of the comics, like Wolverine wearing a hat shaped like his hair and the fact that he and Beast have the same hairstyle. 

I think it holds up well, especially given to how tied to the turning of the millennium it was and Morrison and company's efforts to synthesize the original film's more realistic aesthetics into a superhero comic, but given that it's kind of the intentional opposite of '90s X-Men, I'm reluctant to recommend it to fans of X-Men '97 and the like.

•Ultimate X-Men (2001-2003) Like New X-Men, Mark Millar and Andy Kubert's book was presented as an X-Men book for new readers...but perhaps even more so, as it was set in a brand-new fictional "universe" being built from the ground up, completely divorced from the previous decades of Marvel Universe continuity, which Marvel (rightly, I think) thought provided a stumbling block for potential readers. I was a fan of Millar's previous DC writing—I haven't read anything of his since Secret Service, but it seems to me that he started out great and got worse as he his career went on—and only knew Kubert from the first Batman versus Predator miniseries.

I quite liked the Ultimate imprint and read everything for a while. I continued reading for a while after Millar left, reading the Brian Michael Bendis run and ultimately bailing on this book sometime during Brian K. Vaughan's run, I think. Twenty-five years later, I assume there's no real difference in reading a Marvel Universe book and an Ultimate Universe book, though, in terms of accrued continuity. Like, the book was very much of it's time...and that time has passed. 

(Also, that logo sure didn't age well did it...? Like the cover art on that first issue, it looks extremely unappealing to my eye now...)

•X-Force (2001-2002) Even more emblematic of Marvel's then-leadership's willingness to risk breaking things and pissing off fans was this radical book from Peter-Milligan and Mike Allred, the former of whom I knew from DC's Vertigo Comics, and the latter of whom was an artist who I was at that time willing to buy anything he drew. I mean, they didn't just give these two their own X-title, but they had them take over X-Force with its 116th issue. I can't imagine the whiplash. 

The creators would eventually get their own title (X-Statix) and do lots of bold, fun things with it...although I wish they wouldn't have chickened out about using Princess Diana as a character. I followed them on to X-Statix and some of the various miniseries and revisits that followed.

I haven't revisited their work since; I wonder if the superhero reality show premise at the start is dated or not...I thought it felt a bit tired 25 years ago, honestly. Given the fact that, like New X-Men, this was a premeditated curveball thrown at the heads of '90s X-fans, this also doesn't seem like the place to start for the X-curious.

(By the way, I never did figure out how to read Doop speak, but I understand it is figure-out-able, isn't it...?)

•X-Men: Evolution (2002) I wasn't overly enamored with the 2002-2003 animated series that this book was a companion to (It was better than The Animated Series, though! The theme song wasn't as good, of course, but it wasn't a bad theme song, either). The comic was written by Devin Grayson for eight issues though, so that was enough for me to read it. I don't recall particularly liking it, and I assume it's not too terribly appealing to anyone who wasn't a fan of the cartoon.

•Astonishing X-Men (2004-2009) This was another X-Men book sold as one that wasn't necessarily for fans of the X-Men, thought it was more traditional in tone and a more straightforward superhero comic, and thus the realtively rare book that both newcomers and the traditional fanbase could enjoy (At least, I think so; members of the traditional fanbase can correct me if I'm wrong).

TV and movie guy Joss Whedon coming on as writer was the bigger selling point, though, and he was teamed with critically acclaimed artist John Cassaday. After their relatively short run ended, Warren Ellis and Simone Bianchi took over. I remember switching from singles to trades part of the way through Whedon's run (Which, if I recally correctly, was rather write-for-the-trade-y). I don't remember anything about Ellis' stories, but I recall Bianchi's art. I think I dropped it while Ellis was still writing it. 

And yes, the book seems like a cursed one looking back from 2006, what with Whedon passing the baton to Ellis. 

•X-Men: First Class (2006-2009) Jeff Parker, the writer of Agents of Atlas, and artist Roger Cruz and others collaborated on a series of mini-series and specials featuring new, fun, often funny adventures set during the first year of the original X-Men line-up of Cyclops, Marvel Girl, Beast, Angel and Iceman. Lots of guest-stars and very loose continuity (In fact, I'm not sure if these were meant to be canonical or not; perhaps a real X-Men fan would be able to answer that). I also liked the 2008-2010 Wolverine: First Class series from Fred Van Lente and others.

•Wolverine & The X-Men (2012-2014) Unlike the rest of the books on this list, I didn't buy these individual issues but instead read them in trades from the library. By the point that the title launched, I hadn't read all that much of writer Jason Aaron's Marvel work, but he had a reputation for "awesome" comics featuring their darker, more adult heroes, and I liked all of the artists involved on the book, inside and out. The premise—Wolverine succeeds Charles Xavier as the headmaster of a school for "gifted youngsters"—was irresistible, and I liked Aaron's highly comedic execution. Like Morrsion's New X-Men, it added a lot of new characters via the student body.

I'm sure there were other X books I've read over the years. I know I gave a Peter David X-Factor revival a try based on critical acclaim for the original, for example. I read a Rick Rememder-written X-Force featuring Wolverine, Deadpool, Fantomex and some others in matching costumes. I know I read the Bendis X-Men run for a while, wherein the original teenage X-Men came from the past into the present. I read a book featuring an Avengers/X-Men hybrid team following Avengers Vs. X-Men. But the above are the ones I made a point of following...and still remember fairly well. 

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By the way, I should probably take a moment to acknowledge the best answer to the question of where to start with a particular superhero comic: Anywhere.

Like, just pick one up and start reading. If it's well made enough that it interests you and makes you want to know what happens next (and/or what came before), it will inspire you to keep reading.

I mean, I started reading comics in general with Advanced Dungeons & Dragons #2 (Not #1, but #2). I started reading Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles with some short stories published in the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and Other Strangeness role-playing game source book. I got into regularly reading Batman and the mainstream DC Universe with a trio of annuals from a crossover event series presenting alternate futures of the characters (Detective Comics Annual #4, Batman Annual #15 and Superman Annual #3...still love those gloves...!)

The great thing about comics is that one inevitably leads to another, as you follow a character or "universe" or publisher or writer or artist from one book to the next.

My sister did take my nephew to the closest comic shop—with some trepidation, as she has helped me move more than once, and has thus seen and carried boxes and boxes of graphic novels and longboxes full of bagged and boarded comics books, and knows what starting reading comics as a teenager can lead to—and he showed me the half dozen or so comic book-comics he bought, including from the dollar bin. 

The X-Men comic he's starting with? Fabian Nicieza and Andy Kubert's The Amazing X-Men #4 from 1994, which seems to be part of "The Age of Apocalypse" event storyline. (I wonder if it was Kubert's drawing of Storm's naked shoulder on the cover that drew him to that particular comic...?)

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

Anyway, below is what I ended up ordering from the library for my nephew. You'll notice a few points of overlap with what I've read before. In the near future, I plan to read (or re-read) all of the books below, and I'll write about that experience in the future).

•X-Men: First Class—Mutants 101 (2022) Collecting 2006's X-Men: First Class #1-8 and 2007's X-Men: First Class Special, all written by Jeff Parker and mostly penciled by Roger Cruz (Paul Smith penciled #6, and the special featured pencils from Smith, Kevin Nowlan, Colleen Coover and Nick Dragotta). 

I assume most X-Men fans wouldn't consider this X-Men: First Class an essential book in terms of the overall X-Men mega-story and lore, but I have to assume that if a teenager in the '20s wants to read about the founding X-Men line-up, they will have an easier time with this than trying to slog through the original 1960s comics by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby.

Plus, I know from experience that these are fun and funny, and rather continuity light...that is, one doesn't really need to know or have read anything in particular to follow them, nor do they weave a bigger, more complex story from issue-to-issue. 

In these comics, the founding five face such villains as Juggernaut, The Sentinels, Spidey's foe The Lizard and The Skrulls and they team-up with the likes of Quicksilver and Scarlet Witch, Doctor Strange, Thor and Gorilla-Man (from Paker's own Agents of Atlas).

The book ends with pretty expansive profiles of Professor X and his X-Men, giving their stats and histories and ranking their powers and abilities. I assume this is useful to someone just getting into the X-Men, right? This is certainly the sort of thing I loved when I first started comics.

•Astonishing X-Men Vol. 1: Gifted (2014) Collecting the first six issues of TV and movie guy (and apparent terrible person) Joss Whedon and the late John Cassaday's 2004 series. Despite my reluctance to promote the work of Whedon, this is one of those relatively rare X-Men books that seemed created from the ground up to be new reader friendly, and, if I recall correctly, was at the time something of a compromise between the New X-Men era's more realistic (and high-quality) direction and the action-packed, superhero stuff of the '90s; a book for fans of the '90s X-Men cartoon and the first movies, then.

"Time to make nice with the public, eh, Summers?" Wolverine asks during a suiting-up sequence.

"We have to do more than that, Logan," Scott says, concluding his sentence on a two-page splash page revealing the team in their costumes for the first time in the book, "We have to astonish them."

Flipping through this again now—I haven't read it since I did so in singles over 20 years ago now—I'm struck by how many of the images I remember clearly. Cassaday's work on this title is quite incredible, and there's an awful lot of specific panels, poses and spreads that are just plain burned into my memory.

Anyway, Cyclops, Wolverine, The Beast, Emma Frost and Kitty Pryde star in a story involving the promise of a "mutant cure" and a new alien menace. Plus, Colossus comes back to life after what seems to me like a rather long time for an X-Man to be dead (but maybe not?), and there's a dramatic, silent two-page spread where we throws Wolverine at something. I always like when they do that. 

•Wolverine and The X-Men By Jason Aaron Vol. 1 (2012) Collecting 2011's Wolverine & The X-Men #1-4  by Jason Aaron, Chris Bachalo, Nick Bradshaw and others. With the X-Men bickering and split into factions—I think this was one of those times Professor X was dead, and during the time that Cyclops was a terrorist or whatever?—Logan is the new headmaster of the newly re-named mutant school, The Jean Grey School for Higher Learning. Plenty of familiar faces make up the teaching staff, including Kitty Pryde, Beast, Iceman and even Doop. 

From what I recall, this was basically a comedic, occasionally even sticom-like take on the New X-Men concept, with the X-Men splitting their duties between superheroing and teaching a student body full of young mutants. Also, lots of new characters among those younger students, not all of whom were necessarily mutants. 

As such, it seems to be a pretty good jumping-on point—and it ran long enough that there's a big, satisfying chunk of it—although I wonder if it spinning out of a particular point in X-Men history might mean that it doesn't age particularly well? At least in terms of it being so different from the current status quo...? 

•Uncanny X-Men by Gail Simone Vol. 1: Red Wave (2025) Collecting 2004's Uncanny X-Men #1-6 by Gail Simone and pencil artist David Marquez (Javier Garron draws the sixth issue). I haven't read much of Gail Simone's Marvel work, but I was a fan of her team books for DC Comics over the years (Her first runs on Birds of Prey and Secret Six, anyway), and I think she's a really great, craftsperson style writer. Her work is often fun and funny, and she's good at relationships and team dynamics and if every story isn't always a great one, it's never a bad one, either; like, I've never regretted buying or reading a Simone book for the writing.

Also, she just seems like a really nice lady.

So Simone on the X-Men seemed like a good move on Marvel's part...even though I didn't pick it up,  my disinterest in the X-Men cancelling out my interest in Simone.

This seemed like a good choice for my nephew though, as not only do I trust Simone to create good comics, but it's one of the current ongoing titles and it has a small cast of some of the better-known characters, even if you only know the team from the cartoons and movies: Wolverine, Rogue, Nightcrawler, Gambit and Jubilee (Heck, they're all well-known enough that you can just look at the trade's cover and recognize each of them by their hands...or tail, in Kurt's case). 

•X-Men by Jed MacKay Vol. 1: Homecoming (2025) Collecting 2024's X-Men #1-7, by writer Jed MacKay and pencil artists Ryan Stegman and Netho Diaz.

This wasn't on my radar at all, and I'm not super-familiar with MacKay (I have liked all the Stegman art I've seen, though), but Kiel Phegley suggested it on Bluesky when I was crowd-sourcing suggestions, and it has the advantage of being one of the current iterations of the team (Unless it's changed since this book shipped, I guess). Also, Cyclops is in it, and my nephew did say he likes Cyclops. 

I haven't read it yet, but the team seems to be more...idiosyncratic than that of the Simone book. Aside from Cyclops, I recognize The Beast, Juggernaut and Magik from the cover; the back cover says the lady with the pink sword is Psylocke and the kid with pink hair is Kid Omega (Grant Morrison and Frank Quitely's Quentin Quire). Some investigation reveals that the person on the ice bridge is Temper. As for the bald guy with black eyes...no clue. Maybe just a random mutant they are protecting...? Also, while he's not on the cvoer, Magneto is also in the book.

Flipping through, it looks rather nineties-ish...which I imagine is probably appealing to many modern X-Men readers, picking up the comics because they like X-Men '97 and Rivals or whatever...

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

Before I started thinking too hard about what to recommend, I asked my nephew for some more information that could potentially guide me.

"Are there any particular characters you are interested in?" I texted him. "Or line-ups? Or eras or artists or storylines...?"

When he responded, he answered with characters beyond just the X-Men:

i like cyclops, wolverine a lot. also magneto. i'm also interested in any spider man ones.

...

also am big fan of night wing.

In quoting his text here, I obviously didn't add a hyphen to "spider man" nor smooth "night wing"  together into one word, in order to better express where my nephew is as a superhero fan (Or maybe a texter?). 

As he had a birthday coming up a few weeks after that exchange, I went to the Barnes and Noble down the street from my library to look for some Spider-Man and Nightwing books, which seemed easier for me to pick out than X-Men ones.

I had posted about this on Bluesky at the time, but I was kind of shocked at how poor the American superhero comic book selection in general was, as it had shrunk by at least half since the last time I looked at it. Meanwhile, the manga section seemed to have doubled in size (Honestly, just eyeballing it I think the store had more shelf space devoted to volumes of Jujutsu Kaisen than to all Marvel comics).

There were only a handful of Spider-Man books, and the only ones there—Spider-Man: The Other and Spider-Man: Blue (although the spine just said "Spider-Man") and the Marvel Premier version of Spider-Men: Worlds Collide (although the spine just said "Spider-Man")—didn't seem like good starting points. 

I ended up only buying one book there and then ordering two others from online. If you're curious, here's what I got him for his birthday: 

•Nightwing: Leaping Into the Light: DC Compact Comics Edition (2026) I love these things, as they are extremely cheap (Just $9.99! The cost of two and half brand-new comic books!) and they are mostly focused on evergreen "classic" DC comics, the very sorts of comics you would gift someone curious about a particular character. (The only thing I don't like about the line? All of the books they've published so far have been ones I've already read in singles or trades). I had previously bought my nephew the Compact Comics Editions of Batman: Hush and Batman: The Long Halloween when he had requested various Batman books a few months back (At that price point, they make for a good impulse buy, too).  

This collects the first 11 issues of Tom Taylor, Bruno Redondo and company's acclaimed recent Nightwing run (Or the first two trade collections). I think it's unusual among the Compact Comics line in that its contents are of more recent vintage than most of the other comics collected. 

Anyway, I read at least the first half of this in a trade previously and liked it just fine. I do wonder if it's the best place to start with Nightwing but, well, I feel like he's a character whose history is, at least in the broad strokes, relatively simple—the original Robin and long-time Teen Titan as a grown-up, now serving as the vigilante protector of his own city—and my nephew knows him from various Batman cartoons (In fact, when he was still young enough to have themed birthday parties, he asked for a Nightwing party one year. Not Batman, to my sister's frustration, as there are plenty of decorations and party favors related to Batman, but Nightwing. My niece/his sister diligently created a string of flags with Nightwing symbols on them). 

Oh, this is the one I found at Barnes and Noble, by the way.

•Nightwing Vol. 1: Bludhaven (2025) I was reluctant to buy a Chuck Dixon comic, but then I convinced myself that the only problem with Dixon is that he has terrible politics, and compared to the likes of other comics creators, well, he didn't commit any crimes or abuse anyone, so...it could be worse? (In fact, I've already mentioned several other terrible human beings in this very post!) Also, it seems hard to avoid Dixon if one wants to read about Nightwing. 

Looking online, it seems like most of—maybe all?—of his long run on the title has been collected into huge compendium editions, but a 1000-page book seems like a bad thing to hand someone who is still comics-curious. 

This particular collects the first eight issues of the Dixon and Scott McDaniel run, which launched the ongoing Nightwing series way back in 1996. It also, to my surprise, contains a 1995 four-issue Nightwing miniseries by Denny O'Neil and Greg Land (from back when Land's art still looked like it was drawn by hand). 

I've never read this mini, but, flipping through it, I noticed it opens with Nightwing in one of his older costumes, and he has comically long hair, which he wears down when he's Dick Grayson  and in a three-foot long ponytail when he's Nightwing. Hopefully the hair—and Dick's fashion!—won't scare my nephew away...

•Spider-Man: Brand New Day (2026) This is a brand-new $9.99 collection of 11 issues of Amazing-Spider-Man from the rebooted "Brand New Day" era. If you haven't run across this in the wild, it's the same size as the DC Compact Comics and Marvel Premier Editions, just lacking the trade dress of the latter. 

I was not a fan of the reboot, which I think "broke" Spider-Man in the same way that the New 52 broke several characters and franchises...or, at the very least, caused my interest in them to evaporate. While there were a lot of talented folks involved during that period of Spider-Man and I picked up issues here and there based on the artists, flipping through this now, I don't think I actually read any of this.

Still, it is a starting point, and it is being marketed as such, and, well, there aren't a lot of such entry points to the character. Unlike, say, Batman, Spider-Man doesn't seem to have a Dark Knight Returns or a Batman: Year One (Or an Arkham Asylum or a Gothic or a Long Halloween or a Hush or a Court of Owls or...), so I went with this. 

I see that it features Wolverine (on page 3!) and The Punisher, so I'm sure it should prove exciting enough to a newer, teenage reader (Also The Shocker and J. Jonah Jameson, but I can't imagine the boy likes those two as much as his uncle does).

Oh, and there's art from Chris Bachalo and Marcos Martin, which are two artists I am more than happy to stick in the face of a new reader...

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

🤔 In retrospect, I wonder if I should have just given him some Doom Patrol comics and feigned ignorance of the difference. "What do you mean? You wanted the comics about an old guy in a wheelchair leading a group of super-powered freaks that launched in the 1960s, right...?"

A Month of Wednesdays: August 2026

BORROWED:

Crescent Moon Marching Vol. 1 (Scholastic/Graphix) I was intrigued by this manga when I first heard about it, mainly because my friend who also reads manga used to be in her high school marching band, and thus a manga about high school marching band seemed relevant to her interest. 

When it was finally released, then, I snapped it up, intending to write a review of it for Good Comics for Kids but, alas...but then I remembered that my editor had already written an early review of it a few months back...and it was also highlighted as one of the books of interest in a column on the site the week of its release.  There's no rule that says we can't offer multiple reviews of the same book, of course, but it seemed like overkill for me to review it too. I mean, it's a fine book, and there are some interesting things about it that differentiates it from the pack—it's printed in full color rather than black and white, it's from Scholastic rather than a publisher better known for their manga offerings—but I don't think it's so extraordinary that readers need a third post about it on the site.

So, I'm writing about it here.

Hamachi Yamada's series stars Mizuki, who runs away from home—and the pressures to succeed academically in school, and her demanding mother who is doing the pressuring—to the small, seaside town of Akita, where her aunt lives and runs a small cafe.

While there, she meets an intriguing boy Akira, and shortly afterwards she sees him enter a school gym from which loud and strange noises are emanating. She looks inside, she finds the school's marching band rehearsing, and the poor girl, who is afraid she's wasting her whole youth on studying but has never found anything to really interest her when she's not studying, is awestruck.

Her aunt offers some advice: "Once you find something that sets your heart racing...DON'T LET GO OF IT. You'll regret it when you're older."

And thus before too many more pages pass, somewhere in the second chapter, Mizuki, who has never even held an instrument before, is transferring to Senshu High and joining the marching band. Specifically, she'll be playing the trumpet, the same instrument that Akira does.

The rest of the volume follows her as she learns more about the trumpet and marching band, discovers just how challenging it actually is, meets some of the other members of the band and prepares for their first public show.

Readers, of course, will learn all about marching band along with her, and, personally, as someone with no real experience with the subject, I found it a bit of a revelation. There's some metaphorical stuff about keeping your head up (not unlike Haikyuu's repeated references to volleyball being a sport where you're always looking up) and being part of and in synch with a group, but there's also just all sorts of literal stuff about how complicated it is. I mean, not only do you have to play your instrument, not only do you have to play it with a bunch of other people playing there's, but you have to do so while marching, which means there's a degree of physical challenge (the holding of the instrument, the marching) and a high degree of choreography, so that everyone stays in step, and you don't, say run into the person in front of them and cause them to cut their lip on their instrument (As Mizuki does to Akira at one point). 

I was surprised to see all of this—and maybe I shouldn't have been, but, again, I don't know anything about marching band—and was thus intrigued to see the band members running laps and doing sit-ups (Which maybe isn't universal; that friend I mentioned said they only had to run for punishment sometimes) and the pages and pages of choreography Mizuki finds herself being asked to memorize. 

Like other, similar manga and American comics for young readers I've read, then, this book is about its subject in multiple ways...while also telling dramatic story related to the subject. Will Mizuki find herself through marching band? Will she fit in with this new community? Is she going to end up falling for Akira? (They've already done the manga/anime trope of falling together, so that he lands on top of her)

I mean, I imagine. 

As I said, the book is in color, which is in and of itself rather unusual, and it gives the proceedings not only a vibrancy, but also a particular mood and tone, and helps communicate just why it is that Mizuki is so taken with the band when she first encounters it, as well as the various charms of her new town. 

Okay, so maybe the book isn't an important one to the overall comics medium (Although, I won't be surprised if it finds many fans, and that, to some of them, it will prove to be an important book in their own personal lives), but it is certainly a charming one, and, with the deep, rich, emotional coloring added to a style of art we rarely see in color, it's a beautiful book, too. 

...

Also, I'm kind of curious about the "DANGER BEARS" signs near the school. I guess this is because the school is out in the country, meaning it's possible there are bears around...?

The above panels lead to a joke of sorts, where the rustling and the signage discuss a bear is sneaking through the foliage, but it ends up being one of the characters. But I can't stop thinking about that sign....

Justice League Unlimited: DC KO (DC Comics) I'm just not that interested in DC's latest big event series, DC KO, for all of the obvious reasons. 

It's yet another "crisis" story in the DCU, it involves messing with continuity to some degree yet again, and then there's the big, dumb premise, which seems to be that Circumstances have forced the heroes into a video game-style fight-to-the-death tournament (in which no one will actually die) in order to save the universe (Say, where was Scott Snyder when the brain geniuses who came up with Injustice were brainstorming ways to do just that? DC KO's version seems better than the grim half-the-heroes-are-fascists-in-a-parallel-universe one they settled on).

Despite curiosity about the Plastic Man/Lobo fight* (and a couple of questions), I had planned on skipping it. But, if I did, would I be able to make sense of the latest volume of Mark Waid and Dan Mora's Justice League Unlimited, which, as the subtitle suggests, is apparently a tie-in to DC KO...? 

It was with some trepidation that I cracked the cover, but I assumed I would be alright. I mean, I've been reading reviews of some of the DC KO issues as they came out (and just read a review of the collection a few days before I sat down to write this) and, again, the premise doesn't seem that complicated. Besides, Mark Waid has been writing big event series and tie-ins to such series for about as long as I've been reading comics; if anyone knows how to script a comic so that it ties into an event yet still stands on its own, it's gotta be him, right...?

To my surprise, the big DC event that this arc seemed to tie-in to wasn't DC KO, but rather an entirely different one from long ago: Waid's own 1995 Underworld Unleashed. 

See, while the book acknowledges what is going on in DC KO—Earth is falling to Darkseid again and thus the heroes are trying to evacuate the entire population of the world somewhere safer, most of the big guns are busy elsewhere—the plot here is that many relatively minor and/or silly villains have been given power-ups by the devil Neron in exchange for their services (here, though, without the accompanying redesigns), and, in order to stop them, a team of heroes must journey to hell itself and attempt to trick Neron by preying on his inability to resist making deals. (It also, to a lesser degree, reminded me a bit of 1994's Zero Hour; I'll get to that in a moment).

How does this tie into DC KO? Well, it seems pretty clear that it doesn't actually have to, and that Waid is basically just marking time with this arc, filling a certain number of issues of his ongoing series with something that won't interfere with DC KO, and at least gestures towards relation to it. He does manage some connective tissue, though, so much so that a less cynical reader—like, say, the Teenage Caleb who read Zero Hour and Underworld Unleashed—might not see the strings.

Essentially, with so many heroes starring in DC KO proper, the remaining Justice Leaguers are meant to be helping with the evacuation of the world, but all the villains villain-ing is keeping them from being able to do so, and thus the distraction needs to be dealt with. And as to why so many villains are willing to work with Neron at all—even those like Captain Cold and Heatwave, who got screwed over pretty badly by him once before—well, they are sure that Earth has really had it this time, and Neron has promised them sanctuary in Hell if they just do his bidding here at the end of the world. 

Waid divides the arc into two real plotlines. One, set on Earth and the Watchtower above, where we see series regulars like Red Tornado, Blue Beetle Ted Kord and The Challengers of the Unknown do satellite stuff while Mary Marvel, Kid Flash, Doctor Occult, Martian Manhunter**, Cadejos, Boruka and Golden Frog and Airwave fight with the villains on the ground (And there, as per usual, plenty of cameos, although here there more from villains than from heroes). 

The other involves Mister Terrific taking a team of heroes to Hell to confront Neron. But with the heroes spread so thin, who is left to go on a suicide mission with Mister Terrific? Well, luckily there are all those time-lost heroes from the past and the future who have apparently been hanging around the Watchtower since the end of "We Are Yesterday", some of whom I know and some of whom I don't. (Conveniently, assembling a League of random heroes from different timelines for the space of an arc also means Waid can tell a JLU story without actually using any heroes who are busy elsewhere in the event and its tie-ins.)

These guys are actually a pretty perfect team for Terrific to use too, as he tells them that they aren't actually their real selves, but "remnants" of those selves plucked from the timestream, distinct entities that will cease to exist when everything is straightened out. (And here's the bit that reminded me of Zero Hour, as these heroes know that saving the day ultimately means they're own deaths; in Zero Hour, it was slightly different, but some time-lost heroes knew that fixing the timestream meant they will return to their own timelines, and, in at least some cases, that's a death sentence of sorts.) 

Of course, telling them this is probably not all that smart on Terrific's part, even if he does now claim to be the "smartest man on the planet"—not the third smartest, as per usual, but the smartest—as it means they spend their lives a little too freely, and, in at least one case, the looming threat of non-existence leads one to actively hamper Terrific's mission. But I suppose Waid wants us to know just how expendable these guys are, so we don't feel quite so badly when they start sacrificing themselves during their journey through Hell. 

So which time-lost heroes are we talking about here...?

Hook-handed, 1990s Aquaman (Seeing Dan Mora draw him certainly hasn't made me rethink the fact that this is still my favorite Aquaman design); Power Girl Kara Zor-L (That's the pre-Crisis, Earth-2 version, right?); Guy Gardner, Warrior (from 1994's Guy Gardner: Warrior #17, from the look of it, although his hair is wrong); electric Superman; the Interlac-speaking Gold Hawk, who I think might be the first Hawkman incarnation (He's one of the two characters completely unfamiliar to me here); a Batman Beyond who is actually Tim Drake (So, the Batman from Futures End, I think...?); Kingdom Come's Green Lantern Alan Scott; a Doctor Fate (Real name Sofie; this is the other one I can't place) and Justice Legion-A's Owlwoman from the 853rd Century (Whom I first remember seeing in the Grant Morrison/Dusty Abell contribution to 1999's DC One Million 80-Page Giant). 

Waid makes a decent enough attempt at giving each of them a moment or so, either in the hours before they embark on their mission, or during that mission itself, at least gesturing towards some form of characterization (like Guy going to see the modern-day Ice and finding out they are no longer together, or Power Girl recording a video message for her current self, the repeating panels of the sequence giving me a flashback to Heroes in Crisis). It's a nice attempt, but it mostly boils down to a character trait apiece: Alan Scott has been doing this a long time, Tim Drake is scared, etc. 

As they journey through Hell, they take turns sacrificing their lives in one big action scene after another, until, by the time they arrive at Neron's throne at the climax, Mister Terrific is there with just one other hero. 

DC's Hell is different here than any I've seen, but then, DC has a lot of versions of Hell, and it's rarely consistent; this one doesn't much resemble that of Underworld Unleashed or Day of Judgment, both of which were Hells ruled by Neron. It's built of some DC stuff (The Demons Three are there to greet the heroes when they first arrive), some stuff from classic mythology (Charon and his ferry) and some stuff unique to this comic; there's a lot of weird monsters with bug-like forms.          

The journey seems to go on perhaps too long—Waid and Mora spend several issues having the heroes fight their way to Neron, whereas Waid and pencil artist Howard Porter did so in less than an issue in Underworld Unleashed #3—and I suspect that had as much to do with marking time as any other aspect of the arc.

Still, Mora is a great artist, and it is, as always, worth one's time picking up comics like this just to see him draw stuff. I certainly enjoyed seeing him revisit some costumes from the '90s—he really makes that temporary Superman costume sing, for example—and getting to draw weirder, scarier stuff than usual. 

As with the first volume of Matt Fraction's Batman, as I read this, I wondered if I maybe I have just been reading DC comics for too damn long now, given how much of this felt overly familiar, with Waid covering ground I have seen covered and re-covered before. I mean, I've lost track of how many times I've seen DC's superheroes journey to Hell since I read Alan Moore's story of Swamp Thing doing so. Of these ten heroes, I've seen Superman, Alan Scott, Aquaman and Guy Gardner all do so before.

So, when they first arrive, and Electric Superman starts stuttering in disbelief, while Alan Scott narrates that, because Superman doesn't believe there is any such thing as an irredeemable soul, "of course his mind is reeling," I thought of the image of a weeping Superman in Neil Gaiman and company's 2000 Green Lantern/Superman: Legend of the Green Flame, which may or may not be canonical, and 1999's Day of Judgment, another time Superman went to hell (That latter trip to hell would have been from a point in his life after which this time-lost version existed, though).

Somewhat disappointingly, while Waid tries to give a bit of characterization and a big action moment to each of the time-lost heroes, he doesn't quite do the same with Terrific...except, of course, for one scene where he uses a logic paradox to trick a gatekeeper and then when he tries to make a deal with Neron. At no point, however, does Waid address how Terrific might feel about the concept of Hell, given that he was, at least earlier in his history, an avowed atheist and skeptic of the supernatural, something he would argue with his fellow members of the JSA about (This despite, of course, that his origin involved The Spectre). 

Maybe later writers addressed the matter of Michael Holt's faith in the years past—Heck, maybe Geoff Johns did so in past pages of JSA or Justice Society of America, and I've read and forgotten about it—but given that Mister Terrific is the one character on this journey who is "real" and stars in Justice League Unlimited, and that he at least had a very strong opinion about the prospects of the afterlife before, I think that might have made more interesting ground to explore than, like, I don't know, seeing an alternate future Tim Drake freak out about being in Hell and trying to live up to the legacy of his Batman, you know?. '

Ah well. It's become clear for a while now that this book is going to be a sort of narrative string around which the beads of various DC event series and crossover events can be strung, an ongoing title in which the mega-story of the whole DC line can play out 20 pages a month. While that isn't very appealing to me, it does have a couple of strong selling points.

This is, after all, a "toy box" comic in which we can see Mark Waid and, often, Dan Mora play with DC's heroes and villains, and one in which we can hope to see unexpected cameos from random, little-seen characters (Check it out! There's a panel featuring Jack O' Lantern in this!). 

Though nothing much new or exciting or imaginative happens in this volume, it still has those elements going for it.

And hey, I was able to follow it, even without having read and/or caring about DC KO...!

REVIEWED:

The Girl Who Loved Monsters (Viking) While it's a little awkward in its construction due to the fact that writer Insha Fitzpatrick is simultaneously trying to set up a series and provide the first in what is apparently meant to be several episodic adventures, once it gets going, the book is actually a lot of fun. I kind of loved the idea of the two dueling books about monsters—one "evil" book and one "good" book—and artist Ashley Robin Franklin (who oddly gets an "Illustrated by" credit on the cover instead of something more accurate) designs and draws a hell of a werewolf. Every time I see or hear the title I can't help but think of Emil Ferris' My Favorite Thing Is Monsters, though. Anyway, my full review of Fitzpatrick and Franklin's book is here. 

Hulk Teach: A Tale of 2 Teachers (Scholastic/Graphix) This is the sequel to Jeffrey Brown's Hulk Teach. In the original comic, a deal worked out by Bruce Banner's lawyer/cousin She-Hulk finds him performing community service to make up for all of the damage caused by The Hulk (instead of being sent to a SHIELD prison), and the form that community service takes is teaching middle school. Here, Banner is joined by a part-time co-teacher with a similar deal: The Fantastic Four's Benjamin Grimm, AKA The Thing. Hilarity ensues. I reviewed the first volume here and the just-released sequel here.

But I want to take this opportunity to talk about an aspect of the books that I didn't mention in the reviews. And it involves a sizable spoiler to them, so, if you haven't read them—and if you like The Hulk, the Marvel Universe and funny comic books, you should definitely read them—please stop reading this post and go away. You can come back and finish this post after you've read both Hulk Teach books. 

Okay, so in the first book Banner meets Mr. Museler, a very peculiar fellow teacher who is something of a foil and rival to Banner...so much so that he acts like a foil and rival, despite the fact that the two are, you know, both middle-school teachers. 

Mr. Museler is a curious character. Not only is he a sort of negative example of a teacher, strictly teaching his class to the test so that they can score the highest in the school (and win a pizza party), rather than prioritizing their learning, but he's also pretty weird. He says he's independently wealthy, and only teaches middle-school as a hobby, rather than it being a job he needs to do in order to make a living (Or it being a vocation). 

And the source of his wealth? A hat factory. Indeed, he is always wearing a comically large hat. 

Here, for reference, is Mr. Museler...or "Hat Man" as The Hulk calls him:

Okay, so why did Brown draw such a tall hat...? Well, given that Museler has an adversarial relationship with Banner/The Hulk in the books and that he has a mustache and the specific shape of his hat, I immediately assumed he was actually The Leader in disguise the first time I laid eyes on him.

And yet Hulk Teach ended without ever revealing that Museler was hiding a very tall head under his very tall hat, and so I decided I was wrong after all. Brown did not create Museler—French for "to muzzle"—as a middle-school teacher alter ego for Hullk villain The Leader afterall, it seemed. I guessed that the mustache was just a coincidence, and that Brown just drew that particular hat like that just because he thought the taller hat was funnier than one that was more standard hat size and shape..

Anyway, in A Tale of 2 Teachers, Museler is once again there to bust Banner and The Hulk's chops—as well as the chops of the ever-lovin' blue-eyed Thing—competing with them while teaching his class in ways that are suspect, like having them watch movie adaptations of classic works of literature rather than having them reading or using AI to help them writer their speeches.

I was shocked—shocked, I say!—by the events of the climax. Both Banner's class and Museler's class have built robots, and these are fighting in a robot battle royale. Museler's class's robot destroys all the other robots and kind of goes crazy, leaping out of the "Robactagon" at one point, and damaging Museler's signature hat:

As you can see, Museler does indeed have a very big head under his very big hat. Then, in my second-favorite page of the book, The Hulk and The Thing destroy the robot while shouting their catchphrases. A fire breaks out, and the kids build a makeshift aqueduct (something the Hulk had previously taught them about) to put out the fire but, in the process, some splashes on Museler...revealing his green skin!

At this point, Museler/The Leader's dialogue bubbles turn green, the same color as the dialogue bubbles of the gamma-irradiated Hulk and She-Hulk, Banner explains to the kids who The Leader was and how he came to be, and The Thing states the obvious: 

So even though I had immediately suspected that Mr. Museler was really The Leader, because Brown didn't reveal it in the first book, I assumed my suspicion was incorrect...and therefore when Brown did reveal this fact in the second book, I was actually completely shocked!

Bravo, Jeffrey Brown. 

*Actually, from what I've heard on Bluesky, that fight doesn't actually occur in the main series...or, um, anywhere else, aside from the marketing. That sucks...but it also feels sort of appropriate that the most compelling element of a Big Two event comic isn't actually in the comic or its tie-ins, but the marketing for them. 

**Wait, is Martian Manhunter really not in the tournament...? That seems...weird, as he is not only one of the most powerful heroes, one who could swat down the majority of the participants without breaking a sweat, but he's also one of the few who could go all the way. I mean, if anyone in the DCU could take down Superman in a fight, it's J'onn, right...? At this point, one thing I am curious about the tournament aspect of the main series is how Snyder might convincingly sell us on Superman winning rather, I don't know, the last match being The Spectre eliminating Martian Manhunter...