G.I. Joe, A Real American Hero Pt. 12: #46-48

G.I. Joe, A Real American Hero #46 (1986)

Art by Rod Whigham and Andy Mushynsky

•The previous issue of Larry Hama's G.I. Joe series was a pretty intense, action-packed one, and the title isn't going to let up at all until the landmark issue #50, as several new prominent characters will be introduced (some of whom change the very make-up of Cobra), Joes fight their way into Cobra's base, a Cobra agent fights his way out of The Pit and then we get the biggest battle of the series so far, featuring (almost) every one of the by this point many, many Joes.

As we saw in the last issue, Snake Eyes and Storm Shadow have finally learned the name of the man responsible for murdering The Hard Master (it was—40-year-old spoiler alert!—Zartan), and now they will stop at nothing to get their revenge. (Just look at how Mike Zeck drew Storm Shadow's eyes on the cover above; I would not want that guy looking at me like that with a sword in his hand.) Meanwhile, Zartan has kayoed Rip Cord and begun impersonating him, while dressing the unconscious Joe in his own clothes, and Hawk has sent a Joe team to infiltrate Cobra Island and retrieve Rip Cord.

•While last issue's ending was pretty equivocal about whether Zartan or Rip Cord won their hand-to-hand fight after their long-range duel, this issue's opening splash dispenses with the suspense: Zartan won and had assumed the identity of Rip Cord—which is, this issue, apparently being spelled as all one word again—with his holographic equipment. He ultimately strips the Joe of his uniform, and dresses the unconscious Rip Cord in his own clothing, sticking that odd little cowl he wears atop hid head.

"Can't have two Ripcords on Cobra Island, can we?" Zartan says aloud to himself. "No, it's far better to have one wounded and unconscious Zartan bleeding in the sand... ...And one wounded Ripcord, anxious to be recovered to by his fellow Joes and returned to the safety of headquarters for proper medical attention!"

•Inside the Terror Drome, Crimson Guardsman Appel shows off the Firebat to Cobra Commander. This was a little red aircraft that came with the toy line's Terror Drome playset (along with its red and silver clad pilot, referred to as "AVAC"...which apparently stands for Air Viper, Advanced Class, and is a role, rather than a name). 

Appel talks up the vehicle quite a bit while laying out all of its features—including the fact that it is so advanced that it doesn't actually need a pilot—to which the Commander responds, "Really, you carry on as if it were your own child."

The Firebat and its various features will be of importance to the story shortly, of course.

•Hama leaves Cobra Island long enough to check on the Joes back at the Pit. The newly promoted General Hawk returns and mentions "his new set of battle togs." These correspond to what his first action figure, not released until 1986, was dressed in. That action figure, by the way, came packaged with a helmet; you can see Hawk holding it under his arm in the that last panel. In the cartoon, he was always wearing it...maybe because it was cheaper to animate the characters if they never changed their appearance at all, or maybe because, as I've noted before, Hawk and Duke look so much alike. 

•The Joe team that has infiltrated Cobra Island for the dual purpose of rescuing Rip Cord and doing some surveillance consists of Flint, Spirit and the just-introduced characters Quick Kick and Alpine. Hama is nice enough to have their mission involve some mountain-climbing, which is of course Alpine's specialty.

Their surveillance involves the Terror Drome, which they can't quite make sense of, and a very big vehicle covered by a huge tarp. We won't see what's under that tarp this issue, but it appears to be the Cobra Night Raven, a big, black airplane from the 1986 line that included a smaller vehicle that could detach from it and came packaged with a Strato-Viper action figure. 

•Meanwhile, Appel finds the unconscious "Zartan", who is, remember, actually Rip Cord, on the beach, and hurries him back to the Terror Drome. "Take it easy, you slimy shape-changer!" Appel tells him once he's on a wheeled gurney. "You're going to be all right!"

It is then that he makes a discovery. "Zartan" is still clutching something he apparently tore off of "Rip Cord" during their struggle on the beach:

Realizing that not only is this actually the Joe who his daughter was involved with, but that Cobra Commander has been keeping him in the dark about Candy's whereabouts and thus stringing him along, Appel helps Rip Cord into the cockpit of the Firebat. 

Rip Cord protests that the Joes assaulting the Terror Drome by this point wouldn't hurt him, but Appel tells him it's not the Joe team, but Storm Shadow and Snake Eyes, and they are after Zartan...whose clothes Rip Cord is currently wearing and, because Zartan's a shape-shifter, he could easily take on Rip Cord's face, so the ninjas might not be convinced tha Rip Cord really is Rip Cord. So, Appel decides the best course of action is to just shoot Rip Cord-dressed-as-Zartan off the island in the Firebat which, remember, doesn't even need a pilot. 

•Snake Eyes and Storm Shadow have landed in a borrowed Rattler, and hit the ground running, taking out Cobra agents left and right and they storm the island in search of Zartan. They knock out the soldiers that meet them at their plane, they attack the air traffic control tower (above), they fight their way into the Terror Drome where a technician raises blast shields to act as cover ("Cover?" Storm Shadow says, "There is no cover... ...when you deal with ninjas!") and then head straight for Cobra Commander's quarters. 

The Commander, seeing them on a monitor, is dismayed: "That inexorable ninja...finally found out who killed his uncle, and he's brought along Snake Eyes to share in his revenge!"

Tomax, Xamot and their Crimson Guard form a human shield around The Commander, just as the two ninjas blow open a sealed door and Whigham poses them much like Zeck does on the cover.

"I want him," Storm Shadow says. "Give him to me."

The Commander quickly gives up Zartan, who he tells them is on the floor below. During the process, he excuses his own role in the assassination of The Hard Master, saying that Zartan had done the deed in order to prove that he could.

Is this true...? We'll find out more details in issues to come, but it seems good enough for the ninjas, who leave the Commander and take off after Zartan. 

•Maybe it's just because I grew up with the cartoon rather than the comic, but I was a little surprised about just how many Cobra soldiers these two kill in the process of trying to get to Zartan. I mean, I guess Snake Eyes gunning Cobra soldiers down makes some amount of sense, but Storm Shadow cutting them down with his sword or shooting them with his bow and arrow...? These guys were his allies and co-workers until not that long ago...even if he had only joined Cobra in order to learn who had assassinated his uncle in the first place. 

•It turns out Appel was right to fear the ninja wouldn't wait to make sure the "Zartan" they were after was the real Zartan or not, as Storm Shadow charges the Firebat, intent on cutting "Zartan" down in the cockpit. Appel steps between them, and Storm Shadow instead seems to kill Appel with a ZASH of his sword. 

Just then, Snake Eyes tackles Storm Shadow as the Firebat launches like a rocket. 

"I could have got him!" Storm Shadow cries. "The blast would have killed me... ...but I could have got him!"

•So that's what happened to Rip Cord-dressed-as-Zartan, but what of Zartan-dressed-as-Rip Cord...? Well, after some fighting of their own, the Joe team sent to rescue him manage to do so, get back to their raft and make it out to sea. Spirit notices some inconsistencies between the wounds on the man they think is Ripcord and the damage to his uniform, but they don't suspect it's actually Zartan in disguise. 

G.I. Joe, A Real American Hero #47

Art by Rod Whigham and Andy Mushynsky

•Okay, so Rip Cord, wounded and dressed like Zartan, was rocketed off Cobra Island to safety in a Firebat by Professor Appell. And Flint and his rescue/reconnaissance team managed to make it to sea, with who they think is Rip Cord (but is actually Zartan in disguise). But there's still a Joe left on the island: Snake Eyes, who, along with Storm Shadow, managed to fight his way into the heart of Cobra's Terror Dome base...and must now fight their way back off of the island. 

Their attempts to do so, and the Joes' attempts to help them and the Cobra attempts to stop them, will comprise the entirety of this action-packed issue.

•The Joes make it to the WHALE hovercraft (It's been a while since we've seen it, but that's WHALE as in Warrior Hovering Assault Launching Envoy, and it seems to be a favorite of Hama's, as it shows up more often than many other Joe vehicles in the series do). 

Once he's aboard, Doc begins to prep Rip Cord for evacuation...and Zartan temporarily reverts to his own face, complete with the diamond shaped makeup or mask...

Amusingly, Doc is hardly suspicious at all that the man in front of him seemed to take on the appearance of an enemy agent known as a master of disguise. 

•Meanwhile, one of those big transport helicopters Cobra uses in the comics—but that have no toy or cartoon equivalents—returns to the island, carrying Destro, The Baroness, Doctor Mindbender, Buzzer and a cargo that Mindbender is worried about. 

They target the WHALE, but Cutter and company get the first shot in, sending the helicopter careening towards a crash-landing...right on top of all the planes in the airfield that Storm Shadow and Snake Eyes had just arrived a..

Seeing all of the planes destroyed, the pair then turn and instead head for the shore. 

"Down to the beach!" Storm Shadow shouts. "If we can't commandeer a plane, we'll settle for a boat!"

•Time to introduce some new toys!

The ninjas manage to take a Cobra Hydrofoil and launch it, still fighting with the Eels aboard it. The Eels? These were Cobra's red and gray clad frogmen, and their action figures came armed with harpoon guns.

Hawk orders a pair of Devilfish attack boats into the water. These were vehicles from the 1986 line and were orange on the box art (and the cover of this issue), but are colored green within the comic. 

Piloting them this mission will be the two "newest Joes," who Hawk says are "the most qualified for this mission": Beach Head, a ski-mask wearing Ranger, and Wet-Suit, a Navy SEAL.

Meanwhile, Dr. Mindbender and some Eels board the water attack craft that were the cargo he was so worried about earlier. These are Cobra Hydro-Sleds, and are basically the equivalent of the Devilfish, although they are piloted from a prone position rather than a seated one. The toys were Cobra red and blue, but in the comic they are a solid blue gray. (Do note Cobra Commander talking shit about Major Bludd's literary abilities in the panel above; his disdain for Bludd's poetry is one of my favorite ongoing bits in the comic).

•Storm Shadow and Snake Eyes get thrown overboard during the battle and engage in acts of extreme bad-assery. Storm Shadow fights Eels underwater. Look at all the blood being spilled!

•And Snake Eyes fights a fucking shark. 

These are some pretty badass panels, although as awesome as Snake Eyes fighting a shark with a knife may look, I think it's still not quite as cool as Stalker fighting a crocodile with a knife while rattling off its scientific name way back in G.I. Joe #13. 

That's because one expects Snake Eyes to do the coolest shit, like fight sharks with a knife, whereas Stalker is just an ordinary elite soldier, and not a super-ninja. 

•Snake Eyes kills his shark and gets to safety atop a Devilfish. Storm Shadow and the Eels surface and turn their blades on all the sharks now swarming them.

"Fight hard, Eels!" Storm Shadow tells them. "Even if you live through the sharks... ...you'll still have me to contend with!"

Hawk tries to comfort Snake Eyes preemptively, putting his hands on his shoulders and telling him that Storm Shadow is just too far away and there are too many sharks. 

But nothing is impossible for a ninja!

Storm Shadow struggles to the shore...only to meet The Baroness.

And the exhausted ninja takes three bullets to the chest. His death here is only the more dramatic given all what he had just managed to survive. (And note Whigham's depiction of the silent Snake Eyes' reaction, his right hand curling into a claw of pain at the sight).

•Given what a momentous event that scene contained, one would think this would have been a good place to end the issue, but there are actually two pages left, in which we check in on Rip Cord-dressed-as-Zartan and Zartan-dressed-as-Rip Cord.

The Dreadnoks pull the semi-conscious Rip Cord out of the Firebat when it lands at the Springfield airport. Hearing him mutter "C-Candy," they promise to get him some nice candy..."and grape soda, too!"

Meanwhile, Zartan is loaded onto a VAMP that speeds him towards The Pit. Fortunately for the Joes, he's still unconscious from the drugs Doc gave him, and thus when he wakes up inside their secret base, he won't know exactly where it is or how to get there...not unless he manages to escape, of course.

G.I. Joe, A Real American Hero #48 (1986)

Art by Rod Whigham and Andy Mushynsky

•Were you perhaps holding out hope that Storm Shadow wasn't really dead...? Don't, Hama says at the beginning of this issue. The first page splash has Dr. Mindbender, Destro and The Baroness checking Storm Shadow's body, and we see his lifeless staring eyes. Then Destro checks for Storm Shadow's pulse and is unable to find one (Maybe because he's wearing metal gauntlets over his fingers as he does so...?).

They discuss just how dangerous ninja are, and adept at playing dead, and Destro throws some shade at The Baroness. "I assume that was The Baroness' rationale for killing an exhausted, unarmed man," he says. 

The death of the scene is leveled with some sex, as the splash features a nice view of The Baroness in her fetish gear-inspired costume and, as you can see above, the next panel uses her curves to frame the actual action being depicted.

•So, if you've just killed a ninja, how can you be sure he's dead...? Do you burn the body? Cut off the head and put a stake through the heart? Dr. Mindbender doesn't, as he is interested in Storm Shadow's "good genetic material."

Hmm, what could Dr. Mindbender want with genetic material, I ask myself, as if I have never seen the original G.I. Joe cartoon series...

•It doesn't take Zartan's trickery too long to be detected in The Pit. Doc looks at his blood under a microscope and realizes his blood type doesn't match Rip Cord's. It takes far longer for the Joes to catch Zartan, though...in fact, most of the issue. That's because Zartan uses his powers to continually shape shift into the form of other Joes, leading to a lot of running around, mistaken identities and fun visuals (When neither disguised as a Joe nor invisible, Zartan appears in a pair of ripped striped pajamas, with this mask/makeup on; in those images, he looks an awful lot like a pissed-off Nightwing in pajamas). 

•And in Springfield, the not too-terribly-bright Dreadnoks are completely unaware that the guy they think is Zartan is actually Rip Cord. When he awakes to find Buzzer, who, remember, had kidnapped Candy, he hits him with a bedpan ("KA-BONGGG!") and starts beating him, ranting "He took my candy!"

The Dreadnoks still thinking he's talking about candy-with-a-lower-case-"c", of course. 

Thinking that Zartan has gone mad, they decide to spring him from the Springfield hospital and take back to their New Jersey hideout.

•On the road, they stop for grape soda and chocolate ice-cream floats at a diner. I've never been a fan of grape flavor, and I don't think I've ever had grape soda, let alone paired it with chocolate doughnuts (the Dreadnoks' favorite snack) or chocolate ice cream.

Were any of you who might have read this comic as children ever inspired to try grape soda and chocolate doughnuts...?

By this point, Rip Cord has recovered his wits and suggests they all head back to Springfield. 

•This issue includes what at first seemed like a pretty big introduction to me. While the Joes are busy chasing Zartan around The Pit, a big, strapping guy in camouflage with a duffel bag slung over his shoulder arrives at the motor pool. 

This is the first appearance of Sgt. Slaughter. 

Now, Sgt. Slaughter was an unusual G.I. Joe character in that he was actually a real person: Robert Rudolph Remus. The Slaughter character was created for his professional wrestling career, and his trademark look consisted of a opaque sunglasses, a wide-brimmed hat and a little mustache.

I have no idea how exactly he ended up in the G.I. Joe cartoon and toy line (and, thus, the comic book); there were a few other real people who were made into Joes in the toy line, but Slaughter was the only one who was also on the cartoon. 

There, he was a major player, playing a particularly big role in the "Arise, Serpentor, Arise!" mini-series that kicked off the second season, and the real Sgt. Slaughter acted as a live-action host to the cartoon after that.

In the toy line, his action figure was released in 1986, either as a mail-order exclusive, or packaged with the "Triple T" tank (Those three T's...? Tag Team Terminator). This was a little white tank that basically looked like a big metal easy chair with huge treads on either side. According to his file card, Slaughter was the team drill sergeant.

In 1987, he got his own little sub-team, Sgt. Slaughter's Renegades, who came in a three-pack, and were introduced in 1987's G.I. Joe: The Movie, which Slaughter also played a sizable role in. 

Then, in 1989, after I had quit paying attention to G.I. Joe, Hasbro released a "Slaughter's Marauders" team. This consisted of a new Sgt. Slaughter figure and five previously released figures with new coloring: Barbecue, Bazooka, Footloose, Low-Light, Mutt and Spirit. (Oh, and Junkyard and Freedom, although their colors hadn't changed at all). In this respect, the team was basically the same as the Python Patrol and Tiger Force sub-teams...which we'll get to eventually in the comics.

His introduction in this issue is pretty cool and certainly presents his arrival as somewhat momentous. In the first panel in which he appears, his face is dramatically obscured by his duffel. Above, we see some Joes hassling him, and, when it seems like they might come to blows, his response is simply to grin. 

When we next see him, he's standing on a floor littered with four Joes, holding their heads and groaning. (When they tell him what's going on with Zartan in th Pit below, he tells them, "On your feet, soldiers," and lifts a pair of them up by their collars.)

At the risk of getting ahead of myself here, I'm kind of surprised that we don't see much of Slaughter after this issue. He'll show up again in issue #51 and...I think that might be his last appearance...? 

As of the time I write this, I have finished Image Comics' G.I. Joe: A Real American Hero Compendium 3, which means I've read through issue #113 of the series (and all of the spin-off Special Missions), and Slaughter doesn't appear in any of those that I remember. I suppose it's possible he shows up in one of the last 43 issue of the series, but, if so, he doesn't make any covers.

Likewise, the Renegades and "Slaughter's Maruaders" never seem to show up.

Now, Hama seems to have dutifully written everything from the toy line into the comic he was presented with, no matter how silly it might seem (I'm thinking here of the G.I. Joe and Cobra space shuttles, for example, or the Cobra Pogo Ballistic Battle Ball vehicle, or this one particular character who even the other characters continually comment on how weird he is). Looking at the covers of issues I've yet to read, I see Megatron from The Transformers will show up, which means at least one giant alien robot is in the series.

But Hama apparently did draw some lines...some of which will seem arbitrary. He never included Cobra-La, for example; these were characters from a bizarre, prehistoric civilization that were the villains in the movie (and, like the Renegades, were sold as a three-pack). That's perfectly understandable, as their presence would seem to break the whole premise of Cobra that he had already established (As well as warp the narrative, pushing it rather far into hard horror and speculative fiction). 

For some reason, Hama also never included the Cobra flight pods (AKA "Trubble Bubbles"), one-person vehicles that were pretty cool-looking and maybe a bit on the futuristic side, but not as fantastic or weird as some of the vehicles into the comics. They were quite commonplace in the cartoon, too, which I suppose is why their absence in the comics seem notable. 

Anyway, I wonder if Hama barely using Sgt. Slaughter meant that he wasn't a fan of the character. Or if he didn't like the Robert Remus or his schtick. (According to Wikipedia, there was some stolen valor-related controversy around his wrestling gimmick, as Remus never actually served in the military). Or if, perhaps, it was uncomfortable or otherwise impractical to use a character who was also a real person (Like, did Remus have to sign off on his likeness and dialogue in each issue or something...?)

•It's ultimately Slaughter who stops Zartan. The shape-changer escapes into the ventilation ducts, fighting his way up them with Gung Ho right behind him the whole way. ("You can't win you know...my strength is quite...inhuman," Zartan says, before kicking the Joe in the face. Gung Ho responds, "It takes more than a kick in the face to stop the U.S.M.C.!!")

On 1997's Green Lantern/Flash: Faster Friends

This two-issue series, which was originally released as Green Lantern/Flash: Faster Friends and Flash/Green Lantern: Faster Friends, was collected in Flash by Mark Waid Vol. 6. That's where I pulled the image at the top of my post about the DC Plus specials, and, since I had already checked the collection out, I figured I would give the story a reread. 

The idea is definitely a fun one, a sort of team-up of two different team-ups, the original Flash Jay Garrick and the original Green Lantern Alan Scott (then de-aged and still going by the codename Sentinel) and the then-current Flash Wally West and then-current Green Lantern Kyle Rayner. 

And each over-sized, 48-page issue was written by the writers of the Flash and Green Lantern ongoings, with Ron Marz scripting the first part (Green Lantern/Flash), which was (mostly) narrated by Kyle and Mark Waid and Brian Augustyn scripting the second (Flash/Green Lantern), narrated by Wally. 

While the action revolves around an alien invasion rooted in an adventure of the Golden Agers in the 1940s, the series is really about the relationship between Wally and Kyle. In their previous meetings, the two young legacy characters didn't get along, with Wally resentful of Kyle essentially being randomly handed the ring and role and rather quickly accepted, while he had spent most of his life superhero-ing (and had to work hard to prove himself when he took over for Barry Allen), and Kyle resentful of the resentment.

This take on their relationship was interesting, especially at the time, because it was such a reversal of expectations, as Barry and Hal Jordan (and Jay and Alan) were always perceived to be friends (Similarly, when Marz and others wrote team-ups between Kyle and Green Arrow Connor Hawke, the original Green Lantern/Green Arrow dynamic was reversed, so that the new Green Lantern was the hothead and the new Green Arrow the cooler of the pair). 

The Kyle/Wally relationship gets explained and explored here, and the older guys point out that, despite what most people believe, they didn't like one another when they had first met and had only gradually grown to be friends. The implication is that this Flash/GL team will also become close eventually, but they'll get there.

They're not there by the end of the series, but I thought it interesting to note that, a few months after this series concluded, the pair seemed to be pals in the pages of JLA, as Grant Morrison had them playing a ring-generated game and gossiping about their co-workers in JLA #5:

While there was initially some static between the pair when they first encounter one another in JLA fighting members of the Hyperclan, they seemed to get along well in that series, likely on account of the fact that they were both the youngest members of the team and the two legacy characters who had never served on a League with all of the big names on it (Wally was in Justice League Europe for a while during the JLI era, of course, but that wasn't quite the same as this incarnation of the League).

So, the somewhat complicated plot of Faster Friends, which the writers seem to take some pains to differentiate from your average alien invasion one, revolves around an alien referred to as "Alien X". With big, bulging eyes and a head shaped like a brain, he seems like a typical old-school sci-fi movie conception of an alien. 

He had apparently arrived on Earth in the 1940s, and the U.S. government asked Alan and Jay to team-up to capture him, which they did...although they now realize that blindly doing what the government asked, and assuming an alien was hostile just because it was an alien was wrong. 

At any rate, they handed Alien X over to the government, and then Alan hid the alien's ship...from both the alien and the government. Over the course of the next 50 years, the feds poked, prodded and experimented on Alien X, who, despite his powers, lay there and took it, because, as he eventually explains, his lifespan is so long compared to that of the humans that a few decades being experimented on were nothing to him...until, he discovers, whatever they were doing to him over all that time eventually gave him a form of cancer, and he now had little time to live.

So, he breaks out and, using his mental powers, captures Jay and Alan in order to force them to reveal the location of his ship. The men's wives, Joan and Molly, call in their successors, and soon Kyle and Wally are racing around the arctic (in the splash page above) and bickering (that other page above).

Eventually, the four heroes confront Alien X, who forces them to fight one another, and then he takes his own life and dooms Earth as a final act of revenge, summoning a numberless, insatiable horde of extradimensional aliens (which look a bit like ankylosaurs to me) to overrun the world.

(By the way, any idea who that guy fighting alongside Wonder Woman in the second panel might be...? I asked Bluesky, but to no avail. My best guess is a mis-colored Damage, but Damage would be an odd one out among Superman, Wonder Woman, Aquaman, Martian Manhunter and Captain Marvel, right...?)

In an attempt to stop the invasion, Kyle and Wally leap through a portal to the invaders' home dimension and, despite being told to stay on Earth and rally the Justice League and other heroes, the old timers soon follow suit.

The majority of the second issue takes place on the world of the invaders, where Wally and Kyle find themselves mysteriously scrambled—Wally's mind is in Kyle's body which is in Wally's costume, and vice versa—a rather on-the-nose plot point which forces them to literally walk a few miles in one another's shoes.

Near the climax, the four heroes find themselves facing off against the mother/queen of the alien horde, and have an ethical debate about how to save the world without killing her. 

The alien menace is presented as a kind of malignant cancer that will overtake victim planets, like Earth, and when the Flashes and Green Lanterns attack the giant organism that is the queen, they compare themselves to a sort of cancer attacking it. 

As you may have noticed, the cancer runs throughout the story. And there's one more instance, too. When we first meet Jay in the first issue, he rescues a woman and her baby from a tree falling on them...and then kneels and clutches his heart until the pain passes. Apparently, this mysterious pain has been coming and going for a while now and, when he checks in with a doctor, he learns that his "hypermetabolism" has been eating away at him for months, and now he's undergoing "a complete cellular degeneration." 

He will, he tells the others, be dead by morning. Spoiler alert: He will not. 

I'm kind of curious what went on behind the scenes with this story, and how much time there was between when the scripts were finished and when the books were actually released. That's because the first issue has five different pencilers—Bart Sears, Andy Smith, Jeff Johnson, Ron Lim and Tom Grindberg—and two different inkers, Mark Pennington and Bill Anderson.

Despite being familiar with some of those pencil artists, and the fact that they have pretty distinct styles, it's not always entirely clear who drew what, a fact likely attributable to them sharing inkers (I think Sear drew the prologue, and that the splash page atop the post is Lim, but I'm not 100% on this). 

Meanwhile, the entirety of the second issue is drawn by a single art team: Pencil artist Val Semeiks and inker Chip Wallace.

Predictably, the first issue is kind of all over the place, and the style isn't too terribly consistent from scene to scene, but things get better looking in the second half. I'm a big fan of Semeiks' work. A frequent collaborator of Alan Grant's in the early '90s, he drew Grant's run on The Demon and much of the Lobo ongoing, and he would actually draw a pretty decent chunk of JLA-related stories during Morrison's run, including the Morrison-written JLA/WildCATS and DC One Million, the very fun Len Kaminksy-written, body-swapping one-shot JLA: Foreign Bodies and the Tom Peyer-written JLA/JSoA crossover DC 2000*.

For me, rereading this today, it was something of an exercise in nostalgia, revisiting the DC Universe as I used to know it. I do wonder what the story might read like to someone reading it for the first time today, given how much things have changed, now that Barry Allen and Hal Jordan are alive and have resumed their superheroic roles, so that Wally and Kyle are now both a Flash and a Green Lantern among a whole family or corps of such heroes, among so many other changes (Like Alan's costume, code name, age, sexuality...and clean shaven, beardlessness...)

You know, having just reread this, now I kinda want to re-read the 1998 Green Lantern/Green Arrow/Flash crossover "Three of a Kind," a three-part crossover with a triptych cover teaming Kyle, Connor and Wally...even if that would mean reading comic by both Chuck Dixon and Mark Millar in 2026...

*I'm a big fan of his particular series, in which Peyer plays with the superhero trope of heroes being visited by a team of dark heroes from a twisted, dystopian future and must fight to stop that future from ever coming to pass...although here the heroes are the Justice Society of the 1940s, and the "future" they want to prevent is our present. I think it was particularly fun in that it came right on the heels of Morrison's DC One Million, which its title and cover deliberately echo, and, of course, that DC put Semeiks on pencils for it. It doesn't look like it's been collected anywhere yet, which is too bad; definitely worth picking up if you find it in a back-issue bin, though. 

On 1996's Azrael Plus #1

I hope you guys aren't sick of me talking about DC's 1996-1997 Plus specials just yet. That's because, when taking a closer look at them for last week's post, I discovered Azrael Plus #1, a title that wouldn't have been on my radar at the time, which featured what struck me as an intriguing pairing of character and creator.

Now, for most readers, particularly in 1996, I think that character and creator pairing would have been The Question Vic Sage and writer Denny O'Neil. 

O'Neil was then writing the Azrael ongoing monthly, which would have just finished its second year of publication. It starred a character that O'Neil himself had co-created with artist Joe Quesada, a character who played a major role in the Knightfall/Knightquest/Knightsend cycle of stories in the Batman line of books. But in the late 1980s, O'Neil had written The Question for three years, and that well-regarded title remains the only monthly to star the character (or his successor, Renee Montoya). And here he would be writing both characters together!

Me, I was more interested in the pairing of Azrael and artist Vince Giarrano, who drew this special.

 Now Azrael was an odd-looking character, an admixture of elements from medieval knights and Quesada's own peculiar early '90s aesthetic, so his costume consisted of a mask, bits of armor, a hood and fleur de lis...as well as over-sized gauntlets with a mitten-like appearance, retractable flaming blades and a weird, ribbony cape not unlike that worn by Hawk from Hawk and Dove, which I don't think I ever quite understood (Like, why do the strands of Azrael's cape stand up like that...? How do they stand up like that...?) 

To be honest, I don't think Quesada's design for the character was very good, something I think is revealed by the fact that Azrael rarely looked quite right when artists who weren't Quesada were drawing him, and Quesada had only drawn him in a single mini-series, the Batman: Sword of Azrael one that introduced him. (A hallmark of a good superhero costume design, if you ask me, is that it has to be transferable to other artists and work in their own individual styles as well...which, yes, often means that simpler is better.)

Still, Giarrano was an extremely energetic and talented artist, one who at the time had embraced a sort of cartoonishly, exaggerated style with the then en vogue pointy edges and lots of little lines. I don't know what was going through his head while drawing, but I've always thought of his art as a sort of sarcastic response to Rob Liefeld and company, a fun take that seemed to be at least half-parodic. (If you're not familiar with Giarrano, who did a bunch of Bat-work that decade, including "The Human Flea" and "The Tally Man" arcs of Shadow of The Bat, the framing sequence of Legends of The Dark Knight #0, as well as the short-lived 1994-1995 Manhunter series and the Lobo/Demon: Helloween special I wrote about not too long ago...and I realize I'm repeating some of what I said in that post, including recommending some of the same Giarrano comics...)

So, I was quite curious to see what Giarrano, who drew some big mainstream comics in the 19990s in a very of-the-moment style and then left the industry to pursue painting, might do with a character like Azrael, who, though he's come and gone in different forms since, was very much a '90s character.

As it turns out, nothing too terribly special, and the book probably wasn't worth the shipping I paid to get it sent to my doorstep from an online retailer (That said, I'd still buy a DC Finest collection of the Plus books...that or a Legends of the Dark Knight: Vince Giarrano collection, if there are enough Bat-books to fill one). 

There's nothing all that striking among the visuals here—probably the image of the villain's badly deformed face, depicted in a single panel where he unwinds the bandages wrapping his face being the most noteworthy. Otherwise, there's the stereotypical Barbie-esque figure of the female character, a typical image of The Question's special gas curling into a question mark-like shape in one panel, and, as I noted on Bluesky, Giarrano's drawings of Azrael's surprisingly dainty legs and feet as he repeatedly kicks bad guys in the fight scene. 

The story is basically the sort of generic one that one imagines that O'Neil could have written in his sleep by that point in his long career, and what I found most notable about it were a couple of scenes where the page breakdowns felt...off.

Check out these two sequences:

The dialogue runs on from panel to panel in a way that feels rather unnatural, doesn't it...?

I can't quite figure out why this is. I mean, in addition to being an extremely experienced writer, O'Neil was similarly a very experienced editor at the time. And the actual editor of this special...? Archie Goodwin. So, it's surprising to see not one, but two portions of a single comic that seems so not-quite-right like these.

Anyway, this 37-page story feels a bit more like a Vic Sage story in which Azrael guest-stars than an Azrael story. 

It opens with Sage—not the questions, but Sage—foiling an assassination attempt on a bald, mustachioed politician, who Giarrano draws in a typically cartoonish type. In fact, he looks a bit like a heavyset Monopoly man, albeit not quite so formally dressed. 

Here Sage has a long ponytail that doesn't seem to fit his short haircut, as if he had an incredibly long mullet. There's a bit of stubble on his face, and his eyes are often obscured by shadow. Dressed in a plain shirt and pants and what look like cowboy boots, the way colorist Demetrius Bassoukos gives him a gray-blue shirt with darker pants, I thought of Jonah Hex when I first saw him. 

After this opening action sequence, the politician hires Sage to secretly protect his daughter, an actress who is performing a two-part play on a riverboat (I wonder if it was meant to be a gambling boat at some point, given cover artist Barry Kitson's use of a blackjack wheel on the cover).

Meanwhile, bad guy Junior Musto, who seems to lead a terrorist organization of some sort, talks to his underlings about their plans to kill the politician's daughter...and then trails off to talking to himself, unwrapping his head to reveal a ruined visage.

This visage, which is so causally revealed her, seems much, much more terrible than that of Snake Eyes in Marvel's G.I. Joe, A Real American Hero, which I have been reading my way through lately (As you know). Rather late in the series, after years of teasing how horribly unsettling Snake Eyes' face is, it is eventually revealed on-panel and it is...not that bad at all. He doesn't look anywhere near as bad as this; maybe Marvel should have hired a young Giarrano for that issue of G.I. Joe...

And then O'Neil gets around to Azrael Jean-Paul Valley, still wearing his hair long and opaque, John Lennon-style glasses, on page eight. Jean-Paul is having a lucid dream about his late father, who preceded him as the assassin Azrael, admonishing him for abandoning the vaguely Knights Templar-like secret organization The Order of St. Dumas, who programmed them both, and embarking on a career as a superhero...or whatever was going on in Azrael at the time. Like I've said, I didn't read the series. 

While Jean-Paul talks about how direction-less his life is, his dad, who grows to giant size at one point, tells him to "Search until you find a clue, you dimwit."

The next morning, the wind throws a newspaper in Jean-Paul's face, and he pulls it away to see that it is open to an ad for The Secret of The Angels, the very play on the river boat starring Rita Chablis, the young woman that Vic Sage has been hired to protect and that Junior Musto plans to murder in spectacular fashion. (The name "Azrael" was taken from the angel of death in Islam, by the way, which might explain why Jean-Paul took the name of the play to be a sign of sorts to him).

This leads to an unlikely splash page, where all of the characters are shown crossing the gangplank onto the boat. 

In short order, Rita almost falls overboard, and Vic manages to rescue her single-handedly. And when I say "single-handedly", I mean that quite literally. He does so using only one hand:

Dude must have some wrist strength. 

This rescue leads to them having a bit of a meet-cute, and Rita seems somewhat smitten with the more reluctant Vic. This is only important because the fact that she knows his face means that, when the time comes to fight the terrorists/assassins, he has to suit up as the face-less Question so that she doesn't recognize him. (Yes, it's a bit contrived).

The bad guy's plan is to plant explosives in a piano so that, when the right key is touched, it will explode on stage, and then he and his gang will gun down the audience. 

When the bomb goes off early though, Jean-Paul suits up in a four-panel sequence like those scenes in the Batman movies, saves everyone from the burning theater (his costume is fireproof, he says...and later notes that it is also bullet-proof). 

The bad guys are all punched, kicked and thrown overboard, and then, on shore, Azrael, who comes off as super-weird throughout this comic, awkwardly suggests to The Question that they reveal their secret identities to one another, but Vic demurs. 

And that is that. 

Like I said in the previous posts, other than Batman Plus #1, I didn't really remember most of what I read in the various Plus team-ups that I had read...which might not really recommend them (On the other hand, they did come out around 30 years ago). Had I read this one back then, I imagine I similarly would have forgotten its contents. In fact, I imagine I will quickly forget them, as there wasn't much to it.

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

As someone who reads trades pretty much exclusively now, it was interesting to read a comic book again after so long, and to see the ads that used to accompany them. As I did with the Armageddon: Inferno miniseries, I thought it interesting to note them, as I think it says a little bit about who the comics at the time were geared towards (and how things have changed over the decades).

So, this issue features house ads for the Howard Chaykin and Dan Brereton Elseworlds miniseries Thrillkiller, subscriptions for DC Comics, a crossword puzzle and some DC publishing news, a Rachel Pollack/Chris Weston miniseries for the short-lived Helix imprint called Time Breakers that I have no memory of even existing, a new creative team and direction for Steel and the then-upcoming Grant Morrison, Howard Porter and John Dell JLA ("The Legend Beings Anew In November"), which I posted above. (And yeah, it was in black and white in the comic too, for some reason.)

There are also some ads for music albums, Danzig's "Blackacidevil", Nada Surf's "High/Low" and The Verve Pipe's "Villains", one for the film Executive Descision debuting on Pay Per View (Never saw it, but the cast is interesting, as it includes Kurt Russell, Halle Berry, John Leguizamo, Oliver Platt...and Steven Seagal...?) and finally, on the back cover, one for the TV show Millennium, "From the creator of 'The X-Files'...although I don't recall it being anywhere near as popular.

Review: Draw This, Then Die! Vol. 1

One aspect of Japanese comics I've always appreciated is that so many of them are hyper-focused on particular niche subjects, their creators approaching those subjects with the same sense of import and drama that is afforded to what we Americans would probably consider more "standard" subjects, like epic fantasies, sci-fi sagas, horror and so on. 

Now, my own personal niche interest, like yours, is comics, and, of course, Japan will occasionally produce a comic about comics, or a manga about manga. I've been enjoying the ongoing Now That We Draw, a romantic comedy about two aspiring manga creators, for example, and now here's another manga that is about manga: Minoru Toyoda's Draw This, Then Die!

While Now That We Draw has a romance at its core, Draw This is what Toyoda calls "a high school club story" in the short afterword comic near the back of the first volume. That club is a manga club, and the focus on the book is, once it gets going, more directly on manga and its production. If you read comics, and perhaps especially if you make or have ever tried to make comic, there's a lot to like here. I mean, when I first flipped through it, having picked up because of the intriguing title, I landed on a full-page splash of a character with a clenched fist, sweaty brow and wild hair before a background of speed lines, screaming "YOU REALLY THINK MAKING MANGA IS THAT SIMPLE?! YOU FOOLS!! YOU HAVE NO IDEA!!"

Our main protagonist, and the girl on the cover, is Yasumi Ai, a high school girl who is constantly reading and re-reading her favorite manga that she has borrowed from a lending library in her small community on Izu Oshima. The manga is Robota & Pokota, and, as the woman who runs Teramura Rent-A-Book helpfully exposits, it is "a one-volume high school comedy about the logic-based android Robota and his emotion-based counterpart Pokota working together to learn what it means to be human." 

How important is the manga to Yasumi? Well, the character Pokota, a robot tanuki with a beret and a monitor on his stomach that will sometimes generate a digitized heart symbol, has become a sort of imaginary friend to her, always floating over her shoulder and giving her advice. 

Like, for example, when Yasumi sees a fellow schoolgirl drop a painting that begins rolling down the stairs right past her, Pokota turns to her and says, "Okay, Yasumi...what would a manga protagonist do at a time like this?"

Before school one morning, Yasumi runs into her teacher Teshima-sensei, a stern-looking woman in black business clothes and glasses, her hair tied back tightly. Teshima scolds her that she is going to be late for school and, later, gives her a full-page lecture on how bad manga is, beginning with "It's a waste of time, plain and simple." 

"It's just a meaningless slew of pulpy nonsense, full of cheap, momentary thrills," Teshima continues, "Manga will never get you anywhere in life."

While she listens patiently and respectfully, Yasumi does show her Robota & Pokota, and explains how it has helped her in her life:

When I was a kid, I had a lot of trouble making friends, so I spent all my time reading manga.

But after reading this one, it was like I could suddenly hear Pokota's voice in my own head, cheering me on.

And once I started following his advice, I was able to make real friends for the very first time.

So, you can't say manga's not good for anything. 

Things really get interesting when Yasumi learns that Hoshino Rei, the manga-ka responsible for Robota & Pokota, will be releasing a new volume at Comita, a big (and real life) convention of sorts for independent manga artists.

Without even telling her parents, who would forbid it anyway, Yasumi essentially runs away to Comita in Tokyo, where she experiences a big epiphany, which the artist renders in a a two-page spread of Yasumi and Pokota floating above the conventon floor, bathed in sunbeams and emitting sparkles:

Oh my gosh...

You can just...

Draw your own manga!

I get it now!

She is then confused that, when she gets to the front of the line for Hoshino Rei's table and is finally able to buy her own copy of the new manga, she sees her teacher Teshima sitting across the table.

"One moment, please," her teacher calmy says, then dons a mask over the lower half of her face, takes off her glasses, replaces them with opaque sunglasses, and now disguised, tells her student, "Sorry, you've got the wrong person."

But no, it turns out that Yasumi's favorite manga-ka Hoshino Rei and her manga-hating teacher Teshima are actually—and secretly—one and the same!

In short order, Yasumi and two friends at school, including the talented artist whose painting Yasumi had rescued in the earliest pages, form a manga club and, after proving their dedication, Teshima agrees to be their faculty advisor...seemingly in part because one of Yasumi's friends implies that they will blackmail her if they don't, now that they know her secret dual identity.

Teshima has a few odd conditions she makes the girls promise to, though:

One. Your academics must always be your first priority.

Two. You will not aspire to be professional creators.

Three. You will only ever make manga as a hobby...

And never, ever let it consume you to the point that you draw yourselves to death.

And so, the club begins meeting in the backroom of the rent-a-book shop (it turns out the owner and Teshima are actually close friends), and the girls soon fall into a division of labor: Yasumi writes the manga (she's working on a fantasy story about a pair of anthropomorphic cats on an adventures), the girl from the art club handles drawing it, and the third friend mostly just lays around reading the shop's manga, but offers her unvarnished opinion of the others' efforts, acting as something of a disengaged editor and surrogate audience member. 

Teshima-sensei regularly checks in with criticism and suggestions. (It is she, of course, who was in the "You fools!!" page, fantasizing about what she would like to have screamed at the girls, when they stumbled upon Osama Tezuka's "inductive" approach to storytelling —that is, starting with the ending first and working towards it—and Yasumi celebrates, "Dang, I guess we're all set now, then! We've found the secret to making good manga!")

By this point, of course, the manga has moved from talking about manga in a vague sense to more specifics, and it's fun to see the girls' youthful enthusiasm and their running into creative walls, and Teshima's bifurcated approach to them, acting at once as a mentor while warning them against the perils of making comics. In this, she keeps her stern face, and is limited in her praise and encouragement, while her inner thoughts, which we get to see, often differ greatly from what she says out loud.

So, um, what's with that title...? Is it a reference to Teshima's warning that the girls never draw themselves to death...?

Not...quite.

After the main story and the four-page afterword, Toyoda presents a 32-page story entitled "Lost World." This stars the young Teshima, and is essentially her "secret origin," explaining how she broke into manga. It...was not easy. 

Like Yasumi, Teshima was highly imaginative, and seemed to live her life partly in fantasy, although her fantasies ran toward the violent. For example, after her editor kindly declines her first manga, Teshima imagines detonating the building she has just walked out of in a cool, cinematic scene in which she walks toward the reader, heedless of the explosion behind her (At other points, she will imagine shooting the editor and putting a grenade in her mouth!). She will also frequently compare herself to characters in manga she has read, not entirely unlike Yasumi does.

Throughout this story, Teshima likens the creative process to something she read in Stephen King's autobiography On Writing: A Memoir of Craft, how "stories are 'found things,' like fossils buried deep within the ground." Toyoda illustrates Teshima's search for fossils with little cartoon Teshimas in miner's helmets using pick axes to dig white tunnels underground, not unlike those dug in Dig Dug, dinosaur bones often just outside of the tunnels.

As she struggles to make the right manga, one that an editor will accept and can then see publication, she tries genre after genre. She seems to hit rock bottom when she overhears her parents, who have always been encouraging of her ambitions, talking about how they don't think she will ever make it.

And then, during her first Comita, for which she printed 1,000 copies of her latest manga but only sold one, she meets her own personal manga-ka heroine. She agrees to look at her manga, and responds quite unexpectedly:

Oh, I see what the problem is...♥

You're just not psycho enough.♥

Is making manga—and comics in general—the provenance of psychos...?

Toyoda doesn't seem to suggest that it's not.

Deciding that she would rather just die than make manga, Teshima tells herself, "Well, if I'm gonna die anyway, I might as well try one more time... draw one last manga with all the spite and malice I can muster..."

While that sounds like it might lead to a rather dark or cynical work, that's not how she sees it, and she comes up with this statement of purpose, which, you'll notice, ends with the words, "Draw This, Then Die!!!"

Then she snaps into a sort of crazed, fugue state, screaming in her head at the page and her characters, as Toyoda draws her furiously drawing, rendering her with thick, black, shaky lines. "I'll kill you all!!!" she screams insider her head. "I don't care if it kills me too!! I'll draw myself to death if I have to!!...Laugh, damn you!! Fall head over heels!!...I'll make you, and  you, and everyone else...live happily ever after!! Ah ha ha ha ha ha!"

And, um, that's where her charming high school comedy Robota & Pokota came from. 

So how did Teshima go from her success with that manga to becoming a teacher who seems to be actively crusading against manga? That's one of the mysterious of Draw This, Then Die!, what exactly happens between the events of "Lost World" and the start of the manga. 

After the back-up, I became far more fascinated with her character than Yasumi, although I suppose as things progress, Teshima will eventually have to share more with her pupils, and perhaps tell them the secret of making good manga (That is, going psycho) or continue to try to shield them from achieving a dream with such an apparently high personal cost...? 

I don't know, but I had a blast reading the book, and found myself laughing out loud repeatedly during "Lost World."

I can't wait for the second volume, which is due November 3. 

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.