A Month of Wednesdays: February 2026

BOUGHT:

Mothra: Queen of the Monsters (IDW Publishing) If I didn't already know that Sophie Campbell was a kaiju fan from her past social media postings, it would certainly be evident from her script for last year's Mothra miniseries, the first American comic book to star a Toho monster that isn't Godzilla nor have his name in the title.

It's not just the various characters and other elements from Toho's Mothra films and other monster movies used here. Rather, Campbell seems to draw inspiration for particular aspects from particular Japanese monster movies, mostly from the 1990s.

For example, her human protagonist Mira resents the title monster for her family's deaths in a kaiju battle, like the girl in 1999's Gamera 3: Revenge of Iris. This other monster is a brand-new, original kaiju named Antra who "was originally created by the Earth itself" to defend it, but ended up battling Mothra, not unlike Battra in 1992's Godzilla vs. Mothra. Antra has tiny little fairy priestesses of her own, who upon their initial appearances look like goth, bad guy versions of Mothra's Shohbijin, recalling Belvera, the bad fairy from the 1996-1998 Rebirth of Mothra trilogy. And, at one point, there's a time travel trip back to dinosaur times where we see prehistoric Mothra caterpillars, as in 1998's Rebirth of Mothra III.

Which isn't to suggest that this series is in anyway derivative of any of those films. Rather, Campbell seems to rather deftly pull inspiration from those films (and the Toho catalog in general), transmuting a love of Japanese monster movies into an original comic book adventure, one that reads like the ultimate Mothra movie...albeit one that plays out on paper rather than a screen.

A long time fan of Campbell's, I was somewhat disappointed to learn that she wouldn't be drawing her first kaiju comic as well as writing it, although that disappointment immediately evaporated when I saw who she was collaborating with: Matt Frank, perhaps the ideal kaiju comic artist. And Campbell does provide some art; in addition to some of the covers, she draws short sequences in some of the comics and she seems to have worked closely with Frank on some of the character designs, a few of which look so much like the work of Campbell it's almost surprising to learn that she didn't draw them in the comic. 

The tale opens with Mothra, looking much like she usually does in Toho's films, battling Antra, a scene in which Frank's coloring has a lot of grays and lighter, washed-out colors, save for characters he wants to visually pop, like the monsters, and twin sisters Mira and Emi. 

Mira's family dies in the battle, and the world seems to end; this is a flashback, and, in the present, we see a grown-up Mira living in the hollowed-out skull of one of Antra's "drones", smaller versions of itself, scavenging in a ruined cityscape for survival, and fighting off the remaining drones with a slingshot (Her target practice involves shooting at little figurines of kaiju; one of these, who we only see part of in a panel, seems to be Godzilla; that's the big guy's only appearance in this book, which, by the end, will turn out to be fairly full of Toho's other monsters). 

And then her twin sister Emi, who apparently survived the Mothra/Antra battle 15 years ago, arrives, dressed in a red halter top, loincloth and body paint and carrying the Shobijin in a backpack. This version of the Shobijin is a rather unique one; the tiny beauties have bob haircuts, pupil-less eyes and feathery, moth-like antennae. Letterers Nathan Widick and Darran Robinson have a fun way of trying to convey their habit of speaking in unison, too; their dialogue bubbles are a deep pink with white type, and each bear two long tails that intertwine with one another, as if braided, before pointing to the heads of the characters talking.

By the end of the first issue/chapter (which I actually read when it was first released, thanks to Hoopla), Emi and the fairies have prevailed upon Mira to join them on a magical mission to save the world. Essentially, the fairies want the human twins to act as some sort of super-sized Shobijin, and using their song magic, travel back in time to the Mesozoic to recover a Mothra egg to bring back to the present. 

They succeed, as revealed in a spectacular double-page splash, Frank drawing dinosaurs and other prehistoric reptiles that suggest the designs of Rodan, Titanosaurus, Gorosaurus and Anguirus. And in a surprising cliffhanger ending, two scary-ish, goth-punk looking Shobijin join the familiar ones, and are introduced as the "handmaidens of Antra."

The story moves fast. After a short prehistoric adventure, involving a Mesozoic Mothra caterpillar with its own prehistoric Shobijin, our heroines secure an egg and are able to travel back to the present...or at least pretty close to the present, as they arrive during the Mothra/Antra battle 15 years ago. They didn't come alone, though, as Megaguirus dragonfly monsters follow them through the portal, joining the fray, and turning the tide against the modern Mothra, who Antra ultimately defeats/defeated and kills/killed. (Megaguirus, by the way, hails from 2000's Godzilla vs. Megaguirus, where its origins similarly involve a prehistoric giant dragonfly coming through a portal; while that was the monster's only film appearance, it's shown up in IDW comics before, and its bug-like nature obviously makes it a fitting opponent for Mothra).

So now what? Well, Mira and Emi's new Mothra egg hatches, revealing what is by far the cutest Mothra caterpillar ever. Our heroines try to return to the present day, but overshoot, which gives a big panel in a dystopian future where a Mechamothra (another original character of Campbell's and Frank's) is shown battling a pair of three-headed dragons (One, grayish in color and with forelimbs, is apparently Rebirth of Mothra's Desghidorah, the other is presumably the familiar King Ghidorah...although the background and foreground also show Ghidorah-like one-headed dragons). 

Eventually, our heroes make it to the right time period, and the new caterpillar weaves a cocoon, from which she emerges with a big "CHEEERNT" sound effect as the biggest, fluffiest, cutest Mothra I've ever seen, complete with a mane (see the cover above). 

Mothra's not yet ready to tackle Megaguirus, renamed as "Omegaguirus" at one point, so our heroines begin to train Mothra. This involves a battle with Antra arranged by the pair of handmaidens, and then a bravura sequence in which Mothra tackles a whole series of "sparring partners" pulled from the Toho catalog: Titanosaurus, Anguirus, Gabara, Baragon, Rodan and Varan, Manda and, most surprising to me, Maguma, who, unlike all of the others, has never actually appeared in a Godzilla movie before (And while I haven't yet read every IDW Godzilla comic—I am working on it, though!—I don't think Maguma has previously appeared in any of those, either). 

Who is Maguma? Well, Toho's 1962, Ishiro Honda-directed sci-fi film Gorath, about efforts to move Earth out of the path of a runaway star, features a scene where a giant, walrus-like monster emerges from the South Pole to cause trouble for the heroes. Like Manda then, who first appeared in 1963's Atragon, Maguma is something of an incidental monster from a Godzilla-less Toho sci-fi movie. Unlike Manda, who became absorbed into the Godzilla franchise with 1968's Destroy All Monsters, Maguma didn't later become a Godzilla character.

And why is this? Well, when Gorath made it to the U.S., it was stripped of its Maguma scenes, apparently because the monster looked too silly. (Maguma didn't make it into 2004's Godzilla Final Wars, the jukebox musical of Godzilla movies either, but the runaway star Gorath is mentioned).

You can see some images of Toho's Maguma here. Suffice it to say that Frank's version, who only appears in two panels, is infinitely cooler, more menacing and more realistic. As with all of Toho's monsters, Frank manages to adhere to their basic designs while animating them with a unique lifeforce, as if he were drawing the "real" versions of the monsters that the film studio was attempting to translate into a movie using the special effects technology available to them. 

Ultimately, Campbell and Frank's Mothra powers-up in an unusual way, is renamed "Gemini Mothra" and, thanks to the monster vs. monster training montage and the song magic of Mira and Emi, is able to defeat the book's final boss monster, giving humanity a chance to restart the world. Heck, even Megagurirus seems to get a chance to start over, as an unexpectedly cute, baby version of it emerges at the end. Our heroines will apparently be able to raise it right, just as they did their Mothra.

This might sound weird, given that Godzilla is not even in the series, but this is one of my favorite Godzilla comics to date, devoting as it does a smart script and page after page of gorgeous art to the characters and concepts of the Japanese giant monster movie. 

Runaways: Think of the Children (Marvel Entertainment) Marvel's Runaways haven't been on my radar for quite a while now—I just checked, and it looks like the last collection of Runaways was released in 2021—but I happened to stumble upon this new trade collection of a 2025 mini-series on Amazon the other day. As I have been reading the team's adventures for well over 20 years now, I figured I should add this to my shelf as well.

It's not evident from the trade paperback's cover, but the content makes clear what spurred this particular return to the characters by their last writer Rainbow Rowell: Marvel's One World Under Doom event (The event's logo ran along the top of the covers of the serially published issues). As one member of the book's ensemble cast is a renegade Doombot, it certainly makes sense to check in on the team and see how he (and they) are being impacted by One World Under Doom. 

This was the first time in memory I really appreciated the "Previously" recap on the inside front cover of a Marvel book, as I had completely forgotten where Rowell had left the team when the series was cancelled five years ago. Chase is in the future, Karolina is in space, and Nico is trying to hold the rest of their found family together in their most recent base (The Hostel) and supporting them by working at Trader Joe's Traitor Jim's (Why would anyone use the word "traitor" in the name of a grocery store? Unclear).

Now a squadron of Doombots are apparently scouring the world for errant Doombots—of which there are more than a few—telling the lost members of their flock "It is time to come home to Doom" and, if and when they resist, threatening, "In pieces, if necessary."

They eventually get to the Runaways' Doombot, named "Doombot", or, as he refers to himself, "Doom" (Although the cyborg Victor Mancha, Doombot's best friend, keeps urging him to take on a new name). Rowell does some interesting and fun stuff with this Doombot and the concept of identity, as he both thinks of himself as Doctor Doom himself (and often speaks that way), but simultaneously knows that he is a rebuilt and somewhat reprogrammed robot duplicate of the real Doom, who he is conscious of being a completely different entity.

Doombot tells Victor more than once that he embraces this duality and, indeed, as Rowell writes Doombot, he certainly seems to hold these two contradictory ideas simultaneously and be able to easily navigate the duality in conversation and in relation to the other characters, as frustrating as it may be to Victor.

I hesitate to say that this is Doombot's story, even if the driver of the action involves Doctor Doom's other Doombots coming to return him home to Doom, and "our" Doombot and the Runaways resist them, alternately fighting and running from them. The climax involves a small army of Doombots—at least 20, according to one panel—launching an assault on the Runaways, who end up fighting for their lives against this overwhelming force.

That hesistance is because there's plenty of attention spent on most of the characters, as Chase and Karolina both return. So too does Alex. Most of that attention is devoted to Nico and Gertrude, as the latter coaches the former to pursue the use of magic, despite the fact that in a previous arc she had lost her Staff of One, the (corrupting) traditional source of all her magical power. (Molly seems to get particularly short shrift, as does Gib; Gib basically just fills out blank spaces in some backgrounds...in one case, one of the two artists who draw the series seem to have forgotten to draw Gib at all in a pivotal panel, and it's briefly unclear whether or not he was magically teleported along with the rest of the team or left behind.)

Programmed with Latverian and pro-Doom propaganda, Doombot has adopted the care of the children that make up the team as his raison d'etre, repeatedly spouting the Latverian virtue of tending to the well-being of children. As fun as the insights into this particular Doombot's kind of complicated psychology is, it's even more fun watching him react to the news about Doctor Doom who, in One World Under Doom, has apparently succeeding in kinda sorta conquering the world through magical force and a charm offensive, naming himself global emperor. 

Doombot seems to turn on the television to watch Doctor Doom every chance he gets, responding "Indeed" and "Sensible" to the TV as Emperor Doom makes an address. It is only at the end that Doombot, realizing the inevitability of Doom and the fact that by resisting his fellow Doombots he's actually endangering the children he has elected to care for, that he decides to sacrifice himself, voluntarily leaving the team in order to return to Doom's fold, even though he realizes this likely means he will be reprogrammed, and lose the autonomy he now enjoys.

Of course, things don't work out quite that way, despite a rather emotional goodbye letter in which he perhaps coldly, robotically rattles off his assessment of each member of the team and what he prescribes for them. By the time he leaves, the army of Doombots has engaged the Runaways in what seems like a fight to the death...and the world has learned the whole truth about Emperor Doom and turned on him, leading to villain's off-panel downfall (I assume there was also a big fight involving lots of superheroes too, though).

In short, part of the source of Doom's newer, increased magical powers seems to involve the harming of children, in direct conflict with what Doombot believes...in fact, because that propaganda was programmed into his very being, "believes" probably isn't even a strong enough word for the degree to which such pro-Doom propaganda makes up Doombot's reality. It's certainly far more core than the actual action of Victor Von Doom. 

Rather conveniently, Doombot happens upon a small-looking demonstration in which protestors chant "Down with Doom!" and burn Doctor Doom in effigy. He then stumbles into an electronic store where he sees a news report about how "the longtime villain was draining the souls of Latverian children to fuel his many global endeavors." 

Doombot talks to himself as he witnesses the television news report:

It cannot be...

In Latveria nothing is more precious than our children.

Every child is a child of Doom.

I...

I...

I AM NOT DOOM!

I obviously don't know about the rest of One World Under Doom, but Rowell finds and exploits some pretty obvious parallels between the events of the Marvel Universe as described here and our own world, in which a genuinely bad guy is in charge, has convinced a significant portion of the (American) population that he's a good guy and reinforces his righteousness through a steady stream of television propaganda.

I mean, just as Doombot nodded along, agreeing with Doom's every utterance during an address, certainly plenty of our fellow American nod along in agreement to what they hear on the TV news. 

I suppose then that it is with a degree of wish fulfillment that Doombot can see a single news report, accept it as the truth, and reject the propaganda that has led to his support of Doom and has, in fact, informed his very being.

I mean, in the real world, our propaganda-programmed, bad guy-admiring fellow Americans would simply say news that their leader and idol is, in fact, a bad guy and is, in fact, harming children, is fake news, and suspect the media of manufacturing lies, maybe using AI to smear their leader. I mean, our villain has alleged to have sexually abused children by some witnesses whose reports are in files of the Epstein investigation that have been released so far (and, at the very least, he had been long-time friends with two people convicted of sexually abusing children) and his administration has kidnapped, imprisoned and deported children. And yet, some 30% of his followers still support them.

If only more Americans were as persuadable as this robot duplicate of a comic book supervillain...

BORROWED: 

Spider-Man & Wolverine Vol. 1: The Janus Directory (Marvel Entertainment) I suppose the pairing of two of Marvel's most popular characters is the main selling point of this series for most readers, and while that didn't hurt any when I was considering reading the book, it was the presence of artist Kaare Andrews that drew me to the book. 

Andrews is a very talented artist and storyteller, and he has an impressive range, able to work in a variety of different styles. He is particularly adept in this sort of unhinged '90s style, which he employs here, which can be a lot of fun to read; I saw a lot of Todd McFarlane, some Jim Lee and Erik Larsen and even a bit of Capcom (in Wolverine) while reading this, and much of the imagery is so over the top that it's clear that Andrews is doing something of a bit, as if there's an almost sarcastic edge to the '90s-ness of the art. 

Quite surprisingly, though, there are also a handful of what can only really be considered art mistakes in the book, ones that often follow almost immediately on something that's meant to be funny. (I say surprisingly because Andrews is such a good artist, as well as being quite experienced at this point and hell, this is Marvel; editors really should catch little panel-to-panel continuity things, right?). 

Clearly, Andrews is drawing like this on purpose, but he wouldn't also be doing a bad job on elements of the art on purpose too, would he? This isn't some extremely elaborate meta-commentary on both the excesses and overall quality of '90s Marvel comics, is it? One that writer Marc Guggenheim and the editors and publishers are all in on?

Here, let me give you some examples.

In the first issue/chapter, Peter Parker is on a coffee date with some lady who is not Mary Jane at an outside table (I am most certainly not up on Spider-Man continuity these days, so I have no idea what's going on with Peter's love life). A very Jim Lee-looking Logan simply appears astride a motorcycle right behind Peter, telling him he needs his help right this second. Wolverine speeding up to their table and apparently screeching to a halt inches away, so suddenly that he might as well have teleported? That's funny.

And then, at the bottom of the page, Logan speeds away with Peter behind him on the bike...and Peter and his date have a whole conversation of some half-dozen exchanges as the heroes drive away from her on a motorcycle, the string of alternating dialogue balloons looking like something out of an old issue of Spawn or, like, any Brian Michael Bendis comic.

Later, Wolverine and Spider-Man battle villains in a secret base. In one panel, the bad guys raise comically large guns that are almost perfect rectangles; the weapons aren't so much big in the way that the guns Cable used to tote around were big, but they are each about as long as the villains toting them are tall. Again, that's pretty funny.

But then, on the next page, a very Erik Larsen-y looking Spidey dodges what appears to be a girder thrust from off-panel at him, complete with a sound effect ("SSHHMM") and the hero taunting the villain who apparently tried to strike him with the object ("Nyah nyah, missed me"), but in the next panel, the villain is revealed, and their hands are empty. What was it that just almost struck Spider-Man, and how did the villain try to hit him with it if not with his hands? I dunno. 

One more.

Near the end of the book, Andrews draws a female character I have never heard of (but whom seems to be of some great importance to Spider-Man), and he draws her with both her breasts and butt jutted out to such an exaggerated degree that her spine is a perfect curve; she seems to be in the shape of a comma. Here, again, Andrews seems to be be making fun of the style he's imitating.

In the next panel, she fires a series of shots into the prone villain she has just downed, holding the gun in her left hand. In the very next panel after that, we get a close-up of her holding the smoking gun...but it's now in her right hand.

Again, I have no idea what was going on here, but such mistakes, while perhaps minor, are awfully frequent for a single story arc and are extremely distracting. 

But let's talk about Guggenheim's story, shall we? Though it's entitled The Janus Directory, it could just as easily be called The Story's Maguffin or Two Random Words. It's just a plot device brought up and mostly dropped after the first issue, save for a bit in the denouement which resolves the big revelation and conflict driving the arc, resetting things to normal.

The connective tissue between the two characters that Guggenheim explores here is one that seems obvious enough that I'm kind of surprised no one else has done so before. (Or maybe they have; I guess I wouldn't know either way). Logan's long, pre-superhero life included a lot of mysterious work as a mercenary, intelligence agent and wetwork, right? And Peter Parker's parents were super-spies before they died, leaving Uncle Ben and Aunt May to care for him, right? (Um, unless you believe Mark Millar, I guess?)

Well, what if Logan and Peter's parents had crossed paths back then? And what if it was Logan who was responsible for their deaths? Huh? What about that?

Guggenheim rockets through the set-up. By page three, an old spy associate (Bill Branscome? Ring any bells for anyone else?) has told Wolverine about the Janus Directory, "a master database of the world's double agents," which came into possession of SHIELD before they disbanded (SHIELD disbanded? I could really use some asterisks and footnotes here, Marvel!), making it the "intel equivalent of a loose nuke."

For reasons of plot convenience, Logan turns to Spider-Man for help (Actually, I think Wolvie says at one point he needs a computer guy, and Spidey being a nerd in his contact list is enough to qualify him). The heroes arrive at a secret SHIELD base in New York, and they are immediately beset by villains Kraven the Hunter, Omega Red and Mysterio (The latter's illusions blending the heroes' traumatic memories, so that Wolverine digs his way out of a grave and watches Green Goblin kill Mariko, while Spider-Man is crucified on an X and runs around snowy Canada in his underwear and Weapon X-style helmet, and so on).

When Spidey finally gets to the keyboard and has access to the directory, he decides to check out the final transmission of his parents, and here he sees Logan with a knife aboard their plane before it crashed. OMG! Logan killed Spider-Man's parents?!

This, obviously, leads to a fight. 

Spidey kicks Wolvie from behind and then crouches over the prone X-Man, his muscles bunching up in such a way to make him look deformed, vowing in a red-rimmed dialogue balloon "...I'M GOING TO KILL YOU."

That's the end of the first issue. So yeah, pretty good cliffhanger!

The fight occupies the entirety of the second issue, which includes a double-page splash you have to turn the book on its side to look at properly. The pissed-off Spidey has the best of it for a while (Unfortunately for them both, because Logan's memories are so fucked-up, he can't outright deny that he didn't kill Peter's parents, because he himself doesn't know for sure that he didn't). Is this because Spider-Man really could take Wolverine in a fight, or because Wolverine is holding back? Unclear.

Wolverine stops holding back, however, when Spidey punches him so hard that he dislocates his jaw and hurls him into something that explodes, and he emerges with a broken jaw, a pretty gross series of images by Andrews showing his limp lower jaw wagging beneath his mouth, his tongue lolling around, and apparently in a berserker rage.

(I had to see it, so now you do too.)

Things then start to go Wolverine's way for a bit, and the one-issue fight finally ends when Wolvie seems to impale Spider-Man on his claws, shoving his fist into the web-slinger's gut hard enough that the claws come out of Spidey's back. End issues two. Again, pretty good cliffhanger!

Let's here pause to consider the question that Guggenheim raises with this issue: Who would win in a fight, Spider-Man or Wolverine? 

It's a question I never considered before, having not been into Marvel comics at the age in which that might be a thing I would think or care about. Doing so now, I think Spider-Man should defeat Wolverine pretty easily, right?

The main problem seems to be how to maneuver them into a fight at all, and, perhaps, how to sufficiently motivate Spidey to fight as hard as the deadlier, more vicious Wolverine, but, well Guggenheim has already done that here. 

Even given Wolvie's current more amped-up healing factor and assuming he now has some degree of super-strength, as would be necessary to lug around those metal super-bones of his, Spidey is stronger, faster, more agile and has his spidey-sense. Also, he can attack with his webbing from a distance, meaning he could wrap Wolverine up and incapacitate him pretty much as soon as the fight starts, right? 

(So, how wrong am I? I have to assume that over the decades these two have fought once, or twice or twenty times before. Who usually wins when they fight?)

Guggenheim and Andrews seem to cheat a bit here, though, making Wolverine strong enough to simply tear his way out of Spider-Man's webbing (Again, am I in the wrong here? Wolverine's not supposed to be that strong, is he?). I mean, I'll definitely buy that Wolvie's claws can cut through steel-strong webs, but he shouldn't really be able to do that if he's all cocooned up like a mummy, right? Here he simply rips free of head-to-toe webbing. 

Anyway, back to the plot. After Wolverine seemingly kills Spidey in a rage, the third issue/chapter opens with them in the Savage Land. Spider-Man's wound is now dressed and his red-and-blue suit has been replaced with his black costume ("Believe me, if I wanted you dead, you would be," Wolverine says by way of explaining how it was that running Spider-Man through with his claws didn't kill him). And Wolverine is now dressed in his brown and yellow costume with the big red belt.

Why? Well, because those costumes are pretty cool, I guess? And so are dinosaurs? So why not have them in the Savage Land in their old costumes? 

For the remainder of the series, they will fight villains at various locations (Doctor Octopus joins the fray at one point) around the world, teleported from place to place, all at the behest of a new villain with a light saber and the presumably intentionally dumb name Dreadshadow (He's also a cyborg, naturally). He's organized all of this as part of an extremely expensive plan to get his revenge on Wolverine and Spider-Man for something they inadvertently caused that I won't spoil. That, and because he wants to prove a point. 

Dreadshadow is ultimately killed by Teresa Parker, who is apparently Peter's sister...? (I actually shared the panels of her stabbing and shooting Dreadshadow to death above). She first appears in the second-to-last issue, wearing Wolverine-like clawed gloves, toting a gun that fires special Wolverine-killing bullets, and wearing a costume that changes pretty dramatically between the fourth and fifth chapters/issues (In the fifth issue, Andrews draws her with some sort of metal breastplate that looks more like she is wearing a steel bra outside her union suit).

This particular discrepancy isn't completely Andrews' fault, though. The fourth issue has a guest artist, Gerardo Sandoval, who inks his own work alongside Victor Nava. 

He does a fine job and matches Andrews' energy and over-the-top style (I particularly like the way he draws the "ears" on Wolverine's mask, as rather than being static, they bend a bit depending on Wolverine's actions).

Still, he's not Andrews, and, given that I was reading this to see Andrews go nuts with the awfully random-feeling plot elements Guggenheim challenges him with, I was a little disappointed to find a fill-in. (Also, issue #4 of a new ongoing series seems fairly early for a fill-in, doesn't it?).

Oh, and if you're worried that maybe Logan did kill the Parkers, rest assured that the footage was manipulated, and Spider-Man was just being an easy mark, as Guggenheim wanted a big Spider-Man/Wolverine fight. There are further ramifications, too, but they are for Teresa Parker, who I didn't even know existed, so they don't feel like a big deal to me personally, but perhaps they will for Spider-Man fans...? And/or Teresa Parker fans...?

While there are obviously some issues in this book, and it's not as good as it could be—and should be—it is still a lot of fun. I laughed a couple of times, and I had a good time with Andrews' art. I don't know that it's worth paying $17.99 for, but it's definitely worth seeing if your library has a copy. 

REVIEWED: 

Calamity Before Jane (Toon Books) Following his 2023 Paul Bunyan, cartoonist Noah Van Sciver tackles another legendary character from American history, this time telling the story of the woman we call Calamity Jane...and the stories she told. More here. 

A Kid Like Me (HarperAlley) The protagonist of Norm Feuti's graphic novel about a middle-schooler struggling to fit-in and be cool when starting over at a new school faces an additional challenge far beyond his control: He's economically disadvantaged, and his relative poverty is all the more strikingly apparent as he encounters kids from wealthier backgrounds. More here. 

Wrong Friend (First Second) Charise Mericle Harper's graphic memoir (?) about a young girl named Charise who gets suddenly dumped by her best friend, and then has to start over, looking for a new BFF. As with the earlier Bad Sister, Harper here reteams with artist Rory Lucey. More here. 

Isn't this the exact thing people used to argue was necessary in order to save the comics industry...?

I've been blogging about comics here at Every Day Is Like Wednesday for about 20 years now but even before that I used to read about and very occasionally talk about comics online, mostly on the DC Comics message boards and the handful of comics news sites that were around at the time. One thing I used to hear said an awful lot back then was that the one thing that could save the comics industry* would be if publishers could just get their books back in grocery stores and drugstores, where they could be seen and purchased by kids and other new readers, thus growing the market beyond those that already patronize their local comics specialty shops.

Well guess what I saw in the checkout aisle at the grocery store?

Shelved among the latest issues of People and Woman's World and, um, some books of word searches was a magazine simply entitled Justice League, the cover featuring a Jim Lee drawing of the New 52 League (note the presence of Cyborg, and Superman's lack of red briefs) and the words "Four acclaimed comic book stories by all-star writers and artists!"

I was surprised to see it there, although I suppose I shouldn't be. I had previously seen similar magazine format collections of reprints focused on Batman and Superman in the same store, although those were in the magazine section, rather than right here in the checkout aisle, where a kid could presumably spot it and ask his or her parent if they could get it.

This was for a very long time Archie Comics' whole business model, selling digest collections of their comics in grocery store check-out lines and, according to Tim Hanley's book Betty and Veronica, it was a model that helped save the publisher when the comics market was contracting and specialty shops started to replace newsstands and spinner racks as the places that people bought comics. 

Of course, this collection costs $14.99, which seems like a fairly steep price for an impulse buy, although I suppose that's about what magazines tend to cost these days. (There weren't any Archie digests on sale there to compare it to, but according to the publisher's online store, one of their upcoming digests costs $9.99 for about 100 pages). 

Comics readers will likely find that price point pretty high, though, as that's $15 for only 84 pages of comics, all of them reprints. That price is approaching trade paperback level. I mean, Justice League Unlimited Vol. 1: Into the Inferno, the latest trade paperback collection featuring the Justice League, costs $17.99, and that collects six issues, or about 120 pages.  

I did ask my sister if she would buy a $15 magazine for my nephew if he asked for it in the checkout line of the grocery store, and she said she would, as she encourages any kind of reading. Given that this is a survey of just one parent though, I can't be sure how representative she is of the average parent. 

So, what are the four acclaimed stories by all-star writers and artists collected within? A quartet of timeless, evergreen done-in-ones? Ha ha, no don't be silly. Rather, they are the first issues from four different Justice League titles from the last 30 years or so, and I couldn't discern the logic for the order in which they appear; they are neither chronological (that is, oldest to newest) nor reverse chronological (newest to oldest). 

Also, somewhat surprisingly, though the magazine is magazine-sized rather than comic book sized, the comics pages within have been blown-up or reformatted in anyway. They're at comic book page-sized, they just all have wide borders that fill up the rest of the extra space. 

Anyway, here's what $15 will get you at the grocery store...

Justice League Unlimited #1 (2025) by Mark Waid and Dan Mora This seems to be a smart, even obvious choice, as this is the first issue of the current Justice League title, one that's only about a year old at this point (DC has only published one, maybe one and a half collections of it so far, depending on how you want to count Justice League Unlimited/World's Finest: We Are Yesterday).

It introduces various plot elements that won't be resolved for a while (the mysterious villain team Inferno, for example) and it ends on a fairly potent cliffhanger (with point-of-view character Airwave confessing to the readers in a narration box that he's only joined the Justice League in order to kill them all). But, at the same time, the first half or so of the issue pretty thoroughly introduces the premise of this particular Justice League book, that of a massive, army-like super-League consisting of pretty much every superhero in the DC Universe.

The early scenes, in which Airwave arrives on the new team's new satellite Watchtower headquarters, is chock-full of appearances by various heroes, making this story a pretty strong introduction to the breadth of the DC Universe. Skimming through the book again as I pound this post out (I had previously reviewed the first trade paperback collection of the series in this column), I counted over 50 heroes appearing in some fashion, including those you might expect in a modern Justice League comic (Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman, a The Flash), some less likely candidates (Firestorm, Black Lightning, Star Sapphire, a Kid Flash) and some pretty deep cuts (Tuatara, for example; he doesn't just cameo, but is name-dropped as well, as Red Tornado sends him off on an off-panel mission with a few others). 

The issue, and the next five, are collected in the aforementioned Justice League Unlimited Vol. 1: Into the Inferno, which was then followed by Justice League Unlimited/World's Finest: We Are Yesterday. Other characters and concepts introduced in these 20 pages are followed up on in various spin-offs too, like Challengers of the Unknown, The Question: All Along the Watchtower and Justice League: The Atom Project. The JLU title is still ongoing, and the last issue to ship as of this writing seems to be #16.

I have some concerns about JLU—mainly that the book seems to offer a status quo rather than a story or stories, and, increasingly, that it's meant to serve as a bridge between various big event series like Absolute Power and DC K.O.—but in terms of quality, that first issue was solid. 

There are certainly worse creators a new DC reader could choose to follow after this series than Waid and Mora, too. The former has decades of quality series and miniseries on his resume (including various Justice League-related books), and Mora is one of the best artists drawing super-comics for DC at the moment...or drawing them for anyone else, for that matter. 

Justice League #1 (2011) by Geoff Johns, Jim Lee and Scott Williams I was a little surprised to see this one in here. Not just because this was the first chapter of The New 52 version of the Justice League's origin and the New 52 continuity has since been rebooted away (Although according to New History of the DC Universe, this story, or at least some version of it, still happened in current continuity, it just would have had to happen fairly differently). No, I was mostly surprised because it's not really much of a Justice League story. Despite the whole team appearing on the cover, the issue itself is basically just a Batman/Green Lantern team-up; the only other Leaguers to appear at all are Superman, who is one panel, and a pre-Cyborg Victor Stone, who is on a couple of pages.

This issue (and the story arc it is a part of) has been collected and recollected several times now, starting with 2012's Justice League Vol. 1: Origin (There have also been deluxe, "Absolute" and "Unwrapped" editions since). This iteration of the title would last 52 issues, with Johns writing the first 50 of them (Lee would draw two arcs, the first one and "The Villain's Journey"). 

As I was a Justice League fan, I wasn't exactly enamored with this story or this run (or the New 52 in general), which jettisoned DC comics history/continuity to offer a new "Ultimate" style reboot. 

Johns' greatest strength as a DC writer was his ability to finesse thorny continuity into things that mostly made sense, solving the storytelling problems that occurred when various writers over the decades took turns on the characters, synthesizing past, sometimes contradictory stories into something that felt natural, even intentional. The New 52 stripped him of that, of course. 

Lee is, obviously, a pretty great artist, and this arc was a decent showcase for him—although the number of splash pages in this first issue is striking and, if you happened to have bought the issue in 2011, annoying—but he's not the best character designer, and the New 52 Justice League notoriously had him redesigning some of the best and most iconic characters in history. I mean, can one really improve on Superman's costume? No, but Lee tried and, well, you can see what that looked like. (Even the costumes he left mostly alone, like Carmine Infantino's Flash costume and Gil Kane's Green Lantern costume, were given more, fussier lines.)

And, again, because The New 52 continuity is now over, I'm not sure there's a whole lot to really recommend this iteration of the Justice League book to new readers. Although if you are a Jim Lee fan, then there are at least two trade collections of him drawing a Justice League you might want to check out.

Justice League #1 (2018) by Scott Snyder, Jim Cheung and Mark Morales The Scott Snyder-written iteration of the Justice League book spun out of his Dark Nights: Metal event series and Justice League: No Justice miniseries, and his line-up seemed to be an in-comics re-creation of the that in the old Justice League cartoon series, with Hawkgirl, Martian Manhunter and Green Lantern John Stewart rejoining after pretty long absences from each. (You'll note Cyborg is on the cover, and, in this issue at least, he is presented as a member of the current team, while John is called in as a secret weapon at one point; Cyborg will pretty immediately leave this "main" league, joining the splinter team in the spin-off Justice League Odyssey, while John will essentially replace him on the team.)

In this issue, the already formed Justice League, headquartered in the Hall of Justice, fight a long-term scheme of Vandal Savage's, the heroes keeping in touch via J'onn's telepathy while they fight against Savage's armies on various mini-missions. Each is assisted by a guest-star or two—Green Arrow, Adam Strange, Plastic Man, Mister Terrific, Swamp Thing, etc.—although these do little more than cameo. While the League staves off that threat, it's actually Lex Luthor and his new (rather small) Legion of Doom that ultimately confront Savage. 

Meanwhile, a mysterious threat from beyond the Source Wall streaks like a comet towards Earth, space-time swirling "like road dust" behind it, while various other cameos look on (The 853rd Century's Justice Legion-A, Kamandi, a Monitor, The Quintessence).

Like the previous issue collected in the magazine, this issue has been collected and re-collected plenty of times; I just re-read it in a library-borrowed electronic copy of Justice League by Scott Snyder Book One The Deluxe Edition. 

Snyder's run, which featured a few fill-in issues from writer James Tynion IV and art from a whole bunch of different artists, lasted about 39 issues. The title continued for another 36 issues though, with writers Robert Venditti, Simon Spurrier, Jeff Loveness, Joshua Williamson, Brian Michael Bendis and the team of Andy Lanning and Ron Marz all following Snyder, some of them writing enough issues to constitute a "run", others only writing a story arc. The title was then cancelled with issue #75, as part of the lead-up to Williamsons Dark Crisis on Infinite Earths. 

I read all of the Snyder issues (and the rest of the title more sporadically), so I guess it was good enough that I never dropped it. It was well-written, and the art was never terrible (although it would have been nice if Snyder had a true, regular, consistent partner on his run). What is both noteworthy—and really weird—about Snyder's run is that it is essentially just one big, long story arc, about the Justice League fighting the Legion of Doom (Luthor, Grodd, Sinestro, Black Manta and Cheetah...The Joker, who is in this first issue, would leave almost immediately) over fundamental forces of the universe, and the direction that the universe was to take...towards justice, or towards doom. 

Snyder also introduced some cosmic beings that played into his own messing around with the nature of DC continuity and the multiverse.

It had its moments (most of them revolving around Starro and Jarro), but, seen from the remove of years, it now seems a lot like an ongoing series devoted to marking time, acting as a bridge between Snyder's Dark Nights: Metal and his Dark Nights: Death Metal. Because of that, I can't really remember the specifics of any single issue or arc within the overall narrative, nor have I ever been tempted to revisit it. 

JLA #1 (1997) By Grant Morrison, Howard Porter and John Dell The final issue collected in here is the first of the Morrison/Porter/Dell JLA, which took the then novel (if obvious) approach of re-teaming the Justice League's founders (with the legacy versions of The Flash and Green Lantern taking the places of their then-dead predecessors). It was the first time that some version of these seven heroes had starred in a Justice League title together since the early 1980s, and thus seemed pretty fresh, new and exciting then.

I do wonder how readers seeing this comic for the very first time might react to certain aspects of it. Would they know who this Kyle Rayner character was? Would they wonder at all about Aquaman's design, with the gladiator armor and harpoon hand? Or why Superman has a mullet? Or perhaps why Martian Manhunter seems so nude?

The issue opens with a UFO landing on the White House lawn. Out of it steps a golden, caped man named Protex and his superhero team The Hyperclan, who say have come to save the world and deal with all of its problems...even if they do so in a much harsher way than any Justice League ever has (At one point, they execute supervillains tied to posts with their eyebeams; Porter draws one of them to resemble Marvel's Wolverine). They are met by Superman, and he and various other heroes aren't so sure about the Hyperclan's methods or promises of quick fixes to long-term problems.

At one point, mysterious assailants assault the then-Justice League America's satellite base, knocking it out of the sky, and forcing Leaguers Metamorpho, Ice Maiden, Obsidian and Nuklon to a desperate gamble to save their own lives (Metamorpho, who transforms himself into an escape capsule, dies in the process, or at least seems to die in the process; his funeral is then held in JLA #5 but, like all superheroes, and like Morrison hints during the funeral, he will eventually get better).

In this first issue, all of the incoming Leaguers appear, except Aquaman, who will be reluctantly drafted into the brewing fight against the Hyperclan in JLA #2. Superman, Green Lantern and Wonder Woman (who was leading the previous League, the team who flee the satellite, in Justice League America, the title that JLA would replace) get the most panel time, while Martian Manhunter and Batman get the least, the latter showing up in the last five panels, and uttering "HH!" for the first time.

(I love how Potrter poses Batman there, melodramatically stalking around, gesturing like a vampire; this is pretty consistent with how then Batman artist Kelley Jones was drawing him.)

Frankly, I could talk about this title, and this particular story arc, for thousands of words, but that's probably enough for this post. 

This issue, and this arc, has also been collected and recollected over and over. If you've never read it and would like to, basically just look for any book with "JLA", "Grant Morrison" and a "1" on the cover. 

Morrison's run would last through issue #41, with maybe a half-dozen fill-in issues, and include JLA/WildC.A.T.s (did I spell that right?), original graphic novel JLA: Earth-2 and event series DC One Million.  Porter and Dell drew most of it, with fill-in artists needed here and there to meet deadlines (These include Oscar Jimenez on #8 and #9, Mark Pajarillo here and there and, surprisingly, the likes of Greg Land and Gary Frank, among a few others). 

Morrison was followed by Mark Waid and Joe Kelly on JLA, which would ultimately run 125 issues, and, after Kelly's run, the book became an anthology series with rotating creative teams until it was finally canceled in 2006 as part of the events of Infinite Crisis. 

I am likely prejudiced and influenced by nostalgia to some degree, as this was my first introduction to the Justice League, but Morrison and company's JLA was (and is) one of my favorite comic book runs ever; revisiting it now and then, I still think it holds up as one of the best superhero comics ever.

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Previous to the comics portion of this magazine, there's a two-page introduction by a Jim McLaughlin, under the headline "Top Heroes. Top Talent." It's maybe 500-800 words, tops, and seems to do a decent enough job of offering a sort of elevator pitch to the Justice League concept and then introducing the writers, pencil artists and concepts for each of the issues included. The thesis seems to be that the idea of the Justice League was to unite the best DC characters into one book, which naturally produced the best comics by the best creators.

It's a decent piece given its brevity and I wouldn't argue with its main points, publisher boosterism aside, although I will nitpick it (I also would have attached the names Gardner Fox and Mike Sekowsky when mentioning 1960's Brave and the Bold #28). I mean, you know how wordy I am; I would struggle mightily to produce a piece that hit all these points in so few words.

The parts I found most interesting, maybe even revealing, were the ways in which McLaughlin described the writers and pencillers.

Mark Waid isn't just "one of comics' most acclaimed and award-winning scribes," but he is also "the scholar, the teacher." And Dan Mora? Well, he's "a 30-something hotshot who burst out of Costa Rica to become one of comics' most dazzling talents almost overnight." (Overnight, I guess, if you don't count his pre-DC work for the likes of Boom, although you should count it; it's also great!).

Upon relaunching the League for the New 52, Geoff Johns was "writer and executive producer of DC's The Flash TV show and Wonder Woman movies", rather than one of super-comics' most popular writers, who then had a decade of experience writing most of DC's biggest heroes, teams and events, and had even managed to make books starring less-than topline characters like Hal Jordan and the Justice Society into hits. (As for the New 52, that was "a groundbreaking slate" of comics "that grabbed both critical acclaim and massive sales success." Sales? Sure. Acclaim? Eh...the fan press sure like Scott Snyder's Batman, but I'm having trouble thinking of many—or any—critical darlings among that mess. Refresh my memory, if you do.)

Scott Snyder's run on Batman was also "groundbreaking", according to McLaughlin, and Jim Cheung is an excellent draftsman. Together, their book—which Cheung didn't last all that long on, intentionally built a lineup to "echo" that of "the smash-hit Justice League animated series."

And finally, we get to Grant Morrison, "a madman-with-a-plan writer who cut his teeth on DC Imprints books." (McLaughlin also refers to Morrison as "he" here, rather than Morrison's preferred pronoun "they", which I can definitely relate to, as EDILW readers have repeatedly had to call me out for doing so here and on Bluesky; still, it's probably embarrassing to do so in print, rather than online, where it's so easily fixed).

I found the "DC Imprints" phrase...weird. Yes, Morrison wrote some Vertigo books (And why not just say "Vertigo" instead of "DC Imprints", with a capital "I" in "Imprints"?). These included Sebastian O, The Mystery Play, Kill Your Boyfriend and Flex Mentallo. But before that, Morrison had written Animal Man and Doom Patrol (Morrison's runs on each title concluding before these books were absorbed into the new Vertigo imprint in 1993, although certainly Morrison's work helped establish the Vertigo aesthetic). And, of course, there was Morrison's earlier Batman work, the original graphic novel Arkham Asylum and the Legends of the Dark Knight arc "Gothic" (the latter of which was collected into a trade paperback, back when such collections were relatively rare). That's just the DC stuff, though; prior to that Morrison "cut his teeth" (or "their teeth") on comics in the UK, of course.

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Anyway, it's nice to see that DC Comics' Justice League comic is finally taking its place in the grocery store checkout aisle, alongside such other important pieces of American pop culture, like, let's see here...

...ground beef, Sydney Sweeney's breasts and Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce's "epic" romance, I guess. 

*And by "comics industry", I think they just meant "the direct market" or "DC and Marvel as publishers that release series as floppies once a month".

Bookshelf #19

This week's bookshelf is the second-to-last one on this particular shelving unit—an Ikea one that I built all by myself last year—which is the final shelving unit on the first floor of my ancestral home. After next week's shelf, then, we'll head upstairs to look at some older shelves containing far older books than these. 

The organizing principle here shouldn't be too hard to suss out. At least, that for the small collection of books on the left should be immediately obvious. These are all Dark Horse books. 

While there are a couple featuring characters/creatures I like, like a pair of Aliens books (a big, fancy 2015 collection of Dave Gibbons, Mike Mignola and Kevin Nowlan's 1993 Aliens: Salvation and James Stokoe's Aliens: Dead Orbit) and a pair featuring Rober E. Howard's badass pilgrim Solomon Kane (both written, I see, by the now extremely problematic Scott Allie), most of these books were purchased because I liked the creators who made them, including Mike Mignola (The Quarantine Sketchbook, Mr. Higgins Comes Home), Stan Sakai (47 Ronin...featuring human beings!), Peter Bagge (Founding Father Funnies), Evan Dorkin and Sarah Dyer (the charmingly named Calla Cthhulhu) and so on.

There are a lot of great comics on this shelf, but probably the one I was most excited to get my hands on was 2015's Frank Frazetta's The Adventures of the Snow Man, as I had long been fascinated by that particular character, one of those from the Golden Age who I had only known from the glimpses of him on a cover and thus had to imagine what his stories might have actually been like. I wrote about it here when it first came out; it's worth noting that parts of it are more than a little racist.

Oh, and if you're wondering why on Earth I have volumes 7, 8 and 9 of Adam Warren's Empowered on the shelf, and none of the first six volumes, rest assured those are on a shelf upstairs. Somewhere.

To the right are my Oni Press books from this particular time period (with one exception, which will make sense in a moment). The first of these are Corey S. Lewis' Sharknife. If you haven't read it before, and find it in the wild anywhere, do snap it up. Actually, do so for anything by Lewis. He's a really brilliant comics creator, and his every page radiates with energy and excitement. 

Then there are volumes 2 through 7 of Sophie Campbell's Wet Moon series. If you look closely (don't look closely), you'll see I had many of these for quite a while, before Campbell had changed her name. I really should update to the more recently published volumes, those with her real name on them. 

Between Sharknife and Wet Moon is the non-Oni book here, 2006's The Abandoned, a done-in-one tankobon-style digest, which I believe was Campbell's first published work. It's certainly where I first saw her work, and when I became a fan of hers. 

Let's all read JLApe: The Complete Collection together, shall we?

The 1999 storyline JLApe: Gorilla Warfare asked a question I don't think had even occurred to most people previously: What if the heroes of the Justice League were transformed into gorillas? 

If so, would the members of the Justice League still be the noble and courageous heroes we had come to know and love, or would they perhaps give in to their new, animal natures? And, if it came down to it, would they continue to protect humanity, or side with their own species in a human vs. gorilla war?

The epic, 300+ page adventure played out over eight summer annuals, that for JLA and one from each of the books starring a Justice Leaguer at the time: Aquaman, Batman, The Flash, Green Lantern, Superman, Wonder Woman and Martian Manhunter. Len Kaminsky wrote the bookends, JLA Annual #3 and Martian Manhunter #2 and thus seems to have been the mastermind of the event. The six books occurring between each featured on a single character and was produced by a different creative team. Essentially, these were side adventures embarked upon by the characters when they split up between the beginning of the crisis, which involved them all, and its resolution. It was the original JSoA or JLoA formula, expanded into an event.

Tying all these annuals together? Beautiful Arthur Adams covers featuring super-gorillas in familiar costumes in conflict. 

DC finally collected the entire event in a 2024 trade paperback entitled JLApe: The Complete Collection. I couldn't find it at any local libraries (nor could I find the annuals among my long boxes; I thought they would be with the DC crossover events, but now I wonder if maybe I filed them with the JLA tie-ins, which I haven't been able to locate the last few times I looked). But luckily, it is available via Hoopla, so that's how I'm reading it here.

I'm going to go through it chapter by chapter, which is a good excuse to post all the Arthur Adams covers. But the very first chapter of the trade is actually not a JLA-related annual but, instead, an Impulse-starring issue of the anthology series Legends of the DC Universe, which was labeled as "A Primate Prelude"; I am guessing that it is this book's presence which led to the trade being entitled "The Complete Collection."

Legends of the DC Universe #19

By Jason Hernandez-Rosenblatt, Pop Mhan and Romeo Tanghal

I don't think I've had occasion to mention this particular title at any point over the course of my blog's life before. It was a monthly running between for 41 issues between 1998 and 2001 (plus a pair of excellent 80-Page Giants). The basic idea seemed to be to do what Legends of the Dark Knight did for Batman for the rest of the DCU, with top-tier talent on each arc, the difference here being that while many (most?) of the stories would be set in the past, some would be set in the present day, like a four-issue arc featuring the Hal Jordan Spectre by J.M. DeMatteis, Michael Zulli and Vince Locke, or, um, this particular issue.

(Looking back at the gallery of covers on comics.org, I see that I read the book quite inconsistently, and it's one of those titles I now wish I had picked up each month. I read the JLoA arcs by Christopher Priest and Ken Lashley, the Zulli-drawn Spectre arc and two particularly weird arcs, one a Western starring Green Lantern Abin Sur and the other a Batman/Aquaman team-up that was an unlikely sequel to the classic Joker fish story. I skipped a lot of stories that I am now pretty interested in, though.)

I honestly can't remember if I had read this one or not. The Duncan Fegredo cover looks quite familiar, but that may be simply because I remember seeing it in the comic shop at the time (Legends always had pretty great, often portrait style covers). 

Having just re-read it, I can see why it's possible I might have read it 27 years ago and then proceeded to completely forget doing so. Not only is it not terribly memorable, but it has almost nothing to do with the JLApe saga. Indeed, it is only the second-to-last panel of the entire 22-page story that has anything at all to do with it, and that panel is merely one of Gorilla Grodd, JLApe's chief villain, reading about the Impulse/Max Mercury adventure involving another Gorilla City-born villain in the newspaper, and saying out loud that that villain's plans were "FAR too SMALL", followed by a tag reading "See Grodd's BIGGER Plans in This Summer's JLApes annuals!"

As for the preceding 21-and-a-half pages? Well, the story opens with a page about how nobody at Manchester Junior High, where Impulse goes in his civilian identity of Bart Allen, likes brainy, arrogant new kid Gordon Matthews, for reasons "no one could put their finger on."

Then Max and Impulse investigate a mysterious breakout at the Manchester Monkey Business School, where apes are trained for show business. Apparently, a gorilla, an orangutan and two chimps are missing. 

Bart, who has a big chemistry test coming up, goes to study with his friends Preston and Carol, while Max meditates, entering The Speed Force and finding that it seems to be being siphoned off by some animal intelligences, and no animal has attempted to do so before, "aside from China's legendary fourth-century super-fast panda Xong Tsai," which, honestly, sounds like a more interesting story that this Impulse one.

As will soon be revealed, all is related. The mysteriously unlikable Gordon Matthews rescued the apes, affixed Speed Force-siphoning hats atop the chimps and I guess the orangutan as a distraction for Manchester's hometown heroes (Although Mhan doesn't draw the organgutan like an orangutan, nor does colorist Daniel Vozzo color it like one in its first appearance; it just appears as a third chimp. Later, when captured by Max and tied up, it does look like an orangutan). Matthews then captures Carol, intent on placing her mind within the body of the gorilla so she can be his bride.

And why might he want to marry a gorilla with a human mind? 

Well, as he reveals by touching a device on his belt when Impulse confronts him, he is not, in fact, Gordon Matthews, human boy, but rather Gorbul Mammit, son of Gorilla Grodd!

While the son of one of Barry Allen's rogues, a loquacious super-gorilla scientist with a big vocabulary and a tendency to rant, might seem like a good villain for Impulse, as far as I can tell, this is Gorbul's only appearance. 

Things shift in Impulse's favor when the female gorilla, thinking a nearby yellow component of a high-tech device creating an anti-speed field is actually a banana, plucks it out. While Impulse and Gorbul do battle, the gorilla goes after Carol. Somewhere off-panel, the gorilla must have ripped her shirt off—that, or she is caught in an explosion caused by Impulse pulling wires from a machine at super-speed—as when he asks if she's alright, there's a panel of her saying, "Never better," in which Mhan draws her in her bra, the red shirt she was wearing previously in tatters.

Why did Mhan draw a junior high girl in her bra here, and why did DC publish it? Good question! I thought about putting the image in this post, as I did of the splash introducing Gorbul, since maybe you wouldn't believe me that the panel exists, but then I realized I shouldn't be reproducing an image of a junior high girl in a bra, even if DC did publish it.

Maybe it snuck through editorial somehow though, as the handful of panels featuring Carol throughout the rest of the book show her with her red shirt on and intact, save for a rip in the sleeve. (Maybe the gorilla pulled her shirt off when trying to grab her, and then she put it back on afterwards...? Unclear...but weird!)

Anyway, not much to do with JLApe, but maybe it succeeded in bumping up sales for Legends little that particular month...?  

JLA Annual #3

By Len Kaminski, Jason Orfalas and Jordi Ensign

Two things of note on Adams' cover of the JLA annual, which was used as the cover for the eventual collection. First, while it depicts Batman as a gorilla along with the rest of the heroes who founded this particular iteration of the League, Batman does not get turned into a gorilla alongside his teammates here. I'm not 100% sure why; maybe the Batman office at the time drew a line about turning Batman into a gorilla and held firm on the point.

The other? Well, as you may notice, The Flash is not wearing his regular costume. This was because, at the time, Wally West was replaced by a mysterious "Dark Flash", one who had an admittedly quite cool and different costume, one that was a darker scarlet color with a big silver lightning bolt that stretched diagonally across his chest and had other silver highlights. It is this Flash who appears throughout JLApe; he appeared elsewhere in the DCU while this storyline was ongoing in the then Mark Waid-written Flash title, although he never appeared in JLA proper. (Given that it's been over 25 years at this point and I'm not even sure those Flash issues are available in trade, I guess I could go ahead and spoil this Flash's identity here, but I'll let you Google it, as it doesn't really impact this storyline at all; suffice it to say that Kaminski and, later, Brian Augustyn characterize this Flash as if he's basically the same one who has been appearing in JLA all along.)

Now, Kaminski and the art team have a lot of space to work with here, what with the annual being 38 pages long (In fact, they seem to be working to kill space near the climax, as there are three two-page splashes in a row at the climax, as our gorilla-ized heroes try to quell a massive riot involving humans similarly transformed.

Because of this, they take their time in getting to the gorillafication of the Justice Leaguers, and are then able to dwell on the transformation, what it means for the characters, how it was accomplished and how it might be cured. 

The tone is relatively light throughout, with several jokes of varying degrees of effectiveness, but the threat is taken seriously. Taken altogether, this chapter at least reminded me a bit of the Keith Giffen/J.M. DeMatteis Justice League run, which so effectively balanced comedy with straightforward superhero action. 

Given "the current age of ecological and geopolitical turmoil", Gorilla City's leader Solovar has decided to start engaging with the rest of the world, revealing the existence of his civilization of super-gorillas to the world and petitioning to join the United Nations so that gorillakind can start working with humanity to better the world for the betterment of both species. 

To this end, Solovar dons a gorilla-sized suit and tie and begins a whirlwind public relations blitz, including a meeting with President Bill Clinton, but a very busy week for him ends in tragedy: His limo is destroyed in a bombing. 

A new group calling itself "the Human Supremacy Movement" claims responsibility, although the Department of Extranormal Operations suspects it's a front ("Monaghan?" Sarge Steel asks Chase Cameron, referring to the star of Hitman, but she responds, "Not his style.") Meanwhile, back in Gorilla City, the super-gorillas start calling for "Death to the hu-mans!"

This is the position taken by "the Simian Scarlet Cultural Purity Movement" anyway, led by an inner circle of new gorilla villains that seem specifically designed to fight various Justice Leaguers (a gorilla gangster for Batman, a gorilla admiral for Aquaman, etc.). And they, in turn, are led by Grodd. Their pawn is Prince Regent Ulgo, nephew of Solovar, and he has a plan.

Gorilla City calls the JLA and asks for Superman, Wonder Woman, Aquaman and The Flash to visit them, and act as interspecies intermediaries to help prevent a human vs. gorilla war, but the Leaguers are ambushed and subjected to a gorilla bomb, which turns them into gorillas.

While they fight the mental side-effects, it soon becomes clear that their new gorilla brains instinctively cause them to side with gorillas over humans, and, despite a mighty struggle, even Superman succumbs and declares "Death to all hu-mans!"

Luckily, while the invisible Martian Manhunter was similarly turned into a gorilla, he is immune to the psychological effects of the transformation, and, using his mental abilities, he's able to straighten out his fellow Leaguers before they can return to human civilization and start slaughtering people with their powers. (As to why J'onn, a shapeshifter we've been repeatedly told can control his body on a molecular level, doesn't just simply change shape back to his normal appearance, it's never brought up in this issue.)

In what I thought to be the most effective of the jokes in this issue, the League assembles on the Watchtower, and calls Green Lantern Kyle Rayner in. Though stunned by their transformation, which none of them immediately explains, he tries to play it cool and not say anything, which lasts only for a few panels before he shouts, "What the screaming blue heck is going on here?!" a delightful exclamation in a world where "blue blazes" and "Great Krypton" and "Merciful Minerva" usually take the place of swear words. (Other, less effective attempts at humor include the implication that Solovar and Clinton discussed something dirty during a private meeting, and homages to first the Marx Brothers and then the Three Stooges...and hey, I'm a Marx Brothers fan!)

Batman shows up next. He and J'onn analyze a "gorilla bomb", which they decide works with an "unusual metaphysic harmonic" similar to one J'onn has sensed in former Justice League Europe member Animal Man, and he goes off to check in with Buddy Baker.

Oddly, Kaminski writes Animal Man as if Grant Morrison's run on the character had just concluded, as he mentions "an anthropomorphic coyote being the savior of mankind", referring to 1988's Animal Man #5, "The Coyote Gospel." He also rants about what appears to be the revelation that he and the DC heroes are all characters created by writers. "Explanations are meaningless...God's way of making his deadline!" Animal Man shouts at J'onn in one panel, following up shortly afterwards with "Universes live and die by committee!"

It's not necessarily a bad characterization of a post-Morrison Animal Man (I thought it was funny, for example, when J'onn says the League needs his expertise, and Animal Man sighs, "Oh God...I'm important to the plot..."). But it was ill-timed. Remember, this story came out in 1999, and Morrison's run on Animal Man ended 1990. 

(As for how Morrison might have written Animal Man in 1999, Buddy shows up in JLA arc "World War III," where his knowledge of the morphogenic field is integral in helping Wonder Woman, Steel, Blue Beetle and Black Lightning create what Wondy refers to as "an anti-war ray", a purple ray that evolves every human being on Earth into a superhero...at least temporarily.)

Anyway, as Batman and J'onn work on a cure, the Leaguers notice Ulgo and his fellow super-gorillas are carrying a gorilla bomb into the U.N., and, despite their current appearance, Superman and the others join GL in teleporting down to save the day.

They are seconds too late, however, and the entire U.N. transform into gorillas (as does Kyle), their new instincts paired with their traditional enmities leading to utter chaos, as gorilla fights gorilla. J'onn and Batman have the cure, but there's a convenient-to-the-plot hitch: There's just enough to restore the entirety of the U.N., but not enough to spare in order to cure the affected Leaguers. Selflessly and heroically, they all agree to use the cure on the other victims and remain in ape form themselves. 

While the U.N. is saved, Ulgo and his followers were allowed to walk thanks to their diplomatic immunity. J'onn was able to glean that this was just the beginning of their plot, not the end, however, and he picked up six locations during his brief mind scan of Ulgo, though not what is supposed to happen at those locations. Conveniently, these are places familiar to each of the Leaguers: Atlantis, Themyscira, Central City and so on.

And so the team splits up, each to go star in their own annual, before they will regroup in the Martian Manhunter annual. 

As for the visuals here they are, obviously, fairly bonkers. I'm not familiar with the name Jason Orfalas, whose handful of DC work included issues of Supergirl, Hourman and Birds of Prey. Rereading this comic now, his work reminds me quite a bit of that of Val Semeiks, who drew some excellent JLA adventures. Most prominent among them was, of course, 1998's DC One Million, but he also drew JLA/WildCATs, JLA: Foreign Bodies (also written by Kaminski) and the excellent, unfortunately uncollected DC 2000, a two-part JLA/JSoA team-up written by Tom Peyer. 

Batman Annual #23

By Chuck Dixon, Graham Nolan and Mark Pennington

Time for your semi-regular reminder that Chuck Dixon is an excellent writer of Batman comics and Graham Nolan is an excellent artist of Batman comics (and, indeed, seems to draw the hell out of every character and book he's worked on) but, despite that, they seem to have pretty shitty personal politics. Both proudly voted for Donald Trump in 2016 (although, like a lot of Donald Trump supporters, I wonder how they feel about the guy now, given we're at the anonymous, masked agents of the federal government literally murdering innocent civilians in the streets part of his fascist takeover of the government). Also, Comicsgate claims Nolan as one of their own. 

So, you know, you probably don't want to buy any comics those dudes are making these days...not that you'll see either working for a mainstream publisher at this point in their careers anyway. 

Their JLApe tie-in story called "Jungle Rules" and it opens with Batman and Nightwing questioning a badly banged up guy in a hospital bed, the survivor of a gangland massacre in which a huge guy "ten feet tall and almost as wide" was tearing a joint apart with his bare hands. The mysterious assailant then whipped out what the cops later said was a 20mm anti-tank gun, which he was able to hold as if it were simply a rifle.

In the few panels in which this giant gangster appears, Nolan obscures his face and feet and every inch of his skin but, despite the fact that there are no visual signifiers, the readers of the annual have already seen the cover (or, in our case, read the first installment of the JLApe storyline), and thus already know what Batman suspects but Nightwing does not: This giant gangster is actually a super-gorilla from Gorilla City.

Dixon and Nolan actually play coy with revealing the giant's identity for a while, including a scene in which a bellboy brings an unusual dinner order to his hotel room while he's in the shower and thus off-panel. It's only in the final panel of the sequence, in which the bellboy asks if he needs anything else, that we get a clue to his identity—"I'm gonna need lots of shampoo"—and see his big, hairy hand.

This is Grimm, the gorilla gangster in Grodd's inner circle introduced briefly in the JLA annual. His job is to have a mysterious shipment that turns out to be high-tech weapons stuff delivered to Bludhaven, and to pave the way for that, he's muscling in on the turf of Roland "Blockbuster" Desmond, the city's...well, it's kingpin of crime. (Dixon's Nightwing was pretty Daredevil-y.)

That also explains Nightwing's presence...well that, and Batman needs someone to talk to, of course (Oracle, who was then also a member of the League, makes a brief appearance as well). In fact, though this is a Batman annual, its events will prove of some importance to Nightwing, to the extent that a blurb on the last page directs readers to the Aquaman annual containing the next chapter of JLApe and adds, "For more on GRIMM and BLOCKBUSTER check out NIGHTWING every month!"

There are a fair amount of jokes in here, and while Dixon isn't a writer I typically think of as being good at comedy, there are a couple that land pretty well here (Although there are also several that feel lazy or off, like the presence of a pair of hit-apes based on John Travolta and Samuel L. Jackson from Pulp Fiction). My favorite gag was probably Batman looking around Nightwing's new "lair" disappointedly and then dismissing it as merely "a garage."

While reading and enjoying it today may require one to do a fair degree of separating the artist from the art, this is a very solid comic, and maybe the best of the tie-ins in that while it is technically a part of the overarching crossover plot running through the annuals, it reads perfectly well on its own as a Batman and Nightwing story. It's not even until the penultimate scene that the events of JLApe are referred to, during a five-panel sequence in which Blockbuster watches a TV news report on Solovar's reaching out to the rest of the world and the events at the UN.

Aquaman Annual #5 

By John Ostrander, M.D. Bright and Dick Giordano

The creators lean more heavily into comedy here than Dixon and Nolan did in the previous chapter, but then, their protagonist has been transformed into a gorilla, so that is perhaps natural. 

Entitled "20,000 Apes Under The Sea", the story involves Admiral Trafalgo, the pirate-looking ape from the JLA annual, and his crew aboard the super-submarine The Kong attacking Atlantis. Their target is a giant gemstone called The Eye of Poseidon. Their plan is to use it as a sort of lens, which will allow them to gorillaize whole continents at once with their ray weapons that turn humans into gorillas (Given their small numbers, the bad-apes' plans aren't to conquer humanity outright, but to convert them into gorillas, you see).

Oh yeah, here the apes are armed with ray guns that can turn humans—and apparently anything else—into gorillas. In the JLA annual, they used gas, but I guess gas wouldn't work in this book's underwater setting, huh? The other annuals would similarly focus on gorilla ray rather than gorilla gas.

Weirdly, the rays don't just affect humanoids like the Atlanteans, though. The Landlubbers—Lagoon Boy, mermaid Sheeva and whale-with-robot-limbs Blubber—are all turned into gorillas as well. Blubber is just a really big gorilla, and Sheeva is a gorilla from the waist up, but a fish from the waist down.

And then when Aquaman rides a whale into battle against The Kong, it fires on the whale, and we see it turn into a giant gorilla as well.

In addition to the battle between the gorillas and The Atlanteans, in which Aquaman's supporting cast of Mera, Tempest and Dolphin all play parts, Aquaman must also struggle mightily against his new gorilla instincts, and, at one point, he and a gorillaized Tempest battle in order to establish which of them is the true alpha male.

For all the comedic elements—Ostrander has Trafalgo speak in over-the-top pirate dialogue, and there are of course multiple instances of the word "sea monkeys"—there's also a fairly strong bit of characterization, when Mera and Aqua-Ape discuss how the latter feels about being king, being Aquaman and being with the JLA, and how he realizes he's probably better at all of those things than he is at being a husband and father (Of course, that was in 1999; today, he is once again both a husband and father). 

During the adventure, Aqua-Ape retrieves the trident of Poseidon and, during a pitched battle, he tries to unleash its magical energies through the Eye, as the gorillas had planned to do with their ray weapons, and the unexpected but convenient result is to restore all of the gorilla-ized Atlanteans, Aquaman included, back to their regular forms (One assumes the whales became a whales again, too). Perhaps surprisingly, all the gorillas caught in the blast found themselves turned into Atlanteans. 

Trafalgo and what's left of his force retreat, while Aquaman swims off, vowing "This isn't over yet...But I swear it will be!" 

Bright's art is just realistic enough that even when the events are being played completely straight, as they mostly are throughout this annual, there's a humor in the sheer surreality of Aquaman in the form of a big red ape.

Wonder Woman Annual #8

By Doselle Young, Brian Denham and Jon Sibal

Of all of the creators involved in this crossover event, it was the Wonder Woman annual that seemed to have the most unfamiliar names to me. In fact, of the three primary creators, the only name I recognized was that of inker Jon Sibal.

Looking up the others though, I see that I actually have read a series by Doselle Young, the 12-issue, 2001-2002 WildStorm series The Monarchy, which I bought just because it was drawn by Hitman's John McCrea (If I recall correctly, it was something of an Authority spin-off). 

And Denham, it will come as no surprise once you see his art here, had previously drawn a bunch of Image comics featuring Rob Liefeld characters, as well as some comics for Chaos, Antarctica and a couple for Marvel (In the years since this annual, he's gone on to do plenty of work for all of those publishers, as well as DC, IDW and Dynamite).

Anyway, here are some of the earlier pages from the annual, so you can get a sense of what it looks like, and how hard it is to read.

First, here's the second page, in which some of the enemy apes ambush and try to re-kill Charon, the ferryman of the underworld:

Second, here's the first panel to feature Wonder Woman and some of her allies, Shim'tar (left) and Artemis (right):

They're not the only Amazons to appear. Hippolyta briefly appears, Nubia makes a surprise (to me, anyway) appearance near the climax, and Wonder Girl Cassie Sandsmark, still wearing her wig, glasses and denim jacket, appears for a few panels before saying she needs to go help Young Justice. (If you're curious, this was about eight issues into writer Eric Luke's run on Wonder Woman, which fell between John Byrne's and Phil Jimenez's).

Anyway, the whole book basically looks like this, although there's a few decent images of the title character, including a double-page splash near the climax.

The story, "The Thin Gold Line", is narrated by Luk-Nutt, who once belonged to the harem of Priestess Abu-Gita, a sorceress member of the Simian Scarlett, who is here pursuing her own agenda. Instead of relying on the morphogenic weapons, which Luk-Nutt's narration tells us will eventually wear off where super-humans like the carved-from-clay Wonder Woman are concerned, she invades Themyscira and makes through the Gates of Tartarus to the River Styx, all in an attempt to raise what she calls the gorillas' gods.

A fully human Wonder Woman, along with her allies, are following a trail of banana peels to the gates, and, once they enter, she uses the Wonder Dome to take the shape of a ship upon which they can pursue the apes. 

As to why Wondy is in her natural form rather than that of a gorilla, a brief flashback shows Artemis entering a New York City skyscraper, where the Wonder Dome is going crazy. She enters a feature-less room and is confronted by random-looking green humanoids that don't really seem like they are meant to be apes:

What's going on here? No idea. I think that's the bare minimum a comic book should have to achieve; one should be able to figure out what the hell is going on by looking at the pictures and reading the words in it (My best guess is that these green monster creatures are maybe creations of the Wonder Dome, summoned by Diana's gorrillaized mind...? But, if that were the case, I'm not sure why they are green and not translucent).

Artemis aims a flaming arrow at Wonder Ape, and in the time it takes to fly from Artemis' bow to Wondy's bracelet, Wonder Ape has transformed back into Wonder Woman, having apparently shed or fought of the effects of the gorilla gas she was subjected to.

As to why Wonder Woman is wearing this particular get-up in this book, with the straps on her bustier and the star-spangled loin cloth...? No idea. Maybe she changed clothes when she got back home. I suppose it's even more pointless to wonder why Artemis is wearing a costume composed entirely of leather studded straps, huh...?

Ultimately Wonder Woman and her allies are able to defeat the gorillas, thanks mostly to Luk-Nutt betraying his species by pointing out—while tied in the lasso of truth, so no one could doubt him—that Gorilla City's culture, including the religion Abu-Gita professes, is actually manufactured and based on concepts from human civilization that was appropriated by the apes after they got their smarts not really all that long ago. 

There's something kind of interesting in that, and certainly there is a lot of energy in the art, but ultimately the book is pretty poorly constructed, and sticks out as a particularly weak link in this crossover. 

Young seems semi-embarrassed about writing a chapter of JLApe, and throughout the script characters as various as Wonder Woman and Luk-Nutt continually point out how ridiculous the premise and the plot are, as if they too are embarrassed to be in the comic. 

Is it a bit goofy...? I mean, I guess, but then, so were Wonder Woman and Justice League of America for, like, decades. Maybe this gorilla-centric crossover seemed silly and Silver Age-y to some in the 1990s, but hadn't Grant Morrison and company's JLA run proven how compelling Silver Age strangeness could be when presented with straight-faced, deadpan seriousness and a high degree of craft...? 

The Flash Annual #12

By Brian Augustyn, Doug Braithwaite and Robin Riggs

The story in the Flash annual is given the title "The Apes of Wrath"; I suppose someone had to use that title in one of these comics. 

Here the gorillaized Flash has already succumbed to his new gorilla instincts, and, between the last pages of the JLA annual and the first scene here, allied himself with the event's main villain, Gorilla Grodd (Grodd, like Solovar and Gorilla City, all originally came from Silver Age Flash comics, after all). 

He leads his speedster allies—Golden Age Flash Jay Garrick, Jesse Quick, Max Mercury and Impulse—into a trap, where Grodd and his soldiers shoot them with their gorilla guns, turning them into apes. 

They too immediately ally themselves with Grodd, whose scientists hook them up to special treadmills in a skyscraper with a huge satellite dish atop it. The plan is to harness the Speed Force energy they generate by running and then beam it up to a satellite, which can then bathe the Earth in a gorillaizing ray. 

A surprisingly philosophical Impulse—who has renamed himself Chimpulse, as the cover says—finds himself wondering what they are actually doing, and he is eventually able to break the spell. It seems to be a joke of Augustyn's that once Impulse is transformed into an ape, he's actually much more intellectual than he was as a human teenager. (And as to why he is drawn as a chimpanzee instead of a gorilla? Your guess is as good as mine. Jesse Quick sports a tail, which would make her a monkey rather than an ape. I assume this is one of those things we shouldn't dwell on, as this certainly isn't the sort of comic story we're meant to think too much about.)

It's also Impulse he discovers a way to reverse the transformation, when he vibrates though a wall at super-speed, and comes out the other side human again. The Flash offers an explanation after he too restores himself in the same manner: 

Interestingly, each of the transformed Leaguers is able to return to their normal form in a completely different way.

Freed from the species loyalty that being a gorilla instilled in him, it is only a matter of time before The Flash is able to defeat Grodd and destroy the building before it can transmit the energy it had stored. Grodd disappears in the explosion, but totally isn't dead, as JLApe is still far from over. 

Superman Annual #11

By Dan Abnett, Andy Lanning, Joe Phillips, Rich Faber and Rob Stull

Remember a few paragraphs ago when I said it was inevitable that someone would use the title "The Apes of Wrath" in this crossover? Well, it was used twice; this story is also entitled "The Apes of Wrath". It's becoming increasingly apparent that the communication between the involved creative teams wasn't as strong as it could have been. The most glaring example of this will be in the final chapter, the Martian Manhunter annual. 

Metropolis, like Central City, is in chaos, as Gorilla City's army invades, turning their victims into gorillas. Superman, or Supergorrilla, is on the scene, reenacting the cover of Action Comics #1 with a news van containing Lois Lane, complete with a dazed gorilla in the foreground, holding the sides of his face. 

Things get worse when a giant ape with eyebeams (thus recalling Titano) appears, but it turns out that this is actually a giant robot gorilla (see the cover above) named Grogamesh covered in gorilla hides for some reason. It is piloted by Prince Regent Ulgo, who was eager to join his people's war against the humans to avenge his uncle.

Supergorilla is able to restore himself to his normal form here by flying into space and towards the sun, the solar energy purging the effects of the gorilla ray from him.

There is, of course, a fight, but ultimately Superman and Lois are able to convince Ulgo that he has been manipulated into this war, and he stands down.

Young Justice makes a very brief appearance at the end, which kind of made me wish the event might have actually been a bigger, wider one, rather than just confined to the Justice League-related annuals. After all, the sense of silliness that pervades JLApe seems to be tonally of a piece with Young Justice, and the storyline certainly seems like it would have been right up Peter David's alley....

Green Lantern Annual #8

By Keith Giffen, Octavio Cariello, John Nadeau, Marcello Campos and Jordi Ensign

To his credit, writer Keith Giffen tries to do something a little different here, with sections of the story (entitled "Grunts", and not "The Apes of Wrath" for a change) reading like those from a war comic...albeit one in which the soldiers are all gorillas.

I didn't much care for it when I originally read it in 1999—it was awfully wordy and spent a lot of time on the Gorilla City soldiers that I thought should have been spent on the guy whose book this was—but I certainly appreciate it a lot more now. While I don't think it's the best of JLApe annuals, it's certainly the most ambitious. 

Like The Flash in his annual, Green Lantern has already succumbed to his ape mind when this book opens, and though he seems a bit out of it and confused, he's a loyal soldier in the gorilla army, his more experienced comrades showing him the ropes. 

These soldiers are ordered from their current duty to space, where they will essentially be used as cannon fodder for Gorilla City's more valuable space marines. 

What's going on in space? Well, that's where Simian Scarlet's General Zolog is in command of a huge orbital satellite base. This is where the ray apparatus that the giant gemstone from the Aquaman annual and the Speed Force energy from the Flash annual were going to be utilized.  Since the gorillas were unable to get the gem or transmit the energy, Zolog is going to proceed with firing the gorillaizing rays down to Earth with a lower rate of efficacy, and, to do so, the gorillas will have to drop their cloaking, which means they are to expect an attack from the superheroes.

And it's their grunts—like Kyle and his new teammates—who are going to soak up the damage.

The attack on the gorilla satellite base is orchestrated by Martian Manhunter in the Watchtower's monitor womb. For some reason, he is drawn in his normal appearance here, rather than as a big, green gorilla. Given his shape-changing abilities, there is no reason why he couldn't just shape-shift back into his more humanoid form, of course, but it seems a little odd that he's done so off-panel since he didn't do so at all in the JLA annual, and Giffen doesn't explain that he did so here. 

Who is J'onn sending against Zolog's forces? Occasional Green Lantern supporting characters Sentinel Alan Scott and Warrior Guy Gardner (still in his unfortunate morphing phase, with the garish design, although Giffen does write a good boorish Guy), as well as The Metal Men. 

Why these guys? Well, Alan and Guy are probably there because this is a Green Lantern comic (you'll note all of the annuals save perhaps the Superman one has featured each hero's respective "family" of sidekicks and supporting characters), and the Metal Men are immune to being gorillaized, although Giffen never makes this explicit.

When J'onn detects Kyle's mind among those in space, he uses a JLA teleporter and his own psychic abilities to pluck him from the battlefield and try to subtly manipulate him. When that doesn't work, J'onn uses psychic "shock therapy" to remind Kyle of who he is, at which point the ring purges him of the effects of the gorilla gas that transformed him, and he immediately returns to the fray, intent not just on stopping Zolog, but also on saving his former gorilla allies from being killed (By their own forces, who view them as expendable, not by the heroes, obviously).

There's a pretty striking epilogue, in which Kyle visits his former gorilla teammates behind bars. While strange to read and maybe misplaced, it's still quite effective character work on some extremely minor characters in the overall plot. 

Martian Manhunter Annual #2

By Len Kaminski, Gus Vasquez, Mark Propst and Claude St. Aubin

And finally, we get to the last chapter, the Martian Manhunter annual. It's the most appropriate annual to serve as the other bookend to the crossover, as the Martian Manhunter title often read like a JLA spin-off, as Martian Manhunter didn't have the same "family" of characters that his fellow Leaguers did in the late '90s; rather, the JLA were his supporting cast. 

Still, he remains the protagonist throughout the story, "Fear and Loathing on the Planet of the Apes". 

It opens and closes with J'onn thinking about the nature of human beings and of apes and how the former relate to the latter (And, honestly, these are some inspired passages, offering more interesting insight than one might expect from a comic book in which the Justice League gets turned into a bunch of gorillas).

After fixing his own turned-into-a-gorilla problem, which is here so simple I again find myself wondering why he spent most of the JLA annual as a green gorilla, J'onn teleports up to the Watchtower, where he and Batman compare notes...and recap the events of the previous seven annuals in an extremely tedious conversation spread over a two-page splash that is completely skippable.

Kaminski doesn't write the pair as collegial as many other writers have. Instead, he has Batman maintaining a dismissive, hard-ass attitude which seems misplaced when addressing J'onn, one of his oldest allies, although Kaminski does have J'onn repeatedly sassing Batman here, which is fun (Every time J'onn takes a dig at Batman, the Dark Knight responds with an "Mmn-hh" or "Hhh").

Both of the detectives have come up with the same suspect when it comes to determining who has manipulated the gorilla vs. human war, but Kaminski has them both playing incredibly coy about it. J'onn even goes off to interview potential sources in an effort to help confirm the villain's identity, although no one actually says his name until he appears near the climax.

This is very strange because readers already know who this is. The Impulse prelude story shows and names him, as does the JLA annual and he's on the cover of this very comic. And, of course, he's the gorilla villain in the Flash annual, so by this point, the heroes themselves know who is behind the plot. Hell, J'onn even names him during the tedious recap splash with Batman.

It is, of course, Gorilla Grodd, the only super-villain to ever hail from Gorilla City. (Except for his son, I guess, who was just introduced in that Legends of the DC Universe story starring Impulse discussed above.)

Still, J'onn's conversations with those who might know something about Grodd are fun. These include several of DC's other ape characters: Detective Chimp, Monsieur Mallah, Sam Simeon (the ape half of Angel and the Ape) and Congo Bill, the very last of whom discusses an event he witnessed while in Congorilla's body. As we've been talking quite a bit about Detective Chimp of late, here is the page featuring him:

Note that he is talking out loud here and, unlike with the panel in Warrior #29, he's talking to a human (well, a Martian disguised as a human), rather than another ape. Here Bobo seems to have retired from the Bureau of Amplified Animals from that Green Lantern/Flash crossover and gone into the private eye business. 

Finally, note the sign on the door. Is this the first instance of Bobo's full name? The door on his BAA office, for example, read simply "Bobo."

Oh, and if you're wondering where the rest of the JLA, those other than the seven founders of this iteration of the League, have been throughout this crisis, as I have, well some of the others are finally mentioned in this annual:

Steel is now on the Watchtower, where his technical know-how will help the League cure all of the people who have been turned into gorillas so far, and Zauriel, Plastic Man and Huntress are dealing with the resulting chaos of the human vs. gorilla panel in various side adventures that are mentioned but not dramatized. We saw Oracle briefly in the Batman annual, so only New Gods Orion and Barda are unaccounted for. 

The annual is thus divided between J'onn's investigation and the rest of the League doing League stuff. At the climax in Gorilla City, J'onn names Grodd as the villain behind it all (as we all knew), but there is a twist: The specifics of Grodd's masterplan. 

Grodd didn't want to just turn all of humanity into gorillas in order to decide some kind of contest of species, but rather because his "force of mind" psychic abilities apparently allow him to drain mental energies from other gorillas, so the more gorillas there on Earth, the more powerful he can become.

Grodd immediately demonstrates his newfound powers by taking down J'onn, but J'onn is ultimately able to defeat him, not through brute psychic strength, but through a clever bit of trickery. 

With Grodd behind bars, Simian Scarlet manacled and all of the affected human de-gorillaized, the threat of the human vs. gorilla conflict is finally over, and Ulgo pledges to continue his uncle Solovar's work of making Gorilla City a responsible, peaceful partner in the community of nations.

And maybe join the Justice League himself someday...

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

JLApe was the only time Gorilla Grodd faced off against the League during Grant Morrison's run on JLA. But if you're wondering how Morrison might have handled the villain, Morrison used Grodd in his three-part 2005 JLA Classified arc (As you can see, Morrison would have Grodd try to eat Batman). It's not a simple Grodd vs. the JLA story, but also involves another superhero team and Morrison's version of The Nebula Man, but it is quite good (and far, far better than JLApe). 

If you haven't read it, the arc has been collected in 2007's JLA: Ultramarine Corps and 2010's JLA: The Deluxe Edition Vol. 4.