Another Mothman

If you're reading this blog, then you are almost certainly an adult, in which case you are not the target audience for writer Heather Alexander and illustrator Sam Kalda's Haunted USA: Spine-Tingling Stories from All 50 States (Wide Eyed Editions; 2025). But if you, like me, appreciate great art and spooky stories, you will probably enjoy flipping through it and reading the entries that strike your fancy. 

As the title says, it's a collection of scary stories from each of the 50 states (plus one for Washington, DC), presented in two-page spread, a three-to-five paragraph story on one page, a gorgeous illustration of that story by Kalda on the facing page. Most of these are ghost stories, an aspect of the paranormal which I am not particularly interested in, and that includes the Ohio story (That of a "Racer Boy", a ghost said to appear on the tracks of a roller coaster at Kings Island).

 A few of the stories involve cryptids though, a subject which I am quite interested in. What grabbed my attention was the appearance of Mothman in the upper left corner of the cover. 

(You can't tell by looking at a picture online, but the cover has shiny silver elements on it, including the creators' names, the spots on Mothman's wings, the cat's whiskers and so on).

The story of Mothman is the West Virginia's entry in the book. Alexander's five-paragraph retelling includes the first sighting as that of the gravediggers who saw something large with wings and the most famous one, that of the Scarberrys and Mallettes in the TNT area, which lead to the newspaper report that seemingly kicked off the flap of sightings and its media coverage. 

The only mistake I noticed was in this sentence: "Some locals wondered if the Mothman was living in the nearby nuclear power plant, but police found no evidence of the creature or anyone there." West Virgina does not actually have any nuclear power plants, nor has it ever. Alexander probably meant the TNT area, a series of World War II-era concrete, igloo-like structures in which explosives were once stored. It is now the McClintic Wildlife Management Area, a locale Alexander mentions when telling the story of the Scarberry/Mallette sighting. 

But what we're most interested in here is the image of Mothman. As you can see, Kalda leans on the "moth" in the name, as so many artists do. Note the moth-like wings and the long, fuzzy antennae-like structures on its head. In this, Kalda seems to be following in the footsteps of Frank Franzetta, who painted a moth-man of a Mothman on the cover of High Times, and sculptor Bob Roach, who created the shiny statue of the cryptid that now stands in Point Pleasant.

No witnesses actually reported anything moth-like about Mothman, of course, aside from wings and nocturnal habits. Despite the spots, Kalda does get the creatures two most notorious features into his image: Big, black wings and staring red eyes (I like also the way he depicts Mothman as essentially face-less, no witness ever being able to articulate what its face might have looked like).

I also like how Kalda gives his Mothman such long, creepy fingers...and even long toes. It's a really gorgeous image.

The other handful of crytpids covered, each of which is also beautifully rendered, are Alaska's humanoid otter creatures the Kushtaka (Alexander's clever title? "Otterly Terrifying"), Massachusetts' Pukwudgies, a handful of different lake monsters from Michigan and Missouri's hairy humanoid Momo (who looks a bit like a cross between Chewbacca and Cartoon Network's Brak, I thought).

The Pukwudgie image is particularly potent, and I can imagine it scaring the hell out of me had I encountered it as a little kid, monsters scraping their claws on my bedroom windows being a particularly vivid fear of mine (elicited by the sound of utility wires creaking against the tree branches outside my window).

Perhaps also of note is Iowa's chocolate-eating ghost, star of an urban legend in which, if one leaves a candy bar on a particular bridge at a particular time, the chocolate will disappear, leaving only an empty wrapper. Though presumably a ghost, Kalda's brilliant illustration suggests a sort of red-eyed giant monster...while simultaneously looking like it might just be the shape of the trees and shadows on the bridge. 

Anyway, next time you're in the library, do take the time to check this book out. You can see more of Kalda's work on his website and his Instagram account. 

 

 

Review: 1997's The Spectre #51

While DC editorial was able to get it together well enough to schedule the Spectre as a guest-star in the pages of Batman and Batman in the pages of The Spectre in January of 1997, they didn't necessarily get the details right. 

On the second page of John Ostrander and Tom Mandrake's The Spectre #51, Batman is swinging from a New York City rooftop, thinking about how he has come in pursuit of The Joker. 

"This is the second such trip made here recently," the Dark Knight thinks, "Last time brought me up against The Spectre.*"

The asterisk refers readers to "Batman 450-451." But, as we know because we just read those issues, Batman did not make a trip to New York City in them, bringing him up against The Spectre. Rather, the New York City-based Spectre journeyed to Batman's Gotham City, where the two clashed...at least in words, if not physically.

Odd.

That aside, this issue, one of the handful of issues of the series I had read off the rack when it was still being published serially, is just as I remember it: A fairly strong done-in-one in which the two caped heroes argue about sin and punishment regarding The Joker, with a terrifying moment in which the madman gets ultimate power (as he apparently occasionally does*) and the villain ultimately being defeated in the same way he will soon be in a JLA story. 

Having just read the Batman crossover, I of course wanted to read this issue, which will presumably be collected in a future The Spectre by John Ostrander and Tom Mandrake Omnibus 2. Luckily, DC included it in their 2019 collection The Joker: His Greatest Jokes, which my library had a copy of (Interestingly, this issue of The Spectre is the only story included from a book that isn't one of the Batman line of books. You would think they would have included a Joker vs. Superman story in there, at least...)

It's a tightly-written 22-pager, with no time to waste on anything but the central conflict, only a few lines of dialogue really devoted to what's going on in the pages of the book at the time (Jim Corrigan really is, as he seemed to be in those issues of Batman, on the police force again, and partners with Nate Kane. Apparently, he has recently been injured by the Spear of Destiny again and is hiding out inside Nate's body. Oh, and there's a passing reference to the events of the previous fall's line-wide crossover, Final Night...which I'd love to see DC collect into a DC Finest volume or two...I remember it being one of the better such crossovers). 

The Joker is already in New York City as the book opens, and Batman has obviously already shown up too. Kane takes a report on the Batman foiling a mugging from his superior, thanks to Corrigan/The Spectre temporarily controlling his body.

Both Batman and Kane have the same concern about The Spectre meeting The Joker. "Based on our last meeting, if Spectre encounters The Joker first there won't be much of him left to return to Arkham," Batman thinks to himself. "Moonface, there better be someone left for me to question when I get there," Kane shouts after The Spectre, as the spirit flies off toward the sight of The Joker's attack. 

As for that attack, it too seemed familiar to me at this point. Someone in the city had the bright idea to open up a Joker-themed nightclub, where all the patrons dress up like The Joker (an off-hand remark by a club-goer makes this sound a bit like a comic book world's version of a goth club, where patrons dress a bit like vampires). It's kind of remarkable to read this and realize it was written almost 30 years ago, given how often the last few decades of comics have presented us with various iterations of the fans-of-The Joker or Joker-as-charismatic-figure stories. 

The story I immediately thought of, though, wasn't a comic book one at all, but an episode of the original Batman: The Animated Series, wherein a casino owner opens up a Joker-themed club called Joker's Wild, drawing the attention and the wrath of The Joker himself (For what it's worth, that episode of the show, also called "Joker's Wild", aired in 1992...that said, I suppose it's possible it was based on an older Batman comic I never read, as many episodes of the show were inspired by comics storylines).

Here an emcee announces The Joker on stage and is nervously taken aback when the Clown Prince of Crime seems less than flattered by the club's existence. "You mean, the idea of bedwetting little twits turning me into a fad?" Joker says, reaching to shake hands with the emcee. "What's not to like?"

The Joker then proceeds to electrocute his victim with a deadly joy buzzer ("They also know better than to fall for that in Gotham!" he laughs), and he then turns to spray the club with gas, his henchmen having welded the doors shut and filing in wearing gas masks.

That's when Batman shows up. The Joker immediately sics his fans-turned-victims on the Dark Knight. And then The Spectre appears, materializing out of the gas being shot by The Joker. 

Spec makes short work of The Joker's men in his own inimitable way—

—much to the delight of The Joker. 

Honestly, if you made a Venn diagram, The Spectre's sense of humor and The Joker's sense of humor probably overlap more than a little. Both seem to like dark jokes that end with someone violently dying. 

Before The Spectre can do something like turn The Joker into a giant playing card and rip him in half, though, The Batman makes a case for sparing him.

"The Joker himself is some kind of unholy innocent--a sociopath!" Batman argues. "He has no real concept of good and evil!" He argues that The Joker is sick and needs treatment, and, perhaps appealing to The Spectre's sense of mission, he says that if God created The Joker in this way, how can The Spectre punish him for being that way?

It's only a few panels, but it's an interesting little comic book debate, and with the characters bringing in God, making for a slightly more nuanced than the usual "executing killers makes you no better than them" sorts of arguments Batman can get into with characters who use deadly force (See, for example, his brief fight with The Punisher in 1994's Punisher/Batman: Deadly Knights #1 over how to deal with The Joker).

To get to the truth of the matter, The Spectre enters The Joker's eyes to investigate his mind in person, something we've seen him do repeatedly before, with characters alive and dead, in the pages of The Spectre. Of course, when he does so, he loses the upper hand, the person whose mind or soul he is visiting having the ultimate home court advantage.

This time it goes disastrously wrong. From the other side of the glass in a funhouse mirror within his mind, The Joker tells the Spectre, "Love the cape. And the hood. Mind if I try them on?"

And just like that, The Joker switches places with Corrigan, and the madman is suddenly in control of The Spectre's powers, appearing as a white-skinned grinning giant with a flower on the "lapel" of his giant green cape.

I was at this point rather struck by potentially how big a threat The Joker-with-The Spectre's-powers would be to not only Batman and the city, but to the whole world. Not for the first time while reading Ostrander's Spectre this month, I realized that Ostrander had come up with a plot that could very easily be an epic story arc or even big crossover event, but it was instead just used for an issue or three in the pages of the book. (The other Spectre plot it's easiest to imagine DC having exploited is the conclusion of the arc in which the United States seeks a Spectre counter-measure, ultimately arming Superman with the Spear of Destiny and sending him to confront the Spectre, leading to a sequence in which Superman fights the whole DC Universe and declares himself a sort of king of the world—where have I heard that before?—although much of it is a sort of fantasy that The Spectre presents, Ghost of Christmas Future-style, to Superman.) 

And so, the giant Joker uses Spectre's powers to attack Batman and/or anything within striking distance, the Dark Knight trying to keep the now god-like Joker's attention on him rather than on any other possible victims. 

Meanwhile, Corrigan explores the inside of The Joker's head, where there are a bunch of labeled electrical power boxes in a dilapidated maintenance shack behind a fun house. Just as Batman said, the one labeled "Conscience" isn't hooked up at all, and Mandrake draws it empty but for a crumbling skull.

Corrigan notes that, when it comes to conscience, "I got that in spades," and then he proceeds to stick a handful of glowing electrical cables into his open mouth, essentially hooking up The Joker's mind to Corrigan's conscience. (These scenes occurring in the mind, the sets, props and actions are all visual metaphors, of course.)

"Have a taste, Joker!" Corrigan shouts, his own head now enveloped in electric blue light. "Here's what a sense of right and wrong feel like!"

This has the desired effect as, over the course of a page and a half or so, The Joker is forced to think about and truly understand what he's done in his lifetime of killing:

Oh no!

OH NO!

All those lives! All those precious lives...!

DEAR GOD, WHAT HAVE I DONE?!

As The Joker freaks out, Mandrake draws a crowd of faces, apparently those of his countless victims, washing over his own screaming face like a wave. While they mostly appear to be just random civilians, one is quite recognizable as Robin Jason Todd. 

The Spectre leaves The Joker's body, and the villain collapses into a fetal position. 

"He has tasted his own guilt and it has proven too much for him," The Spectre explains to Batman. "He has slipped into catatonia."

Thus, The Joker's threat has been stopped, and Spectre concedes the argument over properly judging the maniac killer to Batman, the Joker expert.

As I alluded to earlier, this turn of events being a bit familiar to something that happened in Grant Morrison's JLA. 

In 1998's JLA #15—so well after this issue of Ostrander and company's Spectre—in the concluding chapter of the "Rock of Ages" story arc, The Joker gets his hands on the philosopher's stone/the Worlogog, a four-dimensional map that gives whoever bears it control over time and space**. So yet again a DC writer has put power over reality itself in the hands of The Joker. 

He doesn't get much of a chance to play with it, though, as the Martian Manhunter uses his mental abilities to telepathically order the information in The Joker's brain, forcing him into a temporary sanity, during which The Joker realizes he's done terrible things. 

I don't think Morrison necessarily swiped this brief scene from Ostrander, any more than I think Ostrander was inspired to create his Killing Joke club by Batman: The Animated Series, but it's interesting to note how often these stories rhyme one another, as various writers over the decades all might come to similar ideas. Like, for example, how scary would it be if a crazy villain like The Joker had god-like powers? 

In a fun little stinger of an ending, The Spectre turns to face the crowd of clubgoers who had dressed up like The Joker and had been patronizing The Killing Joke club. A few weeks later the club has reopened under the name The Wrath of God, a sort of BDSM club with naked people dressed in hooded green cloaks and green underpants, one of them apparently spanking others with a rod and preaching of sin and punishment. 

*In 1997's DC Special Series #27, better known as "Batman vs. The Incredible Hulk", the Shaper-of-Worlds grants The Joker his reality-writing powers at the climax (I wrote at length about that crossover here). And in the 2000 "Emperor Joker" crossover in the Superman line of books, The Joker gained access to Mr. Mxyzptlk's nigh omnipotent powers to alter reality. Those are the stories that immediately leapt to my mind, but perhaps there are others...?

**I read "Rock of Ages" when it was originally released in 1997 and 1998, when I was still in college, and thus relatively early in my exploration of the comics medium...and the DC Universe and its history. I had always just assumed that Grant Morrison had created the Worlogog, as it sure seemed to be of apiece with the sort of big, crazy ideas that punctuated his JLA run. 

It wasn't until 2018 or so that I was reading the collection of Jack Kirby's 1984 Super Powers series that I realized that Kirby had actually created the Worlogog. I practically fell out of my chair when I read the word in that comic. 

I have long since realized that much of which seems big and crazy in Morrison's super-comic writing is basically just old-school comic book craziness—especially that of the Silver Age—repurposed into the more sophisticated, more realistic presentation of more modern comics. (Which I don't think is a bad thing! In fact, it's a great strength, that Morrison doesn't just take characters or plot points from DC history like other writers but also manages to imbue his comics with the spirit of those past comics.)

Oh, and speaking of the Worlogog, it also showed up in the 2019 Teen Titans Go Vs. Teen Titans cartoon crossover, of all places, where it was part of the mechanism allowing for the two universes to intersect. There's even a brief musical number based around its pronunciation.

Bookshelf #6

This week's shelf is my Marvel shelf, containing various Marvel trades (and one hardcover) I had acquired between 2012 and 2024 or so. This is around the time that I started buying fewer and fewer serially published single issues and then stopped altogether. 

It's probably harder to tell exactly what exactly is on this shelf compared to some of the past posts of this sort, given how Marvel often has all of their trade spines look alike, no matter what book it is, hence all those all-white spines with the red Marvel logo at the top facing you here. 

On this shelf you will find the entirety of Ryan North, Erica Henderson, Derek Charm and company's Unbeatable Squirrel Girl (a dozen trades plus an original graphic novel), Rainbow Rowell and company's Runaways, the first five volumes of Ms. Marvel, five Secret Wars tie-ins and some various Avengers books (two volumes from Mark Waid's All-New... run, the first three volumes of Jason Aaron's run, the first volume of Kelly Thompson's West Coast Avengers and something called Avengers Mech Strike, which I think I bought specifically to review at Good Comics for Kids...well that, and because it was the Avenges piloting giant robots).

The rest of the books are more-or-less random ones, purchased either because I liked the characters, or the creators or, ideally, both. 

You'll note that despite the relative uniformity of Marvel's trades here (only The Unbeatable Squirrel Girl Beats Up the Marvel Universe juts up a bit), there are also some smaller, digest-sized books on the far right. 

These are more kid-friendly comics that Marvel published during that time: Marvel Rising (Squirrel Girl! Ms. Marvel! Ryan North! Devin Grayson! G. Willow Wilson! A Gurihiru cover!), Spidey: Freshman Year, The Unstoppable Wasp: G.I.R.L. Power (so good, and with superior art by the great Elsa Charretier)...and one that is actually an IDW book, Marvel Action: Spider-Man: A New Beginning, from that weird time in which Marvel was farming out their kid-friendly comics to a different publisher for some reason. 

As for that stack of books on the far right that are laying down on their backs, those are Image trades purchased during that time. But, because I ran out of good bookends, I didn't have a way to stand them up spine out. 

I'll temporarily do so just so you can seem 'em though:

It's a particularly random assortment, all purchased because I liked the artist (some of my all-time favorite artists are represented here, including John McCrea) or because someone recommended them to me (as in the case of Maneater and those Rat Queens volumes). 

Seeing Chynna Clugston Flores' Blue Monday there reminds me that I never bought the rest of the collections of it (looks like there are four total). I have all of her Blue Monday comics in singles, of course, but I like the book enough that I wouldn't mind having a more easily accessible version of it too. (Oh, and writing this post also reminded me that I never bought the future volumes of The Black Panther by Christopher Priest: The Complete Collection, having stopped after acquiring the first. Maybe I shouldn't be doing these posts at all, doing so is only adding to my to-buy list...)

Review: 1997's Batman #540-541

It's been a while since I revisited any comics from the 1995-1998 Batman run by Doug Moench, Kelley Jones and John Beatty, but my recent reading inspired me to do so. First, I've been reading a lot of Kelley Jones comics, thanks to that huge collection of all of his Swamp Thing comics from October and this month's Dracula Book Two: The Brides. Secondly, The Spectre has been on my mind a lot, thanks to the Spectre by John Ostrander and Tom Mandrake Omnibus Vol. 1, which collects the first half of their 1992-1998 series.

Jones drew the Spectre in both Swamp Thing and The Spectre collections, albeit it briefly in both. 

All that got me thinking of the first time I had seen Kelley Jones' Spectre...as well as curious to see how Doug Moench might have handled a conflict between Ostrander's vengeful, killer ghost and the never-take-a-life Batman. 

The Spectre appeared in a two-part story in 1997's Batman #540 and #541, and DC made a little event out of it at the time. Just as The Spectre was appearing in the pages of Batman, Batman was appearing in the pages of The Spectre; though being published simultaneously, they were two distinct stories (If I recall correctly, the Spectre issue had the two heroes in conflict over whether or not to kill The Joker, and the villain ultimately, temporarily gaining control of the Spectre's powers). 

To re-read these issues of Batman, I turned to an electronic copy of Batman by Doug Moench and Kelley Jones Vol. 2, available through my library (I hate trying to find particular old comics in the 20-ish long boxes I have upstairs now). 

I was a little surprised to find that, while these issues were indeed a Batman/Spectre story, with the latter appearing on both covers (the second one, unencumbered by the logo and text, is above) and his name even appearing along the top of the covers so that they read "The Spectre & Batman", there's actually a lot of Bruce Wayne content in these issues.

So much so, in fact, that there's a bifurcated plot running through the issues.

One half of that plot deals with Batman and The Spectre's intersecting criminal investigations that lead to their collision and, given their differences on how to deal with criminals, conflict. The other deals with Bruce Wayne romancing his then new love interest, late night radio host Vesper Fairchild (Who, like so many of Batman's girlfriends over the years, would eventually meet a bad end; here they seem to be meeting for the first time and having their first few dates, though). 

The former plot, obviously, plays to Jones strengths more than the latter. To dispense with the Bruce Wayne plot first, it features various listeners around Gotham City hearing Vesper's show, on which she announces Bruce will be an upcoming guest; Batman is one of those listeners and has to hurry to change and get there in time.

Apparently, Alfred had booked the interview, trying to get Bruce to dust off the rich playboy/Gotham philanthropist persona after a relatively long absence. Things get out of hand when Bruce seems genuinely interested in Vesper, though—Jones draws an image in which Alfred, hearing Bruce hit on Vesper over the air, is sweating as profusely as a stool pigeon Jim Corrigan/The Spectre was working previously—and they have a couple of dates, which Alfred isn't all that thrilled about ("But sir, if you'll recall what happened the last time with Shondra Kinsolving..." he says at one point, bringing up another Batman girlfriend who met a bad end).

Anyway, Bruce Wayne does an interview with Vesper Fairchild, they go to a diner after, and then set up a lunch date for the following day, which requires Bruce to visit his office for the first time in about a year-and-a-half, and lets Moench write the faux-fop version of the character we don't see all that often. 

The scenes between Bruce and Vesper are almost all banter, with the pair lobbing lines back and forth like they were playing tennis. Like much of Moench's Batman writing at the time, it feels somewhat stagey and unrealistic, but it suits the melodramatic tone of Moench and Jones' vision of the book (The Spectre and Batman will banter rather similarly, although obviously less flirtatiously).

As for the portions of the story involving muscular guys in capes, Jim Corrigan—who here seems like he might actually be a police officer again?—and Spectre supporting character Nate Kane are at the scene of a deadly arson, which they believe to be the work of Tony "Sparks" Weal. In an interrogation room, Corrigan uses the Spectre to scare info of Weal's whereabout out of an informant: Weal has apparently gone to Gotham City, to meet with the lieutenant of the Black Mask Gang.

Batman, meanwhile, is busy busting that same lieutenant, one Damon Shugrue, which he does during a pretty great fight in a pool hall (Jones' Shugrue, by the way, is an amazing design, looking like the sort of stereotypical criminal that Jack Cole might have drawn; a big, hulking guy with beady little eyes and an almost Frankenstein-shaped head).

Because Batman showed up at the meet instead of Weal, Shugrue thinks Weal must have tipped off the Dark Knight, and so he sends three of his soldiers to kill Weal. Just before they gun him down, one of them says, "Relax, Sparks--we just came to deliver a Gotham welcome... and three more kisses from the Batman."

Okay, it's a bit purple—Moench's writing in this title so often is—and it is perhaps a strained way to make Weal think Batman has something to do with his killing but, well, Moench needed something to send The Spectre after Batman, right? 

The spirit of vengeance finds Weal in Gotham, but not until after he had died. And so, he enters his corpse through the eyes, and visits his soul in Hell, where it is secured to an x-shaped cross amid flames. During questioning, Weal says it was Batman who had him killed, and so the Spectre turns his hands into a big green bellows to fan the flames and then makes for Wayne Manor.

There's a whole series of great images of The Spectre in Gotham. As a semi-transparent giant creeping around the corner of the morgue, dissolving into a cloud to enter and exit Weal's body, streaking out of the morgue like a comet, descending from high above the manor with an impossibly long cape trailing behind him and, ultimately, appearing as a giant face pushing through the stalactites to accuse Batman in the Batcave. 

I kind of love how cool, calm and collected Batman remains when a giant, screaming ghost face emerges from his ceiling, but then, I guess this is just, like, another Tuesday for Batman (Well, another Wednesday, I guess, this being comics). 

Satisfied by Batman's denials, The Spectre leaves and the two conduct separate, parallel investigations, ending at an abandoned night club where the three men who gunned down Weal are in hiding, protected by other Black Mask gang soldiers.

Batman has to fight his way in, giving The Spectre, who just magically appears before the killers, time to kill them all. He appears with his hands in the form of giant Swiss army knives with which he impales one, he turns his hand into a chainsaw to cut down another, and, in the most spectacular killing, he calls them cowards for wearing masks and says "And so it is time to face-- --the wrath behind my mask!"

Here The Spectre pulls apart his own face and out slithers a snake-like projection that is all teeth, gums and spine, looking vaguely Giger-esque (and resembling elements of the bizarre alien creatures Jones drew in 1990's Swamp Thing #94, collected in that Swamp Thing by Len Wein and Kelley Jones book mentioned earlier). Do note the evocatively specific sound effects Moench came up with, and letterer Todd Klein brings to gorgeous life. 

The bad guys thus either colorfully exterminated by The Spectre or beaten up by Batman, the two heoes have a brief, banter-y argument. It is noteworthy, I thought, for Batman talking, ever so briefly, of elements of his own beliefs and faith, something that doesn't come up too often in Batman comics, but which Batman fans seems to have a lot of opinions about.

Their argument, which spans a couple of pages, goes about just as one might expect given the particular vocations and crimefighting practices of the characters. The Spectre ultimate leaves, telling Batman that he reminds him of his friend Amy (This is Amy Beitermann, Corrigan/The Spectre's kinda sorta love interest in the early issues of The Spectre; she gets killed off surprisingly early...but given how much the book deals with aspects of the afterlife, she still shows up in various capacities for a while). 

My favorite part here is how the relatively tiny Batman's ears go back as he points at The Spectre. One of the many, many things I have always loved about Jones' Batman is the way he draws Batman's ears as if they are a literal part of his body, and they thus sometimes move as if to reflect his feelings.

The most interesting part of the entire story is what happens next, though. 

As you can see on the bottom of that page, Batman calls for The Spectre to wait as he's in the process of leaving, seemingly jumping backwards through the ceiling.

Noting that The Spectre said he spoke to Weals in Hell, Batman then asks if that means there's really a Heaven too, and Spec is equivocal in his answer: "I have seen such a place...but whether in reality or illusion, I know not."

Batman says that, while he himself doesn't need, as The Spectre puts it, "the crutch of such a promise" of Heaven in order to live his life well and do good, there were two people that he cared about who were murdered, and Spectre then guesses what it is Batman wants to ask him.

"And you wish to know if they are at peace in Heaven," Spectre says. He then cuts Batman off before he can name them, but readers will know that he is of course talking about his parents:

Preserve your mind and soul where they belong, mortal--in the misted struggle between doubt and faith.

...

What I know is not yours to know. 

Besides, I am far more familiar with the denizens of Hell...than the geography of Heaven.

The Spectre then takes his leave on this, the penultimate page. I found the conversation sort of fascinating, as it's one of the relatively few instances in comics where I can recall Batman's encounters with various spiritual or magical entities or brushes with the afterlife including the obvious, his questioning of what he sees or learns might mean for the souls of his parents.

Another tack Moench might have taken here is questioning if The Spectre had avenged the death of the Waynes or, perhaps, if he has such vast powers, why he doesn't prevent murders, but instead only avenges them after the fact. (Questions, by the way, that John Ostrander deals within the pages of The Spectre, but, of course, Batman doesn't know that). 

I also find this exchange kind of interesting because surely this isn't the first, second, third, fourth or fifth time that Batman has crossed paths with The Spectre, and so surely he has had previous opportunities to chat with him about the afterlife during, say, one of those social gatherings between the annual JLA and JSA (although perhaps many of those were no longer meant to be canonical post-Crisis...?) or during some other team-up (although, again, The Spectre's meeting with Batman in the pages of The Brave and The Bold would have predated Crisis On Infinite Earths).

But perhaps Batman wasn't previously convinced that The Spectre was who he said he was, or perhaps he didn't necessarily know that The Spectre could visit the afterlife...?

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

The other comics featuring The Spectre that I've read in the last year or so were in the DC Finest collections of the Golden Age All-Star Comics, DC Finest: Justice Society of America: For America and Democracy and DC Finest: Justice Society of America: Plunder of the Psycho-Pirate. 

In those stories, it's clear that The Spectre is the ghost of a dead man and, like his fellow Society member Doctor Fate, his powers seem more or less unlimited, as he's able to do completely crazy things like, for example, deposit a criminal on the surface of Pluto (Although, more often than not, The Spectre, like Doctor Fate, takes on criminals using only his fists). 

The idea of The Spectre transforming his body into outlandish shapes or using his powers to sentence evildoers to harsh, ironic punishments doesn't seem to have been part of the character's depiction yet back in the 1940s. 

One element of these stories I found particular surprising though, and the reason I bring them up in a post about Batman and The Spectre at all, is that the writer Gardner Fox repeatedly referred to The Spectre by the nickname of "The Dark Knight"...which, these days, we associate with Batman, rather than The Spectre. 

Review: Justice League of America: The Rise of Eclipso

The 2012 Justice League of America: The Rise of Eclipso trade paperback collection is a complete mess, which probably shouldn't be surprising. After all, the entire 2006-2011 volume of JLoA was a bit of a mess, especially after its initial writer, Brad Meltzer, left. "Rise of Eclipso" was the final story arc in the series, followed by a sort of one-issue epilogue—"Adjourned"—after which the series was cancelled. 

Not, it's worth stressing, because the series was a mess, of course, nor because its last few arcs were any worse than its first few, but because DC cancelled all of its books at the time, closing out their post-Crisis continuity for their biggest, hardest reboot ever, September of 2011's The New 52 initiative. 

This trade, then, represents not just the end of the JLoA series, but the end of the 25-year post-Crisis Justice League saga. 

It is, I am disappointed to say, not very good, and the sort of historical nature of the story makes it more disappointing still. Were 25 years of stories all leading up to this? No, this was just a placeholder story, something to keep a Justice League comic on the shelves while DC worked on a new, New 52 version of their flagship team title, one that would prove to be a sales hit (and, if you ask me, creative flop).

But let's stay on topic.

The comics collected herein are all written by James Robinson, and drawn by pencil artists Brett Booth, Daniel Sempere, Jesus Merino and Miguel Sepulveda and inked by Sepulveda and three other artists. That may seem like a lot of artists, but Booth draws most of the book, including all but one chapter of the title story, with Sampere and Sepulveda penciling the one issue he does not. 

Booth's presence, by the way, is why I had never before read these comics. I was not (and am still not, I find) a fan of Booth's style, so this is the point at which I finally dropped JLoA, after faithfully reading JLA and JLoA month in and month out since 1997. 

Therefore, I opened the cover—a featuring a fairly nice image by Ivan Reis that originally ran on the cover of the final issue of the series, JLoA #60—somewhat tensed, expecting the worst. Even so, I was sort of surprised to find, on the second page of the trade, the words, "A Dark Things Epilogue." The book starts with an epilogue to a different story...?

Indeed. Even odder, the issue doesn't feature any members of the current Justice League. Instead, it is one long scene in which Green Lantern Alan Scott and his son Obsidian talk to one another on the moon, the rest of their team, the Justice Society of America finally showing up on the last page. The only Justice League of America characters that show up during the course of this particular issue, do so in crowd scenes filling its many splash pages, depicting possible futures. 

I would discover the why of this later. This particular issue isn't even an issue of JLoA, rather it is JSoA #43. The "Dark Things" story arc was a crossover involving both of the Justice...of America titles. My guess is that this ended up in a JLoA trade because DC probably published "Dark Things" under the more popular JLoA title in trade. That, or maybe DC didn't collect the last issues of JSoA into trade at all, and thus there was nowhere else to stick this. It does have some bearing on "Rise of Eclipso," introducing readers who might have skipped "Dark Things" (or, like me, read it like 15 years ago and forgotten it), to The Emerald City.

This is a massive city on the moon, built by the Starheart, the magical source of Alan Scott's Green Lantern ring and its magical powers. I'm not sure when exactly the Starheart entered DC lore, but it's been around since at least the '90s. It was a way to incorporate Alan into the greater Green Lantern mythology, from which he was originally had nothing to do with when Hal Jordan and the Green Lantern Corpse were created in the Silver Age.

Anyway, whatever happened during the course of "Dark Things," the Starheart's power has now created a massive city composed of Green Lantern construct buildings, and various magical creatures from Earth have been "called" there and have made it their home. Alan is sort of its sheriff and administrator. He gives his son a tour of the place, and they angst about a current bit of drama involving their family: Obsidian and his sister Jade can no longer come within a half mile of one another, or risk combining into some weird composite form that will bring about the end of the world.

Alan says that he and Dr. Fate ran through every conceivable scenario to fix things, but all they found were alternate futures in which, say, Earth's vampire and fairy populations go to war and superheroes get caught in the middle or all of the superheroes with Earth powers will go insane.

The issue is notable for two reasons. First, despite Merino providing the best pencil art of the whole trade, this issue looks like it must have been thrown together in a hurry: Of its 22 pages, six are spent on double-page splashes and three on single-page splashes. (There are also a couple of pages with only two panels apiece, which are practically splashes.)

Some of those double-page splashes do have a lot of figures in them, like the one depicting the aforementioned war, but man, 2011 Caleb would have been so pissed if he spent three bucks on a comic that was, like, half splash pages...

The other notable thing is just to what degree Robinson seems to be treating the endeavor as a "toybox" comic. He's always set his work deeply into the DC Universe setting, of course, often finding and using lesser-known characters in interesting new ways and keeping an admirable fidelity to DC continuity. Here, though, that aspect of his work seems turned up to 11 (and it will stay so throughout the trade). Aside from various JSoA character, Mordu, Nightmaster, Gemworld, Monolith, Zara, Andrew Bennet, Geomancer and Tara II are either namedropped or make cameos of sorts and, of course, that spread with depicting the war is full of various superheroes, at least one of whom I couldn't even identify.

That out of the way, "Rise" begins in earnest and it, too, gets off to a bad start.

Take a look:

The very first page of "Rise" consists of two panels. The first has narration, white type in black boxes (just like Obsidian's dialogue in the previous chapter, although this is not Obsidian talking). It reads:

At a time of grave crisis, the world's greatest heroes banded together to combat evil.

The name of this team...

...The Justice League of America.

The image in this first panel shows the original (pre-Crisis, post-Infinite Crisis) Justice League founders, the seven heroes from 1960's The Brave and the Bold #28, but, in the background, we see the Hall of Justice...which wasn't actually the headquarters of any Justice League in the comics until Brad Meltzer imported it from the Super Friends cartoons in the early issues of this particular volume of JLoA, so circa 2006 or so. 

The second panel, accounting for the bottom half of the page, has narration reading:

Other heroes joined this group...other champions. The roll call changing year by year. 

Here Booth draws a mostly random assortment of later Leaguers, stretching from the likes of Green Arrow and Hawkman to Red Arrow and Black Lightning. 

Between these two panels, but more on the bottom than the top, is...a mysterious object, a colorful box with what looks like a "7" on it (It's on the right edge of the page above). I could not for the life of me figure out what the hell this was supposed to be, especially since it seemed to be reaching onto the page from somewhere off page. I flipped to the next page to see if this was a mistake of layout, and maybe something on the next page explained it, but no.

Eventually I decided it must be a TV news microphone, from a Channel 7, perhaps being pointed at the JLoA founders, as if they were giving a press conference (If you look closely, there's the tip of another tiny microphone in the bottom right corner of the first panel, near Batman's crotch). 

I'm not sure why Booth drew it, but I am sure he should not have. 

And then onto the second page of the issue, a full-page splash featuring the current line-up fighting what, upon close inspection, turn out to be green hard-light constructs of Alan Scott, presumably generated by Jade during "Dark Things." 

Here the narration tells us the team has changed again, and that this version of the team came together during the events of "Dark Things." The line-up during this volume of JLoA seemed to shift each story arc, something I have to assume was not Robinson's doing, nor to his liking (His predecessor on the title, the late Dwayne McDuffie, complained about editorial taking characters he was using or planning to use out of circulation on a regular basis. If you've read much of Robinson's run, you'll find the "official" line-up more fluid still). 

I did appreciate this page, as it tries to contextualize this team as a Justice League, and make the constant changes in team make-up seem like part of the overall Justice League story. That, and it told me who was actually supposed to be on the team at this point: Jade, Supergirl, Congorilla, Donna Troy, Jesse Quick, Batman Dick Grayson and Starman Mikaal Tomas.

So, notably, it's a couple of fun, unlikely characters (Congorilla and Starman), and a bunch of legacy characters plucked from the extended "families" of founding Leaguers (everyone else), some of whom might not have been the second, third, or even fourth choice to fill those roles (Green Lantern-like Jade and speedster Jesse Quick, for example).

Still, it's a noteworthy line-up in just how many women are on it. In fact, I think this may be the first and only time the number of women outnumbered the number of men on the team...?

From here, the scene shifts from the battle scene on the moon to Earth, where Bruce Gordon takes over the narration, and, ultimately, somehow transforms into Eclipso, despite there not being an eclipse. From here on out, the book will mostly be narrated by a conversation between Eclipso and Gordon, the latter of whom is reduced to a voice in the former's head.

Gordon's words appear in very light gray, almost white narration boxes. Eclispo's appear in purple boxes. There is occasionally omniscient narration too, with this in white boxes, which can easily be confused as Gordon's thoughts. And there is at least one instance where Eclipso's dialogue appears in a light gray box, as if it were Gordon's. Again, it's remarkably slipshod for a DC comic, I thought, and I was kinda surprised that mistakes like this made it into the trade, as surely someone would have noticed it the first time the book was published, and then fixed it before it was published a second time, no? 

This first chapter of "Rise" is, aside from that splash page introducing them, devoid of the Justice League, instead following Eclipso as he goes around gathering allies with various shadow-based powers and "eclipsing" them: The Shade, Nightshade, Acrata and Shadow Thief, plus two more I had never heard of, Dark-Crow and Bete-Noir (this Bete-Noir character being a skull-faced gorilla who speaks French, not to be confused with Martian Manhunter villain Bette Noir). (Oh, I guess there's a good reason I never heard of these two; they are new characters appearing here for the first time. Neat.)

Oh, and Eclipso also awakens a slumbering elder god for his team, an off-brand Cthulhu, named Syththunu.

As for what Eclipso is up to this time, well, it's a very complicated plan, and it is revealed only gradually throughout the story arc, but essentially he plans to kill God by destroying the Earth, Robinson proposing a rather interesting idea that, in the DC Universe, Earth is a sort of conduit between God and the universe, transferring energy back and forth (I'm not entirely sure if this is all Robinson's idea, though, as the events of Brightest Day are referenced in relation to this, specifically the White Lanterns and that weird White Lantern entity). 

On the last pages of this chapter, we see Alan Scott in the Emerald City. He is now bald and emaciated, laying in a bed with an IV. What happened to him between the first issue collected in this trade and the second? No clue. 

(Oddly, when events from other books are reflected in the issues, there are no asterisks and editorial boxes letting a reader know where they might have occurred...but there are a few editorial boxes referring back to very old stories, like one reading "Way back in Brave & The Bold #115", which was the 1974 issue in which The Atom entered a braindead Batman's brain and hopped around, "piloting" it).

The next issue is a good example of just how messy this series is. Though it's entitled "Eclipso Rising Part Two: Mayhem", it's actually also a tie-in to a Superman event (The original cover, which you can see here on comics.org, includes a "Reign of Doomsday" banner along the top). 

Supergirl, wearing a black and white costume, is floating around the wreckage of New Krypton, when Batman shows up in a spaceship. And so does cyborg "Alpha Lantern" Boodikka. And then Doomsday, who can now fly...? And then Starman and Blue Lantern Saint Walker (Though not officially a Leaguer, Walker is in this book more than Supergirl and, in the final issue, Dick mentions him as a potential future Leaguer).

They fight. 

The last page of this issue features two reveals. On the moon, Eclipso has eclipsed Jade, and the Cyborg-Superman pops out of Boodikka on the team's satellite base. 

Whatever is happening with the latter, it's not addressed in this book at all. Cyborg-Superman doesn't reappear at all, so apparently that unfolds in the Superman books, where one assumes "Reign of Doomsday" must be playing out. Those events seem to take Supergirl out of the story as well, as she won't reappear until the final pages of the JLoA #59, the concluding chapter of "Rise". (When she does, she's in red and blue again, and, when Congorilla asks where she was, she simply replies, "Long story, Bill...").

On the moon, Eclipso starts eclipsing all the elves and fairies and other magical residents of the Emerald City. The reserves are called in (which, I was surprised to see, included The Bulleteer, who I don't think was ever actually on any incarnation of the League...?), but they too get eclipsed.

Caleb-favorite character Zauriel is among the reserves, and, rather than eclipsing him, Eclipso sword-fights him, captures him, and forces him to send out some kind of weird divine distress signal, which summons The Spectre. Eclipso kills The Spectre (!), cutting him in half vertically with his giant black sword on a double-page splash printed sideways, and Eclipso thus absorbs his power. (I'm not sure who The Spectre's host is at this point, or if this is a host-less Spectre-Force. The story doesn't address that at all; at any rate, this Spectre doesn't have a goatee, so it doesn't look like the Crispus Allen version, although I would have thought Allen was still The Spectre at this point...)

Things seem very bad, but eventually the League rallies and, with the help of Obsidian, a healthy-again Alan Scott and The Atom Ray Palmer, they defeat Eclipso and save the world...and, I guess, the universe and God himself. (As for The Spectre, is he dead-dead? Unclear, but since the universe is rebooted immediately after all this anyway, I guess it doesn't matter. Corrigan is The Spectre again when introduced into New 52 continuity). 

And then we get issue #60, the final issue. In it, all seven official members of the League take turns telling the rest of the team why they are deciding to quit at this particular juncture. Sure, it strains credulity—all seven decide they need to step away simultaneously?—but then, Robinson was writing these characters off for the final time here, and I don't know the best way to close out the series in these particular circumstances might have been. (Me, I think I would have had them stay together, maybe rushing off into their next adventure on the last page, at least implying that this version of the team, and of the DC Universe, might still go on, if only in the readers' imaginations...)

Between the various team members telling one another what they plan to do next, there are splash pages devoted to adventures that they apparently had in the weeks between the end of "Rise" and this particular meeting: A Construct-led robot uprising, "The Saturn-Thanagar War" and "The Battle for Gemworld". 

At first, I assumed this was Robinson using up his ideas for future JLoA stories, a way of getting them into the book before he left it, but the more I thought about it, the more I began to doubt that a writer would "waste" such ideas in such a way, and so perhaps these were just plots he thought up while writing this particular issue, random off-panel adventures that he considered the basic outlines of without really having fleshed them out, or intended to use anywhere else.

The most interesting bit, I thought, was on the last page, when Dick Grayson and Donna Troy are about to teleport back down to Earth, as the rest of the team already did. They have a short exchange about their version of the Justice League, which really sounds like Robinson talking about his run more than anything else.

"Do you think they'll remember us?" Donna asks Dick and, when he replies, "Who? Bill and the others?" she answers in such a way that it seems as if she's talking about the readers:

No, dummy, the people. The world. Think they'll remember this version of the J.L.A. and all that we did?

To which Dick responds:

Who can say? We did what we could with what we were given and I'm proud. I'll remember. Other people? Honestly who cares, it's not why I'm in this anyway.

Well, I hope that's how Robinson felt...and still feels. Because, despite the fact that I'm reading this story arc and writing about it 15 years later, I feel like Robinson's run has been somewhat forgotten, as has been most of the final stories of DC's books immediately preceding The New 52. 

Though DC has since de-rebooted The New 52, restoring pre-Flashpoint continuity...while keeping some of the The New 52 developments that didn't contradict the previous continuity too badly...I think the Justice League continuity is more screwed-up than that of other characters and concepts within the DCU. 

I'm trade-waiting Mark Waid and company's New History of the DC Universe; perhaps that will reveal if this Justice League is still canon or if it was over-written by all the various cosmic timeline altering events of the last decade or so. 

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Among all of the things that were wrong with this trade paperback, the wrongest thing is something I didn't yet mention. 

I don't know why this is the case, or if it was the case with all of the copies of the trade that were published, or just the one I happened to borrow from the library, but there was apparently some kind of printing mess up.

For some reason, all of the narration boxes and dialogue balloons that were on the far side of the pages were cut off throughout. Here's an example; note Jesse's dialogue in the first panel:

In all cases, there is enough of the cut-off words to guess what they are supposed to be, but it's really weird, isn't it?

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Oh, and if you're wondering why on Earth I'm writing about this particular book at this particular time, well, I'll tell you.

As I mentioned a while back, after reading the last half-dozen or so JLA arcs, I had considered re-reading the book that followed the end of JLA, Justice League of America. I ultimately decided not to because a) I didn't care for it the first time around and b) my library system didn't have every volume of it available in trade (They do have them all available electronically, but I'm not a fan of reading comics on my laptop or phone).

So, the idea of revisiting JLoA was already in the back of my mind.

And then I read The Spectre by John Ostrander and Tom Mandrake Omnibus Vol. 1, which made me curious about more recent Spectre comics that followed their series..specifically, the character's storyline after Hal Jordan stopped being the host of The Spectre. Also, during the events of Ostrander and Mandrake's Spectre, the title character seems to rather definitively defeat Eclipso, smashing him to ashes, and I found myself wondering how he came back from that, so I was a bit curious about later Eclipso stories too.

When looking for later Spectre comics, then, I saw that "Rise of Eclipso" featured both Eclipso and the Spectre and, given when it was published, these would have been the last appearances of each character in the Crisis to Flashpoint timeline, so that was two reasons to check this story arc out. 

I plan on writing a few more Spectre-related posts in the near future too, so I hope that's something you guys are interested in reading about...

Bookshelf #5

Continuing with our tour of my bookshelves, we now move into the master bedroom, where I have three big shelving units from Ikea (two of which I inherited when a friend moved, one of which I bought—and assembled all by myself!—to match the other two). All of the books on these shelves would have been acquired when I lived in Mentor, so between 2011 and 2024 or so.

Atop the top shelf of the first of these units, you'll see a handful of prose books which, like the few prose books I actually own, are just kinda stuck wherever I can find room for 'em. This being a comics blog, I won't linger on those, but they give you a decent idea of some of my interests aside from comics: Giant monster movies, the Marx Brothers and certain elements of Christianity (The one fiction book up there is Pete Beatty's Cuyahoga, which I would highly recommend...especially to any of you who may be in or around Cleveland). 

As for this week's featured shelf, it is, due to its size, devoted to books of smaller dimensions. 

On the left are DC comics for kids (Shadow of the Batgirl, Superman Smashes the Klan, etc.) and DC manga (Batmanga Vol. 1, Batman and the Justice League Vols. 1-3, Superman vs. Meshi Vol. 1). Randomly stuck in there are a pair of Disney comics from Dark Horse, simply because of their size (Disney Dracula Starring Mickey Mouse and Disney Frankenstein Starring Donald Duck). 

On the right are manga related to two of the earliest anime I series I watched, Dragon Ball Z and Neon Genesis Evangelion. Representing the former, there's the first volume of Dragon Ball Super (a series I immediately lost track of and am now so behind on I will probably never actually read it), Akira Toriyama's Jaco the Galactic Patrolman and the ratherr weird Dragon Ball: That Time I Got Reincarnated as Yamcha. Representing the latter, there's all six volumes of the lighter, brighter Neon Genesis Evangelion: Angelic Days series, the Neon Genesis Evangelion: Comic Tribute anthology and Insufficient Direction, a manga about Evangelion creator Hideaki Anno by his wife, Moyoco Anno.

I think just about everything on this shelf is pretty good, and I would likely recommend it to anyone, depending on their tastes (Kami Garcia and Gabriel Picolo's Teen Titans: Raven probably necessitates one being okay with YA fiction, for example, and those Disney books I thought were more interesting than great. Oh, and obviously the entire right half of the shelf will likely do nothing for you if you're not already a Dragon Ball or Evangelion fan).

Three out of four Spider-Man manga homage Amazing Fantasy #15's cover

This is the cover of 1962's Amazing Fantasy #15, penciled by Jack Kirby and inked by Steve Ditko, based on the latter's design for the new character Spider-Man. As perhaps the first image anyone outside of the Marvel bullpen had seen of the Spider-Man, it is one of the most famous poses of the character, and one frequently homaged and riffed upon.

Even overseas, as I've noticed recently.

In Yusuke Osawa's 2023 Spider-Man: Fake Red, Silk sneaks into protagonist Yu Onomae's apartment and looks around, her eye landing on a framed photo of Spider-Man in his Amazing Fantasy cover pose hanging on Yu's wall. The picture appears a few more times in the scene, with Silk placing her hand dramatically upon it at one point, and the pair of heroes shaking hands in front of it.

In Setta Kobayashi and Hachi Mizuno's 2025 Spider-Man Kizuna, Spider-Man strikes the iconic pose when he rescue's the books protagonist Yu Yamato.

And in Shogo Aoki's 2025 Spider-Man: Shadow Warrior, protagonist Hyo Hachizuka, who is possessed and empowered by a piece of the Venom symbiote, rescues a pair of civilians like so.

In fact, the only Spider-Man manga I've read in the last few years that didn't contain an homage to that pose was Spider-Man: Octo-Girl. That series is still ongoing, though, so maybe its creators will fit one in during the next volume...

Review: Spider-Man: Octo-Girl Vol 2

Just as reading and reviewing the Spider-Man: Shadow Warrior manga led to my seeking out Spider-Man Kizuna, it also reminded me of the manga series Spider-Man: Octo-Girl. The work of the My Hero Academica: Vigilantes creative team of Hideyuki Furuhashi and Betten Court, the series launched in the states in the fall of last year (I reviewed the first volume here), and this second installment was released back in May. It looks like the third volume was just released last week, so I suppose it's past time I got caught up.

For an original manga, the series is remarkable in how closely tied into Marvel comics continuity it is. In his afterword in the first volume, writer Furuhashi explain how he became enamored with "one of Spider-Man's more antiquated and obsolete villains", Doctor Octopus.

Essentially, he read a Japanese translation of The Superior Spider-Man (the Dan Slott-written series wherein Otto Octavius swapped his consciousness with that of Peter Parker and thus becomes Spider-Man for over a year). His excitement of that particular storyline led him to read about a decade's worth of Spider-Man comics, those published between 2009 and 2019, made him see the villain in a new light, and, ultimately, to create this manga, in which he could introduce readers to "a new perspective on the appeal of Doctor Octopus." 

Charmingly, he also wrote that his ultimate goal was to someday have one of  the "western comics" include a cutaway gag referring to the events of Octo-Girl, which has a premise that might sound pretty bonkers in its description, but is really not that big of a leap from what Slott and Marvel were doing with the characters during their storylines.

If you haven't read Spider-Man: Octo-Girl Vol. 1 (and I would certainly recommend you do so!) or even my review of it (you do read every single thing I wrote, don't you?), that premise is this: After backing himself into a corner during a fight with Spider-Man, Doctor Octopus attempts to transfer his consciousness from his current, seemingly-about-to-die body to a pre-prepared clone one, but due to various circumstances, his mind accidentally ends up in the body of a Japanese school girl who was in a coma.

She soon "wakes up", though, and so the mind of Doctor Octopus is now "sharing" a body with middle-schooler Otoha Okutamiya. After acquiring a spare set of metal arms from a Japanese safe house of his, cutting Otoha's unruly long hair into his signature bowl cut and trying to violently assert his dominance over her misfit school "chums", Otto and Otoha reach a sort of arrangement.

Using a high-tech device disguised as a cute octopus hairclip, the two can switch control of Otoha's body back and forth, and the person not currently in control can still communicate with the outside world. That communication is often accompanied by a hologram of one of them, being projected from one of the wondrous metal arms (And thus readers get to see plenty of Otto, even though his body, which Spidey actually saved from splattering on a New York City street, is stuck in a hospital bed in America, seemingly in a coma).

In the first volume, the pair agreed to work together to try to get Otto back in the right body, which meant stealing a particular brain scanner of his invention that was then being used at a Japanese hospital (the scanner's earlier usage on the injured Otoha was part of the circumstances that landed Otto's mind in her body). 

There were, of course, complications. 

First, there was the appearance of Sakura Spider, a multiversal Spider-Man variant that ended up in our world (Apparently introduced in the Deadpool: Samurai manga, according to Furuhashi's occasional behind-the-scenes info provided between chapters, as well as a page of flashbacks involving Deadpool). Then there was the fact that Otoha's classmate and estranged childhood friend seemed to be working on something high-tech and possibly nefarious in a warehouse. And some drama involving the weirdest of Otoha's classmates. And, in the first volume's cliffhanger ending, there was the appearance of another Marvel character: The Superior Octopus, which is Doctor Octopus' body in a clone composite of Peter Parker and Otto Octavius. ("It's kinda like... ..if you and Spider-Man had a kid together?" Otoha says of the clone, to which Otto replies, "Silence! Such phrasing is unseemly! Rather, I have improved upon my archrival's power.")

I haven't previously encountered this particular version of a Doctor Octopus-in-Spider-Man's-body character before personally. As you can see on the cover of this second volume, he looks a bit like a Spider-Man with Doc Ock's arms and with a white, black and green-highlighted costume. (This character, it is explained, is apparently a "past" version of Otto's consciousness, which must have been uploaded into a clone body when his system kept trying to do so after the original mix-up that led to Otto and Otoha sharing her body).

In this second volume, Furuhashi and Court give us a backstory of another of Otoha's classmates who is in on the secret, rounding out the character in the same way they did with a girl in the first volume. This also adds another player to Otto's growing Japanese girl gang.

In this volume, our heroes—or perhaps I should say "protagonists", given Doc Ock's insistence that he's not a hero—spend the better part of the book's page count in conflict with Superior Octopus. 

Discovering the truth about Otto/Otoha, he captures her and takes her back to his warehouse HQ, where he plans to delete the villainous Otto consciousness (the original and up-to-date version) from Otoha, freeing her and permanently disposing of a supervillain (Superior Octopus is still in a trying-to-be-a-superior-superhero phase, which the original Otto has since gone through and gotten over). 

It's up to said girl gang to help Otto get back in control of Otoha's body (and the octopus arms) so he can defeat the Superior Octopus; this he ultimately does by using Otoha's hijacked body as a sort of human shield. That is, he can beat the hell out of Superior Octopus with his metal arms, while S.O. refuses to land a blow on an innocent little girl.

The conflict ends in a draw. Though Otto is perfectly willing to kill off the Superior Octopus, he's saved by the appearance of Otoha's childhood friend, now wearing a high-tech, bird-themed super-suit that she has invented, making her look a bit like a new version of a Vulture. 

The rest of the volume tells us more about Otoha and her friend's childhood, the tragedies they experienced, and their falling out. Takoyaki, the Japanese snack made from octopus tentacles, is involved, as I suppose was inevitable in a manga featuring octopus-themed superhero characters. The friend now wants to use her super-suit to gain vengeance against a corporation she holds responsible for the death of her father. 

Spider-Man also appears, albeit in a single, brief scene set in New York, wherein he fights and defeats the streaming super-villain Screwball. This seems to suggest that we haven't yet seen the last of Spidey in this series, and that he will eventually interact with our protagonists again.

The pleasures of the series first encountered in the first volume remain the same here in the second. A megalomaniac and genius who thinks he knows better than everyone, Otto Octavius is a fun character, and it's especially fun to see him dealing with problems he himself finds trivial, like those faced by a middle-schooler, problems he can't help himself from trying to solve, even while protesting how ultimately unimportant they are to a man of his stature.

And Court's depiction of the lead is great, as her expressions and demeanor so drastically shift, depending on whether Otoha or Otto are in the driver's seat of her diminutive body. 

Court is also great at the action, of which there is a great deal, choreographing the often-inventive uses of the various characters' metal tentacles. (As spectacular as the various fights are, and as dramatic as the scenes of the Octopuses looming menacingly on a pair of their arms might be, I think my favorite images in this volume are those of Superior Octopus in "disguise", in which he wears a wide-brimmed hat and trenchcoat over his extremely conspicuous-looking costume. I find it especially funny as, earlier in the book, we see him out-of-costume on the streets of Japan, where it is of course easy enough for him to blend in.)

The situation obviously lends itself towards humor, of which there is also a lot, but the story sort of covers similar ground to the Slott and Marvel stories it is inspired by. That is, Doctor Octopus repeatedly sliding into regular acts of heroism. Even this version of the character, who has already attempted to be a superhero and found that it brought him nothing but suffering and that has thus re-embraced villainy, seems to have an innately heroic side that can be coaxed out in the right circumstances. 

This volume ends with Superior Octopus and the Vulture-like girl going to storm a corporate headquarters together, Otoha declaring that she will eventually make-up with her friend, even if it seems like the next step will be to have Doc Ock fight to stop her. 

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Interestingly, this volume includes and eight-page "mini-comic" at the end, which was a tie-in to the 2023 movie The Marvels. Furuhashi introduces it by saying it was meant to be less of an ad and more of a primer on the characters and, amusingly (at least to me), he writes, "Doing the necessary research took quite a bit of time"...

Yeah, I imagine tracking Marvel's "Marvel" characters over the course of some 55 years of characters changing codenames and costumes took a while, let alone then trying to reduce, say, the history of Carol Danvers into a single splash page and some 25 words of text.

Sure, it's fun to see Betten Court drawing Carol, Monica Rambeau, Kamala Khan, Movie Nick Fury and, on the opening page, seemingly all of the Captains Marvels ever. But, as someone who has written so much about super-comics continuity over the years, here on my comics blog as well as in articles intended for "civilian" readers, I found some of Furuhashi's statements fun to read.

For example, here is the first of two pages devoted to Captain Marvel Carol Danvers:

This is Carol Danvers.

Formerly Ms. Marvel...

...Now Captain Marvel.

After a complicated sequence of events...she inherited the title... ...and the weighty responsibility that comes with it.

Yes, "a complicated sequence of events" is a nice simplification of the typically byzantine history of a superhero, and can be applied to like, just about any of 'em at this point. 

I also liked the page devoted to Monica's history:

And this is Monica Rambeau. She's gone by a number of code names... ...which is plenty common for heroes with long careers.

Again, true. And it is certainly a gentle way of saying that writers, editors and publishers often flail about with what to do with some characters, especially one-time legacy characters that aren't successful enough to hold that legacy name forever, but are popular enough to keep around, so the publisher has to keep trying to find something that works for them...

Bookshelf #4

Finally, we come to the bottom shelf of the first of my bookshelves. 

To the left are various Top Shelf books, all acquired during my time in Mentor (so, about 2011-2024 or so). Though all from the same publisher, there's quite a variety of genres represented. 

First, there's Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell's From Hell, a hardcover I acquired when it was being weeded from the library, and the various Nemo books that spun out of Moore and the late Kevin O'Neill's League of Extraordinary Gentleman  bboks (I also stuck in Moore's Neonomicon with Jacen Burrows in there, which is actually from Avatar, but I guess was thinking it was a Moore book, and thus belonged with the others). There's also George Takei and company's They Called Us Enemy, Paul Tobin and Colleen Hoover's Gingerbread Girl, some James Kochalka, one of Sam Henderson's always hilarious books and Jeffrey Brown's Incredible Change-Bots (which I used to think was the best Transformers comic ever made, but that was before Tom Scioli had made Transformers vs. G.I. Joe and Go-Bots).

On the right is a completely random assortment of books, grouped together there simply because I didn't seem to have enough books from those publishers to give them their own shelf. And so this motley corner includes Roar's Dinosaucers and The Scarecrow Princess, Scholastic/Graphix's The Dumbest Idea Ever and Sparks, a pair of Jane Mai books, Bryan Lee O'Malley's Scott Pilgrim follow-up Seconds, Nimona, Ahoy Comics' Jesus sitcom Second Coming, the seemingly-made-just-for-Caleb Giraffes on Horseback Salad, Street Fighter vs. Darkstalkers (Hey, I loved the Darkstalkers arcade game, and have always been a fan of those character designs, even if none of their comics are ever very good; I even bought the Viz mini-series back in 1998, when Viz was still publishing manga in single-issue comics format). Oh, and something called Sharkasaurus, which I 100% bought just because of the title and the cover (But which must not have been very good, as I don't remember anything at all). 

Considering the right half of the shelf now, I realize that it consists mostly of books I had either gotten review copies of or had bought specifically so that I could review them, as I wrote about almost all of these, with few exceptions (like Bian Chippendale's weird-ass Maggots from PictureBox).

I'd highly recommend just about everything on this shelf (Save for Sharkasaurus and Street Fighter vs. Darkstalkers...and maybe Dinosaucers, depending on whether or not you watched the cartoon as a kid).