When Batman Met Spawn Pt. 1: On 1994's Batman/Spawn: War Devil #1

DC Comics and Image Comics collaborated on a Batman/Spawn crossover in 2022, a book that seemed likely to have been occasioned by the fact that artist Greg Capullo, once primarily known as the artist of Spawn, had since had a long run as the primary artist on Batman. In other words, the popular artist had become pretty much the ideal candidate to draw a Batman/Spawn crossover. 

Spawn creator Todd McFarlane rounded out the creative team for that one-shot special, writing the script and inking Capullo's pencil art (Despite the fact that, as quickly becomes evident when reading the resultant book, McFarlane is not the greatest of writers).

I went ahead and bought it, because hey, how often does Batman meet Spawn? (Three times. The answer is three times.) 

While I didn't really care for it, it did make remind me of the first two times the characters met, in a pair of one-shots from 1994, and I thought about revisiting those comics to see how they compared...and, of course, to see how they had aged over the course of some three decades.

DC and Image made it easy to do so, collecting those comics into the hardcover Batman/Spawn: The Classic Collection...although I missed it upon its initial release, and just remembered it recently (Perhaps put in the mind of 1990s crossovers by recently writing about the two Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles/Flaming Carrot team-ups here and here, or perhaps being reminded of the each-publisher-does-its-own-version style of crossover by hearing folks on social media discuss Marvel's recent Deadpool/Batman, with a DC-produced Batman/Deadpool to follow).

Regardless, I finally got around to revisiting these 31-year-old comics via their 2022 collection. That collection looks surprisingly slim at just 112-pages—Of course, the two one-shots in collects weren't very long, so that does make sense—but it's a nicely designed package.

It looks like it features new cover art by Capullo and McFarlane, featuring the two characters confronting one another, bathed in the sickly green of Spawn's hell-spawned magical powers. And I see they used one of the Batman logos of the 1990s for the cover, the same style logo that was atop the cover of the DC crossover, entitled Batman/Spawn: War Devil (the wraparound cover of which is atop this post).

There's not much in the way of additional features, either, just a pin-up "gallery" of two images. One is a double-page splash featuring a tight close-up of the two heroes flying through the sky, drawn by Greg Capullo (and dated with a "'93"). It's certainly interesting to see how much Capullo's art has changed over the years, particularly his Batman. 

The other pin-up is a "jam" piece by the Spawn/Batman creators, Frank Miller and McFarlane, depicting the two heroes kinda sorta standing in air, a big full moon and a city skyline in the background, and bats flocking everywhere. McFarlane obviously drew Spawn and Miller Batman, and as for the rest, I'd guess those were Miller's buildings and McFarlane's bats (His bats are prominently featured on the cover of Spawn #1 and #3, for compaison's sake). 

I'm going to tackle each of the two crossovers in two separate posts. This one will be devoted to the DC-produced Batman/Spawn: War Devil #1. 

I always found the creative team for this book, which I had of course bought and read upon its initial release, to be a curious one. It has not one writer, not two writers, but three writers. These are Doug Moench, Chuck Dixon and Alan Grant, who were at the time writing the three ongoing Batman titles, Batman, Detective Comics and Shadow of the Bat. 

Why did DC, or perhaps the book's editor Denny O'Neil, decide to enlist the entire Batman line's writing staff for a relatively short and extremely straightforward 48-page story? I didn't know then and I still don't know for sure, as certainly any one of these gentlemen could have handled the assignment and done an admirable job of it. If I had to guess, I would guess that O'Neil, and probably the writers themselves, wanted them all to share in what I imagine must have been fairly decent royalties accompanying what I have to assume was a potentially very good selling book. 

I have no idea how popular Spawn was in 1994, of course. The character's book launched in 1992, and in May of 1994, the month War Devil was released, the most recent issue of Spawn was February's #18, which I see was written by Grant Morrison (!) and drawn by Capullo and Art Thibert. (Me, I had dropped the book after the first five issues, then returned for 1993's #8-11, those written by Alan Moore, Neil Gaiman, Dave Sim and Frank Miller. Other than the three Batman crossovers, I don't think I ever read another issue of Spawn*.) The character's not-very-good live-action film was still three years away, as was the HBO animated series, so I assume the character's popularity had then yet to climax.

As for the art on War Devil, it was provided not by one of the then-regular artists of the Bat-titles (or all of them, as with the writers), but by Klaus Janson, who also colored his work (with Steve Buccellato).  Janson wouldn't have been my first choice for the project at the time. I thought (and still think) Norm Breyfogle would have been perfect. In addition to being my favorite Batman artist, I always thought there was some aesthetic similarity between he and McFarlane when it came to drawing their caped heroes, particularly in terms of their dynamism (In fact, one of the things that attracted me to McFarlane's Spawn originally was that it looked somewhat Breyfogle-esque to my teenage eye). 

Those two artists could tend towards the cartoony in their expressions sometimes, they sometimes drew similar bats (compare the one to Harold's right on this cover to those on those Spawn covers I linked to earlier, for example), and there's this one trick they would both occasionally employ, which I don't have any examples to point to in front of me, nor the words to describe it; basically, when something exciting, shocking or extremely dramatic might happen, the panel itself would sort of "scream", with jagged white lines biting into the image (Next time I see examples, I'll try to post some). 

But by 1994, it had been almost a year since Breyfogle's last issue of Shadow of the Bat, and he was about a year into his series Prime for Malibu, a series I never read and, unfortunately, may never read, given who Breyfogle's collaborator was on that series and what became of him...somehow, I don't see any publisher collecting any of his work ever again. 

My other choice to draw a Batman/Spawn crossover would have been my other favorite Batman artist, then Batman cover artist Kelley Jones, whose preference for drawing gigantic capes, billowing and flapping as if they were alive, makes him a perfect artist for Spawn, a character I don't think he's ever officially drawn (Not even, I was surprised and disappointed to find, on one of the coves for the 2022 crossover, accompanied as it was by variant covers from so many Batman artists). 

Instead, they went with Janson, who even then was a veteran artist with a long list of solid, quality comics on his resume (At the time, I knew him best as the guy who inked Miller on The Dark Knight Returns, though).

Whoever DC went with, though, I think it would have been interesting, given that the Spawn character was so associated with the art of his creator. I'm not sure how many other artists might have actually drawn Spawn by spring of 1994 (Capullo had done a few issues of Spawn by then, but perhaps the character appeared in pin-ups by other artists, or had guest-appearances in other Image books...? Not sure if Hilary Barta's Stupid cover counts or not...). But I can't imagine it was very many, and thus seeing any other artist drawing Todd McFarlane's Spawn character would have probably been something of a novelty.

I think Janson does a decent job with Spawn. He honors the massive cape and streaming chains of McFarlane's version, although they do tend to look a little off at times. Though Batman's cape is similarly sometimes unrealistically big and billowing, Janson's style is realistic enough to make the exaggerated, expressive flourishes feel less than natural. 

I also think seeing Janson's take on Spawn somewhat underlines some of the weaknesses in the design. As striking as the character might look, it's pretty clear he wasn't designed to be a character that could be drawn over and over again by anyone, the many fussy details—the skulls, the randomly-placed spikes, the white stripes—making him a figure an artist has to linger one, and a reader's eye might get stuck on. 

What surprised me most about re-reading the book today, however, was the discordant clash of the various lettering styles. The book was lettered by Todd Klein, who, in addition to being one of the handful of names of letterers most comics readers will actually know is, I think it's safe to say, one of the best in the business. As a reader, he is who I would want to be lettering the comic I'm reading. And, were I producing a comic book, he's the letterer I would want handling it.

Klein honors the exact style of Spawn's signature dialogue balloons and narration boxes. The former have a very specific font with bigger than usual sized letters, the border of the balloon thick and black, and surrounded by a second, thicker, gray-colored border. The tails are also quite distinct, dramatically hooking like little sickles in Spawn's direction. 

As for the latter, these are the customary yellow, but feature the same too-big type size, jagged irregular borders and an underlying layer of green that make them look somewhat 3D. (Tom Orzechowski lettered the first issue of Spawn, and I assume is responsible for the distinct style of Spawn's visual "voice"). 

The intent, I think it's safe to say, is to suggest that Spawn's voice doesn't really sound like anyone else's and, given what else we know about the character, it's probably meant to sound a little deeper, a little louder and perhaps spookier than the voices of normal people.

But now, after decades of communicating via email, text and social media, long, long after we all agreed that writing in all-caps suggested shouting or yelling, reading panels of Spawn in conversation with Batman, wherein the Image Comics hero's dialogue is so much bigger and bolder than Batman's, it now looks like Spawn is always talking in an inappropriately loud voice, like perhaps he's hard of hearing or something. 

The most fun aspect of the book for me in 2025, though, was reading a script written by Moench, Grant and Dixon, three writers who, by this point, I have read untold hundreds of pages of comics by and have long since become familiar with their individual styles and personal tics. 

I didn't notice at all in 1994, but now it seems apparent that, if they all collaborated on the plot, they apparently took turns scripting the pages, as some read as obviously the work of Dixon, for example, while others sound just like Grant or Moench. (The first clue that they are taking turns is in the lettering, too; one page will feature the regular bolding and italicization of certain words in the sentence, as some comics writers practice, while the facing page will hardly have any bolded, italicized words at all.)

I'm not saying I could necessarily tell who was writing each page in all 48 cases—a Grant script and a Moench script are closer to one another than either is to a Dixon one, for example—but it's often quite clear when the baton is passed, and it's a lot of fun trying to parse who's writing which page. 

There are, of course, some obvious tells. For example, when the two heroes fight a literal demon from hell at the climax, there's a panel in which Batman throws three objects in the direction of the monster, and, in his thought cloud, he thinks, "Percussion caps!". Grant would often have Batman announce, either to himself or his opponent or the reader, what weapon he might be pulling from his utility belt to use. 

Earlier, when the Dark Knight is fighting a couple of security guards over the course of a mostly word-less page, the sound effects are all pure Moench: KUNCH, TUNCH, THROK, HWOK, SWUKK.

And so on.

Perhaps unsurprisingly given the writers, War Devil is a pretty good Batman story, and a fairly weak Spawn one (I do wonder how it might have read if the Batman writing staff added a fourth writer, in the form of McFarlane). Re-reading it today, I didn't really get any sense of who Spawn actually was. What's his status quo? What's his background? What exactly are his powers, and how do they work? There are few clues here. From this particular comic, all that is evident is that he is a semi-amnesiac former hitman who now has undefined magic powers he uses when encountering supernatural opponents sent to attack him. 

That, and that he is somewhat new to being a superhero. "You're new at this, aren't you?" Batman asks, after beating "the living crap" out of Spawn. And, in the last panels of the comic, Spawn watches as Batman swings away, thinks about the kind of man Batman is and, in the story's very last words, thinks "The kind of man I'll be."

It would take very little retooling to adjust this script so that, instead of Spawn, it featured pretty much any supernatural hero helping Batman on a case involving the forces of the underworld: Doctor Fate, The Spectre, John Constantine, whoever.

The comicopens in the Roanoke colony in 1587 North Carolina, with the birth of Virginia Dare, the first British child born in America, and the mysterious disappearance of the 100 people who lived there, the only clue as to what might have happened being "a single word carved or burned into the trunk of a tree, far higher than a man could reach: 'Croatoan'."

In this telling of the real-life historical mystery, though, there's also a second clue, "although no one could see it." Janson draws the settlement from above, and it's clear the trees of the surrounding forest have been cut down in a very specific pattern, forming a five-pointed star around its walls and buildings.

In modern Gotham City, beneath a sky full of blimps, Batman is looking for a Virgil Dare, who has something to do with a shipment of explosives and Gotham real estate ("Bombs and buildings," Batman thinks to himself, "A bad combination... ...if ever the twain are permitted to meet"). The search for Dare leads him to eccentric architect Simon Vesper, a man who has been missing for years, a man who, in fact, Batman had seen shot to death before his eyes, although the body immediately disappeared. Vesper resurfaces suddenly, just as Gotham Tower, a long-time project of Vesper's, is about to be completed and opened for the public.

Meanwhile, Spawn, who we meet sitting among the boxes at the back of an alley, has a newspaper blown into his lap, and its front page has a story and image about Gotham Tower, which prompts his memory of being hired to kill Vesper, back when he was still Colonel Al Simmons. He strides off towards Gotham.

Batman visits the tower, where he finds a blood-splattered elevator ("It looks like a slaughterhouse"), and the body of Virgil Dare, his throat cut, laying in the middle of a five-pointed star drawn in blood, the word "Croatoan" written in blood on the floor.

As Batman is leaving the tower through a window and swinging away, Spawn spots him, drops on him from several stories above, delivering a flying kick to the Dark Knight's abdomen on a two-page splash.

"So, he sent another of you losers?" Spawn says, while Batman responds with a pained, "UNNH!" 

When they reach the ground, Spawn talking the whole way down, his fist glows green and he points it at Batman, who has broken his fall by grabbing a flagpole and landed atop a nearby parked car. 

In maybe the book's only funny moment, Spawn is surprised to find that nothing has happened to Batman.

Apparently, Spawn saw Batman's costume and assumed he was some kind of demon from Hell (In this story, Spawn has apparently never heard of Batman, despite the fact that they share the same world, rather than, like, coming from different dimensions or realities or whatever). He had tried to magic him back to Hell, but it doesn't work, because Batman is not actually a demon from Hell. 

Batman then flying kicks Spawn, punches him in the face three times, and ultimately kicks him through a nearby store window. The fight part of the fight-and-then-team-up ritual is short, and decidedly one-sided. Though Spawn readers will know that the character has genuine super-powers that would make him more than a match for Bats, here Spawn finds no reason to prove himself, simply pointing at Batman from the ground, and saying, "You don't know how close you came." 

It's not super-clear, but I think that Spawn's powers somehow shut themselves off when he was confronting a regular human being and then turned themselves back of when the fight was over. Is that how they work? It's not how they work in this book's sister publication, Spawn/Batman #1, which we'll discuss in the next post. 

Wait, I guess this part is actually kind of funny too:

Once on the two heroes get on the same page, they head back to Gotham Tower. There, the undead Vesper has gathered Gotham City elite for his diabolical plan. He's blacked out all of the city save for Gotham Tower, had fires set all over in order to create a burning pentagram around the tower, and magically emptied the graveyard, its revived corpses shuffling towards the tower in order to feed on the rich and powerful who Vesper had gathered there.

The plan is, apparently, to open a gateway to hell, offer the souls of all his victims to the/a devil (Vesper rants about "him who is more evil than you can even begin to imagine!", "my dark master," and "the armies of Satan!"), in the hopes of garnering his own corner of Hell to rule.

Vesper tosses Batman around while Spawn is busy investigating the gateway to Hell in the basement, the apparently undead businessman soon transforming into a big, red brute that grows out of Vesper's suit, Hulk-style. When Spawn then arrives to confront him, "Vesper" says, "You're confusing the clothes with the man, Spawn...Vesper is a shell I'm wearing."

He then transforms again, growing bigger still, and taking on a green, vaguely reptilian humanoid form, with a big head and bent limbs and posture that kinda sorta suggests that of McFarlane's Violator from the Spawn comics. The creature then introduces itself, talking in a special, unique font and dialogue bubbles suggesting someone big, ancient and powerful: "BEHOLD THE ARCHFIEND IN EXILE! HE WHO WAITED BUT WAITS NO LONGER-- THE DEMON CROATOAN!"

The fight is mostly Spawn's, Batman's sole contribution being the aforementioned "Percussion caps!", which explode THOOM! THOOM! THOOM! behind Croatoan, distracting it long enough for Spawn to gesture with his hands, shooting sickly green fire that first shrinks and then seems to kill the demon, while he narrates cheesily, remembering the vision of his ex-wife Wanda that he had seen through the portal of Hell earlier: "I pour it out, the hate-- the lust for revenge. Then I remember her face-- --and it's love that finally tears him apart."

Did whoever write this particular page—my guess is Grant, but maybe Moench—want the reader to think of Joy Division at this point? I don't know, but "Love Will Tear Us Apart" was certainly stuck in my head for the rest of the night after reading it.

The day saved, Spawn's powers sending the army of undead to crawl back into their graves, the two heroes stand atop a nearby rooftop to debrief. Batman asks Spawn what happened, and McFarlane's hero responds, "Something evil...If you need a name, call it...'Terrorism of the soul.'"

He then proceeds to ask Batman a rather philosophical question: "You know the darkness, Batman...What is it that makes one man good, the next man evil?"

Batman responds with an unattributed quote that I can't find by plugging into Google, although all the results that did come up were of things written by Nietzsche:

That's beyond me. 

But somebody once said--"Good and evil are not determined by the intercourse of people with one another, but entirely by a man's relationship with himself."

Then the Dark Knight politely excuses himself—Literally saying, "Now if you'll excuse me"—and Spawn has his moment of reverie regarding Batman as a role model.

When the two would next meet, in Spawn/Batman #1 by Frank Miller and Todd McFarlane, they wouldn't be nearly as polite, nor would Spawn find much to admire in Batman, nor would there be any mediation on the nature of good and evil.

There would be a lot of tough guy narration and posturing and a lot of violence, though...

*What about you guys? Have any of you read the Morrison-written Spawn? Should I seek out those issues? As I assume most of you know, I am a fan of Morrison's comics-writing.

Review: Uncle Scrooge and the Infinity Dime: Gallery Edition

After his The Other Side and Scalped became successes for DC's Vertigo imprint in the 2000s, writer Jason Aaron began a career at Marvel, one full of generally well-regarded runs on various high profile characters. He wrote Ghost Rider, Thor, The Punisher, Wolverine, The X-Men, Wolverine and The X-Men, Doctor Strange, The Hulk, The Avengers, and even Star Wars and Conan.

In 2023, he announced that he was no longer under exclusive contract with Marvel and he was shortly tackling some...well, some unusual characters for a guy who had spent about 20 years writing so much of the Marvel Universe. He wrote Superman (in an Action Comics arc, followed by the Absolute Superman ongoing), the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (relaunching IDW's ongoing series based on the license) and Uncle Scrooge (for a special Marvel one-shot). 

I wondered if, perhaps free of his exclusive contract, he was setting about working on his bucket list of comic book characters in earnest.

One has to imagine that, if Scrooge McDuck isn't on a lot of comics creators' bucket lists, it's only because writing him might seem so unrealistic. Luckily for Aaron, though, he had a long and fruitful relationship with Marvel, a corporate entity that is now owned by Disney (Although, aside from licensing most of their Star Wars comics to Marvel, Disney has mostly steered clear of having Marvel publish much of anything starring their signature cartoon characters, Fantagraphics seemingly remaining their favored publisher for duck and mouse comics). 

Certainly, Scrooge is one of the all-time greatest comics characters, and, of course, Aaron is a fan—although according to his brief introduction to the hardcover "Gallery Edition" of his comic Uncle Scrooge and the Infinity Dime, he's a rather recent one. 

Under the title "Why I Love This Duck", which begins with the sentence "Uncle Scrooge is one of the greatest adventure characters in comic-book history," he tells of sitting down with his son at bedtime one night to read Don Rosa's "Son of the Sun". After that, he was hooked, and said he spent the rest of his son's childhood reading the Don Rosa library with him, singling out "Guardians of the Lost Library" as his favorite story. 

While he dedicates The Infinity Dime to several people—including his son, Rosa and Scrooge creator Carl Barks—he also says he wrote it for "you," by which he seems to mean readers who aren't already fans of Uncle Scrooge, hoping his comic would serve as a sort of gateway into some of those many great comics, comics you can know fill several bookshelves full of handsome collections of, thanks to Fantagraphics.

After reading that, I was a bit curious as to how well the project might have succeeded. Did Uncle Scrooge and the Infinity Dime find its way in front of the average Marvel Comics fan, or, perhaps Jason Aaron fan, and did such readers not have any prior experience with Uncle Scrooge? (Given the presence of Disney comics in comic shops over the last few decades, and the existence of two different versions of the cartoon Duck Tales, one from 1987s and one from 2017, I have to imagine most comics readers already had a pretty good idea of who Scrooge was and what he was all about. I know I personally met him in repeated viewings of Mickey's Christmas Carol, hung out with him after school during the initial Duck Tales series, spent hours playing the video game based on the cartoon and then followed him into the comics as soon as Fanta started their Carl Barks Library.)

Anyway, Aaron's effort is a rather odd comic, something of an uneasy Marvel/Disney hybrid. Its writer is, of course, a Marvel guy, and the basic idea seems to be to put Scrooge, his cast and basic milieu into a somewhat typical Marvel comic book, although they apparently didn't want to book to look or feel like a Marvel comic, as rather than commissioning a Marvel artist or artists to draw it, they turned to a half-dozen Italian Disney artists, splitting the chapters between them: Paolo Mottura, Fancesco D'Ippolito and Lucio De Giuseppe,  Alessandro Pastrovicchio and Vitale Mangiatordi and Giada Perissinotto, with colors by Arianna Consonni.

The only clue of what members of Marvel's "bullpen" might have done with the character if given a chance came on the covers. Recent Fantastic Four cover artist Alex Ross is responsible for the one above, but there were of course plenty of variants, including ones from J. Scott Campbell, Gabriele Dell'Otto, Steve McNiven, Frank Miller, Peach Momoko, John Romita Jr, Walter Simonson and Skottie Young (This particular hardcover collection includes them all in the back, as well as interviews with many of the artists; we'll get to them later on in the post, as I'm sure you're fascinated to find out what Frank Miller's version of a Disney duck might look like and, if you can't wait, you can always visit Comics.org).

Now, The Infinity Dime was apparently a 30-page, $7.99 one-shot, published in August of 2024. Being currently comic shop-less, I naturally skipped it, deciding to wait until it was republished in trade (I had assumed it was a far longer, multi-issue story, to be honest; I guess when one stops reading Marvel's solicitations month in and month out, one no longer knows exactly what they're getting when picking up the publisher's works).

I never did buy a trade, nor did I ever find one in my library and, recently remembering the comic existed, I checked the library catalog for it, and was somewhat surprised to see that that while an over-sized 9.57-inch by 13.25 inch, 112-page hardcover collection was indeed published back in March, neither my library nor the consortium we share materials with had ordered a physical copy for some reason (Reminder: That consortium consists of 40 different library systems throughout northeast Ohio, including the Cleveland Public Library system). 

And so I read it as an "eComic", borrowed via the Hoopla app.

This meant that I couldn't tell how big the published version's pages actually were, nor could I guess how long it actually was until I had finished reading it. Based on the original comic's cover boasting that it was "The Story of the Century!", and by Aaron's professed interest in the works of Rosa and Barks and company, and by the fact that it was broken into three chapters and an epilogue and the fact that it had so many different artists involved, I was expecting the story to be, well, something of an epic, you know?

It's not. Like I said above, there are just 30 original story pages devoted to The Infinity Dime, making it the length of about one-and-a-half regular Marvel comics. That was, obviously, rather disappointing.

And as for Aaron's story, while it is big in terms of scale and stakes, if not page count, and it does seem to endeavor to offer something of a mission statement on the title character and what makes him so special, it can't help but feel a little small...more of a trifle than an epic, really.

The plot is really quite superheroic, and while many Disney comics have been published that deal with the genre—including those in which Donald Duck and Goofy have their own superhero personas—this one feels much more like a modern DC or Marvel book, rather than an application of the Disney characters to the classic superhero tropes.

The book begins with Donald and Huey, Dewey and Louie diving through a terrible snowstorm, on their way to Bear Mountain, where they would meet their distant Uncle Scrooge for the first time and spend Christmas with him (This is, of course, the same premise of Bark's 1947 story "Christmas on Bear Mountain," the first appearance of Scrooge). Here, things go differently, though: Scrooge's nephews never make it to see him, Donald never proves his mettle to Scrooge and the old miser never becomes part of their lives. This, a caption in the last panel of the first page tells us, is a world "among the myriad of alternate universes arrayed across infinity."

That's right, it's a multiverse story! Sick of the Marvel Cinematic Universe telling multiverse stories? Well, now they've even infected Disney duck comics!

This particular world's Scrooge seems to have still had many of his adventures, enough to fill a massive money bin, but he's grown more bitter and lonely than ever. One day, while stomping through his bin, he happens by a magic mirror embedded in a pile of coins, which he had taken from "that two-bit conjurer, Magica De Spell". No sooner does he finish his exposition, telling readers that it was called "The Mirror of Worlds", then it begins to glow pink, emit a stream of five-pointed cartoon stars and pull on his number one dime, which he wears like a necklace. (For some reason, it's a really big dime, looking more like a fifty-cent piece).

Then he has a revelation: "Why settle for being the richest duck in the world, when I could be... ...the richest duck on ALL the worlds!!!"

Meanwhile, in the "real" world, Scrooge and his nephews are flying back into Duckburg, where they see the Beagle Boys attempting a strange money bin heist, wherein the entire bin is being lifted up off the ground and into some sort of pink energy portal in the sky.

Scrooge goes on the attack, but he soon finds himself face to face with Doctor Doom-like "the Scrooge-Above-All", the evil Scrooge we had just met, now outfitted with a villainous-looking costume (dig the coins on his knuckles). Between the pages, he has apparently busied himself by visiting alternate reality after alternate reality, besting each world's Scrooge and then making off with that fallen Scrooge's number one dime and money bin. He gets those of our Scrooge too.

Scrooge and the nephews go to Gyro Gearloose for help, and the nephews explain the multiverse, using the entry on "multiverse" from their Junior Woodchuck Guidebook. Gyro pulls out this world's Mirror of Worlds, which he has been studying (He does not, therefore, end up inventing anything here to help Scrooge). 

After it's explained that to travel through the multiverse, one needs a "universal constant", "something that exists in all universes at once," Scrooge at first thinks that his number one dime might be it, but Gyro tell his that no, it is Scrooge himself that is the universal constant (And I guess he does exist in our universe, the only one we can be sure is definitely real, in the form of a comic book and cartoon character, but then, we also know that he doesn't exist in other universes we read about regularly, like that of the Marvel Universe or DC Universe...)

To make a not-very-long story short (a "weeks later" caption seems to skip over what a reader might expect to come next), our Scrooge visits the Scrooge-Above-All's Duckburg and infiltrates his gigantic money bin, which is a money bin big enough to encompass all the other worlds' money bins. It's "The All-Bin."

Confronted by Beagle Boys, our Scrooge commands his shadowy allies, revealed on one of the book's several splash pages, a story technique that is definitely more modern Marvel than classic Disney, "Fight like Scrooges!!!"

Scrooge's multiversal army of himself then falls before the magical might of the Scrooge-Above-All, who tells them that this has all happened before, and refers to himself at one point as "Scrooge...Uncle to NO ONE!"

Then the Scrooges unleash their secret weapon, dogpile, er, duckpile the evil Scrooge, and, in a matter of panels of them yelling at him while wrestling, convince him that all of the money in all of the worlds is still just so much metal, and that the sense of adventure, the connections made along the way, and family is the real treasure.

And, a few pages later, there's a two-page epilogue, during which we see that the evil Scrooge too has been redeemed in the same way that the "real" Scrooge was...his redemption just took a lot longer, and a violent intervention by his own multiversal doppelgangers, rather than just, you know, spending a Christmas with his nephew and grand-nephews.

As you can see then, it's quite "Marvelous" a story...Aaron even drops a "'Nuff said" into the proceedings. 

I confess to being somewhat disappointed, but that's mainly because I was expecting something longer and grander (and the way I read it kept me from realizing how short it actually was until I reached "THE END" on the last page; obviously if you get a physical copy of the book for yourself, this won't be a factor for you), but it certainly does its job of putting Scrooge and company into what feels a lot like a modern Marvel story, while extolling the character's virtues: Not only is he smart and tough and super-rich, but his extreme wealth is presented as a symbol of what is really valuable in life. 

And then it's on to the backmatter, of which there is a lot.

In fact, there is some 80 pages of it. All these extras include a short interview with Jason Aaron, another with the artists, one with the artist who designed the "dark" Scrooge including some preliminary sketches, some pages of unfinished art, and each of the variant covers, including interviews with many of the artists who contributed them.  Finally, there's Bark's original 19-page "Christmas on Bear Mountain," reprinted in all its glory.

The Marvel artists who contributed these tended to fall into one of two camps. 

Some simply drew in the Disney style and did so to such a degree that you might not recognize their art as theirs at all. This includes Alex Ross (I mean sure, his is painted, and in a more photorealistic style that suggests a degree of three-dimensionality, but other than that, his Scrooge just looks like the regular Scrooge, right?), as well as J. Scott Campbell, Ron Lim, Steve McNiven, Gabriele Dell'Otto and, I think, even such distinct stylists as John Romita JR and Walt Simonson.

I mean, at a glance, could you tell these covers were the work of JRJR and Simonson?

And then there are artists who drew Scrooge in their own signature styles, design be damned. These include Peach Momoko, Skottie Young and Frank Miller.

Check out Miller's Scrooge:

I think it's quite safe to say that it doesn't look like a piece one might expect to find on a Disney-branded comic (I'm most intrigued by how he handled Scrooge's feathers between the hem of his coat and the top of his legs; it looks like he's wearing a white hula skirt...and man, that beak...! I remember from middle-school trying to draw Scrooge's beak, and damn, it is not easy...!)

I think the artists who fares the best at drawing Scrooge, the one who balances adherence to the design without sacrificing their own personal style at all is Young. Check this out:

It's obviously a Scrooge, and a workable one, but not the Scrooge, right? I imagine it is merely a result of Young's own cartoon-inspired style being closer to that of Disney comics than the style of many of his peers, but it's easy to imagine Young having drawn all of The Infinity Dime, for example, while Miller doing so would seem unthinkable.

Now, while the book doesn't say so, I can say so here. If this really was your first introduction to Uncle Scrooge comics, click this link and start shopping. 

While I've yet to read a book from any of Fanta's Disney series that I didn't enjoy, I'd recommend starting with pretty much any volume of The Carl Barks Library, be they Donald Duck or Uncle Scrooge books. I only have a pair of volumes from the Don Rosa Library myself so far, as I wanted to get all the Barks ones before moving on, but, obviously, those are damn good comics too (And, after reading this, I want to seek "Guardians of the Lost Library" ASAP).

When it comes to Fantagraphics' collections of classic Disney comics, it's really rather hard to think of a better deal in terms of quality of comics to money spent ratio in comics right now....

A Month of Wednesdays: September 2025

 BORROWED: 

The Avengers in The Veracity Trap! (Abrams ComicArts) I'm afraid this book just doesn't really work the way in which it was intended.

And that's something of a disappointment, because pairing book designer, author and comic book fan Chip Kidd with the phenomenally talented artist Michael Cho on a work celebrating the original Marvel Comics collaborations of Jack Kirby and Stan Lee sounds pretty much like a dream book, doesn't it?

Unfortunately, the problem is a deep one, seemingly coming at the point of conception, and with the involvement of the publisher Abrams (Instead of the company that, you know, actually owns and functions as caretaker for these characters, Marvel).

It certainly seems to start on solid ground. In its first 25 pagens, Kidd and Cho present an epic battle involving a team of some of the very earliest Avengers: Iron Man, Thor, The Wasp, The Hulk, Giant-Man Hank Pym and Captain America (I consulted comics.org to see if this line-up ever actually existed, as I thought Hulk officially left the team before Cap actually joined, but never mind all that; continuity is not important for this book).

The heroes are all "somewhere in Asgard", where the Avengers' first-ever villain Loki is commanding an army of monsters, none of whom are named in the book, but most of whom will be immediately recognizable to many a Marvel fan: Fin Fang Foom, Orrgo, Goom, Googam and so on. 

If you've seen Cho's work on various Marvel covers in recent years you will know exactly what to expect. He's working with Kirby's designs, and somewhat in his style here, but with a more elegant, smoother rendering that is all his own. The art looks both classic (even classical) and fresh and new at the same time. 

And these pages certainly show that work off, with plenty of splashes (some character-specific ones labeled "A Marvel Masterwork Pin-Up" and including the character's logo and nickname, like "the Golden Avenger, IRON MAN") and double-page splashes. None of these pages feature more than four panels.

While most of the Avengers show off their powers defeating the monsters in this sequence, Iron Man asks, "Where did Loki run off to?", and The Wasp chimes in, "More important, where's Thor?"

The latter is in pursuit of the former and finds him in an extremely Kirby-esque "ancient temple", which also houses a large, humming ball of energy, emanating shafts of light and what we now call Kirby dots, although these are green rather than the traditional black.

Loki calls it his "veracity vortex" and warns his brother of its power. Thor hurls Mjolnir at it, and the vortex seems to absorb it. And so Thor reaches into it to retrieve his enchanted hammer and, in a pair of splash pages, Thor too is taken into it with a WHHOOOOM! that saps all the color away from him, breaking him down into black and white lines, then just faint blue pencils and, ultimately, the white nothingness of a blank page and, on the next page, WHHOOOOM!, spits him back out with his hammer, the whiteness now gradually turning back into a fully inked and colored page. 

Thor falls to his knees, covering his face, and his allies gather around him. 

"By the Gods!" he exclaims, " We are...not real?"

What happened to The Mighty Thor, Prince of Asgard between those two WHHOOOOM!s, as the readers merely turned the pages? Apparently, he discovered that he and his fellow Avengers were actually comic book characters, as he rants and raves to them wearing a shell-shocked look on his face. Hulk exchanges glances with Iron Man, holding his index finger to his ear and spinning it in a circular motion, the universal gesture for "He's crazy!"

Thor's ranting, in which he explains the comic book creation process to the Avengers in language that is clearly written by a comic creator is genuinely quite funny at first. He starts: 

Nay, heed me, comrades. We exist in a sort of codex called a...comic book! It is considered by many to be literature of the lowest order!

After explaining how someone "outside our realm" illustrates them using a pencil and paper, he goes on:

Then another hand takes those pages and completes the illustrations in ink! But they are no mere tracers!

And yet another party applies pigment to those illustrations, using something called a four-color process! They aren't paid nearly enough, but what choice do they have? They're still waiting for ad agency callbacks to work on actual accounts! I don't even know what that means, yet it was revealed to me as such!

But Kidd keeps this going a bit too long, which is where we get to the crux of the problem:

We possess no free will! The stories of our lives are imprinted on wretched scrolls called newsprint, betraying visible chunks of wood pulp upon its curious surface!

The pages are gathered within a glossy covering and bound together with pathetic metal rivets called staples. And we are almost never in register! I don't know what that means, either.

The pamphlets of our adventures appear upon the dawn of each month, and they almost always end in cliffhangers so readers keep buying our stories. 

You can probably see the problem here. 

Never mind the fact that Cho himself is, in addition to co-plotting the story, penciling, inking and coloring it himself, rather than passing it on to various "hands." Never mind too the bit about comics being referred to as "literature of the lowest order" in 2025, so long after museums to the medium having been opened, college courses taught on it, graphic novels regularly becoming best-selling books, the fact that Marvel comics dominates modern pop culture and so on.

Everything Thor is saying in this case is obviously not true. This adventure isn't printed on newsprint, there are no chunks of pulp visible and the characters are clearly in register. The book isn't stapled together, but is bound, and in hardcover no less. 

Hell, not only is this book not a monthly pamphlet with a cliffhanger ending, this book isn't even published by Marvel Comics, but by an imprint of Abrams, a long-lived and venerable publisher of, like, real books, not comics. 

Thor's speech might have been cleverly metatextual had Kidd written it in a Marvel comic from the 1960s, from which these characters and the designs they are here rendered in all hail from. But in a modern, bound, high-quality hardcover original graphic novel from a respected publisher? 

In order to truly be metatextual, doesn't the work really need to be in the same basic form as the text in which it is commenting upon? I mean, sure, this Veracity Trap is comics, or sequential art if you like, and thus the same medium, but by concentrating on the specifics of the physical format as Kidd does in Thor's speech, the book betrays itself as being so clearly not that. 

At the end of the scene, Captain America looks off-panel and tells Hank and Janet that there's "only one way to find out" the truth of Thor's words. And then a turn of the page finds a trio of panels in which the "camera" zooms out from a tight black-and-white close-up of Cap's inked face, as we had seen it in that last panel, gradually revealing the previous page of uncolored, unlettered comics art in someone's hand.

The fourth panel, taking up the bottom half of the page, shows an artist sitting in a chair at a drafting table considering the page, while a man in glasses and a striped jacket leans over him. 

"Hmmmmm..." the artist says aloud, "I don't know if this is working, Chip."

The artist is, of course, Cho, and the man standing over him is Kidd, and, I have to say, upon first reading this book, I agreed wholeheartedly with Cho: I didn't think it was working, either. 

Kidd doesn't agree, at which point Cho replies, "I'm still not sure about this whole meta take." He continues, "It's been done before." 

Indeed it has and, I daresay, it has been done better. 

The two comics creators, whom Cho gives an increased degree of shading, are then confronted by all of the Avengers (who are all also more shaded when in the "real" world). The team has all leapt through the veracity vortex which, of course, leads to the real world, and, specifically, to the creators of this story, Cho and Kidd. 

"If the two of you created the vortex, then mayhap the two of you can destroy it!" Thor says, pointing a finger at them. "You are coming with us!"

And so they abduct the writer and artist, taking them back through the vortex to Asgard, where Kidd and Cho are little kids, for some reason. And then a giant Two-Headed Thing, much bigger than any of the earlier monsters (most of whom seem somewhat scaled down, probably in order to make them more compatible as opponents for the human-sized Avengers), stomps towards creators and characters alike. The Marvel heroes are on their backs, seemingly wrestling with existential dread and having their vigor sapped by the trips through the vortex.

Kidd and Cho decide to return to Earth, where they have the power to shape the story, and there are then some shenanigans with Loki, who boasts of the power of stories and himself as "the God of Stories!", which seems to be somewhat similar to what Al Ewing was doing with the character when he was writing him for Marvel a few years back (At least, according to what I read of Ewing's work with Loki in Douglas Wolk's All The Marvels; I didn't personally read any of those comics). 

Frantically working in what appears to be the "Marvel method," with Kidd telling the story to Cho as he puts it directly on the paper (and thus affects what's going on with the heroes), Kidd-through-Cap comes up with a plan to build a machine that does the opposite of the vortex, which Iron Man describes as "a machine that weaponizes...the imagination!"

Captain America, who is also an artist (as he reminds the creators), sits down at the drawing board and designs what Kidd dubs "The Imaginirritator", another extremely Kirby-ish looking design, a sort of giant super-tank bristling with weaponry, including an "X-trov cannon" which, as you might guess from its name, is especially designed to shut down the vortex. 

As kids in Asgard again, the creators make a pair of speeches. Kidd reassures the Avengers that it's not just them, but that everyone is actually someone else's idea and that no one asks to be born or created, and that it is thus the choice of the individual what they do with the life they are given that really matters. And then Cho takes the opportunity to meet the Marvel heroes face to face to thank them, telling them, "Those comics weren't disposable pulp...they were our dreams."

In the end, the Avengers triumph, Loki and the monsters are defeated and receive just punishments, and Kidd and Cho finish their book on the penultimate page, the very last page being devoted to another splash, this one showing the team posing, apparently about to plunge into the fight scene that covers the book's endpapers. 

It's beautifully drawn, and the high production value and the 8.9-inch by 11.35-inch, bigger-than-your-average-comics presentation flatters Cho's work nicely. I'm sure it was a blast for them both to make, presumably collecting a decent paycheck to create a love letter to comics characters they are obviously quite passionate about. It also made me think, as I dwelt on what they were attempting to do here, what they were saying, how they were saying it and how it might have been more effectively said.

I'm never going to complain about a gorgeous-looking superhero book that makes me think.

But that doesn't mean it really works, and thus as ambitious a project as it may be, I don't think it's quite the work its creators might have imagined it to be. 

Gracie's Ghost (Image Comics) I originally checked this out thinking it might be a good candidate for review on Good Comics for Kids, but, after reading it, I wondered if it might be just a little too...bleak for some young readers. I mean, sure, the point of Dawn Brown's graphic novel is that her young protagonist Gracie is able to not only survive her many travails, but keep living her life despite them, but those travails? There are a lot of them, and some of them are rough.

Many will be familiar to most kids, including her hopefully well-meaning mom's inability to understand her, watching her spoiled little brother get whatever he wants, mean teachers and unsympathetic Catholic school administrators, relentless bullies and, rather often, just plain old bad luck. Throughout most of the book, it seems like the universe itself is against Gracie. (I think the stuff with her mom tends to hit the hardest, as she is generally opposed to enforcing rigid gender stereotypes on Gracie, and sometimes seems to take away the few things that give her daughter actual comfort and pleasure, like throwing away her box fort, for example.)

There's one person in Gracie's corner, though, and that's the second half of the title. She is often accompanied by a ghost who, Calvin and Hobbes-style, only she can see and hear, and who, true to being a ghost, can't really interact with the world in any real way, so that the line between "imaginary friend" and "ghost" is particularly thin. (There is one rather dramatic exception to this rule, of course, at the end of the book, when a bully finally gets her comeuppance thanks to the unseen actions of the ghost.)

Cartoonist Dawn Brown's book is black and white, and divided into short, discrete stories, kind of like a collection of a comic strip, although those strips might be a couple of pages long rather than a couple of panels long. There is an overarching story involving the ghost, who tries to explain who she was in life at one point and how she died, but the story doesn't really go anywhere. There are also occasional pages where we see the ghost checking in with an authority figure and learn that the ghost has to help someone and, well, "behave" in order to leave Earth and ascend to the next place.

Perhaps somewhat oddly given the title though, the ghost doesn't play too big of a role in the proceedings, is absent from plenty of the stories and, in fact, it's actually not hard to imagine this graphic novel with the ghost removed from it entirely (well, the climax wouldn't quite work without her, I guess...)

Brown's art, presented in black-and-white throughout, has the look and feel of newspaper comics page cartooning, which seems quite appropriate given its apparent inspirations and format. I'm still not sure if it's necessarily a good comic for kids or not (I suppose it will depend on the kid), but adults should find some things to like in it.

Komi Can't Communicate Vol. 35 (Viz Media) Okay, I know I've been speculating about when this series might actually end for quite a while now, pretty much ever since its stars Komi and Tadano, whose will-they, won't-they mutual crush drove so much of the book, became a couple. Now it seems like it's really drawing to a close for sure though, as manga-ka Tomohito Oda includes a caption reading "As Komi Can't Communicate enters its final stretch." Also, we are told Komi only has to make three more friends in order to meet her series-long goal of making 100 friends, so I assume the series will end when she hits 100 and graduates from high school.

Anyway, in addition to the usual focus on Komi and Tadano, this volume includes a passage wherein Manbagi has to impress her new boyfriend Wakai's father (who is alarmed to find out that she's a gyaru) and another involving Komi and Tadano's younger siblings. 

REVIWED: 

Deepwater Creek (G.P. Putnam's Sons) Michael Regina's horror graphic novel is about a group of kids who encounter a bizarre monster and related phenomenon on the river they regularly fish. It's also about depression and grief...but that's the subtext. The text? Monsters. More here. 

Masks (Andrews McMeel Publishing) This is probably the perfect time to read Margaret Rae, Brian Nathanson and Beck Kubrick's graphic novel about young monsters living in the fringes of human society, as the majority of the book is set on Halloween. There's a pretty obvious metaphor here, in which "monster" is a stand-in for anyone who might be different in some way (or feel like they are), particularly LQBTQ+ people, but the book is never the least bit pedantic and works quite well as a fun adventure with some comedic moments throughout. More here.