A Month of Wednesdays: October 2025

 BOUGHT:

Batman '89: Echoes (DC Comics) I confess to having had some difficulty wrapping my head around the concept of DC's Batman '89 books, of which Echoes is the second, following 2022's Batman '89. Honestly though, I think it comes down to the branding. 

That branding seems to follow the pattern established by DC's Batman '66 comics, which presented new, original comics in the milieu of the 1966-1968 TV show, more often than not using the likenesses of the actors who had played the characters and presenting the comics stories as if they were lost episodes of the series.

With the Batman '89 books, writer Sam Hamm, who wrote the 1989 Batman film and co-wrote its 1992 sequel Batman Returns, teams with artist Joe Quinones to produce story arcs that present what amount to alternative, theoretical sequels to those films, ones where Hamm kept writing, Michael Keaton kept playing the lead, and the style and tone didn't diverge quite so widly as they did with the sequels that ended up playing in theaters (1995's Batman Forever and 1997's Batman & Robin). (With the first book, I also thought the idea might be to imagine the film series continue as if Tim Burton were still directing but, well, neither have seemed all that Tim Burton-y, the main nod in Echoes to the director's aesthetic being one of the villains' wearing black and white stripes.)

Of course, episodes of TV shows are quite short and can be fairly quickly produced, and I've never found it too difficult to get myself in the right headspace to see various Batman '66 projects as occurring in that particular world. 

But feature films are an entirely different animal, each taking years to make (the installments of that first cycle of Batman films were all two or three years apart), so if Hamm and Quinones' first Batman '89 was a theoretical third Keaton Batman film set after the events of Batman Returns (Michelle Pfeiffer's Catwoman is a character in it, after all), then this one would be the fourth, and I guess we're now around 1997, and not 1989, right? (In fact, there's a character in the book who, in expressing that Batman and the Joker are no longer news anymore, dates the latter's death to "what, 1989?")

So, I guess this is really a branding thing more than anything else. To be fair, I don't have any better ideas on how they could have branded these two comics that would have been better (I guess they could have gone with Sam Hamm's Batman, or What if...Michael Keaton Kept Playing Batman?, although Michael Keaton and Marvel might have something to say about that latter one).

I think what really got me into a thought spiral about all this is the presence of Harley Quinn, who was most certainly not around in 1989, although I guess would technically have been around in time to stick into a fourth Batman film being released in 1997...despite the fact that she certainly wasn't all that popular at that time (She debuted in a 1992 episode of Batman: The Animated Series, a cartoon that Warner Brothers sought to at least aesthetically link to the Tim Burton Batman films).

While Harley is a villain in Echoes, she's not the villain; in fact, there are a lot of villains, to the extent that they are practically fighting for attention throughout (Given how many characters Hamm stuffs into this story, I got the sense that this was going to be DC's last Batman '89 book for the foreseeable future, so he was just trying to use up as many potential villains as possible.) 

The Scarecrow is pictured on the very first cover, and Quinones' design for him seems to owe a lot to that of The Animated Series version of the character (the later designs from the cartoon, as he had several, the ones with the noose around his neck, the draping coat and scythe). In addition to those two psychologists-turned-supervillains, whose similar backgrounds make them somewhat easy to put into the same story, Echoes also includes a kinda sorta version of The Riddler, or at least a puzzle-obsessed Arkham inmate who goes by "E. Nigma"*; a terrorist version of Firefly (here named Robert Lowery instead of Garfield Lynns);  a character with a Middle Eastern-sounding name who spends most of the book in a coma but who, upon waking, is revealed to be (Spoiler!) Ra's al Ghul; a big, muscular Arkham inmate named Blockbuster; and, although he's already dead at the start of the book, an unscrupulous psychologist named Hugo Strange. Oh, and Catwoman again returns, if only for a handful of scenes.

Echoes follows rather closely the events of Hamm and Quinones' first Batman '89 series, which introduced the Robin-esque character Winston Drake (who is here never referred to as "Robin", and adopts a new version of his costume that more closely resembles the Robin costume Chris O'Donnell wore in Batman & Robin) and Barbara Godon (who will here eventually become Batgirl, if only for the climax; perhaps in a nod to superhero movies' insistence on keeping heroes and villains out of costume as much as possible, probably to show off the faces of the stars they spend so much money on, the heroes and villains in this book spend relatively little time in their masks).

The book opens with a bit of a mystery element, with both Batman and Bruce Wayne apparently missing (the former went into an earlier retirement two years ago, part of a deal struck with Barbara Gordon), and gurys dressed up like Batman getting somewhat regularly murdered by military veterans who seem to have a pathological fear of Batman.

Meanwhile, there's a federal manhunt for the manifesto-writing terrorist known as Firefly, one that eventually yields results, with the suspect being sent to Arkham under the care of Doctor Jonathan Crane. "Firefly" bears an uncanny resemblance to a younger Michael Keaton...only with gray hair and a prominent scar.

There's an awful lot going on, but apparently Batman/Bruce Wayne has infiltrated Arkham to get to the bottom of a plot involving the late Doctor Strange, experiments on military men and drugs that cause fear and forgetfulness, the latter one developed with funding from Wayne Enterprises. TV personality "Doctor Q", a celebrity psychologist who practices something she calls "persona therapy", also works at Arkham, while trying to score her own show at a local TV station run by a sleazy TV producer. 

For much of the proceedings, the story seems rather...well, small, even cramped. The events take place mostly at Arkham, or at a TV station. There are some scenes at the police station, and at Wayne Manor. Oddly, there are no cityscapes, no establishing shots, hardly anything in the way of architecture. It doesn't look or feel very cinematic, really.

Similarly, there's not much in the way of action scenes, little in the way of fighting or car chases (for much of the story, anyway), relatively few gadgets or vehicles. There isn't even much in the way of trippy shit, besides a few panels, given that drugs are involved.

Rather than filmic, then, much of the early part of the book feels more like a novel, or maybe a TV show. 

Hamm and Quinones are building towards something, though, and by the time it gets out that the patient everyone thought was Firefly is really...not him, by the time Ra's al Ghul wakes up, then the stakes ratchet up, and things start to feel more like a superhero movie. 

At that point, there are costumes, there are car chases, there are some fights and explosions, there are toyetic bat-vehicles in action, and the entire city, if not the world, seems to be imperiled. But even then, the book never really opens up, the images never get big. Somewhat oddly for a superhero comic book in 2025, Echoes is completely devoid of splash pages. 

Relatively unusually for a superhero comic, Quinones "casts" his book, using various '90s appropriate actors to "play" the various characters, meaning there are all sorts of unexpected likenesses throughout the book.

 For the previous Batman '89, he had something to go on, as Harvey Dent was played by Billy Dee Williams in the original Batman film, and so Quinones drew the Dent who was the villain of Batman '89 to resemble Williams. Similarly, the Drake Winston character was drawn to resemble Marlon Wayans, who was apparently attached to play Robin to Keaton's Batman at one point of Batman Returns pre-production.

Here, I'm not sure if Quinones just used whichever likenesses he liked the idea for, or if the actors used are ones that Hamm would have liked to play the characters, or who were rumored at some point, or what. But there are a lot of them.

Barbara Gordon and Harvey Bullock look as much like Winona Ryder and Bob Hoskins as Quinones' Bruce Wayne and Alfred Pennyworth look like Michael Keaton and Michael Gough, for example. Harley Quinn is clearly modeled on Madonna (If I had any doubts, they were laid to rest in a sequence where a character suffering the effects of fear gas hallucinates cartoon dancing Harleys, and they use the same dance moves as the animated Madonna from Who's That Girl's opening, or the final image of Echoes' Harley, where she wears a Madonna-esque conical bra).

Kevin Nealon seems to make a very unexpected appearance in a few panels, playing a newscaster, and I think one of the Arkham inmates is supposed to be played by Stephen Wright. Oh, and one minor character seems to be based on Oded Fehr as he appeared in 1999's The Mummy.

As for the other major players, I assume they too were based on real actors appropriate for the time this "movie" would have unspooled, but not any I was familiar enough with to identify with any certainty. How about you guys, did you read it? Who did Quinones base his Scarecrow on? Or his Riddler? Or his Ra's? Or TV producer Chuck Lantz?  (I'm pretty sure one of the bigger Arkham guards is meant to be Jesse Ventura, who played an Arkham guard in Batman & Robin, although here his uniform isn't nearly as formal looking.)

It's a weird, occasionally distracting aspect of the comic, but it is consistent enough, and Quinones is a skilled enough artist, that it works for him here, and makes for a relatively fun aspect of the book, giving readers something to pore over and guess at when returning to the comic later, not unlike all the little cameos Alex Ross inserted into some of his work (Similarly, of course, I wouldn't mind reading an annotated version of Echoes providing some sort of answers to guesses and theories, though).

Walt Disney's Donald Duck: Donald Duck Finds Pirate Gold (Fantagraphics Books) This book was actually released back in August, but it took a few months for my comics shopping list to perfectly align with my bank account (Though worth every penny, at $39.99 Fanta's Carl Barks Library books are pretty pricey, especially for someone in my line of work). 

This volume is actually volume one in the Carl Barks Library, collecting various Donald Duck comics from between 1938 and 1943 (Fantagraphics hasn't been publishing the volumes in chronological order, obviously). If that seems like it might be a little too early for Barks' Donald Duck comics stories, that's because the volume also includes 15 four-panel daily newspaper Donald Duck comic strips that Barks had plotted. 

As the back cover copy notes, this being the first volume of Barks' duck comics means it is "naturally, filled with firsts." These include Barks' very first comic book story (which is not a Donald Duck comic, but one starring Pluto), the first American Donald Duck comic book story, the characters' first treasure hunt story, Barks' first Donald Duck 10-page stories and his first solo epic-length adventure story.

For all its historical significance to Carl Barks scholars and Disney comics aficionados (many of whom, as per usual, write notes on each of the stories contained herein at the back of the book), the volume contains what remain all-around great comics, making for timelessly pleasurable reading, regardless of one's age or experience with the character or cartoonist.

The title story is a 64-page adventure that first appeared in 1942's Four Color #9, and Barks was but one of the creators to work on it. A Bob Karp is credited with the script, while Barks and artist Jack Hannah switched off on art duties every few pages (not that one can tell, of course, both working in the established Disney style of the era). 

The comic was apparently based on a planned but scrapped Disney cartoon, one which was far enough along that storyboards existed for it.  That might explain the dramatic sweep of the adventure, as well as the several set-pieces revolving around gags that don't necessarily advance the plot but are amusing in and of themselves.

When the story begins, Donald and his nephews are running a seaside seafood restaurant, the charmingly named Bucket o' Blood, when they are visited by a peg-legged parrot in pirate garb named Yellow Beak. He gets his hands on a treasure map, which perennial Disney villain Black Pete is after (Here, Pete does not have a peg-leg).

In an effectively executed reveal, Pete tricks Yellow Beak and the ducks into hiring his ship to take them on their treasure hunt (the ruse involves Pete in drag), and he proceeds to try to steal the map during their trip to the island. 

The tale moves much differently than later similar duck stories that Barks would write and draw, but it's interesting to see where that aspect of the characters' comics might have started, and it's fun to see the ducks interacting with Mickey's traditional comics foe, Pete. 

That's followed by a bunch of shorter, sillier stories by Barks (the most fun of which, I thought, was one in which Donald is a lifeguard, and repeatedly engages in fistfights with sharks), and then Barks' first solo duck adventure story, a 28-pager entitled "The Mummy's Ring," in which Donald and two of his nephews end up journeying by sea to Egypt to save the third nephew.

In addition to the previously mentioned newspaper strips and usual story notes and backmatter, the volume also includes 1942's "Pluto Saves the Ship," a mostly silent-ish story that reads very much like a Disney cartoon in comics form. Barks apparently helped script it, along with Hannah and a Nick George, while a Bruce Bushman handled the art. 

While I think we can safely say that these comics aren't Barks at the height of his powers, they still make for a great read.

Walt Disney's Donald Duck: The Lonely Lighthouse on Cape Quack (Fantagraphics) You won't find volume numbers in the titles or on the spines of Fanta's Carl Barks Library, but this is apparently volume 29 in the series, and thus collects later Barks stories, from 1961 to 1972. 

The latest of these, the last four, are scripted and laid out by Barks, but actually penciled and inked by artist Dan Jippes, and though they look great, they aren't quite to my liking. That's because they are all Junior Woodchucks stories, of which I am not a big fan, not necessarily finding acronyms funny, nor the nephews all that engaging when they're not being played off their uncle Donald.

Their other uncle, Scrooge, does appear in three of these four stories, in which he plays a mostly villainous role, the fact that he is a rapacious capitalist coming to the fore in ways that are far less endearing than when he's on the hunt for a treasure of some kind (In one story, for example, he's trying to remove a bunch of the then quite endangered bald eagles from their natural habitat so he can drill for oil, and he only gives up after nearly dying in an eagle trap of his own making). 

The rest of the volume consists of shorter stories devoted to familiar riffs, like Donald temporarily having a new job (dogcatcher, ferry operator, "master wrecker", selling concessions at the "Duckburg World's Fair") or in conflict with his nephews (trying to take embarrassing pictures of them with his new camera, trying to chase them and their fellow Junior Woodchucks out of the woods). Sorceress Magica De Spell, whom I first met in the original DuckTales cartoon of the '80s, appears in a pair of stories, trying to get at Scrooge's number one dime in both. 

The title story, a short adventure involving Donald and his nephews saving the day during a terrible storm, is perhaps my favorite of the bunch, but I didn't find anything too terribly compelling in this particular volume.

That said, it's still Carl Barks, so it's not like these are bad, or even not great comics, it's just that many of them aren't of the sort I personally prefer. 

BORROWED:

Death in Trieste (Fantagraphics Books) At this point, no comics reader should need me or anyone else to explain or extoll the virtues of the work of the Norwegian cartoonist known simply as Jason. Since the turn of the century, he's published around 20 books, all of them both brilliant and hilarious, told in a sturdy, steady storytelling style and featuring blank-eyed, anthropomorphic animal characters engaged in straightforward, descriptive action and deadpan dialogue delivery. 

So instead, I will simply tell you what is in this particular volume book, a collection of three stories. 

The first is "The Magritte Affair", and it is a very peculiar crime story. Two men in suits and bowler hats (like the figure in Rene Magritte's The Son of Man) and domino masks break into people's homes and replace a piece of art hanging on the wall with a counterfeit Magritte. Upon seeing the new painting, the victim also dresses in a suit and bowler hat and starts talking in nonsense dialogue. Meanwhile, artists are disappearing, being kidnapped by the men in masks. A pair of investigators eventually unmask the villain behind the plot, the motivation of which is, while technically logical, as crazy as any of the nonsense spouted in the story.

When the villain is revealed, one of the investigators declares his identity, citing the page and panel from earlier in the story in which he first appeared.

That is followed by the title story, perhaps the weirdest of the three, which opens in St. Petersburg with the death, or at least attempted killing, of Rasputin, and then jumps to 1920s Berlin, for a sprawling narrative involving the Dada movement, Marlene Dietrich, a time-travelling David Bowie, Nosferatu, a character that appears to be the title character from Jason's The Last Musketeer and, I don't know, maybe some of the other characters are meant to be historical or pop culture figures and I just didn't recognize them, either because I'm unfamiliar with what Jason is referencing or because it's not always easy to see likenesses when human characters are rendered as dogs, cats and birds. 

The final story requires no familiarity with 20th century art, save for 1980s New Wave music, I guess. That is "Sweet Dreams," and it involves what seems to be a secret society of popular musicians, some of whom possess super-powers or magical abilities, as they prepare for a meteor to strike Earth and deal with other menaces.

For example, all of the mummies in the British Museum suddenly come to life, leaving their coffins and going on a rampage. A panel on the wall in a room where The Eurythmics are hanging out makes a "bip" noise, and Dave Stewart says "Mummy alarm! Grade eight!" He and Annie Lennox go into action, she making gestures with her hands that render the mummies into piles of unwound bandages, he lifting his sunglasses to fire eyebeams like Cyclops.

I should note that the only reason I know this duo is definitely the Eurythmics are because Jason includes a splash page—one of only two in the book, which is otherwise a strict, uniform, four panels per page—that shows the pair posing, a bubble in the upper right-hand corner reading "A New Wave Pin-Up" and the word "Eurythmics" running along the bottom of the page.

Jason includes another such pin-up for Ultravox. As for the other characters, I can't be 100% certain who they are meant to be. The character code-named "Starman" is obviously David Bowie (making his third appearance in the book; in "The Magritte Affair", the first victim has a portrait of Bowie on his wall, which is taken down and replaced with The Son of Man forgery). 

The story opens with a character in a long black jacket conversing with one of the big head statues of Easter Island whose messy mop of black hair and the black circles around his eyes makes me think he's meant to be The Cure's Robert Smith but, you know, he's a dog, so I can't be sure. Other characters have hairstyles or clothes that make me think of Danzig or Elvis Costello, but I'm not that familiar with either artist that I can definitively ID them here.

Oh, and the long-haired, side-burned character who looks like Danzig to me is interrupted mid-occult ritual by an infiltrator with a terrible mullet; after he kills the interloper by making Doctor Strange hands/devil horn gestures and choking him to death, he looks down at the body and says, "Ah, little Paul David Hewson trying to save the world again..." 

I had to google "Paul David Hewson", but that is apparently the real name of U2's Bono.

Anyway, a fun story...although I bet it's more fun if you recognize all of the characters, which I most certainly did not. (I was only 12 in 1989 and didn't really discover some bands of the era like The Cure, The Smiths and Joy Division/New Order until I was a grown up.) 

If for some reason you're not already familiar with the work of Jason, well, I envy you; there's about 20 great graphic novels waiting for you to read, and you can start with any of them, including this one. 

Flip (First Second) Cartoonist Ngozi Ukazu is probably best known for her webcomic-turned-graphic novel duology, Check, Please!, but the first comic of hers I read (and, I assume, given my audience here, the first comic of hers many of you have read), was her 2024 original graphic novel Barda, a sort of YA romance starring a pair of Jack Kirby's more interesting creations for DC Comics (I reviewed it here, if you're interested). 

The title of her latest, a 320-page graphic novel that actually really reads and feels like a novel, has a double meaning. 

One of the characters is named Flip; that is Flip Henderson, the latest in a line of what protagonist Chi-Chi Ekeh tells us are "impossible crushes on rich white boys who don't know I exist."

Both Chi-Chi and Flip are seniors at a very exclusive, very expensive Christian private boarding school in Texas, and a school where, we are told, very strange things seem to occasionally happen, which is about as far as Ukazu goes in trying to explain the very strange thing at the center of this particular story, which is the second meaning of the title.

After Chi-Chi makes an elaborate "promposal"-style video asking Flip to the big spring dance, a video he accidentally opens during a class project, so that the entire class both sees it and sees him reject Chi-Chi-Chi, she runs off into the rain, wishing that she wasn't herself...and not for the first time in her life. 

But this time, she gets her wish. The next morning, she wakes up to find that she and Flip have "flipped", their minds having swapped bodies, Freak Friday-style (The kids name the film at one point in the story, although their point of reference is of course the 2003 remake starring Lindsay Lohan and Jamie Lee Curtis, not the 1976 original...I am just now learning that the first film was adapted from a 1972 novel, although the body swap premise was previously used in an 1882 novel by an F. Anstey entitled Vice Versa).

In all such stories, which I feel like I've seen done in film more than comics, although there's certainly a notable comics story in which it happens**, the point is that the flippers live quite different lives, and by literally walking a mile in one another's shoes, they learn more about what the other experiences, and thus develop greater empathy and respect for them.

Here, Ukazu has her flippers about as different as can be while both attending the same school. Chi-Chi is not only a girl and relatively unpopular at school, she's also black, poor and the child of immigrants, with a very close, even intense relationship with her parents. Flip, meanwhile, is a popular boy (although his popularity recently took a hit, as one of Chi-Chi's brilliant best friends illustrates with a chart), as well as white, rich and the child of elites...although his dad is currently in jail for a financial scandal, and his mom has retreated into drinking.

Ukazu addresses some thornier issues in body-swapping then, often in the forms of quite effective jokes. When it comes to touching their borrowed bodies, for example, the rule is to be tidy, but not explore. 

And as for the racial issues, well, as a white guy, Flip obviously can't say the N-word...but, just theoretically, can he say it when his mind is in the body of a black girl? Can Chi-Chi, a black girl, say it when she is in the body of a white guy? (The answers, if you're wondering, are no and no, although Chi-Chic pauses to think about the latter for a panel, while they are having an argument while inhabiting one another's bodies).

Oh, and can Chi-Chi-in-Flip's body touch Flip-in-Chi-Chi's body hair? This question is fraught, although Chi-Chi and her friends decide white hands shouldn't ever touch black hair, regardless of whose mind is in whose body, although Chi-Chi eventually makes an exception, to do her own hair while she's temporarily in Flip's body.

Oh yeah, that's the other thing that differentiates this story from other body-swap comedies. The characters "flip" at regular intervals, so that rather than being stuck in one another's body, they go back and forth on a regular basis...although one of Chi-Chi's friends eventually figures out there's a pattern to the flips, and they get longer and longer each time.

As disruptive as navigating the flipping is, Flip, Chi-Chi and her friends have to struggle with various deadlines, too: Going home for the weekend, attending a K-Pop concert and, ultimately, graduation. And then there's an additional, darker and scarier possibility that I don't think I've ever seen discussed in this little sub-genre's other entries, which I won't spoil here, but it suggests a horror direction. Essentially, the characters eventually learn of another couple of students who similarly flipped many, many years ago, and are now adults.

As funny as the proceedings are—and the book really does read a lot like a comics version of a great teen movie—it's actually pretty deep, as Ukazu doesn't just deal with the traditional aspects of such stories, in which the characters learn to respect and appreciate one another in a new and more significant way, but they learn to appreciate themselves and their own lives.

The predicament apparently began because of Chi-Chi's desire to not be herself, after all, but seeing herself and her life at a remove, literally through another person's eyes, her self-loathing gradually becomes acceptance, even self-love.

It's therefore the best kind of comic (or, I think, story in general), one which is full of surface-level pleasures, but has a lot going on. That is, it's not the comics equivalent of either candy or a salad, but a big, full, delicious, nutritious feast.

If you've not read any of Ukazu's previous works, the art is quite cartoony, with somewhat abstracted characters, composed of sharp, thick lines, and existing in a flat-ish world. It may take a few pages for some readers to get used to—but just a few—although the story-telling is superior, and the character "acting" is accomplished.

I think the medium is a bit more challenging for a body-swap narrative than film is, mostly due to the lack of movement. Ukazu does introduced a few visual shortcuts to identifying whose mind is in whose body. Flip's eyes are always blue, whether he's in his own body or Chi-Chi's, for example, and Chi-Chi's are always dark, whichever body she happens to be in. 

There's an even artsier attempt, in which  Ukazu occasionally draws the character in the panel as whoever they are on the "inside" at that moment, only wearing, or lifting up a fake-looking "mask" of the character whose outside they have at the moment (See the cover for an example of what these masks looks like; that's Chi-Chi in Flip's body...although now that I look at it closer, I see her eyes are blue, which indicates that it's Flip in Chi-Chi's body...in Flip's body...? Well, let's not dwell on the cover image, I guess).

Anyway, this was really great, a substantial enough narrative that the second word in the term "graphic novel" is earned, yet still light and fun enough that it often feels like a well-made teen comedy film. 

Godzilla Vs. The Marvel Universe (Marvel Entertainment) When Marvel finally republished their 24-issue 1977-1979 Godzilla series in 2024, the publisher celebrated by a series of variant covers pitting various iterations of the King of the Monsters against their heroes, only relatively few of whom actually met the big guy during his original series (SHIELD mainly took point on fighting Godzilla, but The Champions, The Fantastic Four and The Avengers all took turns taking on Godzilla, but the encounter I remember most vividly from the black-and-white Essential collection I read in 2006 was J. Jonah Jameson yelling at the monster).

With a series of a half-dozen 2025 Godzilla Vs... one-shots, Godzilla returned to the Marvel Universe proper, starring in battles against the publisher's most prominent heroes. In addition to a different title hero or hero team, each of the one-shots also features a different creative team and is set in a different decade of Marvel history.

Despite that last fact, the one-shots don't tell a single cohesive story; this is not an alternative history of the Marvel Universe in which Godzilla co-exists with the superheroes. Rather the varying decades instead seem to simply be a sort of writing prompt, and a way for the creators to use different versions of the various Marvel heroes....and, somewhat surprisingly, different version of Godzilla (evident in the character's differing designs, attitudes and even moral orientation).

And so the stories are each standalone ones. Some seem like they could fit into Marvel continuity (like the 1960s-set Godzilla Vs. Fantastic Four or 1990s set Godzilla Vs. X-Men), others expressly mess with canonical events (the 1980s-set Godzilla Vs. Spider-Man) and some contradict one another (characters said to be dead in the 1970s-set Godzilla Vs. Hulk show up alive in the 2000s-set Godzilla Vs. Avengers). 

Given how disconnected the Godzilla seen in Marvel's late-seventies series was from the filmic version of the character, to the point that the comic book character didn't even seem to resemble Toho's character, it's remarkable the extent to which Marvel here embraces Toho's Godzilla. Not only are all of the various Godzillas pretty faithful to particular designs (though those designs vary from issue to issue, as different versions of Godzilla are used), but we also see various other monsters from Toho's menagerie, human characters from the films are referenced in the dialogue, and Godzilla Vs. Thor is basically a sequel to 2001's Godzilla, Mothra and King Ghidorah: All-Out Monster Attack (as I discussed a few posts back).

My favorite of the stories are the Fantastic Four and Spider-Man ones. 

The first, written by Ryan North and drawn by John Romita Jr., pits Marvel's First Family against the first iteration of Godzilla (seemingly the same one from the original film***, or at least the second one of his species that emerged for Godzilla Raids Again and the rest of the Showa films). It's obviously fun to see JRJR, perhaps one of the quintessential Marvel artists, drawing Godzilla in his style, and he and North get a lot done in a short period of time, having the FF tackle Godzilla hand-to-hand and then ultimately come up with a way to defeat him and save New York City... only to then have to team-up with him to save the world from Galactus' latest herald, a cosmically-empowered King Ghidorah (Godzilla also gets the power cosmic, thanks to The Silver Surfer, the first instance in which the monster gets some sort of Marvel Universe power-up in this trade; later an emergency transfusion from The Hulk will give him Hulk-like gamma radiation powers, the Venom symbiote will attach itself to him and turn him into the first of two incarnations of "Godvenom", and, finally, he will fuse with a sliver of "All-Black The Necrosword" to become "GODZILLA THE GOD BUTCHER!!!").

Though it ends with Reed Richards speaking of the inevitability of a Galactus vs. Godzilla battle (and there's a question mark after the words "The End"), being a one-shot, that teased encounter is never realized. Which is perhaps for the best. I'm not sure how big Galactus is meant to be, given that his size seems to fluctuate by appearance, but here Ghidorah perches on his arm like a bird in one panel, so he would presumably be to Godzilla as Godzilla is to The Thing.

The Spider-Man issue is set shortly after Secret Wars (according to one of the many asterisks and footnotes included in the story), when Spider-Man is wearing his nifty new black suit, but doesn't yet know its weird true nature. This one is written by Joe Kelly and drawn by Nick Bradshaw, one of the best Godzilla drawers here, and an artist it is quite easy to imagine delivering a fantastic Godzilla comic for IDW (He's drawing the Heisei era Godzilla, by the way, although Kelly's talk of Godzilla as a creature that defends the Earth and balances nature seems like more of a Millennium or Monsterverse take). 

Kelly seems to be having a blast on his script, messing with the way things actually happened in the official Spider-Man history (like Mary Jane meeting Black Cat for the first time, Spidey learning about his new suit and Eddie Brock ultimately becoming Venom...Er, "Godvenom"), and peppering the dialogue with '80s references (Similarly, Bradshaw's backgrounds are full of decade signifiers).

Jason Aaron's Thor issue isn't just tightly woven to a particular film, but also to plot points from various Aaron comics, and, more than any of the other books included, serves as a sort of mission statement for Godzilla, a nice standalone portrait of the character, focusing on how Godzilla can never truly be defeated, and pairing he and Thor in an eternal battle. 

Aaron is teamed with Aaron Kuder, who like Bradshaw, not only draws a perfect Godzilla, but is good enough at doing so that it's easy to imagine him drawing Godzilla comics that have nothing to do with Marvel.

While not necessarily my favorite, the Aaron/Kuder story may be the best one.

Also of particular note is writer David F. Walker, Georges Jeanty and Karl Story's Avengers story, which should probably have been entitled Godzilla Vs. The New Avengers, as it's set in the 2000s and features that particular iteration of the team (minus The Sentry, whose powers would only complicate things, I guess). 

More than anything else, it's a parody of Brian Michael Bendis' Avengers comics, complete with a premise that lends itself to talking heads—Maria Hill gathers the team for a tense debrief after they get involved in a Godzilla vs. Fin Fang Foom fight, and they explain what happened to her—everyone talking in quips and jokes and the pages getting more and more panels as things proceed. 

Even if you weren't reading Bendis' Marvel comics in the 2000s though, and thus can't appreciate what a good Bendis impression he's doing, Walker writes some funny moments that the artists execute quite well, including the dismissive way in which Godzilla deals with Fin Fang Foom, the root of their conflict and the unlikely appearance of 1970s Godzilla character Jet Jaguar in a 2000s story (including the look on Triple-F's face when he first sees him, and the Bendis-ian obsession on Jet Jaguar's name).

Rounding out the book are Gerry Duggan, Giuseppe Camuncoli and Daniele Orlandini's Hulk issue and Fabian Nicieza and Emilio Laiso's X-Men issue, the latter of which, being set in the '90s, actually featured a team line-up and status quo I was familiar with, thanks to the cartoon series. 

In addition to Godzilla, King Ghidorah and Jet Jaguar, the stories also include appearances by Toho's Anguirus, Hedorah, Kumonga, Mechagodzilla(s) and Mothra, ranging from a cameo appearance to a boss battle (And Battra, Biollante and Rodan are all name-dropped). 

For a comics reader who loves Godzilla movies (like, um, me), Godzilla Vs. The Marvel Universe, a Godzilla comic in which the title character fights famous comic book characters, is pretty much an ideal book.

Lucas Wars (First Second/23rd Street) As we all know, I tend to be particularly, perhaps detrimentally wordy, so I'm going to give this book by writer Lauren Hopman and artist Renaud Roche a brief, 11-word review, after which you can skip ahead to the next book covered in this column if you like. Ready? 

This is the very best Star Wars comic book ever made. 

Okay, now for the long version...

I think we can all agree that George Lucas' 1977-1983 Star Wars trilogy is the best and most potent pop culture adventure ever made, a perhaps grand proclamation that is nevertheless supported by the fact that here we are, approaching 50 years after the original film was released, and scores of different companies and creators are still devoted to mining Lucas' characters, setting and mythology to create hundreds of different stories in all imaginable media, in film and television, in live-action and in animation, in comics and video games, in role-playing games and toys. 

As much as the original Star Wars film might have struck a chord, I'd argue that almost as compelling (if not quite as endlessly exploitable) as that movie's storyline is the story of its creation. And for evidence, I would marshal Hopman and Roche's graphic novel, a re-telling of that story,

Chances are you have heard much of it before. Certainly, as I read the creators' Lucas Wars, I continually came across details and anecdotes I already knew (Likely from Chris Taylor's 2015 book How Star Wars Conquered the Universe and various Carrie Fisher memoirs, like 2008's Wishful Drinking). 

Their story begins as a biography of Lucas, from his childhood to the promise he showed as a young filmmaker, eventually settling into the story of the making of the original Star Wars, ending with the negotiation between Lucas and 20th Century Fox over the making of a sequel, one in which Lucas is portrayed as completely triumphant, as the suits are now essentially helpless to refuse him anything, given the success of Star Wars (a dramatic reversal from the way they treated him and his weird idea they were never quite sold on throughout the book's previous 180 or so pages). (Well, that's not the very end; that's followed by a very funny, one-page, three-panel sequence starring Mark Hamill.

Hopman and Roche get quite a lot of mileage out of telling—or really, retelling—this story at this point, so long after the fact that pretty much everyone who reads their book will know the ultimate outcome of so many of the conflicts.

So, for example, in the early 1970s, after Francis Ford Coppola's American Zoetrope studio goes into bankruptcy after producing Lucas' THX 1138, Lucas asks Coppola what he's going to do next. 

"I was just offered a movie, but it's not really speaking to me..." Coppola says, holding a glass of wine to his lips. "It's about an Italian family in the forties. Based on a book."

"What book?" Lucas replies, and in the very next, silent panel, Coppola sets the book on the table, so that Lucas (and the reader) can see the cover: The Godfather by Mario Puzo. 

While such knowledge is often used in similar ways, it's quite remarkable how much drama and suspense the creators are able to wring out of aspects of the story like, for example, the casting. 

We all know who the principals will ultimately be, but this is presented as a mystery to the characts in the comic, and that feeling radiates outward to the reader. Especially regarding Harrison Ford's eventual casting as Han Solo, as, at the outset, Lucas told himself he wouldn't cast anyone in Star Wars who had appeared in his previous film, American Graffiti, which Ford had a small role in. (It is fun to see all of the various now-famous actors who auditioned for the roles of Luke, Leia and Han though, and to imagine how differently the story might have unfolded if, for example, he had cast still-a-minor Jodie Foster as Leia, or to imagine Han's various lines as spoken in the idiosyncratic cadence of Lucas' first choice, Christopher Walken).

Ford eventually earned the role by gradually becoming Han, running lines as a Han stand-in with various would-be Lukes and Leias. Well, there was that, and a suggestion by Lucas' wife Marcia, who plays a huge role in his life and the film's ultimate success, who eventually tells the director, "Can you stop fixating on that?! No one gives a rat's ass that he had a small role in your last movie!" 

(Ford would ultimately remake the role in his image, not just through his personal ability and charisma, but by taking some ownership over it, like ripping a big, floppy, Pilgrim-looking collar off the white shirt of his wardrobe that Lucas had wanted, and rewriting some of Lucas' awkward dialogue into something that sounded much more natural. The "George, you can type this shit, but you can't say it out loud!" line appears in one scene, after Ford excises "to activate the ionic particles' subliminal flux" from a line about the Falcon's navicomputer.)

That odd, vicarious suspense is at work throughout the book, as we all know how successful Star Wars would prove to be—if it weren't, why on earth would a couple of French comics makers be making a graphic novel about its making, populated by real-life people who are now household names, decades later?—but it was so far from a sure thing at the time of its creation that it seemed to be in constant danger, Lucas and his collaborators' drive and occasional bluster and studio exec Alan Ladd's constant fighting for it heroically keeping it going, often seemingly against the wishes of the studio (under-)financing.

Also, a whole lot of stuff had to go right. For example, in order to film the space battles the way Lucas envisioned it, his collaborators had to invent an entirely new kind of camera and film-making process.

What I found most remarkable about this telling of the story is the seeming contradiction of the fact that Star Wars seems simultaneously to be the singular, personal vision of the auteur Lucas, a film no one else could make, and that was so dependent of Lucas' control over various aspects...and yet so much of what ultimately ends up on the screen was actually dictated by circumstance and by the contributions of others, both of which sometimes were either in opposition to things Lucas thought he wanted (it was Marcia's suggestion to kill off Obi-Wan, for one thing) or things he didn't directly control and dictate.

It's hard to imagine Star Wars differently at this point, but take, for example, John William's music. Or Ralph McQuarrie's early design work. Or Ben Burtt's sound work, which gave us the sounds of light sabers, TIE fighters, blasters, R2-D2's beeps and Chewbacca's vocalizations. Or the various designers and prop guys who designed Darth Vader's costume, or the light saber hilt, or Han Solo's blaster, or the Millennium Falcon. 

Lucas suggested some of this stuff, he certainly accepted it all, but he wasn't directly responsible for it. In a very real way, Star Wars became the film it was because of Lucas' vision...but also, sometimes, ironically, despite it (There's one funny scene, for example, where Lucas suggests filming the film in Japanese with sub-titles, giving us a brilliantly "acted" silent panel of a person's reaction; Marcia tells George to "stop with that nonsense."). 

It's really astonishing to what extent collaboration made Star Wars, and how much of it turned out to be pure serendipity (the best example of the latter being Williams' score, one of the few things that seemed to have gone completely perfect the first time for Lucas and his fellow filmmakers). 

The other most remarkable aspect is Roche's gorgeous artwork. Like the best comics arc, it is both beautiful and detailed enough to look realistic, while also appearing to be completely dashed off. Smooth, clear, clean and seemingly effortless, Lucas Wars has some of the best art I've seen on a comic book in recent memory.

This is especially impressive given that he's drawing so many real people. Lucas we obviously see at various ages, from childhood to a grown man in the late seventies, and he always looks like the same person. There are lots of very famous names that appear in Lucas' life and behind-the-scenes (I already mentioned Copolla, for example, and then there's Steven Spielberg and maybe a dozen Hollywood names you already know, many of them coming in a sequence during the casting process). 

Harrison Ford, Mark Hamill, Carrie Fisher, Alec Guinness, Peter Cushing and others, we see them as "themselves" and as their characters off and on throughout the book, and Roche does a simply incredible job in making them look like themselves while also looking like characters he himself drew. Photo reference likely helped in the design process for him, but he draws them just as expertly in scenes of which there couldn't possibly have been any reference, like those chronicling Ford and Fisher's romance (which includes one rather cinematic sequence involving a fight and a chase, in addition to the expected canoodling and cuddling).

As someone who has probably read thousands of pages of Star Wars comics at this point, and suffered through a lot of stilted, sub-par art built around film stills in the modern Marvel comics, I wish all such Star Wars-related comics could have art this elegant, art able to balance celebrity likeness and personal style this effectively. 

Particularly fun was watching the film's story take shape, as Lucas struggled to write it. Again, the various permutations that the basic Star Wars story went to are pretty well-known to most fans at this point—Dark Horse even published a comic book series based on one of Lucas' earlier rough drafts, which they entitled The Star Wars—but, this being a comic book story instead of a prose work, Roche is able to visualize what these earlier takes might have looked like.

This leads to various panels in which we see what the characters might have looked like, from character types like the old samurai, the rebel princess and a pair of bickering deserters that are pretty much lifted from The Hidden Fortress, to varying, evolving versions of various characters, eventually involving robots, a big fury alien, and a menacing villain (Amusingly, one version of what became Han Solo was based pretty directly on Coppola, and the Obi-Wan and Luke characters seemed to start off as one character before splitting into two. Oh, and in at least one version, the hero was meant to be a young girl...imagine how different Star Wars fandom in the 2020's might have been if the franchise originally starred a teenage girl!)

Roche dutifully imagines and portrays these different proto-characters, and the lines devoted to describing Lucas' evolving plot brings up aspects that wouldn't make it into the original trilogy, but would be key in the prequel one, including clone factories, the older Jedi knight/younger apprentice dynamic and the name Annakin (Other familiar Star Wars proper names, like Utapau, Aquilae and "Kiber" crystals appear in this section). 

Anyway, if the Star Wars films represent one of the greatest stories of our lifetimes, then the story of the films is one of the other greatest stories. 

If you've any interest in the franchise, or of a pivotal point in Hollywood history, or simply great comics art, I'd highly recommend this book. 

Oh, and obviously the success of the first Star Wars film wasn't the end of Lucas' story, nor is it necessarily the end of Hopman and Roche's telling of that story. Just last month, Les Guerres de Lucas Episode 2 was apparently released in France, telling the story of the making of The Empire Strikes Back and the creation of Indiana Jones (which is something hinted at in this volume). I assume that it will get here eventually, and if that is as successful as this, maybe Hopman and Roche will end up with their own Star Wars saga of sorts. 

Predator Vs. Spider-Man (Marvel Entertainment) The basic formula established in the 1987 action film Predator—mysterious alien big game hunter visits Earth in order to stalk the most dangerous game of all—has proven compelling, effective and flexible enough to support eight feature films of varying degrees of quality over the course of the last 38 years*****, and, after Dark Horse first-published an original Predator miniseries in 1989, more comics than I can easily count.

That formula is so simple that it's almost mathematical: Just change the particular prey that the Predator alien is hunting, and/or perhaps the setting, and you've got something that is still essentially a Predator story while being endlessly riffable. 

And so, in addition to all of the original human being characters that Predators have hunted across decades of Dark Horse miniseries, the character/concept has been particularly proliferous when it came to crossovers, starting with the title creatures from the Aliens film franchise (those comics eventually leading to a video game and a pair of films), and quickly expanding to include the likes of Batman, Superman, the JLA, Judge Dredd, Tarzan, Magnus Robot Fighter, Witchblade and even the cast of Archie Comics*****. 

After Marvel acquired the Predator (and Aliens) license in 2022, the publisher pit versions of the character against first Wolverine, then Black Panther and, finally, their flagship character, Spider-Man. 

Is there a limit to the kinds of crossovers that can fit into the Predator framework? After the pair of crossovers with Archie Andrews and the gang, I wouldn't have thought so, but, reading Predator Vs. Spider-Man, I started rethinking that. 

Writer Benjamin Percy, who wrote both 2023-2024's Predator Vs. Wolverine and 2024-2025's Predator Vs. Black Panther, is once again helming a Predator-hunts-a-Marvel-hero miniseries, and the tone feels a little off, even wrong, as Percy seems to be forcing the square peg of Spider-Man into what reads like a Predator film. 

This is certainly the goriest Spider-Man comic I've ever read, given the amount of blood drawn on-panel (some of it in a grand guignol-style, over-the-top sequence) and the number of flayed, dismembered corpses. That might be expected in a Predator narrative, of course (the movies were rated R, after all), but feels a little surprising (if not shocking) in a Spider-Man story (that guy's movies all being PG-13).

But maybe that's just me? The only Spider-Man title I ever read regularly for any length of time was the original Ultimate Spider-Man by Brian Michael Bendis and company, and I haven't really read any of the character's comics from the maturing, grim-and-gritty 1980s or the more extreme '90s of Venom and Carnage...are serial killers and on-panel gore as rare in Spider-Man comics as they seem to me...? 

Certainly Superman and Archie aren't characters one expects to see in violent narratives full of blood and corpses, but the creators of those Predator crossovers seemed to find the right tone to make those crossovers work. Here though, I kept finding myself surprised by what Spidey was facing. (Of the previous Marvel crossovers, I only read the Wolverine one—reviewed in this column—and that character seems to fit into a violent, gory narrative in a way that a character like Spidey doesn't.)

For this story, Percy is working with pencil artist Marcelo Ferreira, inker Jay Leisten and colorist Frank D'Armata. I didn't much care for the art, which didn't look particularly drawn or comic book-y to me, but then, the style seems to be well within the range of 21st century Marvel comics. They certainly accentuate all the violence of gore of the proceedings, which is more "Look at THIS!" than, like, tastefully rendered with staging and shadows, but there's only so much one could probably do with the script to soften its brutal elements.

That is because of the particular qualities of the Predator alien featured in this story (The title page refers to them as "the Yautja", but I'll keep calling them "Predators", as I have since the 1980s, thanks). It is apparently the Ed Gein (or Leatherface, really) of its species, a trophy-taking serial killer and skin-collector rather than a big game hunter.

Thus, when Spider-Man or the police—here, a single police detective named LaPearl, who seems to be the only one on the force in the city from what we see in the comic—stumble upon this Predator's victims, they aren't just hanging dead from the ceiling like slaughtered cattle, they are also completely skinned, and missing parts of their bodies. There are two full-page splashes in the first issue/chapter devoted to such a reveal of flayed corpses. 

Later, the Predator—which The Daily Bugle's J. Jonah Jameson and/or Peter Parker, who here seems to be a reporter and not just a freelance photographer, have dubbed "Skinner"—will tear the face off a victim with its bare hands as if it was simply removing a mask (Is that even possible for anyone who isn't The Boys' Female? I wouldn't have thought so). It will then carry it around and peek through it, like the New 52's Joker, and, when MJ Watson and a fellow subway passenger stumble upon Skinner's lair, they will find chandeliers of bones, sheets of stitched-together human skin and a throne of spines, skulls and more skin. 

Again, it seems like a lot for a Spider-Man comic...even one marked "Parental Advisory." 

Percy's story opens in a sweltering summer in New York, in which the temperature has reached triple digits. Detective LaPearl, a brown-skinned woman with short, dyed-blonde hair wearing a suit and ever-present sunglasses, is surveying a room full of those flayed, dismembered corpses, while a person in a Hazmat suit snaps pictures on a cellphone and chats with her...a person who turns out to be Peter Parker.

Swinging away, he calls boss Jameson—seemingly having webbed his cellphone to the side of his head to allow him to use both hands for web-slinging—telling him he's got a story, but he gets sidetracked by some robbers in a getaway car. 

By the time our friendly neighborhood Spider-Man can catch up to them, however, the Predator Leatherface has killed, skinned and hung them all up. 

Meanwhile, things get worse for the city: All the air conditioners running so stresses out the grid that it causes a black out. 

Despite this Parker and Jameson, who seem to be the only employees in the weirdly empty Bugle building, go ahead and publish the paper "analog", with the headline " WHO IS THE SKINNER?" and, apparently, the photos of the victims. Jameson and others then start selling the papers on street corners, like modern day newsboys. (In addition to it being illegal to publish the photos of victims without the consent of their families, as LaPearl tells Jameson later, would any newspaper actually publish photos of skinned corpses...?).

Meanwhile, Mary Jane Watson is on the subway, reading over a script for A Streetcar Named Desire, when the lights go dark and the train stops. She comforts a panicking fellow commuter, and then they all get something to really panic about. The Predator alien appears outside the subway, holding the ripped-off face of his previous victim before its own face and leering through its eyeholes.

(By the way, I've not been following Spider-Man continuity in quite a while, but in this book Mary Jane seems to still be in a romantic relationship with Peter; this is one of a few instances which made me wonder if this book is meant to be canonical or if the Predator Vs.... series are all occurring in their own discrete continuity). 

It's in the subway that we get some of the most over-the-top gore, as the Predator seems to proceed to slaughter everyone aboard except MJ and her new friend. When someone opens the subway door, for example, a literal wave of blood pours out of it. And when the two surviving women meet a man, he leads them to the Predator's layer, where we get a few panels of all the arts and crafts it has made out of human skin and bones.

Up top, Spidey decides to do some research on the killings, and, since there's no power, he goes to the darkened New York Public Library, somehow finding the books needed to come to the conclusion that this "Skinner" has been plying his trade for a long time all over the world (Quick question: If there's no electricity to run the catalog computers, how do you think Spidey navigated the shelves of the library? Do the libraries in NYC still have an old-fashioned card catalog? Or is one of the lesser-known benefits of spider-sense the ability to navigate the Dewey Decimal System? And can you imagine starting with just a symbol drawn in blood, and using that to conduct your research? Also, when Spidey-as-Peter shows his research to Jameson, he has images; if there were now scanners or printers running, does that mean Spider-Man tore pages out of various library books? Man, Jameson is right; that guy is a menace!)

Now, despite a few leaps in logic in the plotting, Percy knows his Spider-Man well enough to realize that the hero's extensive rogues gallery already has a particularly long-lived villain whose entire deal is that he hunts Spider-Man for sport. And so, Kraven the Hunter is prominently featured in this story; when he realizes that "Skinner" seems to be a hunter of sorts like himself, he decides to hunt him. When the nature of his prey becomes apparent, and other Predators appear, Kraven immediately develops an interest in and affinity for them. The final panels to feature Kraven are quite great, and this actually makes for a decent Kraven story. In fact, it's not too hard to imagine Percy having reoriented the story so as to make Kraven the protagonist and reduced Spider-Man to a supporting character...or even left him out entirely.

Perhaps it is because Spider-Man has been in so many stories in which he's hunted by Kraven before that Percy decided to go with a Predator who is more serial killer than hunter, and the plot is thus a little more complicated than what one would assume the application of the Predator story formula to the Spider-Man comics might be (That is, basically just swapping Spidey in for Arnold Schwarzenegger or Danny Glover). 

And so complicating things further—or perhaps I should say differentiating things still further—a spaceship full of other Predators arrive, these ones also hunting Skinner, as he hunts without honor and is therefore seen as something of a deviant by the others of his species.

As a Predator story, I suppose it's a decent enough one (there are certainly some scary moments, particularly Skinner's appearance outside the subway window), but it's not a very good Spider-Man story...and given how many other Predator comics there have been over the decades, it's the Spider-Man part of the occasion that makes this particular entry in the franchise of any real interest at all. 

Not only is there that matter of tone and the odd continuity issues, but Spidey doesn't seem much like himself throughout (he barely even quips, save for a few panels in the scene where he fights a trio of Predators in the empty Bugle newsroom), and the action isn't even satisfying, getting hard to read during what ends up being the climactic battle.

If any of you have read it, I'd be interested in hearing what you think because, as I said, I'm not exactly an expert on Spider-Man comics...

REVIEWED:

Brume Vol. 1: The Dragon Awakens (Hippo Park) This French import tells the story of a little girl with mysterious origins who likes to play witch and, when she seeks out a dragon in the woods near her village, we (and, seemingly, she) find out that she might actually be one. The charming book seems to be the first in a new series. More here. 

Diary of a Nature Nerd (Scholastic) While the vast majority of the books I write about at Good Comics for Kids are all-ages comics, and, I assume, can therefore be enjoyed by readers of any age, so long as they like comics. Tiffany Everett's Diary of a Nature Nerd, however, is definitely a kids' comic. It's not a bad comic at all, but I don't think it has too much to offer adult readers like you. It's still a good comic for kids though, especially for those interested in the natural world. More here. 

Hooves of Death Vol. 1 (HarperAlley) Cartoonist Sam Bragg's comic quickly expands beyond its initial (and, admittedly, grabbing) hook of unicorns vs. zombies, becoming an epic fantasy adventure set at the end of the world, involving the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse and various creatures from mythology and cryptozoology. It's a lot of fun and played perfectly straight. More here. 

Hulk Teach (Scholastic) Our old friend Jeffrey Brown is back with a new series for young readers, one in which Dr. Bruce Banner is required to teach middle school for court-mandated public service, stemming from all the chaos and property damage caused by The Hulk's battles. 

While Brown's Banner looks more like the guy from the comics than Mark Ruffalo, the "world" of the comic seems more influenced by the Marvel movies than the comics (That said, Wolverine, Juggernaut, The Rhino and even Onslaught all have cameos; She-Hulk, General Ross and the movies' Avengers all play supporting roles). 

A pair of Watchers note at one point that this particular telling of The Hulk's story seems a little off, a nod to nitpicky Marvel fans I suppose, as here the accident that turns Banner into Hulk for the first time involves middle-schoolers on a field trip, rather than saving Rick Jones from a bomb test. In fact, there is no Rick Jones in this Hulk story. Just like there's no Rick Jones in the Marvel Cinematic Universe (Isn't it crazy that the Marvel Cinematic Universe has been around for 17 years now and is comprised of something like 35 films and I don't know how many TV shows and specials, and yet Rick Jones has yet to appear?). 

Anyway, this was a lot of fun, and it is apparently the first in a series, the next volume having The Thing on the cover with The Hulk. More here. 

Spider-Man: Shadow Warrior (Scholastic) Though the title says "Spider-Man", the main character is actually a new one, a young Japanese man who bonds with a piece of the Venom symbiote that Kingpin has brought to Japan with him. 

The story is set in an alternate history version of Japan, and, in addition to the new character, who goes by various names throughout the book, and Spidey and Kingpin, the book also features Ghost Spider Gwen Stacy and "other" Spider-Man Miles Morales, both wearing new localized costumes, and new versions of The Scorpion and Hobgoblin. 

It's not the greatest comic, and not even the best Spider-Man manga I've read (I preferred Yusuke Osawa 2023's Spider-Man: Fake Red and Hideyuki Furuhashi and Betten Court's 2024 Spider-Man: Octo-Girl), but the black and white artwork and manga-ka Shogo Aoki's ink-heavy style certainly works well for a Venom-esque symbiote-possessed character. The book is somewhat open-ended, but there's no "1" anywhere on it, so whether or not it turns out to be a series must remain to be seen, I guess. More here.

*Here "E. Nigma" is itself a puzzle of sorts. The character who turns out to be the story's Riddler is introduced to us as "Maynard" and he later tells Batman his full name is "Edward...Nigel..Maynard."

**That would be a two-issue story in Brian Michael Bendis and Mark Bagley's Ultimate Spider-Man, wherein Wolverine and the title character swap bodies, memorable for the adult Wolverine apparently trying something wholly inappropriate and sexual with the teenage Mary Jane off-panel that is referred to in passing. ("That thing you tried to do this morning, can we not do that till we're older?" MJ says to Peter once he's back in his own body.)

***As I mentioned in the previous post on Godzilla Vs. The Marvel Universe, I always assumed that there were two Showa Godzillas; the one from the original film that gets skeletonized by the oxygen destroyer at the end and the one who starred in the rest of the Showa series. But while reading this trade paperback, I realized for the first time that perhaps the healing factor introduced in much later Godzilla films could be retconned onto the original Godzilla, and perhaps he grew back from his skeleton to star in the rest of the Showa films. This doesn't always work, though, as Millennium era films Godzilla Against Mechagodzilla  and Godzilla: Tokyo S.O.S. feature a Mechagodzilla that was built around the bones of the original Godzilla that attacked Japan in 1954 in order to fight the Godzilla presently terrorizing Japan. 

****Only two of which I actually think are any good at all: The original, 1987 Predator, and 2022's Prey (Although 1990's Predator 2 has some moments...and included the suggestion that the Predators had been visiting the Earth for centuries and that they had hunted the xenomorphs from Aliens).

*****I can't imagine what's been keeping the inevitable Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles vs. Predator crossover, to be honest.