On 1998's Batman #551-552, guest-starring Ragman

In 1991, DC published a limited series by Keith Giffen, Robert Loren Fleming and Pat Broderick, starring the relatively obscure character Ragman. Though it was not the first appearance by the character—he was introduced in an extremely short-lived "ongoing" series in 1976 by creators Robert Kanigher and Joe Kubert—it was a pretty good place to start.

After all, this was the first post-Crisis appearance by the character, and writers Giffen and Fleming has revised his origin, giving him a new, mystical nature, and one tied directly to Jewish legend. The eight-issue series wrapped in 1992, and I probably read it sometime that year, as I had bought it in back issues from my local comics shop.

I was still quite new to comic books back then, but I was attracted to the character's name, the book's logo and, especially, the character design (All of which you can see on the cover of the first issue). I'm sure the Gotham City setting and the appearance of Batman late in the series didn't hurt, either. 

That series made me a fan of the character, although there weren't many other Ragman comics to track down at the time (I eventually found 1976's Ragman #1, but none of the four issues that followed it). Still, the character stayed in my head, and he was a character I delighted in drawing sketches of; like the Tim Sale version of The Scarecrow from 1993's Legends of the Dark Knight Halloween Special, Ragman would often appear in the corners or along the edges of various spiral ring notebooks and class handouts in high school and college.

The Giffen/Fleming/Broderick limited series lead to another mini-series by a different creative team, Elaine Lee and Gabriel Morrrissette's 1993-1994 Ragman: Cry of the Dead, probably most notable for featuring gorgeous covers by Joe Kubert, after which point the character re-entered limbo again. 

I kept wishing for a return, though, thinking the fact that he lived in Gotham City meant he had to turn up in one of the Bat-books eventually. I mean, what he was doing during "Knighftall", for example, or "Contagion"? Did Eclipso not try to eclipse him in The Darkness Within? Did history going crazy during Zero Hour or the sun going out in Final Night not affect his neighborhood?

You can imagine my delight, then, when he finally turned up in 1998's Batman #551. Sure, that was just a few years after the last issue of Cry of the Dead, but it's forever in teenager years, and do you have any idea how many different Batman books and comics set in Gotham City that DC had published during those years?

Better still, here Ragman was appearing in a comic drawn by the art team of Kelley Jones and John Beatty, who had already done such an amazing job of drawing whatever guest-stars witer Doug Moench was able to work into the series by this point, like Swamp Thing, Deadman, The Spectre and The Demon. (For the purposes of this review, by the way, I'm rereading Batman #551-552 via digital copy of Batman by Doug Moench and Kelley Jones Vol. 2 borrowed through the library. Same place I found the two-parter featuring The Spectre, which I covered here).

First, it should be noted that, as always, the art is great—if over-the-top in every conceivable way, as is Jones' wont—starting right there on the cover of the first issue (at the top of the post), in which we see Ragman's rags attacking Batman, bending one of his rabbit-like ears in the process. 

Spooky, dramatic and wearing a living costume that is like half billowing cape, Ragman is a character that seems almost as if he was specifically created for Kelley Jones to draw. 

Let's look at a few of Jones and Beatty's renderings of Ragman, shall we...?

While it's of course hard to compete with the images of Ragman terrorizing a Nazi, or that badass image of him as a ragged, living green cape flying through the air, I think I like that last image the best, the way his cape is drawn so large that it seems to fill the room, draping itself over crates.

I like how Jones draws capes, usually Batman's, as gigantic, a bit of artistic flair. I like it even more though when he draws them in such a way to suggest that No, it's not just artistic license, the cape I'm drawing is literally thirty-feet long and twenty-feet wide, see? 

Because Ragman's costume has a life of its own, it makes a certain sense that his cape's size might vary from image to image and move in dramatic, unnatural ways that real fabric might not in real life. In that respect, I think Ragman, like Spawn, is a perfect character for Jones to draw (Sadly though, he he's never drawn Spawn, not even on a variant cover). 

Jones doesn't draw his Ragman with the same prominent "bow" that Broderick did at the front of his cape. You can see some cords dangling from beneath his hood in a few of those panels, but they are not as big and prominent as Broderick drew them; Broderick's bow is a bit more like tentacles crossed with a ribbon on a Christmas gift.

Now Ragman's origin, at least the revised Giffen/Fleming one from 1991, was that each of the rags that comprise his costume is actually a human soul, that of an evildoer that the Ragman has punished and absorbed (Broderick actually depicted this occurring on the actually kinda scary cover to that series' second issue). 

The Ragman costume then, is a sortof  living "suit of souls." It was originally created in 16th century Europe by the same Jewish mystics who had created the legendary Golem of Prague. They eventually deemed the golem a defective defender of the Jewish people, as it lacked a human soul to guide it, so they then created the suit of souls, which could be worn by a human defender. The costume and mantle were thus passed on from champion to champion, ultimately going to Gerry Reganiewicz. 

After World War II, Gerry emigrated to the U.S., where he opened the Rags 'n' Tatters junk shop. But when he was killed by gangsters, his adult son Rory Regan found the suit, becoming the new Ragman, now the sort of spirit of vengeance type of character that populate "universe" comics, not unlike DC's own Spectre or Marvel's '90s iteration of Ghost Rider.

Don't worry; you don't need to know any of this before picking up these comics, as Moench recaps it all elegantly enough in the space of a page or two.

In the two-part Batman story, entitled "Suit of Evil Souls", Regan returns to Gotham City, having apparently been in New Orleans ever since the Cry of the Dead minieseries. The reason for his return is a rather unhappy one: Benjamin Mizrahi, a man who used to visit his junk shop, has just been murdered in his synagogue by a member of the Aryan Reich, a racist prison gang-turned-street gang now terrorizing Regan's old Jewish neighborhood.

Both Batman and Regan-as-Ragman pursue the killers. In fact, the first issue opens with an image of Batman swooping down on one of them:

Batman brings the skinhead he was chasing in. 

While Regan talks to his late friend's rabbi about the Reich and how they have been terrorizing Jews and others in the neighborhood, one of their number throws a brick through the window. Regan and his rags give chase. The rags wrap tightly around the evil man they were pursuing, seeking to smother him, but Regan calls them off, and they form his Ragman costume around him.

After he's dealt with the threat though, some of the rags detach again, rebelling against his control, and they then smother the man to death. To his horror, Regan learns he can no longer control the rags. And, what's worse, the soul of the man they killed turns into another rag in Ragman's suit of souls, adding to their evil, and thus making it still harder for him to control them.

The rest of the story then, will revolve around Regan and his rebellious rags. Apparently, the new hate crimes in the neighborhood are exacerbating the evil in the suit, and Regan's own hatred—his hate of the hatred of others—further affects his control of the suit. 

He asks for help from the rabbi (with whom he shares the story of Ragman, from the suit's creation to his own inheritance of it) and, later, from Batman. 

Meanwhile, Vesper Fairchild, the late-night radio host that Bruce Wayne is falling in love with, has a guest on to talk about the rash of hate crimes, and the Aryan Reich prepare to escalate their murder campaign, opening a new crate of weapons in their headquarters. The guns are, of course, lugers. 

Ultimately, the rabbi's lessons about the power of God's love are enough to help Regan regain his control of the rags, and Batman helps him round up the rest of the gang—without allowing the rags to smother them all to death or let them burn up in a warehouse fire that accidentally starts during the confrontation. 

Luckily, there are less than a half dozen members of the Aryan Reich, so the heroes are able to defeat this particular threat once and for all by the end of the second issue. 

Jones does a great job of depicting the rags themselves as a threat. When they go after their victims, they don't do so in the form of the suit, but as a swarm of individual rags, seemingly growing rigid and flying as if by an agency of their own. 

Not only do they attack their victims by clinging to them, wrapping them up like mummies and suffocating them, but they also hold Regan captive at one point, some binding him at his wrists and ankles, while the others swirl menacingly above him. 

They fly through the air, shattering a window to escape and, in one panel, they form a little tornado shape. 

Obviously, antisemitism and racism aren't so easily defeated in the real world, and so we are obviously still dealing with it today. In fact, it seems worse now than at any other point in my life, with the mainstreaming of various racist conspiracy theories and masks-off appreciation of Nazis (often in the form of nihilistic, irony-soaked "jokes" that give those who espouse them a degree of deniability) being mainstreamed by the right. 

Given that, it was interesting to re-read this 27-year-old story today. That the skinhead gang that plays the villains are Nazis is never in doubt. The first one we meet has a swastika and the words "Hitler Youth" tattooed on his arm. Another has the double-lightning bolt "SS" tattooed on his arm. While one of them holds the rabbi at gunpoint and raves about how Jews always cheat, and how they had apparently "tricked" America into joining the "wrong side" of World War II, Jones super-imposes a realistic image of Adolf Hitler in the panel's background.

The victims are here all Jewish, and the interview scene discusses antisemitism, but the rabbi tells us that it isn't just Jews who are the focus of the gang's predation.

And as for the obviously white Batman, well, as the man he pursues in the first issue's opening scene tells him, "And if you're siding with them-- --It's time you were stomped too!"

I don't think Moench ever uses the word "white" though, nor "white supremacy" to describe the Aryan Reich, which is too bad, I think, as I would prefer "white supremacy" be as directly linked to racism and Nazism as much and as often as possible, personally. I wonder if there's a space here in America where people stake out their own thinking as pro-white (rather than anti-Black or anti-Jewish, etc) and, in their minds at least, wall it off from racism or Nazism, despite how close those thoughts might be, or how the former might lead to the latter.

At any rate, Moench has the Aryan Reich refer several times to the "pure" man, as opposed to the white man. 

Moench obviously paints with a very broad brush here—this is mainstream superhero comics, after all, and from a time when a lot of kids were still reading them—and some of the story might seem a bit preachy. Especially the radio interview section, which is essentially a little lecture in the form of a scene.

In fact, in 1998, I might have thought that villains were a little bit too cartoonish to be realistic, but, well, here it is 2025, and in the news the week I am writing this post? The Secretary of Defense, who prefers to refer to himself as the "Secretary of War" and has several controversial tattoos associated with the Crusades and white supremacy, has been accused of ordering the illegal killing of survivors of illegal military operations to kill presumably innocent Venezuelan men accused of drug-trafficking. And the President of the United States has been publicly calling African immigrants "garbage" that he doesn't want in this country. 

At this point, our cartoons aren't even as cartoonish as our real-life villains. 

But back to the comics. These two issues comprise a pretty good superhero morality tale, one about the power of God's love to conquer hate...and, as ever, how strong, good men can and should overcome the work of weak, evil men. And the art is great, as Jones and company make great use of two extremely potent comic book character designs. 

The final of these issues, Batman #552, would ultimately prove a significant one. It is actually the final issue of the Moench/Jones/Beatty team, which had begun their run on the title in 1994's #515. The issue's last page has Batman in the Batcave, remarking on strange balls of light drifting through the cave, "some sort of geomagnetic anomaly...the phenomenon known as earthlights? Or something else...?"

No, they were earthlights, of the sort that some people believe sometimes presage earthquakes. The very next issue of Batman would be part of the "Cataclysm" Bat-books crossover about a massive earthquake striking the city, followed by stories bearing an "Aftershocks" logo, followed by a couple of those with a "Road to No Man's Land" logo, and then the start of the "No Man's Land" mega-story/status quo.

And what became of Ragman? 

Well, if he had anything to do with "No Man's Land", DC never showed us what it was. (I presume he continued to defend his own Jewish neighborhood of Gotham throughout that state of affairs just as Tommy Monaghan and his friends defended their neighborhood The Cauldron. In Regan's case, he must have done so completely off-panel, while Hitman at least devoted a single story arc to its cast during "No Man's Land"...that's 1999's #37 and #38 "Dead Man's Land," in which vampires try to move into Gotham City, if you're interested. It's great!).

The next place I remember seeing Ragman was a short story in 1999's Day of Judgment Secret Files and Origins #1, wherein he is part of a group of magical superheroes deciding where to put the Spear of Destiny (There he was drawn by another of my favorite artists, Hitman's John McCrea). He would later appear in 2005's Infinite Crisis lead-in Day of Vengeance, chronicling The Spectre's war against magic, and the 2006-2008, 25-issue Shadowpact series (the magical superhero team book that DC seemed to have been flirting with launching for years), and he seems to have appeared in the final issues of the New 52 Batwoman for a bit, although I didn't read that. 

As a headliner, this version of Ragman's last appearance was in the 2010 one-shot Ragman: Suit of Souls by Christos Gage and Stephen Segovia. In 2017, writer Ray Fawkes and artist Inaki Miranda were responsible for a six-issue Ragman series that gave the hero a new origin and new, much blander look. As that last series fell between the New 52 reboot and the Death Metal de-reboot, whether it's now meant to be canonical or not, I can't say.

Personally, I liked it better when DC rebooted their continuity only once every generation or so. 

Another Mothman

This week I received an early Christmas gift from my co-worker, the talented artist (and fellow cryptid enthusiast) Gillian DiPofi. 

It is, as you can see, a framed watercolor painting of our favorite cryptid, Mothman, looking somewhere between creepy and socially awkward, as the best Mothmans should.

She also gave me a smaller, more festive Mothman painting, in which the big guy looks ready for the holiday:

To see more of her work, check out her Instagram page here. 

The comics that first got me into comics

Some thoughts...

•These are not the first comics I had ever read. Those would have been the funnies pages of the Ashtabula Star Beacon and the Cleveland Plain Dealer, the little comics that came packed with Masters of the Universe figures in the 1980s and Marvel's Return of the Jedi adaptation. Rather, these are the fist comics I read that led to me wanting to read more comics, the ones that got me hooked on particular series, creators and characters.

•I know I've written about this before, but DC's Advanced Dungeons & Dragons #2, featuring art by Jan Duursema, is what really got me interested in comics as a teenager. I was home sick with walking pneumonia, and my mom had bought me a copy; she and my grandmother had always bought me comics when I was sick, apparently thinking they were the kid equivalent of a magazine. I remember the cover images of some of them quite well, still, and, thanks to the Internet I can identify some of them, like Justice League of America #215, G.I. Joe #44, and Transformers #17. I'm sure there was a Spider-Man in there somewhere, too.

•While some of those cover images were strong enough to embed themselves in my young mind well enough that I can recall them some 35 years later, none of those comics made me want to read another one. But a few months after reading AD&D #2, I happened to be in Perry's Park Street News with my dad, and I noticed AD&D #7 on a spinner rack. The cast had changed somewhat, the setting was different, the characters had all changed clothes (something that seemed unique to me, given the comics I had previously read, as G.I. Joes and superheroes didn't ever change their clothes) and, for the first time, I found myself wanting to find out how comic book characters got from point A to point B. I started reading the book monthly after that, making it the first comic book series I read.

•The Complete Frank Miller Batman and Stacked Deck: The Greatest Joker Stories Ever Told were fancy hardcovers that I bought in the book department of a local department store, which was a thing that still existed in 1989. Both books were presumably published to capitalize on increased Batman interest associated with the movie. They could not be more different, as the former contained Batman: Year One and The Dark Knight Returns, (Plus a story that Miller had drawn for 1980's DC Special Series #21, a Christmas story penned by Denny O'Neil, which stood out like a sore thumb). Rather than seminal, mature epics, the latter was a collection of Joker stories from the Golden Age to the '80s, culled from various monthly Bat-books and not, like, I don't know, I guess Batman: The Killing Joke and Arkham Asylum might have been the Joker-focused equivalent of Year One and DKR...

•Interestingly, neither of these were published by DC Comics, or even Warner Books, which I've seen listed as the publisher of some of the earliest DC trade paperbacks I've come across. Instead, they were from Longmeadow Press. How strange it now seems that bound comic books were once such a rarity in the book market that a publisher like DC didn't even publish their own collections back then. 

•Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles #37 was the first issue of the series I bought new off the rack after having read and reread Mirage's Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: The Collected Book Vol. 1, which contained the first 11 issues of the series and each of the four "micro-series" one-shots. From that point, I started reading the ongoing series backwards through back-issue bins and forward as new issues were released...based, at first, on whether or not I liked the covers. At that point, the book was in a very weird place, having essentially become a very random anthology series from guest-creators.

•TMNT #37 was by Rick McCollum and Bill Anderson. The former penciled, the latter inked, and they shared the writing credit. I loved that issue, and their extremely idiosyncratic art style and unusual take on the characters. They also did TMNT #42 and a series of shorts that appeared in the 1991 full-color Turtle Soup mini-series.

•That Robin trade collects the original Chuck Dixon, Tom Lyle and Bob Smith Robin mini-series plus a three-issue Batman arc by Alan Grant, Norm Breyfogle and Steve Mitchell (That Batman arc was my first exposure to what would become my favorite Batman creative team, and one of my favorite all-time pencil artists). That's eight issues total. And the cost of that trade paperback? Just $4.95. I know 1991 was a long time ago and all, but damn, to think that trade paperback collections were ever so cheap...!

•After three years then, I was reading AD&D and Sandman monthly, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles whenever it came out, whatever Batman comics looked good to me (including a lot of Grant/Breyfogle/Mitchell books from the back-issue bins) and I was starting to dabble with the broader DC Universe, thanks to Armageddon 2001, the bookends of which I eventually read. Then came 1992, "The Death of Superman", Spawn, DC's Eclipso: The Darkness Within annual event, Robin II: The Joker's Wild and, well, I had become a regular comic book reader. It would be a few more years before I started visiting a comic shop on a weekly basis for new books, but, by 1992, I was well on my way.

•Looking over these earliest comics I read, the ones that led me to reading other comics, I see some obvious, apparently perennial entry points into comics: Books based on a license (AD&D), books that inspired mass media adaptations and, in these particular cases, a veritable flood of media attention (Batman comics, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles), crossover events (the Armageddon 2001 annuals) and mainstream media coverage (I had read about both Armageddon 2001 and Sandman in the newspaper; an article on Sandman had specifically said that the Special was a good jumping-on point...plus, it had a glow-in-the-dark cover!).

Bookshelf #8

This week's bookshelf consists of my Archie Comics trades and the start of my modern (that is, those from 2012-2014-ish) DC books, beginning with those featuring the hero one would expect at the vanguard of DC characters.

I should note that, at some point during this period, Archie was sending me review copies, which accounts for some of those Archie books (I did read 'em all, though, and would be happy to discuss any specific ones with any of you.) 

My favorite of these was probably that 200+-page digest collection of She's Josie, featuring as it does tons of superb cartooning from Dan DeCarlo on a comic that has long since been eclipsed by the Josie comic that followed it, Josie and the Pussycats. Speaking of which, I also really enjoyed Marguerite Bennett and company's Josie and The Pussycats Vol. 1, and those three collections of the Jughead book by Chip Zdarsky, Erica Henderson, Ryan North, Derek Charm and company.

As for the Superman side of the shelf, I think that Dark Horse Comics/DC Comics: Superman collection is probably the most "valuable" to me. Its 400+ pages collect Superman crossovers with Tarzan, Mike Allred's Madman and two different Aliens crossovers. It's of course out of print now, and while I'm not sure who happens to hold the Tarzan license (or is the big guy public domain at this point?), Marvel currently holds the Aliens license and is thus unlikely to republish those crossovers. 

This little corner of the bookshelf also holds 2018's Superman: Blue Vol. 1, collecting the first chunk of the "Electric" Superman saga of the '90s that I failed to follow in singles at the time, and that same year's Superboy Book One: Trouble in Paradise, featuring the first ten issues of the '90s Superboy and the #0 issue. 

I was hoping both would lead to second volumes, eventually collecting the entire Electric Superman storyline (I would really like to read the entirety of the Millennium Giants story that concluded it, when a new "Supeman Red" joined the Electric blue Superman) and the rest of Superboy...or at least much of the rest of it (Oh, and Superboy and The Ravers too, please...?)

Unfortunately, like the collections of other '90s series Robin, Catwoman, Aquaman and Green Lantern starring Kyle Rayner, DC seems to have started collecting them but abandoned doing so quicker than I would have liked. 

Finally, seeing those collections of the New 52's Action Comics by Grant Morrison, Rags Morales and company makes me think that it might be worthwhile to revisit those comics at this point, now that the New 52 period is over (and, in terms of DC history, papered over), and they can perhaps be read as a discrete, standalone work, rather than as part of a grand publishing initiative being sold as something meant to replace all that had come before...

Review: 1995's Lobo/Deadman: The Brave and The Bald

I quite clearly remember seeing the house ads for this 1995 one-shot—that sub-title is a memorable one—but I passed on paying $3.50 on a Lobo one-shot. A fan of writer Alan Grant and artist Simon Bisley, I had previously read the 1990 miniseries the pair did with the character's co-creator Keith Gifffen, as well its 1992 sequel, Lobo's Back and 1991's Lobo Paramilitary Christmas Special. I had read a few of the one-shots (like 1993's Lobo Convention Special, drawn by Kevin O'Neill) and, of course, by the early '90s the character was regularly appearing in DC's crossover events. 

By the time The Brave and The Bald had hit stands, I had heard the character's one-note played often enough—that he is, get this, really, really violent—and would have needed something sort of extraordinary to get me to plop down some of my then precious few dollars on another Lobo comic. (And by that point, Lobo had graduated from miniseries and an endless string of one-shot specials to his own ongoing series, also written by Grant. There was no shortage of Lobo comics available for those who were interested.)

I was reminded of this particular one-shot's existence recently when looking up Deadman titles on comics.org for something else I was blogging about. Since I have been writing about so many '90s comics in the past few months anyway, I figured why not check this book out now? After all, is there anything more '90s than a Lobo one-shot...? 

Now, looking back at this comic from a remove of 30 years, I see there are a couple of things that are sort of unusual about it.

First, Lobo was sharing billing with another character here, something that was a bit rare. In the '90s, the only other times this happened was in 1996's Lobo/Judge Dredd: Psycho-Bikers vs. The Mutants from Hell (by Grant, John Wagner, Val Semeiks and John Dell), Lobo/Demon: Hellaween (by Grant and Vince Giarrano) and 1997's Lobo/Mask (by Grant, John Arcudi, Doug Mahnke and Keith Williams). It wouldn't be until after the turn of the century that we got further Lobo team-ups, featuring Hitman, The Authority, Batman, The Roadrunner and Superman. 

And, as you can see, Lobo/Deadman actually predates all of those, so this was his first team-up comic.

Second, the comic's art was by New Zealand artist Martin Emond. He had a handful of prior Lobo credits, and while his art here differs from that of Simon Bisley in quite a few ways, it very much is following in Bisley's conception of the character as something of a compromise between a cartoon and a heavy metal album cover. 

Finally, Deadman seems like a completely random character to pair with Lobo, the two characters literally coming from different worlds (Earth and Czarnia), different sub-genres (supernatural superhero and sci-fi superhero) and different tones (serious melodrama and brash, broad parody). I don't think they had ever crossed paths before this, and I don't think they ever crossed paths since (Although given all the crisis comics DC has published in the last 40 years or so, chances are they both appeared in crowd scenes within the same issue of some comic or other).

Grant and Emond divide their story into three distinct chapters, and there are several surprises of one sort or another, although I will go ahead and spoil the last and biggest surprise, as you've already had 30 years to read this comic unspoiled.

In this first chapter, Lobo is speeding towards Earth on his flying space motorcycle (or a "far-out fragger of a space hawg," in Lobo's words), talking to the reader through the device of a little alien hitchhiker he has picked up (and will ultimately leave hanging from its tied-together antennae from a satellite. This being a Lobo comic, the setting is very much of a painted-looking Looney Tunes sort, with a floating sign pointing an arrow toward Earth.

Lobo is headed to Earth on a bounty-hunting job, and if he's not excited, then at least his interest in piqued:

This guy I gotta arrest sounds like a real hard dude--an' I ain't never met no hard dudes from Earth afore!

'Ceptin' Etrigan The Demon, of course. But he ain't really from Earth...

An' he ain't all that hard, either!

By this point, Lobo has thrown hands with Green Lantern Guy Gardner, Captain Marvel and Superman before, so apparently none of those powerhouses count as hard dudes. As for Etrigan, it's worth noting that Grant wrote The Demon for about 40 issues between 1990 and 1993, and if Lobo and Etrigan weren't exactly friends, they were at least frenemies, showing up in one another's books (And sharing that Hellaween one-shot mentioned above, which I had bought and read for Grant's name and Giarrano's art, although it must not have been very good, as I don't remember anything at all about it now; maybe taht's another old '90s comic I should revisit...). 

Meanwhile, Deadman is floating above a map of the United States, in a very uncomfortable looking, folded-up position. (He is, of course, the "Bald" in The Brave and The Bald). Emond's Deadman looks a bit like Carmine Infantino's original design for the character, and a bit like the emaciated corpse version Kelley Jones drew in 1989's Deadman: Love After Death. He's extremely boney, maybe even skeletal, but doesn't quite look rotten in the same way Jones' does. Also, Emond's version of his long, pointed collar trails off into thread thin curlicues.

Emond's work with Deadman is perhaps the most visually interesting aspect of the book. 

I found his rendering of the ghost a little off-putting, as, in terms of color and texture, Deadman seems to be made of the same "stuff" as everyone and everything else in the comic. There's no visual indicator that he may actually be a ghost, or made of ectoplasm or something, so it looks kind of weird and wrong when Emond draws him climbing into a particular body to possess it. It looks a bit more like they are just being smoothed together, rather than Deadman going inside the person.

You can also see this on the cover, where Deadman's arm is extending through Lobo's chest, but Lobo's flesh also seems to be poking out along with the arm, suggesting some sort of stretchiness to Lobo's body, rather than Deadman simply sticking his insubstantial arm through Lobo's quite substantial chest.

While Emond's Deadman may look as solid as Lobo and the other non-ghost characters, he's unnatural looking in the way he moves, constantly stretching and bending, his limbs often extending behind him and resembling long strings of spaghetti or, perhaps given the red of his suit, licorice. More than once while reading this I found myself wishing Emond had drawn a Plastic Man comic before he had passed away.  

According to his narration, Deadman's therapist has said he needs a vacation, and so he heads for Pismo  Bizmo Beach. He proceeds to take over the body of an apparently good-looking "skurfer" (That's "sky" + "surf") and is in the process of enjoying having oil rubbed on him by various beach babes when their boyfriends from the Steroid Biker gang arrive. A fight ensues, Deadman body-hopping in order to defeat the bad guys.

After a few pages of Lobo wandering around the beach, giving Grant a few scenes to play the hyper-violent "Main Man" off of Californian beachgoers, he arrives at the fray, and we begin chapter two, and the first of those surprises.

Deadman is the bounty that Lobo is hunting! I suppose that should have been obvious from the title, huh? But it still surprised me. This panel, by the way, features what is my favorite joke in the comic, the "Wanted: Alive!!" poster for Deadman.

Okay, maybe it's not much of a joke, but I liked it...

Lobo is armed with a spook-detector and a spook-collector with which to find and capture Deadman, but it is ultimately Deadman who captures Lobo, taking over his body...although not without some difficulty, due to Lobo's alien physiology and single-minded will ("His mind is a seething cauldron of undifferentiated rage, hatred and boredom...Somewhere, really ugly heavy metal music is playing.") 

In order to find out who put a price on his head, Deadman-in-Lobo's body flies to the meet point in outer space...only to be Boom Tube-ed to Apokolips, which is the other, bigger surprise: It is Darkseid who hired Lobo to capture Deadman!

Well, in actuality, it is one of Darkseid's minions. Not Desaad, but a new, original-to-this-book one, a Doctor Kroolman. (If you're wondering why Grant made up a new New God for this story rather than using Desaad or someone, well, this is a Lobo comic, so you can probably guess how it will ultimately turn out for the villain, and obviously this isn't the place to lose valuable IP). 

What does Kroolman want with Deadman? Well, his is a rather weird, though amusingly audacious, plan and, refreshingly, it isn't just another attempt to secure the Anti-Life Equation. We'll get to said plan in a moment.

As Deadman-in-Lobo fights his way through hordes of Parademons—which Emond draws as bat-winged demons from his own imagination, rather than hewing to Jack Kirby's designs—he accidentally uses the gun on his hip, which is the spook-collector, and thus Deadman gets sucked out of Lobo and trapped, ready for delivery to Kroolman. 

The trapped Deadman is a great image, by the way. Here are the first few images of him in the collector, a tiny little head, pair of hands and a mass of red squiggles:

It's only after Kroolman tricks Lobo into accepting a hit on himself—which, unable to ever go back on his word, he goes through with, killing himself to complete the contract—that Kroolman finally explains his plan to Lobo:

Both you and Deadman have been to Heaven. Therefore, you must know your way back--not consciously, perhaps, but deep down inside you--on the spiritual level.

By interrogating Deadman, and matching his buried knowledge with yours, I will be able to locate it with pinpoint precision!

And why does Kroolman want to get to Heaven? Well, he explains, in order for Darkseid to be "the one true God", he has to unlock the secrets of the old gods, secrets that can be found in Heaven. 

So Apokolips plans to make war on Heaven. (I have to assume in an earlier draft of the script, Grant had Kroolman saying something about Darkseid trying to bump off God and take his place, which seems more direct than this business about finding secrets, but maybe DC balked at that). 

Once they're both dead, Lobo and Deadman finally meet face to face, and they do not get along. Kroolman uses his special equipment to start disassembling the pair's spirits but, as the stars of superhero comics so often do, they manage to escape the— Well, I was going to say "death trap", but I suppose that's not quite the right word, since at that point they are both already dead.

Suffice it to say that the guys whose names are in the title are not erased from existence, and the villains' plans to conquer Heaven never come to pass. This is thanks to a pep talk from Lobo ("'S loser talk...dude!"), Deadman's possession abilities and the stupidity of a henchman (Although to be fair to that henchman, I would have done the exact same thing had I found myself in his circumstances).

In the end, Kroolman dies, Lobo flicks off Darkseid and gives him the business and, after a few more neat images of Deadman, he walks off into the background of a panel, one ridiculously long leg trailing behind him as a raincloud forms above his head. 

While there are definitely some fun elements to the book—and I suppose it's something of a must-read for fans of Deadman, if only to see Emond's rather unique take on him—it's still very much one of Alan Grant's Lobo comics, and thus your mileage may vary, depending on how funny you happen to find Lobo. 

Do take that into consideration if you decide you might want to track this book down. It hasn't been collected, so doing so would require either finding a back issue or turning to Amazon's Comixology. 

I do feel it is something of a waste of the "Brave and The Bald" joke, though. I think that might have been better suited to a Lex Luthor team-up book, as baldness is associated with Lex in a way that it isn't with Deadman, even if, yes, Deadman is technically bald...

Bookshelf #7

This week's bookshelf is probably pretty self-explanatory, given how apparent the organizing principle for it is, and how big and clear the spines are.

To the left is, obviously, various Fantagraphics Disney books, most of which come from their Complete Carl Barks Disney Library series, of which I'm missing a lot. There are also the two Lewis Trondheim and Nicolas Keramidas books (Walt Disney's Mickey and Donald: Mickey's Craziest Adventures and Walt Disney's Donald Duck: Donald's Happiest Adventures), a pair of books from the Complete Don Rosa Library (of which I am also missing many volumes yet), a pair of Disney Masters books and the first volume of the Floyd Gottfredson Library (I'm more of a duck fan than a mouse fan, personally).

Perhaps the most interesting of these Disney books from Fantagraphics though is The Return of Snow White and The Seven Dwarfs, as it's such an outlier.

Also, there's one non-Fantagraphics books I stuck among the others, as it's Disney-related, even if it's just a little too long for this particular shelf and juts out in a way that is unsatisfying to look at (Although you probably can't tell from this picture). That's Walt Disney's Christmas Classics, a 2017 release from IDW that collected 33 special daily comic strips produced between 1960 and 1997 that were offered to newspapers to run during the holiday season. 

Because Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck had their own comic strips already, these strips tended to feature characters from Disney feature films and unusual crossovers. I reviewed it for Good Comics for Kids when it was released, if your curious about its contents. It's definitely an interesting book.

Then, on the right of the shelf, we have a handful of works from Osamu Tezuka: Unico, Princess Knight, The Mysterious Underground Men and Triton. Shelving Tezuka side by side with Disney seemed to make sense at the time, but, as you can see from the latest Donald Duck volumes being stacked atop the older ones, I've run out of space, and will have to eventually find a new place for the Tezuka books to make room for the rest of the Disney books...especially if I manage to fill in all the holes in my collection of Barks' duck books. 

A Month of Wednesdays: November 2025

 BOUGHT:

Dracula Book Two: The Brides (Dark Horse Books) The first installment of writer Matt Wagner and artist Kelley Jones' epic Dracula series, originally crowd-funded before being republished by Dark Horse last fall, focused on the origins of the character, dwelling on how he learned his black magic and became the first of a new breed of blood-sucking undead. All of this was extrapolated from a few, relatively short passages of Bram Stoker's 1897 novel, the creators' philosophy apparently being to add to the character's backstory without contradicting anything from Stoker's story. 

This second volume is, in some ways, even more challenging, as it must bridge the ancient past, when the character was the ruthless Voivode of an eastern European kingdom warring with the Ottoman Empire, to the late 19th century, when he would arrive in England as Count Dracula.

That is a time that spends hundreds of years and, despite his relative immortality, would take Dracula from a still-vital young man, involved in the day-to-day activities of ruling his small chunk of Europe and its people, to an aged old man who looks near death (but still looks pretty good for 400!), haunting his crumbling castle. 

The throughline Wagner focuses on is right there in the title: Dracula's three brides. There, he seems to have no more to go on than he did in depicting the first volume's Scholomance, his tutelage under Satan, and his becoming a vampire. The brides have only brief but memorable scenes in the novel, and almost 130 years of adaptations and extrapolations have done little to suggest a way to turn them into actual characters. More often than not, they are almost identical, completely interchangeable monsters lurking in Dracula's castle, a threat little different than a particularly scary group of guard dogs.

The book opens with Dracula feeding, telling us how the blood of a young woman is the best blood, and then disposing of the remains of his victims, lest they rise as the sort of shambling revenants that we met in the first volume, strigoi, which seem more zombie than true vampire. 

The increasingly lonely Dracula longs for some form of companionship, but doesn't yet know how to make more creatures like himself. He eventually turns to the magical mirror he gained at the Scholomance, which offers a cryptic clue, and he sets about trying to create a bride.

Most of the book is devoted to his brides; how he meets them, how he makes them his (which is more and more difficult with each one) and how he turns them. In each case, he gradually becomes disillusioned with them before setting his sights elsewhere. 

While there is a degree of sexual interest and even romance between Dracula and his brides (the acquisition of the third involving the longest attempt at "courtship" before he resorts to trickery), his pride, aristocratic nature and vision of himself as a lord above all (and probably the chauvinism inherent in the era) leads him to treat them as something between children and pets...sometimes unruly ones which must be chastised and punished.

By the end of the book, he finds that his life pretty much revolves around "maintaining" them, hunting on their behalf, as finding new victims becomes increasingly hard, many of his followers having moved on and the neighboring population growing increasingly superstitious and wary of him. In fact, this weird, gothic domesticity, in which Dracula has become something of a hen-pecked husband toiling on behalf of his wives, seems to be what drives the saga on to its next novel-like installment, as he looks to England as a new challenge to be conquered (and a much-needed new hunting ground). 

As was evident in the first volume (and is repeated more or less verbatim in some of the blurbs on this volume's back cover and flaps), Wagner's Dracula biography is the comics story that Kelley Jones was born to draw. It's rare to find a character and story so perfectly suited for the artist drawing them. 

In addition to Dracula, at various ages and attitudes and in various monstrous forms, with his ever swirling, billowing cloak and blank red eyes below a furrowed brow (eyes given an unsettling light by colorist Jose Villarrubia), Jones get to draw wolves, bats and rats, ghosts and a werewolf, multiple strigoi, and more gore and violence than one usually sees in vampire narratives, images that would probably prove truly upsetting if they weren't drawn in Jones'  highly expressive, usually exaggerated style, which is more cartoonish grand guignol than modern cinematic torture porn. 

The settings are likewise perfect for Jones, including a castle in which the artist draws each and every brick in each and every wall, and the spooky forests full of skeletal trees that surround it.

Given the particular subject matter of much of this volume, Jones is also called on to draw a lot of women, often nude or in states of undress, and the drawing of beautiful women and sexual content is not something I usually associate with Jones' work, perhaps given how much of it has been devoted to corporate, mainstream comics like Batman. Still, he acquits himself well, here.

The erotic nature of a vampire feeding is prevalent throughout, and there are certainly sexual scenes involving Dracula and/or his brides (one licking the blood from another while gently caressing her breast, for example, another on her knees sucking blood from Dracula's extended fingers for another), but there's no sex-sex. Indeed, although there are a couple of panels showing Dracula lying next to a naked bride or two, it's unclear if Wagner and Jones' vampires can have or are even the least bit interested in literal sex, as they are so focused on the metaphorical sex of feeding on blood.

As with all of Jones' comics work, the book is full of striking, memorable images. The bricks really stood out to me, given this era of mainstream artists taking technologically assisted shortcuts. There was one example late in the book, where Dracula stood posing on what looks like a pile of rubble, his courtyard in the background, Jones seemingly having inked in hundreds of books. I paused to marvel at the remarkable image, and then turned the page, only to be confronted by a two-page spread of the castle, some four times the size of the panel that had originally stopped me cold with its great detail.

There's a climatic sequence in which villagers storm the castle, holding aloft their church's cross, intent on putting an end to the monstrous Dracula once and for all, in which he unleashes his sorcerous powers, and the wild imagery contains shock after shock: Lightning from the sky tearing chunks of the castle and dropping them on victims, a mass of rats pouring like a loathsome avalanche over the invaders (there are some real squirm-inducing panels in this sequence which, again, if drawn in a more realistic style than Jones, would likely prove nauseating) and a swarm of bats, one of which tears a woman's face apart.

And then there is an image of red-eyed wolves in the foggy forest, the top of their heads breaking above the surface of the mist, like crocodiles peeking above the water.

Unsurprisingly then, the book is full of potent imagery.

On the last page, Dracula, preparing for his move to London, thinks of what the modern, English equivalent of "Voivode" might be, and settles on "a title of rank and consequence."

"And thus I became...COUNT DRACULA", those final two words lettered by Rob Leigh in big, ornate gothic font.

If that weren't enough to clue readers on what to expect next, there's the last page, reading "The blood drenched history of the vampire lord continues in Dracula Book Three: The Count...Coming Soon."

Not soon enough for me. I think the next book might be the most challenging for Wagner yet, if it indeed covers the events of the novel. In these first two books, he had to fill in big, blank areas, spanning centuries. Next, he will have to contend with the opposite problem, of retelling a story so often told, where in there is hardly much blank space in which to play. It will be interesting to see how Wagner and Jones approach it...and if Count Dracula is so easily dispatched as he was in the novel, given the show of power that comes at the climax of The Brides...

The Spectre by John Ostrander and Tom Mandrake Omnibus Vol. 1 (DC Comics) Given the quality of the past comics of writer John Ostrander and Tom Mandrake I have read, and how good the handful of issues of their 1992-1998 series The Spectre that I had previously read were, I was assuming that this collection would be pretty great.

I mean, you would have to be under that assumption in order to drop $125 on an 800-page hardcover, right?

Still, I was surprised at just how good the book actually was. I don't think the word "masterpiece" is too strong a word to apply to it, and I would include it among the best DC Comics ongoing series I've ever read, like Swamp Thing, Sandman, Hitman, Hourman and maybe Grant Morrison's JLA. 

As I said, I had read some issues of the series before. Looking at the cover gallery on comics.org, I see that I had previously bought #1, #8, #13, #0 and #51 new off of the rack. And I picked up some issues from various discounted back-issue bins, usually because I liked the covers so much (#22, #26, #31, #54, #56). And this year I bought electronic copies of #54 and #62, in order to revisit the origins of Mister Terrific Michael Holt, who a lot of people were meeting for the first time this summer, thanks to the new Superman movie.

Still, knowing that Mandrake is a great artist whose spooky, ink-heavy style is absolutely perfect for The Spectre character, or that Ostrander could turn out strong individual scripts, didn't prepare me for the scope and sweep of the story when it's read in order, chapter by chapter, all in a single sitting (or two or three or maybe even four sittings; this collection was 800 pages). 

A unlikely fusion of the horror, crime and superhero genres, the book reads at once like a Vertigo mature readers book that imbues a long-lived lesser DC property with more sophisticated, literary stories for adults while also keeping a foot firmly planted in the DCU setting (Superman and Batman will guest-star, for example, and the book participated in the various crossover events, like the post-Zero Hour zero month, Underworld Unleashed and Final Night, though those latter crossovers come later than the comics collected herein). 

I fairly raced through the volume, finishing it in record time for a book quite so big. The drama was often intense, and the suspense such that it wasn't always an easy book to set down. For example, one major storyline in this particular volume involves The Spectre/Jim Corrigan's newfound friend Amy Beitermann, who fortune teller Madame Xanadu says is doomed to die under the knife of a serial killer—is her destined fate set in stone, or can the almighty Spectre change it? 

Another story arc involves The Spectre mulling over whether or not to destroy all of humanity, a threat made all the more serious after we see him pass judgement on an entire (fictional) country riven by civil war, by killing every man, woman and child that lived there. 

Full of difficult moral and ethical dilemmas and various debates on such broad, abstract subjects as justice, vengeance, guilt, sin, faith, grief, crime and atonement, this Spectre collection can be heavy stuff, but it is always related to the core concept of the character—an all-powerful spirit tasked with avenging the murdered dead by heaven.

It also deals quite a bit with the cosmology of mythology of the DC Universe, an almost unique setting whose Heaven, Hell, afterlife and the beings that populate such places have been gradually built up over the course of, by the 1990s, some 50 years of stories by dozens of creators. (I say "almost unique" because the Marvel Universe is similar in its gradual construction over time by many hands.)

And the visuals are uniformly spectacular, given the title character's limitless powers and previously established habit of transforming his body and/or his victims to deliver ironic punishments. 

For example, in the very first issue, Corrigan witnesses a drive-by shooting by a drug-dealing gang. His response? We see the gigantic head of The Spectre rising out of the pavement as if he were emerging from water, open wide his mouth and swallow the gang's getaway car. Then we see the giant Spectre, the fingers on his right hand replaced with the upper bodies of four victims (not unlike that memorable image of Felix Faust on the cover of 1962's Justice League of America #10). In his other hand he holds aloft a syringe, filled with fire, and plunges it into his arm, pushing down the stopper so that the flame flows though his vein, and burns the men alive, flaying off all of their flesh until they are just screaming skeletons.

Later, in one of my favorite visual sequences, gunmen target a victim and shoot hundreds of rounds at him. A tiny little Spectre appears between the intended victim and the first bullet, which he stops in mid-air. He does so for all of the other bullets, too, and then re-directs all of the bullets like a swarm of angry bees, knocking aside the shooters and then raining the deadly bullets down like hail on the car in which the man who ordered the killing was waiting.

It's hard to imagine such images in other media. Surely computer-generated imagery would make such scenes possible in a live-action film, for example, but there they would look weird and likely fake. But in comics? It all seems perfectly natural. 

The book collects the first half of Ostrander and Mandrake's Spectre series, which means 32 individual comic books, the first 31 issues of the series and August of 1994's #0 issue, which fell between issue's #22 and #23. Remarkably, Mandrake pencils and inks almost all of them himself, and he also provides seven of the covers which, more often than not, are provided by a who's who of artists (Among those collected here are covers from Simon Bisley, Dan Brereton, Glenn Fabry, Michael Wm. Kaluta, Alex Ross, Charles Vess and Matt Wagner and others...Joe DeVito's is a particular favorite of mine, for the obvious reason).

There are a handful of fill-in artists, though, the most noteworthy being pencil artist Jim Aparo, an artist who has drawn plenty of Spectre comics before, who is here being inked by none other than Kelley Jones. It's an incredible pairing that really needs to be seen to be believed, and a perfect treat for Batman fans who may, like me, find themselves lingering over each panel and parsing which artist drew which line (I thought this pairing of artists with incredibly disparate styles similar to the comics in which Bill Sienkiewicz inked Aparo that same decade, examples of which Mike Sterling posted on his blog a while back). 

In addition to all of those comics, DC offers plenty more to make buying this omnibus—and you should buy it, or at least ask your local library to purchase a copy of it so you can borrow it from them—worth the significant amount it costs.

There is a brand-new introduction by Ostrander, a reprint of the introduction Ostrander wrote for a 1993 trade collecting the early issues of the series (trades being much rarer back then, DC only published two collections prior to this omnibus) and, most rewardingly, seventeen pages of original commentary by Ostrander, in which he talks about the book, issue by issue.

Finally, there's about 20 pages of behind-the-scenes art, including the sketches of the principal characters by Mandrake that were included in the original pitch (Interestingly, in his original sketch of the lead character, Mandrake gives The Spectre his traditional collar with buttons, which he would lose by the time of the first issue). 

Oh, and if you're wondering if the omnibus' cover might glow in the dark, as the covers for a handful of issues of the original series did, let me assure you that not only does the cover, a new original image, glow in the dark, but so does the image on the back (taken from the cover of 1993's Spectre #8) and the logo and images on the spine.

Now I realize this makes about 20 paragraphs devoted to the book, which is plenty long enough for a review but, um, well, I still have a lot to say about it. Given the length of the collection—again, 32 issues and some 800 pages—I plan at discussing it at greater length in a future post. Actually, two posts, as there's a particular aspect of the book, I also want to spend some time on. So, look for those in the near future, I guess...

BORROWED:

Justice League: The Atom Project (DC Comics) I went back and forth with myself a bit over whether or not I should even write about this book, given just how bad it is. At this point in my life (and in my comics-writing-about "career"), I'd really prefer to focus on good comics, suggesting things I think readers might enjoy, rather than on bad comics, and warning potential readers away from them. 

And I would certainly warn you against reading this; it is easily the worst comic book I've read in recent memory. Not just poorly conceived or somewhat problematic in its plotting, not simply lacking here or there. Rather, I found every single page hard to force myself through, and the overall package careless in its production. 

At various points I found myself marveling that a professional editor approved of the work that was turned in, and that any publisher would go ahead and publish it, let alone DC Comics, one of the two biggest names in superhero comics and one of the biggest forces in the North American comic book direct market.

This is mostly the fault of the art, and perhaps I shouldn't have bothered reading it at all given what I saw on the cover, or during a quick flip-through, as it certainly didn't look good (You may note that Captain Atom is off-model on the cover that DC chose to use for the trade paperback collection; the artist or colorist forgot to include his gloves and boots).

But I thought Justice League Unlimited Vol. 1 was if not really a great comic, a well-made one with an interesting premise, and so I was interested in seeing how its spin-offs might use that premise to tell different stories. 

Mike Perkins is responsible for the art on the book. Chances are you have encountered the British artist's work before, as he's been professionally making comics for over 30 years now, for 2000 AD, Caliber, CrossGen, Marvel and DC. Reviewing his bibliography, I imagine he's now best known for his work on Captain America, as he was drawing portions of Ed Brubaker's seminal run (along with artist Steve Epting).

I've read some of his past work, but I don't recall it being...like this. In The Atom Project, Perkins doesn't merely rely on photo reference for his art, but he seems to incorporate it into his art, ala Greg Land. So, every single panel appears to be a photograph imported into a computer program and manipulated, with, say, superhero costumes drawn over the source images. The backgrounds—settings, cars, rubble, even background figures—don't seem so much manipulated as simply dropped in, a form of visual "sampling", I guess. 

The result is a comic book that looks like a rather rushed, extremely careless photo-collage, rather than something a human being might have drawn with their hands. 

Had Perkins been exacting in his reference/source material, then I think his work here—colored by Adriano Lucas—might have worked better, but there's no consistency in the imagery at all. The main character, The Atom Ray Palmer, might look like Matthew Smith's Doctor Who in one panel and like Hugh Grant on the next page. I swear I saw Bill Pullman in The Atom's costume at one point. Basically, as photorealistic as the art might be, it's completely fluid. Ray Palmer is a white guy with brown hair; every other characteristic about his face differs panel to panel (The same goes for the other major character, The Atom Ryan Choi, who usually looks like a younger Asian man with black hair...but his face changes panel to panel too).

Now, the pages are broken into panels and one can read those panels and the dialogue balloons and narration boxes as sequential art is usually read, but the individual pictures in those panels? They're just barely sequential, and if it weren't for the colorist and the fact that superheroes wear such distinct costumes, it would be impossible one wouldn't be able to read it in the way one normally does comics art at all. 

The script is written by Ryan Parrott and John Ridley, and the book's premise is rather odd. This seems to be a six-issue miniseries specifically commissioned to resolve a dangling plotline from Mark Waid's earlier Absolute Power event series—specifically, that when the superheroes got their stolen super-powers back, the proper powers didn't always end up with the proper person—but then, that plot point was sort of tacked on to Absolute Power's ending, as if Waid had written it just to set up a follow-up like this one (That is, the plot point wasn't left dangling, but a dangling plot point was grafted on). 

It is, as we have previously seen in the pages of Justice League Unlimited, up to The Atom Ray Palmer and his one-time successor-turned-colleague The Atom Ryan Choi, a pair of super-scientists, to solve the problem and make sure that the right people end up with the right powers. 

In this series, it doesn't go at all as smoothly as it did in JLU, though. In the second issue of that series, we see The Atoms restore Atom-Smasher Albert Rothstein's lost powers to him in the space of a few panels, and though he complains about the process being excruciating, it seems to work. But in The Atom Project, Al in being kept in a cell on the Watchtower by The Atoms, and he's seriously deformed, his size-changing abilities resulting in a hideously over-grown right arm and an Elephant Man-like head. 

Parrott and Ridley divide the story into two timelines and jump back and forth between the two throughout. One is set in the present, wherein The Atoms are hunting Captain Atom, as is the U.S. Air Force and, eventually, a third party. In the other timeline, set in past, we see what led to the conflict between the heroes.

The split timeline isn't necessary, of course, but it does allow for the sort of in media res opening that comic books have long been fond of, and it help keeps one interested, perhaps even invested, in the first half or so of the story.

The book opens with a conversation between two unseen characters, their dialogue appearing in two sets of narration boxes, one red and one blue, as they comment on the action, which involves Nathaniel Adam on the run from the military, eventually being confronted by Palmer, who floats down from the sky somehow, as if he could maybe fly now...? 

One might assume that the two speakers are Palmer and Choi, given what we know about The Atom Project from JLU, what we see on the cover of the trade, and the fact that both characters used to wear red-and-blue costumes. But it is not them. The actual identity of the speakers won't be revealed until issue #5; during the first 100 or so pages, the mysterious voiceovers will come and go and are often accompanied by the presence of a weird-looking, sometimes green-ish fly.

Here is what is happening. Captain Atom never regained his powers back at the end of Absolute Power and has turned to The Atoms on the Watchtower for help (The Watchtower is here eerily dark and devoid of other heroes. While scenes set there in JLU and Titans showed backgrounds full of cameoing DC heroes going about their business, here the only hero we see aside from Captain Atom and The Atoms is Dr. Light. Ray talks to an off-panel Red Tornado at various points and, in the very last issue, The Question and Mister Terrific put in appearances, but throughout a majority of the series, it's just Atom, The Atoms and their human lab rats).

Meanwhile, The Atoms have been tracking down various civilians who have gained stray super-powers, apparently as a result of the events of Absolute Power, although the exact mechanics of all this aren't really clear (Palmer and Choi refer to "meta-energy" a few times, and even though we know the origins of the powers of every hero in the DCU is more or less unique, here they are treated as if they are all, at their root, the same thing. That's fine; a degree of hand-waving is likely necessary. I mean, the way Amanda Waller stole all the powers in the first place was via Amazo technology, so we're talking about Silver Age comic book science from 1960 here). 

I suppose I should here note that neither Atom much looks like they originally did upon their comic book introductions, nor like they have traditionally been drawn. Gone is the dynamite red and blue costume that Gil Kane designed for Palmer, and the pretty-much-the-same version of it that Choi wore. 

Now Ray wears a black version of that costume with red boots and gloves, and a white layer over his torso. He's also got shoulder pads for some reason. It's not as good as his original costume but, as Dan Mora drew it in the pages of JLU, it didn't look that bad...I mean, it wasn't as bad as The Flash's new costume, at least.

Choi, meanwhile, wears a costume that seems to be inspired by the goofy armor-like one the CW gave Brandon Routh in the "Arrowverse" TV shows, complete with shoulder pads, a helmet and visor. It's mostly blue and black. 

These costumes are not Perkins' fault, at least, not as far as I know; the characters showed up dressed like that in the Mora-drawn JLU first. 

The Atoms perform painful experiments on Captain Atom, trying to restore his powers, while presiding over cells full of maybe a dozen or so other civilians who have gained unwanted powers, civilians they hope to remove the powers from. Oh, and poor, deformed Atom-Smasher.

Eventually, they track down Cap's missing powers, restore them, and then Captain Atom develops or discovers a new ability, I guess. Somehow, he is able to "take" powers from others the way that an Amazo robot can and add it to his own power set. Later we will see that he is then able to gift copies of those superpowers to others.

And so, Captain Atom becomes something of a superpower battery/superhero factory, able to grant powers to others at command. 

And General Wade Eiling, who is apparently no longer in a shaven Shaggy Man body and is back to being an Air Force general does so command (I suppose one benefit of DC doing something like a half-dozen continuity reboots in a decade or so means that nobody knows what actually "happened" before, and so writers are free to ignore any developments they like when using many characters). He tells Cap to bestow super-powers to various Airmen serving under Eiling, which he does, since he feels compelled to follow orders (I guess Captain Atom is still an active miliary man? The writers nod in the direction of this weirdness by having Captain Atom tell Choi, "My status has always been a bit...fuzzy.")

Obviously feeling conflicted about cranking out super-soldiers for Eiling, Captain Atom goes on the run...and The Atoms team-up with the U.S. military to capture him, so that he can keep making them super-soldiers. This, needless to say, seems a little...fraught, and the sort of thing one might imagine someone else in the Justice League might have something to say about (Again, though, I don't know if we're meant to remember Eiling's actions from, say, Grant Morrison and company's JLA run. But still! One might think Superman, Batman or Wonder Woman would maybe want to have a meeting about giving the U.S. a bunch of super-soldiers). 

Eventually, Eiling calls in Major Force and, to complicate things further, two hooded, cloaked figures from the "super-terrorist" organization Inferno, which was introduced in JLU, also show up to take Captain Atom for their own purposes. 

Great lengths are taken to keep these hooded figures' identities hidden for a bit, to the point of being a little silly. The one with pink hands wearing a yellow ring on his finger, for example?  He doesn't use his normal powers, which would reveal his identity; instead, the pair seem to use high-tech forcefields and weaponry, even when they're trying to kill their foes.

Okay, I am now going to spoil the identity of Inferno, which was previously revealed on the last page of the Justice League Unlimited Vol. 1: Into the Inferno trade (and thus I think I spoiled it previously on here), so stop reading if you haven't yet read that book and want to be surprised.

Inferno is actually just The Legion of Doom...but! In a twist, they are a Legion of Doom from the past, specifically from when Waid's Batman/Superman: World's Finest series is set (So, the pre-Crisis 1980s, our time). (They also, incidentally, include a new villainess I didn't recognize. Her name is used once, and when I looked her up later, I learned she is apparently a new character.)

The time travel doesn't really come up here, though. The two cloaked figures, and the two voices that we heard talking about Captain Atom in the very first scene of the series? They were Lex Luthor and Sinestro. 

With help from Choi, Captain Atom battles his way out of The Legion's clutches (and then the villains and their headquarters relocate, as detailing the real fight with them is actually taking place in the pages of JLU, I'm not entirely sure why they are in this series at all) and Palmer belatedly decides to stand up to Eiling regarding the manufacturing of super-soldiers. 

Fortuitously, in the closing pages everyone learns that Captain Atom's newfound ability to grant others super-powers is actually temporary—that is, the powers he gives others soon fade away—resolving the book's core conflict just as suddenly and randomly as it began. 

(I should perhaps note that over at Atomic Junk Shop, Greg Burgas said of this book that "It's fine" and "mildly entertaining, but that's it," and that "Perkins does nice work on the art," so perhaps your mileage may vary on how readable the art actually is? Maybe my revulsion to is a Caleb problem more than a Mike Perkins problem?)

Justice League Unlimited/World's Finest: We Are Yesterday (DC) I've been reading Mark Waid and company's Batman/Superman: World's Finest collections by borrowing them from the library. But I bought the first volume of Waid's Justice League Unlimited...and was planning on buying that series in trade going forward. But the second and next JLU trade is actually a crossover with World's Finest, which meant I had to decide whether to borrow it, as I do with World's Finest, or buy it, as I had with Justice League Unlimited. 

As I am always leaning towards not spending money rather than spending it, I opted to borrow this, so I guess I'm done buying JLU in trade already...?  You just lost a trade sale, DC!

As to why these two books are crossing over at all, other than the fact that Waid writes both of 'em, I'm not entirely sure. Given that they are set in two different time periods, with World's Finest seemingly set somewhere in the early 1980s/late Bronze Age and JLU set in the present, it's not a terribly natural crossover, and thus necessitates a time travel element.

Now the mysterious "super-terrorist" organization Inferno, which vexed the new iteration of Justice League throughout the first volume of JLU (and part of the Justice League: The Atom Project miniseries), were revealed at the end of that volume to be a Gorilla Grodd-led iteration of The Legion of Doom. As we learn, though, this Legion isn't a modern one, but one from the past. 

Why? I don't know. It's possible Waid went that route because it makes the involvement of the heroes of World's Finest, past versions of Superman, Batman and Robin Dick Grayson, relevant, and that choice was therefore made specifically to allow for this crossover. 

The in-story reason, though, is articulated by the present-day Grodd in this trade as he considers a plan to take on the new army of superheroes that make up the League: 

Suitable partners are scarce. 

Alas, those who once formed our "Legion of Doom"--Luthor, Joker, Manta, others--are equally useless to me.

Some have reformed. Some have degraded. Still others are now too psychotic to be allies.

I'd need evil in its prime. 

This will lead to a plan that he forms in the first JLU issue included, and the second chapter of this trade.

But first, the past! In this first chapter, set in the time of World's Finest, Waid and artist Clayton Henry has the title team, Flash Barry Allen and a ring-less Hal Jordan (There's a funny moment in which Bruce Wayne learns that Hal doesn't wear his power ring when piloting) thwart an attempt by Grodd to take over Gorilla City. It has nothing to do with "We Are Yesterday" really, but serves as a decent prologue, and one that introduces Grodd and his basic deal to anyone who might be unfamiliar.

In the Travis Moore-drawn present of the second chapter, at which point Waid is joined by co-writer Christopher Cantwell for the rest of the proceedings, Grodd comes into possession of some of Martian Manhunter's free-floating mental powers, boosting his own (This follows a weird plot point in Waid's own Absolute Power, wherein superpowers stolen by Amazon robots are lost or swapped). This gives the super-gorilla a little rainbow-colored, butterfly-shaped crystalline-looking tiara for some reason.

He then manipulates young Leaguer Airwave into thinking the League is bad, spying on them for him and, ultimately, allowing him to travel back in time to the pages of World's Finest to gather the Legion from that time and bring them back to the present, where, armed with "time guns", they will storm the Watchtower satellite in pursuit of a power source introduced in All In, one capable of transforming Gorilla Grodd into the Gorilla God. 

No, seriously, he says that:

Then we get an issue of Dan McDaid drawing Grodd's recruitment of the past Legion and their attempts to siphon energy from various time travel devices, leading them to battle with World's Finest's Superman, Batman, Robin, Green Lantern Hal Jordan, The Flash, The Atom and Plastic Man.

(I suppose we should here pause to consider this Legion. It's...not one that I am sure actually ever existed back then but do correct me if I'm wrong. It's basically that from the Challenge of the Super Friends cartoon, the "Banded together from remote galaxies are thirteen of the most sinister villains of all time" Legion, minus Brainiac, Giganta, The Riddler, Solomon Grundy and Toyman, and with The Joker and a new, original character added. I'm not 100% on why the line-up is smaller than that of the cartoon that inspired the team, but perhaps the cartoon line-up was just too many characters to juggle? Which is ironic, given how many characters are on this version of the League, I guess). 

At one point, the World's Finest of World's Finest get flip-flopped in time with their modern-day selves, so that the younger versions of the heroes stumble into the present-day DCU (and fight similarly time-travelling villains), the older versions get lost in the timestream and, at the climax, Airwave uses his powers to summon an army of heroes from various timelines to fight the Legion in the defeated League's stead. 

And here we get the likes of '90s Aquaman, Batman Beyond's Batman, The Terrifics, New 52 Harley Quinn, "Zero Year" Batman and "Year One" Barry Allen, among others. And then the League returns. And there's a big, huge fight with tons of characters, all drawn, in this final issue/chapter, by Dan Mora. 

In the end, the heroes win and the villains lose, as one might assume, but there seem to be some interesting repercussions, as Superman tells the time-lost heroes like Jonah Hex, Ultra the Multi-Alien and company that they seem to be stuck in the present and, on the last page, two cosmic beings discuss how time in "this universe" is coming to an end. 

Perhaps that was the reason for including time-travelling villains from the past rather than the modern villains, then, to add to the screwing-around-with-time element enough to signal a major crisis...?

In addition to Waid's titles, some of this will surely come into play in the upcoming event series DC KO, as the copy of the trade I have sitting in front of me right now, unlike the image above taken from Amazon, has the words "The Road To DC KO" on the cover near Luthor's fingertips. 

While both World's Finest and Justice League Unlimited might seem like toybox comics, allowing Waid to play with characters from two distinct eras of DC Comics publishing history, this particular crossover storyline multiplies that element by a factor of ten, so that, by the end, there's an avalanche of DC IP on the page.

It's a pretty chaotic story arc, and I confess I have already lost track of some of the players, but it's a fun kind of chaotic, and there are few creators better suited to playing with DC toys like this than Waid and, in the last chapter anyway, Mora. 

Let This One Be a Devil (Dark Horse Books) I have read a lot of the prolific writer James Tynion IV's DC super-comics work, which I always found to be good-enough if unremarkable. Because of that, I never felt moved to check out any of his other creator-owned work, but I have been excited about his recent works on the outré like 2023's Blue Book (about the 1961 Betty and Barney Hill UFO abduction saga), 2025's True Weird anthology (some stories of which were back-ups from Blue Book), and now Let This One Be a Devil, which, if you know much of anything about the Jersey Devil, is obviously about one of America's most famous monsters.

As a long-time comics reader who is also interested in cryptozoology and monster folklore, a series about the Jersey Devil is one of those occasional works that I feel was made just for me. Quite coincidentally, I had just finished James McCloy and Ray Miller Jr's The Jersey Devil (Blue River Press, 2016), a slim volume recounting much of the lore of the monster, last week, so when Let This One Be a Devil showed up at the library, I was pretty primed for it. 

For this book, which was originally a four-issue miniseries, Tynion is working with co-writer Steve Foxe and artist Piotr Kowalski. I'm not familiar with the previous work of either, but Kowalski is certainly a revelation. His style is highly realistic; his panels filled with lots of ink in the form of delicate linework. It's quite well-suited to the book, most of which takes place in 1909, the year of the biggest flap of Devil sightings, although there are plenty of flashbacks (and one flash-forward). 

Interestingly, Let This One... is both an original drama involving The Jersey Devil and an overview of the phenomena, a blend of fact, fact-with-a-question-mark and fiction. The book therefore tells a story of the Jersey Devil as well as the story of the Jersey Devil, the two narratives briefly intersecting in a ten-panel climax that reads as somewhat mystical and somewhat metafictional. 

As for the original story, bespectacled, highly educated young man Henry Naughton has moved back home to a farmhouse on the edge of New Jersey's Pine Barrens, intent on helping his recently widowed mother. His hard-working 15-year-old brother, who is taking his father's place at the factory, is resentful of Henry. This dynamic is highlighted when the farm gets an unusual visitor one night: A winged, goat-headed creature raiding their chicken coop.

This is the "main" Jersey Devil of the book. Kowalski's design for it is fairly far removed from most newspaper reports of the creature from the early 20th century, but it still incorporates elements of some sightings, so this devil is at least a plausible source for many of them. It's also quite a deal scarier (If, perhaps, not as scary as the carnivorous goat monster that artist Max Fiumara drew on the cover above).

Essentially humanoid in shape, Kowalski's Devil has the head of a goat with long, curling horns, hooved legs, a large pair of bat-like wings and a long, rat-like tail. He will draw many other Devils throughout the book, as whenever Henry hears a story of the Devil, Kowalski will draw that story's version of the Devil in the panel illustrating the story, so we also see Devils that look a little like large owl with horns and red eyes, or a dragon, or a smaller, less menacing winged goat man.

In town, Henry finds a newsboy hawking papers with a story of the devil (leading to a flashback of its 18th century birth, which is of course where the title comes from) and consults an amateur historian, who, hearing about the "hoofprints in the snow", has laid out a bunch of Jersey Devil material on a desk, just waiting for someone to ask him about them.

This leads to a section on the Leeds family, the controversial almanacs of Daniel Leeds and Benjamin Franklin's weird feud with Titan Leeds, and some of the most famous historical Devil sightings, like that of Joseph Bonaparte (brother of Napoleon). 

It's a tightly written eight pages or so but seems to cover the bases fairly well. Reading this bit, I was curious if Tynion and Foxe had read Brian Regal and Frank J. Esposito's The Secret History of The Jersey Devil: How Quakers, Hucksters, and Benjamin Franklin Created a Monster (John Hopkins University Press; 2019), as that book spends quite a bit of time on 18th century politics and almanacs, and the association of the Leeds family name with devils. (If you want to read more about the Jersey Devil, by the way, this is the first book I would recommend; it's about as thorough and definitive a work on the subject as one can imagine).

Later, we will check in on a dime museum in Philadelphia, where unscrupulous men are exhibiting the Jersey Devil...which is really a rented kangaroo, wearing something of a devil costume and kept in a dark enough cage that a gullible visitor might mistake it for something fantastic (Here Kowalski does a fine job of showing us the creature as visitors might have seen it, in a shape not unlike the "real" Devil that Henry saw at the chicken coop, and then revealing it for what it is).

As the book reaches its climax, young Roy and his friends take up rifles to hunt the Devil at night, against the advice of a man we see telling a crowd not to, as they are more likely to shoot one another in the dark than to bag a monster, and Henry rushes out in an attempt to save his brother.

This leads to that climax I referred to earlier, and a woods that is at once full of devils, and also completely free of devils...and then a little coda, wherein we return to the/a story of the Devil, a story that lives on as a story, regardless of what the Naughton boys (or anyone else) might actually think.

I liked this book a lot, and I hope Tynion continues to make comics on Fortean subjects and with such interesting creators. Especially comics about cryptids, although there is probably no monster as woven into American history and the American psyche than the Jersey Devil, not even Bigfoot, really. 

REVIEWED:

Angelica and The Bear Prince (RH Graphic) In his afterword, cartoonist Trung Le Nguyen explains that he wanted his follow-up to his (masterful) The Magic Fish (which I reviewed here) to be less personal and less emotionally heavy, given that he now knew he would have to be talking about his work, like, constantly. 

That likely explains why much of Nguyen's second book, despite still having a teenage child of immigrants for a protagonist and still having fairy tale inspiration, feels so much lighter and fluffier, and even has at least one dumb coincidence (There's a point where the characters are distressed by a particular turn of events, despite the fact that we have already been introduced to a particular character whose hobby is fixing the exact sort of problem before them, which I realized immediately, but it takes them some time to remember, apparently).

In fact, aspects of the book reminded me a bit of a Hallmark holiday romance, only with a teenage couple at the center of the narrative (Perhaps it's more typical of YA romance, although I wouldn't know, as I've never read any prose YA romance). Still, as Nguyen himself admits, he failed at the vapidity he was striving for, and the book ends up tackling some tougher subjects, particularly grief and mourning.

It's also noteworthy for its representation, I think, with an Asian lead, a popular best friend who is of a bigger build than such characters usually are and, I think, a trans character in a major role...although that character is presented in such a they-just-so-happen-to-be-trans way that there's only a single line that makes me think they are supposed to be (the character mentions choosing their name), so do correct me if I'm wrong.

Anyway, it's a very good comic, and, like all of Nguyen's work I've seen so far (he's also done some superhero stuff for the Big Two between books), it's gorgeously drawn. More here. 

Go-Man: Champion of Earth (Union Square Kids) Cartoonist Hamish Steele's new graphic novel series is a mélange of various bits of Japanese pop culture: Ultraman, giant monster movies like Godzilla and Gamera, Super Sentai, giant robot anime, there's even a bit of Astro Boy and Sailor Moon, the last as a magical girl cartoon that exists within the world of Go-Man. Despite the many and varied influences, Steele blends them all well, presenting a perfectly cohesive and original whole. I liked it a lot and I look forward to the second volume. More here.