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As DC hasn't collected every one of those appearances, and some of those that the publisher has collected aren't readily available in library-borrowed trade, I've been pretty much just reading what I can find, in whatever order I can find it.
Now I come to the 2005 miniseries Day of Vengeance, one of four miniseries the publisher launched as lead-ins to 2006's Infinite Crisis, each of which dealt with a different aspect of the DC Universe. This one covered DC's various magical and supernatural characters and prominently featured The Spectre and Eclipso.
While I was curious to revisit it in light of Ostrander and Mandrake's take on those two characters, I was also curious if, like those last arcs from JLA that I recently reread, the book now reads better at the remove of a couple of decades, when one isn't reading it in regular installments as a part of an unfolding story, with the various expectations that can entail.
While I have the six-issue miniseries in singles, I opted to borrow the 2005 trade from the library. That includes a not-very-good three-issue arc that Judd Winick and Ian Churchill did in the Superman books that doesn't seem entirely necessary, as well as some fun bonus features.
I've opted to go with random thoughts and bullet points, rather than something more formal, so feel free to skim.
•I had completely forgotten until I started rereading Day of Vengeance here that it was drawn by Justiniano. If you're not familiar with that name, it belongs to a very talented artist who did a great deal of admirable work for DC Comics between 1999 and 2010...and, in 2011, was arrested for possession of child pornography. He plead guilty and was sentenced the following year.
How do we assess the work of a comic book creator who has committed such a heinous crime? Well, while it's certainly possible for two things to be true at once—that is, that Justiniano could draw comics very well and that he is a bad person who is responsible for something terrible—in general, I'm inclined to ignore the work of such creators.
I don't think DC will even give you the option of spending money that might in any way support Justiniano at this point, as I'm fairly certain nothing he drew for them has been collected since his arrest, which seems fair. After all, no publisher would want to be associated with such a person.
But regardless of buying work Justiniano has drawn, should we even read it? Should we write about it? I don't know that I have a good answer. I think it's a discussion worth having, especially as there are now a good handful of mainstream superhero comic book creators who have done terrible things that have victimized others.
For today anyway, I'm going to go ahead and write about this collection and try not to focus on Justiniano's contribution to it any more than I have to.
•The single most impressive part of this collection is the one to which no name is attached, and thus I am unsure who produced it.
That would be the 16-paragraph prose piece entitled "The Nature of Magic" that starts on the title page, preceding any of the comics content. It is, in essence, the history of magical beings and the practice of magic in the DC Universe setting, from the point of creation to the rise of Gemworld following cosmic events in "what humans called the 15th century."
The opening few paragraphs blend ideas from comics across decades from various writers on quite different books, like Jerry Siegel's "The Voice" from his 1940 "The Spectre" strip, Jack Kirby's "The Source" from his 1970s Fourth World comics, Marv Wolfman's Destiny from 1972's Weird Mystery Tales, and elements from Neil Gaiman's Books of Magic and The Sandman, Grant Morrison's JLA and John Byrne's Genesis, all from the 1990s.
And on and on it goes, a coherent, consistent cosmology created piecemeal over many years by many hands, but here presented as a whole. It's both a remarkable bit of synthesis by whoever wrote it, and an eloquent example of what is so appealing and so unique about the two main comics "universe" settings, those of DC and Marvel, and how they evolve writer by writer and story by story over many years.
•The Judd Winick, Ian Churchill and Norm Rapmund three-part story "Lightning Strikes Twice" that is collected here is pretty unnecessary to the events of Day of Vengeance. Sure, it includes a bit about a black diamond shard of The Heart of Darkness finding its way into Jean Loring's cell in Arkham Asylum and reveals that Eclipso would take her as a new host, but then, the first pages of Day of Vengeance tell us that too.
Still, I guess there's no reason to complain about getting more comics in your collection, is there? (This whole 200+ page collection only cost $12.99, by the way. These days, thirteen bucks would only get you, what, three DC comics...?)
•"Lightning Strikes Twice", which originally ran through an issue apiece of Action Comics, Adventures of Superman and Superman, centers on a fight between and Eclipso-possessed Superman and Captain Marvel...as did 1992's Action Comics Annual #4 (Collect 1992's annual event, Eclipso: The Darkness Within, I say!).
Here, we open with Bruce Gordon doing action movie stuff in South America, the wizard Shazam having Captain Marvel standing by on the Rock of Eternity and a disembodied Eclipso trying to maneuver closer and closer to Superman in Metropolis, somehow manipulating various civilians to take their own lives very publicly and violently.
Eventually, Eclipso eclipses a S.T.A.R. Labs doctor, who strips to her underwear and then suits up in a LexCorp battle suit specifically modified for Superman-fighting (It fires red sun energy, and is built with a kryptonite alloy). Plan A seems to be to duke it out with Superman, pissing him off enough that Eclipso can use the diamond shard aboard to eclipse the Man of Steel.
When that fails, it's time for Plan B, secretly eclipsing Lois (she isn't drawn with an eclipsed face or red eyes, nor does she speak in Eclipso's purple-rimmed dialogue balloons), having her snipe at Clark in their apartment until he loses his temper, and then press the diamond to his forehead, finally giving Eclipso possession of Superman again.
Then, in the final chapter, it's finally time for the eclipsed Superman vs. Captain Marvel rematch, as Eclipso wants Marvel as his new host. They knock one another around a bit, Marvel resorting to the same move he used against Superman in Kingdom Come, shouting "Shazam!" and positioning himself so that the magic lighting strikes Superman, over and over.
As Winick runs out of pages, Shazam himself appears to blast Superman with lightning. And then the then host-less Spectre appears and...does something. The art is kind of confusing, but it seems The Spectre does something to pull Eclipso out of Superman.
The Spectre and Shazam have a brief, portentous chat, during which the Spirit of Vengeance says something that seems like it might be important when reading the curious events of Day of Vengeance, wherein his actions don't actually make a whole lot of sense:
Without a host, my memories fade in and out. Only my instinct survives.
My purpose.
And the diamond? Well, the narration isn't really much clearer than the art on this point. After The Spectre tells Shazam that it has "disappeared again...pulled away by hate," Winick writes the following in white boxes that appear on the penultimate page: "The black diamond was taken by something or somebody."
However it got there, it ended up in Jean Loring's padded cell in Arkham Asylum, where Eclipso has apparently taken over her mind. The last page of the story is a splash, showing a smiling Loring in a gray Arkham jumpsuit, her facial features making it clear that she has been eclipsed.
•Say, do you think Jean Loring being committed to a home for the criminally insane is supposed to be an admission that the nonsensical plot to get back together with her ex-husband—by murdering Sue Dibny, taking out a hit on Jack Drake and threatening Lois Lane—was crazy...?
When Lois is introduced, she's shown striding though the office of the Daily Planet, dressed in a tight-fitting shirt showing lots of cleavage, and a skirt with a slit that goes almost to her hip. Later we see her in her apartment, and she's wearing a tight-fitting babydoll t-shirt and a pair of skimpy panties (Clark, meanwhile, is fully dressed).
When we first meet Dr. Tracey, she's sensibly dressed in a pantsuit and coat, but she will spend the remainder of the story in a strapless bra and panties (I guess you have to strip down to your underwear in order to pilot this particular make of LexCorp battlesuit...?)
Somewhat frustratingly, Churchill doesn't always draw an eclipsed person with all of these signifiers, as in the case of Lois Lane mentioned above. In that case, I think it was to keep the fact that she was eclipsed from the reader as much as from Superman, although it got me wondering...Do you think the various signifiers are just there for the benefit of the readers, or do Eclipso's victims literally transform like that within the world of the comic, so that, say, Superman can tell at a glance whether Lois Lane has been eclipsed or not...?
I've been wondering about this off and on (the same day I reread Day of Vengeance, I read the trade paperback Eclipso: Music of the Spheres), as the various "rules" as applied to Eclipso seem to change story to story.
Here, for example, he seems to be driving various civilians to kill themselves, although they don't appear as if they are eclipsed (nor do they seem to ever be exposed to a black diamond), and, in the case of Tracey, he seems to be goading her into a particular action before he finally does take over her body.
While the suicide scenes are quite heavy in narration, they don't ever explain just what Eclipso is doing or how, which is, obviously, the sort of thing that can irritate a reader like me.
•Between the end of "Lightning Strikes Twice" and the beginning of Day of Vengeance, the collection includes a three-page prose feature. Under the heading "The World of Heroes and Sorcerers", there are five paragraphs devoted to explaining the existence of numerous super-people on Earth today and recapping the plot of Identity Crisis, concentrating on Jean Loring, who, as we just saw, was possessed by the hostless Eclipso while imprisoned in Arkham.
"So begins the story," the first section ends, "but first let us introduce you to the dramatis personae..."
The rest of the three pages is devoted to the six main characters, those that would later star in Shadowpact: Blue Devil, Enchantress, Nightmaster, Nightshade, Ragman and Detective Chimp. Each of them get a long-ish paragraph detailing their biography and history, including their current status quo.
This seems pretty valuable, given how relatively minor some of these characters are (For example, this was the first time I had ever read anything featuring Nightmaster—that I actually remembered him in, anyway. He was introduced way back in 1969).
Actually, not all of the six heroes get all that thoroughly explained here. The entry for Detective Chimp just says "Bobo tells his story better than anyone, and you'll find it four chapters in." Indeed, while writer Bill Willingham will allude to events in the other characters' lives throughout the series, Detective Chimp is the only one who gets an entire passage of the comic devoted to retelling his origin and history.
•One imagines that Willingham, like the writers of the other "Countdown to Infinite Crisis"-branded miniseries, was given a few particular plot points by editorial before he ever sat down to write this story. Not only does it feature DC's magical and supernatural characters, but it also seems to be working through a particular checklist, in order to get certain characters to certain places and accomplish certain events, moving a bigger mega-plot forward so that Geoff Johns could resolve certain things in Infinite Crisis, and some books that followed that event series would have something to work with that seemed like part of a bigger DC Comics story (For one fairly minor example, original Blue Beetle Dan Garrett's mystical scarab artifact is shown being thrown from the Rock of Eternity to El Paso, Texas...where we know it will be found by Jaime Reyes, who will become the third Blue Beetle in the 2006 Blue Beetle series).
As for that checklist, it seems to include 1.) Presenting a host-less Spectre as a serious worldwide threat (again, I guess, following Johns' own 1999 Day of Judgment, which only ended upon The Spectre getting a new, heroic host), 2.) Killing off of the wizard Shazam and destroying the Rock of Eternity, setting up a new, dumb and ultimately very temporary status quo for the Marvel Family and 3.) Setting up an ongoing series about a magic team in the DCU, something DC seems to have been continually flirting with since at least 1995's Underworld Unleashed: Abyss—Hell's Sentinel, if not earlier.
I'm not sure how successful this was, long-term. Sure, the new Blue Beetle has managed to stick around, starring in four different ongoings of various lengths in the years since, but as for the other changes wrought by the events here?
Well, The Spectre got a new host during Infinite Crisis, recently killed-off Gotham City Police Detective Crispus Allen, but he never got his own ongoing series, just a three-issue Infinite Crisis Aftermath-branded mini, and when DC rebooted their line a few years later, Jim Corrigan was again the Spectre's host.
The Judd Winick-written 12-issue maxi-series The Trials of Shazam had Captain Marvel wearing a white costume and changing his name to just "Marvel" to replace the wizard, while Captain Marvel Jr. changed into a red costume and started going by the name "Shazam" (Which, now that I type it out, sounds exactly backwards, doesn't it?). Johns and co-plotter/artist Jerry Ordway undid these changes three years later in the pages of JSoA (And, two years after that, the New 52 rebooted and reset the Marvel Family's status quo yet again anyway).
And while the Shadowpact did indeed get their own series, it only lasted 25 issues (For comparison's sake, the Gail Simone-written Secret Six, which spun out of Day of Vengeance's sister series Villains United, lasted 36 issues, only ending when DC rebooted their whole line in 2011). The magic hero team concept would return in the New 52 though, with different creators and a different line-up, under the title Justice League Dark. That book lasted over 70 issues across two series. Maybe what DC magic hero team needed to thrive was the "Justice League" branding...? Or, perhaps, to feature former Vertigo characters like John Constantine, Swamp Thing and Black Orchid...?
•This is the plot of Day of Vengeance. Eclipso has taken over Jean Loring, giving her a dramatic make-over that includes a black "eclipse" symbol over her face, and a costume featuring a bustier/corset with lots of cleavage. She then seduces—the comics' word, not mine—the still host-less Spectre, who was shown to be wildly out of control, punishing even the most minor of offenses severely, as in one case in which a boy who stole who stole six dollars from his mother's purse is caught in a wave of coins (It's unclear whether or not the kid survived).
Here's the part that doesn't quite make sense. Eclipso, The Spectre's enemy stretching back millennia, manages to convince him that in order to eradicate all evil from the world once and for all, he need only destroy any and all forms of magic, from magical locales to magic-users (Never mind that the Spectre's raison d' etre isn't to wipe out evil, but to "confront" it and, at least in all the comics I've ever read, punish the murdered dead).
So, the Spectre then begins waging a war on magic in the DCU, wiping out hundreds of magic-users. These are, of course, mostly unnamed characters. The only IP DC seems to sacrifice here is minor Firestorm villain Black Bison and, at the end of the book, Shazam (Both have since returned to life, of course).
As for the "big guns", Spectre takes them out without killing them: Doctor Fate is entrapped in his helmet, Madame Xanadu is blinded and The Phantom Stranger is turned into a mouse ("I don't think even you could kill me, Spectre," The Stranger says during their fight. "I doubt the universe would allow it.")
A bunch of magical heroes gather/hide out in Nightmaster Jim Rook's inter-dimensional bar for just such a clientele, The Oblivion Bar (As does Animal Man; Willingham must have a generous definition of magic). Eventually, Nightmaster, his bouncer Blue Devil, Nightshade and Detective Chimp all decide to step up and tackle The Spectre head-on, joining forces with Ragman and The Enchantress, who have just escaped a fight between The Spectre and Blackbriar Thorn (Oh, I guess he dies too, but he's shown already growing back to live before this series ends).
The half-dozen heroes confront The Spectre in Budapest, where he's throwing down with Captain Marvel (Throughout this series, Spectre mostly just zaps energy bolts and throws punches, rather than using his powers in imaginative or visually interesting ways, so the multi-issue Spectre/Marvel fight isn't really much of a read).
While Detective Chimp and Nightshade go to recruit a character that the former thinks can actually vanquish The Spectre, Enchantress borrows magical energy willingly donated by volunteers around the world, channeling it into Captain Marvel and, ultimately, making him a giant (See the cover at the top of the post). (And yes, this did remind me of Goku creating his spirit bomb during his fight with Frieza on Namek in Dragon Ball Z.)
Temporarily vanquished by Marvel's powered-up punches, The Spectre flees, carrying the wounded Eclipso with him.
For round two, Detective Chimp's stratagem is employed: Black Alice, a character introduced by Gail Simone, Joe Prado and Ed Benes just previously in Birds of Prey, uses her meta-human ability to temporarily steal magic powers to completely drain The Spectre.
The only problem with this is, of course, without a host, The Spectre is pretty much nothing but magic powers, so when Alice takes those away, he's nothing but a formless ghost, which the Shadowpact is unable to affect in anyway, their attacks going right through him. He again flees, but this time without Eclipso; Nightshade had used her powers to create a portal to an orbit around the sun, through which they had thrown Eclipso.
Finally, The Spectre goes to the Rock of Eternity to duke it out with Shazam. During their battle, the Rock explodes over Gotham City, showering the world with magical debris, and seemingly scrambling the world of magic to such a degree that a full-time magic super-team will be needed to deal with it going forward, as opposed to the ad hoc unions of magical characters that had been semi-regularly popping up in DC Comics over the last decade or two.
The book ends with the Shadowpact vowing to stay together, but, as for the threat of The Spectre and other fall-out of his attack, that won't be addressed until Infinite Crisis proper. I am not rereading that.
•As stated previously, Day of Vengeance opens with Jean becoming Eclipso's host. Here, that is much more involved than was shown in "Lightning Strikes Twice." There's a good two and a half pages of argument between Jean and Eclipso; we're not privy to what he seems to be saying to her through the black diamond in her cell, only her responses to him which, oddly, sound kind of dirty at times ("And what do you expect in return?" she asks at one point, followed later by, "Oh, no, I could never do that! What kind of woman do you think I am?" and "Because I was raised better than that--that's why!").
Anwyay, once Eclipso finally eclipses her, a seven-panel sequence depicting a painful process, she is transformed, and, pointy-ears and eclipsed face aside, doesn't look much like any of the eclipsed from the previous story...which, in this collection, is, like, five pages ago.
Also, her dialogue bubbles don't have a ring of purple around them, seemingly suggesting that she's talking in Jean's own normal, human voice, rather than in Eclipso's distinct voice.
•Willingham's take on Ragman, who narratees much of the first issue, is a distinct one. While we would have last seen him in a 1998 Batman arc—which you and I have just seen quite recently——here he's not only not resistant to taking the lives of evil people but seems to regard doing so as his job. "Once upon a time I used to be a superhero," he says, "Now I'm just the guy who picks up the trash."
In this scene, "the trash" refers to a man who apparently murdered his wife and business partner. Ragman chases him down, throws him around, enwraps him in the rags of his cape, and then ultimately sucks the man's soul out of his body to become another rag in his suit of souls, leaving behind a desiccated husk.
Here, Ragman seems to be intimately familiar with each and every rag/soul in his suit, able to recall their name, their crime and their willingness to help him, by lending them their strength. His power seems to correspond to the number of souls in his suit, and, when he needs to lift a large tree trunk to save someone trapped beneath it, he narrates, "I take energy from dozens...And when that doesn't work, I increase the enlistment to hundreds."
•As to how Eclipso is able to convince The Spectre to attack magic, well, that gets explained (or as explained as it ever is), in the second issue. We listen in as Eclipso talks directly to The Spectre in purple narration boxes, referring to him as "Darling" and "Handsome."
When The Spectre lays eyes on Eclipso and hears his/her name, he says only that it sounds familiar. Willingham than has Eclipso expound on The Spectre's confused state, referred to by Winick in "Lightning Strikes Twice":
I know you're a bit confused these days, right? Old memories all a jumble?Eclipso isn't going to be his new host, although that might be a bit more believable, if one spirit of divine retribution can indeed host another ("I have my own part to play, in the grand scheme of things," she answers, when he asks if Eclipso is to be his new host). (Of course, what would make the most sense would simply be to have Eclipso eclipse The Spectre. Then The Spectre's evil actions could be explained as his being controlled by an evil entity, rather than this talk of seduction and belief that magic is the source of evil.)
It shows.
Not your fault, though.
This is the first time in ages you've been without a human host. Someone to anchor you to this reality.
I'm here to remedy that.
Rather, she says she has been sent by "the higher powers" to advise him and give him direction.
That conversation, and Eclispo's thoughts, are shared with readers in a scene wherein The Enchantress channels Eclipso, speaking his thoughts aloud to her new allies. Eclipso boasts that her logic "is subtle, but flawless." "Law and order are all about following the rules," Eclipso-through-Enchantress says, "And magic is all about breaking the rules of nature."
Maybe. I think there were better ways to "sell" this conflict which, again, I think was dictated to Willingham rather than being entirely his own invention, and perhaps another would simply be the host-less Spectre deciding that magic was a sin in the eyes of God, an unnatural usurpation of God's dominion over the world and its workings. After all, there are passages in the Bible forbidding witchcraft and other forms of magic and divination, and certainly for centuries now the church has associated magic with the devil and dark powers.
Anyway, Willingham continues to make it weird. The first words we hear Enchantress speak when the scene shifts to her are "I'm doing it...I'm actually seducing The Spectre." And, a few panels later, after mentioning how lonely The Spectre has been without a host and how happy he is that Eclipso has befriended him, she says, "And oh, the new feelings I've woken in him! He wants me in more than just a spiritual sense."
I...don't like to think of The Spectre as a sexual being at all, but I suppose DC has done something similar before.
At any rate, the recent Spectre omnibus includes a panel wherein Madame Xandadu says something cryptic about how, in the past, "both natures of The Spectre fed me the tantric power by which I maintained the spell," and the art shows her with her hand on the grim face of The Spectre, next to another image of her happily embracing a shirtless Corrigan. (She seemed to be referring to the events of the 1987-1989 Spectre series written by Doug Moench, which I've never read, but heard a bit about.)
And in 1999's Day of Judgment, a caption refers to Madame Xanadu as, in part, "former lover of The Spectre", again likely referring to the Moench series.
•Hmm, all this talk about magic being the root of all evil aside then, could Eclipso have really seduced The Spectre simply by showing interest in him...and showing so much cleavage? That's something the old Eclipso never had, anyway.
If Jean wanted to get back together with The Atom, maybe she should have tried putting her boobs in his face, rather than that whole murder-his-old-coworker's-wife stratagem...
•Rex The Wonder Dog makes an unnamed cameo, appearing in a panel of the origin story that Detective Chimp shares with Black Alice's dad ("On our circuit was a show in rural Florida, where a doggie pal of mine led me to the Fountain of Youth," he says in a brown narration box with a magnifying glass in the corner, while the art shows a still-naked Bobo and a white dog drinking from a pool).
If DC had only released a complete collection of the 1986-1990 Secret Origins series, maybe Bobo wouldn't have had to take up so much of this mini-series telling his story.
(If you, dear reader, missed that particular barroom brawl, which was drawn by Barry Kitson and appeared under a cover by the great Dan Brereton, DC collected it in 2015's Shazam! A Celebration of 75 Years, which is a pretty good book to have on your bookshelf.)
Now, as far as I knew in 2005, sunlight was Eclipso's one great weakness, and exposure to sunlight would drive him out of the whatever body he happened to be in possession of. Had that changed somewhere between 1992 and 2005...? (I don't think it did, as I had read all of his appearances between The Darkness Within and Day of Vengeance, but I suppose it could have in, say, JSA, and I just don't remember).
Justiniano filled these scenes with plenty of original character designs, but there's also a ton of extant DC characters, like Jennifer Morgan, Arion, Black Orchid, Witchfire, Janissary and The Ghost Patrol...it was a fun scene in the comic, rewarding one scanning the background and seeing which characters could be recognized, and it was equally fun to have the "answers" to the scene in the back like that.
