"Man's Underworld" from Batman: The Brave and the Bold: Tomorrow's Heroes

When I was putting together last fall's post on all of Plastic Man's team-ups, the Plastic Man/Wonder Woman team-up from the pages of Batman: The Brave and the Bold #19 and #20 had long since shipped, but it hadn't yet been collected into trade, so I decided to wait to address it in a later post, not wanting to spend...let's see...$16?!...just for a blog post.* 

Well, the trade is here now. So now I can post about it.

The Plastic Man/Wonder Woman team-up is the first story collected in Batman: The Brave and The Bold: Tomorrow's Heroes. Entitled "Man's Underworld", it is the work of writer Dave Wielgosz and artist Nikola Čižmešija. 

The pairing of the two characters struck me as a particularly interesting one, because not only have they never had a team-up like this before (unless you count those two pages from "The Great Super-Star Game!"), but I am having trouble recalling even a particular significant scene featuring the two characters during the seven years or so they were on the Justice League together between 1998 and 2005 (Although Wonder Woman was dead for part of it, and Plastic Man was on a sort of sabbatical for another). Certainly not in the main, Grant Morrison-written portion of the JLA title, although it's possible I am forgetting something from an anthology, spin-off or a JLA Classified story...please let me know if you can think of any!

This story is set, an asterisk and editorial box on its third page tells us, before Absolute Power, so presumably sometime during the 2018-2022 Justice League series, when the team was based in the Hall of Justice...and Wonder Woman was on the team and Plastic Man was not (Although, come to think of it, wasn't Wonder Woman dead for part of that series too...? At least, Hippolyta seemed to have temporarily replaced her on the team again for some reason during Brian Michael Bendis' run...).

An opening full-page splash has Wonder Woman seemingly addressing the reader directly: "My lasso of truth has been stolen...I have come here to request your assistance to help me find out where it is and who is responsible...Will help me?"

A turn of the page reveals who she is addressing, which, of course, the cover—for the single issue or the trade—has already spoiled. 

Sitting behind a desk with a "W. Winks" name plate is a smiling, bald and round-faced Woozy Winks, who answers that, "My partner and I do excellent P.I. work..." That partner, standing behind Woozy, shadow obscuring his face, is an uncharacteristically silent and grim-looking Plastic Man...who will snap back to his chattier self in the very next panel.

It's been a while—the last time I remember Plastic Man's day job coming up, he was running a security firm of some sort during Joe Kelley's JLA run—but Wielgosz remembers that Plastic Man and Woozy opened a detective agency in Phil Foglio and Hilary Barta's 1988 miniseries, which then played a role in the Superman team-ups that followed it.

Plas first questions why someone with Batman and Martian Manhunter in her contacts would turn to him for this, and he seems disappointed in her answer. That is, they (and the apparently not-dead male Question) recommended she go to Plas, telling her he would be "the most capable of getting in the mind of a thief."

Woozy and Plas have a somewhat pointed exchange regarding Plastic Man's need to prove himself, to which Plastic Man tells his old pal, "I didn't make a great impression back in our JLA days."

Again, I found myself struggling to think of any time the pair had really spent together in JLA. Plastic Man obviously acquitted himself well throughout his time on the team, helping save the world/the future/the universe/all reality alongside his teammates repeatedly. Still, he was generally portrayed as something of a jackass, constantly making annoying jokes. 

And he was often portrayed as particularly libidinous, asking Power Girl if she wanted to know why he was called "Eel" in the Mark Millar fill-in or, perhaps most famously, disguising himself as teammate Barda's dress in one of Mark Waid's fill-ins issues during Morrison's run.

I don't recall him sexually harassing Wonder Woman or coming on to her at any point, but, given his behavior in a lot of comics during that time, I guess I wouldn't be surprised if he did in a tie-in or spin-off and I'm just blanking on the instance. 

All I can think of at the moment is a passing comment about a peephole during his triumphant return to the team during Kelly, Tom Mahnke and company's JLA arc in which the team faces Fernus/The Burning Martian:

He could, of course, just be kidding here, but, uh, what a think to joke about.

Oh, and I suppose Plastic Man could be referring to something beyond a particular interaction with Wonder Woman in general, or a general feeling of insecurity about his status as a true hero given his criminal background. I mean, Kelly did write Plas as something of a bad person, a dick to his ex-lover and literal deadbeat dad, so...

So, the idea of Plastic Man being asked to "think like a criminal" in order to solve a case that Batman or Martian Manhunter couldn't knock off in a couple of pages is an intriguing premise, although it's worth noting that Wielgosz doesn't really come up with such a plot (In his defense, I guess this entire story is only 24 pages).

Like, solving the case basically just requires reviewing some security footage of a tour group at the then semi-public Hall of Justice, a working knowledge of DC supervillains that any Justice Leaguer (or reader!) should have, busting up a bar and then busting up an auction full of criimnals. I'm pretty sure Wonder Woman could have handled this case solo...or with the help of pretty much anyone else.

Seeing a shadow in Wonder Woman's room steal the lasso, Plas tells her it is Shadow Thief Carl Sands, who Plas apparently knows from his old days as gangster Eel O'Brian (The criminal underworld in the DC Universe, according to this story, was a very, very small world). 

I liked Sands' dig at Plas, in which he pointedly refers to him as "Elongated Man."

Next stop? Central City, for an auction of superhero memorabilia to a club full of criminals, all of whom are disguised by gas masks, making them relatively easy to infiltrate (In introducing the set-up, Wielgosz refers to both Final Crisis and Scott Snyder's "Black Mirror" story from pre-New 52 Detective Comics).

The pair do so, which requires Wonder Woman changing into a fancy black dress on a rooftop with Plas, who says, "I'll just...turn around and not look and you tell me when you're done gearing up." Which he does, without turning his eyeballs into periscopes or anything. 

Again, he talks to Wonder Woman about his insecurities, particularly during his tenure on the Justice League: 

Once inside, the two split up. 

Wonder Woman, being a statuesque beauty, even when wearing a gas mask, draws the attention of the old guy presumably running the operation (Not great at this undercover thing, the superheroine imbued with the gifts of the Greek gods introduces herself as "Cassandra Troy"...although given those are the names of two of her Wonder Girls, maybe she just panicked and grabbed two names out of her memory, like a disguised Bruce Wayne introducing himself as Tim Grayson...). 

Plastic Man, meanwhile, stretches and wriggles through the ventilation system until he spots the lasso, and is confronted by a flame-thrower wielding Roulette, the actual boss of the operation. As she explains, she wants to move on from superhero fight clubs and get into other criminal enterprises. 

As it turns out, Plastic Man also used to know Roulette, back before he was a superhero and she was a supervillain (I had completely forgotten this story when I read "Man's Underworld", but Neil posted about it on Bluesky between then and my writing this post, reminding me that Plas and Roulette have shared a story before, the Len Wein-written, Tom Derenick-drawn Justice League of America #35-37 from 2009; now I wonder if that Justice League story mentioned that the pair had a past...?)

There's a flashback, some "Join the dark side" talk and a brief fight. During all that, Roulette needles Plastic Man as "the superhero permanently on probation," adding, "I saw how Wonder Woman talked to you out there, with so little respect...You know that won't ever change."

Plas rushes out of the back with the lasso, Roulette on his heels, blowing Wondy's cover, and leading to our heroes back to back, the whole crowd circling them. 

Wielgosz takes a shortcut that doesn't really make much sense here, as, at one point, we're meant to believe that Plastic Man is somehow in danger of being torn apart by the crowd, as he's being stretched in different directions by each limb, but, well, the panel or so devoted to it isn't terribly convincing (see the middle one below), as Čižmešija doesn't draw Plas all that stretched, certainly not to anything that looks like a breaking point, and, besides, stretching is, like, his whole power's deal, right? 

The artist only has a single panel to work with, and Plas is in the background. A legitimate threat to Plas could have been posed by the flamethrower—indeed, Roulette temporarily melts him with it in one panel earlier—but the creators would have had to do something different to present a realistic threat to Plastic Man then what they do here. Maybe another draft of the story might have helped.

Anyway, Plas being in danger at all is simply an excuse to have Wonder Woman throw her lasso around him in order to pull him to safety...and give readers the opportunity to see its effects on Plastic Man, or what Wielgosz suggests those effects might be.

Here, he transforms back into Eel, seemingly losing his powers (and goggles) and completely freaking out, as if in pain or having a brief panic attack. In the last two pages of the story, Plastic Man reveals bits of his origin to Wonder Woman, who I was fairly certain knew that he used to be a criminal named Eel O'Brien from Mark Waid, Bryan Hitch and company's JLA #51-54, wherein the Leaguers with secret identities, including Plastic Man, are each split in two (It's been a while since I've read that story too, though; Waid's short, 18-issue run was a real mess, and, outside of "Tower of Babel", I haven't really ever reread any of the JLA arcs he wrote during that time).

During his brief talk with Wonder Woman, Plas tells her that "Plastic Man" is "a character I created" and, having played him so long, he sometimes loses track of that. He explains that, after getting his powers, he started fighting crime, "hoping one day I could do more good things than Eel O'Brian had done bad". And that "being the goofy, loud guy no one wants to deal with works in my favor."

Some of this psychology seems to echo what Marv Wolfman wrote of Plas in his not-very-good 2011 one-shot Green Lantern/Plastic Man: Weapons of Mass Deception, and it also perhaps helps explain the somewhat bifurcated nature of Plastic Man since Morrison folded him into JLA. Specifically, that he's at once a hyper-competent superhero and an irritating comedy relief character who often appears dumb, libidinous and borderline criminal or immoral...usually as part of an unfunny joke a writer might be setting up for him. 

At any rate, Wonder Woman stifles a laugh when he says, "I know more than I let on, except when I don't," and proposes the two keep working together as, while they've recovered the lasso, there's still Roulette, the auctioneer guy and a bunch of criminal types obsessed with superhero memorabilia to deal with. 

In the lower right corner of the last panel, there's a red "THE END", followed by a yellow "of our story, but the start of a lovely partnership."

So as Plastic Man stories go, this has the strength of being an unlikely, somehow never done before one, as well as exploration of what goes on in Plas' head, even though I'm not fond of the insecure take on the character, whether that insecurity comes from his criminal background, his concern that he's regarded as a clown or unserious superhero by his peers (Something explored in the Eclipso half of 2007-2008 Countdown to Mystery, collected in 2009 as Eclipso: Music of the Spheres**) or, here, how he behaved/was written during his JLA years. (Although I suppose that is kind of interesting in a meta way, and Wielgosz seems to be attempting a retcon of sorts, or least an explanation to square JLA Plas with "real" Plas.)

Of course, the idea of keeping score with himself, weighing Eel's bad against Plastic Man's good, and worrying about always being regarded by others as a criminal on some level, that seems like a better story for somewhere in Plastic Man's past, sometime before he was inducted into the line-up of the World's Greatest Heroes, got a seat at the Justice League meeting table on the moon and started saving the world from the likes of Solaris and Mageddon and company on a monthly basis.

Čižmešija's art is quite strong throughout. I don't know the name, and his Plastic Man, perhaps appropriate for this story, is toned down quite a degree, looking consistent from panel to panel, rather than flowing from one shape to another as is usual the case. He also looks like a straightforward superhero character, rather than having, say, big ears, or a cartoonish grin, or some of the other signifiers some artists have given him over the years to demonstrate that he's a "funny" character. I wouldn't mind seeing more of Čižmešija's Plastic Man...or other characters. 

*DC was really selling a comic book for $7.99? That is insane, even for a 68-page book. This 120-page trade paperback collection is only $17.99; why bother with single issues once they reach the cost of, like, half a trade...?

**I actually bought and read that trade paperback in December, when the omnibus collection of John Ostrander and Tom Mandrake's Spectre series had me curious in revisiting various later takes on The Spectre and Eclipso. I ultimately decided not to write about it at all though because it wasn't very good, or interesting in any way, so it didn't really seem worth my time or that of the reader. It's a really bad Plastic Man story, though! And has a terrible, terrible take on Woozy Winks!