Now, for most readers, particularly in 1996, I think that character and creator pairing would have been The Question Vic Sage and writer Denny O'Neil.
O'Neil was then writing the Azrael ongoing monthly, which would have just finished its second year of publication. It starred a character that O'Neil himself had co-created with artist Joe Quesada, a character who played a major role in the Knightfall/Knightquest/Knightsend cycle of stories in the Batman line of books. But in the late 1980s, O'Neil had written The Question for three years, and that well-regarded title remains the only monthly to star the character (or his successor, Renee Montoya). And here he would be writing both characters together!
Me, I was more interested in the pairing of Azrael and artist Vince Giarrano, who drew this special.
Now Azrael was an odd-looking character, an admixture of elements from medieval knights and Quesada's own peculiar early '90s aesthetic, so his costume consisted of a mask, bits of armor, a hood and fleur de lis...as well as over-sized gauntlets with a mitten-like appearance, retractable flaming blades and a weird, ribbony cape not unlike that worn by Hawk from Hawk and Dove, which I don't think I ever quite understood (Like, why do the strands of Azrael's cape stand up like that...? How do they stand up like that...?)
To be honest, I don't think Quesada's design for the character was very good, something I think is revealed by the fact that Azrael rarely looked quite right when artists who weren't Quesada were drawing him, and Quesada had only drawn him in a single mini-series, the Batman: Sword of Azrael one that introduced him. (A hallmark of a good superhero costume design, if you ask me, is that it has to be transferable to other artists and work in their own individual styles as well...which, yes, often means that simpler is better.)
Still, Giarrano was an extremely energetic and talented artist, one who at the time had embraced a sort of cartoonishly, exaggerated style with the then en vogue pointy edges and lots of little lines. I don't know what was going through his head while drawing, but I've always thought of his art as a sort of sarcastic response to Rob Liefeld and company, a fun take that seemed to be at least half-parodic. (If you're not familiar with Giarrano, who did a bunch of Bat-work that decade, including "The Human Flea" and "The Tally Man" arcs of Shadow of The Bat, the framing sequence of Legends of The Dark Knight #0, as well as the short-lived 1994-1995 Manhunter series and the Lobo/Demon: Helloween special I wrote about not too long ago...and I realize I'm repeating some of what I said in that post, including recommending some of the same Giarrano comics...)
So, I was quite curious to see what Giarrano, who drew some big mainstream comics in the 19990s in a very of-the-moment style and then left the industry to pursue painting, might do with a character like Azrael, who, though he's come and gone in different forms since, was very much a '90s character.
As it turns out, nothing too terribly special, and the book probably wasn't worth the shipping I paid to get it sent to my doorstep from an online retailer (That said, I'd still buy a DC Finest collection of the Plus books...that or a Legends of the Dark Knight: Vince Giarrano collection, if there are enough Bat-books to fill one).
There's nothing all that striking among the visuals here—probably the image of the villain's badly deformed face, depicted in a single panel where he unwinds the bandages wrapping his face being the most noteworthy. Otherwise, there's the stereotypical Barbie-esque figure of the female character, a typical image of The Question's special gas curling into a question mark-like shape in one panel, and, as I noted on Bluesky, Giarrano's drawings of Azrael's surprisingly dainty legs and feet as he repeatedly kicks bad guys in the fight scene.
The story is basically the sort of generic one that one imagines that O'Neil could have written in his sleep by that point in his long career, and what I found most notable about it were a couple of scenes where the page breakdowns felt...off.
Check out these two sequences:
I can't quite figure out why this is. I mean, in addition to being an extremely experienced writer, O'Neil was similarly a very experienced editor at the time. And the actual editor of this special...? Archie Goodwin. So, it's surprising to see not one, but two portions of a single comic that seems so not-quite-right like these.
Anyway, this 37-page story feels a bit more like a Vic Sage story in which Azrael guest-stars than an Azrael story.
It opens with Sage—not the questions, but Sage—foiling an assassination attempt on a bald, mustachioed politician, who Giarrano draws in a typically cartoonish type. In fact, he looks a bit like a heavyset Monopoly man, albeit not quite so formally dressed.
Here Sage has a long ponytail that doesn't seem to fit his short haircut, as if he had an incredibly long mullet. There's a bit of stubble on his face, and his eyes are often obscured by shadow. Dressed in a plain shirt and pants and what look like cowboy boots, the way colorist Demetrius Bassoukos gives him a gray-blue shirt with darker pants, I thought of Jonah Hex when I first saw him.
After this opening action sequence, the politician hires Sage to secretly protect his daughter, an actress who is performing a two-part play on a riverboat (I wonder if it was meant to be a gambling boat at some point, given cover artist Barry Kitson's use of a blackjack wheel on the cover).
Meanwhile, bad guy Junior Musto, who seems to lead a terrorist organization of some sort, talks to his underlings about their plans to kill the politician's daughter...and then trails off to talking to himself, unwrapping his head to reveal a ruined visage.
And then O'Neil gets around to Azrael Jean-Paul Valley, still wearing his hair long and opaque, John Lennon-style glasses, on page eight. Jean-Paul is having a lucid dream about his late father, who preceded him as the assassin Azrael, admonishing him for abandoning the vaguely Knights Templar-like secret organization The Order of St. Dumas, who programmed them both, and embarking on a career as a superhero...or whatever was going on in Azrael at the time. Like I've said, I didn't read the series.
While Jean-Paul talks about how direction-less his life is, his dad, who grows to giant size at one point, tells him to "Search until you find a clue, you dimwit."
The next morning, the wind throws a newspaper in Jean-Paul's face, and he pulls it away to see that it is open to an ad for The Secret of The Angels, the very play on the river boat starring Rita Chablis, the young woman that Vic Sage has been hired to protect and that Junior Musto plans to murder in spectacular fashion. (The name "Azrael" was taken from the angel of death in Islam, by the way, which might explain why Jean-Paul took the name of the play to be a sign of sorts to him).
In short order, Rita almost falls overboard, and Vic manages to rescue her single-handedly. And when I say "single-handedly", I mean that quite literally. He does so using only one hand:
This rescue leads to them having a bit of a meet-cute, and Rita seems somewhat smitten with the more reluctant Vic. This is only important because the fact that she knows his face means that, when the time comes to fight the terrorists/assassins, he has to suit up as the face-less Question so that she doesn't recognize him. (Yes, it's a bit contrived).
The bad guy's plan is to plant explosives in a piano so that, when the right key is touched, it will explode on stage, and then he and his gang will gun down the audience.
When the bomb goes off early though, Jean-Paul suits up in a four-panel sequence like those scenes in the Batman movies, saves everyone from the burning theater (his costume is fireproof, he says...and later notes that it is also bullet-proof).
The bad guys are all punched, kicked and thrown overboard, and then, on shore, Azrael, who comes off as super-weird throughout this comic, awkwardly suggests to The Question that they reveal their secret identities to one another, but Vic demurs.
And that is that.
Like I said in the previous posts, other than Batman Plus #1, I didn't really remember most of what I read in the various Plus team-ups that I had read...which might not really recommend them (On the other hand, they did come out around 30 years ago). Had I read this one back then, I imagine I similarly would have forgotten its contents. In fact, I imagine I will quickly forget them, as there wasn't much to it.
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So, this issue features house ads for the Howard Chaykin and Dan Brereton Elseworlds miniseries Thrillkiller, subscriptions for DC Comics, a crossword puzzle and some DC publishing news, a Rachel Pollack/Chris Weston miniseries for the short-lived Helix imprint called Time Breakers that I have no memory of even existing, a new creative team and direction for Steel and the then-upcoming Grant Morrison, Howard Porter and John Dell JLA ("The Legend Beings Anew In November"), which I posted above. (And yeah, it was in black and white in the comic too, for some reason.)
There are also some ads for music albums, Danzig's "Blackacidevil", Nada Surf's "High/Low" and The Verve Pipe's "Villains", one for the film Executive Descision debuting on Pay Per View (Never saw it, but the cast is interesting, as it includes Kurt Russell, Halle Berry, John Leguizamo, Oliver Platt...and Steven Seagal...?) and finally, on the back cover, one for the TV show Millennium, "From the creator of 'The X-Files'...although I don't recall it being anywhere near as popular.
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