A Month of Wednesdays: October 2026

BOUGHT: 

Dracula Book Three: The Count (Dark Horse Books) In some ways, the third volume of Matt Wagner, Kelley Jones and Jose Villarrubia's Dracula series is the most interesting. That's because it is devoted to the character's time in London in the late 19th century and thus covers the time of the "real", original Dracula story, that told in Bram Stoker's 1897 novel...and retold over and over again in what now seems like countless adaptations. 

How then would they differentiate their telling of this part of Dracula's long life from all the others...aside, of course, from the fact that this one features Jones' idiosyncratic art and thus, visually, wouldn't look a damn thing like any previous Dracula retelling?

Well, as Wagner points out in his afterword, one interesting aspect of the original novel is that, once the action shifts from Transylvania to London, we don't actually see all that much of Dracula. And because of the epistolary nature of the novel, we actually get to hear from almost every character in the narrative except for the title character himself. As well covered as Dracula's time as "Count Dracula" in London might be in pop culture, then, there is a surprising amount of room for Wagner and company to maneuver, and, though there are more specific beats for this volume of the comic to line up with than in the first two, it too in an extrapolation, in which the creators fill in the blank spaces and shadows of Stoker's novel.

Now, if you've read Dracula, or seen any of the more faithful adaptations, then you know the story, and you know some of what he is up to: Buying property, shipping crates of dirt, driving Renfield crazier by his presence, menacing Lucy and Mina, being hunted by Abraham Van Helsing and the men who love the women. 

But given how much Dracula has been built up in the previous two volumes, established as a ruthless ruler, a powerful sorcerer in league with Satan and a long-lived monster, surely he's got more on his agenda than drinking blood from the throats of a couple of English ladies, right? 

Indeed, Wagner's Dracula seems engaged in an ambitious scheme to conquer the city and, with that as a foothold, perhaps the whole of the British Empire...and through, it, maybe even the world...!

Doing so involves many machinations, not only the property buying, the acquisition of servants and the pose of a foreign aristocrat, but also his marrying into greater wealth and title and making thralls of powerful businessman, who boast to "the Count" in a sitting room of a men's club that they are the true power in the nation. (Indeed, in one such club, he even suggests marrying Queen Victoria: "Your celebrated monarch--Victoria--has been famously widowed for over twenty years now. Who knows...perhaps she is of a mind to take a new husband?" It's not clear if he's joking or not, but one of the bankers he is speaking to certainly regards it as a joke). 

Interestingly, the heroes of the novel—Van Helsing, Jonathan Harker, Dr. John Seward, Quincey Morris and Arthur Holmwood—spend much of the book beneath the notice of Dracula (The women, on the other hand, gets plenty of attention from Dracula). To reflect this, Dracula himself barely ever speaks their names (Van Helsing being an exception), and, in the comic themselves, Jones barely draws them, and we never really see their faces.

Though aware they are slowly circling him, Dracula seems to regard them as bumbling nuisances...which is fairly inspired, as when The Count nears his climax, these small men completely beneath his notice are soon frustrating his plans, as he has to set aside his city-conquering in order to fight for his very survival. All of a sudden, it seems, this handful of nobodies have chased him from one bolt hole to another...and ultimately out of London, as he races back to his castle, with Van Helsing, Lucy and the others giving chase across the continent (In this latter sequence, he narrates from within a coffin, his senses, his powers and his connection to Mina giving him an idea of what is going on outside it).

In this telling, then, Dracula's defeat at the hands of Van Helsing and the others can be read not only as modern men respecting the old ways of superstitious and religion to defeat an ancient evil...but also due in part to his own arrogance (And, given that the Wagner/Jones Dracula is the story of Dracula himself, it's fitting then that even this is used to characterize the protagonist).

The very end of the book is particularly dramatic, as he lays in his box, waiting for the sun to set, as the men battle his followers, and, on the last page, they pull off the lid and raise their weapons above him. It's some cliffhanger, especially since we know that there's going to be a fourth book, The Undead, so Dracula's story obviously doesn't end exactly at the point that the novel did. 

There are some interesting takes on vampire lore in here, particularly a sequence in which Dracula sits for a portrait with a desperate, starving, seemingly half-mad painter who is frustrated that his attempts to paint the vampire all fall apart at a certain point, what is mean to be a realistic portrait devolving into abstraction (This, Dracula theorizes, is an extension of the fact that he casts no reflection; apparently, his likeness can no longer be captured in any media...including art).

Jones, of course, has no trouble capturing this powerful, amorphous Dracula, and in this volume he presents what must be a good half-dozen or so bravura images, striking portraits of one of literature's most fascinating villains that sear themselves into the memory.

My favorites include him exiting the Tower of London, silhouetted in the darkness and casting a long shadow on the wall, while a horde of rats seem to pour of him; a panel showing him entering the open window of a club in the form of a mist, here moving with the purpose and velocity of a rocket; the mist reassembling itself into a human form in his clothes, the red glow of his eyes resolving first; a double-page spread in which he assumes a Man-Bat-eque form and takes flight over Victorian London (above); crawling down from the roof of a building towards a window, his preposterously large, billowing cape clinging to and smothering the building.

I hope you guys are reading this series. If not, I would recommend doing so. 

I was quite intrigued to read in Wagner's afterword that he says, "We have at least one more volume to go in our tetralogy of graphic novels and, as readers and fans of Stoker's masterpiece must surely be asking...where does it all go from here?"

Note the words "at least," and that a sort of house ad from The Undead on the last page says, "The Blood-Drenched History of the Vampire Lord Continues in Dracula Book Four: The Undead." Continues and not concludes, huh...? So maybe Wager and Jones' Dracula will last a little longer than originally advertised...

The Spectre by John Ostrander and Tom Mandrake Omnibus Vol. 2 (DC Comics) This 800+-page hardcover collection of the second half of Ostrander and Mandrake's 1992-1998 series came out on October 20th, and I haven't had time to read it in the last 17 days. In fact, I've only read the first issue collected within, despite how excited I was about it...! So, I'm afraid I won't be able to review it here, and I am just listing it because it is a comic book I bought in the month of October. 

You probably don't really need a review of it from me at this point though, do you? I mean, based on the first volume, it seemed this Spectre run was one of the best DC ongoings ever published...or at least one of the best I ever read. I have to assume the second half is pretty good.

I will note that, unusually for a hardcover collection of any kind, let alone a gigantic compendium like this, the omnibus has a gimmick cover. Like the previous volume (and a handful of issues of the original series), there's a glow-in-the dark cover. Charge it up in the light for a bit and then take it into a completely dark room, and you can see The Spectre's skeleton glowing. So too can you see the skeletons of all of the characters on the front, a crowd that includes everyone who attended The Spectre's funeral for himself. The logo on the spine and the back cover also glow in the dark. 

BORROWED:

Marvel: Black, White & Blood and Guts (Marvel Entertainment) I'm pretty curious about the backstory of this four-issue miniseries, a limited palette anthology along the lines of previous character-specific black, white and red/"blood" series Marvel has published in the past few years...only here they've added the word "guts"...maybe because one of the stories uses green and orange instead of red/"blood"...?

I wonder if this began on the ruins of a planned but abandoned Blade: Black, White and Blood series, as five of the 13 stories are Blade stories. The only other characters who repeat are The Punisher (who appears in two stories), and I suppose The Hulk and Doctor Strange, who each star in a story of their own, and then reappear in the final story, a Defenders story that, oddly enough, is set in 1979, sliding timeline be damned. 

And so the book is about half Blade, half random Marvel characters, including Iron Man (or at least his cursed armor), Thor, Hit-Monkey and the above-mentioned characters. The result thus feels a little...off, too Blade-y to be a branded "Marvel" as it is. It's easy to imagine separating the Blade stories out and adding some more to make for a Blade series and then adding some other stories featuring other characters to make for a general Marvel series.

Well, whatever.

The reason I brought this book home from the library at all was that, curious about the title and cover (Like, why is Hulk's hair so damn long?), I flipped through it and noticed John McCrea art...which, further investigation revealed, was for a story by Garth Ennis. Obviously, I was curious about a new story from the creative team behind Hitman (and Dicks, a run on The Demon, Hulk: Smash, Tangled Web: The Thousand and parts of The Punisher and The Boys).

This one is black and white...and green, orange and red, and thus, I wondered, if it is the reason they added "and Guts" to the title. 

Sometime in a fairly terrible-looking future, a gang of barbaric, Mad Max extra-looking guys stage gladiator fights in what's left of a stadium. 

Their star is apparently what's left of The Hulk, a gory green head and torso with a gaping head wound, opaque eyes, sharp teeth and intestines he works like tentacles, tearing apart his foes and feeding their body parts into his own mouth.

He is colored green, as is his dialogue (In this the story is like Jeffrey Brown's all-ages Hulk Teach graphic novels). That dialogue mostly consists of a garbled, guttural version of his catch phrase: "ULG SMAAAAAHHH", which he says over and over.

When we first meet him, he seems to be in the process of dismembering zombified Avengers Captain America, Thor, Iron Man and the Ms. Marvel/Warbird version of Carol Danvers, which suggests that maybe this is set in some kind of zombie apocalypse future. This would explain the state of The Hulk too, I guess. 

One day, a mysterious big, tough-looking guy with a machine gun slung over his shoulder appears, carrying a high-tech cannister. He wants to challenge The Hulk with a "Guy I know," a guy who lives in the cannister.  Out of it slithers a huge glob of orange slime—colored orange, of course—in which float a pair of big, blue, staring eyes. It too repeats a phrase over and over again: "UHZ KLOBRUN TUHM".

The mysterious man grabs one of the bad guys and throws it toward the orange creature to demonstrate its abilities. It promptly absorbs the man, graphically melting him. 

So, as you've probably figured out, this The Hulk vs. The Thing...as you've never seen them before!

(If Hulk got into his current state via zombification, what's up with The Thing...? Well, the stranger says he found him in a "research center up north...looked like they'd been experimenting on it, before the place was overrun by the dead.")

As for the mysterious stranger, there are clues to his identity, one big one of which is, of course, the creative team, but he's finally revealed on the last page, where the color red finally appears:

I do like McCrea's jagged, ragged version of his logo, which is true to the spirit of it while looking different enough to create some space between it and the more standard version, which has since been co-opted for stickers people put on their trucks and patches that real-life bad guys wear. 

The Blade stories are fairly generic, despite the obvious talent poured into them, each basically presenting him as a freelance badass monster killer who finds himself being plugged into different scenarios. 

Of these, Al Ewing and Kev Walker's "The Trail" is mildly interesting in its conception of a fitness app created by vampires to monitor and select the most desirable victims (and it includes what seems like a one-panel reference to the original Blade movie).

I also enjoyed Anthony Oliveira and Javier Pulido's story involving a community of monks-turned-vampires and a visiting werewolf (Visually, this was by far my favorite story in the collection, mostly because I so dig the style, but there are several great-looking stories within, including the Blade stories drawn by Devmalya Pramanik, Ho Che Anderson and Luke Ross). 

Ty Templeton provides two pages of "Sunday Scaries," which puts Marvel characters into comic strips in the style of familiar artists: a Winsor McKay style Little Namor in Sleepyland (Wait, why is the Avenging Son taking a bath underwater?), a Mr. Natural-style Mr. Fantastic and Nick Fury's Battle Buddies, which renders the Howling Commandos characters in a Mort Walker style. 

These aren't exactly scary or horror related, or even bloody...the only blood appearing in the final panel of Battle Buddies, wherein Junior Juniper is lying in a pool of blood. (I wonder if these came from some other project too.)

The weirdest story of them all though is that Defenders story, written by Victor LaValle and drawn by Bruno Bull. As I said, it is set in 1979—the last hours of 1979, actually, as it is New Year's Eve—and has the team of Dr. Strange, The Silver Surfer, Namor, The Hulk and Valkyrie dealing with demon-caused madness in New York City. (An editor's note stipulates that this takes place before Defenders #125, which came out in 1983...I would say that seems extremely unimportant, but I suppose any readers reading this story who were also reading Defenders 43 years ago will know why this is important).

Saving the day hinges on The Hulk's ability to sew, which is not a skill I would have associated with him, and there's a bit of a gag to the ending...although even that seems pretty out-of-date at this point, as it comments on the nature of the 1980s, which I imagine many Marvel readers today might not even have been around for.

Anyway, wherever this comic came from, however weird it is, there are some bright spots to it. 

Marvel Dimensions (Abrams ComicArts) Over the course of the last few months, I've been thinking a lot about the dearth of Marvel graphic novels currently available, particularly relative to DC's perennial selection of evergreen titles. Defining "graphic novel" as an accessible, novel-length complete story between a single set of covers, well, check your local bookstore or go online, and you'll have plenty of DC books to choose from, while Marvel's offerings are mostly just collections of runs of their serially-published comics. 

The timing of this release seemed interesting, then. Marvel Dimensions, written and illustrated by Alex Ross, is a complete, standalone graphic novel that would seem to tick all of the boxes....except, I suppose, for one. You see, it's not actually a Marvel book. 

I mean, yes, its pages are filled to overflowing with Marvel heroes and villains—much of the publisher's character catalog, I would guess—and it's even got the word "Marvel" right there in the title, but it is actually published by Abrams' Abrams ComicArts imprint, the latest in a line of such books featuring Marvel characters*. Like their kids comics, it seems Marvel has decided to simply farm out the production of graphic novels to other publishers.

I find it a curious move, personally, but it is probably a smart one, one that will presumably get the book into the hands of more readers and, hopefully, keep it in print and available for a longer time. It certainly has the potential to become the sort of evergreen book one could put in the hands of curious readers for years to come, the sort that DC seems to have plenty of and Marvel hardly any of.

Dimensions is an extremely...interesting book, one that is perhaps more weird than it is great, but one that caters to Ross' talents. It took me a while to really get into it, for reasons that will become clear shortly, but, by the final third of the book, I was having a blast with it, and found myself repeatedly pausing, lifting my glasses up and holding the page close to my eyes to scrutinize a tiny background character in the corner of a panel here or there (Like Ross' Kingdom Come, this is a book that could use a character key in the back...at least for a more casual Marvel reader like me; I assume the more experience you have with the publisher's comics history, the more you will get out of the redesigns of the characters who go unnamed and have no dialogue).

The book is narrated by someone in the Watcher's house on the moon who, it won't be revealed until page 41, is actually a curious-looking robot, a humanoid with a transparent body through which one can see a rather old-timey looking mechanical skeleton and staring, expressionless red circles for eyes.

"My name is Aaron," he introduces himself (to the reader? Not quite), "I've been called The Machine Man." 

The Watcher, he says, "drafted me to continue his duties when he was no longer able to perform them."

The proceeding 40 pages account for the first third of the book. These are two-page origins of various Marvel characters, each broken into a fairly strict format, with a long panel across the top of both pages in the spread, and then a strip of more vertically oriented panels below it. These are all painted, seemingly recreations of particular panels from the character in question's own comics (a reader will note that all of the clothes and technology seem to be appropriate to the era in which the characters were originally created, so mostly the 1960s). Prose narration tells the story of these origins, although they are mostly superfluous, as the visuals are strong enough on their own (and, if you're very familiar with Marvel from comics and other media, you know most of these stories anyway).

The narrator of these origin stories is different in each example, and almost never the character being featured. Instead, they might be sidekicks (Toro and Bucky tell the stories of the original Human Torch and Captain America, for example) or foes (General Ross on The Hulk, J. Jonah Jameson on Spider-Man, etc.) or even unexpected quarters (Hawkeye on Black Widow, Namor's mom on her son, etc.)

If you've read Ross and Paul Dini's JLA: Secret Origins, then you've already read a DC version of this passage of the book. 

At the time, I found this all fairly tedious, and actually stopped reading partway through, waiting a few days to pick the book up again. Now having read the final two-thirds of the book, I can sort of understand why Ross engaged in this section, as it establishes a "baseline" for how the "real" Marvel Universe and its characters should be (and, in this respect, the book is not only perfectly accessible to any reader but, perhaps a little too accessible). 

Still, I question some of the inclusions; Black Widow seems an outlier among the more popular characters and seems to be here because the Marvel movies so elevated her Q-rating, but she is one of a handful of characters who are barely in the next two-thirds of the book, and so it's not like a reader needs to know who she is exactly. (This is true of others, too; Namor appears in a single panel. Daredevil gets a few. I don't recall seeing the original Human Torch at all. And so on.)

Machine Man then spends a few pages talking while observing flat panels that seem to show Earth history...and then dynamic, angled panels that seem to show alternate timelines and, well, dimensions (You'll recognize "Days of Future Past", Deathlok, The Squadron Supreme, the War of the Worlds' tripods that will appear in the story of Killraven, etc.).

He then introduces the second third of the book, a variant world that is "fundamentally opposite" of the Marvel Universe, which he probably too-cutely calls "The In-Verse." This world is introduced to readers via a 34-page comic book, printed at standard comic book size, with a different paper stock than that of the rest of Dimensions, and drawn rather than full-painted. This is bound within the greater graphic novel. 

This is basically Ross giving the Marvel Universe it's equivalent of DC's Earth-3, a world gone wrong where all our familiar superheroes are now supervillains. And this means that not only is Ross giving these new characters new bad guys names, but he's also completely redesigning them, giving some of them new powers and tweaked stories and rebuilding a world around them.

It is, of course, awesome.

Bruce Banner/The Hulk, for example, now works hand-in-hand with the United States military. He goes by the name "The Reactor", and rather than trying to keep his gamma-irradiated other identity trapped within his human body and psyche, he lets it out to serve as a weapon. As the comic opens, we see Banner being dropped like a bomb into a city, and a gigantic, green Hulk exploding like a mushroom cloud out of him...before Banner sucks back in all the deadly radiation. (Later on, we'll see The Reactor at more normal Hulk size, but seemingly made of energy, and with a little, limp Banner visible floating within the center of him.)

The Fantastic Four are now The Unknowables, and, in one of the book's cooler and most inspired redesigns, Benjamin Grimm is now The Blot, an energy being who has the same basic look as The Thing, but he is now entirely composed of Kirby dots. (Reed, Mister Unknown, is incredibly terrifying, the true nature of his cosmic ray-induced mutation not revealed until a climactic moment in the final third's battle; the "Midnight" version of FF is going to have to try awfully hard to beat this, I think). 

Ross proceeds to introduce the evil Avengers (1st Strike), the evil X-Men (The Exalted), the evil Daredevil (The Inquisitor) and the evil Spider-Man (Spider-Menace, whose costume is colored differently, but otherwise looks just like the regular Spidey; an acknowledgment by Ross of the perfection of the Spider-Man costume...or that we've seen so many goddam variants over it over the last decade or so there's little new to do with it?). 

In doing so, we learn of an ultimate weapon of sorts being held in The Dark Dimension. This is The Ultimate Nullifier, and all of these teams want it...as do others. Not all of the In-Verse's Marvels get named, but we get intriguing glimpses of this world's Spider-Woman (dressed all in fishnets), She-Hulk (like her cousin, a green being of energy) and Iron Fist and Power Man (the former with a cool, dragon-inspired look) and plenty of others. None of these get named and seem to basically be Easter Eggs for those that recognize them.

Their existence (and that of others) reminded me a lot of Kingdom Come (I never read Earth X, which seemed similarly filled with redesigned superheroes, so I'm not sure if this is true of that book as well or not). 

The very first time I read Kingdom Come, I didn't recognize many of the players, and hardly any of the background ones. Each time I returned to the book, having read more and more DC comics between each reading, I "got" more of them though. I assume younger and newer readers might find this book similarly rewarding over the years, should Abrams keep it in print.

After the last page of The In-Verse comic, a splash featuring Master X leading The Exalted and a captive Spider-Menace in pursuit of the Ultimate Nullifier, the story resumes in the bigger, fully-painted format. 

This final third is basically just a big-ass fight scene, some 30 pages of Ross' redesigned Marvel character catalog duking it out, each panel crowded with figures, including tiny ones worth looking for and discovering (Look, there's a black-feathered Howard The Duck! Is that a magic-using Punisher...and is he a good guy or a bad guy here? And so on).

As The Exalted and 1st Strike face one another, more and more players arrive (Like evil Namor and his evil Defenders, or "The Underlord and his fellow Aggressors") and posture, Ross gives us what we've been missing so far, finally bringing on the bad guys...who are here, of course, the good guys.

And so good Doctor Doom and Magneto spring their trap, and a whole army of heroic versions of Marvel's villains attack the army of villainous versions of Marvel's heroes for what is probably the biggest superhero battle I've seen since Kingdom Come. 

Ross keeps escalating, as more and more powerful reinforcements and other players show up—Good Thanos! Evil Phoenix! Not-sure-if-they're-good-or-bad Silver Surfer and Galactus!—until there's nowhere left to go and the book ends.

In this respect, it is, at the end, a pure toybox comic, with Ross playing with all the action figures he has access to here, but what makes this a lot more fun than similar such toybox comics is, of course, Ross has gone and redesigned all of those action figures. These then are bespoke, homemade action figures he's smashing together.

Some of the redesigns are great. Like, there's really no reason for this Mysterio, who is never named, never has any dialogue, and only appears in the background of a few panels, to look as cool as he does. One imagines that Ross has notebooks full of sketches and background stories behind his werewolf Moon Knight, his armored looking Man-Wolf/Stargod, his Adam Warlock (I think?) who looks like a human Infinity Gauntlet and so on.

As with Kingdom Come, seeing all these cool designs and wondering who these guys are and what their stories might be is like lightning to the eyeballs of the reader, setting the imagination ablaze. It seems almost a waste for Ross to have done so much creative background work for a big fight scene—although there are gestures regarding the meditation on good and evil, and a surprise ending that attempts to elevate the book beyond its component parts—although seeing DC revisit many of the characters from Kingdom Come over the years convinces me that it is better to let one wonder about the heroic Green Goblin than actually hear his story (Or, worse, see him team-up with the 616 Spider-Man to fight Norman Osborne or whatever). 

So yes, this book is weird. Behind a completely generic cover that gives a reader no indication of what might be within, we find three different comics: a Secret Origins of the Marvel Universe, the introduction of a Marvel Earth-3 and a fight comic in which characters from Ross' sketchbooks duke it out.

Ultimately, I had a blast. Is it good comics? Sure. Is it great? In some ways. But the words that I keep coming back to are weird, unusual and fun. And those are great words for a comic book to suggest, if you ask me. 

Shinobi Undercover Vol. 3 (Viz Media) I enjoyed the first two volumes of Ippon Takegushi and Santa Mitarashi's series about teenage super-ninjas going undercover at a Japanese high school that I was happy to pick up the third one when I saw it at my library. 

The series follows the socially awkward but seemingly unbeatably powerful Yodaka, who has been assigned as a bodyguard to cute classmate Aoi, who doesn't know she is the target of evil ninja and is surrounded by good ninja protecting her from them. The pair became unlikely friends, and he seems to be genuinely falling for her.

In this volume, a rival for her affections appears, the incredibly, disconcertingly good-looking Makoto Yuki, who "is so handsome all the girls are going wild," and is the sort of manga character who emits sparkles. Though the newcomer is one of the good ninjas, and thus on Yodaka's team, the pair come to blows over Aoi, the new ninja demonstrating an unusual ability to stretch like Plastic Man, wielding their arms like whips. 

After Yodaka is surprised by an element of the newcomer's identity, however, they make peace. 

Then all four of the school ninja go to investigate the bad ninja base, only to find themselves in a trap, facing off against two more fantastical enemies.

In this volume, the school stuff seems to recede quite a bit, as does the focus on Yodaka's poor social skills and the running commentary from "Op," the voice in the good ninjas' earpieces. That, of course, is what I found the more fun and interesting parts of the series and, without that, what we have is a fight comic.

Sure, the creators make each new opponent a threat that is as imaginative and unique as formidable, but it also makes for a repetitive, predictable narrative.

REVIEWED: 

Film Nerds (Putnam) When Ami starts middle school, her life feels like it's falling apart. This is because she finds herself separated from her best friend Ivy for the first time since kindergarten...as well as all of her other friends. Shy and awkward, she struggles to make new friends in her classes, and soon her sole "happy place" seems to be working with Ivy on their movie. Meanwhile, she keeps her social troubles secret from Ivy, afraid she'll lose her if she finds out how unpopular she has become. The graphic novel—which, curiously, is not the first one I've read about middle-school friends making a movie together!—is the first graphic novel from cartoonist Sofia Warren. You can't tell by reading it; it's pretty good. More here. 

GalaXic Baseball League Vol. 1 (Viz Media) A thousand years in the future, the Earth sport baseball has swept the galaxy, becoming not only the known universe's pastime, but also a proxy for war. The planets that win the most baseball games also get favored trade status. Despite inventing the game, Earth has been unable to keep up with the advances and abilities of various alien teams, and, in fact, they've been doing so poorly of late that it seems like they won't even be able to field a team for the 3026 team. The Earth team's new manager, a brilliant inventor and former CEO, has an audacious solution: She will simply build a time machine, travel back to 2026, abduct that year's legendary Major League Baseball players, and manipulate them into playing for her. 

Even if you're as ignorant of professional sports as I am, you will probably recognize the names of some of these players. That's because they are all real MLB players, whom manga-ka Acky Bright has plopped into his narrative. 

I had a blast with this vaguely Space Jam-ish manga, and I suppose it would be even more fun for kids (and/or manga-reading grown-ups) who know who all these guys are. More here.

*These include Patrick McDonnell's The Super Hero's Journey, Chip Kidd and Michael Cho's The Avengers in The Veracity Trap!, Kevin J. Anderson and company's Doctor Strange: Endless Nightmare, Ross' own Fantastic Four: Full Circle and John Byrne's fan comics X-Men: Elsewhen. I've only read and written about a few of these. You can find my review of The Super Hero's Journey in this post and The Veracity Trap! at the top of this post.