Review: Uncle Scrooge and the Infinity Dime: Gallery Edition

After his The Other Side and Scalped became successes for DC's Vertigo imprint in the 2000s, writer Jason Aaron began a career at Marvel, one full of generally well-regarded runs on various high profile characters. He wrote Ghost Rider, Thor, The Punisher, Wolverine, The X-Men, Wolverine and The X-Men, Doctor Strange, The Hulk, The Avengers, and even Star Wars and Conan.

In 2023, he announced that he was no longer under exclusive contract with Marvel and he was shortly tackling some...well, some unusual characters for a guy who had spent about 20 years writing so much of the Marvel Universe. He wrote Superman (in an Action Comics arc, followed by the Absolute Superman ongoing), the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (relaunching IDW's ongoing series based on the license) and Uncle Scrooge (for a special Marvel one-shot). 

I wondered if, perhaps free of his exclusive contract, he was setting about working on his bucket list of comic book characters in earnest.

One has to imagine that, if Scrooge McDuck isn't on a lot of comics creators' bucket lists, it's only because writing him might seem so unrealistic. Luckily for Aaron, though, he had a long and fruitful relationship with Marvel, a corporate entity that is now owned by Disney (Although, aside from licensing most of their Star Wars comics to Marvel, Disney has mostly steered clear of having Marvel publish much of anything starring their signature cartoon characters, Fantagraphics seemingly remaining their favored publisher for duck and mouse comics). 

Certainly, Scrooge is one of the all-time greatest comics characters, and, of course, Aaron is a fan—although according to his brief introduction to the hardcover "Gallery Edition" of his comic Uncle Scrooge and the Infinity Dime, he's a rather recent one. 

Under the title "Why I Love This Duck", which begins with the sentence "Uncle Scrooge is one of the greatest adventure characters in comic-book history," he tells of sitting down with his son at bedtime one night to read Don Rosa's "Son of the Sun". After that, he was hooked, and said he spent the rest of his son's childhood reading the Don Rosa library with him, singling out "Guardians of the Lost Library" as his favorite story. 

While he dedicates The Infinity Dime to several people—including his son, Rosa and Scrooge creator Carl Barks—he also says he wrote it for "you," by which he seems to mean readers who aren't already fans of Uncle Scrooge, hoping his comic would serve as a sort of gateway into some of those many great comics, comics you can know fill several bookshelves full of handsome collections of, thanks to Fantagraphics.

After reading that, I was a bit curious as to how well the project might have succeeded. Did Uncle Scrooge and the Infinity Dime find its way in front of the average Marvel Comics fan, or, perhaps Jason Aaron fan, and did such readers not have any prior experience with Uncle Scrooge? (Given the presence of Disney comics in comic shops over the last few decades, and the existence of two different versions of the cartoon Duck Tales, one from 1987s and one from 2017, I have to imagine most comics readers already had a pretty good idea of who Scrooge was and what he was all about. I know I personally met him in repeated viewings of Mickey's Christmas Carol, hung out with him after school during the initial Duck Tales series, spent hours playing the video game based on the cartoon and then followed him into the comics as soon as Fanta started their Carl Barks Library.)

Anyway, Aaron's effort is a rather odd comic, something of an uneasy Marvel/Disney hybrid. Its writer is, of course, a Marvel guy, and the basic idea seems to be to put Scrooge, his cast and basic milieu into a somewhat typical Marvel comic book, although they apparently didn't want to book to look or feel like a Marvel comic, as rather than commissioning a Marvel artist or artists to draw it, they turned to a half-dozen Italian Disney artists, splitting the chapters between them: Paolo Mottura, Fancesco D'Ippolito and Lucio De Giuseppe,  Alessandro Pastrovicchio and Vitale Mangiatordi and Giada Perissinotto, with colors by Arianna Consonni.

The only clue of what members of Marvel's "bullpen" might have done with the character if given a chance came on the covers. Recent Fantastic Four cover artist Alex Ross is responsible for the one above, but there were of course plenty of variants, including ones from J. Scott Campbell, Gabriele Dell'Otto, Steve McNiven, Frank Miller, Peach Momoko, John Romita Jr, Walter Simonson and Skottie Young (This particular hardcover collection includes them all in the back, as well as interviews with many of the artists; we'll get to them later on in the post, as I'm sure you're fascinated to find out what Frank Miller's version of a Disney duck might look like and, if you can't wait, you can always visit Comics.org).

Now, The Infinity Dime was apparently a 30-page, $7.99 one-shot, published in August of 2024. Being currently comic shop-less, I naturally skipped it, deciding to wait until it was republished in trade (I had assumed it was a far longer, multi-issue story, to be honest; I guess when one stops reading Marvel's solicitations month in and month out, one no longer knows exactly what they're getting when picking up the publisher's works).

I never did buy a trade, nor did I ever find one in my library and, recently remembering the comic existed, I checked the library catalog for it, and was somewhat surprised to see that that while an over-sized 9.57-inch by 13.25 inch, 112-page hardcover collection was indeed published back in March, neither my library nor the consortium we share materials with had ordered a physical copy for some reason (Reminder: That consortium consists of 40 different library systems throughout northeast Ohio, including the Cleveland Public Library system). 

And so I read it as an "eComic", borrowed via the Hoopla app.

This meant that I couldn't tell how big the published version's pages actually were, nor could I guess how long it actually was until I had finished reading it. Based on the original comic's cover boasting that it was "The Story of the Century!", and by Aaron's professed interest in the works of Rosa and Barks and company, and by the fact that it was broken into three chapters and an epilogue and the fact that it had so many different artists involved, I was expecting the story to be, well, something of an epic, you know?

It's not. Like I said above, there are just 30 original story pages devoted to The Infinity Dime, making it the length of about one-and-a-half regular Marvel comics. That was, obviously, rather disappointing.

And as for Aaron's story, while it is big in terms of scale and stakes, if not page count, and it does seem to endeavor to offer something of a mission statement on the title character and what makes him so special, it can't help but feel a little small...more of a trifle than an epic, really.

The plot is really quite superheroic, and while many Disney comics have been published that deal with the genre—including those in which Donald Duck and Goofy have their own superhero personas—this one feels much more like a modern DC or Marvel book, rather than an application of the Disney characters to the classic superhero tropes.

The book begins with Donald and Huey, Dewey and Louie diving through a terrible snowstorm, on their way to Bear Mountain, where they would meet their distant Uncle Scrooge for the first time and spend Christmas with him (This is, of course, the same premise of Bark's 1947 story "Christmas on Bear Mountain," the first appearance of Scrooge). Here, things go differently, though: Scrooge's nephews never make it to see him, Donald never proves his mettle to Scrooge and the old miser never becomes part of their lives. This, a caption in the last panel of the first page tells us, is a world "among the myriad of alternate universes arrayed across infinity."

That's right, it's a multiverse story! Sick of the Marvel Cinematic Universe telling multiverse stories? Well, now they've even infected Disney duck comics!

This particular world's Scrooge seems to have still had many of his adventures, enough to fill a massive money bin, but he's grown more bitter and lonely than ever. One day, while stomping through his bin, he happens by a magic mirror embedded in a pile of coins, which he had taken from "that two-bit conjurer, Magica De Spell". No sooner does he finish his exposition, telling readers that it was called "The Mirror of Worlds", then it begins to glow pink, emit a stream of five-pointed cartoon stars and pull on his number one dime, which he wears like a necklace. (For some reason, it's a really big dime, looking more like a fifty-cent piece).

Then he has a revelation: "Why settle for being the richest duck in the world, when I could be... ...the richest duck on ALL the worlds!!!"

Meanwhile, in the "real" world, Scrooge and his nephews are flying back into Duckburg, where they see the Beagle Boys attempting a strange money bin heist, wherein the entire bin is being lifted up off the ground and into some sort of pink energy portal in the sky.

Scrooge goes on the attack, but he soon finds himself face to face with Doctor Doom-like "the Scrooge-Above-All", the evil Scrooge we had just met, now outfitted with a villainous-looking costume (dig the coins on his knuckles). Between the pages, he has apparently busied himself by visiting alternate reality after alternate reality, besting each world's Scrooge and then making off with that fallen Scrooge's number one dime and money bin. He gets those of our Scrooge too.

Scrooge and the nephews go to Gyro Gearloose for help, and the nephews explain the multiverse, using the entry on "multiverse" from their Junior Woodchuck Guidebook. Gyro pulls out this world's Mirror of Worlds, which he has been studying (He does not, therefore, end up inventing anything here to help Scrooge). 

After it's explained that to travel through the multiverse, one needs a "universal constant", "something that exists in all universes at once," Scrooge at first thinks that his number one dime might be it, but Gyro tell his that no, it is Scrooge himself that is the universal constant (And I guess he does exist in our universe, the only one we can be sure is definitely real, in the form of a comic book and cartoon character, but then, we also know that he doesn't exist in other universes we read about regularly, like that of the Marvel Universe or DC Universe...)

To make a not-very-long story short (a "weeks later" caption seems to skip over what a reader might expect to come next), our Scrooge visits the Scrooge-Above-All's Duckburg and infiltrates his gigantic money bin, which is a money bin big enough to encompass all the other worlds' money bins. It's "The All-Bin."

Confronted by Beagle Boys, our Scrooge commands his shadowy allies, revealed on one of the book's several splash pages, a story technique that is definitely more modern Marvel than classic Disney, "Fight like Scrooges!!!"

Scrooge's multiversal army of himself then falls before the magical might of the Scrooge-Above-All, who tells them that this has all happened before, and refers to himself at one point as "Scrooge...Uncle to NO ONE!"

Then the Scrooges unleash their secret weapon, dogpile, er, duckpile the evil Scrooge, and, in a matter of panels of them yelling at him while wrestling, convince him that all of the money in all of the worlds is still just so much metal, and that the sense of adventure, the connections made along the way, and family is the real treasure.

And, a few pages later, there's a two-page epilogue, during which we see that the evil Scrooge too has been redeemed in the same way that the "real" Scrooge was...his redemption just took a lot longer, and a violent intervention by his own multiversal doppelgangers, rather than just, you know, spending a Christmas with his nephew and grand-nephews.

As you can see then, it's quite "Marvelous" a story...Aaron even drops a "'Nuff said" into the proceedings. 

I confess to being somewhat disappointed, but that's mainly because I was expecting something longer and grander (and the way I read it kept me from realizing how short it actually was until I reached "THE END" on the last page; obviously if you get a physical copy of the book for yourself, this won't be a factor for you), but it certainly does its job of putting Scrooge and company into what feels a lot like a modern Marvel story, while extolling the character's virtues: Not only is he smart and tough and super-rich, but his extreme wealth is presented as a symbol of what is really valuable in life. 

And then it's on to the backmatter, of which there is a lot.

In fact, there is some 80 pages of it. All these extras include a short interview with Jason Aaron, another with the artists, one with the artist who designed the "dark" Scrooge including some preliminary sketches, some pages of unfinished art, and each of the variant covers, including interviews with many of the artists who contributed them.  Finally, there's Bark's original 19-page "Christmas on Bear Mountain," reprinted in all its glory.

The Marvel artists who contributed these tended to fall into one of two camps. 

Some simply drew in the Disney style and did so to such a degree that you might not recognize their art as theirs at all. This includes Alex Ross (I mean sure, his is painted, and in a more photorealistic style that suggests a degree of three-dimensionality, but other than that, his Scrooge just looks like the regular Scrooge, right?), as well as J. Scott Campbell, Ron Lim, Steve McNiven, Gabriele Dell'Otto and, I think, even such distinct stylists as John Romita JR and Walt Simonson.

I mean, at a glance, could you tell these covers were the work of JRJR and Simonson?

And then there are artists who drew Scrooge in their own signature styles, design be damned. These include Peach Momoko, Skottie Young and Frank Miller.

Check out Miller's Scrooge:

I think it's quite safe to say that it doesn't look like a piece one might expect to find on a Disney-branded comic (I'm most intrigued by how he handled Scrooge's feathers between the hem of his coat and the top of his legs; it looks like he's wearing a white hula skirt...and man, that beak...! I remember from middle-school trying to draw Scrooge's beak, and damn, it is not easy...!)

I think the artists who fares the best at drawing Scrooge, the one who balances adherence to the design without sacrificing their own personal style at all is Young. Check this out:

It's obviously a Scrooge, and a workable one, but not the Scrooge, right? I imagine it is merely a result of Young's own cartoon-inspired style being closer to that of Disney comics than the style of many of his peers, but it's easy to imagine Young having drawn all of The Infinity Dime, for example, while Miller doing so would seem unthinkable.

Now, while the book doesn't say so, I can say so here. If this really was your first introduction to Uncle Scrooge comics, click this link and start shopping. 

While I've yet to read a book from any of Fanta's Disney series that I didn't enjoy, I'd recommend starting with pretty much any volume of The Carl Barks Library, be they Donald Duck or Uncle Scrooge books. I only have a pair of volumes from the Don Rosa Library myself so far, as I wanted to get all the Barks ones before moving on, but, obviously, those are damn good comics too (And, after reading this, I want to seek "Guardians of the Lost Library" ASAP).

When it comes to Fantagraphics' collections of classic Disney comics, it's really rather hard to think of a better deal in terms of quality of comics to money spent ratio in comics right now....

Review: Invaders Now!

Not wanting to repeat the mistake I had made with last week's review of a Marvel comic, wherein I accidentally re-reviewed a book I had reviewed years previously, I took the time to search and see if I had already written about 2010-2011 miniseries Invaders Now!, which I know I had read before. I couldn't find a review of the collection on my site, so I guess I had either read it in single issues and reviewed it as part of my columns reviewing new releases, or I had read it in trade and never actually wrote about it.

The series was a collaboration between writer Christos Gage and cover artist Alex Ross, who share a "story" credit, and artist Caio Reis. Interestingly, the cover bears the logos for both Marvel and Dynamite Entertainment, and the credits page lists five folks from Dynamite. This, despite the fact that all of the characters are, of course, Marvel characters. At this remove, I couldn't even guess why Dynamite would be involved in a series like this; was Ross perhaps under some kind of contract with the publisher that necessitated their involvement...?

The stars are, of course, The Invaders, a Golden Age super-team retconned into Marvel Universe history by Roy Thomas and Sal Buscema in a 1969 Avengers story. Though some of the characters shared covers and occasionally crossed over—especially in regards to Namor and The Human Torch— in various Timely comics, they never really operated as a team during the war years. These days, they are basically Marvel's answer to DC's Justice Society of America. 

For this particular series, Ross and Gage have essentially reassembled the 1970s line-up, and added the Golden Age Vision, who functions as much as a plot device as a character. Of course, it picks up those various characters where they were in the Marvel Universe circa 2010, and so Bucky is serving as the "official" Captain America, Steve Rogers has a new, maskless costume and is the leader of SHIELD, The Torch and Toro are recently-ish resurrected, Namor is hanging out with the X-Men on Utopia and Union Jack is the Joseph Chapman version.

The story is pretty straightforward. There's a bizarre, terrifying attack at a hospital in the Netherlands, wherein a muscular, badly deformed man stumbles in seeking aid, and then attacks with what seems like super-stength and rage, his bite infecting others and transforming them into creatures like himself. Somewhat zombie-ish then, although the victims look a bit more like Hulked-out versions of Quasimodo than the undead.

Shown footage of the incident, Steve Roges, serving as Boss of All Super-Heroes, folds his hands and says, "I know what this is." Just as he's in the midst of ordering Maria Hill to alert various heroes, The Golden Age Vision and the other characters from the cover appear, Vision declaring, "Only The INVADERS can save this world now," the team's name appearing in a giant, stylized font as it does on the cover. (Though this Vision is an extra-dimensional alien rather than an android, his yellow-colored dialogue balloons are square in shape, with rigidly straight lines connecting them, which visually suggests a mechanical nature to his voice.)

We then get a series of flashbacks, showing Vision as he gathers the others in groups of two—the fact that the various Invaders were spending time with one another at this point of crisis, he intimates, was no coincidence, but part of the pull of a magical force being marshalled against them).

And then a more substantial flashback, revealing the truth behind a bombshell Steve drops at the end of the first issue. 

"She's talking about the darkest chapter in our history," Steve says of something that Spitfire breaks up while recalling, "...WHEN THE INVADERS MURDERED A TOWN FULL OF INNOCENT PEOPLE."

Pretty strong cliffhanger, right?

As for that story, it takes places in the Netherlands in 1945, wherein The Invaders were battling "the full roster of the Uberkommando", all of Hitler's superhumans: Master Man, U-Man, Baron Blood and Warrior Woman. The Nazi super-people are defending a nearby castle containing the laboratory of Arnim Zola, who was, at that particular point, still entirely human.

In that lab, he had cooked up weaponized disease glimpsed at the beginning of the first issue, the thing that turns civilians into deformed, muscular killer monsters and drives the to bite others, spreading the disease zombie apocalypse style.

Once they learn that there is absolutely no cure, and that the disease causes incredibly pain for those suffering from it, the heroes make a terrible judgement call, one that the original Union Jack refused to be a part of, even if he also said he wouldn't try to stop them from implementing it: The Invaders kill all of the infected civilians, burning down their village and flooding the whole area.

And now these same characters (with a new Union Jack in for the old) are forced to face that situation again, as the infection seems to have resurfaced and, when they return to the town, they see it magically being rebuilt and find themselves facing the new iteration of the team of super-Nazis they fought during the war (Master Man, Warrior Woman and U-Man all seem to still be around, and are here joined by a huge robot battle-suit going by the name Iron Cross and two identical skinheads in matching shirts with swastikas on them; I didn't catch their names).

So, what exactly is going on?

Well, the villain is revealed to be a survivor of the town, one whose infection resulted in his being deformed, but not becoming a mindless killer like the others. He blamed the Invaders for the deaths of his family, and has spent his life studying the occult, trying to find a way to bring his family back to life...and hating these heroes the whole time.

It certainly didn't help that almost all of the Invaders have, one way or another, not only survived the war, but also cheated death and lived, young and vital as ever, into the 21st century. Hell, several of them have literally died and been resurrected through extraordinary means. (It must be unusual for those who lose a loved one to regard death in the Marvel Universe, where there are so many famous examples of people returning from the dead, and almost as many different ways to achieve those resurrections; one imagines the loss lacks the finality that it does here in our universe.)

Using his occult knowledge and the Spear of Destiny, the vengeful old man has summoned a Lovecraftian deity associated with the area (the word "fhtagn" is repeated a lot) and attempts to trade the Invaders' lives for those of the townspeople...a bargain the Invaders themselves seem willing to make, to his own surprise. (Two quick points of interest. First, when the magic-user holds aloft the Spear, he says that it was "lost during the closing days of the war," and an editorial note points readers to 2010's WWII-set one-shot The Twelve: Spearhead, completely ignoring the fact that a kid lifted it from a German museum during the events of 1994's Wolverine: Evilution; this is Evilution erasure! Second, that Lovecraftian entity, a one-eyed ball of tentacles, is Shua-Gorath; I didn't recognize it as a pre-existent character the first time I read this, but now recognize it from the film Doctor Strange and the Multiverse of Madness.)

Naturally, despite long odds and the surprise appearance of the now weird-looking, robot-bodied Zola, the heroes end up saving the day, defeating the various villains and even providing a cure to the new crop of infected victims, something they were unable to do in 1945, back before they had the likes of super-scientists like Reed Richards and Hank Pym in their contact lists.

The story is fairly simple, and of the plot-over-character variety, but it is quite well-told, moving quite swiftly through pages with very few panels on them and driven by some particularly hooky cliffhangers. Despite Ross' predictably realistic covers, the interior art occasionally leaves something to be desired.

Reis' art is fine so long as it involves super-people in costumes posing, of which there is a fair amount here, but he's much less able to sell the scenes of various civilians, even when it involves our heroes out of costume. I'm not quite sure about his female figures, either. Spitfire, who wears a full-body yellow suit with little ornamentation, essentially looks like she's naked in every panel she appears in, color artists Vincius Andrade protecting her modesty, and there's at least one panel of Maria Hill weirdly jutting her breasts out Steve in their office (Page 20, panel 1, should you have a copy in front of you).

The whole affair reads like it was meant to be a pilot series for an Invaders ongoing, ending with a two-page spread featuring eight-person team posing, flashbacks to past adventures appearing in the clouds of mist seeming to emanate from The Vision, who declares, "Should freedom ever again be threatened... The INVADERS will answer the call." 

The Invaders did indeed get a short-lived ongoing a few years later, with 2014's All-New Invaders by James Robinson, Steve Pugh and others, but it only featured half of this line-up—Steve Rogers (back to being Captain America), Namor, The Human Torch and Bucky Barnes (back to being The Winter Soldier)—and picking up a few other characters before its cancellation 15 issues later. Then in 2019, Chip Zdarsky helmed another short attempt at an ongoing featuring the same four heroes (Where was poor Toro in all of this?), this one only lasting 12 issues.

I think Invaders Now! was an effective enough reunion sort of comic, and could have served for a decent launchpad for something like a Marvel answer to DC's JSA, so I'm kinda curios why Marvel didn't commission such an ongoing from Gage, but instead waited a few years and had Robinson, who had actually co-written DC's millennial JSA for a bit, try his hand at a version of the team. 

Revisiting it today, I think it provides a fun opportunity to see some of the original, pre-Marvel Marvel characters interacting and see some of the lesser-used characters like The Vision and Toro doing anything at all.

There's also a particularly fun bit hanging on some Marvel Universe lore, as when Namor takes The Torch back to Utopia, and a couple of shy young mutants blurt out, "IS IT TRUE YOU KILLED HITLER?"

After a silent, beat panel, where The Torch looks taken aback and Namor smiles at him smugly, two of the boys looking like they realize they said something they shouldn't have, and another flashing back to The Torch setting Hitler ablaze, he finally answers:

It's all right, son.

The answer is yes... ...I killed Hitler. 

And I don't mind talking about it at all. There are plenty of things I did in the war I'd rather forget... ...but setting that monster on fire and watching him burn...

...I regret I could only do it once.

On the following page, Namor tells The Torch that his willingness to set Hitlers on fire is part of the reason the world of the 21st century needs someone like Jim Hammond around:

What you said to those boys, Jim Hammond... You must understand that is why you're needed.

The warriors of today...The Avengers, The X-Men...They adhere to a different code. One perhaps appropriate to the modern world...but limited. 

They are reluctant to kill...even the likes of Hitler. Those who are not averse tend to relish bloodshed. Often too much.

The world needs men like you. Who will do what is necessary without hesitation, but recognize that war and peace are different states of being.

With the short life spans of these humans, such men are swiftly fading from the Earth.

Namor sold me...which makes it kinda too bad we don't see more of this Torch in Marvel comics these days. 

And it makes me wonder, were Spider-Man in Hitler's bunker 80 years ago, would he have killed Hitler? Would Cyclops? Iron Man? Daredevil? Hawkeye?

Kingdom Came.

As I mentioned the other day, I recently re-read Kingdom Come via a copy of Absolute Kingdom Come, paying the most attention to the copious amounts of supplementary material in the back. While reading through all the names on the two page section marked "Memorial," which was basically a key to the 105 (105!) characters on the covers of the first three issues, I was actually taken aback by how many of these characters were introduced into the mainstream DCU before the 2011 reboot. Several of them were introduced by Ross himself during his collaboration with Geoff Johns on the 2007-launched Justice Society of America (as character creator, cover artist and eventually co-writer), but there were obviously a lot of Kingdom Come fans writing and editing at DC Comics in the last 15 years.

Just looking at the key...

•A female Judomaster II was introduced in 2007's Birds of Prey #100, and she later joined the JSoA

•Magog was introduced to the DCU in the pages of JSoA, eventually earning his own short-lived solo title, and even making the transition into the post-Flashpoint, rebooted New 52 universe in the pages of Superman/Wonder Woman

•Lightning, "Black Lightning's metahuman daughter," was introduced in the pages of JSoA, albeit via a retcon that gave Jefferson Pierce his second adult daughter (Writer Judd Winick had previously retconnd Black Lightning's history to give him an adult daughter who took the name "Thunder"; Black Lightning's retconned origin would include them in Black Lightning: Year One

•Von Bach, Swastika and 666 are among "The Fourth Reich" super-Nazis that mess up a picnic in Columbus, Ohio at the opening of the 2007 Justice Society of America series

•The Thunder of Kingom Come is "a new Johnny Thunder with the mischeivous spirit of the Thunderbolt;" the Jakeem Thunder that Grant Morrison, Howard Porter and John Dell introduced in 1999 JLA arc "Crisis Times Five" has some obvious differences from this Thunder (including having an exterior rather than interior Thunderbolt), but they sure look an awful lot alike

•The Hawkman of Kingdom Come didn't come to the DCU, but his design did, as former Infinity, Inc. character Northwind "evolved" into that design during Johns and company's run on JSA

•Robotman III is the name that Victor Stone, AKA Cyborg takes in Kingdom Come, sometime after his half-robot body was updated to one of golden-colored liquid metal. Cyborg never took that name in the DCU, the second Robotman never stopped using it or died for very long, but he did acquire a golden-colored liquid metal body at the climax of Titans/JLA and kept it through Devin Grayson and company's The Titans ongoing. Johns changed Cy back to a more familiar design in the pages of The Flash, essentially giving Cyborg his George Perez-design, but with the gray metal parts now being colored gold. When Johns relaunched Teen Titans in 2003, Cyborg was back to the grayish metal coloration

•While I've lost track of DC's Starmen over the years, Kingdom Come's Starman VIII–his costume and origin as revealed on this key completely in tact–was a member of the JSoA

•Wesley Dodds's former sidekick Sandy the Golden Boy did indeed dawn the costume of Kingdom Come's Sandman IV (that of Jack Kirby's 1970s Sandman), in the pages of JSA. He didn't keep it long, though, and never really took the name Sandman for very long either, sticking with the one-syllable "Sand" for most of his career

•The red-haired, tornado-powered Red Tornado III was introduced with a different name and cooler costume into the pages of JSoA as Cyclone; she's sadly been MIA since the 2011 reboot

•Atom-Smasher was probably the very first emigree from Kingdom Come to the DCU, and he also stuck around the longest. Here he's described simply as "formerly Nuklon, godson of the original Atom." Nuklon took the name Atom-Smasher in the first story arc of James Robinson, David S. Goyer, Stephen Sadowski and Michael Bair's JSA, although his costume varied somewhat (and for the better). He wore the blue full-head mask that Ross' Atom-Smasher does, but had a more traditional spandex superhero costume than the professional wrestler gear Ross outfitted him with. Atom-Smasher, like most legacy heroes, has also been MIA since the reboot

•The Red Robin name and costume came to the DCU via Jason Todd during the best-ignored Countdown period of DC Comics, and was then adopted by Robin III Tim Drake, after it became clear that Robin IV wasn't going to be killed off any time soon. After the Flashpoint reboot, Tim Drake ditched the Kingdome Come costume, but kept the name. The name has apparently become strong enough that I noticed it was what was used instead of "Robin" in this goofy Batman Unlimited: Animal Instinct direct-to-DVD cartoon I watched (the costume in that looked like a stripped-down, anime-inspired version of Ross' design

•Roy Harper, who first went by Speedy and then by Arsenal, never grew out his goatee or started wearing a red cap, but he began wearing a red version of the Neal Adams-designed Green Arrow costume in Dan Jurgens' Teen Titans way back in 1998. His costume changed (for the worse) a few times since then, but he returned to a red Green Arrow costume in the pages of the Brad Meltzer/Ed Benes Justice League of America, where he also finally took the name Red Arrow. He later returned to "Arsenal" and a different costume, and, since the reboot, has been going by Arsenal, but wearing a costume closer to that of his Red Arrow one

•Zatara II was introduced to the DCU during Johns' Teen Titans run, but rather than being the "son of the late Zatanna, and grandson of the original Zatara," he was the still-alive Zatanna's cosuin.

•Wildcat III is described as "a man-panther with the original's spirit;" a Wildcat with that exact design was introduced by Ross and Johns into their JSoA, although he was now the long-lost son of the original Wildcat, Ted Grant

Those are just the characters from the covers of Kingdom Comes #1-#3, of course, and thus not a complete accounting.

It's also interesting to note that in the years since these covers first appeared on comics shelves other characters with these names have all appeared, but in very, very different forms. Characters like Mr. Terriffic II (all-around good guy Michael Holt, rather than the over-equipped and over-zealous human arsenal of Kingdom Come), Joker's Duaghter II (a crazy lady with a belly shirt and The Joker's flayed-off face worn as a mask over her own, rather than a Jill Thompson-esque Harlequin with cool gadgets), Hourman III (an intelligent machine colony from the 853rd century with vast powers over time and space, rather than a strong guy who can fly), Batwoman II (a mundane human vigilante, rather than a New God fan of Batman's with an amazingly insane costume and a giant flying dog named Ace), Spy Smasher II (a lady who messes with Oracle in Birds of Prey, rather than an "indpendent operative in the post-cold war world"; neither is terribly developed, but their designs are racially different), a new version of Black Condor and The Phantom Lady (Basis updates of the originals; Kingdom Come's Condor wasn't really distinguishable from any previous Black Condors, but its Phantom Lady was an actual phantom) and a new Stars and Stripes (Plucky teenager Courtney Whitmore and her stepfather Stripey in a robot battle-suit code-named S.T.R.I.P.E., rather than the heavily armed, reckless legacy versions of Kingdom Come).

The further adventures of Cathedral

A few years ago, I singled out Cathedral as my favorite character from Alex Ross and Mark Waid's 1996 Kingdom Come series, mentioning that as far as I knew he appeared only in a single, two-panel scene in the first issue (fighting The Whiz, only to be tossed aside by Wonder Woman) and on the cover of the first issue (along with 32 other characters). The key to that cover in one of the trades is where I learned the character's name, as he goes without one in the comic itself, and found a simple five-word description of the character: "Holy terror of the underworld."

I was recently re-reading–well, skimming–Kingdom Come in the form of a well-loved/falling apart library copy of Absolute Kingdom Come. I paid more attention to the copious supplementary material than the story itself, which I've read and re-read so many times before, although I did scan all of the pages for little details, particularly all of the pages with crowd scenes, as the pages in the Absolute version are so large that it's much easier to see background characters.

I learned a little more about Cathedral in this volume. First, there's the above sketch; he appeared with Catwoman II and Manotaur in the section of the sketch gallery marked "The New Breed." Here we get more than five words on Cathedral. Writes Ross, "Instead of dark-clad, cloaked figures roaming around on building rooftops and edifices, I threw together someone who would blend in better."

Sheesh. Look at the detail on the sketch. No wonder Cathedral was relegated to just two panels, which only showed parts of him anyway. He looks like a real pain in the ass to draw; can you imagine him starring in a monthly comic? It's hard to imagine anyone drawing that guy on 20 pages a month...I would assume he would spend a lot of time out of costume or in silhouette.

Anyway, it turns out he does appear in more than two panels, although only in the background. You really have to hunt and/or read the "Keys to the Kingdom" character annotations to follow Cathedral's storyline through Kingdome Come. Apparently he didn't learn his lesson after his encounter with Wonder Woman and The Justice League, and so he ends up in The Gulag with all of the other "bad" super-people (his leg appears in one panel of a Gulag scene).

During the climactic battle scene, which makes a bit less sense every time I read it (Batman decided the best way to de-escalate the fight between The Justice League and the escapees was to attack them all with his own superhero army?), Cathedral is among the active rioters.

He's shown rushing Red Robin in one panel and, a few pages later, is shown being knocked down by Justice Leaguer and original Red Tornado Ma Hunkel, who I did not even realize was in this comic, but who is fantastic; she now wears a full suit of high-tech armor, and has some sort of torso-spinning tornado punch action with which she floors Cathedral.

Catherdal's body is not among those named in the splash page showing the aftermath of the nuclear bomb explosion (which claimed the life of Red Hood, aka Lian Harper, who apparently dies an early death in this continuity too). But he's not shown being tossed into Dr. Fate's cloak/portal or under Green Lantern's forcefield, nor is he shown among the surviving prisoners who Wonder Woman takes with her to Paradise Island for rehabilitation, Golden Age Wonder Woman-style.

So his final fate is undetermined, but fingers crossed he appears in an Alex Ross-written-and-drawn comic book called Alex Ross' The Cathedral at some point.

With her own Astro City analog, Orca, The Whale Woman has finally arrived

I'm not sure how much writer Kurt Busiek, artist Brent Anderson and character designer and cover artist Alex Ross would agree with me, given how reductionist it likely sounds, but the trio's on-again, off-again superhero series Astro City is more-or-less powered by its inspiration from other, older superhero comics, particularly those of DC and Marvel Comics.

As Busiek and Ross did with their seminal Marvel series, the stories quite often focus on superhero characters from the civilian sidelines, teasing out problems and solutions to real-world considerations of genre elements, and comments on aspects of comic book superheroes—and heroic fiction in general. It does so, in large part, by first building a world that is much like the one that likely existed in the creators' imaginations when they were children and young men, a sort of amalgated universe where DC, Marvel, Charlton and Hollywood heroes all share the same space.

Since they don't own the rights to any of these characters, however, they fill Astro City with analogs, some much more direct than others: The Samaritan is Superman, The Confessor and Altar Boy are Batman and Robin, The Gentleman is Captain Marvel, The First Family is The Fantastic Four and so on (Often with key, imaginative differences, sure, but, for the point of this post, I just want to focus on the fact that Astro City is populated with analog versions of some the most popular superhero characters of all time).

The latest iteration of Astro City is being published under DC's Vertigo imprint, and its latest collection was Astro City: Winged Victory, starring the Wonder Woman analog named in the sub-title. It also features a new villain in a minor role: Maneater!

She is one of several female supervillains, including Warmaiden and Jagged Jill, who tell the media that Winged Victory paid them to fight her and take dives, which is all part of a very elaborate, collection-long conspiracy to discredit and destroy Winged Victory.

In the back of the book, we're shown a sketch of Maneater:

And we also get to see some of the design notes:

Maneater is a black woman with a shark-like fin, gray shark-type skin and pointy teeth; she wears something that looks like a surfer's wetsuit, patterned like an orca.

Like an orca, huh...? Aha! Now I know why Maneater looked so familiar!

She looks so much like Orca, The Whale Woman, a minor (very minor) Batman villain introduced by Larry Hama and Scott McDaniel in 2000's Batman #579-#581, during a particularly fruitful and well-organized period for the Batman line of books (At the time, each of the several Batman books had a very distinct tone and style, and dealt with a highlighted, isolated aspect of the character: Hama and McDaniels' Batman book dealt with Batman as superhero).

If you missed that story arc, or her subsequent cameos, here's the deal with Orca: Dr. Grace Balin (Balin! Like baleen! Get it?!) was a marine biologist and social activist whose spine was paralyzed in an accident that cost her the use of her legs. Just as Dr. Kirk Langstrom looked to bats in his development a serum to combat deafness and Dr. Kurt Connors looked to lizards in his development of a serum to help people re-grow lost limbs, Balin develops a serum that can restore her spine, but with the expected side effect of turning her into a half-human, half-animal monster.

Her orca-like strength and endurance make her more than a match for Batman in a fair fight, on land or especially in water, but by the third act, and with the help of a custom-made, action figure-ready SCUBA suit (SCUBA, of course, standing for Self-Contained Underwater Batman Apparatus), he is able to save the day.

And that's pretty much the end of Orca, save for a brief appearance in Last Laugh and a briefer still one getting killed off in "One Year Later" Batman/Detective Comics story arc "Face The Face."

I always kinda liked the character, for a couple of reasons. First, she did not have the typical build and figure of, let's see, every single female supervillain ever. Second, like Killer Croc and Man-Bat (and sometimes Solomon Grundy or Clayface), she fit into the "big, tough, monster" category of Batman villain, of the sort that could give a more powerful superhero someone to fight when they team up with Batman. Third, I kinda like underwater villains, especially in the DC Universe, as poor Aquaman, a long-time favorite character of mine, never seemed to have enough cool villains of his own to fight. Fourth, she was a minor, slightly silly, oft-ridiculed Batman villain, of the sort Batman history is lousy with, and whom attain a sort of underdog status I always enjoy rooting for. Fifth, I just like typing the phrase "Orca, The Whale Woman."

Which, oddly enough, when I Google, I only find used on comics blogs making fun of Orca, like this 20008 one with the inspired title from Mr. Chris Sims (from which I stole one of those scans), or this older-still post on The Absorbascon.

Well, say what you will about Orca, and you will say more about Orca, at the very least, she now has an Astro City analog character based on her, and that's something you can't say about every Batman villain.

Incidentally, unless I missed some appearances—I don't remember her appearing as a Black Lantern during Blackest Night, which, if true, is kinda weird, as they were pretty desperate for dead Batman villains to put into the tie-ins—then Orca analog Maneater has already had one-third as many appearances as her inspiration.

Assuming she was inspired by Orca, and it wasn't just a pure coincidence that Busiek and company produced a villain that looked so much like one who appeared in like five comics. As an Orca advocate, I'm going to continue assuming that Maneater was created in knowing, loving tribute to Orca.

Some of the best DC Comics covers from 2000-2008, according to DC Comics: The 75th Anniversary Poster Book

The second-to-last cover included in DC Comics: The 75th Anniversary Poster Book (which I swear I won’t write any more posts about after this!) is Gary Frank’s cover from Action Comics #863, depicting Frank’s Christopher Reeves-inspired Superman standing among the members of the new old post-Infinite Crisis Legion of Super-Heroes.

It’s a nice enough image, but when I first laid eyes on it while flipping through the book, my initial thought was “What’s that doing here?”

The section of the book devoted to the last ten years is in some ways the most interesting section, because it’s so difficult to see history when you’re in the midst of it.

Picking out the most important, influential images from the ‘40s, ‘50s and ‘60s from the early 21st century was probably a breeze, the biggest challenge being which ones there weren’t room to include. Those covers—heck, those from the ‘80s and perhaps even ‘90s—are far enough away that an editor or compiler can see how they’ve held up over the years, how many homages there have been to them, how the comic under that cover has come to be thought of over the years, what the artist who drew it has gone on to do.

But Action Comics #863…? I don’t know. It doesn’t seem to me like it will be regarded as a necessarily important cover, any more than the story inside will wind up being a classic one, but I suppose it’s too early to tell.

So here are the covers from the 21st century that were included in this visual history of DC Comics (If you have a copy of the book, you may want to whip it out and follow along. If not, I’ll link to the relevant images at comics.org.)


—Dave Johnson’s cover for Detective Comics #745, one of the earlier issues of the post-“No Man’s Land” iteration of the title. At that point, Greg Rucka was writing, Shawn Martinbrough was penciling, the book was colored in single colors approaching a black-and-white effect, and there were back-up stories included, at no additional cost to the cover price. Johnson would hang around until #761, after which point EDILW favorite John McCrea came on as cover artist and Greg Rucka, now teamed with Rick Burchett, Scott McDaniel and Steve Lieber, finished up his Sasha Bordeaux storyline and TEC got swept up in the “Bruce Wayne: Fugitive” crossover story.

Here’s my favorite from Johnson’s run as cover artist: They’re all pretty great though, and Johnson continues to do dynamite cover work, now for DC’s Freedom Fighters title.


—Darwyn Cooke’s Catwoman #2, from the 2002-launched volume of the book, initially written by Ed Brubaker. That title was one of DC’s most visually interesting for a few years there. In the first year, there were four covers by Darwyn Cooke (who penciled the first story arc, his art inked by Mike Allred), five covers by Paul Pope, one by Scott Morse, one by Jeff Parker, followed by a few by J. G. Jones and then Javier Pulido and Cameron Stewart, who were by then doing interiors.

Here's one of Pope's covers, a pretty unusual view of the character, seen in the rain through a car windshield:


—Dave Johnson’s 100 Bullets #33, from a series of Johnson’s covers which featured design work so completely different from that of his TEC covers that it seems like the work of a different artist in many ways.

I have to confess to having decided to trade wait 100 Bullets after the first few issues…and then never actually catching up on it in trade. I hear it’s pretty great though. A glance at the cover gallery makes picking just one to represent all of them seem like an unenviable task.


—Adam Hughes’ cover for Wonder Woman #184, which was no doubt a difficult choice, given the fact that Hughes has drawn roughly one million Wonder Woman covers (Okay, it’s closer to 50, still).

Hughes was something of a controversial choice for Wonder Woman cover artist, given the relentless sexuality of his images. His Wonder Woman had a sense of humor, sure, and she could “act,” but it was her scantily clad body that seemed to be the focus of the majority of the covers.

And I think that’s fine. Wonder Woman is a scantily clad woman after all, and most of Hughes’ depictions of her tended toward the good girl end of the cheesecake spectrum, with relatively few ever approaching exploitation (Even ones like this “mud-wrestling” cover generally winked knowingly at the audience).

I didn’t really care for the way Hughes portrayed Wonder Woman’s boots, which were always baggy, and I had a hard time understanding how they even worked, and I wasn’t crazy about the way he drew her lasso, as a thin little wire whipping about as is possessed of its own life, but there’s no denying that Hughes is a great artist, and his version of Wonder Woman is probably the most consistent and pervasive over the past few decades, on account of how long he was attached tot he character.

When I close my eyes and imagine “Wonder Woman,” it’s a Hughes image that comes most immediately to mind.

Here are two of my favorites:The first one is from a multi-part crossover in which the Wonder women team-up with the Bat Family for a few issues. I like the way it says “Batman’s in this” subtly, without actually surrendering the cover to him, and Hughes just plain rendered the hell out of Wondy’s face there. And the bat’s face too. There’s an amusing one a few issues later, showing a bunch of the side-kick types cowering behind Wonder Woman (I think Scarecrow and/or a Greek god of fear were involved at that point).

I really only like about a third of the second one, and that’s the third featuring Wonder Girl. I like her pose and expression, and the fact that Hughes went to the trouble of making her look different than the other two Wonder women.

Actually, looking at the cover for Wonder Woman #186 longer, Wonder Woman actually looks pretty gross on that cover. Her costume seems about seven sizes too small on top, too…


—Jim Lee’s swinging-flying-kick cover for Batman #608...... which seemed an odd choice, give how much more often I’ve seen this one:Lee later repeated the pose and basic composition on the first issue of his less popular run with Brian Azzarello on Superman:I didn’t realize until I read this particular poster book that the pose was at least inspired by Brian Bolland’s Wonder Woman #72 cover.
I like Lee's work a lot more now than I did in the past; he’s an artist who has only gotten better over the years, but revisiting his cover work for Batman, Superman and Infinite Crisis, I see he’s still not all that much of a cover artist. Oh, he does the superheroes posing superheroically images just fine, but there’s nothing special about his covers.

Check out his Batman run on the cover gallery on comics.org, and it’s dullness becomes accentuated.

The cover artist immediately preceding him was Scott McDaniel who, for all his faults, suffuses his work with a weird, awkward energy that reminds me a bit of Jack Kirby’s work in terms of posing and the feeling of bottled up tension either about to explode or in the act of exploding:
And the cover artist immediately following Lee was Dave Johnson again, doing something fresh, new and exciting with negative space and story title for the Azzarello/Risso “Broken City” story that followed “Hush,” and was all but eclipsed by it (I liked that story, by the way, although it read as if it was only meant to be in some sort of quasi-continuity, more appropriate for Legends of the Dark Knight or Batman Confidential than the flagship title.
(Holy shit, let’s stop and think about this for a minute—Jim Lee and Eduardo Risso were drawing Batman comics just a couple of years ago! Now they stick poor Grant Morrison with guys seemingly at random).


—James Jean’s covers for Fables #18 and Batgirl #45. I would wager that these were included because they are exceptional images created by James Jean moreso than because of the particular individual titles or characters involved… although it’s worth noting that Fables became Vertigo’s post-Sandman, default flagship title.

I would further wager that a fairly large part of Fables’ success is owed to the strength of Jean’s work (I know it’s what first got me to pick up a Fables trade, and what I missed the most when I eventually tired of the series; the covers on the trades seemed to result in more visitors to my house picking up copies and flipping through them then other trades I may have laying around, as well).

Jean did 17 Batgirl covers, coming on to the 2000-launched, Cassandra Cain-starring title right about the time it probably should have been canceled, when it’s original creative team left, their story complete. Around that same time, Jean did just shy of a dozen covers for Green Arrow, another title that had begun flailing and failing creatively.
Jean turned out to be a hell of a superhero cover artists, perhaps because his work is so far removed from the typical superhero cover art.


—J.G. Jones’ cover for Y: The Last Man #16, the Ampersand-doing-Hamlet cover. This popular and highly addictive Vertigo series seemed more visually striking on the inside than on the outside, but that’s a pretty great cover. You can’t go wrong with monkeys or frilly, Shakespeare collars, and this cover has ‘em both. And I love how hard Ampersand is acting in that image. He’s not a monkey pretending to act, he’s a monkey acting.


—Tim Sale’s cover for Detective Comics #792, a rather weak cover from late-ish in Sale’s 20-issue run of covers for the title in 2003 or so (Dark, dark days fro the Batman franchise, which was just about to enter into the “War Games” crossover, which would pretty much unmoor the whole family of books until 2006 or so, when Grant Morrison and Paul Dini would take over the two main Batman books.

I can’t imagine why they chose that particular Sale image over the other 19 or so in that run of covers, or why they chose any of Sale’s covers from that period. If you think “Tim Sale” and “DC Comics,” you probably think of one of the striking covers from one of his two signature Batman series, The Long Halloween Not sure why they chose to highlight Sale’s work on this particular title instead of the much more popular and influential limited series he did with Jeph Loeb, Long Halloween and Dark Victory…



—Darwyn Cooke’s cover for DC: The New Frontier #6, one of six great covers for that series (I really liked the moody Challengers of the Unknown image on the cover of #3 and the cubist renderings of Justice Leaguers around the coiled tentacle on the cover of #5 too). That sixth and final one is probably the best of the lot though, and certainly the most “DC” of the images, with Hal Jordan reaching for his Green Lantern ring and the other six members of the “Big Seven” JLA all throwing their fists in the air.

It’s stylized, it’s artsy and it’s “Hell yeah!”

New Frontier is probably this past decade’s Kingdom Come, in terms of a high-profile, out-of-continuity miniseries that made a star of its artist and influenced the way in which other creators depicted DC’s superheroes.

I just wish it influenced the art in the DC Comics that followed as much as the writers…


—Alex Ross’ Green Lantern #1, speaking of Kingdom Come. I flipped through the stack of Green Lantern comics in my room before typing up this tidbit, and realized that despite all of the great artists who have drawn this book since it launched in 2005, there aren’t really very many great covers.

Ethan Van Sciver did scary versions of Hector Hammond and The Shark on the covers of #4 and #5, but for the most part the covers from the series that stick out in my memory are the unintentionally funny ones: Green Arrow and Green Lantern blissfully about to make out with a couple of Black Mercy monster flowers on Neal Adams’ cover for #8, Green Lantern and Batman about to angrily make-out on the cover of #9, blood puke and so on.

Alex Ross’ cover for Green Lantern #1 may actually be the best one in the series then, as static and uninteresting as it is (although it’s worth noting that it’s actually an incredibly dynamic image for Ross).

As the title neared the end of Blackest Night, and Doug Mahnke started doing the covers, I think we started to see a lot more higher quality images, but this book was assembled before that.


—Dave McKean’s cover for the 2005 Arkham Asylum Anniversary Edition seems like a bit of a cheat, as the book itself is from the late eighties. Nice, scary, evocative image though!


—Paul Pope’s cover for Batman: Year 100 #1, from the fairly incredible, alternate future Batman series from 2006 that I’ve devoted an awful lot of verbiage to before.

It’s worth noting again though that Pope’s cover there was his version of the first appearance of Batman on the cover of Detective Comics #27: Man dressed as bat, legs folded, rope, some pipes. See?


—Frank Quitely’s cover for All-Star Superman #10 is a really weird choice, given the unique strength of the smiling-Superman-resting-on-a-cloud image from All-Star Superman #1:When I think about All-Star Superman, that’s the cover I think of. All of this book’s covers are pretty great though; #6’s featuring Superman and Krypto at Jonathan Kent’s grave and the wacky Bizarro World cover for #8 are particular favorites.


—Gary Frank’s cover for Action Comics #863, which we already discussed a bit. Looking at Frank’s other Superman covers from Action Comics and Superman: Secret Origin, that probably is the best image of his Reeves-inspired Superman, although I’m awfully fond of his quiet cover for #869. The original one, without the big, generic “SODA POP” label photoshopped in, of course.


—Alex Ross’ cover for Batman #679, a chapter of the “Batman R.I.P.” storyline, is the final image in the collection. It’s probably one of the most boring Batman images imaginable. Well, you can imagine a more boring Batman image—say, Batman just cold standing there—but Ross already used that one for a poster.

I generally like Ross’ work, and think he’s a pretty decent cover artist, but he seemed pretty out of his element on this particular storyline. It was chockfull of some pretty crazy ideas—Batman was, if I recall correctly, out of his mind on “weapons-grade” meth, hallucinating a magical negro hobo and an alien parasite version of Bat-Mite, while dressed in a homemade red, yellow and purple Batman of Zur-En-Arrh costume, fighting his way to Arkham Asylum where he would face both The Joker and a guy claiming to be either his father and/or the devil.

And Ross just paints a picture of Batman swooping down from a rooftop, an image that could been the cover for any Batman comic book ever published. Here’s interior artist Tony Daniel’s alternate cover for the very same issue:Imagine how scary a Ross version of that Batman would be, his photorealistic eyes with their eye-lashes all looking crazy at the reader from behind a purple cosplay cowl stitched together in an alley.

Hate the Alex Ross cover, not the Alex Ross

It seems somehow wrong to say that I kind of like Alex Ross out loud or in public like this, as if admitting I like and appreciate a lot of his work may compromise my reputation as a cranky, cynical, hard-to-please critic who hates everything. Additionally, liking Alex Ross seems kind of un-cool, or—what's the word the kids use these days?—square.

Mostly because Ross not only promotes backwards-looking nostalgia for things that weren't very good the first time around (and he does so quite persuasively), but also because he embodies such nostalgia.

Ross is like a living, breathing avatar of the veneration of one's childhood experiences with superheroes. A lot of us imprint on the first superheroes we encountered as kids, and follow them like baby ducks from that point on. So Barry Allen is the best Flash and Hal Jordan is the best Green Lantern only because they were Ross' firsts; the satellite League is champagne and what followed was shit because the former was his first Justice League and the latter wasn't. (Not that Ross has said any of this in interviews or anything; I'm just assigning these sentiments to him, as he symbolically represents them).

I certainly understand why dissing Ross is therefore pretty commonplace among critics, fans and people with access to the Internet, but that doesn't mean I feel compelled to dis him too.

I like the fact that he likes Captain Marvel and Plastic Man, and considers them at least as important as all the other DC superheroes he considers icons and treats like saints in his work. I like the fact that he dresses up friends, relatives and whoever he can convince to wear a cape and lay on a coffee table in a flying pose to play dress-up for him (I would probably be able to bring myself to buy Greg Land comics if each issue of his work included photos of people dressed in X-Men costumes making silent movie actor-broad facial expressions). I like the fact that he knows enough about human anatomy to remember that men have genitals, and draws them under their pants. I think he's a pretty fantastic superhero costume designer (see Kingdom Come and Astro City for particularly good examples). And I even enjoyed some of his recent comics collaborations, like Avengers/Invaders and Justice (his JSoA arc, on the other hand, was pretty tedious, and I remain shocked at how boring the Ross spear-headed Project: Super Powers work has been).

But there's no denying he has his weaknesses as an artist, and the greatest of these seems to be a relative lack of imagination. He's been doing a great deal of cover work these last few years, much of it for DC super-comics, and a great deal of that work is, well, just plain boring.

If Ross' strengths are his nearly photo-realistic portrayal of characters, and the iconic aspects of them that he draws out from them by drawing them in certain poses, the power of those strengths erodes the more he paints the same subjects. This makes him a pretty rotten cover artist for an ongoing series, as he's been on Batman, Superman and Justice Society of America for a while now.

There's only so many different ways in which to paint Batman looking stately and slightly perturbed on a rooftop. Looking down at the reader, in profile, in the rain, from behind, holding a batarang, etc. I think this might have been one of his most dynamic and imaginative Batman covers,

and what's going on in it, exactly? A low-angle on Batman, here yelling instead of glowering, while some crazy lights fill the background? Considering what's actually going on inside the comic book—which, you may recall, involved Batman being shot up with drugs while his back-up personality, an alien Batman from a different world, took over his mind and made him dress in a homemade rainbow-colored costume while he took a baseball bat to his foes, while getting advice from Bat-Mite who was also half alien insect for some reason—well, it's pretty prosaic, isn't it?

I was thinking about how Ross is at once a great comic book cover artist (the painting makes books look important, and he's good at the single pin-up image that's in style these days) and what a miserable comic book cover artist he is (the images are almost always boring and infinitely less entertaining than whatever they're actually covering), when I saw the cover for the new printing of the History of the DC Universe trade, which collects a Marv Wolfman/George Perez effort from 1986. (I talked a bit about why re-publishing the book now seems a somewhat strange publishing decision in this week's 'Twas column at Blog@, if you're at all interested).

I haven't read it, as I wouldn't get interested in comics until I became a teenager almost a decade after it was published, but apparently it's a sort of definitive, here's-what's-in-and-what's-out story of the DC universe's entire fictional history during the post-Crisis years. Or, as the solicit says, it features "virtually every character in the DC Universe, this tale takes us from the dawn of creation to the end of recorded history."

Wow, that sounds like pretty exciting stuff, right? Every character ever? Every adventure ever, over the course of billions of years? What kind of cover image might Alex Ross come up with for that?

Seriously? That's the best he could think of? The history of the DC Universe can essentially be boiled down to the fact that Krypton exploded, Bruce Wayne saw his parents killed and was then dive-bombed by giant bats, Captain Marvel screamed in Egypt this one time and the trinity all have different good sides they like to be photographed from? Oh, and there was a blue space man with funny hair.

I mean murder, the destruction of a planet and creepy blue space men are pretty dramatic things, but they aren't terribly representative of billions of years worth of events involving gods, aliens, humans and superhumans; it's more like Superman's Tuesday lunch hour.

Here are the original covers for the series:


I'm not terribly excited by these covers, nor am I sure I understand why the images repeat with only some small alterations between issues as if it were an example of one of those can-you-spot-the-differences picture puzzles, but it at least gives some idea of the scope of the project. You know it involves superheroes and an evil god and cowboys and wars and Uncle Sam and gorillas.

Here's a cover to what I assume is one of the first collections, although I don't know who the artist is:

In some ways I think it is the weakest of the three, but, one advantage it has over the Ross version is that it's an active image—there's a character doing something on it—and it gives some sense of the scope. The red mess of characters might not be all that well chosen—does Vigilante really deserve such a prominent spot?—but again you see that the history involves a World War I flying ace and World War II sergeant, little blue space men and giant ghosts of god, Batman and Darkseid, Wonder Woman and hawkpeople.

I'll probably try to pick this up—despite the fact that I imagine most if not all of the information within is completely irrelevant—the next time I have an extra $13 to waste at the comic shop, but I wouldn't mind it having a less lame cover.


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I wonder why DC hasn't done a new version of this series yet? I know they had Dan Jurgens draw one about the post-Infinite Crisis "New Universe" in the opening issues of 52, but 52 ended with another reboot, and then was followed by Darkseid-falling continuity hiccups/disorientations and another re-ordering of the multiverse and recration of the DC Universe in Final Crisis. When the dust has finally settled—after they've figured out where they're going with the Legion of Super-Heroes, the Multiverse and maybe this "Blackest Night" business, Paul Levitz, Dan DiDio, Geoff Johns and Grant Morrison should all sit down and figure out the definite past, present and future of the DCU, at least in the broadest of strokes and do a new series in this splash page-and-prose format.

Fans would appreciate it, it would be helpful to creators and editors, and, after hammering out what "counts" and what doesn't, it should be pretty easy to produce—just have Geoff Johns polish his notes from the meeting for the prose, and have Perez provide a bunch of new splash pages and Bam! comic book hit. I know DiDio has spoken in past interviews about not wanting to nail history down so much that it limits DC's abilities to tell stories but a) that's stupid, since it's not like there weren't a ton of great DC Comics between the years 1986 and 2005 (actually, come to think of it, aren't most of DC's very best efforts from those years?) and b) it can be down in general enough terms it doesn't limit the ability for future writers to tell good stories (For example, knowing whether Wonder Woman started her career five months after Superman started his or five years afterward, and whether she co-founded the Justice League or joined eight years later doesn't exactly take any stories off the table).

But be sure to get a better cover for that version, guys.