Don't forget Batman '66 Meets Wonder Woman '77 #5...!

I forgot Batman '66 Meets Wonder Woman '77 #5 when I was at the comic shop this past Wednesday, and had to return to pick a copy of it up this weekend. That is why it is not mentioned in the previous installment of the Comic Shop Comics feature. This issue begins the final third of the decades-spanning series, and thus jumps to the third temporal setting, the year 1977 (when the second and third seasons of the Wonder Woman TV show were set). The first two issues were set in the 1940s (when the first season of the Wonder Woman TV show was set, and Bruce Wayne and Talia al Ghul were just little kids) and the next two were set in 1966 (when the Batman TV show was set).

Thus, with this issue we get to see the future of the Batman '66 timeline. Bruce Wayne has grayed at the temples, Mister Fantastic/Nick Fury style, and retired from crimefighting during an off-panel incident in which he killed The Joker (who attacked Wayne Manor, indirectly killing Alfred in the process). Barbara Gordon has turned from library science to police work, and has replaced her late father as the city's police commissioner (Chief O'Hara's daughter also inherited his title as Police Chief, as well as his brogue). And Dick Grayson has adopted the name Nightwing, and become Gotham City's primary costumed crimefighter (Amazing how '70s ready his Nightwing costume was; I'm pretty sure all that cover artist Mike Allred and interior pencil artist David Hahn did to make his original costume more '70s-ish is add a zipper and some bellbottoms).

This series is awesome and everyone should read it. If you missed this last issue, you can always go back to the shop and buy a copy. I did! And if you missed the first five issues, well, at this point I'd just wait for the trade, if I were you.

While I was there, I purchased Suicide Squad Vol. 6: The Phoenix Gambit and got a few pages into it before I realized that I had actually never purchased and read Suicide Squad Vol. 5: Apokolips Now. While I was disappointed that I would have to wait a while to read this one, I was also excited that DC is now putting out collections of the original, John Ostrander-written volume of Suicide Squad at a quick enough pace that I have now officially lost track of it. With the sixth volume, they've collected the first 49 issues of the 66-issue run. Another collection or two and will finally–finally!–all be available in collected, trade paperback form! Huzzah!

Review: Dark Horse Comics/DC Comics: Superman

This 400-page collection is the latest big, fat, book of crossovers between DC characters and those owned or licensed to Dark Horse Comics. I can't quite figure out how they are organized. For example, this collection includes two Superman/Aliens crossovers, which seem like they could have just as easily appeared in the previously published DC Comics/Dark Horse Comics: Aliens (which did include the Superman/Batman/Aliens/Predator crossover), and the upcoming DC Comics/Dark Horse Comics: Justice League will include two Superman stories. I imagine it has something to do with which publisher technically publishes which collection–note the way the order of which publisher is named varies from book to book–but regardless of the behind-the-scenes organizing principal, these books include a bunch of harder-to-find-then-I'd like crossovers of the past couple decades, many of them quite good comics.

This particular volume features comics from 1995-2002, three of which are in Superman continuity (or in continuity as it existed at the time), with the fourth and final one being an Elseworlds story. Let's take them one at a time, shall we...?

Superman/Aliens by Dan Jurgens, Kevin Nowlan, Gregory Wright and Android Images

This three-issue, 1995 miniseries is among the best of the DC/Dark Horse crossovers, and one of the better inter-publisher crossovers I've ever read. Much of that is due to the skill that went into crafting it, but more still is due to the amount of care that writer/artist Dan Jurgens put into the book.

The Aliens, like the Predators, have become such frequent participants in crossovers due to their extreme flexibility–they're basically just cool monsters to fight–that such comics can often read as extremely lazy. Jurgens, however, brings a real sense of occasion to this story.

He manages to make the story almost as much of an Aliens story as it is a Superman story, and while the superhero is the protagonist of the story, Jurgens carefully sets it up in such a way that the Aliens and their horrifying life-cycle aren't just backdrops to a Superman beat 'em up. Rather, he evokes the sort of lonely setting and the horror/suspense mood that are so prominent in the film franchise, and even uses the single, female protagonist that powered the earlier films...although here she is, of course, teamed-up with Superman.

More remarkably still, not only does Jurgens handicap Superman in such a way that the Aliens pose a real threat to him–most of the story is spent far from Earth, so his solar-based powers are waning like a dying battery throughout, and he must struggle with his refusal to take a life, even the lives of the Aliens–but he instills about as real a sense of danger that can exist in a Superman comic.

At no point did I think Superman was going to die in this comic, but when the near-powerless Superman has an Alien implanted in his no-longer invulnerable chest cavity, I did find myself wondering how exactly he was going to survive (My guess, that he would plunge himself into the sun, burning out the embryo while restoring his own powers, as soon as he returned to the solar system, turned out to be wrong; the reality was much grosser).

Oh, and Jurgens sets this story firmly within Superman's post-Crisis, pre-Flashpoint continuity–inter-company crossover or no, this is canon guys–reflecting not only the status quo of the Super-books circa 1995, but also referencing a handful of previous stories from this continuity. Most of these aren't terribly important, although they are referred to in dialogue and asterisked editorial box, but one does play a big role: Superman's early career execution of the pocket universe Kryptonians, as that was when he swore never to kill again, an oath frequently tested by the Aliens (His first fight with a single Alien is actually kind of funny, as he keeps trying to communicate with it while it tries eating his face.)

Reporters Lois Lane and Clark Kent are covering LexCorp's space-division as they recover an alien probe and take it to their orbiting space-station. It's a distress pod of some kind, asking for help, and Superman recognizes the language it's using as Kryptonian. He insists that he and he alone find and help the people who sent it, with the help of LexCorp, who provides him with the space ship to do it in.

The destination? Argo City, a domed city in deep space (far from a yellow sun) and peopled with too-few Kryptonian-speaking humanoids. Superman loads some injured, unconscious residents into his ship and sends it back to the station, asking them to send it back for him (as otherwise he would be stranded here). Sure, his powers are slowly starting to wane, but how dangerous can the place be...?

Pretty dangerous, it turns out, as its swarming with Aliens, and, worse still, the unconscious people he sent back to the space station, where Lois is, are of course harboring gestating Aliens in their chests. At the end of the first issue, Jurgens provides a pretty big shock for his readers at the time: The blonde teenage girl who speaks Kryptonian and is fighting for her survival on Argo City tells Superman that her name is...wait for it...Kara.

That would have been a pretty big deal in 1995, as that would make her the only other survivor of Krypton in the post-Crisis continuity, it would also make her a new version of the original (read: real) Supergirl. The one in DC Comics at the time was the weird sentient protoplasm from a pocket universe one whose back-story just got more and more confusing until DC just let Jeph Loeb restart Supergirl's origin in Superman/Batman a decade or so after this saw publication).

As the series progresses, we learn whether or not this Kara is the Kara, but, more importantly from the stand-point of making a good Superman/Aliens crossover, Jurgens has effectively split the action into two settings, both evocative of the first two Aliens movies. On the space station, the hatched and escaped Aliens stalk Lois, LexCorp's Dr. Kimble and the rest of the much more expendable cast, while on Argo City, Superman gradually loses all of his powers and must face a series of blows to his confidence and optimism: That he can't just punch out the millions of Aliens, that he sent a ship-full of them towards a space station containing Lois and orbiting Earth, that no ship is coming to retrieve him and, ultimately, that he and Kara both have Aliens gestating in their chests.

As unlikely a pairing as the two multi-media franchises may be–seriously, pause and compare the films Superman and Superman II to Alien and Aliens in your mind for a moment–Jurgens makes them fit naturally, and manages to deliver a story that honors the attributes of Aliens while cutting to the core of what makes Superman such a great, aspirational, noble and heroic character.

You know what else is an unlikely pairing? Jurgens and Kevin Nowlan. Jurgens pencils the book, while Nolan inks it, but based on the results, it looks like Jurgens provided fairly full lay-outs and Nowlan finished them. It's a great collaboration, as it looks at once like the art of Jurgens and the art of Nowlan, two very distinctive, very prolific artists whose work is easily recognizable at a glance.

There are therefore a lot of the familiar lay-outs and heroic poses of Jurgens' Superman comics–having drawn Superman as long as he has, Jurgens' work often suggests the "real" Superman in the way that, say, long-time Batman artist the late Jim Aparo's Batman poses and expressions often seem genuine in a way that those of other artists don't–but here the art is all more detailed and smoother, with thicker, bolder black lines.

I enjoy the work of current Superman artists Doug Mahnke and Patrick Gleason, but honestly, I can't remember the last time I read a Superman comic where I enjoyed the artwork this much.

(I suppose it's also worth mentioning how odd it is to read this story after reading Geoff Johns and Jim Lee's first story arc of Justice League in 2011 and early 2012, the story in which Superman and his League allies so cavalierly kill Parademons without a second thought. This story is a good illustration of why that was so strange to see. Here Superman tries to communicate with an Alien before even striking it, and resolutely refuses to pick up a gun and destroy one even at his most hopeless, because a life is still a life. In Justice League, he was tearing apart Parademons that were, until recently, normal human beings, without even stopping to consider what they were.)

Superman/Aliens II: God War by Chuck Dixon, Jon Bogdanove, Kevin Nowlan and Dave Stewart

As is so often–too often–the case, the sequel is not nearly as good as the original. This 2002 miniseries, which retains only inker Kevin Nowlan from the first Superman/Aliens crossover, is as much a New Gods comic as it is a Superman or Aliens comic...in fact, Superman and the Aliens both seem like guest-stars in a New Gods comic.

Writer Chuck Dixon has Superman visiting New Genesis, just sort of hanging out with other humanoid super-aliens who can fly and are invulnerable and dress as colorfully as he does, when Darkseid launches a horrible attack. Having discovered the Aliens, Jack Kirby's god of evil impregnates a battalion of his warriors and sends them to attack New Genesis, essentially using them as trojan horses carrying the real weapon, the Aliens themselves.

During the course of the battle, which includes Lightray, Barda and Forager but no Mister Miracle, Orion gets an Alien implanted in his chest. Knowing his time is limited, he decided to go straight for Apokolips, with Superman tagging along. Meanwhile, Barda and her forces try to stave off the invasion of the Aliens that Darkseid rained down on them.

It is, in other words, everything the original Superman/Aliens was not. Here the Aliens are just cool-looking, dramatic monsters appearing in a Superman beat 'em up, but Superman is only one of several heroes doing the beating. If one wonders how Orion survived, I'll spoil it for you, although it should be noted that he should be invulnerable enough to survive in a manner more similar to that of Superman in the original. Basically, Darkseid shows mercy on his son, and uses the Omega beams to destroy the growing Alien. His long-term plan, he explains to lackeys like Desaad, is to instill a sense of indebtedness to his biological son, so that Orion may someday side with him over Highfather.

And, in the stinger ending, if not, well, Darkseid still has a hidden vault full of warriors with face-huggers on them, apparently in stasis to pull out when needed.

The only real pleasure I took in this particular story was the art. I like both Jon Bogdanove, a one-time constant presence on the Superman family of books, and Kevin Nowlan alot, although their styles seem even further apart from that of Jurgens and Nowlan.

Weirdly but understandably, Bogdanove seems to have attempted to town down the Bogdanovicity of his pencil work in an attempt to draw more Kirby-esque, and Nowlan followed his lead. The results are...weird. The New Gods characters all look extremely Kirby-esque, with some panels looking like Kirby himself drw them. Superman is a strange mixture of the thick-torsoed Silver Age Superman with flashes of a primal, angry Kirby face and Bogdanove's normal Man of Steel, and the Aliens look like, well, Aliens.

Dixon's Superman was so changed by his first meeting with these creatures, that he doesn't have any of the moral compunctions about seeing them exterminated that he originally had, and, even if he did, he spends much of the time fighting either alongside Barda or Orion, so it's not like it matters; he's not about to fight Orion to the death to stop the dying New God from turning massive Alien hives into pools of acidic blood.

Other than picking apart the various influences and letting one's eyes surf along the curious braiding of various art styles, there is still some pleasure to be had in the artwork. Dixon and company provide a few interesting images, particularly the scene that follows the mass-birthing of the Aliens from Darkseid's invasion troops, where we see a panel in which the just-born, snake-form of the baby Aliens cover the ground like a carpet.

It's a disappointing read, but then, it hardly matters in this particular collection, as it is but one of four stories, and it is sandwiched between two such great ones.

The Superman/Madman Hullabaloo by Mike Allred and Laura Allred

The second Aliens crossover is followed by Madman creator Mike Allred's three-issue, 1997 miniseries in which his signature creation meets the original and greatest superhero.

Allred was one of the greatest superhero comics artists of the time, and he remains as such–if anything, he's gotten better. His style is the sort that no longer seems as sought after by the Big Two as perhaps it should, but he he has a great line, and produces work that is clean, simple, just-flat-enough and classic-looking...more timeless than nostalgic. When I close my eyes and imagine "comic book art," its Allred's style that immediately springs to mind.

While the artist has long since done a great deal of work for both DC and Marvel, this was a rare and early example of Allred drawing non-Madman, non-Allred creations, and it is pretty glorious.

The plot finds Superman and Madman both aiding their respective bearded scientist friends in researching some weird energy at the same time, the result being a sort of cosmic collision in which they pass through one another and then materialize in one another's dimension.

Superman is in Madman's body, with an amalgamated costume (Allred is one of the great costume designers, and would have been up their with Alex Ross and Darwyn Cooke if I were Dan DiDio and I was trying to decide which artist to let redesign the whole DC Universe for The New 52; DiDio, obviously, went with Jim Lee instead), lands in Snap City. Madman, in Superman's considerably handsomer and more powerful body, lands in Metropolis, also with an amalgamated costume (here somewhat resembling a leather jacket-less '90s Superboy, but with more prominent yellow, and a strip of Madman-mask, so we'd recognize him).

While messing around on one another's Earth and meeting one another's supporting cast (Lois Lane and Professor Hamilton both get pretty big roles, while pretty much everyone from the Madman comics of the time show up), they figure out what's going on and how to fix it. Meanwhile, the collision dispersed bits of Superman's powers throughout both universes, so once restored the pair and their pals must track down individuals exhibiting super-strength and suck those powers out of them with a mad science device.

The root of all this madness? Mr. Mxyzptlk (Here pronounced "Mix-Yez-Pittle-Ick" rather than "Mix-Yez-Spit-Lick," as it was pronounced by Gilbert Gottfried on Superman: The Animated Series, which is how I've been pronouncing it since.)

While technically "in continuity," Allred's Superman and Lois are perfectly classic in their look and characterization, so that with only minor alterations to their clothing they could be Bronze Age, Silver Age or maybe even Golden Age Superman and Lois, or from various media. It's amazing what a good handle Allred had on the characters' essence, and the way he's able to boil them down so perfectly.

There's a neat scene where Madman asks Superman about God, and even a bit of a moral as Mxyzptlk challenges Madman to a magic-free challenge that can only be won physically. It's...well, it's pretty great.

The comic ends with a "The End?!" a gag referring to Dr. Flem's use of Madman as a sort of living crash-test dummy, but it's actually kind of disappointing that it did indeed turn out to be the end. At least we've since gotten to see Allred draw much of the DC Universe in his issue of Solo, and Metamorpho in the pages of Wednesday Comics and so many characters from the original Batman TV show on the covers of Batman '66 and...

Superman/Tarzan: Sons of The Jungle by Chuck Dixon, Carlos Meglia and Dave Stewart

The 2001 three-part miniseries Superman/Tarzan: Sons of The Jungle adhered to the popular (to the point of default) formula for Superman Elseworlds stories of the time: What if the rocket that carried baby Superman from the exploding Krypton to the planet Earth landed in some other place or some other time? Here the rocket crashes not only in late 19th Century Africa, but into the pages of Edgar Rice Burroughs' Tarzan origin story.

So just as the mutineers were about to strand Lord Greystoke and his pregnant wife Alice on the coast, they see a fireball from the sky and take it as a sign not to do so, instead taking them to the next port. The fireball was, of course, Superman's baby rocket. And so it is Kal-El rather than Tarzan who is discovered, adopted and raised by the apes, while the-man-who-would-have-been-Tarzan is born in English society, although he becomes a mopey, Byronic figure, aware that something's wrong, that he's not where he's supposed to be, and so he travels the world in a funk, looking for his place.

The characters' stories are too powerful to be altered for long, however, and the original Superman and Tarzan narratives gradually but inexorably reassert themselves. When Greystoke joins a aerial zeppelin expedition of the ruins of a lost city in Africa, an expedition covered by Lois Lane of the Daily Planet and her assistant Jane Porter,
they are shot down by Princess La and her people.

Superman, decked out in a leopard-skin loincloth with a red "S" drawn on his bare chest, comes to the aid of the white-skinned people who fell from the sky. Along the way, Lois falls for this powerful man of action, while Lord Greystoke and Porter ultimately decide to stay behind in Africa, Greystoke finally having found what he was missing there.

So, at the end, Superman becomes Superman (albeit a bit earlier than usual, and thus the costue he wears for a single panel at the end in Metropolis looks much more Flash Gordon than superehro, and Tarzan becomes Tarzan.

Of particular interest is a prose piece entitled "Sons of the Jungle?" written by Robert R. Barrett, identified as "Edgar Rice Burroughs archivist." He recounts the relationships between the two heroes who would eventually both become stars of prose stories, comic strips, comic books, film and television animation, highlighting Superman co-creator and writer Jerry Siegel's overture to Edgar Rice Burroughs in 1934, which included a treatment for a John Carter of Mars adaptation in "cartoon-form," to run alongside the Tarzan Sunday strips. Burroughs, as per policy, never even read the letter. Barrett also address Burroughs' reaction about bringing Tarzan from his jungle setting to the modern, civilized , urban world, which would of course have made him into more of a Superman-like figure, to which Burroughs objected, saying that if Tarzan could not "out-superman Superman...he might suffer by comparison."

As interesting as all this is, I particularly like the paragraph devoted to this comic book series, in which he says that Dixon's "quite...entertaining" story is "interestingly illustrated by the team of Carlos Meglia and Dave Stewart."

"Interesting" is certainly one way to refer to Meglia's art, which is unlike any generally applied to either Superman or Tarzan. Highly cartoony and animated, to the point that the static characters sometimes appear to lurch or launch across the panels, Meglia's arwork is exaggerated as it can be while still being readable. I like it–although I'm not so sure about his obsession with drawing individual strands of hair on a man's arm or chin–but it's certainly not what I would have thought to apply to a crossover of these two characters. I can't help but imagine what a Superman/Tarzan comic drawn by the likes of Joe Kubert circa 2001 might have looked like, for example.

Is Dark Knight III: The Master Race a comic book, or just a vehicle for variant covers?

That's probably not too terribly legible, but it's the credit page for the first issue of Dark Knight III: The Master Race. Those long columns of credits are the artists responsible for the "retailer" variants; there are another handful of "regular" variants. All in all, there are 49 variant covers listed on this page, although I'm pretty sure between black-and-white versions, blank covers and the super-rare incentive variants, there's likely well over 50 variants for this book, making it, perhaps, DC's answer to Mavel's Star Wars #1, which I believe had somewhere in the neighborhood of 10,000 variants, if I put the comma in the right place.

Looking at that list, I can't help but wonder if maybe DC shouldn't have just published a comic book format "gallery" like they used to occasionally did in the 190s, a tribute to Frank Miller's Dark Knight comics by top creators (If you've seen many of the variant covers, you'll notice none are specific to this new series, of which only one issue has been released, after all, but to the original Dark Knight Returns series).

It's a very strong line-up, including some of my favorite artists--

--and at least one from an artist I never would have expected to produce a variant cover for a prestigious DC superhero comics project, Kevin Eastman--

(Although given the fact that it was already announced that Eastman would be contributing variant covers to the upcoming Batman/Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles cover, his presence seems much less out-of-left-field than it might have otherwise.)

On the other hand, I'm sure DC is going to make many, many, many times more money publishing a new Miller-attached Dark Knight comic book series with 50-100 variant covers than they would just publishing a Dark Knight Returns tribute gallery book.

The good news is that the book itself is pretty alright, particularly if you view it for what it is--Brian Azzarello and Andy Kubert doing their best Frank Miller impressions in homage to Dark Knight Returns, with an actual Frank Miller mini-comic embedded in the middle of it. Also, there was at least one incredibly shocking moment in the book, something I never expected to see in a DC comic book. Not because it was over-the-top or anything (it's not; it's a perfectly natural thing, really), but given the particular character and the fact that what she's doing is still deemed "controversial" in some circles, I was surprised to see it appear here, and in the way it appeared.

Anyway, I'm sure I'll be talking in greater length and with (hopefully) greater insight on the book at some point later in the very near future. In the mean time, I just wanted to point out that Good God that is so many variants! and, while I generally think variants are a pox upon the industry, it is at least nice to know that it lead to so many great images from so many great artists, like those whose work is pictured above.

Meanwhile...

I reviewed the first collection of Nick Spencer and Ramon Rosana's Ant-Man Vol. 1: Second-Chance Man at Robot 6 yesterday, looking specifically at the way that Marvel and their creators chose to navigate between the two most recent takes of the character (In Matt Fraction, Mike Allred, Lee Allred and company's FF and the recent movie), and man, did they lean hard towards the movie version.

After spending an additional 24 hours thinking about it, as much as I love that Allred Ant-Man costume design above (swap out the blue for red and the red for black and it becomes a perfect "solo" Ant-Man costume), particularly how smooth and stripped-down it is, while still looking both ant-like and man-like, I've come to the conclusion that  the clunkier, more "realistic" costume he wore in Ant-Man Vol. 1 probably suits the story and Rosana's style better.

I was a little surprised to see that Marvel bothered to put a "1" on the spine of Ant-Man Vol. 1, however, as it is the entirety of this Ant-Man ongoing, as the book gets re-titled and re-numbered this fall as Astonishing Ant-Man (while retaining the same creative team). I would hope they will just label the collection of that series as Ant-Man Vol. 2, instead of Astonishing Ant-Man Vol. 1, because, goddammit, how confusing is that going to be, if you want to start reading the Nick Spencer/Ramon Rosana's series, and it starts with a Vol. 1, and then continues into a second Vol. 1.

Also at Robot 6, I wrote about Godzilla In Hell #1 at much greater length than I did last week here on EDILW.

And I've had a pair of recent-ish reviews at Good Comics For Kids, neither of which I think I've linked to here yet: Bandette Vol. 2: Stealers, Keepers! and Steve Jobs: Insanely Great. Those are both very solid comics, but the latter was surprisingly good, so maybe worth bringing special attention to, as I guess I knew extremely little about Jobs and just how crazy important and influential he was in crafting the world as we know it today (I had no idea he had anything to do with Pixar, for example). The style of the book is great too, particularly for the subject matter, which, as I said, isn't anything I knew a great deal about or, if I'm being honest, cared all that much about.

Meanwhile, at Robot 6...

Okay, so there were two new comic book-comic books I read this week that I didn't review here last night: All-New Ghost Rider #1 and Silver Surfer #1. I did not review them here, because I was going to review them at Robot 6, and now I have.

Also at Robot 6 today, Tom Bondurant discusses Pandora and the more-confusing-than-ever cosmology of the DC Multiverse in the era of the New 52, while comparing and contrasting Forever Evil with the 2002 original graphic novel JLA/JSA: Virtue and Vice, which have a few things in common.

Pandora's fusing of the three universes—the DCU, the WildStorm Universe and the so-called Vertigo universe—annoyed me right from the start, as it didn't really make sense on a meta-level, not with what Pandora told The Flash (the argument could be made that the Vertigo imprint fractured the way the DC Universe was "meant" to be, but the WildStorm universe was never split from it), not with DC publishing history (There is no Vertigo Universe; the first crop of Vertigo characters were all from ongoing DC super-comics, and ever since, characters relatively regularly appeared on both sides of the imprint's border) and certainly not with what was going on, like, a month or two prior to Flashpoint (While the Doom Patrol and Animal Man were appearing regularly in the DCU for years since their Vertigo series ended, Swamp Thing and John Constantine had both been back for months as well).

Anyway, Bondurant's piece reminded me that, at the time of Flashpoint, there were 52 parallel dimensions in the DCU multiverse...one of which was the DCU ("New Earth") and one of which was the WildStorm Universe. If we go ahead and give DC the fact that there was a Vertigo Universe, then that would mean that Pandora fused three of the 52 universes, so now the multiverse would only have 50 universes, right?

But wait! The New 52 rejiggering didn't merely add to the DCU, it also subtracted—all of the Golden Age heroes, as well as a sizable chunk of the third generation of DC superheroes (Donna Troy, Aqualad, Flash II Wally West, Jade and Obsidian, etc) were banished from the new, fused DCU, many of them landing on a new Earth 2.

And that Earth 2 is a completely different Earth 2 than all the other, previous Earth 2s, just as the current Earth 3 is a brand-new version of Earth 3. So, I guess Pandora didn't just fuse three timelines, but she fused three timelines, subtracted large swathes of heroes and history from it, and rebooted at least two more timelines, creating or re-creating Earths 2 and 3...?

Jesus God this stuff is complicated. You would think that, by this point, DC would have learned that reboots only ever make things more complicated—it's just quicksand, and the more you struggle the faster you sink into it. (I suppose a pure reboot, one that did not involve the in-story justification of Flashpoint and Pandora could have avoided all of that, but I don't think anyone really wanted and "Ultimate" DC Universe...)

Virtue and Vice was a pretty great comic though; the DCU is a hell of a lot poorer without those characters in it today. And I liked the idea of an annual JSA/JLA Thanksgiving dinner, even if all we ever got out of it was that one great graphic novel and one great done-in-one issue of JSA in 2001.

Also also at Robot 6, there's a link to this very funny webcomic entitled "The Adventures of Business Cat." I liked it a lot.

Also also also at Robot 6, there's an image of Arthur Adams' cover for the upcoming Godzilla graphic novel tied to the upcoming Godzilla film. Is that the clearest look at the new Godzilla design so far...? I would assume so, as it wouldn't do to have an off-model Godzilla on the cover of the book. I like it; it looks an awful lot like the Godzilla Adams drew on his cover to IDW's ongoing Godzilla comic, but with smaller teeth and less separation between the head and neck. It's a pretty big departure from the previous Godzilla designs, but not as radical as the one in the last American Godzilla movie, which ought to make a lot of folks happy. Anyway, based on that one single image, it works for me.

I sure wish I knew what was up with the Godzilla comics license at the moment, though. I saw an IDW Godzilla comic—in which the title monster was battling the Frankensteins/Gargantuas!—on the new rack today. But the movie tie-in is being published by Legendary, and distributed through DC Comics...?

I hope IDW gets to hang on to the license; they've done some pretty great stuff with it (And their choices of artists have been much more inspired than those working on the Legendary graphic novel). And I'm actually really, really scared of a DC Comics Godzilla, for fear it would lead to a crossover with the DCU, and based on DC Universe Vs. Masters of The Universe, I have no desire to see the DCU do any sort of crossing-over with other franchises I like.

Unless I get to write it, I suppose. Speaking of which, I have a great idea for a DCU/Toho crossover! Superman, Godzilla? If you two are reading this, give me a call. The three of us should really sit down for a meeting.

Review: Wolverine and The X-Men Vol. 4

Wow, I guess the 12-issue Avengers Vs. X-Men series must have lasted a lot longer than I expected, given that the this five-issue collection is the second straight collection of this title tying directly into the line-wide crossover story.

As with Vol. 3, the Avengers Vs. X-Men series plot more-or-less takes over the book, with the issues collected herein consisting mostly of done-in-one stories that take place in and around plot beats from AvX, with writer Jason Aaron striving valiantly to move his own sub-plots forward (and sometimes succeeding quite admirably). There are three art teams involved in these issues, with pencil artist Jorge Molina and inker Norman Lee handling three issues, pencil artist Chris Bachalo and a trio of inkers handling a single issue, and Michael Allred coming aboard for a single issue in order to draw the collection's highlight, a story featuring his co-creation Doop.

In the first issue, one of the Molina issue, the Phoenix-possessed Colossus arrives at the Jean Grey School in order to ask headmistress Kitty Pryde, who has been mostly sitting out the conflict in order to keep the school going and the kids safe, out on a date. She complies, in order to try and talk her old friend (and old boyfriend) out of the mad god/cosmic supervillain territory he and the rest of the "Phoenix Five" are quickly edging into (At this point in the main storyline, they've started imprisoning defeated Avengers in an infernal prison camp, and many of the other X-Men are starting to have serious doubts about siding with Cyclops over the Avengers, here dramatized by series regular Iceman walking out on on the crazy mutants). I like the way Molina draws Iceman...he's still a spiky, but not as spikey, and he's not wearing those cargo shorts.

The date doesn't go well, and Colossus is ready to destroy Kitty's school, when its few feeble defenders—Kitty, Deathlok, Lockheed, Husk, Toad, Doop and Krakoa—convince Colossus to leave them alone for now via their apparently willingness to die for the school. Colossus is sad.

Molina draws the second issue as well, a pause-before-the-storm one in which the remaining teens from Utopia enroll at the school, Avengers Iron Man and Iron Fist consult with Beast and Broo about how to deal with the Phoenix Force, Charles Xavier shows up to look over the grounds and briefly deal with Quentin Quire, and then Xavier, Angel, Beast, Wolverine, Rachel Grey and Iceman go off for their final battle with the be-Phoneixed Cyclops and company.

Bachalo then shows up to draw a Hellfire Kids issue, which basically shows what they've been up to now that mutants are ruling their world with their nearly omnipotent powers. While their leader Kade Kilgore tells the readers the story of how he took over the Hellfire Club and went into the business of building and selling Sentinels, Cyclops and company show up, have some words with Kilgore and throw the kids into an adult prison, where they wait out the current status quo, and actually fare much better than one might expect a handful of little kids to.

That's followed by the Allred issue. Entitled "Wolverine's Secret Weapon," it's the story of how Wolverine convinced Doop to join the teaching staff at the school—a three-page sequence in which Doop has Wolverine to try and keep up with him. When Wolvie complies with all of his requests, no matter how difficult and/or embarassing, Doop takes on the position of the Jean Grey shcool's fixer. Doop, it turns out, is the best there is and what he does, and what he doesn't not only isn't very pretty, it's incredibly weird.

So Doop violently deals with hate groups and monsters, seduces local city council officials—male and female—to change their votes, has scary-rough sex with Warbird, out-metals Satan in a "Devil to Georgia"-like guitar duel, competes on the Avengers roller derby team (on his hands, if you're wondering where he puts his skates), baseball bats the laptops of bloggers bad mouthing the school, time-travelling to safeguard Charles Xavier's ancestors, and so on.

It's the kind of craziness Aaron excels at—"We're trapped in a cave in Dimension ZZZ, surrounded by hordes of bloodthirsty robo-barbarians, with nothing between us but a broken sword, a rubber chicken with nails in it, and a gun that shoots bees"—without even the porous filter of a semi-serious X-Men comic tamping down on any of it. Allred is, of course, game for anything, and this issue, in which every panel or four switches to a different scene of madness, gives hima whole bunch of crazy shit to draw...and a pretty big chunk of the Marvel Universe, actually. In addition to the Wolverine and The X-Men cast, he also gets to draw such unexpected characters as Howard The Duck, Tigra, She-Hulk, Gambit, Man-Thing, Deadpool, Sabretooth and more.

It's pretty much the best thing ever. (And a welcome break from the increasingly serious events of Avengers Vs. X-Men.)

The final book returns to the AVX plot, and to Molina and Lee and artists. Aaron jumps back and forth between the final battle between the Cyclops and Pretty Much Everyone Else, the one that ultimately ends with (spoiler!) Cyclops killing Xavier and the Phoenix Force being diffused to restart the mutant race, just as Cyclops had hoped it would, and between the events at the school. These include Husk leaving the teaching staff, Idie acting strangely, and Broo trying to get to the bottom of Idie's strange behavior, which exposes a new and weird plot by those Hellfire kids. In a particularly affecting scene, the Stepford Cuckoos, monitoring the battle via Cerebra, see so many new lights appearing, as the Phoenix Force starts making new mutants again, that no one notices that one light goes out.

As with the previous collection of the series, I'm curious how this reads to someone not following Avengers Vs. X-Men, as so much of it is written as direct reactions (The Doop issue aside, which is the only issue that doesn't refer to AVX at all). Aaron does a pretty good job of writing a long string of tie-ins without completely surrendering his own plotting in service to what it's tie-ing in to, however. Perhaps this has something to do with the fact that Aaron co-plotted AVX and wrote portions of it, and thus knew it inside and outside well enough to intertwine it with the events of his own book.

Three pretty random links

Hey, do you love the artwork of J. Bone, whose Super Friends #24 I was just raving about last night? Well then, you should check out my interview with Bone on Blog@. He was kind enough to share some art with us, including a couple of preliminary roughs for covers (those are the roughs for the Starro issue below the final cover above), as well as a great sketch of Metamorpho.


Oh my God am I dense: Have you ever been reading EDILW and thought to yourself, "Goodness, this Caleb character has no idea what he's talking about. What's wrong with him? Is he really that stupid?" Well good news! You might have been on to something. I've been reading comics for about, oh, almost 20 years no, and I've been aware of Mike Allred's Madman for probably about that long. Allred's one of my favorite artists, so I've snapped up any and all Madman back issues and trades I could find over the years, and was buying single issues from Dark Horse and then Oni and, where was he last, Image...? But it has honestly, no joke, no lie, never, ever, ever occurred to me that Madman's secret identity of "Frank Einstein" was meant to be a pun on "Frankenstein" until this morning, when I read this feature.


Hey, that little stuffed animal brings up a good point!: I've been trying to resist the temptation to comment on the Tea Party/Fox News/Some Tea Party Guy On the Internet Who Noticed It/Marvel Comics controversy, despite the fact that it has to do with comics, which I spend all my writing energy on now, and politics, which I used to spend most of my writing energy on before I started blogging. It's one of those insidious little non-story things that tends to make everyone who covers it, reacts to it, mentions it or even just looks at it sideways look bad. (I'm especially bummed out by Joe Quesada and Ed Brubaker's reactions, which I have a hard time even respecting as company PR or hucksterism—wouldn't having that fight or blowing off anyone actually taking offense at some tiny element of some background in a panel of comic book generate more publicity? Marvel Comics has always, at least with the comics press, operated under the "There's no such thing as bad publicity" philosophy or selling things...with the non-comics press, I think the game's new enough for them that they're not sure how to deal with stories they themselves aren't pitching. Brubaker and Quesada just seem dishonest and easily cowed. As Dirk Deppey noted today—in the process of kinda sorta defending Quesada for behaving like one would expect an adult to behave—of course it's about the Tea Party movement/mob. Wrote Deppey, "the idea that writer Ed Brubaker was discussing modern anti-tax protest movements but not the Tea Partiers per se might make a lick of sense if there were, you know, a second such movement anywhere in the country.")

Anyway, among those that did manage to talk about the Fox-forces-Marvel-to-apologize-and-dissemble-for-accurately-portraying-something-in-the-background-of-one-of-their-comics and come out okay were prominent bloggers Bully The Little Stuffed Bull and Chris Sims, who had some fun with Captain America's outragous behavior on their Twitter twatters last night.

For example, this one or this one from Sims, or this one or this one from Bully.

Joking aside though, I thought Bully brought up a very good point with this tweet, contrasting Marvel's apology for this instance with something a little more obviously offensive and hard to defend. It's certainly something to think about, what Marvel decides to defend versus apologize for, and why they might do so (Quesada and others at Marvel were pretty vigorous in their defense of the "Heroes for Hentai" tentacle rape-inspired cover, for example, and Brian Michael Bendis talked at length about the gang-of-male-villains-pistol-whipping-the-half-naked-tiger-lady-in-bed-while-video-taping-it-for-rebroadcast scene in New Avengers).

The hubbub over the crowd scene in a recent issue of Captain America reminded me of a scene in Secret Invasion, in which writer Brian Michael Bendis again turned away from the story of Skrulls invading New York City to focus on something seemingly trivial—making fun of liberal protesters, who were pretty emphatically identified with anti-war protesters.

Remember this scene?
If not, let Abhay Khosla break it down for you in his review of the issue in which it appeared:

Page after page, not of the first or second or even third issue, page after page of the SIXTH ISSUE-- it wasn’t spent escalating the stakes of the comic, it wasn't spent dealing with characters we care about, it wasn't spent paying off earlier scenes. The fucking SIXTH ISSUE was spent introducing an entirely new cast of straw-men liberal characters, and then attacking them for being naive about the nature of evil.

First, let me just say, on a political level, this comic can go fuck itself. You know-- one pretty easy way a person could read this comic if they were so inclined is that it equates protesting wars with supporting terrorism. I don't think the people who made the comic think that. I don't think they were thinking at all. I don't think they made a big priority of thinking.

If an anti-war protester who happened to have really big glasses wrote a blog post about how Marvel seemed to be calling her and her fellow protesters terrorist-sympathizers deserving of vaporization, and, I don't know, Keith Olberman (is that who people say is the liberal Glenn Beck? I try not to watch/pay attention to cable news ever) freaked out about it, would Marvel have apologized and have said they wouldn't include the scene in the trade?

Damn, I went on about this a lot more than I meant to. I just wanted to say that Sims and Bully made some funny jokes, and Bully brought up a good point. Here, let's take a few deep breaths and meditate on Bone's character designs for some Captain Marvel villains:
Ah, that's better...

A really good Mister Miracle story, in its entirety

I got a lot of interesting feedback from Friday's post about Mister Miracle's seeming inability to carry an ongoing monthly for very long, despite the fact that he's both a superhero and an escape artist, the former vocation being shared with the stars of a lot of successful book, the latter being shared with the stars of a lot of awesome comic books.

A lot of attention seemed to foucs on the nature of Mister Miracle's escapes, which often depended on his high-tech doodad-ery rather than the sorts of physical prowess and skill shown in, say, Houdini: The Handcuff King.

Given the tricky nature of so many of the traps he escapes from, I think downplaying Mother Box's role is probably the best way to depict them. For a good example of how to handle the escapes, I'm hard-pressed to find a better one than Mike Allred's story from Solo #7.

I certainly can't think of a more succint example. Here's an entire Mister Miracle story revolving around his miraculous escape artistry, told in just two pages. (As always, click to enlarge).





Man, it must be hard being friends with Orion. He seems just a little too quick to bash Scott over the head with a large rock, and a little too slow to have second thoughts about throwing him into a volcano.

I especially like that Allred drew him scratching his hemlet in the last panel...

Six Things

1.) Meanwhile in Las Vegas…: This week’s Las Vegas Weekly comics review is of the better late than never Teen Titans Lost Annual, which I totally loved.

It wasn’t just the sight of a Dick Sprang-y looking Robin hanging out with a Jay Stephens-y looking JFK, in brilliant all-Allred ink and color (above), although, let’s face it, that is awesome.

It was the happy ending Haney and company gave our most tragic president:


(And, after a week of thinking on it, I wonder if that had anything to do with DC’s decision to release this…the thought that saying Kennedy survived his assassination and it was an alien doppelganger that died in his stead—complete with a drawing of the iconic image of his mourning son at the funeral—crossed some kind of line of good taste?)

The Stepens/Allred/Allred team is seriously great. Their Wonder Girl is probably the best damn Wonder Girl I’ve ever seen. Here she is in flight:


And here she is receiving foot-worship from an alien hippie:


Good stuff!

I know it’s kind of a tired, unimaginative cliché to say things like, “Wow this Bob Haney/Gardner Fox/Grant Morrison comic is so crazy…they must have totally been on drugs while writing it, for how else could the human imagination ever conceive of such wild ideas?", but, well, surely it must have occurred to Stephens that the alien race of hippies he was drawing were totally flying around on giant pipes, right?

And not giant Dr. Will Magnus pipes, but giant hide ‘em when you get pulled over pipes.

I know future Haney “Year One” Titans stories are out of the question, but I do hope to see some more from the Allreds at some point. If only because I think a lot of folks won’t read this story simply because it’s not in a trade. And where could you collect it in a trade?

Maybe a trade full of Allred Teen Titans stories? So far we’ve got the Lost Annual, and this gem


“Doom Patrol Vs. Teen Titans” from Solo #7.

But that’s still not enough to fill a whole trade. So People In Charge of Assigning Awesome Projects at DC, please see that Mike Allred gets at least one more project featuring the Year One Titans at some point soon, okay?




2.) Careful! Comics blogging can make you so used to bitter nitpicking you’ll find yourself dissecting and criticizing the most innocent and innocuous stuff: While at my local library the other day, I saw a rowdy group of little boys leaving the children’s area with their moms. I would guess they were around four years old or so.

They were all excitedly shouting, “I spin the web! I spin a web!” and I soon realized they were playing Spider-Man.

The boy closest to me made a fist and held his arm out straight in front of him, making a spittle-fueld “Foosh!” sound and saying, “I spin a web!” again.

And I thought to myself how he was holding his hand wrong. Spider-Man only shoots webs from his fist while wearing his black costume. Otherwise using his web-shooter requires him to tap the palm of his hand with his middle two fingers and make that Ditko sign.

And the sounnd of his web-shooters is clearly “Thwip!” and not “Foosh!”

And then I realized I was nitpicking a four-year-old’s imaginary play in the back of my head, and hated myself.

I heard the mother telling the boys to calm down as I passed them, and the one who went foosh protested, “But we were just spinning the web to save the day.”





3.) On second thought, let’s stick with complaining about “One More Day” for a while longer: Sorry gang, but I just can’t muster even an iota of outrage over the fact that there’s a quasi-famous naked lady painted as Wonder Woman on the cover of some issue of Playboy. I honestly don’t see anything wrong with it at all.

As a standalone image, there isn’t really much difference between that cover image and your average Adam Hughes Wonder Woman cover, beyond the difference in media.

In fact, I think DC hyper-sexualizing their flagship superheroine in their comics is a lot more offensive than Playboy doing it in a shrink-rapped softcore porn and men’s interest magazine.

The little kids who see Wonder Woman on the Justice League Unlimited cartoons and in their toy aisles can go into a comic shop and pick up an issue of Justice League of America and see Ed Benes drawings of Wonder Woman’s body straining to escape her tiny costume—including that one issue where Lex Luthor seems to be alluding to sexually torturing her, or that one where her pants completely disappear. These hypothetical little kids hypothetically reading JLoA would see the “real” Wonder Woman in a constant state of undress being treated as a sex object by the villain (if they’re not sophisticated enough to realize it’s actually the artist responsible).

The same little kids won’t be able to buy an issue of Playboy and see what’s inside it because, well, they don’t sell issues of Playboy to little kids. And if kids were to somehow get their hands on a copy—maybe finding it under their dad’s bed or in his closet—it should be clear to them that it’s not the “real” Wonder Woman they’re looking at. First clue? She’s clearly wearing paint, not a costume. And she’s in a magazine, not a comic book or cartoon.

So, what we have here is what I gather is a professional celebrity (she’s from reality TV, right?) getting paid a good deal of money to take her clothes off in a magazine for adults who want to look at pictures of ladies not wearing any clothes, one who happens to be painted up like Wonder Woman—a sort of naughty superheroine look instead of, oh, a naughty nurse or naughty school girl or naughty librarian or whatever.

(Do nurses associations get upset every time they see a scantily clad lady in a tiny white dress with the zipper halfway down clenching a stethoscope in her teeth?)

For other examples of characters dressed as naughty superheroes and superheroines, please see Justice League of America Wedding Special #1, in which Green Lantern hires a bunch of strippers dressed like Marvel heroines for Green Arrow’s bachelor party, and the Green Arrow/Black Canary Wedding Special #1, in which Black Canary’s bachelorette party is at a male strip club called “The Meat Locker” wherein the strippers are all wearing scanty versions of DC’s male superhero costumes.




4.) Which of my favorite Justice Leaguers will die next?: I do hope this item from this week’s Lying in the Gutters column is misinformation Rich Johnston was purposely fed by DC (it’s marked with a “caution” light in Johnston’s system of accuracy): “If Warner won’t let DC Comics kill off Batman in “Final Crisis," who can DC get away with introducing to the Grim Reaper? I mean it has to be decent names, but it also has to be someone that a major franchise license isn’t totally resting on… the two names marked for karking I’ve been given by a DC source are Martian Manhunter and Aquaman.”

I thought both of them were supposed to be involved in some capacity in the upcoming Justice League movie (which I kinda hope never actually gets made…oh hey, good news on that front!), so I would assume Warner Brothers wouldn’t be enthusiastic about either of them dying either.

But regardless, Aquaman is already dead. He’s been dead for months now. When his last series ended, it was revealed that part of his spirit went into Arthur “Aquaman II” Curry and the rest of it mutated into The Dweller of the Deep, who then died and turned to water. So he’s, like, dead, but it’s a death so stupid that he should be pretty easy to bring back. But if they’re going to re-kill him in Final Crisis, they better hurry up and bring him back to life soon.

It’s worth noting that a lot of DC creators and editors don’t seem to even know this. There was Brad Meltzer writing Aquaman II as if he was Aquaman I in his last issue of JLoA, and I saw this panel from Green Arrow/Black Canary in Rachelle Goguen’s reviews of last week’s comics:

So I don’t know, unless they, um, kark Aquaman II in Final Crisis, that just leaves Martian Manhunter. He’s not currently appearing regularly in JLoA or any other title, and DC seems to have a hard time figuring out what to do with him when he’s not in a Justice League comic.

On the other hand, his whole “last of his race” angle makes killing him seem kind of drastic, and the peculiar nature of his shape-changing physiology pretty much makes him impossible to kill-kill anyway.

On the other other hand, unlike Superman, Wonder Woman, Wonder Woman's mom, Hawkman, Aquaman, Green Lantern Hal Jordan, Green Lantern Guy Gardener, Green Lantern Kyle Rayner, Green Arrow Oliver Queen, Donna Troy and Ice, he hasn’t died for longer than a few minutes and come back to life yet*, so I guess that killing him off temporarily might seem like a fresh idea.





5.) Elsewhere on CBR this week, there’s an interview with both writer Tom Peyer and pencil artist Rags Morales about one of my favorite DC comics of all time, Hourman. If you missed the not-in-trade book, you might want to give the interview a read and see if you can find it for cheap somewhere.

It’s interesting to consider the creative success (if not the financial success) of this particular brilliant but cancelled series today, in part because it was the result of a creative team taking a character recreated by Grant Morrison and running with it, and it resulted in some pretty great comics.

More recently, we’ve seen Gail Simone and a small army of artists try to run with Morrison’s ideas for a revamped Atom and Ivy Town in The All-New Atom, “Graymiotti” and a couple of artists try to turn Morrison’s ideas for a revamped Freedom Fighters into a couple of miniseries, and Duncan Rouleau try to turn Morrison’s ideas for a revamped Metal Men into a miniseries.

Of the three, none of them seem to come anywhere near the quality of Hourman (It may have helped that Peyer seemed to genuinely be on Morrison’s wavelength—having edited his work and having been part of the foursome who were notoriously forbidden from taking over the Superman titles—while having a writing style that was quite different).

I like Rouleau’s Metal Men okay, although it can be so narratively jam-packed it can get awfully confusing at times (particularly in the earlier issues), and I tried both ANA and Uncle Sam and the Freedom Fighters, and both failed to click for me.

Apparently turning Morrison’s ideas into comics gold is a very difficult challenge. Maybe they should give Peyer a call next time they decide to release a new series “based on concepts and ideas by Grant Morrison.”




6.) Trade-waiting this series was probably a terrible idea: I am worried that I won’t be able to avoid hearing about the end of Y: The Last Man online before I get around to actually reading it.



*Unless you count “Obsidian Age,” during which he and the rest of the League all died only to be reanimated as unkillable zombies and then brought all the way back to life via magic.

July 26th's Meanwhile in Las Vegas...

This week's Las Vegas Weekly comics column features reviews of Postcards: True Stories That Never Happened (eh), Monster Attack Network (awesome) and Madman Gargantua (expensive).