On 1992 miniseries Armageddon: Inferno

If you happened to find a copy of 1992's Armageddon: Inferno 2001 #1 in a back issue bin today, you would have no idea that the story it would begin, one that would span four monthly issues, was a fairly pivotal one in the history of the first superhero team, the Justice Society of America.

The logo and title link it to Armageddon 2001, DC's1991 crossover event storyline that spanned some dozen annuals and two bookend issues and centered on the new hero Waverider travelling back in time to try to determine which superhero would become a despotic masked villain in his future.

And, of course, the image on the cover of the first issue prominently features Waverider...as does the corner box, a sure indication of who a book's star is meant to be. The Justice Society, meanwhile, wouldn't make the cover until the fourth and final issue.

Even once one starts reading the series, it doesn't seem like it's meant to be any sort of Justice Society story.  They are briefly mentioned in the second issue, when Superman suggests to Waverider that their old headquarters is no longer in use, and thus could make for a good place to host a gathering of superheroes. Other than that, they don't appear until the third issue.

Rather, the focus of the book seems to be to gather a whole bunch of DC's most popular characters, as well as some fan-favorite ones who might have been out of the spotlight for quite some time, and a murderers' row of artists to draw them. 

In fact, that seems to be the major selling point of the book, and the JSoA's return from the limbo they had been stuck in for a half-dozen years or so is somewhat incidental.

Writer Jon Ostrander and primary pencil artist Luke McDonnell spend only nine pages setting the whole adventure up, moving quite fleetly to introduce the premise. 

Waverider follows a disturbance in the timestream to a strange ritual in a Wyoming desert, where a dozen diverse people summon an extra-dimensional entity they call Abraxis. A bolt of lightning seems to split the sky, but rather than fading, it remains, and the slit of energy opens into a titanic staring eye. This is, a voice in a red-rimmed, tail-less dialogue balloon declares, Abraxis.

Abraxis plans to conquer this dimension by transforming his twelve supplicants and empowering them as his "daemen" servants. He will then send them in groups of three to four different points in time, where they will build for him giant "simulacra" which he can then inhabit. To aid them in their work, he will give them armies of "husks", hordes of all-black figures that evoke the shadow demons of Crisis on Infinite Earths. 

Realizing that his own time-travelling shenanigans—in either Armageddon 2001 or its sequel mini-series Armageddon: The Alien Agenda—seems to have allowed Abraxis to breach the wall between dimensions, Waverider realizes that means he can also stop him.

Using his time powers, he finds the locations in time and space the daemen have went to and then finds the precise heroes he will be able to send to these battlegrounds without causing irreparable harm to the time stream.

They turn out to be about whom you would expect, many of the primary heroes of the DC Universe circa 1992, including the most popular heroes, although Ostrander also includes various period heroes from the past, characters that don't turn up all that often in DC Comics, and a couple of oddball choices, current heroes from points in their own past or, in one case, the future.

The adventures of each of the four teams, which are essentially just fight scenes against the daemen and husks, are each drawn by a different artist, including some big names that one might think would have been featured a little more prominently on the cover, but then, maybe in 1992 comics were still more event-driven and character-driven than artist driven...? (Or DC thought so, at least...?)

Each team is announced on a full-page splash by the artist who will be drawing the sequences featuring them, which I'll scan and share here.

First, there's Arthur Adams drawing present-day heroes Superman, Wonder Woman, Martian Manhunter, The Flash (Wally West), Power Girl (here wearing her worst costume, the yellow and white one) and Donna Troy (Here going by "Troia", and rocking the shorthair and short skirt look). This team is being sent to a future that I think appeared in a Superman comic I never read. (You know, this line-up wouldn't make a half-bad Justice League if you gave them one more hero to hit the magic number seven...)

Second, Michael Netzer draws World War II-era heroes Sgt. Rock and Easy Company, Johnny "The Navajo Ace" Cloud, the team of Gunner, Sarge and Pooch (although on first mention "Gunner" is spelled "Gunnar") and the modern day Thanagarian Hawkman and Hawkwoman (here outfitted in what I believe are their Hawkworld costumes). This team will fight their battle during World War II, so it's a short commute for most of them.

Third, Walt Simonson draws Orion, Lobo, Green Lantern Guy Gardner, Enemy Ace (!!!) and Starfire in dinosaur times (As you stare in appreciation of Simonson's take on these various characters, do note the zig-zag of reddish orange in the lower left corner; that too is part of Starfire's weird hair trail). 

And, finally, Tom Mandrake draws Batman, The Spectre, a plainclothes Jo Nah/Ultra Boy from the Legion of Super-Heroes, a Firestorm "from his earlier years" and The Creeper "from the recent past"; this team is sent to the recent past. 

The second half of this first issue features Mandrake's sequence, which lasts 11 pages. Its event will be repeated in each of the other three sequences not drawn by McDonnell.  

1.) The heroes will gather. 

2.) Ostrander will do a decent job of introducing most of them in a way that feels quite natural to them. (Case in point, Starfire is in the midst of using her energy bolts to keep Lobo and Guy Gardner from fighting one another when Orion boom tubes in with the line "I have the word--it is battle!" And then Hans Von Hammer appears, dueling with a huge pterosaur while brooding about "the killer skies"; Enemy Ace doesn't really interact with the superheroes at all and, interestingly, thinks they and the bad guys and the prehistoric reptiles are all part of a nightmare he's having).

3.) They will fight the daemen, each of which Ostrander seems to have done far more work on than was probably necessary, given that this series is the only place they will ever appear, as he gives them each a civilian name, backstory and motivation for selling their souls as well as a new, demonic name and a super-power of some sort that makes them a threat to the heroes they face. I suspect the designs for each of these villains was likely provided by the artists, given how much they seem to reflect the stylistic sensibilities of whoever is drawing them (My favorites are Mandrake's Zhazor, who looks vaguely  Nazgul-like and throws bolts of flame; Netzer's Feth Sudol, who can transform himself into groups of different scary black animals; and Adams' Arquol, who can transform into a variety of cool vehicles; Adams' Inztuk has a somewhat generic eye-beam power, but his design, featuring a Styracosaurus head atop a humanoid body, is pretty cool). 

4.) Abraxis will inhabit the simulacrum. (Abraxis is also a pretty great design, which every artist draws the hell out of; he's a black-colored giant with diabolical horns and fangs that looks a little like Chernabog from Fantastia's "Night on Bald Mountain" sequence blended with a Thanos-like supervillain). 

As you can probably imagine, each of these extended fight sequences are great, and it's hard to overstate how fun it is to see these particular artists drawing these weird groupings of characters, most of whom seem to have been chosen by asking the artists which characters they might most like to draw (In fact, I wonder if that's how Ostrander went about assembling the characters to be featured). 

By the third issue, The Spectre sends a duplicate of himself to confront Waverider in the timestream to tell him the plan doesn't seem to be working, and suggest that they throw another group of heroes at Abraxis in his home dimension, thus stretching the demon/supervillain's attention across five conflicts in two different dimensions to further weakine him.

When Waverider says that he has already recruited all of the heroes he can without endangering the timestream, The Spectre volunteers a group of superheroes who area already outside of time and space: The Justice Society of America, who are still in some limbo dimension fighting Ragnarok from the events of 1986's Last Days of the Justice Society of America. 

Ostrander also writes a sequence from the point-of-view of one of the natives on Abraxis' home world, a hairy hominid that looks like he could be an ancestor to modern homo sapiens. Because Abraxis feeds on souls, he basically treats the native population of his world as cattle, their reproduction providing him with new souls. They are ruled by their most base instincts, and have no real concept of things like bravery, selflessness or heroism...at least, not until the Justice Society appears and awakens a light within them.

Dick Giordano pencils the Justice Society sequences in the fourth issue, so there's one more name to add to the who's who of this particular art team. 

That final issue includes four more splashes from Adams, Mandrake, Netzer and Simonson, each showing their assigned team of heroes battling Abraxis and his minions. These echo the splashes from the first issue, but each is a little stronger, I think, as it shows the heroes in triumphant action, rather than simply posing for a group shot. 

They are all great, but this one's my favorite:

As I noted on Bluesky when I was rereading this, I love that image of Orion manhandling the poor daemon's face. And Abraxis' melodramatic, operatic posing. And, especially, Guy's boots. I don't think anyone has ever drawn Guy's old giant boots better than Simonson does here. 

Naturally, the good guys win, and Abraxis is defeated, never to threaten the DC Universe again (Which is maybe unfortunate, given what a cool design he has). The modern-day heroes are all debriefing in the JSoA's old HQ, where they had met prior to embarking on this mission, when Superman laments the fate of the Justice Society, and Flash says, "Jay--all of them--deserve better!"

"You're correct, Flash," a voice says from off-panel. It belongs to Waverider, who appears suddenly, and the Justice Society materializes right behind him.

"It would be small thanks to such heroes as they to consign the Justice Society back to limbo," Waverider says. "That is why the daemen now fight the eternal battle of Ragnarok and the Justice Society is here instead."

The last panel is a big one, filling most of the last page, and in it, McDonnell draws all the modern day heroes from the series chatting with the newly returned Justice Society. Ostrander pens four narration boxes, the last of which reads, "Every once in a while, the good guys actually win."

The very next month, DC would launch a new ongoing Justice Society of America series by writer Len Strazewski and pencil artist Mike Parobeck, though it would only last ten issues before being cancelled. That book has never been collected, and I've never been able to find it in back issue bins, so I've never actually read it (and I keep hoping DC will collect it at some point). 

As for Waverider and the Armageddon-branding, well, the character would remain a mainstay in the DC Universe, but never got his own series again, and was mostly employed when a narrative called for time-travel or a character to explain time travel. Following the previously mentioned Armageddon 2001 and Armageddon: Alien Agenda, this was the last time DC used that title and/or logo. Inferno has never been collected...and neither have those other Armageddon books.  I know I've said this repeatedly before, but I hope DC will eventually collect Armageddon 2001 into a couple of DC Finest collections...maybe they can throw the sequels into one of them. 

The "What If...?" FF's snazzy new costumes

My sole disappointment with last year's Jeff Parker and Mike Wieringo collaboration Spider-Man and The Fantastic Four was that when Reed Richards went off to space and asked Spidey to fill-in as a member of the Four for him, he handed him a little press-on FF badge (seen above).

In my head, I was imagining how cool it would have been if Spidey got a special Fantastic Four-ized version of his costume to wear with the team, in their blue-colors and with a "4" instead of a Spider icon.

So I was downright giddy when I saw the "What If?" FF of Spider-Man, Wolverine, The Hulk and Ghost Rider don their own versions of FF uniforms in Wednesday's What If This Was the Fantastic Four?: A Tribute to Mike Wieringo.

The premise of the story, also written by Parker with art begun but sadly never finished by the late Wieringo, is that Reed, Johnny and Sue died and Ben gave up super-heroing to raise Franklin Richards, leaving Spidey, Wolvie, Ghostie and ol' Jade Jaws...er, ol' Gray Gams to fill set up shop in The Baxter Building and slap down the likes of Blastaar and Dr. Doom on the behalf of their predecessors.

Here's a wonderful little sequence in which they go into action in their new uniforms for the first time. Peter Parker and Johnny Blaze/Danny Ketch (it was supposed to be the latter, but is drawn like the former; it's explained in the book) are at an oudoor cafe when The Sandman appears, and Ghost Rider vomits out a signal flare for his commrades:


(The first two panels were penciled by Alan Davis; the third one is by Casey Jones)

Here's the best look at all four of the costumes at the same time, from the original cover by David Williams and Arthur Adams (They ended up re-purposing a splash page Wieringo drew as the cover for the project, once it transtitioned from just another Marvel What If? special into a tribute book):

Pretty cool, huh?

In the upper lefthand corner is another group shot of the team in their uniforms. He's not credited with it on the page, but that sure looks like Wieringo's work, doesn't it?

Here's a closer look:


Finally, Chris Giarrusso contribued a one-page Mini Marvels strip to the book, featuring the "random group of four heroes" filling in for the official Four. In the last panel, they also adopt Fantastic Four-ized versions of their costumes:

I like the way the other costumes match one another better, but these are kinda fun too, particularly Hulk's and Ghost Rider's.

Hey, check it out:


Looks like Ghostie is a Guy Gardner fan. It works for him.

Auf Wiedersehen, Dinosaurier!

This week, DC will release the first issue of The War That Time Forgot, a new, 12-issue limited series dealing with the 1950s WWII G.I.s versus dinosaurs premise of Robert Kanigher’s. Judging from the solicitations, the dinosaurs won’t be the only time-lost combatants in the book, as the cast seems plucked from various times as well.

So not only will we be seeing WWII soldiers versus dinosaurs, a concept that is entertaining for at least 500 pages, but we’ll be seeing Firehair, Tomahawk and Viking Prince fighting dinosaurs. And, of course, Hans Von Hammer, The Enemy Ace.

Enemy Ace versus dinosaurs, is there anything more exciting in the world of comics? No, no there’s not. (But please don’t get too excited; it’s being written by Bruce Jones, the guy who wrote a Hulk-free Hulk comic and some of the worst Nightwing comics ever written which, considering the low standards of Nightwing comics, is an incredible accomplishment).

Now, I know what you’re thinking (or at least I know what I like to imagine you’re thinking)— World War I flying ace in a rickety old tri-plane versus the gigantic killers of the Age of Reptiles? How can even the Hammer of Hell hope to prevail in such a situation?

Just by being himself, a born killer who, once in the cockpit of his blood-red Fokker Dr.I, is completely unstoppable.

Besides, it’s not like this is his first dinosaur rodeo. According to my longboxes, Von Hammer has come up against dinosaurs on at least two previous occasions, and he totally killed the fuck out of them.

Let’s take a look, shall we?

Let’s start in 1992, which is when the earliest Enemy Ace vs. dinosaurs comics I have in my collection were published. I refer to four-part miniseries Armageddon Inferno which, despite its name, didn’t really have anything to do with Armageddon 2001, aside from prominently featuring that previous event's protagonist, Waverider.



This book is not available in trade, something that is at once a little bewildering and also completely understandable. See, as far as DC events go, this is a pretty huge one—this is the story in which the Justice Society of America escape their post-Crisis status quo, trapped in a Valhalla-like dimension forever fighting off the forces of Ragnarok to keep the end of the world forever in check. That is, after being taken off the table for so long, this is the story in which they get put back on it, leading to a pretty good (but under read) Justice Society of America monthly by Len Strazewski and Mike Parobeck.

On the other hand, it’s not very good or terribly well-written, as I discovered upon rereading it (This was actually a bit of a shock, since 15-year-old Caleb loved it). However, as bad a comic as it is, it’s one of DC’s best not-very-good comics, due in large part to the art, and the unusual nature of how it was doled out.

The story, by John Ostrander, involves a monstrous nigh omnipotent entity known as Abraxis transforming a small group of followers into “daemons,” each with a supervillain name and often rather cool power. Abraxis is attacking the world in a rather unusual way, building himself giant bodies in several different time-periods.

To defeat him, Waverider must call on different bands of heroes from throughout history, but he’s limited in who he can send when without completely destroying the timestream. The end result is a four-front war between Abraxis’ daemons and DC heroes from various time-periods, each drawn by a fan-favorite and, frankly, awesome artist.

Luke McDonnell handles the framing sequences and those involving Waverider solo and, as much as I’ve liked McDonnell’s work elsewhere, these are kind of weak. However, that could be simply compared to whose work his work appears next to.

So we’ve got Batman, Firestorm, The Spectre, The Creeper and plainclothes Ultra Boy of the Legion of Superheroes, as drawn by Tom Mandrake, a guy with plenty of Batman and Firestorm experience, who would go on to draw the best Spectre stories ever.


We’ve got World War II heroes Sgt. Rock and Easy Company, Navaho Ace Johnny Cloud, Gunner, Sarge and Pooch and the Thanagarian Hawks of the early ‘90s, all as drawn by Mike Netzer.


We’ve got the super-powerful superhero squad Superman, Wonder Woman, Martian Manhunter, The Flash, Power Girl and Donna Troy (in her least terrible costume ever), drawn by Art Adams (Who does some pretty incredible design work on his daemons).


And, most relevant to the discussion of Enemy Ace vs. dinosaurs, we get a team consisting completely of people-who-you-would-not-want-mad-at-you: Starfire, Green Lantern Guy Gardner, Lobo, Orion and, of course, Enemy Ace, as drawn by Walter Simonson.

Now, Simonson’s best-known in superhero circles for being the guy who best made good comics out of Jack Kirby’s cosmic mythology concepts. So no surprise that he does a really good Orion (and, about a decade later, would base a series around the character which fellow Best Shots @ Newsarama.com contributor Michael C. Lorah tells me is the greatest DC comic in, like, ever).

But who knew Simonson could do so much with an essentially silly character like Lobo, and his giant-ass skull cycle? Or Guy Gardner; this is probably my favorite Guy Gardner ever. Or the subject of this post. I love how rigidly straight the wings on the plane are.

So, each of these specially assembled strikeforces are sent to a different point in time to destory the giant Abraxis statue monster things before they can be animated. Simonson’s squad is sent back to dinosaur times, giving Von Hammer the chance to discover if he truly is the deadliest killer to ever fly the killer skies:


Take that, giant pterodactyl thing!

The other Enemy Ace vs. dinosaur comic in my longboxes is also a four-issue miniseries from the nineties, but it has a much higher quotient of Enemy Ace vs. dinosaur scenes, as the focus of the series is on dinosaur-fighting.

It’s 1998’s Guns of the Dragon, written and illustrated by Tim Truman, master of the two-fisted pulp tale of manly action.


This manly action is set in 1920s Singapore, where aged, roguish cowboy Bat Lash has fled due to some disagreements with some folks in the U.S. He’s set up a bar there, where he employs Slam Bradley’s brother Biff Bradley as his bouncer, and, one fateful night, ends up serving drinks to one Baron Hans Von Hammer.

The trio of adventurers are hired to visit the island that would eventually become known as Dinosaur Island to retrieve a pair of swords and a living dragon to fulfill a prophecy about ruling China or the world or something. They make for a pretty sweet team, but they’re only part of the cast. You’ve also got Blackhawk characters Miss Fear and Chop-Chop, plus the immortal villain
Vandal Savage, looking better under Truman’s pen than just about anywhere else I’ve ever seen him,
Chiang Kai-Shek and
Mao Tse Tung? Really? Wow.

Lash, Bradley and Von Hammer race for the prizes against Fear, a band of Japanese ninja were-creatures and Savage’s crew, with dinosaurs constantly complicating matters.

Here’s the Enemy Ace taking advantage of the distraction provided by a Tyrannosaur to get into his plane. But his noble conscience refuses to allow him to leave the ninjas to be eaten alive by a dinosaur, so he does what he does best:





Man, this new War That Time Forgot series is going to have to try awfully hard if it wants to top Guns of the Dragon, which features Enemy Ace machine-gunning a dozen ninjas and a Tyrannosaurus Rex to death in the space of a single page.

Later, Von Hammer is fighting a sword-wielding ninja were-rat with the biggest wrench in the German air force as a flock of a pterosaurs close in on his plane. One flies a little too close to the propeller, leading to the best propeller-generated gore jokes in comics history:




And while those are among the better Enemy Ace scenes with dinosaurs in Guns of the Dragon, they’re not even the best part of the series (I think that’s probably the part where Biff Bradley rides a rampaging Triceratops straight into Vandal Savage's chest).

Sadly, Guns of the Dragon hasn’t been collected in trade yet either, but hopefully DC will get around to it now that there seems to be more interest in these characters and the island full of dinosaurs, thanks in large part to their Showcase reprints and, of course, this new War That Time Forgot series.