On Swamp Thing Halloween Horror Giant #1

I finally gave in and bought myself one of those DC Walmart exclusive 100-page giants last weekend, which, based on the number of stories The Beat has devoted to the subject, is one of the biggest stories in comics right now. This one was the Swamp Thing Halloween Horror Giant #1, which appears to be a holiday special, as opposed to the four ongoing series devoted to Superman, Batman, the Justice League and the Teen Titans. It had its own little cardboard display case set up right next to the usual one that I see on my biweely-ish trips to the Ashtabula County Walmart.

Unlike the other Walmart giants, I wasn't immediately sure I had read all of the reprint stories within this (although it turned out that I had), and I wasn't as confident that the all-new Swamp Thing story advertised on the cover would show up in a collection, as I am confident the Brian Michael Bendis-written Batman story and the Tom King-written Superman story will. And hell, it's only $5--that's significantly less than most of the magazines they shelve near check out aisles in supermarkets to entice impulse buys.

I don't want to get too deep into the logic and ethics of these things again, nor to play armchair publisher regarding them, although I think in general that extremely cheap, mostly reprint comics marketed to a mass audience of civilians is a pretty good idea, especially around holidays like Halloween and, even more so, Christmas. I remain a little baffled as to who exactly these are meant for, though. As with the Batman one I had previously read, this seemed to be geared toward an adult--or at least older teen--audience, rather than an all-ages one. There's some blood, some unnecessary swearing, a particularly gratuitous dark and an oddly out of place story from the 1970s with barely veiled drug humor (Unlike the comics DC sells to the direct market, there's no rating on this one).

And the contents are extremely haphazard, although, in general, the idea seems to be popular-ish DC characters with one foot in the world of horror and the other in the traditional world of DCU superheroics. Off the top of my head, I feel like I could come up with 100-pages of better Halloween comics to fill this thing with, and I got the sense that after the new Swampy story that kicks off the anthology and the Swamp Thing-related reprint that closes it out, the stories were chosen more for the characters featured or their ability to hit the pre-determined page count than for their quality or their accessibility to new readers or their likelihood of selling brand-new readers on particular characters, concepts or comics.

So here's what we've got.

*Swamp Thing in "Hollow" This 12-page short is the "Brand-New Swamp Thing Story! Written by Brian Azzarello and Art by Greg Capullo!" That...doesn't sound, right, and makes me suspect that story selection is hardly the only issue with editing that went into this thing. Anyway, if people who ever visit comic book shops by this, chances are this is the reason they will be buying it. The story itself is kind of simple, and echoes one that appears later in the collection, as well as dozens or even scores of other comics stories. The basic idea is that there are good monsters that fight bad monsters, and that there are places in this world where bad things from other dimensions try to enter when the veil between the worlds is weak enough, and some noble, self-sacrificing types must endlessly keep a lonely vigil for the good of all.

Swamp Thing fights a giant, eye-less, albino crocodile-monster from hell, and there's a pretty neat reveal regarding some other monsters. Azzarello does his usual cute word play, which is either clever or annoying depending on the generosity of the reader, but I imagine Capullo is the big draw here. Indeed, it's the art that sells the reveal, and it was fun seeing his big, scary Swamp Thing, which is much bigger than usual, although I did find myself a little disappointed by one of his entrances (There's a bunch of dead leaves that seem to stir from the wind, and then form into Swamp Thing, but he just looks like he always does, rather than being made out of fall leaves; I've always liked when artists tweaked his design to reflect the type of plants he made his body from in a particular appearance).

*The Enchantress and Blue Devil in "The Pumpkin Sinister" This is the first of the four shorts taken from either the 2007 DC Universe Infinite Halloween Special #1 or 2008's DCU Halloween Special #1. The premise for those was that various villains all sat around telling scary stories starring DC heroes, and so when you remove an individual story from those books and present it by itself, it doesn't quite make sense, as each includes at least a panel of a supervillain, who then serves as narrator (To be honest, DC probably could have just reprinted one of these in their entirety here behind the Swamp Thing stories, and it would have made for a smooth and more comprehensible read). The Scarecrow narrates two of them, and he also appears in them, so those mostly work, but this one is particularly weird in that the villain narrator isn't someone I recognize by sight and never gets named, and he's awkwardly introduced, so the first panel of the story seems to include a giant in goofy '90s Image Comics-style armor, sitting near a house that he dwarfs with his immense size, and then the story begins (In actuality, he's regular-sized, by the creative team of Dan DiDio and Ian Churchill weren't exactly masters of comics storytelling, and it reads much worse removed from its original context).

I actually sighed out loud when I saw this was included, as it is one of the few stories I remember from either of those specials...not because it was good, but because it was so bad. Blue Devil and The Enchantress, who were back then both co-starring in pre-Justice League Dark Justice League Dark book Shadowpact, are giving out candy to trick-or-treaters while, across town, grown-up Peanuts characters Linus and Charlie Brown have just sacrificed Snoopy in a pumpkin patch in order to raise The Great Pumpkin The Pumpkin Sinister, which Charlie Brown sics on Blue Devil because, long ago, BD kissed The Little Red-Haired Girl.

I suppose there's a way to read this in which DiDio was parodying his own direction for the DCU line, which was progressively darker, gorier and more violent, despite the fact that the characters were all created to entertain children, but it is so clumsily executed that there's no textual basis to make that argument.

*Zatanna in "Kcirt ro Taert" Get it? That's "trick or treat" spelled backwards! And Zatanna casts spells by saying words backwards! Another short from the Infinite Halloween special, this one was written by Paul Dini and arted by Dustin Nguyen. The Scarecrow's head appears at the beginning--Nguyen draws a nice Scarecrow head--and he proceeds to tell of a recent Halloween in which he tried terrorize children by putting his chemical concoctions in candy, only to have Zatanna track him down and take her revenge. Nguyen's art is nice on a panel by panel basis, but the story's flow is difficult to read, and I honestly would have had no idea what the fuck was happening at the climax if I haven't read a dozen Scarecrow stories before (So not only can I recognize him without his costume, but they all tend to end the same way). It's an unusual case of great art not quite working right.

*Superman in "Strange Cargo" The last of the Infinite Halloween shorts, this one is a pretty simple Superman vs. Zombies story by horror comic writer Steve Niles and artist Dean Ormston, as told by Poison Ivy (who only appears in the first panel). Jimmy Olsen and Lois Lane are at the docks, as they suspect Lex Luthor has just imported something illegal. They open the shipping crates to find a bunch of zombies, and when Superman arrives to fight them, he finds that they are infused with magic or Kryptonite, as they are kicking his ass. When the reporters point out that they are already dead and thus Superman doesn't have to go easy, he rallies and says, "So, they are...Well that changes everything." But rather than pulverizing them all or burning them to ash with his heat vision, he tosses them back in their shipping containers and flies them to the moon, where they are free to stagger around harmlessly. So, it changes nothing, I guess. Those two lines of dialogue really bugged me, because they have no impact on what is otherwise a pretty strong story that would demonstrate how much Superman respects life/abhors killing and violence...and that he's so powerful he never actually has to resort to it. Also, Poison Ivy's presence feels sort of random. It's frustrating because it's almost a perfect Superman story, but makes a few unfortunate unforced errors that keep it from reaching perfection.

*Batman and The Scarecrow in "The Ballad of Jonathan Crane" This is the last of the villains-telling-stories stories, and the only one from the DCU Halloween Special. Once again it's The Scarecrow's turn to tell a story--it occurs to me that there are at least 100 pages worth of solid Scarecrow short stories that DC could have easily done an all-Scarecrow Scarecrow Halloween Horror Giant #1 had they so chosen--and he basically just remixes "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow" with himself as Ichabod Crane and Batman as The Headless Horseman. I do love the latter.

Plus, you know, Batman on a horse.

In fact, I love that image so damn much that I was thinking I wouldn't mind seeing a whole Elseworlds-like tale of a Batmanified Legend of Sleepy Hollow, although I guess writer Mikey Way and artist Mateus did the whole thing in just eight pages...the page of which reveals just how it is that what looks so Elseworldsy is actually canonical.

*Aquaman and The Demon in "Night Gods" This unlikely team-up by writer J. Michael Straczynski and artist Jesus Saiz is from the 32nd issue of the 2007-2010 Brave and The Bold revival, long after the book stopped being very good (as it was the first year or so, when writer Mark Waid and artist George Perez, and then Scott Kolins, were using it to tell compelling team-up stories that served as chapters in an overarching, universe-spanning story arc). This isn't bad, though. It is basically the two unlikely allies fighting Cthullhu on the ocean floor with the same basic set-up as the Swampy story--monster hero, portal between two worlds, little-known guardians performing thankless task for an ignorant world--framed like so many of these stories as a story one character tells another. It's structured a bit like an old horror comic too, with a surprise ending that is anything but surprising. Saiz is a remarkably solid artist, and he does stately superheroics quite well, but his Demon looks a little...boring compared to so many other artists' takes on the character, and while I liked his (unnamed) Cthullhu design, in general the monsters and settings lacked the weirdness and expressionistic energy I would want in a story in which a guy who is caught in the middle of robbing a grave explains that he recently got magic gills and journeyed with Aquaman and a rhyming demon to the bottom of the ocean and watched an army of sea creatures do battle with undead aqua-zombies and Lovecraft mythos monsters.

*Batman and Robin in "Night of The Reaper!" This one is something of a Halloween classic, set as it is during the Rutland, Vermont annual Halloween parade and featuring the talents of a pretty all-star creative team: Writer Denny O'Neil and artists Neal Adams and Dick Giordano, "from an idea by Bernie Wrightson with an assist from Harlan Ellison." As you can probably guess by the credits and my use of the word "classic," it's an old one, originally appearing in Batman #237 from 1971...the year my father graduated from high school! So, it's that old.

Obviously that means the Robin in question is Dick Grayson, who, at the time, was a college student. He and some guys go to take in the parade and party scene, and one of them is stoned out of his mind from "gulping coffee and who-knows-what-else" to keep his eyes open while studying. In a strange running gag, he is obsessed with parade floats, and spends the rest of the story talking about them to anyone who will listen.

As likely happens to Dick Grayson a lot, he goes out to have fun and ends up stumbling into a strange murder plot by someone dressed as The Grim Reaper. Not The Reaper, but, like, the generic one, with a scythe. Kind of like a murderous Scooby-Doo plot. Involving Nazis. There's lots of rather strong Adams art in this fairly lengthy and substantial comic, showing off his abilities to draw incredibly realistic characters and dramatic Batman poses and action. It's also kind of neat to see so many Marvel superheroes appear in a DC Comic, as many of the revelers are dressed as superheroes from both sides of the DC/Marvel rivalry. There's at least one cameo by a comic book creator too, but I'll be damned if I can recognize who it's meant to be: I was like -7-years-old when this came out, after all.

*Swamp Thing in "The Origin of Swamp Thing!" Like the previous story, this is a decades-old story that I've read before--multiple times, actually--although I'd actually be hard-pressed to tell you where exactly I've encountered it. This is, of course, the original, eight-page Swamp Thing story by his creators Len Wein and Bernie Wrightson, from 1971's House of Secrets, the one with the famous-ish cover (not included).

Rereading it today, after spending so much time looking so closely at Kelley Jones art in the past few weeks, it is really striking how evident Wrightson's influence on Jones was. Not just in certain elements of his rendering or style, but even in the layouts and storytelling. Jones' current style and Wrightson's from later in his career don't really look all that similar, but one can see how the Wrightson of the early 1970s influenced the Jones of the 1990s.

This one seems a bit out of place in this anthology, despite starring the title character. Those last two from 1971 are kinda sorta evergreen DCU Halloween story classics, ones that standalone, whereas so much of what preceded them begs a degree of familiarity with the characters, and tend to be fairly forgettable. Like, I've read all of them before, but don't really remember doing so...only that I fucking hated that Blue Devil/Peanuts comic. Just as it would be easy to imagine a DC Halloween 100-page giant that was all Swamp Thing stories or all Scarecrow stories, it's also easy to imagine one that is all short, "classic" scary stories by some of the greatest creators in DC history from the 1970s and '80s.

For those who care--given that one of the ways in which DC was trying to sell these at the time they were announced was that they would push the comic shop locator and be a way to herd Walmart shoppers into their local comic book shops--I'll mention the ad content. There are shockingly few, given how cheap this comic is. There's just two in the interior of the book, in fact: One for DC/Vertigo's series of Alan Moore-written, Stephen Bissette and John Totleben-drawn Swamp Thing collections and the Comicshoplocator.com one featuring an image of the Trinity drawn by Jason Fabok, which I recall seeing from the last Walmart exclusives I looked at. And then the back cover has an ad for Grant Morrison and Liam Sharp's upcoming Hal Jordan book, the one which is will be about Hal's core workout, based on his abs in that image.

I'm curious to see if there will be a #2 next year, and kind of excited to see what happens in December, as I kind of love Christmas comics. I'm not sure what they would call a Christmas giant though, as I can't think of a DC super-character associated with the holiday spirit in the same way that Swamp Thing (or a dozen or so other characters) is associated with horror/scary business...

On Batman: Damned #1

Batman: Damned #1
Written by Brian Azzarello, art by Lee Bermejo
$6.99; 46 pages

*So, has anyone heard anything about this book yet...?

*I like the fact that Batman's name is the same size and font as that of Azzarello's and Bermejo's. It makes it look a little like maybe Batman inked this comic or something.

*The first page of the book is a nine-panel grid featuring a close-up of the electronic monitor of Batman's pulse in an ambulance, bleeding into an image of his eyes in the bottom tier of panels, the only words being narration. The narrator is Alan Moore's co-creation Jonh Constanine, and he references a line from the climax of the Alan Moore-written Batman: The Killing Joke and my heart sank immediately, as I feared this could turn into a game of Alan Moore Allusion Bingo. Thankfully, it does not, although it's a rare week indeed when the publisher is able to ship a slate of books that doesn't refer to or depend upon the relatively small amount of work Moore did for them in the 1980s.

*The Enchantress in her Suicide Squad design appears, which was unexpected...but she talks in a supernatural font/lettering style, so maybe she's not the actual Enchantress, but a different character with that design...? In addition to she and Constantine and Gotham City regulars Commissioner Gordon, The Joker and Batman's Mom and Dad, this issue also features appearances by Zatanna and Deadman.

*While I'm not a fan of Bermejo's style when applied to Batman and his city and cast, I did kind of like his take on Deadman. The character was an unusual one, a circus acrobat who wore a corpse-like mask and performed under that name until he was murdered, at which point he became a ghost that looked just like his disguised self. Kelley Jones' take on the character was to draw him as an actual desiccated corpse, and in Kingdom Come, Alex Ross offered his own alternate design, in which Deadman was a skeleton wearing the Deadman costume.

Bermejo's Deadman looks more-or-less like artist and creator Carmine Infantino's original design for the character, but the red of his costume is here drawn like the layer of muscle one sees in medical drawings of a human body just beneath the skin. The elevated collar of his costume is also made of what looks like red human muscle tissue. I don't know that it's necessarily a better design of the above-mentioned three--I probably like Ross', then Jones', then Infantino's, in that order--but it's definitely different.

*The bit with the penis is weird. It's there in three, maybe four panels and it's semi-shadowed, so you can see the outline of it, but not any great detail. If it were a movie, the guy playing Batman could have easily used a body double, as his face and penis are never in the same "shot." The nudity isn't erotic in any way, and doesn't seem to be meant to be titillating. It doesn't seem to be fan service of the sort that 90% of the nudity in the manga I've read is. It's not the source of in-comics jokes or dialogue, like Goku's penis in the earliest Dragonball comics.

Rather, it's completely incidental to the story. Batman strips off his costume--which he apparently doesn't wear underwear with, and given that Bermejo's Batman costume seems to be made out of leather, I have to imagine chafing is an issue; Batman should at least have on a jockstrap--and wanders around the cave and manor in the nude for a bit, having a psychotic breakdown.

That's part of what is so weird about it. I can't tell you how many times I've seen Batman take off his costume, or wander around the manner in a state of undress (he's usually wearing a bathrobe), or seen him in the shower. And yet we've never seen his penis. So it's weird that Bermejo goes to the trouble to show it here, apparently just because he can (this is on DC's brand-new "Black Label" mature readers imprint), and I suspect this is something of a publicity stunt. And one that has worked quite well.

*Because DC shipped the initial orders for this book with Batman's penis in it, and then decided to cover it up digitally and in future printings (which it is now guaranteed to get), they have created artificial demand for the un-censored edition. Retailers, please tell me when this has increased in value enough for me to sell it for enough money to order that $150 Detective Comics Before Batman set that was just solicited.

*I'm all for superhero comics in which characters get their cocks and tits out, though. Why not? It would be nice if DC having a mature readers imprint for their DCU characters now meant that Black Label will be the place for violence, gore, swearing and semi-nudity among the superheroes, and the DCU line will become more of an all-ages friendly place, but somehow I don't see that happening in the near future. Honestly, maybe Black Label needs penises in its comics; otherwise, what really differentiates Batman: Damned from, you know, any other Batman comic on the market?

*Honestly, the idea of sainted dead father Thomas Wayne conducting an affair while future World's Greatest Detective Bruce  is around was more shocking to me than the nudity--which was, as I said, just sort of weird--and the placement of the graffiti on the last page seemed like the sort of thing that would have once been considered more taboo than whether or not you can see Batman's penis in shadow or not. Like, I remember when Madonna's video for "Like a Prayer" made people all over the country completely lose their shit.

*I really like this format. It's about 8.5 inches by 10.5 inches, it has a spine and no ads, and it has more than twice as many pages as the average 20- or 22-page DC comic. And it's only two or three more dollars than those comics. Now, the fact that these are more magazine-sized than comics-sized might make finding a place to keep them in your collection a bit of a challenge, and it is for that reason I would probably recommend waiting for the hardcover collection. But this is an all-around nice package.

*Sigh...I just said "package", didn't I? Guys, it's really hard to talk about this comic without sounding like you're talking about Batman's dick, sin't it? Dammit! I just said "really hard" too...! Difficult! It's really difficult to talk about this comic without sounding like you're talking about Bamtna's dick!

These are some recent DC books I've read recently:

Batman: The Dark Knight--Master Race

The inherent weirdness of a Frank Miller comic without Frank Miller that saturated the individual, serially-published issues of Dark Knight III: The Master Race was only accentuated when reading the entire series start-to-finish in a single, slightly re-titled volume.

I know that Miller was technically pretty involved in the series, sharing a story credit with Brian Azzarello and providing extremely loose artwork for the mini-comics that appeared in the middle of each of the nine issues--which are here blown-up to full-size and appear between chapters of Dark Knight III--but it's pretty apparent that it was Azzarello who did the majority of the heavy-lifting. At the beginning, it's clear that some work is being done to make it feel like a Dark Knight comic, but that work only accentuates that it's not, that it's an homage, rather than Miller doing Miller and, increasingly as the series goes on, there are more of Azzarello's ticks evident in the scripting.

As for the overarching story, it seems to be set in the Dark Knight-iverse, but there's really not much to it. It's not a story about anything in particular, it doesn't really comment on anything and, in fact, its plot is so similar to one that could be occurring in the regular DC Universe that it already has occurred in the regular DC Universe to a certain extent. It is just a little too palpably an exercise in brand extension, and an apparent variant cover-generating machine (How many variants were there attached to this book? I don't know, but they were so numerous they appear in their own hardcover collection that Amazon is calling Batman: The Art of The Dark Knight: The Master Race--the words on the cover of the book say something different, however--and the solicitation copy says it includes over 150 covers).

What's been going on in the relatively short time that has passed since 2002's final issue of Batman: The Dark Knight Strikes Again...? Well, Batman is recovering from some particularly grievous wounds, so Robin-turned-Catgirl-turned-Batgirl Carrie Kelly is masquerading as him by wearing some kind of weird man suit. Wonder Woman is raising her and Superman's son, who she wears in a little papoose as she runs around the Amazon jungle, home of the Amazons, fighting monsters and shit. Superman has withdrawn even farther than he usually does in these alternate stories, having basically decided to just sit still in his Arctic Fortress of Solitude until he froze solid within a thick block of ice.

Given Miller's politics, the title of this third Dark Knight book might have have been responsible for a feeling of dread in many comics readers, but it turns out that the "master race" here isn't a race so much as a species: Kryptonian.

And the plot involving them is more or less pure pot-boiling superhero stuff. Lara, Superman and Wonder Woman's headstrong daughter, recruits The Atom Ray Palmer to help her free and un-shrink the microscopic Kryptonians living in The Bottle City of Kandor. These are lead by Quar, a psychotic, murderous cult leader who seeks to subjugate all of humanity and take over the world. So, not entirely unlike the year-long "New Krypton" storyline which found 100,000 Kryptonians freed from Kandor and flooding Earth with a whole people who had Superman's powers, but not necessarily his morals.

Lara sides with the Kandorians over her own parents, even going so far as to beat her dad bloody, and it is, as always, down to Batman to save the world. With the help of a rag tag group of allies, including Batirl, The Flash and eventually Superman and Wonder Woman, he does so. He dies at one point, but gets tossed into a Lazarus Pit and comes out young and vibrant again (There is of course a gross scene where the now grown-up Carrie sees the now youthful's Bruce's rejuvenated genitals).

And...that's it, really. Evil Kryptonians vs. Batman and some other heroes. Andy Kubert is the pencil artist with the tough, thankless assignment of trying to draw a Dark Knight comic, and it actually is sort of fun to see his attempts to approximate Miller art. It no doubt helps tremendously that he's working with DKR inker Klaus Janson.

I don't want to say anything too terribly mean about Miller's art--he pencils most of the interlude comics, although Eduardo Risso randomly draws one--as I understand he was in very poor health at the time but, well, the art is extremely rough, to the point where some of the extremely spare images lean towards the unintelligible, and there are strange inconsistencies that the inker, colorist and editor should have noticed and fixed (the placement of Batgirl's bat-symbols, for example).

In the end, what stuck with me about the book is some strong images throughout.

There's Wonder Woman's nipple, something you don't see too often, as she prepares to breastfeed her child. There's Green Lantern Hal Jordan losing his ring hand, and then searching for and ultimately recovering it (He is able to use the ring, but his hand just float around him, rather than attaching itself back to his arm at the wrist). There's the strange, goofy battle armor that Superman dons to protect him from the Kryptonite-seeded rain that Batman causes to fall over Gotham. There's Carrie Kelly's hot pink and yellow Batgirl costume (her final Batwoman costume is pretty nice, actually; it basically just reverses the black and gray portions of Batman's). There's the redesigned Hawks. And I still dig Miller's redesigns for The Flash and Wonder Woman, previously seen in Dark Knight Strikes Again.

Visually, there's a lot in here to interest the eye, particularly of a longtime DC Comics fan. Otherwise, though, there's little to it other than a superhero beat-'em-up with a handful of allusions to Dark Knight Strikes Again.

DC Super Hero Girls: Past Times at Super Hero High

I arched an eyebrow when this DC Comics/Mattel collaboration was first announced. Though I grew up with similar toy/cartoon/comics marketing vehicles like Masters of The Universe, G.I. Joe and Transformers, they seem incredibly cynical to me now, and it struck me as somewhat sad that DC felt the need to essentially create a girl-friendly version of their universe, as it was an indication of just how girl un-friendly the regular version was.

While the toys and cartoons generated by the premise--where DC's heroes and villains attend a high school where Principal Amanda Waller and weird faculty of bad guys and older heroes teach them a superhero-focused curriculum--I was naturally interested in how it translated to comics. As it turned out, quite well. The first original graphic novel, Finals Crisis, was actually a lot of fun, as were those that followed, Hits and Myths and Summer Olympus. All three were the work of writer Shea Fontana, who helped create the concept and recently penned a fill-in arc on DC's Wonder Woman arc, and artist Yancey Labat.

This fourth graphic novel, Past Times at Super Hero High, varies only in that Labat has two other collaborators on the art, Agnes Garbowska and Marcelo DiChiara. They are all working from some pretty strict style guides in terms of character design, so it's not exactly clear who draws which sections, but there are points where the art does feel a little off.

The plot for this particular adventure is essentially just The Magic School Bus in the DC Universe, which is pretty damn charming in its simplicity. Driving the school bus-shaped time machine for a field trip into the Jurassic Period is teacher Miss Liberty Belle, whose mouth Fontana fills with all kinds of old time-y slang. This Liberty Belle is presumably the original one, Libby Lawrence, and something of a time traveler herself. While Golden Age hero Wildcat is SHH's gym coach, Miss Liberty Belle at one points mentions not having had so much fun since "the Coolidge administration" (1923-1929).

Wonder Woman, Supergirl, Batgirl, Katana, Harley Quinn, Poison Ivy and token boy Beast Boy travel back to dinosaur times, where their bus breaks in half and Liberty Belle is abducted by a pterodactyl. Everyone eventually gets back to the present, but due to some meddling withe the timestream--Harley swiped a pterodactyl egg--their present has been altered so that now immortal caveman Vandal Savage is their principal, the kids based on villains are now all super-villainous and the field trippers have to figure out how to reset time.

That mostly falls to frenemies Batgirl and Harley, who travel throughout the past and to the future before bringing the pterodactyl egg, now a baby pterodactyl, back to its own time, where Harley offers a not-very-scientific theory regarding how her baby Bitey McPuddin'-Face prevented Savage from ever encountering his immortality-granting meteorite.

What remains most fun about this series, to me at least, is seeing the occasional deep cut show up, like Batgirl and Harley meeting the giant dalmatian-riding Atomic Knights in the future, or seeing Principal Waller when she was just a teen in the 1980s, sitting on a stoop listening to her boom box.

There are some fun dinosaur moments in here, like Beast Boy's attempts to blend in and preach harmony between predator and prey species, but it's worth noting that this isn't exactly an educational look at dinosaurs, as their depiction seems a few decades out of date. For the latest on dinosaurs in all-ages comics format, I can't recommend Abby Howard's Dinosaur Empire strongly enough.

Justice League of America Vol. 1: The Extremists

The Steve Orlando-written Justice League book, which features Batman leading a rag-tag team of Steve Orlando's favorite characters and thus feels almost as much of a Batman and The Outsiders book than a League book, suffers in the same way that too much of his writing (and far too much of DC's post-Flashpoint output) suffers. It tries very hard to trade on nostalgia, on readers knowing, liking and caring who the individual members of the team are and therefore already being invested in their setting, their history and their villains, but it does so on the other side of a reboot that purposely erased all of that.

This is that worst-of-both-worlds problem I talk about all the time, and Orlando's solution seems to be to just ignore it. Maybe that is the best choice--after all, I think this is something like the third version of Lobo that has been introduced in the last six years, for example--but the end result is a comic book essentially just introducing a team and assuming you'll care about them, without putting any real effort into trying to convince you to care (and certainly the publisher has given us mixed signals, if they were, say, willing to wipe out The Ray and then replace him with a brand new character that no one likes or remembers and then just reintroduce the original shows that they aren't too terribly pro-The Ray, you know?).

While Batman has obviously been front and center in a whole slew of books since the reboot, and some of the other characters like Black Canary and Vixen have been knocking around, and even Lobo 3.0 and Killer Frost had a role in the Justice League Vs. Suicide Squad book that served as an intro this ongoing, other characters, like The Ray and The Atom, we're meeting for basically the first time (This new version of Ryan Choi appeared previously in DC Universe: Rebirth #1, while I don't think we saw The Ray until Justice League of America: The Ray--Rebirth #1...which is collected with three other character introduction one-shots and Justice League of America: Rebirth #1 in the collection Justice League of America: The Road to Rebirth).

From the pages of Justice League Vs. Suicide Squad Batman brings Killer Frost to the Justice League's original Happy Harbor, Rhode Island headquarters, which, um, shouldn't exist any longer, but still does for some reason (that was the last continuity). He then goes about recruiting a League that includes (a) Lobo, Black Canary, Vixen, The Atom Ryan Choi (he's initially looking for Ray Palmer, whose history post-Flashpoint I couldn't begin to make sense of) and The Ray, a new superhero protecting the city of Vanity (the setting of Grant Morrison, Mark Millar and company's short-lived Aztek: The Ultimate Man series).

Batman's rationale for needing/wanting a new League is waved at in passing a few times, but it's not terribly convincing. He basically says he wants a team that consists of real people, standing shoulder-to-shoulder with the people they are protecting, rather than gods. The make-up of his particular team, which include a couple of folks with god-like powers and one literal super-alien, seems to argue against that, however.

After the recruiting issue of Justice League of America: Rebirth #1--which, yes, is double-collected in both this and Justice League of America: Road To Rebirth--they fend off an extra-dimensional invasion of The Extremists, Giffen/DeMatteis era villains who are analogues to Marvel villains. Dr. Diehard has conquered a small, European country, and the League joins the resistance to help liberate it. By having the League do the sort of thing they explicitly avoid all the time, it raises the question of why they don't do this all the time. The question goes unanswered, though.

That's followed by a shorter story in which the team holds a press conference--sans Batman--and then go to liberate an American city that has been taken over by relatively obscure Wonder Woman villain Aegeus, an arms dealer who sells folklore-based super-weapons.

The art is kind of all over the place, with Ivan Reis pencilling the Rebirth special and the first and final issues of the four-part Extremists arc, while a pair of different artists, Felipe Watanabe and Diogenes Neves, pencil the middle chapters. The two-part Aegeus arc features fine art by Andy MacDonald, but it's in pretty sharp contrast to what it's following...and fails to sell a fairly silly scene that really needed to be sold hard to get over.

Like its sister book Justice League and all of DC's post-Flashpoint Justice League books, then, the latest iteration of JLoA isn't very good, but given it's weird line-up and Orlando's ticks, it is at least interesting.

Wonder Woman and Justice League America Vol. 2

When I discussed the first Wonder Woman and Justice League America collection, I speculated what might be in this one. It turns out they skipped the annuals, and stuck to just six issues of Justice League America--plus two issues apiece of Justice League International and Justice League Task Force, which means this trade collects the entire six-issue "Judgement Day" crossover between all three Justice League books, as well as a coda issue, that repurposes the "Funeral For a Friend" slug from the aftermath of Superman's fight to the death against Doomsday. It also concludes writer Dan Vado's time on the Justice League America title.

The first three issues are concerned with the JLA facing off against Dreamslayer of The Extremists yet again, while natural disasters rage the world over and spooky hints about the end of the world are related to heroes and readers: Darkseid writes off the planet Earth, Vandal Savage appears to the League to warn them and T.O. Morrow tries to tell Max Lord the end is near. Then "Judgement Day" begins in earnest, and it's all hands one deck, with the three Justice Leagues fighting one another, and other unexpected foes, as to the best way to proceed against "The Overmaster," a giant alien humanoid and world-ender who has landed his ship atop Mount Everest and announced the end of the world, saying that any move against him will only result in a lessening of the time left.

Because "Judgement Day" ran two issues apiece in all of the books, that means Vado and primary JLA artists Marc Campos, Ken Branch and Kevin Conrad pass the creative team baton on to writers Gerard Jones and Mark Waid and pencil artists Chuck Wojtkiewicz and Sal Velluto.

Visually, the book is very much of its time--1994. Campos is probably the weakest of the artists, and his anatomy features the worst of excesses, so that the women are all boobs and hips--in one early panel featuring the Leaguers in flight, Wonder Woman and Maxima are literally just busts, a limb or three extending from somewhere behind their boobs and heads--and the men universally ripped and wearing fabrics whose tightness fall somewhere between spandex and body paint, even the decidedly non-superheroic Max Lord and Oberon. Campos is at least consistent, but his work is so detailed and overly-inked that each panel just looks like a wall of unnecessary detail.

Sal Velutto, a very accomplished artist, has his own ideas of character design, one that marries the huge, heroic figures of the Silver Age League with the detailed musculature of '90s superhero art, but even that is inconsistently applied. Only Chuck Wojtkiewicz's art really ages gracefully. Thankfully he's the one who draws the climax, wherein an ad hoc group of some of the more powerful Leaguers--Wonder Woman, Martian Manhunter, Captain Atom, The Flash, Fire, Booster Gold and Amazing Man try to take the Overmaster on hand-to-hand in his ship, while Blue Beetle races to figure out a way to shut it all down.

The story is probably best remembered for being the one that killed off  Ice--she spends this collection in possession of greater than usual powers and weird mood swings, before joining the Overmaster and, finally, betraying him--and it's true, there's not a whole lot to it other than that. There are some neat touches though, like T.O. Morrow looking at his checklist of things that will happen as the League seeks to reach Overmaster, and crossing off each event as it comes to pass (That was in a Waid-written issue).

This storyline and its epilogue were  followed by a Zero Hour crossover introducing Triumph as a founding Justice Leaguer who got knocked out of the time-stream almost immediately, and then the creative team of Gerard Jones and Chuck Wojtkiewicz take over Justice League America for the remaining 23 issues. If the Jones and Wojtkieicz issues all get collected, I think we could be looking at two more volumes of Wonder Woman and Justice League America. If the Zero Hour tie-in does, I don't know, maybe three more? It doesn't quite fit in with the rest of this stuff, though, and might makes more sense in a Justice League: Zero Hour collection, or with the Triumph solo series or Justice League Task Force.

Review: El Diablo

Brian Azzarrello and Danijel Zezelj's 2001 Vertigo miniseries El Diablo represented one of several attempts to make use of the Robert Kanigher/Gray Morrow Western character with the colorful name, following Gerard Jones and Mike Parobek's 1989 effort to create a more superheroic version of the character and preceding Jai Nitz, Phil Hester and Ande Parks' 2008 effort to cast the character as an immortal spirit of vengeance/legacy character.

Azzarello's version of the character that appeared in these four issues--and the 2008 trade collecting them--technically fits in with the DC comics that preceded and followed, as the character acts as a vengeful, supernatural agent, but he's a particularly nasty one. In fact, he's so brutal and savage in his treatment of some of his victims that one could read this with the understanding that El Diablo is literally The Devil. Interestingly, he's not the protagonist of the story, and gets relatively little panel-time.

Towards the end of the second issue/chapter, when a posse that has set out in search of El Diablo are sitting around a campfire and telling stories about him, the name Lazarus Lane and his original origin story come up. But the character spends most of the story as a shadowy figure--bearing little more detail than you can see of him on that cover--that appears and disappears. The only lines he speaks are variations of "Hssss." He is seen in the distance, shooting people down impossibly fast. He often lingers just off-panel, so that we can see, say, the knife he's holding, but not he himself.

When we do get a rare glimpse of him, he doesn't look like the classic version at all. Artist Danijel Zezelj has redesigned him so that he is a long, lanky figure in all-black cowboy garb, with bare arms. He has long stringy hair, and scary cat-like eyes and sharp teeth. He rides a huge white horse, and he seems to be able to turn into various desert animals, or at least we see animals leaving the scenes where he apparently was at one point or another.

The title character's smaller-than-expected role befits his savagery (one victim, who drunkenly boasts about how he plans to lynch the devil by his own pointy red tail, has his gust cut open and is hung from a tree by his own intestines...and set on fire for good measure) and the nature of the story. While this is technically a Western, it's also a horror story, and monsters, like omnipotent villains, don't always make for the best protagonists.

The actual protagonist is Sheriff Moses Stone, who, before settling down as an agent of law and order in the town of Bollas Raton (and as a husband trying to start a family with his beautiful wife), used to be a notorious bounty hunter known as "Holy" Moses. His life is radically upended when the mysterious El Diablo arrives in town. The mysterious figure guns down a saloon full of bad guys, ties Stone up and then carves the name of Stone's home town into the flesh of his back with a knife.

So Stone gathers a posse and rides after El Diablo, headed toward the ironically-named town of Halo. Gradually we learn more and more about Stone and his own shadowy past, and why the devil might be so interested in him. Between El Diablo and Stone, the bodies of characters pile up almost as quickly as they are introduced, and Azzarello manages a few good gut punches by the conclusion, including an extremely satisfying irony.

In addition to a Western and in addition to being a horror story, El Diablo is also something of a mystery, something of a thriller and something of a character tragedy. Azzarello takes full advantage of the license the Vertigo imprint allowed him, and the book is as full of swearing, violence, killing, nudity and sex as one might expect from a post-Deadwood, deconstructionist style genre exercise.

Zezelj, who is here colored by Kevin Somers, isn't an artist I would have immediately thought of as particularly well-suited to a Western milieu, but his mildly-exaggerated figures (mostly around the heads and hands) and heavy reliance on stark blacks prove perfect for the black and white morality of El Diablo, where people are either good, or bad, or worse or a fucking devil. Black patches of ink appear so frequently that the title character, who is mostly just a silhouette with the occasional muzzle flash attached, seems more or less natural in such a visual environment.

I'm fairly certain that this has gone out of print (looks like it's available on Comixology, if that's a thing you do, along with Azzarello's later Vertigo Western Loveless), and anyone interested in the El Diablo character thanks to the derivation of the Nitz version that showed up in the recent Suicide Squad movie probably won't find exactly what they're looking for should they find their way to this. On the other hand, this is a pretty effective story about the diabolical cowboy as a spirit of vengeance, and such stories tend to work best when the agent of vengeance plays a role, but not the starring role.

Azzarello and Zezelj do a strong enough job on the Stone story arc that one could imagine a very similar story being told and having a similar level of impact without El Diablo in it at all. That probably doesn't sound like a ringing endorsement of how well they use the character, but I meant it as such: El Diablo is a remote, unknowable force un-gently prodding and shepherding Stone to the fate he himself chose. That journey is the story they tell here.

Miscellaneous Batmannery

This was one of the variant covers for June 16's Batman #1, by artist Tim Sale. While Sale has never had a regular run as an interior artist on any Batman ongoing series, he has done so many limited series and one-shots featuring the character that, at this point, he's got a gigantic body of Batman work built up. It's a body of work that I imagine eclipses that of many artists who have had regular runs on various Batman ongoing series, in terms of the volume of pages.

I was a little surprised to see him contributing a variant to the new, "Rebirth" era Batman at all, and more surprised still by its content. Sale doesn't draw the current, "Rebirth" Batman, but his own, "Year One" era Batman from his many collaborations with writer Jeph Loeb (Long Halloween, Dark Victory, the Legends of The Dark Knight Halloween specials, etc). Even Neal Adams, an even more classic Batman artist, decided to draw the Rebirth-ed Batman on his variant.

The villains sharing the cover with Sale's Batman are similarly the particular versions from Sale's "Year One" Batman adventures, none of whom look much at all like the New 52 versions and a few of which don't look much at all like the versions other artists draw from any period  (Poison Ivy and The Penguin in particular). Of note is the inclusion of Clayface, who hasn't previously appeared in any of Sale's Batman comics (at least, not this version; I'm pretty sure that Clayface III was in his Showcase story with writer Alan Grant), and whose design Sale seems to have based on that from Batman: The Animated Series (which, in fact, is also the basis for The New 52 version).

The presence of the blond lady baffled me for a while, but I'm like 80% sure she's supposed to be Gotham City District Attorney Janice Porter from Dark Victory, which is a really, really weird choice, considering the villains from the series Sale didn't include, like The Joker, The Riddler, Calendar Man, Carmine Falcone or any of the mob guys. Or a major Batman villain he hasn't drawn before, like, I don't know, Man-Bat or Ra's al Ghul or Harley Quinn or Bane or Killer Croc.

Anyway, it's an interesting piece I enjoyed staring at and picking apart. And much better than the regular cover by the regular artist:

Boo David Finch!

Did any of you read The Dark Knight Returns: The Last Crusade? That was the recent prestige format one-shot in which Batman teams up with Sean Connery to find the Holy Grail before the Nazis can. No, it's the latest of DC release that makes me wonder what on Earth Brian Azzarello is doing with his life (If I had to guess, it would be working on Maus fan-fiction, just to complete the trifecta).

This is his prequel to The Dark Knight Returns, which he is currently writing the second sequel too, as drawn by John Romita Jr. and Peter Steigerwald and featuring vague, nebulous contributions from Frank Miller (He shares a "story by" credit with Azzarello, although "Based on The Dark Knight Returns by Frank Miller" is the first credit; no one is credited with the script). It is a 57-page answer to a question nobody needed an answer to, which is "What exactly happened to the Robin that the old, mustachioed Batman was narrating about at the opening of Dark Knight Returns like 30 years ago?" The answer, of course, was "The Joker killed him," but then, everyone already knew all that.

This is essentially a retelling then; "A Death In The Family" without all the globe-trotting, international intrigue, adventure, super-scary death scene or heroic sacrifice. It's just an older Batman with graying temples and Robin Jason Todd fighting crime in Gotham City together, until The Joker kills Todd. Sort of. Todd is on the escaped Joker's trail when some guys who apparently work with or for The Joker beat him with pipes until red coloring effects fill the bottom of the panels, and The Joker says "Oh, the fun we're going to have little boy... The fun."

Finis!

If it's a worthwhile read at all, it's mostly because it's still kind of fresh and new and exciting to see JRJR draw DC characters, and here he gets to draw classic (or, if you prefer, the real) version of Batman and Robin, rather than the New 52 versions JRJR's been stuck with since leaving Marvel to play with DC's iconic super-characters for a few years.

It served as a pretty good reminder that there was nothing really wrong with the original Robin costume that Jason Todd wore; it's not like it couldn't look cool when drawn really well, and JRJR draws it really well and puts it and the guy wearing it in some very dramatic scenes, that red, yellow and green popping in contrast to the blues, blacks, grays and browns of Batman and everything else around Robin.

I know that a lot of people–myself included–have wondered about how much of this new suite of Dark Knight Returns material is really Miller and how much of it is Azzarello, and to what degree Azzarello is simply trying to do a pastiche of Miller. It was with some amusement that I noticed a line that either demonstrates Miller's involvement or that Azzarello was really asking himself "What Would Frank Miller Write?" during this process.

The above panel is from a scene in which Bruce Wayne visits former Catwoman Selina Kyle, whom his narration tells us he visits whenever he's feeling unsure of himself.

Check out the last two panels at the end of the scene, though:

Superheroes having sex in their costumes for kicks! You don't get a whole lot more Frank Miller than that.

The above panels are the last few in a downright shocking scene in Detective Comics #935, the second issue of the relaunched series, which is numbered #935 instead of #2 because...reasons.

What was so shocking about that scene? It's 13 panels spread across two pages. Red Robin Tim Drake is in Spoiler Stephanie Brown's apartment, taking off his costume in front of her like it's NBD. They're talking about Tim's college plans, when Batgirl Black Bat Orphan Cassandra Cain enters the window holding a plastic bag and wearing an expression of surprise.

"Hey Cass...do you think I could have the place to myself tonight?" Spoiler says. "I need to give my boyfriend a lot of crap for not being honest with people."

That's right, Tim and Stepahnie are dating. They are going steady. They are actually in a relationship.

When did this happen? Off-panel, apparently.

Stephanie Brown was only rather recently introduced into the current, post-Flashpoint continuity during the year-long weekly series Batman Eternal, and she did not meet Red Robin until one of the epilogues of the very last issue. Stephanie walks into her roommate Harper Row's bedroom to see Harper talking with Red Robin. Harper introduces them, and they shake hands...and stare silently at one another for an entire panel before Harper coughs to wake them back up from their apparent reverie, and Red Robin makes a lame, awkward excuse about needing to leave. "Um...Okay. I should go,: he says, rubbing the back of his head "Probably some kind of um...mischief going on."

And as far as I can remember, that's pretty much, like, the extent of their relationship up until this point. Stephanie is in the earliest issues of the sequel series, Batman & Robin Eternal, and shares a scene with Tim. In Batman & Robin Eteranl #2, Red Robin climbs in the window of the apartment Stephanie shares with Harper and Cullen Row and finds Dick Grayson and Stephanie, in her Spoiler costume, standing over a badly injured Harper.

How did he know to show up? He says he bugged the house with cameras and censors, which infuriates Spoiler. "I'm just monitoring for trouble," he says. "I mean, have you met yourselves?" They spend a little more time together with other Batman allies at the Rows' apartment and then in the Batcave, before Stephanie and Cullen get stashed in a safe house while everyone goes off to have an adventure that lasts most of the series (Steph and Cullen both reappear at the end).

And that's about it in terms of Tim Drake/Stephanie Brown interactions.

It therefore feels like a bit of a cheat that writer James Tynion, who is writing Detective and co-wrote the two Eternal limited series, just jumped ahead and we missed all of their flirting, Red Robin's revelation of his secret identity, whether or not it was awkward for Harper and all the humor and drama one would expect in a relationship. I mean, I feel cheated. I liked the idea of Bluebird and Spoiler as roommates, and of a possible love triangle between them and Red Robin. I liked the gradual way Tim and Stephanie's relationship played out in the pre-Flashpoint DCU (under writer Chuck Dixon, who co-created Stephanie and wrote both characters almost exclusively during the various incarnations of their relationship to one another).

I wanted to see Tim and Steph date dammit, not just move from meet-cute to one panel of bickering to suddenly being an item and banging in Steph's new apartment (She no longer lives with the Rows, as she says Batman set both her and Cassandra up with their own places, although Cassandra apparently chooses to instead crash at Harper's or Stephanie's).

I can only assume that Tim and Stephanie are going to break up pretty soon, as otherwise there doesn't seem to be much point of suddenly introducing them as a couple, and that Tynion will focus on that drama rather than the drama of their coming together.

Anyway, note their costumes touching each other on the floor of Stephanie's apartment in that last panel. Symbolism!

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.

You know who would like Wonder Woman's new origin story? Wertham.

Diana has two mommies?!

I've been working my way through Tim Hanley's Wonder Woman Unbound: The Curious History of the World's Most Famous Heroine (Chicago Review Press; 2014), and I'm currently on a chapter dealing with the way Wonder Woman was portrayed in the Silver Age, after her creator William Moulton Marston had passed away and Robert Kanigher took over writing her adventures.

In this section of the book, Hanley spends some time discussing Fredric Wertham's crusade against comics, the detrimental effects it had on the comic book industry (and, perhaps more importantly, the comic book medium) and how DC's post-congressional hearings superhero comics line conformed to the Comics Code Authority.

Wonder Woman, like Superman and Batman and Robin, were among the few superheroes specifically singled out by Wertham in his influential-at-the-time (and now much-ridiculed) Seduction of the Innocent, in which Wertham referred to Wonder Woman as the "lesbian counterpart" to Batman's barely-coded homosexual ideal. While Wertham's objection to the character as a sort of insidious recruiting poster for lesbianism—Wertham, like too many people of his day, thought homosexuality was in and of itself an unnatural and unhealthy thing—it turns out another thing he objected to was her origin story.

Her original origin story was told in 1941's All Star Comics #8, and repeated and refined elsewhere, as in the H.G. Peter-drawn panel from Wonder Woman #1 at the top of this post. It was this version, the only one the then still-young character had, that Wertham objected to. It went like this: Centuries ago, after their encounter with all-male hero Hercules during his famous twelve labors, Queen Hippolyte and her Amazons were led by the goddess Aphrodite to a hidden island, where they would be free of the violent, fallen world of men...and free to build their own advanced society and science. There, Athena taught Hippolyte the art of sculpting, and she made a little girl out of clay. Her patron goddess Aphrodite brought the little statue to life, and she was named after another Greek goddess Diana. The magically born girl would of course grow up to be the princess of the Amazons and, ultimately, Wonder Woman.

Writes Hanley:

Furthermore, Wertham decried the fact that "Wonder Woman is not the natural daughter of a natural mother, nor was she born like Athena from the head of Zeus." In 1954, the Golden Age Wonder Woman origin story still stood, and she was made of clay and brought to life by the gods. Her lack of a "natural" mother or father placed her further outside the maternal, familial norms than her fellow female heroes and made her the archetype of Wertham's narrow-minded deduction.

Wertham would therefor probably prefer the current origin story. While it has been revised before, including by Kanigher himself (although, somewhat amusingly, Hanley points out that Kanighter has no memory of altering Marston's original origin story, despite doing so rather drastically), the current version concocted by Brian Azzarello as part of 2011's "New 52" reboot gives Wonder Woman a much more "natural" origin.

In Azzarello's version, which is apparently going to be the one used in Wonder Woman's feature film debut, Wonder Woman was conceived of a sexual union between her mother Hipplyte and her father Zeus, king of the Olympian gods.

You just don't see the point of conception in too many superhero origin stories, do you?

The whole molded-from-clay thing was, in this new version, a pretty story her mother sold her to keep the truth about her demi-god status and familial relationship with the petty, bickering, often-at-war-with-one-another Olympians from her.

I suppose it would be petty and reactionary to blanketly state, "If Wertham would have liked it, then it's probably a bad idea" as some sort of rule for comic book-making, even when it came to Wonder Woman, the character he seemed to have the most trouble with for the least substantiated reasoning. But I'd be quite okay with comic book-makers having a poster on their office walls saying something like, "If Wertham would have liked it, let's give it a little more thought, just to be safe, shall we?"

Granted, much of Azzarello's soon-to-conclude run on the book has hinged on Wonder Woman being an Olympian, but his change in origin never sat well with me (the other bits of Wonder Woman's back-story he changed, like those concerning the Amazons kidnapping, mating with and then murdering sailors and then selling their male offspring for weapons sat worse still). That is, for the most part, because of how radical a change it was from Marston's conception of the character, which, unlike so many other superheroes, seems to get more and more diluted and generic the more writers work on her over the decades, rather than more and more complex and compelling. (For example, it's hard to find a Batman story that isn't at least as interesting as his first, Golden Age adventures, whereas it's damn near impossible to find a Wonder Woman comic as compelling as those Marston and Peter first crafted).

Is that you, Ebony White...?

Apparently, it's supposed to be.

The sidekick of Will Eisner's comic strip crime-fighter The Spirit began his fictional life in 1940 as an outrageous African-American stereotype, and is perhaps the most embarrassing aspect of the late Eisner's legacy. When Darwyn Cooke resurrected The Spirit as a DC comic book in 2007, he divested the Ebony character of all of the negative aspects of his original characterization. When Frank Miller adapted his friend Eisner's character to film in 2008, he excised all trace of Ebony completely.

And when Ebony appeared in Brian Azzarello and Rags Morales series creating a sort of alternate universe where Batman and a few minor DC characters rubbed elbows with the likes of pulp hero Doc Savage, W.H. Hudson's Rima from Green Mansions and The Spirit, Azzarello decided Ebony would work better as a girl, apparently following logic similar to that of Frank Miller's in casting a female Robin in his seminal The Dark Knight Returns.

A grown man always hanging around a teenage boy who never wears any pants? That seems suspect. But a grown man always hanging around a teenage girl who never wears any pants? That's the stuff of potent fantasy! The same with fully-clothed teenage assistants, I suppose.

Azzarello actually explains his rationale for Ebony's sex change in promotional material that DC ran in the backs of many of their line when he and Morales' First Wave was about to start hitting comic shops in early 2010. These are included in the back of the hardcover collection of the series.

"As for the the elephant in the corner...Look, I have very strong feelings that the only way to make EBONY WHITE work is to make the character a brash girl," Azzarello wrote. "Make the character a brash girl" is underlined in red, and a big "LET'S DO IT!" appears in red at the bottom of the page; the premise of the promotion was that readers were looking at Azzarello's notebook of character proposals to his editors, who are represented by the red ink.

"Then the name and attitude (sass) fit," Azzarello concludes. "We can talk about this."

I'm not entirely sure why this might be so, as a black person essentially named "Black White" is just as unusual regardless of the gender—perhaps he meant only that more girls' names end in Y's than boys' names—and Ebony wasn't necessarily known for a "sassy" attitude as much as a collection of groan-inducing tics and schticks taken from early 20th century American "darky" humor. None of these are present in the character, who was being completely recreated especially for this story along with all the other characters, so Ebony's attitude wasn't exactly a problem.

Whatever Azzarello and company's ultimate rationale for the change, it's interesting that there was a change, as it was interesting to see the various ways in which the creators decided to try and recreate a group of decidedly old-school—even for superhero comics—characters into something for a 21st century audience. Among the other more radical reinventions were those of Rima and Black Canary.

The former becomes a topless jungle warrior who conceals her nipples behind beaded necklaces that always fall just so, speaks only in whistles and hangs out with a black jaguar who kills the opponents she doesn't spear herself (It's a portrayal DC moved towards in the mid 1970s, when Nestor Redondo, Robert Kanigher and Joe Kubert transformed her into a Sheena-like jungle girl heroine for the space of a short-lived series).

The latter never makes it into the story pages of First Wave; she either belonged to an earlier draft, appeared only in tie-ins that aren't part of this collection, or was intended for future stories that the sequel-hungry conclusion begged for, but never actually came.

"Dina Drake is a second-generation American in her late teens," Azzarello writes of his Black Canary. "She lives in Gotham's East End, which is one of the city's worst neighborhoods...over Sherwood Florist, the family business." Deeply respectful of her parents, the young woman is nevertheless "enamored with the exploits of Dc Savage" and fights crime in her neighborhood at night, wearing "a blond wig and a very sexy costume—one her parents definitely wouldn't approve of." (Let me pause to note that with a teenage Ebony and a Rima in her "late teens, early twenties," Black Canary woulda been a third scantily-clad teenage heroine in the world of First Wave; the oldest female hero is the Blackhawk pilot Jenny Cloud, who Azzarello's notes tell us is in her "late twenties.")

He ends his paragraphs on Black Canary with, "Now, doesn't this story make even more sense if Dina is of Korean, Indian, or Middle Eastern descent?" The red-penned editor agrees, underlining "Indian" and "descent." "I mean the old-world parents, the family business in a bad neighborhood. This rings so true to me..."

In red: "YES—DIYATA DASARI?"

**********************

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Seen in its already-historical context, DC's First Wave and the sub-imprint/continuitiverse it sought to establish is something of a curiosity, one of several of the more amusing publishing bumbles of the post-Paul Levitz DC Comics. It seemed a more-or-less doomed endeavor from the start, given little promotion and no real sign of priority among the rest of the publisher's goings-on (particularly compared to the New 52 reboot that was coming just as the final issues of First Wave were shipping).

It had a Batman in it, sure, but there are a lot of comics with a Batman in them, and this was a Batman, not the Batman, and DC's fans, like super-comic fans in general, want to read the comics the publishers tell them are important, the ones that "count," and this was an alternate-continuity one, a comic that most obviously did not count.

The other characters were pretty ragtag in terms of sales draw. Everyone knew The Spirit, of course, star of the critically-acclaimed, marketplace poison Darwyn Cooke series DC had just recently canceled before First Wave. Doc Savage is kind of famous, I suppose, though hardly a popular presence in our culture. Then there was a even less well-known pulp character with some kind of chameleon-esque disguise power (The Avenger, I think; the text was pretty vague); a new, infinitely less offensive version of the Blackhawks-as-international-army group of characters: and a new iteration of Hudson's 1901 jungle heroine, based on the 1975-1976 version.

Basically a League of Extraordinary Gentlemen type of concept, but without any core, organizing principle—the characters were from fiction literate and pulp, from the comic strips and the comic books. (The concept could probably work for a publisher like Dynamite and, in fact, they've been publishing lines based on lapsed-into-public domain superheroes, another based on various pulp, comic, radio and comic strip heroes interacting and, for a while, were publishing as many Green Hornet comics as Marvel publishes Spider-Man comics, but Dynamite is a small publisher operating with very different math and money than DC has to operate with).

Like a few similar efforts around the time—DC's revivals of The Red Circle characters and the THUNDER Agents—it was assumed the audience would already know and care about the characters enough to buy the books. Very little effort is put into the story itself to thoroughly introduce the characters and, in the case of Doc Savage, his Byzantine back story, which includes a half-dozen sidekicks (who, unlike the DCU Batman's army of sidekicks, lack colorful costumes to distinguish them more easily), and several not-entirely introduced villains, some of whom I knew no better at the end of the book then I did at the beginning.

In other words, the thinking seemed to be that 2010-2011's direct market would embrace such a comic book because it existed, which, sad to say, is the basic wishing-and-hoping publishing strategy of DC Comics and, to (a thankfully and) an increasingly lesser extent, Marvel (Though you look at releases like, say, Fearless Defenders and know they're just throwing books into the market to die for nothing more than the intention to crowd small publishers off the new books racks and on the slim hope they'll get an unexpected sleeper hit, too).

The creative team didn't guarantee success the way that, say, a Geoff Johns/Jim Lee or Grant Morrison/Anyone Halfway Decent creative team might have, either. Azzarello's a pretty great writer, and Rags Morales is a really great artist (and one of my personal favorites), and while it's true they do command their own fan bases within the market and can thus bring a certain, set amount of readers to any project, they don't guarantee blockbuster sales by their presence alone (This was a problem with the aforementioned Red Circle and THUNDER Agents books as well; if you're already facing an uphill battle, you really have to assemble a team strong enough to get up that hill almost on their own).

And finally and, I would guess, most damningly, DC started expanding the miniseries into a line almost immediately, before they could possibly have even gotten a sense of how many readers there actually were and how the storyline, its world and the new versions of all these characters were being received.

So 2010's Batman/Doc Savage Special #1 (by Azzarello and Phil Noto, not Morales) was followed a few months later by the first issue of First Wave by Azzarello and Morales.

The following month, when First Wave #2 hit the stands, a Doc Savage monthly and a Spirit monthly set in this new setting also launched. First Wave was a $4, over-sized monthly, and both the new Savage and Spirit books were in the $3.99-for-a-regular-length-title-story-and-short-back-up format that was pretty widespread at DC at the time, but has since mostly disappeared save for a few popular books (Savage had a Justice, Inc back-up; Spirit had a "Spirit Black-And-White" back-up, which featured stellar creative teams doing short one-offs featuring the character, akin to the back-ups that used to run in the back of the late, great Batman: Gotham Knights).

So after spending maybe $8 meeting Doc Savage and getting a feel for the new pulp-iverse in Batman/Doc Savage and First Wave #1, DC then upped the curious' commitment to $12 a month for three different over-sized books. I'm not sure what killed the First Wave-iverse—a re-prioritizing that meant not wasting resources on comics featuring characters the publisher didn't own outright, a desire to focus all attention on The New 52 DCU instead of fooling around with offshoot lines and universes—but if DC didn't grow these books and this premise to death by over-producing too quickly, that decision couldn't possibly have been healthy.

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The comics themselves really aren't bad. I was curious to read much of the First Wave line (not $4-a-pop curious, but borrow-a-trade-from-the-library-years-later curious), most particularly the main series and those black-and-white Spirit shorts. The First Wave trade contained the Batman/Doc Savage special (which I'd actually read in the serially-published format; I didn't like it) and all six-issues of the First Wave series.

Savage and Batman are the two real stars. The former is basically this world's only real super-hero, and the story begins after the death of his father, as he and his team begin to reassert themselves in the world, and chase down a conspiracy involving a bunch of pulp villains, a secret society, a mad science island, a robot, genetic lizard-embiggening, and suchlike.

The latter is very much First Appearance Batman; he doesn't wear the purple gloves, but he carries a pair of .45s, guns down his foes and is more about protecting his city from crime by ridding it of criminals than saving the world (His story arc involves coming to terms with the idea of being a superhero; working with others, leaving his comfort zone to effect true good).

The Spirit is next most prominently featured, but he's more of a collection of tics than a character. He's a fun and funny character, but he's mainly there to bounce off of Savage, Batman or whoever he's sharing a panel with (In addition to making Ebony a sexy teenage girl, Azzarello makes Commissioner Dolan a corrupt cop).

The other characters play minor roles. Rima moves a maguffin from Point A to Point B. The Blackhawks are mercenaries who get tied up in the plot. The shape-changing guy shape-changes once or twice (See back-ups in Doc Savage, I guess). Black Canary never shows up.

There's a lot of plate-spinning and juggling going on with so many characters (Doc's staff doubles the cast size, and the villains double it again), and, structurally, it's a pleasing read. Azzarello fills it with cool stuff of the sort mentioned three paragraphs up, heroes and villains alike are pretty cool and he manages to make the story "about" something, even if that "something" is just "Batman's feelings" or "the world's need for heroic inspiration" or whatever. (The one thing I'd slap him on the wrist for? The fact that there is an actual, literal wave in the climax. The bad guys have built some kind of tsunami-generating device, so if you thought "First Wave" was a reference to the first wave of superheroes, well, sure, it is, but also? There's a wave in this).

A far greater treat was Morales' art which, as mentioned, I'm a fan of. This book is a particularly good showcase for his particular skill for character modeling and acting, as the dozens of mostly costume-less characters all need to look like different people for the story to read at all, and Morales accomplishes that with great gusto.