The first time Batman met Ragman (On 1978's Batman Family #20)

In my recent post about Batman and Ragman teaming-up in 1998's Batman #551 and #552, I briefly discussed the history of Ragman, particularly his post-Crisis iteration, as the character had far more appearances after DC's first big continuity reboot than in the relatively few years he was around before it. 

In a bit of synchronicity, the very next day I saw this post on Dave's Comic Heroes Blog, featuring the cover of Batman Family #20, the last issue in the series. As you can see, that cover featured Batman confronting Ragman. While I don't think DC ever released a collection of the 1975-1978 Batman Family series, that Batman/Ragman story happened to be drawn by Michael Golden, and thus it ended up in 2019 collection Legends of the Dark Knight: Michael Golden, an electronic copy of which I was able to borrow through my library.

And therefore, I got to read that Batman/Ragman comic just about as soon as I learned of its existence and can now write about it for your reading pleasure. 

After a few minutes of online research, it seems that this is the very first appearance of Ragman outside of his own short-lived series ("Short-lived" as in it only lasted five issues). It is also the first time he meets Batman, with whom he shares a city, although the pair would go on to cross paths repeatedly in the future, including in an issue of Brave and The Bold, in the 1991 Ragman miniseries, an issue of Legends of the Dark Knight and that 1998 Batman two-parter.

This story is by writer David V. Reed and, as mentioned above, artist Michael Golden. I have never heard of Reed and I know Golden's name primarily as a cover artist (There's a whole gallery of his covers for various Batman related covers in the back of the collection; that evocative image of a white-skinned Batman you see on the cover of Legends of the Dark Knight: Michael Golden is from one of those). It's entitled, perhaps unimaginatively, "Enter the Ragman."

It opens with Batman, "the matchless fighting machine", beating up a bunch of thugs armed only with sledgehammers and knives. Said thugs have apparently chased all the residents out of an apartment building in a poor neighborhood, part of a criminal enterprise that involves doing that, later razing the empty buildings and then developing the land for a huge profit.

Investigating the scheme is Bette Berg, a freelance photographer and journalist...and girlfriend of Rory Regan, the proprietor of the Rags 'n' Tatters junk shop and, secretly, Ragman. The pair are followed back to the shop by two parties.

The first is Batman, who eavesdrops outside the window for a bit to see what the pair were doing at the scene of the crime. Here he (and we) learn that Bette is a crusading journalist (and Rory, apparently, helps). The other is a member of the crooked real estate racket, and, because of him, the scheme's boss sends a few hoods to Rags 'n' Tatters to slap Bette, wreck the joint and threaten her not to continue her investigation.

It is now time for Ragman to enter "Enter The Ragman."

Before Rory suits up in his very cozy looking costume—which really looks like something warm to wear around the house on a winter's day, doesn't it?—Reed and Golden recount his origin, which takes just 13 panels here. Here are a few of those panels:

Remember, this is his original, pre-Crisis origin, the one conceived by creator Robert Kanigher, not the post-Crisis one Keith Giffen and Robert Loren Fleming came up with, involving Jewish mysticism, a suit of souls and a lineage of magical defenders of the downtrodden.

To recap that original origin briefly, rather than make you try to read the panels above, Rory, his father and three of his father's friends were caught in fallen power lines, and some freak twist of fate caused these to electrocute all of the older men, while transferring their special abilities to Rory, the only one to survive the incident. And, as chance/Kanigher would have it, those friends all had pretty useful abilities, being a former circus strongman, a heavyweight boxer and an acrobat.

I guess the idea was that the Ragman hero was something of a patchwork of the skills of various men, in the same way that his quilt-like costume was made up of various bits of fabric...? Personally, I like the later, post-Crisis origin better. The Jewish identity and mission to protect his people makes Regan a more distinct character than the mostly religious-free superheroes of the comic books, and the magical abilities of the "suit of souls" costume seem more, um, realistic to me than the freak electrical accident.

Of course, that may just be nostalgia speaking, as the Giffen and Fleming-written Ragman was my first exposure to the character. 

Anyway, Rory spends a panel doing research into the real estate scheme at the library—that's where he was when Bette was attacked in his shop—and he finds out who is ultimately responsible for it: Bruce Wayne!

And so Ragman scales the side of a downtown Gotham skyscraper to reach the penthouse apartment of Wayne—I guess that this is the point in the seventies where Batman had moved out of the manor and into his penthouse?—only to be confronted by a superhero who claims to be a "close friend" of Wayne's, the Batman. 

The pair argue for a bit, with Batman saying that the Wayne Foundation has an outside agency handling their properties, and, when they come to blows, Batman basically takes a pair of very powerful punches from Ragman before the Tattered Tatterdemalion leaves, having learned that Wayne's not actually there anyway. 

Instead, Ragman attacks the boss of the scheme and his strongmen, a fight Batman eventually joins.

There's a pretty cool sequence where the two caped heroes corner the fleeing boss, in which Reed let's Golden's evocative imagery do all the talking:

Golden doesn't get too many panels in which to draw Ragman in this relatively short outing, and thus it's hard to fairly judge his Ragman versus those of other artists, like co-creator Joe Kubert or Pat Broderick or Kelley Jones, but he certainly does a fantastic job highlighting the creepiness of the cape and hood in this sequence.

On the one-page epilogue, a very seventies-looking Bruce Wayne himself shows up at Rags 'n' Tatters to show Bette and Rory that he's really a nice guy, congratulating them on their front-page expose in the Gotham Blade, offering to pay for the damages to the shop caused by the bad guys and underwriting a grant so they can continue their work, by which I assume he means the freelance reporting.

The two Gotham City heroes would next cross paths in 1983's Brave and the Bold #196 (written by Kanigher and drawn by Jim Aparo), after which they wouldn't meet again until Crisis on Infinite Earths scrambled DC's history and continuity, leading to a very different version of Ragman. 

Between the original Ragman series, the two '90s miniseries, and these various team-ups with Batman, there's probably enough Ragman comics to fill a DC Finest collection, although I wonder if such a relatively niche character would be deemed popular enough to sell such a book, and if the Batman connection would be enough for DC to greenlight one...

On 1998's Batman #551-552, guest-starring Ragman

In 1991, DC published a limited series by Keith Giffen, Robert Loren Fleming and Pat Broderick, starring the relatively obscure character Ragman. Though it was not the first appearance by the character—he was introduced in an extremely short-lived "ongoing" series in 1976 by creators Robert Kanigher and Joe Kubert—it was a pretty good place to start.

After all, this was the first post-Crisis appearance by the character, and writers Giffen and Fleming has revised his origin, giving him a new, mystical nature, and one tied directly to Jewish legend. The eight-issue series wrapped in 1992, and I probably read it sometime that year, as I had bought it in back issues from my local comics shop.

I was still quite new to comic books back then, but I was attracted to the character's name, the book's logo and, especially, the character design (All of which you can see on the cover of the first issue). I'm sure the Gotham City setting and the appearance of Batman late in the series didn't hurt, either. 

That series made me a fan of the character, although there weren't many other Ragman comics to track down at the time (I eventually found 1976's Ragman #1, but none of the four issues that followed it). Still, the character stayed in my head, and he was a character I delighted in drawing sketches of; like the Tim Sale version of The Scarecrow from 1993's Legends of the Dark Knight Halloween Special, Ragman would often appear in the corners or along the edges of various spiral ring notebooks and class handouts in high school and college.

The Giffen/Fleming/Broderick limited series lead to another mini-series by a different creative team, Elaine Lee and Gabriel Morrrissette's 1993-1994 Ragman: Cry of the Dead, probably most notable for featuring gorgeous covers by Joe Kubert, after which point the character re-entered limbo again. 

I kept wishing for a return, though, thinking the fact that he lived in Gotham City meant he had to turn up in one of the Bat-books eventually. I mean, what he was doing during "Knighftall", for example, or "Contagion"? Did Eclipso not try to eclipse him in The Darkness Within? Did history going crazy during Zero Hour or the sun going out in Final Night not affect his neighborhood?

You can imagine my delight, then, when he finally turned up in 1998's Batman #551. Sure, that was just a few years after the last issue of Cry of the Dead, but it's forever in teenager years, and do you have any idea how many different Batman books and comics set in Gotham City that DC had published during those years?

Better still, here Ragman was appearing in a comic drawn by the art team of Kelley Jones and John Beatty, who had already done such an amazing job of drawing whatever guest-stars witer Doug Moench was able to work into the series by this point, like Swamp Thing, Deadman, The Spectre and The Demon. (For the purposes of this review, by the way, I'm rereading Batman #551-552 via digital copy of Batman by Doug Moench and Kelley Jones Vol. 2 borrowed through the library. Same place I found the two-parter featuring The Spectre, which I covered here).

First, it should be noted that, as always, the art is great—if over-the-top in every conceivable way, as is Jones' wont—starting right there on the cover of the first issue (at the top of the post), in which we see Ragman's rags attacking Batman, bending one of his rabbit-like ears in the process. 

Spooky, dramatic and wearing a living costume that is like half billowing cape, Ragman is a character that seems almost as if he was specifically created for Kelley Jones to draw. 

Let's look at a few of Jones and Beatty's renderings of Ragman, shall we...?

While it's of course hard to compete with the images of Ragman terrorizing a Nazi, or that badass image of him as a ragged, living green cape flying through the air, I think I like that last image the best, the way his cape is drawn so large that it seems to fill the room, draping itself over crates.

I like how Jones draws capes, usually Batman's, as gigantic, a bit of artistic flair. I like it even more though when he draws them in such a way to suggest that No, it's not just artistic license, the cape I'm drawing is literally thirty-feet long and twenty-feet wide, see? 

Because Ragman's costume has a life of its own, it makes a certain sense that his cape's size might vary from image to image and move in dramatic, unnatural ways that real fabric might not in real life. In that respect, I think Ragman, like Spawn, is a perfect character for Jones to draw (Sadly though, he he's never drawn Spawn, not even on a variant cover). 

Jones doesn't draw his Ragman with the same prominent "bow" that Broderick did at the front of his cape. You can see some cords dangling from beneath his hood in a few of those panels, but they are not as big and prominent as Broderick drew them; Broderick's bow is a bit more like tentacles crossed with a ribbon on a Christmas gift.

Now Ragman's origin, at least the revised Giffen/Fleming one from 1991, was that each of the rags that comprise his costume is actually a human soul, that of an evildoer that the Ragman has punished and absorbed (Broderick actually depicted this occurring on the actually kinda scary cover to that series' second issue). 

The Ragman costume then, is a sortof  living "suit of souls." It was originally created in 16th century Europe by the same Jewish mystics who had created the legendary Golem of Prague. They eventually deemed the golem a defective defender of the Jewish people, as it lacked a human soul to guide it, so they then created the suit of souls, which could be worn by a human defender. The costume and mantle were thus passed on from champion to champion, ultimately going to Gerry Reganiewicz. 

After World War II, Gerry emigrated to the U.S., where he opened the Rags 'n' Tatters junk shop. But when he was killed by gangsters, his adult son Rory Regan found the suit, becoming the new Ragman, now the sort of spirit of vengeance type of character that populate "universe" comics, not unlike DC's own Spectre or Marvel's '90s iteration of Ghost Rider.

Don't worry; you don't need to know any of this before picking up these comics, as Moench recaps it all elegantly enough in the space of a page or two.

In the two-part Batman story, entitled "Suit of Evil Souls", Regan returns to Gotham City, having apparently been in New Orleans ever since the Cry of the Dead minieseries. The reason for his return is a rather unhappy one: Benjamin Mizrahi, a man who used to visit his junk shop, has just been murdered in his synagogue by a member of the Aryan Reich, a racist prison gang-turned-street gang now terrorizing Regan's old Jewish neighborhood.

Both Batman and Regan-as-Ragman pursue the killers. In fact, the first issue opens with an image of Batman swooping down on one of them:

Batman brings the skinhead he was chasing in. 

While Regan talks to his late friend's rabbi about the Reich and how they have been terrorizing Jews and others in the neighborhood, one of their number throws a brick through the window. Regan and his rags give chase. The rags wrap tightly around the evil man they were pursuing, seeking to smother him, but Regan calls them off, and they form his Ragman costume around him.

After he's dealt with the threat though, some of the rags detach again, rebelling against his control, and they then smother the man to death. To his horror, Regan learns he can no longer control the rags. And, what's worse, the soul of the man they killed turns into another rag in Ragman's suit of souls, adding to their evil, and thus making it still harder for him to control them.

The rest of the story then, will revolve around Regan and his rebellious rags. Apparently, the new hate crimes in the neighborhood are exacerbating the evil in the suit, and Regan's own hatred—his hate of the hatred of others—further affects his control of the suit. 

He asks for help from the rabbi (with whom he shares the story of Ragman, from the suit's creation to his own inheritance of it) and, later, from Batman. 

Meanwhile, Vesper Fairchild, the late-night radio host that Bruce Wayne is falling in love with, has a guest on to talk about the rash of hate crimes, and the Aryan Reich prepare to escalate their murder campaign, opening a new crate of weapons in their headquarters. The guns are, of course, lugers. 

Ultimately, the rabbi's lessons about the power of God's love are enough to help Regan regain his control of the rags, and Batman helps him round up the rest of the gang—without allowing the rags to smother them all to death or let them burn up in a warehouse fire that accidentally starts during the confrontation. 

Luckily, there are less than a half dozen members of the Aryan Reich, so the heroes are able to defeat this particular threat once and for all by the end of the second issue. 

Jones does a great job of depicting the rags themselves as a threat. When they go after their victims, they don't do so in the form of the suit, but as a swarm of individual rags, seemingly growing rigid and flying as if by an agency of their own. 

Not only do they attack their victims by clinging to them, wrapping them up like mummies and suffocating them, but they also hold Regan captive at one point, some binding him at his wrists and ankles, while the others swirl menacingly above him. 

They fly through the air, shattering a window to escape and, in one panel, they form a little tornado shape. 

Obviously, antisemitism and racism aren't so easily defeated in the real world, and so we are obviously still dealing with it today. In fact, it seems worse now than at any other point in my life, with the mainstreaming of various racist conspiracy theories and masks-off appreciation of Nazis (often in the form of nihilistic, irony-soaked "jokes" that give those who espouse them a degree of deniability) being mainstreamed by the right. 

Given that, it was interesting to re-read this 27-year-old story today. That the skinhead gang that plays the villains are Nazis is never in doubt. The first one we meet has a swastika and the words "Hitler Youth" tattooed on his arm. Another has the double-lightning bolt "SS" tattooed on his arm. While one of them holds the rabbi at gunpoint and raves about how Jews always cheat, and how they had apparently "tricked" America into joining the "wrong side" of World War II, Jones super-imposes a realistic image of Adolf Hitler in the panel's background.

The victims are here all Jewish, and the interview scene discusses antisemitism, but the rabbi tells us that it isn't just Jews who are the focus of the gang's predation.

And as for the obviously white Batman, well, as the man he pursues in the first issue's opening scene tells him, "And if you're siding with them-- --It's time you were stomped too!"

I don't think Moench ever uses the word "white" though, nor "white supremacy" to describe the Aryan Reich, which is too bad, I think, as I would prefer "white supremacy" be as directly linked to racism and Nazism as much and as often as possible, personally. I wonder if there's a space here in America where people stake out their own thinking as pro-white (rather than anti-Black or anti-Jewish, etc) and, in their minds at least, wall it off from racism or Nazism, despite how close those thoughts might be, or how the former might lead to the latter.

At any rate, Moench has the Aryan Reich refer several times to the "pure" man, as opposed to the white man. 

Moench obviously paints with a very broad brush here—this is mainstream superhero comics, after all, and from a time when a lot of kids were still reading them—and some of the story might seem a bit preachy. Especially the radio interview section, which is essentially a little lecture in the form of a scene.

In fact, in 1998, I might have thought that villains were a little bit too cartoonish to be realistic, but, well, here it is 2025, and in the news the week I am writing this post? The Secretary of Defense, who prefers to refer to himself as the "Secretary of War" and has several controversial tattoos associated with the Crusades and white supremacy, has been accused of ordering the illegal killing of survivors of illegal military operations to kill presumably innocent Venezuelan men accused of drug-trafficking. And the President of the United States has been publicly calling African immigrants "garbage" that he doesn't want in this country. 

At this point, our cartoons aren't even as cartoonish as our real-life villains. 

But back to the comics. These two issues comprise a pretty good superhero morality tale, one about the power of God's love to conquer hate...and, as ever, how strong, good men can and should overcome the work of weak, evil men. And the art is great, as Jones and company make great use of two extremely potent comic book character designs. 

The final of these issues, Batman #552, would ultimately prove a significant one. It is actually the final issue of the Moench/Jones/Beatty team, which had begun their run on the title in 1994's #515. The issue's last page has Batman in the Batcave, remarking on strange balls of light drifting through the cave, "some sort of geomagnetic anomaly...the phenomenon known as earthlights? Or something else...?"

No, they were earthlights, of the sort that some people believe sometimes presage earthquakes. The very next issue of Batman would be part of the "Cataclysm" Bat-books crossover about a massive earthquake striking the city, followed by stories bearing an "Aftershocks" logo, followed by a couple of those with a "Road to No Man's Land" logo, and then the start of the "No Man's Land" mega-story/status quo.

And what became of Ragman? 

Well, if he had anything to do with "No Man's Land", DC never showed us what it was. (I presume he continued to defend his own Jewish neighborhood of Gotham throughout that state of affairs just as Tommy Monaghan and his friends defended their neighborhood The Cauldron. In Regan's case, he must have done so completely off-panel, while Hitman at least devoted a single story arc to its cast during "No Man's Land"...that's 1999's #37 and #38 "Dead Man's Land," in which vampires try to move into Gotham City, if you're interested. It's great!).

The next place I remember seeing Ragman was a short story in 1999's Day of Judgment Secret Files and Origins #1, wherein he is part of a group of magical superheroes deciding where to put the Spear of Destiny (There he was drawn by another of my favorite artists, Hitman's John McCrea). He would later appear in 2005's Infinite Crisis lead-in Day of Vengeance, chronicling The Spectre's war against magic, and the 2006-2008, 25-issue Shadowpact series (the magical superhero team book that DC seemed to have been flirting with launching for years), and he seems to have appeared in the final issues of the New 52 Batwoman for a bit, although I didn't read that. 

As a headliner, this version of Ragman's last appearance was in the 2010 one-shot Ragman: Suit of Souls by Christos Gage and Stephen Segovia. In 2017, writer Ray Fawkes and artist Inaki Miranda were responsible for a six-issue Ragman series that gave the hero a new origin and new, much blander look. As that last series fell between the New 52 reboot and the Death Metal de-reboot, whether it's now meant to be canonical or not, I can't say.

Personally, I liked it better when DC rebooted their continuity only once every generation or so. 

Review: 1997's The Spectre #51

While DC editorial was able to get it together well enough to schedule the Spectre as a guest-star in the pages of Batman and Batman in the pages of The Spectre in January of 1997, they didn't necessarily get the details right. 

On the second page of John Ostrander and Tom Mandrake's The Spectre #51, Batman is swinging from a New York City rooftop, thinking about how he has come in pursuit of The Joker. 

"This is the second such trip made here recently," the Dark Knight thinks, "Last time brought me up against The Spectre.*"

The asterisk refers readers to "Batman 450-451." But, as we know because we just read those issues, Batman did not make a trip to New York City in them, bringing him up against The Spectre. Rather, the New York City-based Spectre journeyed to Batman's Gotham City, where the two clashed...at least in words, if not physically.

Odd.

That aside, this issue, one of the handful of issues of the series I had read off the rack when it was still being published serially, is just as I remember it: A fairly strong done-in-one in which the two caped heroes argue about sin and punishment regarding The Joker, with a terrifying moment in which the madman gets ultimate power (as he apparently occasionally does*) and the villain ultimately being defeated in the same way he will soon be in a JLA story. 

Having just read the Batman crossover, I of course wanted to read this issue, which will presumably be collected in a future The Spectre by John Ostrander and Tom Mandrake Omnibus 2. Luckily, DC included it in their 2019 collection The Joker: His Greatest Jokes, which my library had a copy of (Interestingly, this issue of The Spectre is the only story included from a book that isn't one of the Batman line of books. You would think they would have included a Joker vs. Superman story in there, at least...)

It's a tightly-written 22-pager, with no time to waste on anything but the central conflict, only a few lines of dialogue really devoted to what's going on in the pages of the book at the time (Jim Corrigan really is, as he seemed to be in those issues of Batman, on the police force again, and partners with Nate Kane. Apparently, he has recently been injured by the Spear of Destiny again and is hiding out inside Nate's body. Oh, and there's a passing reference to the events of the previous fall's line-wide crossover, Final Night...which I'd love to see DC collect into a DC Finest volume or two...I remember it being one of the better such crossovers). 

The Joker is already in New York City as the book opens, and Batman has obviously already shown up too. Kane takes a report on the Batman foiling a mugging from his superior, thanks to Corrigan/The Spectre temporarily controlling his body.

Both Batman and Kane have the same concern about The Spectre meeting The Joker. "Based on our last meeting, if Spectre encounters The Joker first there won't be much of him left to return to Arkham," Batman thinks to himself. "Moonface, there better be someone left for me to question when I get there," Kane shouts after The Spectre, as the spirit flies off toward the sight of The Joker's attack. 

As for that attack, it too seemed familiar to me at this point. Someone in the city had the bright idea to open up a Joker-themed nightclub, where all the patrons dress up like The Joker (an off-hand remark by a club-goer makes this sound a bit like a comic book world's version of a goth club, where patrons dress a bit like vampires). It's kind of remarkable to read this and realize it was written almost 30 years ago, given how often the last few decades of comics have presented us with various iterations of the fans-of-The Joker or Joker-as-charismatic-figure stories. 

The story I immediately thought of, though, wasn't a comic book one at all, but an episode of the original Batman: The Animated Series, wherein a casino owner opens up a Joker-themed club called Joker's Wild, drawing the attention and the wrath of The Joker himself (For what it's worth, that episode of the show, also called "Joker's Wild", aired in 1992...that said, I suppose it's possible it was based on an older Batman comic I never read, as many episodes of the show were inspired by comics storylines).

Here an emcee announces The Joker on stage and is nervously taken aback when the Clown Prince of Crime seems less than flattered by the club's existence. "You mean, the idea of bedwetting little twits turning me into a fad?" Joker says, reaching to shake hands with the emcee. "What's not to like?"

The Joker then proceeds to electrocute his victim with a deadly joy buzzer ("They also know better than to fall for that in Gotham!" he laughs), and he then turns to spray the club with gas, his henchmen having welded the doors shut and filing in wearing gas masks.

That's when Batman shows up. The Joker immediately sics his fans-turned-victims on the Dark Knight. And then The Spectre appears, materializing out of the gas being shot by The Joker. 

Spec makes short work of The Joker's men in his own inimitable way—

—much to the delight of The Joker. 

Honestly, if you made a Venn diagram, The Spectre's sense of humor and The Joker's sense of humor probably overlap more than a little. Both seem to like dark jokes that end with someone violently dying. 

Before The Spectre can do something like turn The Joker into a giant playing card and rip him in half, though, The Batman makes a case for sparing him.

"The Joker himself is some kind of unholy innocent--a sociopath!" Batman argues. "He has no real concept of good and evil!" He argues that The Joker is sick and needs treatment, and, perhaps appealing to The Spectre's sense of mission, he says that if God created The Joker in this way, how can The Spectre punish him for being that way?

It's only a few panels, but it's an interesting little comic book debate, and with the characters bringing in God, making for a slightly more nuanced than the usual "executing killers makes you no better than them" sorts of arguments Batman can get into with characters who use deadly force (See, for example, his brief fight with The Punisher in 1994's Punisher/Batman: Deadly Knights #1 over how to deal with The Joker).

To get to the truth of the matter, The Spectre enters The Joker's eyes to investigate his mind in person, something we've seen him do repeatedly before, with characters alive and dead, in the pages of The Spectre. Of course, when he does so, he loses the upper hand, the person whose mind or soul he is visiting having the ultimate home court advantage.

This time it goes disastrously wrong. From the other side of the glass in a funhouse mirror within his mind, The Joker tells the Spectre, "Love the cape. And the hood. Mind if I try them on?"

And just like that, The Joker switches places with Corrigan, and the madman is suddenly in control of The Spectre's powers, appearing as a white-skinned grinning giant with a flower on the "lapel" of his giant green cape.

I was at this point rather struck by potentially how big a threat The Joker-with-The Spectre's-powers would be to not only Batman and the city, but to the whole world. Not for the first time while reading Ostrander's Spectre this month, I realized that Ostrander had come up with a plot that could very easily be an epic story arc or even big crossover event, but it was instead just used for an issue or three in the pages of the book. (The other Spectre plot it's easiest to imagine DC having exploited is the conclusion of the arc in which the United States seeks a Spectre counter-measure, ultimately arming Superman with the Spear of Destiny and sending him to confront the Spectre, leading to a sequence in which Superman fights the whole DC Universe and declares himself a sort of king of the world—where have I heard that before?—although much of it is a sort of fantasy that The Spectre presents, Ghost of Christmas Future-style, to Superman.) 

And so, the giant Joker uses Spectre's powers to attack Batman and/or anything within striking distance, the Dark Knight trying to keep the now god-like Joker's attention on him rather than on any other possible victims. 

Meanwhile, Corrigan explores the inside of The Joker's head, where there are a bunch of labeled electrical power boxes in a dilapidated maintenance shack behind a fun house. Just as Batman said, the one labeled "Conscience" isn't hooked up at all, and Mandrake draws it empty but for a crumbling skull.

Corrigan notes that, when it comes to conscience, "I got that in spades," and then he proceeds to stick a handful of glowing electrical cables into his open mouth, essentially hooking up The Joker's mind to Corrigan's conscience. (These scenes occurring in the mind, the sets, props and actions are all visual metaphors, of course.)

"Have a taste, Joker!" Corrigan shouts, his own head now enveloped in electric blue light. "Here's what a sense of right and wrong feel like!"

This has the desired effect as, over the course of a page and a half or so, The Joker is forced to think about and truly understand what he's done in his lifetime of killing:

Oh no!

OH NO!

All those lives! All those precious lives...!

DEAR GOD, WHAT HAVE I DONE?!

As The Joker freaks out, Mandrake draws a crowd of faces, apparently those of his countless victims, washing over his own screaming face like a wave. While they mostly appear to be just random civilians, one is quite recognizable as Robin Jason Todd. 

The Spectre leaves The Joker's body, and the villain collapses into a fetal position. 

"He has tasted his own guilt and it has proven too much for him," The Spectre explains to Batman. "He has slipped into catatonia."

Thus, The Joker's threat has been stopped, and Spectre concedes the argument over properly judging the maniac killer to Batman, the Joker expert.

As I alluded to earlier, this turn of events being a bit familiar to something that happened in Grant Morrison's JLA. 

In 1998's JLA #15—so well after this issue of Ostrander and company's Spectre—in the concluding chapter of the "Rock of Ages" story arc, The Joker gets his hands on the philosopher's stone/the Worlogog, a four-dimensional map that gives whoever bears it control over time and space**. So yet again a DC writer has put power over reality itself in the hands of The Joker. 

He doesn't get much of a chance to play with it, though, as the Martian Manhunter uses his mental abilities to telepathically order the information in The Joker's brain, forcing him into a temporary sanity, during which The Joker realizes he's done terrible things. 

I don't think Morrison necessarily swiped this brief scene from Ostrander, any more than I think Ostrander was inspired to create his Killing Joke club by Batman: The Animated Series, but it's interesting to note how often these stories rhyme one another, as various writers over the decades all might come to similar ideas. Like, for example, how scary would it be if a crazy villain like The Joker had god-like powers? 

In a fun little stinger of an ending, The Spectre turns to face the crowd of clubgoers who had dressed up like The Joker and had been patronizing The Killing Joke club. A few weeks later the club has reopened under the name The Wrath of God, a sort of BDSM club with naked people dressed in hooded green cloaks and green underpants, one of them apparently spanking others with a rod and preaching of sin and punishment. 

*In 1997's DC Special Series #27, better known as "Batman vs. The Incredible Hulk", the Shaper-of-Worlds grants The Joker his reality-writing powers at the climax (I wrote at length about that crossover here). And in the 2000 "Emperor Joker" crossover in the Superman line of books, The Joker gained access to Mr. Mxyzptlk's nigh omnipotent powers to alter reality. Those are the stories that immediately leapt to my mind, but perhaps there are others...?

**I read "Rock of Ages" when it was originally released in 1997 and 1998, when I was still in college, and thus relatively early in my exploration of the comics medium...and the DC Universe and its history. I had always just assumed that Grant Morrison had created the Worlogog, as it sure seemed to be of apiece with the sort of big, crazy ideas that punctuated his JLA run. 

It wasn't until 2018 or so that I was reading the collection of Jack Kirby's 1984 Super Powers series that I realized that Kirby had actually created the Worlogog. I practically fell out of my chair when I read the word in that comic. 

I have long since realized that much of which seems big and crazy in Morrison's super-comic writing is basically just old-school comic book craziness—especially that of the Silver Age—repurposed into the more sophisticated, more realistic presentation of more modern comics. (Which I don't think is a bad thing! In fact, it's a great strength, that Morrison doesn't just take characters or plot points from DC history like other writers but also manages to imbue his comics with the spirit of those past comics.)

Oh, and speaking of the Worlogog, it also showed up in the 2019 Teen Titans Go Vs. Teen Titans cartoon crossover, of all places, where it was part of the mechanism allowing for the two universes to intersect. There's even a brief musical number based around its pronunciation.

Review: 1997's Batman #540-541

It's been a while since I revisited any comics from the 1995-1998 Batman run by Doug Moench, Kelley Jones and John Beatty, but my recent reading inspired me to do so. First, I've been reading a lot of Kelley Jones comics, thanks to that huge collection of all of his Swamp Thing comics from October and this month's Dracula Book Two: The Brides. Secondly, The Spectre has been on my mind a lot, thanks to the Spectre by John Ostrander and Tom Mandrake Omnibus Vol. 1, which collects the first half of their 1992-1998 series.

Jones drew the Spectre in both Swamp Thing and The Spectre collections, albeit it briefly in both. 

All that got me thinking of the first time I had seen Kelley Jones' Spectre...as well as curious to see how Doug Moench might have handled a conflict between Ostrander's vengeful, killer ghost and the never-take-a-life Batman. 

The Spectre appeared in a two-part story in 1997's Batman #540 and #541, and DC made a little event out of it at the time. Just as The Spectre was appearing in the pages of Batman, Batman was appearing in the pages of The Spectre; though being published simultaneously, they were two distinct stories (If I recall correctly, the Spectre issue had the two heroes in conflict over whether or not to kill The Joker, and the villain ultimately, temporarily gaining control of the Spectre's powers). 

To re-read these issues of Batman, I turned to an electronic copy of Batman by Doug Moench and Kelley Jones Vol. 2, available through my library (I hate trying to find particular old comics in the 20-ish long boxes I have upstairs now). 

I was a little surprised to find that, while these issues were indeed a Batman/Spectre story, with the latter appearing on both covers (the second one, unencumbered by the logo and text, is above) and his name even appearing along the top of the covers so that they read "The Spectre & Batman", there's actually a lot of Bruce Wayne content in these issues.

So much so, in fact, that there's a bifurcated plot running through the issues.

One half of that plot deals with Batman and The Spectre's intersecting criminal investigations that lead to their collision and, given their differences on how to deal with criminals, conflict. The other deals with Bruce Wayne romancing his then new love interest, late night radio host Vesper Fairchild (Who, like so many of Batman's girlfriends over the years, would eventually meet a bad end; here they seem to be meeting for the first time and having their first few dates, though). 

The former plot, obviously, plays to Jones strengths more than the latter. To dispense with the Bruce Wayne plot first, it features various listeners around Gotham City hearing Vesper's show, on which she announces Bruce will be an upcoming guest; Batman is one of those listeners and has to hurry to change and get there in time.

Apparently, Alfred had booked the interview, trying to get Bruce to dust off the rich playboy/Gotham philanthropist persona after a relatively long absence. Things get out of hand when Bruce seems genuinely interested in Vesper, though—Jones draws an image in which Alfred, hearing Bruce hit on Vesper over the air, is sweating as profusely as a stool pigeon Jim Corrigan/The Spectre was working previously—and they have a couple of dates, which Alfred isn't all that thrilled about ("But sir, if you'll recall what happened the last time with Shondra Kinsolving..." he says at one point, bringing up another Batman girlfriend who met a bad end).

Anyway, Bruce Wayne does an interview with Vesper Fairchild, they go to a diner after, and then set up a lunch date for the following day, which requires Bruce to visit his office for the first time in about a year-and-a-half, and lets Moench write the faux-fop version of the character we don't see all that often. 

The scenes between Bruce and Vesper are almost all banter, with the pair lobbing lines back and forth like they were playing tennis. Like much of Moench's Batman writing at the time, it feels somewhat stagey and unrealistic, but it suits the melodramatic tone of Moench and Jones' vision of the book (The Spectre and Batman will banter rather similarly, although obviously less flirtatiously).

As for the portions of the story involving muscular guys in capes, Jim Corrigan—who here seems like he might actually be a police officer again?—and Spectre supporting character Nate Kane are at the scene of a deadly arson, which they believe to be the work of Tony "Sparks" Weal. In an interrogation room, Corrigan uses the Spectre to scare info of Weal's whereabout out of an informant: Weal has apparently gone to Gotham City, to meet with the lieutenant of the Black Mask Gang.

Batman, meanwhile, is busy busting that same lieutenant, one Damon Shugrue, which he does during a pretty great fight in a pool hall (Jones' Shugrue, by the way, is an amazing design, looking like the sort of stereotypical criminal that Jack Cole might have drawn; a big, hulking guy with beady little eyes and an almost Frankenstein-shaped head).

Because Batman showed up at the meet instead of Weal, Shugrue thinks Weal must have tipped off the Dark Knight, and so he sends three of his soldiers to kill Weal. Just before they gun him down, one of them says, "Relax, Sparks--we just came to deliver a Gotham welcome... and three more kisses from the Batman."

Okay, it's a bit purple—Moench's writing in this title so often is—and it is perhaps a strained way to make Weal think Batman has something to do with his killing but, well, Moench needed something to send The Spectre after Batman, right? 

The spirit of vengeance finds Weal in Gotham, but not until after he had died. And so, he enters his corpse through the eyes, and visits his soul in Hell, where it is secured to an x-shaped cross amid flames. During questioning, Weal says it was Batman who had him killed, and so the Spectre turns his hands into a big green bellows to fan the flames and then makes for Wayne Manor.

There's a whole series of great images of The Spectre in Gotham. As a semi-transparent giant creeping around the corner of the morgue, dissolving into a cloud to enter and exit Weal's body, streaking out of the morgue like a comet, descending from high above the manor with an impossibly long cape trailing behind him and, ultimately, appearing as a giant face pushing through the stalactites to accuse Batman in the Batcave. 

I kind of love how cool, calm and collected Batman remains when a giant, screaming ghost face emerges from his ceiling, but then, I guess this is just, like, another Tuesday for Batman (Well, another Wednesday, I guess, this being comics). 

Satisfied by Batman's denials, The Spectre leaves and the two conduct separate, parallel investigations, ending at an abandoned night club where the three men who gunned down Weal are in hiding, protected by other Black Mask gang soldiers.

Batman has to fight his way in, giving The Spectre, who just magically appears before the killers, time to kill them all. He appears with his hands in the form of giant Swiss army knives with which he impales one, he turns his hand into a chainsaw to cut down another, and, in the most spectacular killing, he calls them cowards for wearing masks and says "And so it is time to face-- --the wrath behind my mask!"

Here The Spectre pulls apart his own face and out slithers a snake-like projection that is all teeth, gums and spine, looking vaguely Giger-esque (and resembling elements of the bizarre alien creatures Jones drew in 1990's Swamp Thing #94, collected in that Swamp Thing by Len Wein and Kelley Jones book mentioned earlier). Do note the evocatively specific sound effects Moench came up with, and letterer Todd Klein brings to gorgeous life. 

The bad guys thus either colorfully exterminated by The Spectre or beaten up by Batman, the two heoes have a brief, banter-y argument. It is noteworthy, I thought, for Batman talking, ever so briefly, of elements of his own beliefs and faith, something that doesn't come up too often in Batman comics, but which Batman fans seems to have a lot of opinions about.

Their argument, which spans a couple of pages, goes about just as one might expect given the particular vocations and crimefighting practices of the characters. The Spectre ultimate leaves, telling Batman that he reminds him of his friend Amy (This is Amy Beitermann, Corrigan/The Spectre's kinda sorta love interest in the early issues of The Spectre; she gets killed off surprisingly early...but given how much the book deals with aspects of the afterlife, she still shows up in various capacities for a while). 

My favorite part here is how the relatively tiny Batman's ears go back as he points at The Spectre. One of the many, many things I have always loved about Jones' Batman is the way he draws Batman's ears as if they are a literal part of his body, and they thus sometimes move as if to reflect his feelings.

The most interesting part of the entire story is what happens next, though. 

As you can see on the bottom of that page, Batman calls for The Spectre to wait as he's in the process of leaving, seemingly jumping backwards through the ceiling.

Noting that The Spectre said he spoke to Weals in Hell, Batman then asks if that means there's really a Heaven too, and Spec is equivocal in his answer: "I have seen such a place...but whether in reality or illusion, I know not."

Batman says that, while he himself doesn't need, as The Spectre puts it, "the crutch of such a promise" of Heaven in order to live his life well and do good, there were two people that he cared about who were murdered, and Spectre then guesses what it is Batman wants to ask him.

"And you wish to know if they are at peace in Heaven," Spectre says. He then cuts Batman off before he can name them, but readers will know that he is of course talking about his parents:

Preserve your mind and soul where they belong, mortal--in the misted struggle between doubt and faith.

...

What I know is not yours to know. 

Besides, I am far more familiar with the denizens of Hell...than the geography of Heaven.

The Spectre then takes his leave on this, the penultimate page. I found the conversation sort of fascinating, as it's one of the relatively few instances in comics where I can recall Batman's encounters with various spiritual or magical entities or brushes with the afterlife including the obvious, his questioning of what he sees or learns might mean for the souls of his parents.

Another tack Moench might have taken here is questioning if The Spectre had avenged the death of the Waynes or, perhaps, if he has such vast powers, why he doesn't prevent murders, but instead only avenges them after the fact. (Questions, by the way, that John Ostrander deals within the pages of The Spectre, but, of course, Batman doesn't know that). 

I also find this exchange kind of interesting because surely this isn't the first, second, third, fourth or fifth time that Batman has crossed paths with The Spectre, and so surely he has had previous opportunities to chat with him about the afterlife during, say, one of those social gatherings between the annual JLA and JSA (although perhaps many of those were no longer meant to be canonical post-Crisis...?) or during some other team-up (although, again, The Spectre's meeting with Batman in the pages of The Brave and The Bold would have predated Crisis On Infinite Earths).

But perhaps Batman wasn't previously convinced that The Spectre was who he said he was, or perhaps he didn't necessarily know that The Spectre could visit the afterlife...?

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

The other comics featuring The Spectre that I've read in the last year or so were in the DC Finest collections of the Golden Age All-Star Comics, DC Finest: Justice Society of America: For America and Democracy and DC Finest: Justice Society of America: Plunder of the Psycho-Pirate. 

In those stories, it's clear that The Spectre is the ghost of a dead man and, like his fellow Society member Doctor Fate, his powers seem more or less unlimited, as he's able to do completely crazy things like, for example, deposit a criminal on the surface of Pluto (Although, more often than not, The Spectre, like Doctor Fate, takes on criminals using only his fists). 

The idea of The Spectre transforming his body into outlandish shapes or using his powers to sentence evildoers to harsh, ironic punishments doesn't seem to have been part of the character's depiction yet back in the 1940s. 

One element of these stories I found particular surprising though, and the reason I bring them up in a post about Batman and The Spectre at all, is that the writer Gardner Fox repeatedly referred to The Spectre by the nickname of "The Dark Knight"...which, these days, we associate with Batman, rather than The Spectre. 

When Batman Met Spawn Pt. 2: On 1994's Spawn/Batman #1

While I have no idea what the sales figures for books from 31 years ago might have looked like, I have to assume that Image Comics' half of the Batman and Spawn crossover event, Spawn/Batman #1, was more popular than DC's, Batman/Spawn: War Devil #1. It was certainly the more exciting of the two, and the one I had preferred when I read them both as a teenager.

A large part of that is, of course, that Spawn/Batman was drawn by Todd McFarlane, and his art was, of course, the main selling point for the comic featuring the character he had created. 

Perhaps an even larger part, though, was that it was written by Frank Miller.

Miller had previously written Spawn in 1993's Spawn #11 (part of a four-issue run in which McFarlane had a series of surprising guest writers, including Alan Moore, Neil Gaiman and Dave Sim), but the character he is most associated with is Batman. And here Miller would be returning to Batman for the first time since his 1986 Batman: The Dark Knight Returns. These days, after Miller has returned to the world of the Dark Knight Returns repeatedly, and written Batman in a couple of other projects as well, it probably doesn't seem like such a big deal, but I have to imagine it was in 1994.

And the Batman that Miller was writing in Spawn/Batman was, indeed, his DKR version of the character, albeit a younger version, as this story would have been set well before the events of that seminal near-future set series. McFarlane hints at that fact on his cover, an homage to the famous Miller-drawn silhouette of Batman leaping before a bolt of lightning cover from Dark Knight Returns, and there's a note on the 2022 Batman/Spawn: The Classic Collection hardcover's credit page for Spawn/Batman making it explicit.

"Spawn/Batman is a companion piece to DC Comics' Batman: The Dark Knight Returns," it reads. "It does not represent current DC continuity."

I'm not sure of the exact wording that might have run in the original one-shot, but it must have been similar, as I remember knowing at the time that this was meant to be a story of the Dark Knight from DKR and not the "real" Batman (Say, if this is the Batman from Dark Knight Returns, only from an earlier point in his career, does that mean that 1994's Spawn/Batman is technically the first appearance of Frank Miller's All-Star Batman, from the pages of All-Star Batman and Robin, The Boy Wonder...?)

So, what's the difference between this Batman and the one then-current DC continuity...?

Well, not much, actually. The main thing seems to be that Miller writes Batman here as an extremely stubborn, unrepentant asshole...arrogant to a fault, and unable to admit he's wrong or change course when that fact that he might be becomes apparent. That, and he's more violent. 

On page three, there's a panel showing him stalking away from eight men sprawled on the floor, saying "Punks.. ...you're lucky I went so easy on you...", while the blue narration boxes read "Tonight's foes are left behind him, broken things."

Later, when he catches Spawn setting two men on fire, "a wanton act of murder," Batman drops thirty feet and drives his heel into his kidney ("Shouldn't cause too much damage," the narration reads, "Six months in the hospital and he'll be ready to face the judge.")

Otherwise, there's nothing here that really signals this as an entirely different Batman; it's more a matter of the character's attitude and voice than any specific facts. And, given how often other writers have tried to emulate Miller's Batman writing over the years, this take on Batman doesn't sound too off.

Somewhat remarkably given that War Devil had three writers so used to working within the constraints of Big Two corporate super-comics, Miller, who by that time had already become something of an auteur, does a far better job of presenting a real team-up comic, one which does a pretty decent job of introducing Spawn to new readers...of which I think it is safe to assume the character had gotten quite a few of with this comic, as Batman fans and Frank Miller-on-Batman fans likely picked this book up and were meeting McFarlane's hero for the first time.

When Spawn appears for the first time, a splash on page 12, the narration tells us that "He is a dead man brought to a wretched life--a slave of Hell who seeks redemption." As Batman investigates the unhoused people in New York ("the dregs of humanity"), the narration tells us that "now and then he hears legends of one of their own named "Al"--a bum possessed with magic powers."

That there is more than War Devil told us about Spawn, really. The story reflected that, of course, but didn't make any of it explicit. We also learn that Spawn is super-strong and nearly invulnerable, that his magic comes from Hell, and that while he seems to be able to do almost anything with it—including, in this comic, bringing a dead Batman back to life, teleporting the pair of them and manage some sort of psychic mind meld with Batman—he seems to have a limited supply of it, so that he prefers not to use it unless he has to.

As I said, the fist 10 pages or so belong to Batman. The very first page is a 12-panel grid, the panels hosting terse, tough-guy narration that, at this point, I find hard to tell if Miller is writing in earnest or in parody. The first panel features the light of the moon and the words "A cold night," and the "camera" slowly pans from the full moon to Gotham City; it is the first of three, four-panel sequences pulling from a white space to reveal some information about the scene.

So yes, the page opens with the words, "A cold night. A dark night." And it ends with, "A cold night. A dark knight:"

Get it? (Oh, and that's not a typo; there's a colon in the last narration box of the first page; a turn of the page reveals a splash page of an angry looking, wounded Batman standing amid a bunch of intricate pipework, his logo and name atop the page, apparently connected to that colon.)

After having beat up the previously mentioned foes, Batman discovers crates of weapons, "sold by agents of a fallen dictatorship to Gotham street gangs":

Weapons--Built for a war that never happened.

Guns. Grenades. Rocket launchers--

--And strange, high-tech devices that hint at the smaller horrors that would have followed the nuclear nightmare.

Batman is investigating these ("A pair of battle gloves, humming with the promise of power"), when he's attacked by a robot that looks silly, almost sarcastic in design; a round-ish body topped with triangles of armor, two big three-fingered fists atop spindly arms and a periscope-like protrusion from its underside, all perched atop a trio of spindly, too-small legs. 

Batman defeats it, using the gloves (although the one he dons is actually different looking then the ones McFarlane originally introduces two pages previous), gloves that seem to give him a degree of super-strength (This will, of course, come in handy later, when he finds himself duking it out with the super-powered Spawn). 

In the process, though, he discovers there's actually a still-living, severed human head wired up into the robot innards; the robot is actually a cyborg, then, using an unwitting victim's head to provide it with computing power. 

Examining the recovered (and now deceased) head back at the Batcave, Batman discovers that it belonged to a presumed dead "vagrant" and "acute alcoholic" last seen in Manhattan.  

"What's the brain of a New York bum doing inside of a Soviet cyborg?" he asks aloud. The Batcave sequence also features Alfred, and Miller handles their typical rapport nicely ("I don't get nightmares," Batman tells Alfred, "I give them."  "No need for punchlines, Sir," Alfred replies, "You're among friends.")

So, Batman goes to New York to investigate, while Miller uses TV talking heads and news broadcasts to advance the plot, as he did so extensively in DKR (Spawn readers may recognize them, as McFarlane had drawn them in his own book before and since). Also investigating the rash of missing homeless men is, of course, Spawn. The narration boxes tell us he has some friends missing. He encounters a pair of men dousing sleeping homeless man with gasoline and attempting to set him on fire, but, using his magic, Spawn redirects the fire towards the would-be murderers.

"When you meet Satan-- Say hello for me," Spawn frowns at them, and this is where Batman comes in with his kick to Spawn's kidney, saying "You must be Al" on the splash page in which he makes contact, sending Spawn reeling and his chains jangling around crazily.

The pair fight for four-and-a-half pages, and it is a much less one-sided fight than the one in War Devil. Batman is shocked at how strong Spawn is ("It's like punching a brick wall"), while Spawn, who here seems to know exactly who Batman is and to address him by name, fights back effectively hand-to-hand, foregoing magic, except for using it to make himself strong enough near the end "to beat the crap out of Batman."

Their exchanges are silly. "I 'm not in the mood-- And I don't have the time," Spawn says, catching a batarang in one hand and using a chain to block two more. Batman flying kicks him, saying "Got time for this, punk?"

Eventually the fight devolves into just mostly dark panels, narration and sound effects (SMEK SMEK, KOOGH, WHUK! and so on), Batman deciding he's over-powered and that, if dead, he's no use to anyone. He ultimately retreats. 

But, having realized that Spawn still needs to breathe (which reminded me of Batman's first fight with The Hulk, where he made a similar observation about that super-powered foe), Batman had dosed him with "nerve gas-- --enough to make a mob take a nap." While Spawn kept fighting through it, as soon as Batman slinks away, he relaxes the magic he was using to make himself strong and starts vomiting from the gas.

Soon Spawn encounters one of the cyborgs, and, using a makeshift Bat-signal, the book's villain, a humanitarian named Margaret Love, sics Batman on Spawn, telling the Dark Knight that Spawn has been attacking her operation and plans to attack her fundraiser aboard her boat that the president himself plans to attend. 

Of course, by this point, we have already learned that Margaet Love is really Nadia Vladova, and, using the cover of helping the homeless, she has been disappearing some of them and installing their heads in her cyborg killing machines.

Her ultimate goal? To fire a nuclear missile at New York City from her boat, setting off World War III and using all the weapons and cyborgs she commands to rule the aftermath.

Before our heroes can stop her, there's another six-page fist fight. This time Batman is armed with the power gloves we saw earlier, and the heroes are essentially now evenly matched. They beat the hell out of one another, desperately trash-talking the whole time. At the end of it, they are both sprawled on the ground and panting for air, unconvincingly continuing to threaten one another.

"I'll rip you to pieces," a bleeding Batman says, "Undisciplined slob." He follows that up by gasping "KHAGG".

"Catch my breath," Spawn replies. "Just catch my breath and I'll break you in half." Adding "Kheff".

Then Love/Vladova's cyborgs attack, inflicting a mortal wound on Batman, who was by then on the ropes and pretty much helpless. Spawn uses his magic to destroy the cyborgs, heal Batman and, in the process, spending about two and a half pages inside Batman's head. In the process, in which they come to know one another's origins and gain a new understanding with one another, Spawn shares the truth about Love/Vladova with Batman.

While Batman isn't exactly grateful for the save ("If there's one thing I can't stand, it's a dead punk that won't shut up," he tells Spawn), they finally team up, share a double-page splash (an image that artist Greg Capullo seems to have recreated for his contribution to the two-image gallery at the back of the Batman/Spawn: The Classic Collection), attack Vladova's boat full of brain-washed elites, a high-tech arsenal and a primed-to-launch, nuclear-tipped missile aimed at the city. 

While the villainess dies during the battle—in maybe the messiest bit of storytelling of the whole comic, the precise circumstances of her death aren't clear—she launches the missile, and it's up to Spawn with his magic powers and Batman with his clear mind, deft hands and all-around know-how to stop it.

The two heroes bicker on the penultimate page, and, when Spawn points out how they just saved the whole city, maybe the whole world together and asks, "What do you say we just bury the hatchet?", Batman replies with, "Bury this."

The last page, an otherwise silent splash page, reveals that the "this" was a batarang, and it has indeed been buried...right in the middle of Spawn's face, his sickly green blood covering the black, metal weapon and gushing from the wound.

The readers, and Batman, know that Spawn will, of course, live, but man, what a dick this version of Batman is, huh? 

I can't help but wonder if this image, and the wordplay leading up to it, wasn't something that Miller conceived of very early in the project and then worked backwards from to tell a story that might get to it. 

So that's Miller's story, a sort of simple team-up one, in which the character's are introduced separately, put into circumstances causing them to fight one another...put into circumstances to fight one another again, and then ultimately must unite to take on a common foe that they could only defeat by working together. Miller's only real innovation of the classic formula, which I feel was introduced and perfected by Marvel (but maybe not), is to add a second round of fighting, and, despite the initial misunderstanding, keeping the heroes at one another's throats throughout the proceedings. 

As for McFarlane's art, he had, of course, drawn Batman before, rather famously in "Batman: Year Two"...at least the early parts of that story, which was, of course, positioned as a direct sequel to the Miller-written "Batman: Year One". Therefore, he had a decent amount of experience with both characters...though he was obviously much more experienced with Spawn, the character he created. 

His Batman reminded me quite a bit of Norm Breyfogle's, especially in the way in which he would often draw the character mostly as a partial silhouette, an angry, jagged black shape with sharply pointed ears, the white of his triangle eyes and bared teeth and the yellow of the bat-symbol sometimes being the only details visible (In fact, McFarlane so often draws Batman's head in shadow, it's genuinely unusual to see the lower half of his face, the flesh-colored chin that juts out from beneath his cowl, at all in this book).

In addition to Breyfogle, McFarlane's Batman reminded me a bit of that of Joe Quesada, who drew the Dark Knight in 1992 mini-series Batman: Sword of Azrael and, most memorably to me, the cover of the 1992 Batman Gallery. And, of course, I think there's more than a bit of Miller's own DKR Batman in there, particularly in the short, more broad triangle-shaped ears (in the mid-90's, Batman's ears tended towards the long) and the big bat-symbol.

McFarlane seems to have contributed a distinctly huge cape, one that flares up like titanic bat-wings in perhaps the most dramatic image of Batman McFarlane draws, and pools around the character when he's standing still. This was, remember, back before Kelley Jones had started as the regular artist on Batman, too; at this point, Jones was only drawing covers for Bat-comics (McFarlane had previously, somewhat famously, drawn a huge bat-cape with a life of its own on a 1988 Batman cover).

There seems to be, in at least one panel, a bit of Spider-Man to McFarlane's Batman too, in the way he gathers his bat-rope in his hands, the slack forming a crazy pattern that trails off at great length. 

Beyond the drawings of the two heroes, I found the art serviceable but not particularly remarkable. Like I said, the cyborgs seemed a little too stylized, bordering on the cartoonish, and the handful of civilian characters, including the villain and Alfred, aren't particularly distinct nor notable.

Oh, one thing I noticed about the art was that McFarlane has Spawn's mask seemingly coming and going at random throughout the story, although given what we know about his costume being something of a living creature, I couldn't tell if this was due to the occasional art mistake in the book's continuity, or if it was intentional, as that's how Spawn's mask actually works (In War Devil, he's shown removing it, as if it was a piece of cloth he wore).

Tom Orzechowski, who seems to have been the original and regular Spawn letterer, handles the letters here as well, and thus the character's signature dialogue balloons look much more at home in this comic than they did in War Devil, where they stuck out as somewhat foreign or alien and, as I had said, seemed to suggest that Spawn was talking really, really, inappropriately loud all the time. 

Overall, I think Spawn/Batman still reads as the superior of the two 1994 one-shots pairing the two characters. On a technical level, Klaus Janson's War Devil might be better drawn, but McFarlane's issue is more expressive, more highly stylized and thus a bit more visually interesting.

In terms of writing, it's hard to judge the two against one another. Miller's script is, like McFarlane's art, more stylized and, I think it's safe to say, more over-the-top. It's also a bit more unique, reading so unlike so many other superhero team-ups and crossovers. It's definitely a better Spawn story, if not a very good Batman story...which, of course, might be why DC took some pains to differentiate it as a story of Miller's Dark Knight Returns Batman, and not, you know, the real Batman.

As for Batman and Spawn's 2022 team-up, I'm not rereading that and trying to write about it again. I covered it here, though, if you would like to read what I thought of it when it came out. 

When Batman Met Spawn Pt. 1: On 1994's Batman/Spawn: War Devil #1

DC Comics and Image Comics collaborated on a Batman/Spawn crossover in 2022, a book that seemed likely to have been occasioned by the fact that artist Greg Capullo, once primarily known as the artist of Spawn, had since had a long run as the primary artist on Batman. In other words, the popular artist had become pretty much the ideal candidate to draw a Batman/Spawn crossover. 

Spawn creator Todd McFarlane rounded out the creative team for that one-shot special, writing the script and inking Capullo's pencil art (Despite the fact that, as quickly becomes evident when reading the resultant book, McFarlane is not the greatest of writers).

I went ahead and bought it, because hey, how often does Batman meet Spawn? (Three times. The answer is three times.) 

While I didn't really care for it, it did make remind me of the first two times the characters met, in a pair of one-shots from 1994, and I thought about revisiting those comics to see how they compared...and, of course, to see how they had aged over the course of some three decades.

DC and Image made it easy to do so, collecting those comics into the hardcover Batman/Spawn: The Classic Collection...although I missed it upon its initial release, and just remembered it recently (Perhaps put in the mind of 1990s crossovers by recently writing about the two Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles/Flaming Carrot team-ups here and here, or perhaps being reminded of the each-publisher-does-its-own-version style of crossover by hearing folks on social media discuss Marvel's recent Deadpool/Batman, with a DC-produced Batman/Deadpool to follow).

Regardless, I finally got around to revisiting these 31-year-old comics via their 2022 collection. That collection looks surprisingly slim at just 112-pages—Of course, the two one-shots in collects weren't very long, so that does make sense—but it's a nicely designed package.

It looks like it features new cover art by Capullo and McFarlane, featuring the two characters confronting one another, bathed in the sickly green of Spawn's hell-spawned magical powers. And I see they used one of the Batman logos of the 1990s for the cover, the same style logo that was atop the cover of the DC crossover, entitled Batman/Spawn: War Devil (the wraparound cover of which is atop this post).

There's not much in the way of additional features, either, just a pin-up "gallery" of two images. One is a double-page splash featuring a tight close-up of the two heroes flying through the sky, drawn by Greg Capullo (and dated with a "'93"). It's certainly interesting to see how much Capullo's art has changed over the years, particularly his Batman. 

The other pin-up is a "jam" piece by the Spawn/Batman creators, Frank Miller and McFarlane, depicting the two heroes kinda sorta standing in air, a big full moon and a city skyline in the background, and bats flocking everywhere. McFarlane obviously drew Spawn and Miller Batman, and as for the rest, I'd guess those were Miller's buildings and McFarlane's bats (His bats are prominently featured on the cover of Spawn #1 and #3, for compaison's sake). 

I'm going to tackle each of the two crossovers in two separate posts. This one will be devoted to the DC-produced Batman/Spawn: War Devil #1. 

I always found the creative team for this book, which I had of course bought and read upon its initial release, to be a curious one. It has not one writer, not two writers, but three writers. These are Doug Moench, Chuck Dixon and Alan Grant, who were at the time writing the three ongoing Batman titles, Batman, Detective Comics and Shadow of the Bat. 

Why did DC, or perhaps the book's editor Denny O'Neil, decide to enlist the entire Batman line's writing staff for a relatively short and extremely straightforward 48-page story? I didn't know then and I still don't know for sure, as certainly any one of these gentlemen could have handled the assignment and done an admirable job of it. If I had to guess, I would guess that O'Neil, and probably the writers themselves, wanted them all to share in what I imagine must have been fairly decent royalties accompanying what I have to assume was a potentially very good selling book. 

I have no idea how popular Spawn was in 1994, of course. The character's book launched in 1992, and in May of 1994, the month War Devil was released, the most recent issue of Spawn was February's #18, which I see was written by Grant Morrison (!) and drawn by Capullo and Art Thibert. (Me, I had dropped the book after the first five issues, then returned for 1993's #8-11, those written by Alan Moore, Neil Gaiman, Dave Sim and Frank Miller. Other than the three Batman crossovers, I don't think I ever read another issue of Spawn*.) The character's not-very-good live-action film was still three years away, as was the HBO animated series, so I assume the character's popularity had then yet to climax.

As for the art on War Devil, it was provided not by one of the then-regular artists of the Bat-titles (or all of them, as with the writers), but by Klaus Janson, who also colored his work (with Steve Buccellato).  Janson wouldn't have been my first choice for the project at the time. I thought (and still think) Norm Breyfogle would have been perfect. In addition to being my favorite Batman artist, I always thought there was some aesthetic similarity between he and McFarlane when it came to drawing their caped heroes, particularly in terms of their dynamism (In fact, one of the things that attracted me to McFarlane's Spawn originally was that it looked somewhat Breyfogle-esque to my teenage eye). 

Those two artists could tend towards the cartoony in their expressions sometimes, they sometimes drew similar bats (compare the one to Harold's right on this cover to those on those Spawn covers I linked to earlier, for example), and there's this one trick they would both occasionally employ, which I don't have any examples to point to in front of me, nor the words to describe it; basically, when something exciting, shocking or extremely dramatic might happen, the panel itself would sort of "scream", with jagged white lines biting into the image (Next time I see examples, I'll try to post some). 

But by 1994, it had been almost a year since Breyfogle's last issue of Shadow of the Bat, and he was about a year into his series Prime for Malibu, a series I never read and, unfortunately, may never read, given who Breyfogle's collaborator was on that series and what became of him...somehow, I don't see any publisher collecting any of his work ever again. 

My other choice to draw a Batman/Spawn crossover would have been my other favorite Batman artist, then Batman cover artist Kelley Jones, whose preference for drawing gigantic capes, billowing and flapping as if they were alive, makes him a perfect artist for Spawn, a character I don't think he's ever officially drawn (Not even, I was surprised and disappointed to find, on one of the coves for the 2022 crossover, accompanied as it was by variant covers from so many Batman artists). 

Instead, they went with Janson, who even then was a veteran artist with a long list of solid, quality comics on his resume (At the time, I knew him best as the guy who inked Miller on The Dark Knight Returns, though).

Whoever DC went with, though, I think it would have been interesting, given that the Spawn character was so associated with the art of his creator. I'm not sure how many other artists might have actually drawn Spawn by spring of 1994 (Capullo had done a few issues of Spawn by then, but perhaps the character appeared in pin-ups by other artists, or had guest-appearances in other Image books...? Not sure if Hilary Barta's Stupid cover counts or not...). But I can't imagine it was very many, and thus seeing any other artist drawing Todd McFarlane's Spawn character would have probably been something of a novelty.

I think Janson does a decent job with Spawn. He honors the massive cape and streaming chains of McFarlane's version, although they do tend to look a little off at times. Though Batman's cape is similarly sometimes unrealistically big and billowing, Janson's style is realistic enough to make the exaggerated, expressive flourishes feel less than natural. 

I also think seeing Janson's take on Spawn somewhat underlines some of the weaknesses in the design. As striking as the character might look, it's pretty clear he wasn't designed to be a character that could be drawn over and over again by anyone, the many fussy details—the skulls, the randomly-placed spikes, the white stripes—making him a figure an artist has to linger one, and a reader's eye might get stuck on. 

What surprised me most about re-reading the book today, however, was the discordant clash of the various lettering styles. The book was lettered by Todd Klein, who, in addition to being one of the handful of names of letterers most comics readers will actually know is, I think it's safe to say, one of the best in the business. As a reader, he is who I would want to be lettering the comic I'm reading. And, were I producing a comic book, he's the letterer I would want handling it.

Klein honors the exact style of Spawn's signature dialogue balloons and narration boxes. The former have a very specific font with bigger than usual sized letters, the border of the balloon thick and black, and surrounded by a second, thicker, gray-colored border. The tails are also quite distinct, dramatically hooking like little sickles in Spawn's direction. 

As for the latter, these are the customary yellow, but feature the same too-big type size, jagged irregular borders and an underlying layer of green that make them look somewhat 3D. (Tom Orzechowski lettered the first issue of Spawn, and I assume is responsible for the distinct style of Spawn's visual "voice"). 

The intent, I think it's safe to say, is to suggest that Spawn's voice doesn't really sound like anyone else's and, given what else we know about the character, it's probably meant to sound a little deeper, a little louder and perhaps spookier than the voices of normal people.

But now, after decades of communicating via email, text and social media, long, long after we all agreed that writing in all-caps suggested shouting or yelling, reading panels of Spawn in conversation with Batman, wherein the Image Comics hero's dialogue is so much bigger and bolder than Batman's, it now looks like Spawn is always talking in an inappropriately loud voice, like perhaps he's hard of hearing or something. 

The most fun aspect of the book for me in 2025, though, was reading a script written by Moench, Grant and Dixon, three writers who, by this point, I have read untold hundreds of pages of comics by and have long since become familiar with their individual styles and personal tics. 

I didn't notice at all in 1994, but now it seems apparent that, if they all collaborated on the plot, they apparently took turns scripting the pages, as some read as obviously the work of Dixon, for example, while others sound just like Grant or Moench. (The first clue that they are taking turns is in the lettering, too; one page will feature the regular bolding and italicization of certain words in the sentence, as some comics writers practice, while the facing page will hardly have any bolded, italicized words at all.)

I'm not saying I could necessarily tell who was writing each page in all 48 cases—a Grant script and a Moench script are closer to one another than either is to a Dixon one, for example—but it's often quite clear when the baton is passed, and it's a lot of fun trying to parse who's writing which page. 

There are, of course, some obvious tells. For example, when the two heroes fight a literal demon from hell at the climax, there's a panel in which Batman throws three objects in the direction of the monster, and, in his thought cloud, he thinks, "Percussion caps!". Grant would often have Batman announce, either to himself or his opponent or the reader, what weapon he might be pulling from his utility belt to use. 

Earlier, when the Dark Knight is fighting a couple of security guards over the course of a mostly word-less page, the sound effects are all pure Moench: KUNCH, TUNCH, THROK, HWOK, SWUKK.

And so on.

Perhaps unsurprisingly given the writers, War Devil is a pretty good Batman story, and a fairly weak Spawn one (I do wonder how it might have read if the Batman writing staff added a fourth writer, in the form of McFarlane). Re-reading it today, I didn't really get any sense of who Spawn actually was. What's his status quo? What's his background? What exactly are his powers, and how do they work? There are few clues here. From this particular comic, all that is evident is that he is a semi-amnesiac former hitman who now has undefined magic powers he uses when encountering supernatural opponents sent to attack him. 

That, and that he is somewhat new to being a superhero. "You're new at this, aren't you?" Batman asks, after beating "the living crap" out of Spawn. And, in the last panels of the comic, Spawn watches as Batman swings away, thinks about the kind of man Batman is and, in the story's very last words, thinks "The kind of man I'll be."

It would take very little retooling to adjust this script so that, instead of Spawn, it featured pretty much any supernatural hero helping Batman on a case involving the forces of the underworld: Doctor Fate, The Spectre, John Constantine, whoever.

The comicopens in the Roanoke colony in 1587 North Carolina, with the birth of Virginia Dare, the first British child born in America, and the mysterious disappearance of the 100 people who lived there, the only clue as to what might have happened being "a single word carved or burned into the trunk of a tree, far higher than a man could reach: 'Croatoan'."

In this telling of the real-life historical mystery, though, there's also a second clue, "although no one could see it." Janson draws the settlement from above, and it's clear the trees of the surrounding forest have been cut down in a very specific pattern, forming a five-pointed star around its walls and buildings.

In modern Gotham City, beneath a sky full of blimps, Batman is looking for a Virgil Dare, who has something to do with a shipment of explosives and Gotham real estate ("Bombs and buildings," Batman thinks to himself, "A bad combination... ...if ever the twain are permitted to meet"). The search for Dare leads him to eccentric architect Simon Vesper, a man who has been missing for years, a man who, in fact, Batman had seen shot to death before his eyes, although the body immediately disappeared. Vesper resurfaces suddenly, just as Gotham Tower, a long-time project of Vesper's, is about to be completed and opened for the public.

Meanwhile, Spawn, who we meet sitting among the boxes at the back of an alley, has a newspaper blown into his lap, and its front page has a story and image about Gotham Tower, which prompts his memory of being hired to kill Vesper, back when he was still Colonel Al Simmons. He strides off towards Gotham.

Batman visits the tower, where he finds a blood-splattered elevator ("It looks like a slaughterhouse"), and the body of Virgil Dare, his throat cut, laying in the middle of a five-pointed star drawn in blood, the word "Croatoan" written in blood on the floor.

As Batman is leaving the tower through a window and swinging away, Spawn spots him, drops on him from several stories above, delivering a flying kick to the Dark Knight's abdomen on a two-page splash.

"So, he sent another of you losers?" Spawn says, while Batman responds with a pained, "UNNH!" 

When they reach the ground, Spawn talking the whole way down, his fist glows green and he points it at Batman, who has broken his fall by grabbing a flagpole and landed atop a nearby parked car. 

In maybe the book's only funny moment, Spawn is surprised to find that nothing has happened to Batman.

Apparently, Spawn saw Batman's costume and assumed he was some kind of demon from Hell (In this story, Spawn has apparently never heard of Batman, despite the fact that they share the same world, rather than, like, coming from different dimensions or realities or whatever). He had tried to magic him back to Hell, but it doesn't work, because Batman is not actually a demon from Hell. 

Batman then flying kicks Spawn, punches him in the face three times, and ultimately kicks him through a nearby store window. The fight part of the fight-and-then-team-up ritual is short, and decidedly one-sided. Though Spawn readers will know that the character has genuine super-powers that would make him more than a match for Bats, here Spawn finds no reason to prove himself, simply pointing at Batman from the ground, and saying, "You don't know how close you came." 

It's not super-clear, but I think that Spawn's powers somehow shut themselves off when he was confronting a regular human being and then turned themselves back of when the fight was over. Is that how they work? It's not how they work in this book's sister publication, Spawn/Batman #1, which we'll discuss in the next post. 

Wait, I guess this part is actually kind of funny too:

Once on the two heroes get on the same page, they head back to Gotham Tower. There, the undead Vesper has gathered Gotham City elite for his diabolical plan. He's blacked out all of the city save for Gotham Tower, had fires set all over in order to create a burning pentagram around the tower, and magically emptied the graveyard, its revived corpses shuffling towards the tower in order to feed on the rich and powerful who Vesper had gathered there.

The plan is, apparently, to open a gateway to hell, offer the souls of all his victims to the/a devil (Vesper rants about "him who is more evil than you can even begin to imagine!", "my dark master," and "the armies of Satan!"), in the hopes of garnering his own corner of Hell to rule.

Vesper tosses Batman around while Spawn is busy investigating the gateway to Hell in the basement, the apparently undead businessman soon transforming into a big, red brute that grows out of Vesper's suit, Hulk-style. When Spawn then arrives to confront him, "Vesper" says, "You're confusing the clothes with the man, Spawn...Vesper is a shell I'm wearing."

He then transforms again, growing bigger still, and taking on a green, vaguely reptilian humanoid form, with a big head and bent limbs and posture that kinda sorta suggests that of McFarlane's Violator from the Spawn comics. The creature then introduces itself, talking in a special, unique font and dialogue bubbles suggesting someone big, ancient and powerful: "BEHOLD THE ARCHFIEND IN EXILE! HE WHO WAITED BUT WAITS NO LONGER-- THE DEMON CROATOAN!"

The fight is mostly Spawn's, Batman's sole contribution being the aforementioned "Percussion caps!", which explode THOOM! THOOM! THOOM! behind Croatoan, distracting it long enough for Spawn to gesture with his hands, shooting sickly green fire that first shrinks and then seems to kill the demon, while he narrates cheesily, remembering the vision of his ex-wife Wanda that he had seen through the portal of Hell earlier: "I pour it out, the hate-- the lust for revenge. Then I remember her face-- --and it's love that finally tears him apart."

Did whoever write this particular page—my guess is Grant, but maybe Moench—want the reader to think of Joy Division at this point? I don't know, but "Love Will Tear Us Apart" was certainly stuck in my head for the rest of the night after reading it.

The day saved, Spawn's powers sending the army of undead to crawl back into their graves, the two heroes stand atop a nearby rooftop to debrief. Batman asks Spawn what happened, and McFarlane's hero responds, "Something evil...If you need a name, call it...'Terrorism of the soul.'"

He then proceeds to ask Batman a rather philosophical question: "You know the darkness, Batman...What is it that makes one man good, the next man evil?"

Batman responds with an unattributed quote that I can't find by plugging into Google, although all the results that did come up were of things written by Nietzsche:

That's beyond me. 

But somebody once said--"Good and evil are not determined by the intercourse of people with one another, but entirely by a man's relationship with himself."

Then the Dark Knight politely excuses himself—Literally saying, "Now if you'll excuse me"—and Spawn has his moment of reverie regarding Batman as a role model.

When the two would next meet, in Spawn/Batman #1 by Frank Miller and Todd McFarlane, they wouldn't be nearly as polite, nor would Spawn find much to admire in Batman, nor would there be any mediation on the nature of good and evil.

There would be a lot of tough guy narration and posturing and a lot of violence, though...

*What about you guys? Have any of you read the Morrison-written Spawn? Should I seek out those issues? As I assume most of you know, I am a fan of Morrison's comics-writing.