Review: Fistful of Blood

Kevin Eastman's relationship with IDW Productions would seem to be a rather fruitful one. In addition to allowing him to keep a hand on the rudder of their Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles ongoing comic–though he is the "Eastman" of "Eastman and Laird's Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles" fame, Nickelodeon has own the franchise for a while now–IDW also indulge Eastman's far less commercially promising projects, like Fistful of Blood.

They published the comic as a four-issue miniseries a few months back and then collected it into this 120-page trade paperback, but the back-story of the comic is a bit more convoluted. Eastman and his friend and one-time studio mate Simon Bisley originally created it for Heavy Metal magazine circa 2001, and it looks like it was previously collected in 2002. This version isn't that version, at least, not exactly. Eastman refers to it as a "re-mastered version" in the ample back matter included after the actual story, noting that he redrew every page (and colorist Tomi Varga turned the once black-and-white comic into the full-color version that fills these pages).

Even without knowing that, it's evident that Eastman and Bisley both had a great deal of creative input on the pages of this book, and while their precise working method isn't exactly defined, the results reminded me quite a bit of Eastman's early collaborations with Peter Laird, where they both seemed to have written, penciled and inked every panel together, and it was difficult to tell exactly who did what. This is a little like that, as there's a lot of Eastman and a lot of Bisley on almost every page and, interestingly, some pages look a lot like the work of Bisley. In the behind-the-scenes section, Eastman says that they discussed the book together, he did the lay-outs (many of which are included), Bisley did the pencils and then they both worked on finishing the pages together...and now, of course, they've been re-finished and colored.

It's an unusual kind of collaboration, really, more like the construction of rock music by a band than the normal, strict division of duties often associated with comics: It can be hard to tell where Eastman ends and Bisley begins, and, as a fan of either or both artists, it's a blast to try and pick out who drew which line, and who designed which background character throughout (Do note that the cover of the book, above, is clearly all Eastman).

As the title and the Western setting allude to, the comic was created as a deliberate reference to 1964
s A Fistful of Dollars. Eastman writes that it was mean to be a parody of the classic Eastwood Western, but its more of a high-concept riff, "with Zombies, Vampires and Aliens...long before they became all the rage." A quick couple of keystrokes confirms that this genre mash-up predates Platinum Studios' controversial Cowboys & Aliens comic book by a half-decade, and the resurgence of the zombie genre with 28 Days Later by a year.

The basic plot construction is borrowed directly from A Fistful of Dollars. A woman with no name stumbles into town. She is comically well-endowed in the way that only a comic book character could be–and clearly designed and drawn by Bisley–and dressed only in a bra and underpants.* She is immediately set upon by one of the two local gangs, and dispatches them all pretty quickly. Later, she's attacked by a member of the rival gang, and kills him handily as well.

One gang is a bunch of zombies, the other a bunch of vampires, and they've turned an abandoned Western movie set into a literal tourist trap, where their human servant helps them lure visitors in with the promise of a Western theme experience, and then the two warring gangs of ghouls divide up the blood and flesh of their victims.

The woman with no name, the taciturn character sometimes called "Blondie," eventually agrees to help each gang dispatch the members of the other, but it all ends with a huge battle in which her true nature is revealed (Eastman's quote above spoils it; if you didn't catch it, let's just say she's a very strange stranger indeed) as is the real reason she wandered into this particular town in the first place.

The relative slightness of the plot, and the fact that it is borrowed from a movie (which, of course, borrowed it from another movie) means how much fun a reader will have with the book likely revolves around how much one enjoys the work of the two artists. (Personally, I'm a big fan of both.) That, and, perhaps, how much affection one might have for horror creatures like these.

They are very Hollywood in their conception. The zombies walk and talk and are all-around sentient, and they're always all dressed up in cowboy style; they look a bit like Jonah Hex all of him was as ugly as the one half of his face. The vampires, by contrast, all look like variations of the title character from Nosferatu: Bald, big ears, eyes and fangs, billowing black robes, long skeletal fingers ending in claws. A few of them are more colorful, dressed in Asian exotica fashions and looking pretty bizarre.

The designs are all fairly cartoonish, and bear Bisley's general aesthetic. Eastman shares his original designs for the characters, and it's amazing how different (and different for the better) they ended up, with the main character being the one with the least bit of redesign. That back-matter I keep referring to fills 32 pages of this collection, and there's plenty of commentary from Eastman, along with sketches, lay-outs, character designs, storyboards for a movie adaptation that was never made (at least, not yet) and so on. Apparently Eastman adapted it into a film script with a few friends (one of whom was comics writer Paul Jenkins), and came up with ideas for a pair of sequels based on For a Few Dollars More and The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly, which "will see the light of day...one day, either as a comic series or some other form."

I don't know about movies–this particular story is scant enough that it looks like the sort of narrative that could very easily be ruined by filmmakers trying to fix it**–but I'd be interested in seeing those ideas as comics. Particularly if Eastman could re-team with Bisley, because their collaboration is a large part of what made this book so much fun.

In fact, it's kind of hard to imagine this book without Bisley, as his style incorporates so much caricature into the cartooning that it keeps one from ever taking the proceedings too seriously. As high-concept as this might be, it's a rather low-brow form of high-concept, with meant to be laughed with. Despite the horror tropes, it's much more of a B-movie splatter-stick kind of affair than an actual work of horror meant to scare a reader. Under the pencils and pens of different artists, this could be anywhere from terrible to offensive. Under those of Eastman and Bisley, however, it's a damn good time.



*I was going to write "panties" but it has recently come to my attention that women don't like, or even use the word "panties." Is that true, ladies? Or only true of the women I talk to...?

**Well, unless Quentin Tarantino, or someone who similarly loved the source material and was similarly talented at "sampling" other films in their work were was the filmmaker doing the adaptation. But one imagines that From Dusk Till Dawn is the last horror/western mash-up Tarantino will be involved in. For what it's worth, the plot of this comic is far superior to that of From Dusk Till Dawn though.

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.

The Batman/Judge Dredd Collection Part 1, Judgment on Gotham

One of the first comic books I ever read, probably among the first dozen at the most, was the 1991 "prestige format" special Batman/Judge Dredd: Judgement On Gotham, a fully-painted, seemingly once-in-a-lifetime meeting between the most prominent and popular American superhero (who just had a major motion picture in theaters a few years ago, and had another one due the following year) and a character I was told was his British equivalent. That sure sounded like something to read!

It was one of my earlier exposures to comic book Batman, my first exposure to Batman villain The Scarecrow and, of course, my very first exposure to Judge Dredd and the members of his supporting cast that appeared within the story: Psychic fellow officer of the law Judge Anderson, archenemy Judge Death, and less-arch eneemy Mean Machine Angel.

I loved it, although re-reading it many years later, I see that I missed a lot of elements of it, particularly the fact that Dredd and the comics world that emanates around him isn't meant to be a straight one in the manner that Batman and his Gotham are. If Batman comics were usually meant to be read as serious, Judge Dredd comics weren't necessarily meant to be un-serious, but they were often written, drawn and intended with tongue-in-cheek, with parodic elements, with jokes. Not that it mattered to 14-year-old Caleb, who was mainly entranced by the art of Simon Bisley, who presented an exaggerated, heavy metal album cover world of Gotham City and Mega-City One, with garish, cartoony characters covered in realistically rendered muscles, flesh and textures. It looked like Dave McKean's Arkham Asylum, but read like a regular Batman comic from the era (Thanks, in large part, to the fact that it was written by John Wagner and Alan Grant, a writing team with plenty of Dredd and Batman experience; Wagner, of course, was Dredd's co-creator, and while he and Grant started out co-writing Batman comics for DC; Grant later went solo, becoming one of the more prolific and longer-tenured Batman writers).

I suppose Bisley's images of a topless Anderson didn't hurt...

Nor did a rather bravura splash page in which Bisely illustrates what Anderson sees when she takes a peak in Batman's head:

This, remember, was among my earliest exposure to DC Comics' Batman, and the suggestive painting of a strange, scary, brightly-colored world seen in that splash went a long way toward selling me on Batman comics. If that image was representative, what was I missing by not reading Batman comics...?

(It's interesting to look at again now, after having read hundreds of the damn things. The Joker, Penguin and Catwoman are all prominent; dig The Joker's bottle-green suit and Catwoman's peculiar costume, which echoes Batman's own, particularly as drawn by Bisley in this book). There's Judge Dredd and Judge Death, so recently on his mind. There's Robin, whose 1988/1989 death Batman was still rather pointedly mourning. There's a repeat of the shooting death of the Waynes, and a monster at crashing through glass, as in Frank Miller and David Mazzucchelli's version of Batman's origin. There's Judges Death and Dredd, obviously quite fresh in Batman's mind. There's a couple of nasty-looking guys in the upper-right hand corner that could be Batman villains of some sort, the one on the right looks a bit like Clayface III, but given Bisley's style of goon, it is likely just a random bad guy. The character I'm most intrigued by is the one just below that pair, who looks like Wildcat with a cooler, more articulated mask than he's usually given. I'm not sure if that's meant to be Catman, as he doesn't at all resemble the character as he appeared in a 1990 Alan Grant-written encounter with Batman, or Wildcat, who he does closely resemble but who at that point wasn't conceived of as having played any real role in Batman's life. I'm assuming its just Bisley's version of Catman, drawn from his own memory or imagination, or just his response to a script calling for the drawing of "a bunch of weird, dramatic, traumatic Batman stuff" as he saw fit. Cool drawing though).

As much as I liked the book, and as much as it served as a gateway into the world of Batman comics (and DC superhero comics in general), I never read the three sequels. Each of these was also written by Alan Grant and John Wagner, but none of them were painted by Simon Bisley (the major draw of the first one for me) and, by 1995 the very words "Judge Dredd" caused me to recoil in terror, having seen a movie by that title that...didn't really help sell that particular brand to me.

It is now 2014, of course, and in the (jeez) 23 years since Judgment On Gotham, there have been seven more Batman films, one more Judge Dredd film and I've read hundreds and hundreds of comics, including plenty of Judge Dredd comics (though still nowhere near as many as I have Batman comics) and learned the names and work of almost all of these other guys who made all of these other Batman/Dredd crossovers.

So remembering Judgment On Gotham the other day, I thought it was well past time I read all those sequels, and thought I'd see if they had ever all been collected and, naturally enough in our Golden Age of Collections, they have been!

In 2012 DC published The Batman/Judge Dredd Collection, featuring all four of the two characters' crossovers, with Lobo/Judge Dredd: Psycho-Bikers Vs. The Mutants From Hell thrown in as a sort of epilogue; despite its complete lack of Batman, it does feature Dredd crossing paths with a DC Universe character, and it is written by Grant and Wagner.

The collection is rather recent in vintage, coming after the New 52 reboot and after the intro of the new new DC Comics logo (which "2000 AD" appears directly beneath) in the upper right corner. They used Mike Mignola's cover for the Vendetta in Gotham, the second Dredd/Batman get-together, and the only one in this book that isn't painted (save the Lobo cover). I woulda used the Judgment cover, which both came first and looks a bit more prestigious, but I suppose Mignola is a bigger name than Bisley, and one that's moved more trades from the shelves of US book stores and comic shops over the years. On the right, all of the titles of the stories are listed (note how you can determine the particular Batman villains used in the final stories based solely on their titles), and, in a column on the left, the creators, with Wagner and Grant getting top-billing, followed by artists Simon Bisley, Glenn Fabry and, surprising to me at least, Val Semeiks (who only contributes the Lobo story) and then Cam Kennedy, who I would have thought a bigger name than Semeiks.

The tone of the collection seems to hew closer to that of 2000 AD than DC Comics, with the dust jacket issuing such warnings from the "Justice Department" as Warning: Explosive Contents—Handle With Care and Contains excitement levels that may cause unexpected side effects.

I considered reviewing the whole she-bang in one interminably long post, interminably long posts being, of course, the only kind of long posts I do here at EDILW, but I figured I would split them up, story by story, in part to make the piece more reader-friendly and, in greater part, so that I could kill the better part of a week reviewing a single book.

So let's start with 1991's Wagner, Grant and Bisley production, Judgment on Gotham.

The book opens with what must be one of the weirdest openings to any Bamtan comic I've read, the familiar Bat-symbol slowly morphing, over the course of four panels, into two people making out, and then we see a monster's POV sequence as the main villain of the piece sneaks up on his first victims:

Also, there's honest-to-God nudity in a DC comic!

Batman, who Bisley draws to look sort of like Kelley Jones' Batman—extremely long, horn-like ears, huge cape constantly curling its serrated edges like it has a life of its own, muscles bulging through the costume as if it were bodypaint rather than body armor, exaggerated emotion in every expression—but with the careful, painterly detail of Brian Bolland's Batman, hears the screams and reacts. He arrives to find the ghoulish Judge Death, a lisping creature with his own personal dialogue bubble style who "Jjjudgges" every living thing he comes across, plunging his bony claws into the victims, sentencing them to death, and then facing off against a few Gotham police officers.

After a brief melee in which Batman first impales Death upon a wrought-iron fence ("Impaled! I didn't mean to kill it--!") and then incinerates him in an accidental explosion involving stray gunfire at a gas station, Batman examines the corpse of Judge Death after its spirit flies away, screaming "Jjudggmenttt will be carried out ALLLL WILLL DIEEEEEEEeeeeeee", and our hero finds a strange belt, which—FAZZZT!—teleports him to Mega-City One.

There he meets Mean Machine Angel and after a fight that leads to Batman saving Angel from plummeting to his death, Judge Dredd assumes the pair to be in cahoots. Angel escapes using the "D-belt" device that allows for travel from the pages of 2000 AD publications into the DC Universe, leaving Batman to meet Judge Dredd.

He doesn't get along with this particular lawman nearly as well as he does Commissioner Gordon.

Unarmed and un-masked, Batman's being interrogated by Dredd and risking a fifteen year sentence just for the weapons in his utility belt, when Anderson arrives. After exposition explaining what the hell Judge Death is exactly—one of four extra-dimensional "Dark Judges" that believes since all crime is committed by the living, all life must be eradicated to prevent crime—Dredd and Anderson argue over whether they should journey back to Gotham with Batman to save the city and capture Death, or throw Batman in a cell and then throw away the key.

I loved and still love this scene where Batman punches Dredd in the face:

I'm not sure if this is what Grant, Wagner and Bisley intended, but it reads like Batman gets so angry and desperate to save Gotham that he's able to snap the ropes binding him to a chair and punch dread hard enough to shatter his visor and knock him on his knees, all in one single, fluid motion.

"Make it twenty!" is a pretty good, Hollywood action movie-like line, too. I think I'd rather watch a Batman V. Dredd: Punching and More Punching than a Batman V. Superman: Dawn of Justice movie...

Back in Gotham, the now ghost-like Death is seeking a new host body, and happens across Batman villain The Scarecrow in a morgue. In retrospect, I find it curious that Wagner and Grant chose to use The Scarecrow as their Batman villain, in large part because, in 1991, The Scarecrow not only wasn't Batman's archenemy, he might not have even made the top-ten list of most readers.

The two strike a deal and, before long, The Scarecrow and his henchman are providing a new host body for Death and doing their level best to come up with a costume that vaguely resembles the one he was wearing.

In Mega-City One, Anderson and Batman strike a deal of their own, which involves Anderson breaking Batman out and escaping with him back to Gotham, with Dredd hot on their heels.

It all culminates at a heavy metal concert in Robinson Park, where Scarecrow and Judge Death are drawn because of the huge crowd's number of potential victims. Mean Machine Angel is drawn there because he hears the band's name—Living Death—and assumes it refers to Judge Death, who stole the D-Belt from him and with whom he now has a score to settle. And Batman and the Judges show up because, well, that's where the bad guys are.

After a brief musical performance by Judge Death—a parody of the Rolling Stones' "Sympathy for the Devil," which I hadn't recognized as a teenager because I hadn't actually heard
any Rolling Stones songs as far as I knew at that point—everyone fights, and the good guys win.

Bisley gives both of the title heroes pretty bad-ass splash pages:

Dredd wants to take Batman back to Mega-City One with him in order to serve his time, but Anderson intervenes, convincing Dredd to back off for now, and he complies, noting of Batman once the Dark Knight is well out of earshot, "Bit of a tough guy."

Wagner and Grant naturally get the voices of their heroes and villains just right, and Dredd and Batman make particularly good foils for one another. Despite the fact that both are crime-fighters, the fact that Batman is a vigilante with a perhaps-unusual-given-his-vigilantism faith in the 20th century's legal system and Dredd is a completely uncompromising police officer, judge and jury all in one is more than enough to keep them bickering for as many pages as their publishers will allow them to share.

Re-reading this now, I'm also struck by how well the tones of the two strips match-up. The Batman side of things might be slightly more humorous than usual (The Scarecrow's fear gas comes out of a spray can labeled "Fear-O-Sol, Guaranteed Ozone Unfriendly" for example, and there's that awesome scene where Scarecrow shows Judge Death that which he fears the most), but, for the most part, the gag elements come from the Gothamites reacting to the invading characters. The sober, serious Batman more than once refers to the denizens of the Dredd strip as madmen.

But, as I said earlier the greatest attribute this story had, at least as far as I was concerned, was Bisley's art.

There's not a whole lot of difference between his Mega-City One and his Gotham in terms of lighting and texture, but his Gotham is certainly more cartoony and futuristic-looking than usual. There are collage elements used in providing signage, the cops tool around in a big, silver sports car and carry Cable-sized pistols, and most are extremely exaggerated in build and/or design, wearing out-sized blue hats.

I particularly like Bisley's Death when the character is incorporeal, at which point he has his regular head and sometimes hands, but otherwise looks like a rather filthy specter, composed of fluid, flowing ectoplasm.

The effect of his trying to enter other characters, like The Scarecrow here, is similarly neat.

And Bisley's portrayal of the "D-jumps," when characters move from one dimension to another, are pretty cool:

I sure have aged since the last time I read this story, but, surprisingly, it doesn't seem to have done likewise.

Review: Fear Itself: Deadpool/Fearsome Four

This collection does not feature a Deadpool/Fearsome Four team-up, as the title might make one think. Rather, it collects two separate and unconnected Fear Itself tie-in series: the three-part Deadpool series and the four-part Fearsome Four series.

This is the way Marvel handled a bunch of the tie-in minis, which at three-to-four issues were generally too short to fill up a sizable trade collection of their own.

There doesn’t even seem to be a lot of logic to the pairings either, as evidenced from this particular collection. The two miniseries have nothing in common with one another beyond both being Fear Itself tie-ins.

They don’t share any characters, the characters don’t share a franchise or family, no creators are involved in both stories (Contrast this collection to FI: Avengers, which collected two Avengers titles by the same writer).

It was the second half of this book that interested me, and convinced me to pick it up. That name may be borrowed from some old Fantastic Four villains, but the make-up of the thrown-together team include some of my favorite Marvel characters, locked in conflict with another of my favorite Marvel characters (Howard the Duck, She-Hulk, The Defenders’ Nighthawk and Marvel’s fur vest rocking Frankenstein team-up to take on Man-Thing).

The involvement of artists Michael Kaluta and Simon Bisley certainly didn’t make that series any less attractive, either.

But let’s start at the beginning, with Deadpool. Despite what I consider a rather valiant attempt on my part, I still don’t quite “get” Deadpool. I can see why other folks like him a lot, but he doesn’t really work for me, and I rarely if ever find him amusing. (Personally, I think he works best as either a villain or as part of an ensemble in a straight story, as in Rick Remender and company’s Uncanny X-Force, for example).

Writer Christopher Hastings (never heard of him; Internet search reveals that the artist responsible for Dr. McNinja is also named Christopher Hastings though) and artist Bong Dazo construct a somewhat random plot involving the character.

As the book opens, Deadpool and two contractors are installing a supervillian security system for a civilian couple, and just as Deadpool is boasting that it can keep Juggernaut himself out, the Juggernaut—now powered-up by his evil Thor hammer—runs in through one wall and out through another wall.

When the contractors’ van is blown up by a mysterious, furry person and the explosion showers the neighborhood with their tools, their hammer strikes Deadpool in the head and he comes up with a weird, circuitous plan I don’t quite remember the details of, even though I just read it.

When he hears about the magic hammers on the news, he decides to decorate the hammer that hit him on the head to make it look special, and then put it in the hands of a lame-o supervillain (The Walrus, whom I had to look up on the Internet to see if he’s original to this series or not; I just assume any Marvel villain whose name is simply that of an animal probably appeared in an issue of a Spider-Man comic at some point).

Then a disguised Deadpool follows The Walrus around, egging him on to commit villainy that he will eventually put a stop to. But, quite randomly, it turns out that the hammer is actually also a magical hammer, just not one of The Serpent’s hammers—instead, it’s an enchanted hammer used for fighting off werewolves, and the contractors were apparently also werewolf-hunters who were going to use it to stave off a werewolf invasion of a small, Arizona town.

The book is packed with jokes, verbal and visual, and several of them are MC Hammer jokes, which is about the level the humor in the series rises too—1990s Saturday Night Live.

I didn’t like anything about it, although Dazo’s art is of a professional quality, and is just cartoony enough to function as both serious superhero comic art and comic comedy art simultaneously.

As for Fearsome Four, it’s written by Brandon Montclare (another writer whose name was unfamiliar to me, although I guess he wrote that not-that-great Halloween Eve one-shot that Amy Reeder drew for Image). And it's artwork? It's artwork is a complete fucking mess.

There are seven artists credited for the four issues, plus three additional artists given “with” credits. A lot of these artists are really great artists, the sorts of artists whose presence on a Marvel event tie-in is eyebrow-raising enough to get a casual reader to at least browse through the series and, incidentally, among some of my favorite artists and/or artists whose work I wish I could see on a monthly basis.

Check out this line up: Simon Bisley, Ryan Bodenheim, Henry Flint, Timothy Green, Tom Grummet, Ray-Anthony Height and Michael Kaluta.

What the fuck went on with this series, behind the scenes, that lead to the weird hodge-podge of artists? I have no idea, but it certainly doesn’t work at all. Bisley is employed strategically, illustrating a section where Man-Thing uses his connection to the Nexus of All Realities to transform the heroes opposing him into monsters (or, in the case of Frankenstein, a more monstrous monster). The other artists come and go seemingly at random, and none stick close to any sort of character design—She-Hulk’s size and shape is just as amorphous as the all-muck swamp monster’s.

Howard the Duck, a character whose real-world history involves legal battles over his very design, looks different on an almost page-by-page basis, with Bisley the only artist drawing him in his original, pre-Disney legal noise version (before he’s transformed into first a duck monster and then a lizard monster).

His height, the size and shape of his bill, his clothes change from panel to panel.

Montclare’s plot at least addresses a question that Man-Thing fans might have wondered about when reading Fear Itself: How would a worldwide outbreak of supernaturally-inspired fear affect the mindless, emotionally empathic Man-Thing, who is drawn to snuff out fear by his own bizarre chemical reaction that immolates its source upon contact with his own body (You know, the whole “whatever knows fear burns at the touch of the Man-Thing” thing).

Man-Thing is in New York City and running amok: He’s getting bigger, he’s attacking at random and fires are being set all around him (of non-sentient things, so I guess all the fear powers him up…?). Howard The Duck is on his trail, wanting to get his old friend to calm down before he ends up hurting himself and/or destroying the city.

On the way, Howard runs into She-Hulk, Frankenstein’s monster and Nighthawk (the latter of whom is portrayed as a complete nut, fighting criminals by clawing at them with his fingertips). Dubbing them the Fearsome Four, they track and try to stop Man-Thing, but are opposed by Fantastic Four villain Psycho-Man and the old, temporary Fantastic Four of (Gray) Hulk, Spider-Man, Wolverine and Ghost Rider…either because including those characters helps justify the appropriation of the name “Fearsome Four,” or because having Spidey and Wolvie in your comic never hurts sales any.

It’s a pretty terrible comic book, really, but is confounding in its bad-ness, given how much talent is involved (if you see this trade on a shop or library shelf, I’d still recommend picking it up, if only to see what a Kaluta Nighthawk looks like).

Much of that is due to the chaotic art, but the story is rather pointless, repetitive and meandering, and told surprisingly straight. It’s a very, very serious story, and how exactly one takes all those particular ingredients and comes up with an almost joke-free, deadly serious story is beyond me.

Meanwhile, at Robot 6...

The above image is a Simon Bisley-drawn one of a dude hogtying a giant owl. It is from The Tower Chronicles: GeistHawk Vol. 1, a new comic I discuss at great length at Robot 6 today, if you would like to go read that discussion.

I'm kind of tempted to put an "owl bondage" tag on this post, but I worry what sort of traffic that will bring my way...

The Scarecrow vs. Judge Death

From Batman/Judge Dredd: Judgment on Gotham by Alan Grant, John Wagner and Simon Bisley (DC Comics; 1991)

Batman Beatdown #3

You can't win 'em all, even if you're Batman, and you therefore win about 99-percent of 'em.

In our ongoing efforts to chronicle the best ass-kickings that Batman, one of comicdom's premier assk-kickers, has endured, we've previously seen Deathstroke totally take him apart, and watched Etrigan, The Demon beat the hell out of him. Clearly Batman has a little more trouble dealing with metahumans and supernatural beings than your plain old regular joes.

There is one regular joe who has suceeded in taking Batman down, however—one Joe Dredd.

It happened in this comic book,



1991's Batman/Judge Dredd: Judgment on Gotham, which was written by John Wagner and Alan Grant, and fully-painted by Simon Bisley.

This is Fourteen-Year-Old Caleb's favortie comic book, and even Thirty-Year-Old Caleb still sees a lot to like about. It's significant for several reasons. Personally, it was my fourth Batman comic and my first Judge Dredd comic. Less personally, it was the first of the three prestige-format comic book meetings between Batman and Dredd, and the only good one.

The plot involves Mean Machine Angel coming to Gotham City via somekind of teleporting maguffin machine. Judge Death follows him, and meets up with the Scarecrow, and it takes the combined forces of Batman, Dredd and Judge Anderson to settle the villains' collective hash.

But first, Dredd and Batman meet, when the latter is accidentally teleported to the future or alternate dimension or alternate dimension's future or whereever it is exactly that Mega City One is located in relation to Gotham City.

They come into conflict immediately, and, unlike 'Stroke and Etrigan, Dredd drops Batman without even exerting himself at all.

Let's watch:


(Click to mega-size it)

Oh my God! Did you see that?! One hit! He knocked Batman out with just one hit! From conscious to unconscious and unmasked in the space of just three-panels!

Now, Dredd may be as human as Batman, but he's no slouch when it comes to beating people up. While he doesn't have any superpowers or robot parts in him, he was born and bred specifically to beat up lawbreakers. Still, taking Batman out in one panel? Pretty damn amazing.

Now to be fair to Batman, this did occur at a point in his career when he was quite used to working with law enforcement officials, so chances are he had his guard down and wasn't expecting that nightstick to the head.

Later in the same book, he does punch Dredd in the face and knock him on his ass, and even has a sweet moment where Dredd's like, "Assaulting a judge, that's ten years!" and Batman responds curtly, "Make it twenty" while kicking Dredd.

Of course, while Batman does knock Dredd down with one hit, he doesn't knock him out. And it was something of a sucker punch, since Dredd was arguing with another character when Batman hit him. So we may never know whom could take whom in a fair fight (Unless that's settled in one of the two sequels to this story, whcih I've completely forgotten the contents of, on account of them not being very good).

But for now, let the record show that Judge Dredd once totally beat down Batman.