The End of JLA Pt. 2: "The Tenth Circle"

Certainly someone at DC Comics in 2004 thought that reteaming writer/artist John Byrne with Chris Claremont was a pretty big deal. 

Both were among the superstars of mainstream superhero comics in the1980s, thanks, in large part, to their popular work at competitor Marvel Comics throughout the decade. 

Claremont had a 17-year stint on Marvel's X-Men characters, spanning 1975 to 1992, during which time he created many of the franchise's characters, popularized others and delivered most of what are now considered the team's classic and most influential stories.

Byrne, meanwhile, had lengthy and well-regarded runs on Uncanny X-Men, Fantastic Four, The Sensational She-Hulk and X-Men spin-off Alpha Flight. Teamed with Claremont for a time on the X-Men, he drew some of those classic and influential stories, like "The Dark Phoenix Saga" and "Days of Future Past."

Byrne also did plenty of pivotal work by DC, of course, most notably recreating the Superman franchise for the modern, post-Crisis market. He also drew the crossover series Legends, served as writer/artist for a rather lengthy run on Wonder Woman and spent a few years on New Gods/Jack Kirby's Fourth World, as well as drawing and writing another event crossover miniseries, Genesis. He also had some big Elseworlds projects and a pair of inventive DC/Marvel crossovers on his resume.

Claremont's DC output up to that point, meanwhile, wasn't exactly remarkable. He created and wrote the 1995-1998 series Sovreign Seven, penned a 1997 Superman and Wonder Woman Elseworlds miniseries and contributed a 10-page Fire story to an issue of anthology title Showcase '96. Oh, and Claremont also penned a six-issue JLA miniseries in 2003, JLA: Scary Monsters, although I confess that, at this point, all I remember of it are Arthur Adams' covers. 

Still, it's easy to imagine someone at DC thinking Byrne and Claremont reuniting for a Justice League story would be a big deal, and that the creative team, rounded out by inker Jerry Ordway, would be as significant a draw as some of the past big-name creators on the title, like Grant Morrison, Mark Waid, Bryan Hitch and Howard Porter. (And hey, maybe it was a draw...for any older readers who remembered the X-Men of the early '80s, anyway. In my late 20s at the time, I had barely read anything from either man, and I had considered their appearance in the pages of JLA at that particular juncture to be a particularly weird move).

Their story was "The Tenth Circle", which ran from JLA #94-99. Byrne and Claremont shared writing credits on the six-part story, while Byrne penciled it and Ordway inked it. 

It wasn't merely a matter of one of the most popular X-Men creative teams reuniting on a Justice League story, though, it was also a sort of stealth pilot for a new Doom Patrol series by Byrne (Although it's admittedly far less stealth at this point, over 20 years later; the final cover from the arc, depicting the JLA and the Doom Patrol together, was the one DC used for its first collection in 2005's JLA Vol. 15) .

Launching a new Doom Patrol out of the pages of JLA probably made some sense at the time too, as DC had in the recent-ish past used the JLA to help launch other super-team books. The 1998 JLA/Titans miniseries lead directly to a new Titans, that same year's miniseries JLA: World Without Grown-Ups immediately preceded the launch of Young Justice and 1999 JLA arc "Crisis Times Five" reunited a new version of the Justice Society, presaging the launch of JSA the month after it concluded (albeit with some significant line-up changes). 

Of course, the difference between all of those launches and this Doom Patrol launch was that Byrne and Claremont were here introducing the Doom Patrol of The Chief Niles Caulder, Robotman Cliff Steele, Negative Man Larry Trainor and Elasti-Girl Rita Farr as if they were brand-new characters being introduced here for the first time.

This, then, was to be a reboot of the then 40-year-old team, one completely unconnected to the sorts of space/time/continuity crises that DC usually organized such reboots around, not unlike the one DC did with Supergirl in the pages of Superman/Batman that year (Unlike Supergirl, though, the Doom Patrol's recent history wasn't anywhere near as weird and convoluted, nor had it drifted so far from their original conception as the post-Crisis Supergirl had; the Doom Patrol's last title was canceled just a year previously).

(And yes, admittedly it is kind of clever to put some of the X-Men's most famous creators on a story featuring the Doom Patrol, who, like Marvel's merry mutants, also debuted in 1963 and featured a wheelchair bound older man leading a team of super-powered outsiders branded as freaks by mainstream society. Interestingly, there's even a panel where Caulder uses what looks like some sort of Cerebro unit.)

So there was a lot going on in this particular story, and I don't think it all quite seemed to come together in a way that was particularly satisfying. 

In addition to telling a superhero story big enough to give each member of a sizable Justice League something to do (In addition to the "Big Seven" minus Aquaman, the team in this story also consists of The Atom, Faith and Manitou Raven), the creators also have to introduce the quartet of misfit heroes from the Doom Patrol, and they also set about introducing some new characters who would ultimately join them in the new Doom Patrol title.

The title of the story refers to the name of a group of extra-dimensional vampires, monsters that were banished from this plane of existence by Wonder Woman's mom and the other Amazons centuries ago. They currently have a representative on Earth, a vampire with an extraordinarily bad haircut and the extremely unlikely name of Crucifer. 

He lives in a castle brought over from Europe brick by brick, and commands a small band of loyal vampires, and a group of more loyal still acolytes in cloaks and hoods; these latter he is able to subjugate via mind-control, which seems to be most effective when he bites someone...but doesn't turn them all the way into vampires.

After a few chance encounters with Crucifer and his followers, the League realizes that there is a rash of child kidnappings across the county, the victims all seeming to possess the metagene and relatively minor super-powers (if this were the Marvel universe, we could call such people "mutants"), and so the heroes begin to investigate. 

Also investigating are a mysterious group based in an old Spanish fortress in the Florida Keys, a group we will gradually learn are meant to be a new, rebooted version of the original Doom Patrol (They all get something of a makeover, the most dramatic being Trainor; rather than the traditional bandages wrapping his face up like that of a mummy, he here has what looks like some kind of leather fetish mask on, and when he releases "The Negative Man," rather than the familiar streaking silhouette with an electric yellow aura, the powerful energy form now appears as a black flying skeleton in a bluish aura).

A great deal of attention is paid to a couple of kids working for Crucifer, a girl named Nudge who possesses some form of low-level mind-control and has a close relationship with a four-armed gorilla named Grunt (which is, later in the story, referred to by Caulder as a "mega-primate"), and Vortex, a boy with the power to emit some kind of powerful energy blast from his mouth, powerful enough to break through one of Green Lantern's constructs and knock him on his ass.

Meanwhile, Manitou Raven, who we see at the opening of the story, his magical telling stones and a swarm of bats presaging some upcoming disaster, has gone missing. When The Atom searches the stones for clues to his whereabouts, he ends up shrinking down to investigate them in person and then falling through some sort of dimensional portal and into a bizarre, alien microscopic world, the inhabitants of which regard visitors from our world as a god. The Atom will spend most of the arc there, and how that connects to the rest of the story isn't even suggested until the very end, making his part of the adventure feel oddly grafted-on.

Frustrating the League's efforts is the fact that, after Nudge brings a mind-controlled Superman back to the castle, Crucifer bites him on the neck, and the vampire is thus able to mentally dominate the Man of Steel (This is in rather sharp contrast with 2002's Superman #180 by Jeph Loeb and Ian Churchill, where in Dracula tries to bite Superman's neck and recoils as he burns; Superman being a "living solar battery" meaning that his blood was suffused with "the power of daylight"). 

Under Crucifer's command, Superman acts as something of a double agent, at one point kidnapping Faith (who will spend most of the arc kidnapped actually, tied to a chair in Crucifer's castle) and fighting Wonder Woman a couple of times. Crucifer even seems to kill Wonder Woman at one point, impaling her on a sword, but, thanks to the Amazons' purple ray, she gets better.

It will prove no surprise that the League eventually wins the day, our heroes storming the still-forming Doom Patrol's HQ and then teaming up with them to take on Crucifer's forces, dispatching the dumb-looking but seemingly unkillable vampire in a neat way, a sort of superhero comics twist on an element from folklore, wherein other immortals achieve their invulnerable status by hiding their hearts outside of their bodies. 

I thought Byrne and Claremont did a decent job with all of the Justice League characters, at least the ones they spent the most time juggling, and while we don't get nearly as much of the Doom Patrol, they mostly all felt like themselves (Caulder seemed a little cooler and, well, douchier than his Silver Age self, but then, he had been trending that way since Grant Morrison's Doom Patrol, hadn't he?).

Byrne had drawn most of these characters before—and, in the cases of Superman and Wonder Woman, he had drawn them a lot—although I still thought it fun to see what, say, his turn-of-the-century Batman, or Atom, or John Stewart might look like. 

And, after reading the arc to completion, I even kind of developed a love/hate feeling toward Crucifer, who is in many ways your stereotypical old horror movie vampire, but so much so (and with such a ridiculous hairstyle), that he comes around to almost being kind of...neat?

The story ends with a great two-panel sequence, wherein Batman makes a deadpan joke and turns away, and we get a silent panel showing the League's shocked reaction, the Dark Knight betraying just the slightest hint of a smile. That was pretty great.

As the last issue is winding down, Faith assures Nudge how well she fought against Crucifer and says, "I'd like to help teach you," while Vortex expresses and interest in joining Nudge and Grunt with the Doom Patrol.

"I'm intrigued by all three of you," Caulder says, adding, "Faith, as well...if you're interested!" 

They all join the departing Farr, Trainor and Steele on a teleportation platform, Robotman telling the League, "You guys ever need backup, we're there! Just call on the-- --DOOM PATROL!"

It's kind of curious that Faith leaves with Doom Patrol, as she was created by Joe Kelly specifically for his JLA run, and while she lasted some 30 issues or so in the title, she was never too terribly distinct a character, neither in her ambiguous powers, nor her personality, nor her history. 

I really can't imagine what Byrne might have saw in her, aside from the fact that with Kelley's run on JLA ending and Kelly not using her on the upcoming Justice League Elite, she was available, and perhaps Byrne wanted to use her as a sort of bridge character to the Doom Patrol...? (At any rate, she would only appear twice more time in the pages of JLA; she's among the Leaguers in Kelly, Doug Mahnke and company's JLA #100, wherein Kelly has her say in an aside, "Think stickin' with the Doom Patrol for now is best..." and later, during Kurt Busiek and Ron Garney's "Syndicate Rules" arc, she's among the heroes recruited to help the League deal with twin threats from the anti-matter universe.)

She actually didn't stay with Byrne's Doom Patrol much longer, though, leaving the book and the team with issue #5. 

As for Byrne's Doom Patrol, which he wrote and penciled while Doug Hazelwood inked the majority of the series, it only lasted 18 issues, the final one shipping in January of 2006. All in all, then, it didn't even last as long as the 22 issues of the 2001-2003 John Arcudi/Tan Eng Huat series hat it followed (and, of course, rebooted), and only about as half as long as Sovereign Seven. 

If you missed it the first time around and are curious about it after reading this post, "The Tenth Circle" was collected multiple times, including in the aforementioned JLA Vol. 15 from 2005, 2016's JLA Vol. 8 and 2020's Doom Patrol by John Byrne: The Complete Series. While the Doom Patrol business now sticks out oddly, the rest of the book is fairly evergreen, and fans of Byrne's art especially should find plenty to enjoy in it.

Next: Joe Kelly, Doug Mahnke and Tom Nguyen's "Elitism" from 2004's JLA #100.

DC Versus Marvel Pt. 5: Marvel and DC Present Featuring the Uncanny X-Men and the New Teen Titans #1

While I was quite enthusiastic about the DC Versus Marvel Omnibus, it was more so about the collection as a whole, and of finally having access to all of the comics within it, rather than genuine excitement for each and every story contained within. In fact, some of the stories I wasn't really looking forward to at all, and I ended up approaching them with the same sense of anticipation that I used to have for doing homework. 

One of those particular crossovers was Marvel and DC Present Featuring the Uncanny X-Men and the New Teen Titans #1, a 1982 special produced in-house at Marvel that would bring together the two publishers then quite popular team of young-ish heroes. 

Why the reluctance on my part? Well, while the teams and their respective comic books may have been pretty popular with the readers of their time, they weren't popular with me personally, as I wouldn't even start reading comics for about another decade after this was published (I was only five years old in 1982).

I have of course read some X-Men runs in the years since, but only ones that tended to try and reinvent the concept and reach new readers. Think the millennial Ultimate X-Men and Grant Morrison and Frank Quitely's New X-Men and then, later, Jeff Parker and company's X-Men: First Class and Jason Aaron's Wolverine and the X-Men. I made a few attempts in the early years of the new millennium to get into the classic, Chris Claremont iteration of the team, via an Essential volume and other comics borrowed from the Columbus Metropolitan Library, but I just couldn't do it, and so much of my understanding of X-Men epics and various tropes came secondhand, filtered through the 1997 cartoon and the various films.

Similarly, I've never read any of the Marv Wolfman-written, George Perez-drawn Titans comics; I am far more familiar with and affectionate for the weird-ass, post-Zero Hour Arsenal-lead team that Wolfman was writing in the pages of New Titans #0-#130 (of which I wouldn't mind a trade of, by the way!) in the late '90s than of the previous iterations. Certainly DC has done a decent job of keeping those Wolfman/Perez comics available to new readers over the years—there's a DC Finest collection of The Judas Contract scheduled for a February release—but I never felt the urge to pick any of them up.

Basically, both teams are somewhat unfamiliar and unwelcoming to me, so the thought of them teaming up in one comic didn't do much for me personally.

You know what that means, of course. My expectations for the book were quite low going into it, and therefore I had managed to set myself up nicely to be quite pleasantly surprised. The story, unimaginatively titled "Apokalips...Now" (But maybe it was the first to make that particular allusion...?), and weirdly, almost randomly featuring Darkseid as the villain of the piece, turned out to be a quite well-made comic book.

In the end, it didn't matter that I wasn't a fan of any of the characters, or that I wasn't clued in on the various ongoing soap operas that I associated with the two teams. Their crossover was accessible and ultimately enjoyable, expertly drawn by the great Walt Simonson, here credited as penciler "Walter Simonson", with Terry Austin credited as "Finisher".

As to how Simonson got the job, it sounds like there may have been a wee bit of nepotism involved. The writer was Chris Claremont, one of the two most obvious choices for the gig given the fact that he was then currently writing one of the two starring teams. In his introduction to the story, written like so many of these for the pages of 1991 collection Crossover Classics and reprinted in the new omnibus, Claremont said he was in the middle of explaining his idea for the story to editor Louise Simonson when Walt, Louise's husband, poked his head into the office and said, "Did somebody mention Darkseid?" He followed that up fairly quickly with another question, "Need an artist?"

And so Marvel had its assignment to bring the two teams together, the outline of a plot and its creative team all lined up.

What did they come up with? 

Well, as mentioned a few times already, Claremont chose to use Darkseid as his villain. This was not an obvious or even likely choice. Though Jack Kirby had created the character and made him into one of DC Comics' most potent and compelling villains in his 1971-launched suite of comics which would come to be known as his Fourth World saga, he was far from a Titans villain. 

Even almost a decade after his creation, he hadn't yet met the Titans or any of their members, who don't seem to have any experience with the forces of Apokolips here, being confused by the appearance of a detachment of Darkseid's Parademons.

Darkseid faced off against the Justice League in a three-issue arc of their title in 1980 after a 1977 Gerry Conway-written revival of Kirby's New Gods storyline, but it would be a few more years before he appeared in kids' television sets as part of 1984's Super Friends: The Legendary Super Powers Show. In 1982, then, he was still very much a New Gods, Justice League or maybe Superman villain, rather than the sort of all-purpose DCU villain he would eventually become, as Kirby's mythology became more and more ingrained in the DC Comics line. 

Regardless, he was a cool character, and one Claremont apparently wanted to write badly enough to include him here, that inclusion being somewhat justified by the cosmic nature of the plot. After all, the X-Men villain chosen was, as seen on the cover above, was the Dark Phoenix, here resurrected via Darkseid's otherworldly technology.

Claremont did of course include a more traditional Titans foe in the proceedings, with Darkseid hiring mercenary Deathstroke, The Terminator to lead his Parademons on their mission.

After reading the story, I do wonder to what degree it was Darkseid's presence that drew Walt Simonson into the project. An obvious Kirby fan, one of the most notable works on his resume was his years-long run on Thor, which he began relatively shortly after this book was published and, of course, in 2000 he would write and draw a short-lived Orion ongoing series for DC.  Of the many artists to follow in Kirby's footsteps, drawing the characters, worlds and technology that Kirby originated, Simonson is undoubtedly one of the best, and Claremont's tale gives him plenty of opportunities to offer his own spin on Kirby staples.

The book opens, in fact, with the tiny, almost microscopic Darkseid and Metron on a small asteroid before the Source Wall, which fills much of the page, the former speechifying, "Behold the Promethean Giants--"

It's a great page, and it's really too bad that though this is the fourth official DC/Marvel crossover, it is also the first to not be printed in tabloid or "treasury" format but was instead a regularly sized comic book (albeit a longer, 64-page one). In addition to those New Gods and the Parademons, Simonson would get to draw Boom Tubes, several splashes of the Source Wall, the Omega Effect, dog soldiers and Apokolips itself, as seen from space.

That's all in addition, of course, to the Titans/X-Men business.

After striking his bargain with Darkseid, Metron attempts to pierce the Wall, leaving his throne-like flying chair (which Charles Xavier has claimed on the cover), floating behind while Darkseid makes a fist and fills a panel with big, red "HA HA HA"s. 

On Earth, we meet the X-Men at Professor Charles Xavier's School for Gifted Youngsters, while Colossus, Wolverine and Nightcrawler train in the Danger Room (and Simonson draws a great fastball special, with Wolvie attaining a pretty perfect sphere shaped). Kitty Pryde, Cyborg and Storm are all introduced in quick succession, with Claremont and Simonson demonstrating each of their superpowers in the process.

That night, a mysterious figure with a strange apparatus on his gloved hand appears in each of their rooms, extracting thoughts of the late Jean Grey from each. Kitty wakes up in the process, glimpsing a grinning Darkseid above her and screaming, and the various pajama-clad X-Men all rush into action, with Cyclops ultimately being visited by an apparition of Jean. 

Meanwhile, no one's resting all that easy at Titans Tower, either. Oh, by the way, this is yet another DC/Marvel crossover that just assumes that the various characters' adventures take place in the same world, our own, and that they have just never crossed paths before. Claremont, like Shooter in the second Superman/Spider-Man team-up, even has a character remarking on it, as when Cyborg swings by skyscraper that "got trashed by the X-Men" and he thinks to himself, "I wonder why the Titans have never tangled with 'em?"

Anyway, Raven wakes up Starfire and Changeling in the tower when she has a nightmare about a giant cosmic bird of flame, which Starfire recognizes as the entity Phoenix, a danger to all life in the universe (Coming from outer space, she's apparently familiar with it). An emergency meeting is called, and the various other Titans introduced: Kid Flash, Wonder Girl, Cyborg and, lastly, Robin, who is unable to answer the summons after discovering a "Para-Demon" and briefly fighting Deathstroke. (Yes, there's a hyphen in Parademon here, and there seems to be one on every instance of the word.)

The Titans decide to start their search for the Phoenix with the X-Men, as "a woman code-named Phoenix used to be affiliated with them." They storm Xavier's school but are soon attacked by a contingent of Parademons and captured. 

Meanwhile, the X-Men visit Jean's parents, who also saw an apparition of her, and then visit sites where Jean had previously exhibited her Phoenix powers, running into Deathstroke and another contingent of Parademons there. They too are beaten and captured. (If you're wondering who would win in a fight between Wolverine and Deathstroke, they have a two-panel fight here, wherein Wolverine knocks him down but not out; Wolvie is eventually felled by a Parademon-thrown "toxi-cloud grenade.")

Both teams of hostages are Boom Tubed to a floating piece of rock before the Source Wall, where they are put in an elaborate machine, and Darkseid reveals what he's been up to with gathering the essences of Phoenix, ultimately resurrecting her and then taking her hand. He monologues for about a half-dozen panels about how he plans to use her and her power to create a new, second Apokolips out of Earth. He will do so using her vast cosmic powers for...manual labor, I guess, as she will be tunnelling through the Earth to form fire pits (Claremont uses the term "Apokolips Pits") to kickstart the Apokolipsification of the world. 

While the bad guys split and leave our many heroes in outer space to perish, the two teams wake up, free themselves, set eyes on one another and...completely fail to come to blows. Instead, there's a splash page where the two teams face one another, Robin and Cyclops shaking hands. "I suggest an alliance," Cyclops says. "My sentiments, exactly," Robin responds.

That's...unusual, and not what we've come to expect either from the standard superhero team-up, or the cross-company ones we've gotten so far. After some working together, which seems to include Kitty and Changeling flirting ("She seems very attracted to Changeling-- I did not think that would upset me so," Colossus thinks to himself), they find Metron's Mobius Chair and Xavier realizes it can be controlled telepathically.

Soon, they arrive on Earth, and travel underground for their big showdown with the bad guys. It's a pretty fun, well-drawn sequence, and it was genuinely kind of shocking to see the various characters dogpiling Darkseid, who is so far out of...well, all of their weight classes, really. 

The battle is finally resolved when Dark Phoenix starts to dissipate and takes a physical form by possessing Cyclops: "Come my once and former love-- --Embrace your destiny!" she says as she flies into him, and his costume transforms, gaining a Phoenix sigil on its chest.

Ultimately, the Phoenix-possessed Cyclops whips off his visor and fires a huge ruby-colored bird of flame at Darkseid, who stands there with his hands behind his back. There's a terrific explosion, and then both he and the Phoenix are gone, the giant bird streaking into space with a tiny Darkseid in her talon. 

He'll end up embedded in the Source Wall with the Promethean Giants...and not for the last time, though it is a fitting "final" fate for the character...and it certainly seems like that is exactly what it is here. 

Meanwhile, the two teams get a few panels of quiet hang-out time. 

They were apparently destined to meet again. Marv Wolfman wrote in his 1991 Crossover Classics  introduction to "The Heroes and the Holocaust" from Marvel Treasury Edition #28 that he was slated to write a second Titans/X-Men team-up, "but just before we were supposed to go into production, DC and Marvel decided to end the crossovers for the foreseeable future."  

What happened, exactly? It doesn't seem like it was because "Apokolips...Now" was a bad story, certainly not that I could tell from reading it some four decades later, so it was presumably something behind the scenes, and, one can intuit from a prose piece Mike Carlin contributes to the omnibus about the resumption of the inter-company crossovers almost a decade later, it had to do with the leaders at the respective publishers in 1982 and their "us vs. them" mentality.*

It's kind of too bad, as not only would it have been interesting to see what Titans writer Wolfman could have done with the X-Men characters, but his collaborator on New Teen Titans was slated to draw it. Together with the proposed and aborted Justice League of America/Avengers crossover, that makes two DC/Marvel super-team crossovers with Perez art we almost got. (Unlike the JLoA/Avengers project, though, Perez apparently never produced any art for the X-Men/Titans one.)

Whatever happened exactly, it was the end of a brief era for DC and Marvel. But not the final end. Thirteen years later, in 1994, the crossovers would resume, with the very, very weird pairing of Marvel's Punisher with DC's...Jean-Paul Valley, the guy filling in as the new Batman...?

Next: 1994's Batman/Punisher: Lake of Fire #1

*It doesn't take too much Googling to turn up information on why cooperation on crossovers from the two publishers fell apart around that time. I don't want to provide any links, because the last thing I want to do is get involved in any such conversation about disagreements that publishing executives, editors and comics creators might have had while I was in kindergarten, but from what I've read, it certainly appears to be a matter of the publishers not being able to come to an agreement on the Justice League/Avengers comic in a timely enough fashion to save it when things started going wrong.

DC Versus Marvel Omnibus Part 1: All the non-comics content

I'm not a fan of the giant omnibus format. 

The inches-thick hardcovers are just too big, too heavy and too unwieldy. Those that I've handled before, both the ones I've bought and the ones I've seen at the library (where they tend to suffer a lot more damage than smaller comics collections and need repairs far more often), tend to make unwholesome sounding creaks if I hold them at the wrong angle or open them too wide, as if threatening to break on me. 

They're certainly hard to take with you anywhere, barely fitting in a messenger bag and threatening to bust out of it, so they aren't books that I can read on my lunch breaks, or when dining out alone at a restaurant. And even in the comfort of one's home they can be difficult to read, as one can only read them in certain positions.

If publishers must release giant omnibus format books, I would prefer they do so in paperback form, like the recent-ish Sandman Mystery Theater Compendium Vol. 1 that DC released last year. At 980 pages, it was of course still very big, very heavy and very unwieldly, but it was doable, and its basic integrity didn't seem threatened by its own weight or seem unstable like an old rickety, ramshackle house in a storm.

All that said, I do find myself occasionally attracted to the books that get published in the format and have even bought one: DC's 2022 Batman No Man's Land Omnibus Vol. 1, a thousand-pager collecting the many stories published under the "No Man's Land" banner. I only made it about 100 pages into it before giving up, though; it was just too hard to read. 

Despite my dislike of the format, I couldn't resist the DC Versus Marvel Omnibus, a huge hardcover collecting about half of the stories the two publishers have collaborated on over the years, with the other half relegated to a second volume, DC Versus Marvel: The Amalgam Age Omnibus, which looks like it's currently slated for a late December release (More on which publications are in which books below). 

While there's some historical significance for these rare-ish publications, and an awful lot of work by some of the greatest and best-known talents to work in mainstream comics among them, I've read remarkably few of them, partly because many were published before my time, partly because of my ambivalence about the Marvel characters (I didn't really read any Marvel until a good decade after I started reading comics, and never developed the sense of loyalty or ownership of their characters and universe that I felt for DC's) and partly because they were relatively hard to find. 

This then, offered a chance get them all in one fell swoop, even if it was awfully pricey for a single comic book. Still, I've been buying fewer and fewer comics in any format, I could afford it. (As long-time readers have surely noticed, I gave up on serially-published comics some years ago—with only very rare exceptions—and I now try to buy as few trades and collections as possible, given how quickly they can fill up my bookshelves, and my bookshelves then fill up my living space.)

Given the enormity of the book, which contains almost 20 over-sized comics stories and hundreds of pages of extras, it would simply be too big to review in a single "A Month of Wednesdays" blog post, or even in a single blog post devoted to the book alone.

So, as I mentioned the other day, my plan is to tackle the book crossover by crossover, and basically review my way through it. 

Before reading the first crossover story, though, I decided I should devote a post to all the...stuff in the book, given how much of it there actually is. So let's here take a look at all the stuff other than the comics content, before digging into the first of the crossovers. 

Let's start with the basic outline of the tome. 

The 960-page collection includes almost every DC/Marvel character crossover, from the classic 1976 Superman Vs. The Amazing Spider-Man to the millennial Batman/Daredevil. That means that, in addition to those two stories, the omnibus includes (deep breath) Marvel Treasury Edition #28 (Superman and Spider-Man again), DC Special Series #27 (Batman vs. The Hulk), Marvel and DC Present: The Uncanny X-Men and The New Teen Titans #1, Batman/Punisher: Lake of Fire #1 (featuring the Jean-Paul Valley version of Batman, weirdly enough), Punisher/Batman: Deadly Knights #1, Darkseid Vs. Galactus: The Hunger #1, Spider-Man and Batman #1, Green Lantern/Silver Surfer: Unholy Alliances #1, Silver Surfer/Superman #1, Batman/Captain America #1, Daredevil/Batman #1, Batman/Spider-Man #1, Superman/Fantastic Four #1 and Incredible Hulk Vs. Superman #1. 

So, what's missing? 

Well, most obviously given the title of this cinder block of a collection is 1996's four-issue miniseries DC Vs. Marvel. That's slated to be collected in the upcoming DC Vs. Marvel: The Amalgam Age Omnibus, along with all of the Amalgam one-shots, and the two sequel miniseries, DC/Marvel All Access and Unlimited Access. This makes sense, given that the Amalgam comics, each of which featured brand-new heroes that combined DC and Marvel characters, resulted from the events of the DC Vs. Marvel series, as at one point during the proceedings the two fictional universes are fused into a new combined universe.

Also missing is 2003's JLA/Avengers, which is not slated for inclusion in the Amalgam Age Omnibus. It's a curious, and quite unfortunate, omission, as that four-issue crossover series by Kurt Busiek and George Perez is the best of the DC/Marvel crossovers (at least of those that I've read) and one of the better inter-company crossovers of all time. 

It's also, one imagines, the single crossover that would be of the greatest interest to the largest number of readers, given not only its quality and the reputation of its creators, but also the current high profile of the two teams, particularly the Avengers, who weren't exactly the household name they are now 20 years ago.

JLA/Avengers was first collected in a 2004 hardcover set, and then again in 2008 as a trade paperback. An extremely limited edition was released in 2022 to help the now late Perez with his medical bills, and demand then was quite high, which made me assume it would be collected herein. Perhaps if these two omnibuses sell well enough DC and Marvel will see fit to also re-release JLA/Avengers. 

As for this collection, it actually starts out with some Perez art, as the cover is a Perez piece referencing the first couple of DC/Marvel crossovers, repurposed from the 1991 Crossover Classics collection. (If you bought or buy the omnibus through the direct market though, you also have the opportunity to choose a variant cover edition featuring a new image by Jim Lee and Scott Williams; it's not the greatest work from Lee, and, compositionally at least, is nowhere near as strong or dynamic an image as the Perez cover, but, given Lee's early years as a superstar artist at Marvel followed by a career as an executive at DC, he's probably one of the best choices to produce a cover for a book like this.)

Given just how many pages of comics content there are in this book, it might be surprising that the publishers found room for other miscellanea to include, but there are several introductions and forewords, two afterwords and plenty of backmatter.

First here's a brand-new introduction from Paul Levitz dated February of this year. Levitz notes that he was "in the room where it happened" when it came to that first Superman/Spider-Man crossover that was the very first collaboration between the two publishers, which for a majority of their history were among the most bitter rivals in the industry. 

Levitz was, at that time, an assistant editor to DC editor to Gerry Conway, who was chosen by the executives to write the crossover, as he was, at the time, the only person to have written both characters. The art team was similarly chosen to best represent the two publishers and their respective flagship characters: Pencil artist Ross Andru was the only artist to have drawn both characters and was then working as Spidey's primary artist, and inker Dick Giordano was chosen because he was widely regarded as the best inker in the business.

Levitz would go on to be involved in the next round of inter-company crossovers: The next Superman/Spider-Man crossover, that of Batman and The Hulk, and that of the X-Men and Teen Titans, after which things fell apart, and the publishers wouldn't see fit to try again for another decade or so (That decade, of course, was the '90s, the decade in which the vast majority of the stories in this collection were published).

Levitz's introduction is followed by not one, not two, but three forewords, each of which was previously published in the previously mentioned Crossover Classics collection. These are by Conway, Giordano and Tom DeFalco, and all focus on that initial Supes/Spidey book. 

The next prose piece, also culled from the pages of Crossover Classics, is by Marv Wolfman, and details how he almost wrote the second Supes/Spidery crossover (Instead, Jim Shooter would get the honor, though the comic's credits include a notation reading "Special thanks to Marv Wolfman for plot suggestions.") He also mentions being pegged to write the second X-Men/Teen Titans crossover...a crossover that never actually came to pass. 

That's followed by two story-specific introductions from Crossover Classics, one by Batman/Hulk writer Len Wein and another by X-Men/Teen Titans writer Chris Claremont. 

About 300 pages in we get another prose piece original to this volume, this one from long-time Marvel and DC editor Mike Carlin, dated March 2024. In it, he discusses the resumption of DC/Marvel crossovers with 1994's Batman/Punisher: Lake of Fire #1. This comic, and the dozen or so crossovers that followed, resulted from, as Carlin explains, a new generation of writers and editors coming in at both publishers, ending the "cold war" between Marvel and DC (And it helped that these newcomers were all comics fans turned comics pros, and thus had an entirely different attitude about the characters than their predecessors). He also seems to intimate that a new cold war began in the early years of the century (with JLA/Avengers being the sole exception of new DC/Marvel collaborations), seemingly because "some new players would join the mix in the early 2000s."

After the last pages of 2000's Batman/Daredevil: King of New York #1, we get a pair of afterwords, both written specifically for this collection.

The first is from writer Ron Marz, who is quite familiar with the intercompany crossover, having written the DC Vs. Marvel miniseries, as well as Green Lantern/Silver Surfer (and several DC/Dark Horse crossovers). He cites one of the crossovers collected in this book as having reignited his passion for the medium when he was a teenager and had drifted away from super-comics: Claremont and Walt Simonson's X-Men/Teen Titans book, which he reveals he still keeps a copy of in his desk to pull out and flip through whenever he feels the need for inspiration.

That's followed by a very interesting piece by Tom Brevoort, who reveals the original idea for the Superman/Spider-Man team-up was not for a comic book at all, but for a movie. That was the idea of David Obst, the literary agent that kickstarted the first DC/Marvel crossover, anyway. (The idea of such a film sounds pretty insane to even imagine in 1976, two years before the first Superman movie and 26 years before the first Spider-Man movie. Even today, in the years after characters as unlikely as Ant-Man, Aquaman, The Guardians of The Galaxy and Blue Beetle III have all had a movie or two or three, the idea of a DC/Marvel crossover movie still seems so unlikely as to sound crazy.)

Brevoort also discusses a few tidbits about that original Superman/Spider-Man crossover, like the fact that Neal Adams and John Romita Sr. did some uncredited touching up of the art, and the mathematic specificity that went into the story, with each hero appearing in the exact same number of panels and being drawn at the same size in aggregate (If Superman appeared in the foreground and Spider-Man in the distant background of one panel, for example, there would be another panel where Supes was in the background and Spidey foregrounded).

And if you're beginning to think that this sounds like an awful lot of bonus material for a book that pretty much sells itself, wait—there's more!

There's Conway's nine-page story outline for the original Superman/Spider-Man crossover, about 100 pages of art (much of it in black and white) with notes from many of the creators who worked on the pages (Darryl Banks, J.M. DeMatteis, Barry Kitson, Ron Lim, Ron Marz, Roger Stern), the covers from the four Crossover Classic collections (pencilled by Perez, John Romita Jr., Salvador Larroca and Ed McGuinness), Alex Ross' homage to Superman Vs. The Amazing Spider-Man (from a 1999 issue of Wizard Magazine), a fold-out of Dan Jurgens' and Ross' cover to Superman/Fantastic Four, a fold-out by John Byrne and Terry Austin promoting DC Vs. Marvel (which also adorns the cover of the collection, under the book jacket), a few pages of house ads promoting the various crossovers and, in the edition I got anyway, a fold-out of Jim Lee's variant cover for the omnibus, full-color on one side and black and white on the other.

It's an awful lot of stuff, without even accounting for the comics stories themselves. As much as it is, it's welcome. This is, after all, a book selling for over a $100—it's labeled for $150, though I didn't pay that much for my copy—so it's nice to see the publishers seemingly doing as much as they can to make it worth that high price. 

Now, with all that out of the way, I guess I'm ready to start actually reading the comics themselves, huh?

Next: 1976's Superman Vs. The Amazing Spider-Man #1