Golden Age antecedents to Marvel characters

C.C. Beck and Bill Parker's Captain Marvel debuted in 1940's Whiz Comics #2 and would go on to become one of the most popular characters of the Golden Age superhero boom. Because he bore more than a passing resemblance to the other caped strongman who started that boom, the company we now know as DC Comics sued Captain Marvel's publisher Fawcett, and the litigation dragged on until superhero comics were no longer popular, and so Fawcett settled in the 1950s, and the character went into limbo for about 20 years.

During that time, Marvel Comics created their own Captain Marvel character, a super-powered alien warrior with the unlikely real name of Mar-Vell, and they quickly copyrighted "Captain Marvel", so that by the time the Distinguished Competition finally revived the original Captain Marvel, DC couldn't use that name in the titles of any of their books. 

This is why since the 1970s, all of DC's Captain Marvel-starring books (and a 1970s TV show, and the 21st century pair of feature films) have gone by some formulation of "Shazam" instead (and the publisher has tried to change the character's name to "Shazam" in the last few decades, with limited success), while Marvel continues to publish books entitled Captain Marvel (and, of course, their film starring one of their Captain Marvels was able to use that name in the title). 

Marvel's Captain Marvel is by far the most obvious and famous case of the publisher using the name of a Golden Age hero for one of their characters, but as I've been learning, it wasn't the first or the last time.

I've been working my way through Lou Mougin's Secondary Superheroes of Golden Age Comics (McFarland; 2019), which is a defunct publisher by defunct publisher survey of the various superheroes who didn't survive the 1940s, which here seems to mean the various heroes who weren't published (or later acquired) by the company that would become DC or the company that would become Marvel.

Thanks to publications as various as Dynamite's Project Superpowers comics, Image's "Next Issue Project", Paul Karasik's efforts with the works of Fletcher Hanks and others, even casual modern readers will likely know the names and stories of many of these also-ran characters (Mougin notes many of these later revivals, of which AC Comics seems to be responsible for a lot of, along with Project Superpowers).

The other reason that several of these lesser Golden Agers' names will be familiar, of course, is that they have since been applied to Marvel heroes (And, to be fair, some DC characters as well). Let's take a look at some of them, shall we?

We just discussed the case of Daredevil recently. That was, of course, the name of a fairly popular hero from Lev Gleason Publications who wore a striking two-color costume divided vertically, wielded a boomerang, fought The Claw and Hitler and who was worked on by such Golden Age greats as Jack Cole and Charles Biro. 

He was around for a remarkable 16 years, not calling it quits until 1956...just eight years before Marvel's Daredevil would make his debut (And, as pointed out in the previous post, there's a chance—a "legend" in Mougin's words—that Marvel's Daredevil was pretty directly inspired by Lev Gleason's, the result of Stan Lee being asked by publisher Martin Goodman to revive the original guy).(UPDATE: Commentor kevhines pointed me to this 2020 post by Tom Brevoort, discussing the creation of Marvel's Daredevil, his story noting Goodman's interest in possibly reviving the Golden Age version.)

The next most popular Marvel hero with a Golden Age forebear was a pretty big surprise to me, as I had never heard of him, although there's a pretty good chance you might have, given how recently he was revived and by whom. 

I am talking about Doctor Strange.

The Marvel character by that name is, of course, a literal doctor whose surname was literally "Strange," a surgeon who, after a humbling car accident, an epic journey and the tutelage of a wise master, became Earth's Sorcerer Supreme, engaging in various mystic adventures. Steve Ditko created him in in 1963. 

The other Doctor Strange debuted in 1940's Thrilling Comics #1 from Nedor Comics, in a long action-packed story that Mougin refers to as "a 37-page marathon." Writer Richard Hughes and artists Alex Koster's Doctor Strange was "a powerful, brilliant scientist who didn't shy away from duking it out with villains," as Mougin puts it, and the character seemed to have far more in common with the Doc Savage of the pulps than the guy who would become the far more famous Doctor Strange a few decades later.

After happening upon a kidnapping plot and being shot, Strange prepares a dose of Alosun, a super-power granting "distillate of sun-atoms" that made him into something of a Superman in terms of speed, strength and invulnerability. A later refinement of his formula apparently also bestowed upon him the power of flight. Though he never adopted a cape or chest-symbol or went in for tights, by the eighth issue of Thrilling he adopted a uniform of sorts: A tight-fitting red shirt and a pair of blue jodhpurs. 

He also shortened his name to "Doc Strange" after just ten issues as "Doctor Strange," which is perhaps one reason he's not thought of as a contender for the more famous superhero appellation.

His adventures lasted a respectable eight years before he faded away, not to be revived until AC Comics decided to do so in a 1991 issue of Femforce. (I've never really found the covers of that series particularly appealing, but, after reading Mougin's book, I'd really like to check it out; sadly, as long-lived as it is, it doesn't appear to have ever been collected into any trades.)

But it was Alan Moore's revival that is probably better known. See, Nedor also published 31 issues of a book called America's Best Comics between 1940 and 1949, and that was, of course, the name of Moore's 1999 WildStorm imprint, under which he wrote the books The League of Extraordinary Gentleman, Tom Strong, Promethea, Top Ten and other features. 

Apparently leaning into the Nedor connection, Moore reintroduced the Golden Age Doc Strange as Tom Strange in the pages of a 2001 issue of Tom Strong, wherein the older character was presented as an alternate Earth counterpart of the similarly pulp-inspired hero (It was a fortunate coincidence that Doc's first name was previously revealed to be Tom in the Golden Age comics).  

Eventually other Nedor heroes, all of whom had long since lapsed into public domain, showed up alongside Strange, starring in a pair of Terra Obscura miniseries in 2003 and 2004. 

Even more surprising than a character named Doctor Strange appearing in the 1940s, though, was one named Thor. Like the later Marvel one created by Jack Kirby and Stan Lee in 1962, he was a mortal empowered by the real Norse god and fought with the mythical Mjolnir (Marvel's Thor, of course, gradually dropped the mortal aspect of Donald Blake as time went on). 

This first Thor appeared in the pages of Fox Comics' 1940-launched Weird Comics, the first few covers of which seem appropriate for the title. (I put that of the second issue above, because it's slightly weirder than that of the first issue. You can seem 'em all on comics.org, of course; Thor doesn't seem to have ever been featured on one, but such caped weirdos as Dart and Ace and The Eagle and Buddy eventually replaced the mad scientists and scantily clad ladies of the first few issues.)

Here's how he dressed, showing considerably more skin than Marvel's later Thor ever would. 

According to Mougin, Fox's Thor was really mild-mannered mortal Grant Farrel, who was berated by his girlfriend for "his lack of adventurousness" at a night club before a "masher" cut in on them. Later, Grant is visited by the real Thor of mythology, who takes him back to his home realm to train him, telling him, "The lightning will be your servant, my magic hammer your weapon."

After his training, Grant saw his girlfriend trapped by spies, descended back to Earth, downed the plane she was on, smashed enemy tanks with his hammer and rescued her, returning to Thor afterwards to get an attaboy: "You have well earned the right to my name and my magic hammer...They are yours to keep."

Obviously, he didn't keep them long, as this Thor's feature lasted only five issues of Weird, although it's interesting to wonder if Goodman, Lee or Kirby might have encountered the feature and saw some potential in it, either filing it away in the back of their heads or completely forgetting about it except, perhaps, on some subconscious level. 

There are several other familiar names in Mougin's book. The most prominent of these is perhaps The Black Panther, a power-less, origin-less, secret identity-less character in a cat costume who appeared in a single story by artist Paul Gustavoson in a 1941 issue of Centaur Comics' Stars and Stripes. 

Like Fox's Thor, he never appeared on a cover, but you can see his skimpy costume (I do like the tail) in the above splash, which I swiped from Tom Brevoort's blog (You can read the whole story there, by the way; as Brevoort notes, this guy doesn't really seem to have anything at all in common with Marvel's much later T'Challa, save for the name).

There's also...

•The Banshee, a masked and caped Irishman from 1941 who pre-figured the 1967 mutant with a sonic scream that would become part of the extensive, wider X-Men cast (although the second Banshee lacked a "The" in his name)

•The Black Cat, a rather long-lived character from Harvey Comics who was a Hollywood actress/superheroine who debuted in 1941, long before the Spider-Man villainess-turned-love interest of the same name, who appeared in 1979 (You may have seen Harvey's Black Cat in 2018's Mystery Science Theater 3000: The Comic, which repurposed some of her original comics for riffing purposes.)

•Boomerang, a 1944 hero who fought crime alongside an archer named Diana, unlike the same-named character from 1966, who used the weapon for ill

•A couple of different Chameleons, a heroic master of disguise from 1940 and a crook from the 1940s; the Spider-Man villain from 1963 therefore seems to combine elements of both

•Dr. Doom, a civilian supporting character in the feature The Echo from Chesler's 1941 Yankee Comics. He would seem to have been a waste of a perfectly good villain's name, a name that Kirby and Lee's formidable character would begin putting to far better use in 1962

•Hydroman, a Bill Everett-created hero from a 1940 issue of Eastern Color Publishing Company's Reg'lar Fellers Heroic Comics who could, like the 1981-debuting Spider-Man villain, turn himself into water, not unlike a reverse Human Torch. Spidey's adversary would, of course, add a hyphen to the name

•At least two different guys named "Wonderman", one-word, a Fox Comics hero from 1939 who was very Superman-like and a Nedor Comics hero from 1944 who appeared in a feature called "Brad Spencer, Wonderman". Marvel's Wonder Man Simon Williams would debut in 1964, distinguishing himself from those prior Wondermen by separating his name into two words.

I'm sure there were other recycled names, but those are the ones that jumped out at me while reading. 

As for DC Comics, they too would later debut names that had previously been applied to Golden Age characters, though far fewer and none so famous as Captain Marvel, Daredevil, Doctor Strange or Thor. This is perhaps because so very many of the Golden Age's original characters ended up being absorbed into the DC comics line, and the attendant DC Universe shared setting.

Among the Golden Agers whose names DC fans might recognize are...

•Amazing-Man, an Everett-created hero from 1939 whose abilities are owed to training in Tibet; the green-and-yellow clad African-American hero that Roy Thomas introduced in a 1983 issue of All-Star Squadron had a different origin and powers, but his secret identity revealed his debt to the earlier hero: Will Everett

•Multiple Black Orchids, including a 1943 Harvey Comics character and 1944 Tops Comics character. Both were masked females with no powers, though the latter had a gimmicked ring. The 1973 DC character would sport a far more elaborate flower-inspired costume than either of her forebears, as well as array of superpowers. At this point the DC character is probably better known for the incarnation from disgraced writer Neil Gaiman and artist Dave McKean's 1988 miniseries, presaging her later, '90s absorption into the Vertigo "universe"

•Black Spider, a costumed detective from 1940 who fought crime with, in Mougin's description, "a cache of poisonous spiders along with his dukes and a gun." He therefore wasn't much like the Batman villain who debuted in 1976 at all

•Cat-Man, a cat-themed hero from 1940 who seemed to be a Batman riff with various cat powers, including, at the outset, nine lives. Like the Batman villain introduced in 1963, the hyphen in his name seemed to come and go (The Golden Ager just reappeared recently in a Jeff Parker-written Cat-Man and Kitten comic from Dynamite, by the way)

•The Mad Hatter, an intriguing-looking, hat-less caped hero who wore purple and spoke in rhyme and debuted in 1946, pre-dating the much more famous Batman villain of 1948 by just a few years

•The Unknown Soldier, Ace Comics' masked, patriotic-themed hero debuted in 1941's Our Flag Comics #1, and seemed to be in the mold of The Sheild and Captain America more than that of 1966's disfigured master of disguise from Star Spangled War Stories and, later, his own comic

On the creation of superheroes as gradual development versus instantaneous inspiration

I've been thinking a lot about where exactly new superheroes come from over the course of the last few months, thanks largely to some of the books I've been reading: Annie Hunter Eriksen and Lee Gatlin's picture book biographies of Stan Lee and Steve Ditko, Douglas Wolk's All Of The Marvels and the late Lou Mougin's Secondary Superheroes of Golden Age Comics. I've also been thinking about the subject because of what I've been blogging about lately, like the Thunderbolts* movie, with its cast of characters created by almost 25 writers and artists over the course of some seven decades, and, of course, the related issue of who, exactly, created The Sentry and how.

Mougin's book, an exhaustive survey of Golden Age super-comics, rounds up the scores of characters created by over a dozen different publishers in the years following the first appearances of Joel Siegel and Joe Shuster's Superman comics (and some of the more distinct characters to follow in his immediate wake, like Batman, Wonder Woman, The Human Torch and Captain America).

Given the pace at which this army of superheroes appeared and then disappeared from the pages of the comic books of the time, one imagines that most were created on-the-fly by the guys who wrote and/or drew them. 

When a modern reader thinks of how someone might have got the idea for a Cat-Man or a Crimebuster, a Wizard or a Boy King, a Daredevil or a Black Hood, a Mother Hubbard or The Face, it's easy to imagine that sort of out-of-the-blue, lightning bolt-style of inspiration, a deadline-driven act of creation that rushed from an image in someone's head to the drawing board to the printed page (For the more unique characters, anyway; a lot of these heroes seemed to come from artists doing their own riffs on a Superman, or trying a different animal theme for a Batman, or rearranging the stars and stripes on a costume to get their own Captain America).

As for the heroes of later generations, though? 

Well, they had these Golden Agers (and their peers from the pulps and radio and film serials and comic strips) as a vast reservoir of inspiration. Not only could later creators find various templates among the biggest  successes of those early years who are still starring in their own comic books today (Superman, Batman, Captain America, etc), but also the heroes I would consider the true second stringers (the characters who ended up on the JSA, for example, and those of publishers Fawcett, Quality and maybe MLJ). And then the more random-sounding also-rans that fill Mougin's book, like White Streak or The Conqueror or The Blue Bolt or Magno or the guys named The Reckoner, of whom there was more than one. 

Many of the later heroes of the late 1950s and 1960s created for DC and Marvel and Charlton and others could be traced back to Golden Age ancestors, and contemplating such second-generation heroes now, it's actually kind of hard to think of a character whose name, power or gimmick doesn't have Golden Age antecedents of some sort. (Seriously, try it!) 

But still, there are some. Jack Kirby and Stan Lee's The Thing, for example, seems to be born more of monster comics than old superhero comics, and wow, where did the idea for the Silver Surfer come from exactly, you know? 

Anyway, some bits of Wolk's book that I found particularly interesting were the examples he gives when discussing the creation of certain characters. 

In the weeks since I read All of the Marvels, these examples seemed to only become more resonant, as I thought about Lee's work with Kirby and Ditko on the first wave of Marvel heroes while reading those picture books and then later reading of the avalanche of superheroes of the 1940s in Mougin's book. 

Very early in Wolk's book—page 5, actually—he mentions that the "Marvel's narrative," the focus of his book, "has a peculiar relationship with his authorship": 

Legally, it's "maker" is a corporation, one that's gotten bigger over time as its body of intellectual property has changed hands. In practice, it was made by a specific group of people whose names we (mostly) know, and whose particular hands are (usually) unmistakable on any given page. But it's also almost always been created collaboratively: if you think any one person is the sole creator of a particular image or plot point, you're probably wrong, which is why it's a mistake to think of any one person who's worked on a Marvel comic book as it's "author."

This passage then leads to an extensive footnote, during which he notes the difficulties involved in untangling who created what.

This can obviously be a contentious subject that fans and sometimes the creators themselves have argued about over the decades, be it how much (or even if) Stan Lee might have contributed to those early Marvel heroes with his collaborators Kirby and Ditko, or the later disagreements regarding the creation of Wolverine and Ghost Rider (the latter of which went to court), or the current issues with The Sentry. 

Wolk writes:

Even the question of who created Marvel's best-known characters is also often more complicated than it looks. It's easy enough to assess who came up with Marvel's first superheroes of the 1960s, the Fantastic Four: Jack Kirby and Stan Lee. (Except that the Human Torch's name and basic design had been created by Carl Burgos back in 1939).

He goes on to cite a few other relatively easier ones, like Captain America (Kirby and Joe Simon) and Doctor Strange (Ditko), before showing how quickly it can get rather convoluted.

Iron Man? That's a little trickier. Lee plotted his first story, but Larry Lieber wrote its dialogue; Kirby drew the first cover and designed the character's initial costume (which barely resembles the familiar rend-and-gold one, designed by Ditko a bit later); Don Heck drew the initial story and invented what its protagonists Tony Stark and Pepper Potts look like.

So the Marvel Universe hadn't even been around a year yet, and there was already a character who seemed to have at least four primary creators, whom Wikipedia lists under "created by" in its article on Iron Man. (As for Ditko, who Wikipedia does not cite as a creator of the character, where does he fit in? Is a redesign considered an act of creation? If it comes some time after a character's debut, is it seen as somehow less important? Does it matter if that redesign becomes the primary, default one?)

The next example is more complicated still. Writes Wolk;

Daredevil? Well, now you're running into trouble. Lee wrote the first story, and Bill Everett drew it, but the cover was drawn by Kirby, who might have designed Daredevil's original costume, too, although the much more familiar red costume was first drawn by Wally Wood starting in the seventh issue. When you talk about the now-familir look and feel and mythology of "Daredevil," though—the tormented Catholic romantic who leaps around the shadows of Hell's Kitchen and fights ninjas and Wilson Fisk—you're mostly talking about what Frank Miller added to the character in the '80s, along with his artistic collaborators Klaus Janson and David Mazzucchelli. (Except that Wilson Fisk had been created by Lee and John Romita Sr. fifteen years earlier.) And so on. 

Wolk doesn't mention it at all here (this is just a footnote, long as it is, of course, and this is outside the purview of his book), but it's worth noting that Marvel's Daredevil, who debuted in 1964, was preceded by another comic book hero named Daredevil from an entirely different publisher. 

The two-toned, boomerang-wielding Daredevil of Lev Gleason Publications, whose creation is credited to Jack Binder and Don Rico, debuted in a 1941 issue of Silver Streak and his own title ran 134 issues, not being canceled until 1956. (This is the character who, long since lapsed into the public domain, one might have seen more recently in the pages of Savage Dragon as "The Dynamic Daredevil" or in various Dynamite Comics as "The Death-Defying 'Devil".)

Mougin does mention the possible relationship between Lev Gleason's Daredevil and Marvel's Daredevil in his book:

The legend goes that publisher Martin Goodman wanted Stan Lee to do a comic based on [longtime Daredevil writer Charles] Biro's hero, in 1964. Since Lee admired Biro's work, that may not be unfounded. But, instead, Lee, Bill Everett, and Steve Ditko created a new Daredevil, switching the original DD's muteness for blindness and subbing a billy club for a boomerang. 

Does that not sound plausible to you? If not, well, Mougin did say "legend", didn't he? (I am curious about his mention of Ditko here, as Wolk doesn't mention Ditko at all when he discusses the creation of Marvel's Daredevil.)

The sense I got while reading this very early bit of Wolk's book was that rather than being created by a single artist or a single writer or even a single writer/artists team, sometimes it's more of a group effort, a creation by committee. That certainly seems to been the case with Iron Man, for example.

As for the Daredevil example, it shows not only that sometimes it's a team or a staff (or, in Marvel's case, a bullpen) that might create a superhero character, but sometimes it can take multiple creative teams and multiple years—hell, here some 20 years!—before a corporate character like Marvel's Daredevil reaches what will ultimately be considered his essential, perfected form.

Far later in the book, in a chapter entitled "Good is a Thing You Do" that is devoted to the debut and early issues of the current Ms. Marvel Kamala Khan and to Ryan North, Erica Henderson, Derek Charm and company's Unbeatable Squirrel Girl (the latter of which was built around a 1991 character designed and originally drawn by Ditko), Wolk gives an even better example of a character being developed into creation, I think. He does so while also illustrating how newer Marvel characters are dependent on older ones, and how even their earliest antecedents can be traced back to still earlier, pre-Marvel ancestors.

"Kamala Khan is yet another of Marvel's collective creations, her real-world origin too complicated to be attributed to a single originator," Wolk writes.

She emerged from conversations between editors Sana Amanat and Stephen Wacker about Amanat's experience growing up as a South Asian Muslim in New Jersey, as well as writer G. Willow Wilson's interest in creating a teenage Muslim superhero ("Sana and I initially had very modest expectations for this book," Wilson wrote five years later. "Our goal was to get to ten issues.") Artist Adrian Alphona came up with the images of Kamala and her supporting cast, although her costume was designed by Jamie McKelvie. 

Wolk also cites the particular creative choices made by colorist Ian Herring and letterer Joe Carmagna as distinct and important, each further defining and differentiating the initial Ms. Marvel comic book series from others in Marvel's line.

We could also note that while McKelvie designed Kamala's costume, a significant component of it, the lightning bolt-shaped symbol, was taken from Dave Cockrum's redesigned costume for the previous Ms. Marvel Carol Danvers dating back to the '70s.

And, of course, the superhero codename "Ms. Marvel" also came from Danvers, who was created, as Danvers, by Roy Thomas and Gene Colan in 1968, but made into the superhero Ms. Marvel by Gerry Conway and John Buscema in 1977.

And, just to make this into a game of superhero telephone, the original Ms. Marvel was a distaff version of the male hero Captain Marvel (created by Stan Lee and Gene Colan in 1967). He took his name from the Golden Age Fawcett Comics character Captain Marvel (created by Bill Parker and C.C. Beck in 1942), and that Captain Marvel was based on Siegel and Shuster's Superman...or at least, the company then known as Detective Comics was sure enough that he was that they took Fawcett to court, accusing them of copyright infringement (The case was eventually settled in 1953, in large part because, in Fawcett's estimation, superhero comics had by then ceased being profitable enough to fight over).

And thus we get from 2014's Ms. Marvel Kamala Khan all the way back to the very first superhero in 1938. 

Anyway, both Wolk and Mougin's books are very interesting reads, and ones that should be of interest to anyone who reads superhero comics. I'll be formally reviewing them in the future, but I wanted to touch on this idea of superhero creation as a process of development in a post of its own. 

DC Versus Marvel Omnibus Pt. 17: Batman/Daredevil: King of New York #1

DC and Marvel might not have gotten to every conceivable crossover of interest. But between all of the one-shot crossovers in the pages of DC Versus Marvel Omnibus and the various event miniseries collected in DC Versus Marvel: The Amalgam Age Omnibus, I think it's safe to say that, by the end of the '90s, the two publishers had released comic books featuring many of the configurations of characters that their audiences were likely to be most interested in (Save, of course, for the failed Justice League/Avengers crossover, which they would eventually get around to in 2003). 

In fact, by the time the decade ended, DC and Marvel were even repeating particular pairings, publishing a second meeting between Batman and Spider-Man and, of course, a second Batman/Daredevil pairing, which would end up being the last DC/Marvel crossover...with the exception of that JLA/Avengers one a few years later.

While 1997's Daredevil and Batman was created by a previous Daredevil team, that of D.G. Chichester and Scott McDaniel, this time it's a DC team at the helm: Alan Grant, who wrote various Batman titles throughout the '90s, and Eduardo Barreto, an incredibly gifted artist who had worked steadily for DC throughout the '80s and '90s, working on several Batman specials in the latter decade.

His art is always welcome, and it's a special treat in this particular collection, where his contribution is one of the best drawn in the entire tome (up there alongside Jose Luis Garcia-Lopez and Dick Giordano's DC Special Series #27 and Steve Rude and Al Milgrom's The Incredible Hulk Vs. Superman). 

As was the case with the Titans/X-Men crossover that immediately preceded the last cessation of DC/Marvel crossovers, the quality of this particular one doesn't seem to be to blame for the temporary end to the cooperation. It's just about as good as the best of any of the 18 earlier DC/Marvel crossover, and far better than a few. 

Rather, if the blame isn't the changes in leadership at the two publishers, as various prose pieces in the collection seem to suggest, it may just be as simple as fan and market exhaustion of the crossovers, which had been coming at a pretty steady clip since they resumed with Batman/Punisher in 1994. 

While that's just a guess, I have to imagine that, at the very least, the DC/Marvel crossovers had lost that feeling of being rare or special during the course of those six years or so, given how many of them were published in such a relatively short span of time.

But anyway, back to this crossover. 

Grant seems to have constructed the entire thing around one particular meeting of two characters...and not those whose names are in the title. Rather, Grant seemed to want to pit Daredevil, who is nicknamed "The Man Without Fear", against Batman villain The Scarecrow, the self-proclaimed master of fear, whose entire modus operandi is to attack his victims by scaring them ("Modus operandi", by the way, is a term I first learned from reading another Alan Grant-written inter-company crossover that also featured The Scarecrow as its villain) . 

That scene plays out in a short, five-page sequence at the climax of the book. The Scarecrow sprays Daredevil directly in the face with an aerosol bottle containing his fear gas, exposure to which subjects a victim to his or her greatest fear.

"Taste fear, my friend!" The Scarecrow grins, the border of his dialogue balloon wavy and jagged to suggest his spooky voice.  

And in the next panel Daredevil covers his eyes and wheels backward. 

A big panel that dominates the bottom two-thirds of the page is then devoted to Daredevil with his eyes and mouth wide open, various fears apparently running through his mind, Barreto's art depicting five different DD villains, one of whom I didn't recognize, while Grant's melodramatic narration notes just how powerful the gas is ("Another man-- any other man--would crack beneath that onslaught of pure, untainted fear--").

A turn of the page finds Daredevil apparently angrily laughing at the dark sky above, while the narration box reads, "But Daredevil is the Man Without Fear. Defiantly, he throws back his head and laughs in its face!"

"Taste fear yourself, creep!" Daredevil then quips, kicking The Scarecrow over the railing of the torch on the Statue of Liberty, where the four-way battle at the end of the book plays out. 

Of course, Daredevil has his own rogue—or rogues plural, I guess, as he's become a legacy character—who use fear gas as a weapon, the simply named Mister Fear (The first of whom appeared in 1965, well after The Scarecrow debuted).

I wonder, then, if such a scene has previously occurred in Daredevil history, just as I wonder why Grant didn't use any of the various versions of Mister Fear (provided any of them were alive at that point in 2000) to pair with The Scarecrow. Instead, Grant resorted to DD's archenemy, The Kingpin (Who, as we saw, already appeared in a pretty good DC/Marvel crossover, one that also featured Batman). 

(Other decent Batman/Daredevil rogue combinations that would remain unexplored? The Joker and The Jester, and The Penguin and The Owl.)

In this particular story Batman oddly, even counter-factually describes The Scarecrow as a villain who "dabbles in organized crime when the mood takes him" (I've read all of The Scarecrow's appearances throughout the decade of the '90s, most of which were written by Grant himself, and he never once showed any real interest in organized crime beyond hiring thugs to do manual labor or protect him). The conflict driving the book basically rests on that description, though, as this is a story in which Gotham City mad scientist-turned-terrorist The Scarecrow attempts to muscle in on Kingpin's New York City turf, using his prowess with mind-altering chemicals to essentially mind-control criminals into following him. 

The story opens with Daredevil on the trail of Catwoman, the latter of whom Barreto draws a particularly svelte and sexy version of, as she essentially resembles a nude female form that happens to be colored the purple and black of her then-costume. She has apparently stolen a particularly important thing from the Manhattan safe of New York law firm Shane, Murdock and Nelson: Their files on Kingpin of Crime Wilson Fisk's operations. That means, in Daredevil's words, 

Details of meets, associates, businesses owned. Suspicions concerning his activities. Everything a lawyer would need if he were putting a brief together!

Why would anyone want that? Well, that's precisely why Daredevil has followed Catwoman back to Gotham. He's about to bust up her rooftop meet with a pair of criminals, when his senses pick up on Batman about to foil it, so he intercepts the Dark Knight mid-air. Batman naturally fights back and the pair of vigilantes—as well as the head of a stone gargoyle—crash to the rooftop. 

Catwoman gets away with the case as Batman and Daredevil beat up the remaining bad guys. The criminals refuse to talk, but they give up a clue that Batman's Batcave computers manage to decipher anyway: They were apparently subjected to the The Scarecrow's fear gas. And, indeed, readers see Catwoman meet up with Scarecrow on another roof top after losing the vigilantes. 

(If, like me, you have a particular interest in how different artists depict The Scarecrow, I suppose I should here note that his design here is basically that which was seen in the 1993 Shadow of The Bat arc "The God of Fear" drawn by Bret Blevins, only with straw "hair" reminiscent of the Tim Sale design. Or, perhaps even more closely, Barreto's own take on the Batman: The Animated Series design...that of Scarecrow's second appearance in the series, but well before the redesign with the hat noose around his neck.) 

Despite their rough meeting at the beginning of this one-shot, the two heroes decide to work together again, while both the narration and their dialogue will refer back a few times to their initial meeting, in 1997's Daredevil and Batman #1. (Is it worth noting again that their previous crossover bore an "Elseworlds" logo, while this one does not...?).

They follow what clues they can find to a trap set by The Scarecrow, who has apparently been shipping guns to New York...guns covered with a version of his fear chemicals that allows him to instantaneously hypnotize almost anyone who comes into contact with it. In this manner, he takes over Kingpin's operation. 

"Scarecrow's the King of New York now!" as an underling reports to Kingpin about the Gotham criminal having taken over his opeartion...just before Kingpin throws said underling out a window.

Daredevil and Batman soon come calling, trying to urge Kingpin to cooperate, as they've found evidence that Scarecrow has brought cannisters of fear gas with him, and thus has his sights set on something other than becoming New York's new Kingpin of Crime. He wants to attack the city with his fear gas.

Kingpin doesn't just refuse to cooperate with the heroes, but he apparently climbs into an attack helicopter off-panel and then tries to gun them down on a rooftop, before piloting it towards the high point where he assumes The Scarecrow will go to release his gas on the city: The Statue of Liberty.

Scarecrow shoots his chopper down, but the huge Kingpin forces his way through the tiny windows in the statue's crown...just as Batman and Daredevil arrive via speedboat, making awfully good time, considering Kingpin's head start and his, you know, being in a helicopter.

This leads to the climactic battle, in which the two heroes take on one another's villains, leading to the scene between Daredevil and Scarecrow detailed above, which occurs as Batman goes hand-to-hand against Kingpin (As the two didn't come to blows in the earlier Batman & Spider-Man, I suppose this gives readers a chance to see the two fight one another, although the fight is inconclusive, with Kingpin simply deciding to stop fighting after he learns DD has taken out Scarecrow).

In the end, as is ever the case with such books, the status quo for all of the characters essentially resets itself, with The Scarecrow being captured and apparently being taken back to Arkham Asylum (Daredevil of course caught him with his billy club-on-a-wire thingee after kicking him over the railing), and Kingpin walking, as the masked vigilantes can't really accuse him of any wrong-doing without unmasking and personally testifying against him. 

And as the two heroes pointed their boat towards the New York City horizon, the era of DC/Marvel crossovers drew to a close...

Well, almost. 

There was still the aforementioned JLA/Avengers yet to go. That wouldn't ship for another three years (although I wouldn't be surprised to learn that it was at least being discussed and maybe even developed at the time that this crossover was published), and it would differ in some key ways from the other, previous DC/Marvel crossovers collected in this omnibus, the most obvious of which being that it was given an entire four-issue miniseries, rather than occurring in a single, oversized one-shot, making it more similar to the three crossovers collected in the other, second DC/Marvel omnibus, DC Versus Marvel: The Amalgam Age Omnibus. 

I'll be circling back to review its contents in three future posts, detailing 1996's DC Versus Marvel (every other issue of which was called Marvel Versus DC) and its attendant Amalgam Comics tie-ins, 1996-1997's DC/Marvel: All Access (and its Amalgam tie-ins) and, finally, 1997-1998's Unlimited Access. 

Next: 1996's DC Versus Marvel

DC Vs. Marvel Omnibus Pt 13: Daredevil and Batman #1

Batman was, obviously, a popular character for DC and Marvel to feature in their crossovers, having already shared stories with The Incredible Hulk, The Punisher, Spider-Man and Captain America. Perhaps the most obvious character to pair the Dark Knight with, however, was his fellow martial arts expert and urban vigilante Daredevil, and the publishers finally got around to that particular team-up finally in 1997. 

It's not just the several major similarities of the two characters—both of whom, it could be argued, are descended from 1930s pulp fiction character The Black Bat—that made them seem like kindred spirits. It was also their general presentation and the sorts of stories they tended to appear in. 

These factors are likely due to the influence of Frank Miller, who had a pair of highly influential runs on Daredevil in the 1980s (including 1986's "Born Again") and similarly redefined Batman in a pair of stories, 1986's Batman: The Dark Knight Returns and 1987 Batman arc "Batman: Year One".

Miller's shadow loomed (and continues to loom) large over both characters, and many (perhaps most?) stories featuring either character that followed his work on them seemed to either be in debt to Miller's take, or else a reaction to that take. 

Let's here pause to remember that when DC and Marvel were putting together their first crossover, 1976's Superman vs. The Amazing Spider-Man, they took care to find a writer and artist who had experience working on both characters. Now imagine if that was still the case in the 1990s, when the crossovers became so much more frequent. Imagine a Frank Miller-written Batman/Daredevil story, drawn by one of Miller's collaborators who had worked with him on both characters, Klaus Janson or David Mazzucchelli...!

Instead, we got the 48-page "Eye for an Eye," by what the back cover said is "the creative team behind the best-selling Daredevil: Fall from Grace," which I, of course, had never read, neither by the time this was first released, nor in the years since ( It doesn't look like there is a trade collection of it available, either).

That team consisted of writer D. G. Chichester and pencil artist Scott McDaniel. 

Chichester if the first writer or artist whose work appears in the DC Versus Marvel Omnibus whom I had never heard of at all. Looking him up on the Internet, it seems he was a Marvel editor turned writer whose career spanned the decade of the 1990s, and his longest comics-writing gig seemed to be a run on Daredevil. 

McDaniel, on the other hand, is of course familiar to anyone who's read many Batman-related comics in the last few decades, or DC comics in general, having drawn substantial runs on Nightwing and Batman in the late-90s and early-00s, and drawing most of their related characters at one time or another, and then a huge swathe of the DC universe in the 2008 series Trinity. 

By the time of this one-shot, though, most of his work was for Marvel, where he had drawn plenty of Spider-Man appearances and had a healthy run on Daredevil. Particularly germane to our discussions of these crossovers, the previous year he was the artist on the Amalgam comic Assassins, which featured the new characters "Dare" (an amalgamation of Daredevil and Deathstroke that also happens to be a woman for some reason) and "Catsai" (an amalgamation of Elektra and Catwoman). 

Though I haven't seen his work in some time now, I've always liked McDaniel's art style, which is...well, I want to say "weird," but I think "peculiar" might be the more accurate word. I can't think of any other comics artists whose work resembles that of McDaniel's.  I don't see the influence of any earlier artists in his style, I don't see any later artists whose art seem inspired by his, and I have a hard time even describing his work.

His figures may often be quite big, and they are usually well-muscled, but they always seem to be drawing themselves inward, looking somewhat compressed and coiled, even when they are drawn exploding outward physically, as they so often are.

There's also a sense of flatness and unreality about them, a very...well, a very, drawn look to them. McDaniel's art is very comic book-y, for a lack of a better word, as it doesn't look like art you would find in any place other than a comic book. 

He is, of course, a perfect fit for both characters (although he was still in the process of proving himself as a Batman artist at the time this crossover originally shipped), and his presence gives this particular comic book a unique look, his dynamic figures and the charged atmosphere of his style making for a particularly action-packed read, even during the slower or down scenes. 

A comic featuring these two particular characters probably doesn't need any villains—I mean, Batman and Daredevil could always just fight one another, given their particular natures and skills, right?—but the by now well-established formula of these inter-company crossovers demanded a villain from each hero's rogues gallery.

The most obvious villains would of course be their respective archenemies, The Joker and The Kingpin, but neither appear here. I'm not sure if it was Chichester's decision or that of the editors to not use those characters, but it was probably the right call...regarding The Joker, at least. 

Perhaps it was feared readers were starting to tire of the character who had, after all, appeared in every single DC/Marvel crossover that Batman had appeared in so far, which meant he had been in four crossovers in just the last three years alone (Five, if you count DC Versus Marvel, in which he also, perhaps somewhat surprisingly, appears, sharing the opening scene of the series with Spider-Man).  

So instead of The Joker, the Batman villain we get is Two-Face, and he is teamed with off-and-on Daredevil villain Mr. Hyde (who was first introduced as a Thor villain by Stan Lee and Don Heck in the early 1960s). Hyde would seem an unusual choice, but perhaps Chichester zeroed in on the character as one that represents a sort of duality akin to that of Two-Face...although, in this story, Hyde is always his more dangerous, super-powered self, with no apparent connection to his version of Dr. Jekyll, scientist Calvin Zabo.

(As for The Kingpin, he would be featured in two future crossovers; 1997's Batman & Spider-Man #1 and 2000's Batman/Daredevil: King of New York #1, the writers of which would both make pretty great use of him in Batman narratives.)

The inside front cover sees the return of origins of the starring characters, here presented in melodramatic prose paragraphs, next to black and white images of the heroes. These paragraphs, though colorfully written, don't really give readers the necessary facts of the heroes' origins and backgrounds, but then, I suppose that by 1997, everyone knew their whole deals...at least, those likely to pick up this particular book from a comic book shop would have known their deals.

Below these origins is the Elseworlds logo and spiel; as with the previous Batman & Captain America, DC Comics seems to want readers to know that this isn't a canonical crossover, but a one-off that occurs in a standalone world all its own (the previously mentioned later Batman/Daredevil crossover, King of New York, does not bear an Elseworlds logo anywhere on it though, despite the fact that it refers back to this crossover in a couple of places). 

Anyway, we see here the various ways the two publishers handled crossovers after the fact that the Marvel and DC universes were established as different, parallel realities in Green Lantern/Silver Surfer and DC Versus Marvel and its sequels. 

The first page of the story features a long strip of prose running down the left border of the page beneath a big bat-symbol, while McDaniel draws five panels of Batman (his first official drawing of Batman?) investigating a Waynetech crime scene, where the room has been split in half, one side pristine and clean, the other a mess...and full of bodies. A clue to Two-Face as the responsible party, of course.

Batman follows such clues to New York City, where a TV talking head reveals that a rash of "violent robberies have plagued over a dozen technology supply companies in the city." Some of these seem exceedingly low-rent for a villain of Two-Face's caliber, especially compared to what he stole from Waynetech (Which will only gradually be revealed throughout the story, but, to spoil you now, is a "neural net", a sort of advanced organic super-computer than can be grown in living human brain tissue...but with the side-effect that it kills its host.). These crimes include things like stripping and selling copper wire and stealing the quarters from arcade games. 

In the sewers of New York, Batman sees Daredevil with the blood of a murder victim on his fingers, and leaps to attack him ("No external sensation warns Daredevil he's being stalked-- --The Dark Knight is that good--"). DD's radar sense warns him of Batman at the last moment, leading to a brief, not too terribly well-choreographed fight scene that lasts about three pages.

Neither character seems to gain the upper hand, so I'm afraid this comic can't tell us who would win in a fight, Batman or Daredevil. (It's a fan-ish question I'm actually curious about the answer to, having no solid answer of my own. Batman's training is wider and more diverse than Daredevil's, and he's got a utility belt full of weapons, but, on the other hand, maybe Daredevil's super-senses would give him the advantage? No comics professional seems to have ruled on this particular match-up, as the two didn't face off in DC Versus Marvel, and they won't have a conclusive battle in their next team-up either. And while earlier versions of the characters briefly meet in Unlimited Access, they don't come to blows there at all.)

I should here pause to note that I really like the way McDaniel, inker Derek Fisher and colorist Gregroy Wright depict Daredevil's radar vision. McDaniel draws a panel shaped like a big circle, like that of a radar screen, with smaller circles bubbling around its edges. That main circle is black, while white lines emanate from its center, these forming the very rough, sketchy shape of Batman reaching out towards Daredevil, whose eyes we are of course seeing through in this image. 

We'll see a couple more examples of it throughout the story, including one where Daredevil sees the handful of Batagrangs Batman throws at him and then, later, when he sees the Batmobile parked in an alley ("You drove that from Gotham?").

After the allotted space for their fight ends, Daredevil finally says, "We're both sewer-diving for the same reason, am I right? Thieves...and murderers." He proposes a team-up, and soon the pair are running across city rooftops, an image that McDaniel would draw many different versions of on Nightwing, where his Dick Grayson moved across urban environments much like his Daredevil does here. 

Batman is, as always, reluctant to work with another hero, and after the pair share some intel and have a disagreement about whether or not Two-Face Harvey Dent might be redeemable—and after Batman picks up on clues to determine that Daredevil is "visually impaired" and likely has sensory enhancements—Batman tries to ditch Daredevil. 

This leads to a scene in which Daredevil leaps on the hood of the speeding Batmobile, and the pair ultimately play a game of chicken, Batman driving straight at Daredevil, who stands in his way. (The Man Without Fear wins that particular conflict.)

Meanwhile, Two-Face and Hyde are on a rampage of their oddly petty, but extremely violent, crimes, terminating in a hostage situation in an Internet cafe. As to what's really going on, you've probably guessed it from what I've already written, but Harvey is using Hyde to grow the neural net, egging him on with drugs and violent crime to help "cook" it faster.

A big fight at the end pits the two vigilantes against the super-strong Hyde—who, again, was a Thor villain, and is thus a little out of their weight-class—and sees Daredevil testing his theory that there's still a bit of good in Harvey Dent. The two went to law school together, you see, and so Matt Murdock knows Harvey...or at least knew him before his transformation. (I guess that might be part of the reason Chichester chose Two-Face as the villain, as he shares a legal background with Daredevil?).

The adventure over, there's a pretty fun three-page epilogue, in which Matt Murdock and Foggy Nelson run into Bruce Wayne at a Gotham fundraiser, and Murdock and Wayne seem to intimate to one another in a rather intense conversation that they each know who the other is, and Wayne doesn't seem too happy to see him, leading to a clever, almost punchline-like last word from Matt. 

Despite my complete unfamiliarity with the writer, and the rather narrow focus and low stakes of the crossover, it was fun to finally see these two particular characters share a story. It does seem like there's a bigger, better Batman/Daredevil story yet to be told (I believe Brian Michael Bendis and Marvel had made some pretty public noises about trying to get DC to go along with doing one when Joe Quesada was still Editor-In-Chief at Marvel).

As I said, the two will meet again in a few years, in what will prove to be the last DC/Marvel crossover...at least until 2003's outlier crossover, JLA/Avengers. 

But as for Batman, he would be back in another crossover almost immediately. 

Next: 1997's Batman & Spider-Man #1

Some recent Marvel trades I read, um, recently:

Daredevil: Back In Black Vol.3--Dark Art

After a really rather rough second volume (discussed in this post), the current, Charles Soule-written volume of Daredevil is back to the level of quality of the first volume. This likely has a lot to do with the fact that pencil artist Ron Garney is back, drawing all five of the issues collected herein. It may also have a lot to do with the fact that, like the first volume and unlike the second volume, Soule apparently wrote these issues as a single arc. It's not quite complete enough to read like a distinct graphic novel, as it does pick up on at least one event from volume two (Elektra having broken Blindspot's arm), and there's a pretty dramatic cliffhanger ending regarding the fate of Daredevil's new sidekick, but otherwise this is a pretty self-contained comics story.

Our heroes are doing their thing, lawyering and/or law assistancing by day, fighting crime by night, and they are forced to face a sinister new villain. The papers have dubbed him "Vincent Van Gore," which is pretty good, but he personally prefers "Muse," which isn't quite as good. He's a serial killer/artist, and his first major piece being a gigantic Guernica-esque mural painted with the blood of dozens of different victims. He's also got some weird and, frankly, ill-defined powers that make him a match for Daredevil in a scrap, particularly since Daredevil can't "see" him.

And that's pretty much that: Hero vs. villain, with the latter being a brand-new villain. There's something you don't see much anymore!

Complicating matters is that Muse's second piece involves killing of several Inhumans*, and so Daredevil and Matt Murdock try to work with Medusa and New Attilan. There's another new character introduced here--a former New York City Police Department detective who got Inhuman-ized, given a neat but subtle power and who now works as a liaison between the country and the city's police--who spends the most time with DD and/or MM, but the climax of the Inhumans' involvement seems to be to have Medusa be kind of a jerk and let Karnak and Daredevil fight. As I was reading one scene, in which neighborhood toughs attempt to murder an Inhuman, it occurred to me that this story arc may seem quite dated in a few years' time, as the scene is written almost exactly as if Soule had simply replaced the word "mutant" with "Inhuman."

I'm not crazy about Muse's mask, which appears to include a tight-fitting knit cap like the kind of a cartoon burglar might wear, and his tiny little backpack, but otherwise his design is visually striking, and of the sort that fits into the book's unusual coloring scheme (which color artist Matt Milla manages).

I can't say I'm terribly excited about what I imagine may dominate the fourth volume, based on the last, climactic pages of this arc, in which Blindspot is forced to take on Muse solo in order to save many lives, but it's quite possible that Soule will end up zagging instead of zigging.

Again, after a choppy second volume, Daredevil is again pretty tightly written super-comics, with great art and a somewhat unique visual hook to its telling that separates it from the scores of other superhero comics on the shelves at the moment (the vast majority of which are also published by Marvel).

Deadpool: Too Soon?

If Deadpool's current state of popularity is such that his presence can not only goose interest and sales in books he appears in, than this four-issue miniseries operated on almost reverse logic. This is a Deadpool comic filled with a large cast of guest-stars, most of them relatively minor characters, but ones with strong fan bases.

Writer Joshua Corin (whom I have never heard of**) sends The Forbush Man, The Unbeatable Squirrel Girl, The Astonishing Ant-Man, Rocket and Groot, Howard The Duck, The Punisher and Peter Porker, The Amazing Spider-Ham and, um, The Punisher to a mansion, each following a similar mysterious letter. There they are greeted by Deadpool and his apparent wife, a demon named Shiklah (I had heard he was married, although this is the first time in my extremely sporadic reading of Deadpool comics that I learned to who).

Deadpool has invited them all there to pose for his Christmas card photo with him, and has dug up enough blackmail material on each of them to force them to comply. Why this particular assortment of characters? Because, he explains, they are the funniest characters in the Marvel Universe. If The Punisher seems particularly out-of-place among this group, I suspect that is the joke regarding his presence.

This set-up leads to a locked-door sort of mystery, as when the lights briefly go out and come back on, Forbush Man is found decapitated! Is this the end of the Forbush Man, the most expendable of the guests, in that he's not currently starring or co-starring in a comic book? Looks like! At his funeral, attended by all (dig Tippy-Toe's little black ribbon), Deadpool vows to find the killer, criss-crossing the country to investigate the other suspects in the room that night (he naturally dismisses himself and his wife).

Joined against his will by Squirrel Girl, he travels to California, to Miami and then back to New York City, pursued by "Squirrelpool," a hideous clone monster created accidentally when he and Squirrel Girl share an old teleporter (I was pretty disappointed in this design by artist Todd Nauck; it suits the purposes of the story fine, although I'm not sure why it's a hulking monster-sized creature instead of being Deadpool-sized, or even just Deadpool-plus-Squirrel Girl-sized, but man, it would be so easy to amalgamate those two characters into a cool design).

When the beheadings start to pile-up, and include clearly-not-going-to-get-killed-off-for-long characters like Rocket and Groot (and, a little more shockingly, Squirrel Girl's besties Nancy Whitehead*** and Tippy-Toe), the stakes are lowered and, when the murderer is revealed and defeated with some help of Marvel's latest movie star Dr. Strange, it should come as no surprise that everyone is restored to life in some particularly random deus ex machina. (To be fair to Brad Meltzer, whose Identity Crisis is pretty much the worst murder "mystery" in comic book history, I should note that the killer is not a suspect introduced at any point in the comic, and so as a mystery, this doesn't work...not that the mystery set-up was ever meant to be anything more than a premise, of course).

Nauck is an artist I sometimes have some trouble evaluating entirely impartially, given the amount of affection I have for his work on account of his years on Young Justice. His ability--and tons of experience--balancing light-hearted supehero comedy with concinving superhero action serves him well in this particular series, though, and it's certainly interesting to see so many diverse characters translated though his particular visual style, even if they don't all seem to work (Squirrel Girl, for example, is a character that some artist seem to nail a particular take on, while others flounder a bit, sometimes for reasons I have a hard time pinning down. Nauck's version just looks like a typical super-girl character with a few Squirrel Girly features, rather than looking like Squirrel Girl.)

I was a little surprised to find a back-up, the story "Deadpooloween" taken from the Gwenpool Holiday Special: Merry Mix-Up #1, and I was more surprised still to find that it was both written and drawn by Chynna Clugston Flores. I guess it was included because it prominently features Squirrel Girl, as does the Too Soon?. It's been a good long time since I've read a Chynna comic, although I can hardly overstate how much I loved her Blue Monday in Action Girl and then from Oni (Image is currently reprinting it, and you should buy it and read it). While I'm sure she's done something for Marvel since, the last Marvel comic she drew that I read was that issue of Ultimate Marvel Team-Up from the earliest years of the Ultimate line, when Brian Michael Bendis had Peter Parker and pals run into the X-Men at the mall.

In her story, Deadpool belatedly realizes it Halloween, and suits up to cruise the town near Empire State University. There he finds that Squirrel Girl is hosting a Deadpool costume contest, which he angrily enters, irritated that the success of his movie has spawned so many college bros dressing up like him this Halloween.

Remember what I said about certain artists seeming to do a better, truer Squirrel Girl than others? Chynna nails hers. Her style is so different than that of Erica Henderson, but Chynna is just an all-around expert when it comes to drawing geeky young people, I guess. I would love to see more Chynna Clugston Flores Squirrel Girl somewhere in the future.

Doctor Strange Vol. 3: Blood in the Aether

With Doctor Strange's magical powers and resources utterly exhausted by his two-volume battle against the magic-destroying interdimensional entity The Empirikul, he is at one of his lowest, weakest points in Doctor Strange #11, by writer Jason Aaron and guest-artists Kevin Nowlan (who draws the scenes set during Strange's origin) and Leonardo Romero (who draws the scenes set in the present). That means there's blood in the water and the sharks are starting to circle.

And by "the water" I guess we mean "the aether," and by "the sharks" I guess we mean an assortment of villains, including Doctor Strange's arch-enemies and a few newer or more random threats.

So after the prelude chapter that the 11th issue serves as, the rest of the collection is a sort of week-in-the-life story, in which Doctor Strange runs a gauntlet of foes new and old, all the time being forced to rely on his wits, his allies and what new sorcery he can invent on the fly to save himself...and everyone else.

So in rapid succession Strange faces Mister Misery (the name the thing from his basement assigned itself), Baron Mordo, Nightmare, Satana and Master Pandemonium**** (and Pandemonium's hands), the post-Original Sin version of The Orb and, of course, the dread Dormammu. Their motives range from the dire to the petty to the idiosyncratic, and if you're at all familiar with any of these characters you can probably assign each of them to those categories without any help from me, but it all adds up to a pretty dramatic, almost arcade-like fight, with a few lighter moments to stop and exhale.

Regular pencil artist Chris Bachalo manages the bulk of the five issues that make up the actual "Blood in the Aether" story arc (with a pair of pencilers getting "with" credits on the last two issues, and eight different inkers credited on these issues...speaking of credit, it's to Bachalo and company's credit that the story actually looks pretty great, and all those different artists work together well enough that their collaboration is, if not seamless, than relatively seam-light).

It's really difficult to overstate how well-suited Bachalo is to the material, and not just to the Steve Ditko-conceived world of Doctor Strange in general, but to writer Jason Aaron's world-weary, joke-heavy conception of the character and his story specifically. As I've said before, Bachalo handles weird well, and he manages to make old characters like Dormammu, Mordo and Nightmare his own, while the characters that are his own, like Mister Misery, are hard to imagine under anyone else's pens.

Probably the best example of his work is the issue devoted to Satana, however. She plans to open up her own hell, one in which the damned can spend time with "cool" dead people, like dead rockstars and superheroes, like Doctor Strange. She pitches him over a bizarre meal in a bizarre diner (Pandemonium is both her short order cook and her muscle), filled with elaborately, cartoonishly designed creatures. To save himself, Strange must use his astral projection form in a pretty unusual way, which I'm not sure if he's ever done before, in order to achieve a particular goal I'm quite positive he never has.

I'm not sure if Bachalo has completely redesigned Satana here, or if his and colorist Antonio Fabela's version is just strikingly rendered, but this is maybe the coolest I can remember her looking. I think Bachalo draws Pandemonium's hand demons a little too gitancially, but, like Swarm, there's really no way to screw up the drawing of this crazy-ass Marvel villain.

Bachalo's Orb is another pretty great character. I don't believe I've seen him since Original Sin, nor do I quite understand how either he or Nick Fury Sr. "work" in the Marvel Universe anymore, but Aaron's conception of The Orb works well here for the purposes of a Doctor Strange comic, and Bachalo seems to have a lot of fun selling this new life of the character's menace as well as inherent humor.

This volume is really strong enough to stand on its own, independent of the two preceding it, as the only things one really needs to know from the previous ten issues get summarized in the three sentences following the Doctor Strange logo on the title page.

Power Man and Iron Fist Vol. 2: Civil War II

Here's another in the too-long line of pretty good books that got derailed and/or destroyed by Civil War II. In the case of the David Walker-written Heroes For Hire revival, I say "and/or destroyed" because the book is no longer around. That may have simply been Marvel trying to more closely tie their comics to the various Netflix series, as after this book's cancellation Walker went on to write a Luke Cage solo title sharing the name of his TV show, and a new Iron Fist series launched. Or it could have been because of this dumb-ass story arc, that takes over issues #6-9 of the then-new book, almost the entirety of this second collected volume of the series (there's also a fun, holiday annual included in this collection).

For trade-waiters like me, the other unfortunate aspect of Civil War II? Because that book was so delayed, and expanded after solicitation, it meant I couldn't read any of the tie-in trades like this until I read the main series, but so many of the tie-ins were published prior to the Civil War II collection, that basically meant holding off on reading any (or at least many) Marvel collections for a few months longer than I might have otherwise. (As it turns out though, one really only needs to have read the first few issues of Civil War II to understand what's going on here; War Machine's dead, She-Hulk is in a coma and Carol Danvers is a big, stupid immoral idiot and...that's it, really).

Now, this arc is bad, but it's still fun, and maybe as good as a tie-in to such a dumb event series could be if it really did try to honestly engage with the event instead of simply side-stepping it as fast as possible. Walker writes these characters extremely well, and has a lot of fun with Luke's refusal to swear and in recovering the often very goofy characters from Cage's deep past, and other failed or half-forgotten street-level characters from Marvel's past, and reintroducing them, often portraying their past portrayals as youthful indiscretions, or perhaps trying to be something they weren't...or, in at least one case, trying to hang on to something they never were in the first place.

The artwork by Flavianao and Sanford Green is great, and I could look at those two guys' drawings of the two guys in the title all damn day; I particularly like, as I believe I mentioned when discussing the first volume, how huge this Luke Cage is drawn, in relation to Danny, Jessica, Danielle and the whole world around him. He's a literally bigger-than-life character.

Walker's way of dealing with the Civil War II plot is interesting, and I find myself wondering whether the plot for this arc, which isn't quite concluded in this volume, is one he would have written anyway, and he was just forced to fold Carol Danvers in, or if his non-Civil War II plot was an intentional echo of Civil War II, inspired by its plot.

So the first issue opens with Luke Cage, Danny Rand, Jessica Jones and a clueless Danielle watching news footage of the battle with Thanos that took place in Free Comic Book Day 2016, which the Civil War II collection puts between Civil War II #0 and Civil War II #1 (That event series, by the way, makes an excellent case for trade-waiting, as it's really hard to tell where and when it actually starts; there are basically three different starting points, one of which isn't terribly relevant. Better to let a collections editor curate it, I think). This is the battle that ends with War Machine James Rhodes dead and She-Hulk in a coma, and the two heroes are pretty shaken for obvious reasons, with flashbacks giving less-obvious, more personal details: Cage and Rhodey's last conversation was an intense argument, and Danny thinks about the time he kissed She-Hulk. Four more pages are devoted to Civil War II: They attempt to visit Shulkie at the Tri-Skelion but are turned away, and they are warmly greeted by Carol, who then asks if they can give her a minute of their time so she can explain what's going on.

Jump to the two of them walking to their car, reiterating that Civil War II is dumb and they hope they can avoid being in it (they can't!).

"What was all that 'predictive justice' stuff Carol was talking about?" Danny yells. "Sounded like a bunch of fiddle-faddle to me," Luke says, and they agree to sit this one out, as they are also sick of hero vs. hero fights. On a two-page spread, between two tiers of them talking about it, there's a nice big spread of the Luke Cage-lead Avengers (from the second volume of the Bendis-written New Avengers, I want to say) fighting the Carol Danvers and Iron Man-lead Avengers (from the pages of the Bendis-written Mighty Avengers). Cage, who sided with Captain America in the pages of the first Civil War, was basically in a kinda cold war with the government-sanctioned Avengers between the end of Civil War and the post-Secret Invasion "Heroic Age," I think.

Walker then returns to matters related to his book, as a bunch of reformed criminals and their family members attempt to hire the Heroes For Hire to find a bunch of ex-cons who have since gone straight but disappeared shortly after encountering a group of mysterious vigilantes. And then those vigilantes attack! Followed by the police!

This ends with Danny Rand in jail for assaulting some officers, where he tries to figure out the disappearances. Many of those who have disappeared are also in jail there, and they ended up there without officially being charged or getting trials. Outside prison, Luke calls in favors from many friends to try to figure out the one clue they have, a mysterious device that mixes facial recognition software with the ability to manipulate and falsify criminal records. This is what the vigilantes were doing to bust their victims.

So you can see how this thematically kinda sorta ties in to Civil War II, as innocent--or at least innocent-until-proven-guilty--people are being attacked, arrested and punished for crimes they didn't actually commit. Civil War II comes back to the fore when Ulysses--the prophesying Inhuman that Carol Danvers is using to predict possible future crimes to prevent before they happen--has a vision of Luke Cage leading a break-in at Ryker's to free the incarcerated Danny.

In fact, a confused and frustrated Cage calls Songbird and Centurius to join him as he looks at Ryker's, in the hopes that they can talk him out of doing something stupid and figure out this whole mess, and then "Sweet Christmas, Easter and Hanukkah," in swoop Danvers, Mockingbird, Puck, Spectrum, Storm, Deathlok and a whole bunch of SHIELD troops. They are there to stop Ulysses' vision from coming to pass by arresting Luke first and, just as in All-New Wolverine Vol. 2: Civil War II, Carol's intervention is exactly what causes the vision to come to pass (slow learner, I guess).

Luke's not having it, of course, he tells off Carol in such a way to piss her off, and everyone fights, with the fight eventually spreading inside the prison after Carol punches Luke through its walls and a couple of errant energy blasts and explosions continue to escalate the situation.

There's a lot of fighting between all parties. I particularly liked the fight-then-team-up sequences involving Mockingbird, who Walker writes close enough to Chelsea Cain that she sounds like the same character, and Songbird, because they have similar names. And I'm always calling Songbird Mockingbird by accident.

It ends with Cage making a couple of speeches in Carol's direction, and then Danny making another one, and she's eventually shamed into dropping it and they help round up the prisoners and clean up the jail. (I'm not sure this all lines up perfectly well with Civil War II, by the way. In that book's third issue, Luke and Danny appear to be working with Carol and SHIELD, at least according to one big panel of a series of three images that run across a two-page spread while New York City Assistant District Attorney examines Carol Danvers, but in issue #4, Luke is allied with Iron Man on the "cool" team that shows up at the Triskelion to fight Carol's lame team.)

But just as in the pages of Civil War II, the tie-ins seem mostly designed to demonstrate that Carol is dumb and keeps making the same mistakes over and over and over again.

As for the A-plot, which becomes the B-plot, Luke's team is just about to crack where the doohickey being used to find and incarcerate people came from, when a very powerful person in a hoodie teleports to his safehouse and steals it from the hands of his allies.

As I mentioned earlier, the rest of the collection is devoted to an annual, or, to be specific, Sweet Christmas Annual #1. Walker writes this as well, but Scott Hepburn provides the art. It's Christmas Eve, and Luke, Danny and Danielle visit a toy store to find the Pokemon-like hot toy of the season. Also there is Spider-Woman Jessica Drew and her baby. And Daimon Hellstrom, Son of Satan, in an open-coat Santa suit. And The Krampus. And the real Santa Claus. It is every bit as awesome as it sounds, and Hepburn draws a hell of a Krampus, as well as a pretty sweet warrior version of Santa that isn't as over-the-top as the one in the Grant Morrison-written Santa vs. Krampus comic, Klaus.

I'm really glad it was collected here, even though the storyline preceding it didn't really reach its conclusion, because it at least means the book ends on a high note, rather than being another example of the Civil War II storlyine stumbling into an already perfectly strong title, upsetting all the furniture and then stumbling back out.

The Unbeatable Squirrel Girl Vol. 5: Like I'm The Only Squirrel In The World

This volume takes for its cover that of Unbeatable Squirrel Girl #13, i.e. the one where Squirrel Girl is hauling back to throw Tippy-Toe, who is herself hauling back to throw Ant-Man, who is all curled up like a ball in her tiny squirrel fist. Is this modified Fuzzball Special just something for the cover, or does it actually occur within the pages of the comic itself?

It does!

The Squirrel Girl/Ant-Man team-up takes place during a story arc that dominates this trade, occupying the first three of the five issues collected herein. Doreen, Nancy and Tippy-Toe join Doreen's mom at a cabin in Canada for a rather boring vacation, which is interrupted by a bid to conquer the world by a character who can split himself into many different versions of himself. His name is Enigmo, and he is apparently a pre-existing Marvel villain (The Internet said he debuted in 1994 issue of Avengers). Brain Drain, the disembodied brain in a jar atop a powerful robot body that has been hanging around with Doreen and friends for a while, teleports to Canada to help her, and he does so with the only hero he could find who was small enough to fit in the teleporter at the same time as him: The Astonishing Ant-Man, Scott Lang.

As per usual, Squirrel Girl is able to save the day, with the help of her many friends and the help of science knowledge, which writer Ryan North applies to the comic book world of the Marvel Universe as charmingly as ever. For example, there is a flashback to physics class, where in Doreen and Nancy remember their teacher's lecture on "Galileo's Square-Cube law," which explains why giant mice are impossible.

"And yes, you can get around this restriction with certain cosmic rays or other exotic particles. I am aware of Pym's work, thank you," the professor continues. "It's hard not to be when he published journal articles like 'Ha Ha, I'm Giant-Man Now: Screw You, All Other Physicists.'"

That sounds like a fantastic journal article! Should I be reading scientific journals, for laughs?

This very full arc, which actually feels a lot longer than three issues, contains not only a team-up with a very grumpy Ant-Man--who was kidnapped into participating--but lots of jokes based on Brain Drain's nihilistic view of the universe and the humor inherent in Canada, and how it is different than America.

I mention that the arc felt longer than it actually was, not as a criticism, but as a compliment. Not only does artist Erica Henderson draw lots of panels per page when called on to do so, but North clearly spends a great deal of his writing-time think of how to pack as many jokes into each page as possible. Not just the bonus jokes that come in the alt-text like sentences below most of the pages, but, for example, this panel, in which Doreen surveys her choices for magazines to read in the cabin:

North easily could have stopped at the titles of the magazines themselves, but he went above and beyond, to include several jokes on each cover, detailing the contents of those magazines.

Unbeatable Squirrel Girl has got to have set some kind of record for the most jokes per square centimeter of page-space.

The remaining two issues of the collections are done-in-ones. The first of these is a comic told entirely from the perspective of Nancy's cat Mew, which I believe the solicitation for blamed on Matt Fraction and David Aja doing that Pizza Dog issue of Hawkeye a few years back (In fact, there's a dog that appears in this that I'm fairly confident is supposed to be Pizza Dog, although he's not named, and I didn't see either of the Hawkeyes among the many super-heroes running around). In the background, The Taskmaster is using his awesome skills to take on a whole mess of superheroes--Iron Man! A The Hulk!***** Captain America! Spider-Man! Ms. Marvel! Ms. America! Hellcat!--in addition to Squirrel Girl, but she ultimately proves unbeatable, thanks to the fact that she has something Taskmaster can't master. This issue contains several pages by Zac Gorman, in which he draws comic strips that replicate Mew's dreams. Apparently cats dream in comic strips? Who knew?

The final issue is devoted to celebrating the 25th anniversary of Squirrel Girl's introduction by creators Will Murray and Steve Ditko in 1991's Marvel Super-Heroes Winter Special #8. It's a kinda sorta origin of the character, although not in the "how she got her powers and became a super-hero" kind of way as much as a "where, specifically, she came from" kind of story (That is, it opens with her parents meeting, and the title page is her mom holding her just after giving birth). From there it jumps around in five year increments, and we meet the late Monkey Joe, watch 15-year-old Squirrel Girl help The Hulk take down The Abomination and, finally, enjoy a birthday party with her pals and some Avengers, a party which The Red Skull foolishly attempts to crash.

While the issue is mostly another North and Henderson joint, Murray writes the 15-year-old Doreen sequence, and a piece of Ditko art is repurposed to get something from the great artist into the issue.



*Oh hey, in all those recent discussions of the source of Marvel's current sales woes--you know, whether it was diversity of characters or event exhaustion or them renumbering their books twice a year or whatever--did anyone theorize that maybe it was just that everyone hates the Inhumans, yet Marvel seemed to go ahead and keep publishing Inhumans books constantly, while shoehorning them into pretty much everything they publish? Could that have been a factor? Did Marvel comics readers so hate the Inhumans that they stopped buying Marvel comics to avoid reading about the Inhumans?

**At least not until googling him. He's a prose writer and playwright, and this was his first comics work, which would explain why I had never heard of him. It should be noted that he writes like a comic book writer here, and doesn't display any of the typical flaws one sees when writers fluent in another medium tackle comics-scripting for the first time.

***I was a little surprised that Corin didn't include a joke of any kind referring to Nancy Whitehead as Nancy Whiteheadless. He is a stronger man than I am, I guess.

****I just went to check the table-of-contents of Jon Morris' The Legion of Regrettable Super Villains, the companion book to his earlier League of Regrettable Super Heroes and, to my surprise, Master Pandemonium was not included. Nor was The Orb. Swarm was however, and there's actually a pretty good showing from Marvel villains overall: Stilt-Man, MODOK, Angar the Screamer, Black Talon, The Headmen and others.

*****Not a typo! I'm just not sure which The Hulk it is, Amadeus Cho or Bruce Banner, the latter of whom I'm fairly certain wasn't temporarily dead-ish at the time that issue of Squirrel Girl was pubished.

These are some of the Marvel collections I've read lately:

All-New X-Men: Inevitable Vol. 1–The Ghosts of Cyclops

Some eight months or so have passed since the end of the previous volume of All-New X-Men, and something very dramatic has happened involving Cyclops, The Inhumans and the Terrigen Mists during that time–something that lead to Cyclops' death and the whole world hating and fearing him all over again.

That gap, and the mysterious events that occurred during it, have allowed writer Dennis Hopeless to begin his new volume of the title somewhat in media res. The first half of this six-issue collection is essentially a putting-the-team-together story, while the second half sets up their new status quo and sets them against some classic X-Men villains.

Hopeless has inherited not only the title, but also most of the cast of Brian Michael Bendis' series: The original five X-Men, who were pulled from the past to the present in order to try and talk sense to grown-up Cyclops, and not only did they fail, but they all got stuck here.

Of those five, Teen Jean is MIA (she's appearing in Jeff Lemire's Extraordinary X-Men, which is by far the less interesting and entertaining of the two books, at least in my opinion). Teen Iceman is hanging out in Austin, Texas. Teen Angel is still dating Laura, former X-23 and current All-New Wolverine, and they are hanging out in Vail, Colorado. Teen Beast is driving around the country in a VW bus-pulled camper called The Nerd Wagon, which has a Bamf-powered engine that allows them to teleport as need be. For reasons never made clear, recent Jean Grey School graduates Evan and Idie are with him (All that Teen Beast and friends would seem to have in common with these two X-teens are their relative ages; they never really hung out with them in the previous volume of All-New X-Men or in Wolverine and The X-Men).

Those two really stick out because, unlike Laura, who was part of Bendis' team, they are new, seemingly random additions, and Hopeless hasn't made much of a case for either of them being needed here. Idie at least brings some diversity to the otherwise all-white, mostly male team, but Evan? Well, I suspect he's here because the next collection will feature an Apocalypse-related cross-over, but I guess that remains to be seen.

Oh, and what of Teen Cyclops? Well, he's half laying low, dodging his friends and any attention, given the fact that his grown-up self went on to do...something pretty bad (And he'd already conquered the world and killed Charles Xavier in Avengers Vs. X-Men, becoming a wanted terrorist). But he's also tracking some new gang of mutants calling themselves "The Ghosts of Cyclops"; they don masks reminiscent of Cyke's last mask, speechify and basically just knock around tables and commit petty crime.

Teen Cyclops obviously takes that pretty personally, and sets about trying to take them down solo. He does pretty well too, given that they are just a group of untrained college kids with no real idea what they are doing, but he gets in over his head enough that the rest of the team unites to help him and, eventually, make him realize that he needs them after all.

From there, they become a more-or-less normal supehero team, teleporting all over the world to save people from natural disasters and the like. In Paris they run into The Blob, here given a fun, funny motivation for a life of crime, and Hopeless toys with the idea that their old enemy has had years to become a better, more experienced fighter, one used to trading blows with the more powerful adult versions of the X-Men, while they are still essentially "Year One" era teenagers who have yet to log many hours in the Danger Room (This is perhaps somewhat undercut by the idea that the X-Teens have been here a good long while now and should have gotten used to the idea of not underestimating the modern versions of losers from their past, and the presence of Laura and Angel's Black Vortex power upgrade).

The volume ends with a cliffhanger, as Toad too is in Paris, and attacks and kidnaps one of these X-Men, which seems to be in sharp contrast to the more benign Toad of Jason Aaron's Wolverine and The X-Men but, again, who knows what happened during the eight-month gap.

Hopeless seems very much dedicated to the idea of an old-school, classic superhero team comic here, as is readily apparent by the fact that he's not writing for the trade, as there's a three-issue arc and another that is at least four issues long, only the first three chapters of which appear here.

Additionally, each of the characters has a sub-plot of some sort that isn't bound to the particular story arc, but continues as a through line in all of these issues, and will likely to continue to do so. The most prominent of these is probably the tension between Angel and Wolverine; All-New Wolverine seems intent on taking point in any and all dangerous situations in a way that is reckless to the point of seeming insane. As when she throws herself off a cliff to beat Angel to the bottom of the hill while skiing. For fun.

Obviously, Angel has a hard time watching his girlfriend constantly taking bullets and setting herself on fire, and more than once vomits at the violence she subjects herself to, on the belief that her healing factor will help her recover from anything. Having also recently read the first collection of All-New Wolverine (and the annual, which was fun and funny), this portrayal seems somewhat at odds with how she appears in her own book, but, as with all of the sub-plots, it's a story-in-progress.

Hopeless is lucky enough to be working with pencil artist Mark Bagley (inked here by Andrew Hennessy), and not only has Bagley's career made him pretty much the ideal candidate for a Marvel comic featuring teen heroes and/or classic, old-school superheroics, but he's one of the few artists who is fast enough that he doesn't need fill-in artists to help him make a monthly, or even a more-than-monthly schedule, so that this collection is all Bagley and Hennessy, from start to finish.

I'm not sure why the book is called All-New X-Men: Inevitable on the spine and in the fine print but not the actual covers of the actual comics, but I suppose at the very least it will help separate it from the other collections of All-New X-Men with the same volume numbers on the spines of the collections.

Of the three books featuring X-Men teams Marvel is currently publishing, this is my favorite, and the one I would recommend, on the strength of its relative quality and its distancing itself from any X-Men mega-plot involving M-Pox and Inhumans and whatnot (The third, Uncanny X-Men, is drawn by Greg Land, so I didn't even bother looking at that one, nor will I).

Daredevil: Back In Black Vol. 2–Supersonic

So different was this second collection of Charles Soule's Daredevil run that I actually had to check the spine a few times to make sure that this was, indeed, the second volume of the series I had previously read, rather than the third. While that first volume read like a graphic novel, this one reads like a few chapters of one, and is different enough from that last volume that it honestly felt like I had missed a half-dozen issues or so.

Right from the first issue–or the cover, actually–we find ourselves in familiar, over-played Daredevil territory, with Elektra. In a two-part story, drawn not by Ron Garney, but Matteo Buffagani, Elektra attempts to kill Daredevil because she thinks he has done something with her daughter, who may or may not be Matt Murdock's. Matt, like the reader, didn't even know she had a daughter, and, it turns out, she didn't–it was some sorta mind control business to get her to kill Daredevil.

Blindspot, Daredevil's new sidekick introduced last volume, appears but briefly. Long enough to slow down a killing blow from Elektra, and get his arm broken for his effort. He later appears in a page set at Night Nurse's clinic. (Yay! Night Nurse!). With the post-Secret Wars Daredevil having his secret identity back, he and Elektra are on some particularly weird footing, as he knows she used to know, and now she doesn't, which he realizes puts her in sort of a horrible spot (She thought she was cheating on him...with himself). Soule commits a fairly cardinal sin of these sorts of soft reboot/continuity-altering shenanigans: If you have to deal with them at all, for God's sake, don't dwell on them. The next two issues, he dwells on them some more, however.

In those, drawn by Goran Sudzuka rather than Ron Garney, Matt goes to Macau to use his powers to win a ton of money at poker in a casino, which is all part of an elaborate–but fun to read!–plan to get to stay at a particular floor of a hotel, close enough to a briefcase full of something mysterious he needs, that has something to do with the Elektra story (He later says what is in the case, but it seems like he may have been lying). Spider-Man shows up for this story, as in the Peter Parker version, and Spidey knows something's not quite right with Daredevil, but he can't put his finger on it. Because Spidey too used to know Daredevil's secret identity, and know doesn't, and so there is still more talk of this (and a fun little game of keep-away as Spidey tries to press the issue).

This is actually the first time I've read a story featuring the new, post-Secret Wars Spidey and I'm not sure how I feel about that glowing costume. It's looked just fine on the Alex Ross-painted covers I've seen, but looks kind of weird and awkward here.

And that is that. Rounding out the collection if Daredevil Annual #1, which features a 20-page lead story written by Soule and a 10-page back-up by an entirely different creative team. They are unrelated to one another, an unrelated to the four issues of the main series that preceded them.

The longer, Soule-written story is a team-up with Echo in which they encounter a new form of Klaw, who spreads himself like an infection, transforming anyone who hears him into sound wave people. Echo, being deaf, is conveniently immune. She goes to Daredevil and the Emergency Broadcast System for help. It's a fine little story, mostly notable for artist Vanessa R. Del Rey's squiggly artwork and dramatic, elaborate lay-outs (My favorite part is a minor, silly detail, in which Echo seems to stop and take the time to tie feathers into the bandages she wraps around her forearms for absolutely no reason other than the fact that it's kinda sorta her costume; it's not like she dons a mask or any sort of identity-concealing, practical gear.

The 10-pager that closes out the volume is by writer Roger McKenzie and artist Ben Torres, and functions as a kinda sorta origin story for some dumb villain named Gladiator with circular saw blades mounted on his forearms. Torres only rarely seems to draw them in motion, which seems like it defeats the purpose of having such blades mounted on your forearms. It's not a bad story, but it's not a good one either; one imagines we'll be seeing the character in the future, as otherwise this is just kind of a head-scratching page-filler that helps justify using the Echo story in an annual instead of holding it as a fill-in issue.

So no Garney, almost no Blindspot, no complete story and predictable Daredevil enemies and allies–aside from the new costume and color scheme, this second collection was almost nothing that the first volume was, and suffered accordingly.

E Is For Extinction: Warzones

There is a sort of almost essential element of pointlessness to all of Marvel's 2015 Secret Wars tie-ins, which were almost all "What If...?"-style miniseries meant to kill time and fill slots in the publishing schedule, but that pointlessness could be insidious, as it could make one wonder what about these random, non-canonical miniseries was really any more pointless than any other super-comic? The whole endeavor, as much fun and as well-made as many of these series were, brought with it a sort of existentialist dread.

This one's a good example.

Its writers Chris Burnham and Dennis Culver and artist Ramon Villalobos doing an extended riff on Grant Morrison and Frank Quitely's 2001 relaunch of the X-Men franchise, taking as its title that of New X-Men's first story arc. A decade and a half later, that three-year Morrison run (Quitely didn't stick around for much of it), seems stronger now than it was then, and then it was like a punch in the face (Here I might suggest you go read Paul O'Brien's review of this collection, as he is the best writer about the X-Men I know of, and does a far better job of contextualizing New X-Men in franchise history than I ever could).

But what's the point of it, other than to remind readers how great Morrison and Quitely's run was? To pull out old costumes and concepts, point at them and say, "This was cool, wasn't it?" To maybe try and condense the broad themes and storytelling models of that series into just 80 pages?

I'm not sure there is one. I'll be damned if it wasn't fun to revisit that era and its concepts, anyway.

Zagging where New X-Men zigged, Charles Xavier shoots himself in the head with two guns to get Cassandra Nova out of his head. Why two guns? Because that makes an artful, X-shaped blood splatter on the blank wall in one of those big, clean, Quitely-like settings.

From there, we jump ahead an undisclosed amount of years into the future ("X Years Later," naturally). Now Magneto  has opened "The Atom Institute," and he leads a new team of New X-Men: Beak, Angel, Glob, Quentin Quire, Basilisk, The Stepford Cuckoos, Dust, Ernst and Martha. Meanwhile, the surviving "old" New X-Men–Cyclops, Wolverine, Emma Frost and Beast–struggle with their fading powers and feelings of irrelevance. They are here cast as the Neanderthals, and Magneto's students as the homo sapiens in the evolutionary metaphor that Morrison pursued.

The U-Men, District X, Xorn, evil white Beast, the Phoenix business, Wolverine killing Jean Grey, plus all those other characters previously mentioned, plus the costumes and colors and concepts of New X-Men...this is the comic book equivalent of a cover song, maybe a concept album full of covers from another band. It works. But it makes me feel weird though, as I contemplate meaning vis a vis superhero comics books.

Included in the back, in large part to give this enough pages to be collected into a trade, is the first issue of Morrison and Quitely's New X-Men run. In part, this is a smart move, as it provides a great bridge. Like what you just got done reading? Well, here's the first issue of the run that inspired it. Like that? Then you, my friend, need to invest in some trades.

On the other hand, it underscores how different Villalobos art actually is from Quitely's, something that's not as readily apparent when you're not looking at them side by side. DC should get Villalobos to do his Quitely impression for some Superman and Batman and Robin books.

Power Man and Iron Fist Vol. 1: The Boys are Back In Town

Well this was a blast.

David Walker and Sanford Greene reunite the original Heroes For Hire for...well, for no reason, really. Mostly because Iron Fist wants to re-team with his best friend Luke Cage to have adventures together all the time again, but Luke's grown-up and has a wife (Jessica Jones) and kid (Danielle) to take care of.

The pair meet to pick up their old Heroes For Hire secretary or administrative assistant (depending on who you ask) when she's released from prison, take her out for dinner and help her recover a necklace of her grandmother's that fell into the hands of a notorious Marvel gangster.

It turns out to be a lot less simple than that, as their friend turns out to be in cahoots with bad guy Black Mariah (this version quite different than the corrupt politician version on Netfliex's Luke Cage) and the necklace turning out to be the fabled street magic artifact The Supersoul Stone. Suddenly, a bunch of minor Marvel villains of the mostly silly variety are gunning for Luke and Danny.

While the plot is played pretty straight, Walker seems to have taken some delight in rounding up off-beat characters to throw at his heroes, some of whom only make cameos. The dialogue is quick and clever in buddy cop movie fashion, with much of the tension coming not from any kind of racial dynamic, but because of the fact that the heroes are in such different places in their lives and, while they enjoy one another's company and have history, they aren't exactly on the same page any more.

Regarding racial dynamics, Walker touches on it with the whole idea of "street magic" and the Supersoul Stone, something that Luke insists everyone in Harlem has grown-up hearing about, but which rich white guys Iron Fist and even the Sorcerer Supreme himself Doctor Strange have never even heard of ("There are as many forms of the mystical arts as there are martial arts, and no practitioner of either can master all," Strange tells them, "Nor are all worthy of mastering.")

Luckily neighborhood magician Senor Magico is there to set them straight.

Greene's art, like Walker's dialogue and character choices, tends towards the light. His Cage is pretty much a walking sight gag, drawn as enormous, almost elaphantine in size, and generally stuck in small spaces, like a booth at the Excelsior diner or a tiny rental car that Jessica forces him to get when she needs the family car one day.

This is the kind of book where Ruby Tuesday and Gorilla-Man (not to be confused with Gorilla Man) are as likely to show up as Tombstone or Jessica Jones, where you can find a character referring to Strange as a "pendejo" or hear the words "Fistball Special" and jokes about how hard it is to brand something with the word "fist." I loved it.

It's the kind of comic that, had it been published 15-years ago, would have been relegated to a "street-level" comic, but here it's really more "neighborhood level," and while there is crime and violence in it, it's all cartoonish enough that it lacks the sort of grit and grime that it would have had back in the days of the Marvel Knights imprint. Rather, this books is spiritually closer to something like Ms. Marvel, All-New Wolverine or Spider-Woman (Jessica Drew actually  gets an amusing cameo, rooting for Luke's shirt to get ripped off during a fight), with one foot in the "funny" side of Marvel's funny book line (Howard The Duck, Unbeatable Squirrel Girl, Patsy Walker, etc) and one foot in the serious side of the line (Daredevil, the X-Men and Avengers books, etc).

That story about the Supersoul Stone fills up four-fifths of this collection, while Flaviano replaces Greene for the fifth issue, a done-in-one story. Centered around radio personality Jimbo's show, "The Yo, Jimbo Show," it's essentially a sort of Rashomon deal in which various callers and witnesses discuss the apparently reunited Power Man and Iron Fist team's battle against Manslaughter Marsdale. It culminates with Luke and Danny joining Jimbo inside the studio to set the record straight, and Marsdale coming there for revenge.

Flaviano's style is distinct from that of Greene's, but it has a similar flavor, and he sticks with the Cage-as-a-giant visual motif that leads to so many great visual gags, as in a panel here where one witness claims that Cage has the power of flight.

Also, in this issue Danny builds "a modified version of the Fantastic Four's Fantasticar" using instructions he found on the Internet. He intends to call it The Power-Fist Mobile, but Cage refuses to let him call anything "Power-Fist," so Danny settles for The Fist Mobile (The Fistasticar seems more natural to me, given its origins, but whatever).

Finally, I did want to mention Jessica Jones' role in this story, as I've heard some grumbling on the Internet that here she seems to be reduced to the role of nagging wife, like a character on a 1960s sitcom getting mad at her husband for going bowling with the guys instead of staying around the house with her and the family (Here's a pretty thorough piece on that, with lots of looks at Greene's great art). I don't want to say this reading isn't valid, and it was probably more striking if these comics were being read serially, where one might see just one scene with Jessica arguing with Cage about not wearing one of his nice shirts out since it was just going to get destroyed anyway every month or so. Especially since this series started coming out when Netflix's Jessica Jones was presenting a version of the character much closer to that from Brian Michael Bendis and Michal Gaydos' Alias series than to her post-Alias portrayal  (which was also mostly written by Bendis, but in the context of his variou Avengers comics).

Read now, though, and all in one sitting, her apperances didn't strike me as those of a wet blanket or nagging wife so much as the supporting character she serves as in this series. While she is usually angry and trashing Luke and/or Danny, that's Jessica's character in a nutshell, right? Angry and talking shit all the time? She's presented as the person Cage would rather be with than out getting into fights with his immature bachelor friend, and many of the jokes featuring her are among the stronger ones (Like why Luke has started saying "Fiddle faddle" now, and why she can swear as much as she wants, and how Luke can tell she likes Danny).

Her role is certainly smaller than that of Luke or Danny, but then, this is Power Man and Iron Fist, not Power Man and Iron Fist and Jewel, or Jessica Jones' Husband, Power Man and Power Man's Pal, Iron Fist, you know? Her relative lack of panel-time in the first five issues of a series starring her husband and his friend seems as natural as, say, Alfred seeming like all he does is serve Batman food and sass him. Jessica is here, like Alfred in Batman comics, a supporting character.

Perhaps the release of her own series, now entitled Jessica Jones for closer association with the TV show, will salve the irritation some fans of hers have felt at her small role here. I am curious to see how this book and Jessica Jones will read next to one another; I've only flipped through the first issue of Jessica Jones, but stylistically and tonally they are polar opposites and, of course, Gaydos' art is all dark and photo-referenced, so it seems to be set on an entirely different planet than Power Man and Iron Fist is.

Star Wars Vol. 3: Rebel Jail

This is the first of the collections of the Marvel's main Star Wars title that I didn't purchase for myself, more so because I had missed its release than because I was dissatisfied with volume two. I just noticed it on the shelves of the library one day, realized I missed it and supposed that meant I should maybe just start reading the trades from the library instead of buying them for my home bookshelves. Now that I have read it, I'm actually kind of glad I missed it at the comics shop. It's not very good, certainly not when compared to the previous two volumes and Vader Down.

Jason Aaron continues to write the series, and while his scripting is still relatively strong, the collection suffers a bit from two main problems. First is simply one of structure. The title comes from a four-issue arc that is the center of the trade, illustrated by pencil artist Leinil Yu and inker Gerry Alanguilan (whose somewhat bland take on the characters and world of Star Wars might make for a third main problem, actually). It's sandwiched between Star Wars Annual #1, by writer Kieron Gillen and artist Angel Unzueta, and another Younger Kenobi On Tattoine solo story written by Aaron and drawn by Mike Mayhew.

"Rebel Jail" features an antagonist leading a strike force of droids to a secret jail where the Rebellion keeps its worst prisoners, an antagonist who hides his face, says he sympathizes with Leia and wants her to win the war, but that he also wants to teach her that she needs to be completely ruthless, as he's seen the true evil of the Empire. His plan is to execute all of the prisoners in their cells, and to more or less force Leia to join him in doing so, or die.

Who is this mysterious character? Well, it's completely obvious in context. The annual, which immediately precedes "Rebel Jail," introduces us to rebel spy working deep undercover as an administrator on Coruscant. When he has to break cover to try to rescue some high-level prisoners and assassinate Emperor Palpatine, he learns just how evil Palpatine is ("I'm not even the same species of monster") and takes a blast of force lightning to the face. He survives, but just barely, and with a new appreciation of how Palpatine's complete lack of morals actually gives him a strategic advantage.

So when one turns the pages and sees this helmeted, masked character telling Leia he knows her, he felt betrayed by her, she needs to toughen up and so on, it's not difficult to imagine who it is. Aaron nevertheless presents it as some sort of suspenseful mystery to be drawn out.

The other problem? The early issues of the series were in part so successful because they focused on the core group of heroes from the first three films working together, as opposed to focusing on new, minor characters like so much of the expanded universe material has. Here the band is pretty thoroughly broken up.

Leia gets the majority of the focus, and here she is teamed with new character Sana and other new character Dr. Aphra, Darth Vader's new ally from the pages of Darth Vader (which I also gave up on buying, but that because I didn't like the art and found it unpleasant to read). When the prison gets attacked, Leia and Sana forge an uneasy alliance with Aphra (who turns out to have been Sana's former lover? Ha ha, take that Star Wars bros! This arc stars all ladies, two of of them "of color" and also lesbians!).

Luke and Han are off on their own side mission. Charged with buying supplies, Han loses all of the money gambling and so they are forced to try smuggling to earn back the money. Their scenes are all played strictly as comedy, making for a sharp and grating contrast to the more deadly serious business in the prison which, remember, is all about morality, war, crime and punishment and suchlike. Their plot line eventually intersects with that of Leia and the ladies, but not until the final issue, during which they are mostly unconscious.

The droids get even less panel-time; Aaron writes a funny bit in which C3-PO thinks he engages in fisticuffs, but its not particularly well-drawn. And as for Chewbacca, he's completely MIA; I am assuming this story is set during the events of his own (pretty damn good) miniseries, which I covered here.

So that thing that made the first volume so exciting? The heroes of the original Star Wars trilogy vs. the villain of the original Star Wars trilogy, a sort of high-quality, paper expansion from Episode IV in the manner of the original Marvel Star Wars comics, only with the level of care and respect that the material rates in 2016 vs. 1977? That's no longer here. The quality is, mostly (Yu's not as strong as John Cassady or Stuart Immonen, at least not with this material), and so this reads an awful lot like the sort of Star Wars comics that Dark Horse was producing right before they lost the license, specifically the later issues of the Brian Wood-written one.

As for the Kenobi story, it is as lovely looking as previous Mayhew/Star Wars comics...and about as dull, as really, there's only so much Aaron seems able to do with the "Kenobi just kinda hangs around on Tatooine for like 20 years" set-up, particularly in these only occasional, 20-ish page installments. It does look like he's setting something up for the next installment though, that will tie-in to the future/present a bit, but I was a little surprised by how uninteresting these Kenobi stories are, especially considering how awesome John Jackson Miller's prose novel Star Wars: Kenobi, which is set in this same basic time period, is. I wonder if Marvel should maybe just hire Miller for the Kenobi issues...?

Finally, it just now occurred to me as I was putting the cover into this post how bad a cover it is for this particular volume. As I said, Leia stars in the title story arc, which accounts for a good 80 or so of the 130 story pages in this collection, and yet it's those two goofballs from the comedy relief interludes that are on the cover. Probably on account of the fact that they are dudes.

Star Wars: Darth Vader Vol. 3–The Sho-Torun War

The third-ish collection of Kieron Gillen's Darth Vader series (depending on how you want to place Vader Down in the timeline) consists of Star Wars: Darth Vader: Annual #1 and issues #16-#19 of the Darth Vader ongoing. Structurally then, it is akin to the Star Wars collection just discussed, leading off with an annual (drawn by Leinil Yu and inker Gerry Alanguilan) that serves as the first chapter of a story arc in the monthly series, still being drawn by Salvador Larroca (not a fan, although, as stated in previous volumes, he does well enough here, given how many characters have frozen metal faces, and how much of each page is technologically-driven set-dressing).

Vader is on a "diplomatic" mission to the titular planet, an important mining planet with an elaborate court culture that is toying with rebelling against the Empire. That makes it the sort of diplomatic mission that is perfectly-suited to an emotionless invincible robot space wizard like Vader. He basically kills a whole bunch of people (with some help from his droids; Triple-Zero's completely un-subtle attempts to encourage the court to drink the poison he's slipped into their drinks is particularly charming), and installs his own preferred puppet, giving her a damn cold reminder of what happens when planets piss off The Empire. And I mean that literally; he presents her with a gift that she could probably use as a paper weight or a conversation piece, but also performs the function of letting her and anyone who sees it know The Empire is totally cool with killing on a planetary scale.

Yu does a pretty great job on the art in this issue, and is particularly effective of portraying Vader as the kind of cool, never riled customer who just walks calmly through all kinds of terrible dangers, occasionally parrying a blaster bolt with his light saber or casually waving his arm to call upon The Force to fuck some shit up for him.

"The Shu-Torun War" begins in earnest after that, as Vader must return to the planet with a bunch of Stormtroopers and AT-ATs to aid his puppet leader in putting down a rebellion by the many mining barons who aren't down with this new world order. It's a pretty good Darth Vader story, playing him off of various other characters from The Emperor, to some of his surviving rivals that Palpatine set up for him in the first volume (his presentation of one of them to The Emperor is pretty cool), to a sassier-than-usual Triple-Zero, to his ally on Shu-Torun.

Gillen and Larocca also devise a pretty great set-piece in the war, involving giant, tower-sized drill-ships that fly through solid ground like rocket-ships. It's the sort of inventive scene that punctuated the first six films, but was missing from the seventh.