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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Batman brings the skinhead he was chasing in. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And what became of Ragman? 

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

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

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

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

Review: 1997's Batman #540-541

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

...

What I know is not yours to know. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Review: Swamp Thing by Len Wein and Kelley Jones: The Deluxe Edition

I actually bought this 430-ish page hardcover collection when it was released last month, but I didn't get a chance to read it before November, which is why I didn't include it in the last A Month of Wednesdays column. So now it gets a standalone review of its own.

The organizing principle seems to be all of the Swamp Thing comics that writer (and Swamp Thing co-creator) Len Wein did with artist Kelley Jones, which consists of some nine issues between 2015 and 2018. But also included are all of Jones' other Swamp Thing work, which means 1990's Swamp Thing #94 and Swamp Thing #100 and 1995's Batman #521-522. Plus Jones covers for other book's featuring Swamp Thing, like a couple that he did for Justice League Dark and that for 2018's Young Monsters in Love anthology, depicting Swampy stealing Frankenstein's girl. 

Also included are some interesting looking Wein/Jones Swamp Thing collaborations that could have been, like notes for an ongoing continuing from their six-issue 2016 series and, more intriguingly still, what was to be a 1989 three-issue, fully-painted, prestige format series by Swamp Thing creators Wein and Bernie Wrightson. (In that particular case, Wein had written it and Wrightson did rough pencil layouts for some of it, but the latter eventually left the project. Wein apparently suggested Jones draw it, but DC decided to cancel it; so here we to see what the late Wrightston had managed to complete.)

Having become an ardent and devoted Kelley Jones fan during the artist's nineties run on Batman, I have already read most of the stories contained in this collection (and own them in singles). In fact, I had bought and read everything in here except the two 1990 issues of Swamp Thing, so...11 out of the 13 issues within...? 

Despite my relative miserliness, I went ahead and dropped $50 on this anyway though, as it is of course nice to have so much Kelley Jones art so easily accessible in one place. 

Let's look at the features in order, shall we? 

Foreword by M. Christina Valada

M. Christina Valada, her bio says, is a photographer, lawyer, writer and podcaster, although she writes this substantial foreword as Len Wein's wife. As such, she played a substantial role in finding the materials that are presented in this book, as she has looked through his computer and office for much of what ends up in the back matter.

She shares Wein's medical difficulties over the course of the last few years of his life, which included heart surgery and being on dialysis, a toe amputation, neck surgery and more. In fact, Valada said that, in the last 13 months of his life, Wein was in constant pain, and "had more surgeries in the last year than I can actually count." 

Nevertheless, he kept working, mostly on Swamp Thing comics and other projects and, from what Valada said, made some truly heroic efforts to attend conventions.

The piece is also full of touching personal anecdotes, and even some advice that Wein shared with Kelley Jones about making comics...and, I suppose, is here being shared with everyone: "Remember, this is supposed to be fun."

Introduction by Kelley Jones

Kelley Jones' piece is far shorter than Valada's and begins with a fun anecdote: Upon first reading Len Wein and Bernie Wrightson's Swamp Thing as an 11-year-old child in 1972, Jones hated it. 

It was issue #2.

From cover to last panel, it was just disturbing and creepy and sad. It featured a mad doctor/sorcerer named Arcane and his awful creations, the Un-Men, and Swamp Thing...who was supposed to be the hero of the book and a monster! "Monsters can't be heroes!" my still-unrotted brain screamed. Remember, I was 11.

And, when I was done, like I said, I hated. it.

But it stayed with me. I thought about it and turned it over and over in my mind. As with all things taboo. I had to look into the abyss that was Swamp Thing again.

And then I loved it. I mean, really, really loved it.

In just two hours, I went from disgust to joy.

As many of you know, Jones is one of my all-time favorite comics artists, and it was an unparalleled delight to hear so much so directly from him here. 

This is hardly the point of his introduction, but in recounting his history with the Swamp Thing character, he of course mentions his Batman two-parter with Dough Moench (which we'll get to in more detail below). This was, of course, part of the pair's1995-1998, 40-ish issue run, and he notes that Moench "would always ask me who I wanted to draw." That certainly explains something about that run.

Like a lot of modern Batman runs, this one covered a fair amount of Batman's rogues gallery, including some of the bigger characters: The Joker, The Penguin, Two-Face, The Scarecrow, Man-Bat, Clayface, Killer Croc, Mister Freeze, even Black Mask (a Moench creation) and  Black Spider (In addition to several original creations, although none that caught on). But the run also included a bunch of guest-stars, which was then a bit more unusual, and those guest-stars seemed specifically chosen for the fact that it would be cool to see Kelley Jones draw them. And so Batman found himself either teaming-up or at odds with Deadman, The Spectre, Etrigan, Ragman and, of course, Swamp Thing. 

From what Jones said here, using a character from the Vertigo line in a Batman comic then required permission from both Batman group editor Denny O'Neil and Vertigo editor Karen Berger, but both gave their blessing on Swamp Thing appearing in Batman at the time.

Which is how we got one of my favorite Batman comics ever, I guess...!

Convergence: Swamp Thing #1-2

DC's Convergence event series was long on page count, with some 80 issues of tie-in issues published, but short in terms of how long it went on for, the entire thing running between April and May of 2015. The main Convergence mini-series ran for nine weekly issues, and was written by Dan Jurgens, Jeff F. King and Scott Lobdell and drawn by a bunch of different artists. There were 40 (That's right, 40!) two-issue tie-in miniseries, but most of these were pretty inconsequential to the event, which meant readers could basically just pick up those featuring characters and/or creators they like, and ignore the others.

The premise involved cosmic being Telos (who I think was a version of Brainiac, maybe?) collecting cities from throughout various DC timelines in impenetrable domes, kinda like how classic Brainiac had collected cities like Kandor in bottles. During the events of the series, the domes came down, and Telos ordered the heroes of various cities to fight one another. 

In the miniseries, this basically translated into an issue spent establishing the cast and setting, and then a second issue pitting them against antagonists from entirely different world or timeline. (The one I remember best, for example, was the John McCrea-drawn Plastic Man and The Freedom Fighters, which featured Plas and other old Quality Comics heroes fighting robots from The New 52: Futures End.) 

Having only read the main series that once 10 years ago, I don't remember it too terribly well at this point. I think it's main lingering effect was the birth of Jonathan Kent to a Superman and Lois from within one of the domed cities—delivered, if I recall correctly, by Batman Thomas Wayne from the world of Flashpoint—and the child somehow made it into the pages of the Superman books going forward. 

I think there was also a cosmic reboot of continuity of sorts, but, coming between 2011's New 52 reboot and 2017's Dark Nights: Metal, I'll be damned if I know what it changed. At the time, I just read it as another example of random, unenumerated changes to continuity, which future writers would make up as they went along anyway. (Oh, and the logo, which you can see on the cover I grabbed from comics.org above, has stuck with me, as I always thought it looked like a coffee ring from someone using a comic as a coaster.)

You won't find any of this background in the pages of Convergence: Swamp Thing; this trade collection refers to the storyline as "Blood Moon" and then gives a title for each of the two chapters, the actual name of the comic these stories occurred in appearing below those. And, because the Jones-drawn covers are presented sans logos and credits, they're not labeled as Convergence tie-ins. (A page featuring a paragraph of text explaining the basics of the event might have been a helpful inclusion in the collection.)

This sure made me wonder what a reader encountering this story for the first time here would make of it. Divorced from the event it ties into, it's not very good, as Len Wein doesn't attempt to explain the premise of Convergence to readers (And, to be fair, anyone reading it off the racks when these issues were originally published  wouldn't have needed him to), and, if that premise is left unexplained, then the events feel rather random and unmoored from anything else.

I also wasn't sure the when and where of the Swamp Thing and Abby that star in the book; the big event of Alan Moore's run is mentioned (That is, that Swamp Thing is actually a new and unique plant being that thought it was Alec Holland, rather than Holland himself transformed), and there is talk of The Green and  Swampy's Moore-era powers), so I assume they were trapped by Telos maybe sometime after that...? Although the pair are also just friends, rather than lovers or husband and wife, so maybe it's from sometime during the Moore run...? I don't know; I suppose we could ask Mike Sterling; he surely knows.

At any rate, during the first issue/chapter of the story, the Swampy and Abby notice that the skies have turned red, and, seeking to find out what might be going on, Swamp Thing decides to visit Gotham City and ask Batman what's up. He's about to dive into the dirt to travel there by growing a new body there and transferring his consciousness, when Abby says she wants to go along, and so the pair arrive there via bus, Swamp Thing wearing a trenchcoat and wide-brimmed hat as a disguise.

They go to the park, but, Wein's narration tells us, "And that was the moment when the dome came down-- --completely sealing off Gotham City from the rest of the world." 

Kelley Jones' art, meanwhile, doesn't show us anything about a dome coming down, only Swamp Thing "AARRGGHH!!"-ing in pain as he is severed from The Green. He's unable to leave his body to travel outside the dome either, and so the pair are now trapped, Swampy more than Abby, as he is stuck in the park, slowly dying, with her occasional gifts of plant food and fertilizer just enough to keep him alive. 

This is the state of affairs for a year; the most exciting thing that happens during that time being Batgirl Barbara Gordon chasing Poison Ivy through the park (The fact that Barbara is in-costume then would mean this Swamp Thing and Abby come from somewhere in time between Moore's "The Anatomy Lesson" and Moore's Batman: The Killing Joke, huh?).

The plot finally gets some foreword movement again around page 19, when the hexagonal pattern of the dome is visible in the sky for the first time, and a disembodied voice announces itself as Telos and explains that champions from each city must fight one another to save their respective cities.

And then our heroes are set upon by a horde of vampires. The champion Swampy will have to face won't be introduced until the next issue, then, but it's a perfect character from a particular DC reality for Jones to draw: The vampire Batman of Jones' own Batman & Dracula: Red Rain, Batman: Bloodstorm and Batman: Crimson Mist trilogy with writer Doug Moench. 

The second issue is then devoted to vampire-fighting. Contrary to Telos' expressed wishes, Swamp Thing and Vampire Batman don't fight one another, though. First they fight off the vampires menacing Swampy and Abby, and then this Batman tells Swampy his Gotham isn't really worth fighting to save, since it's overrun with vampires. Instead, he asks the muck-encrusted mockery of a man to help him fight vampires with whatever time they might have left, and he does. In the end, they kill the main vampire, resulting in those she has turned becoming human again.

Vampire Batman, who was of course turned by Dracula himself, does not, and he voluntarily watches the sunrise with Swampy and Abby, sacrificing himself. I guess Swamp Thing's version of Gotham thus "wins", but I don't recall what that means for the state of either city/world, as I don't recall much about Convergence. 

So, this 44-page story is basically just half set-up, half fight. Wein does make the bloodless Swampy into a formidable vampire-slayer, though, turning his fingers into oaken stakes that he can shoot along vines into their hearts and, later, emitting a cloud of raw garlic spray that dissolves his foes. 

All of this obviously gives Jones lots to work with, as the two monster lead characters kill vampires in often spectacularly over-the-top images, as in a panel where a trio of vampire women melt into piles of collapsing bones. 

I particularly like the sequence in which Swamp Thing kills his first wave of vampires though, Jones drawing skull encased in clouds in mid-air around a crouching, lumbering Swamp Thing, who explains to Abby the vampires were already dead, and he had "merely sent them...to their final rest...!"

I'm not 100% clear if these skulls are what remained of the vampires after Swamp Thing staked them, and they were in the process of falling to the ground, or if they are meant to represent the vampires' souls escaping their slain bodies, but it looks cool (In the panel immediately preceding this one, a spirit leaving a small pile of bones and viscera that was a vampire). 

The second-to-last panel features a big, stylized "RRRUMMMBBBLLL" sound effect, and Swamp Thing remarking upon an earthquake, which seems pretty random, but was likely meant to be an acknowledgement of something that happened in the pages of the main Convergence series. 

It is perhaps noting here how much Jones' Swamp Thing here resembles that from the original, 1970s comics, as designed and drawn by Bernie Wrightson. He's a big, hulking, lumbering brute of a humanoid figure, and is a fairly solid, uniform green most of the time, vines only appearing on his figure here and there.

It's a sharp contrast to the Swamp Thing Jones had drawn in Batman, and the more god-like version of the '80s and '90s Swamp Thing series, where the character increasingly transformed and borrowed elements from other plant-life to incorporate into his own appearance (Readers can see this contrast for themselves as they make their way through the book, Wein and Jones' 21st century Swamp Thing stories eventually giving way to '90s depictions of the character).

Swamp Thing #1-6 (2016)

While many of the virtues of the Convergence miniseries were likely only enjoyed by Swamp Thing fans who happened to be reading DC comics in the spring of 2015 (and/or Len Wein fans and/or Kelley Jones fans), the two-issue series lead to at least one positive development: It was successful enough that Wein and Jones got a six-issue mini-series out of it.

The collection lists this as "The Dead Don't Sleep", which is the title Wein gave the story of the first issue (And, when the mini was collected, that was the subtitle of the trade paperback doing so). It's a rather unusual mini-series, as, rather than one, complete story, it tells two different, distinct stories, as if these were the first few issues of an ongoing (I just double-checked the original comics covers though, and #1 has a big "1 of 6" in the upper righthand corner, as you can see above). 

It seems to pick up...wherever Swamp Thing was left off in whatever comic preceded this, not necessarily the Convergence issues (Abby's MIA here, for example). 

The first two issues tell one story, the last four are devoted to a different arc, and there's little in the way to connect them; The Phantom Stranger appears to Swampy in the first issue to give him cryptic warnings that, in retrospect, refer to the events of #3-6, but that's about all that ties the stories together. (Jones' Stranger, by the way, is obviously pretty cool. His coat and cape billow dramatically, of course, and while the top half of his face is usually in shadow, his eyes are two inscrutable white dots staring from out of that shadow; it looks an awful lot like how the filmmakers depicted the eyes of The Void in the Thunderbolts* movie.)

Oh, and a new local sheriff is introduced: Darcy Fox from Gotham City, the niece of Lucius Fox. She appears throughout the series. (If it seems like the Fox family is growing rather large, well, if anyone is entitled to invent a new relative for Lucius Fox, it's the character's co-creator, Len Wein.)

These first two issues are essentially Swamp Thing versus a zombie...not of the now common Night of The Living Dead sort, but here an undead guy who is incredibly strong (not only does he hold his own against Swamp Thing in their fights, but he rips him in half vertically at one point) and who also has rudimentary intelligence, enough to talk (although, like Swampy, he does so with lots of ellipses in his dialogue). 

In this story, a couple with the unlikely surname of Wormwood come to the swamp seeking our hero's help. They tell him that their son was killed in an experiment at the unlikely named Cowley College that abuts the swamp (and thus makes it Swamp Thing's business...?)...and he then apparently came back from the dead to murder those he holds responsible for his death, in grisly fashion. ("Next morning, the custodial staff found the mutilated remains of Professor Crisp in the chemistry lab... ...and the gymnasium... ...and the bio lab... ...and the... Well, anyway, you get the point.")

Swamp Thing ultimately triumphs, thanks to some advice on re-killing zombies from Shade, one of the many spooky and/or magical characters to appear in this miniseries (He only appears in about a half-dozen panels though, and he spends those mostly in an armchair, so we don't see how Jones might have depicted his powers, or done much more with the character rather than treat him as a talking head...although the angles and shading are quite dramatic, given that this is Kelley Jones we're talking about.)

The last panel of issue #2 features a man giving his name standing before a window, with a rainstorm raging outside, a lightning bolt splitting the sky in half. 

"The names Cable," he says, "Matt Cable."

Yeah, him! And if you're thinking hey, didn't Matt Cable die (He did! In 1989's Swamp Thing #84!) and then get resurrected as a raven in Morpheus' The Dreaming (Uh-huh, in the pages of The Sandman)....? Well, I can't explain what he's doing here. Both his death and en-ravening happened in those comics before they were labeled Vertigo comics, so the fact that the line was separated from the DCU at one point doesn't seem to explain it. 

Of course, since 1989 DC had hard continuity reboots in Infinite Crisis and Flashpoint/The New 52, among other rejiggerings, so perhaps DC continuity was altered in such a way that Cable never died...? 

Anyway, his presence is kind of important for the second story of the series. In it, Cable explains to Swamp Thing that he had retired from the FBI and devoted himself to searching the world for a "cure" to Swampy's condition, one that could return him to human being Alec Holland (The actually-a-plant-that-thought-it-was-Holland-who-is-actually-totally-dead doesn't come up here; if I recall correctly, I think Geoff Johns might have changed that during the climax of Brightest Day...?). 

Anyway, he's here because he found it, in Deadman's Nanda Parbat: The Hand of Fatima (Again, an unlikely name, given Nanda Parbat's Himalayan setting and history as a fantastical exotic location, whereas the name "Fatima" is associated with Islam and a Portuguese Marian apparition). All they need is a powerful sorcerer to cast the spell to grant Cable's wish. 

They find one in a scantily clad Zatanna (who actually literally disrobes in one scene, albeit off-panel), and the spell produces a result that surprises Swamp Thing: He is turned into Alec Holland, as promised, but, to his surprise, Cable has now become Swamp Thing. (He's distinguished from the Holland Swamp Thing by differently colored dialogue balloons, with fewer ellipses, as well as redder eyes, and more prominent, woody-looking spinal projections.)

Despite regaining his humanity, Alec faithfully hangs around, training Cable on how to use Swamp Thing's powers, but it quickly becomes apparent that this new Swamp Thing isn't going to be such a good guy, as seen when he uses his powers to cause roots to draw and quarter* a lippy poacher, a brutal, gory act that Alec seems a little too quick to forgive when Matt says, "I...I'm sorry, Alec...I guess I didn't know my own strength."

Eventually, the new Swamp Thing captures Alec, builds a huge throne in nearby Houma and tells the world via TV news camera they have to surrender to him or be destroyed. With the Justice League and Titans conveniently off-world, according to SHIELD's ARGUS' Steve Trevor and Etta Candy, it's decided to simply nuke Houma to take out Swamp Thing...unless Alec can gather sufficient spooky allies and formulate a plan to regain his powers from the bad Swamp Thing (There's a bit of a twist here regarding Cable's heel turn, which I won't spoil here). 

He does so, giving us a chance to see Jones draw not only The Phantom Stranger and Zatanna (now in fishnets and top hat), but also The Spectre, who he did a pretty phenomenal version of (See 1997's Batman #540 and #541). There's a particularly great panel here in which a fiercely grinning Spectre says, "Yes...I know" when the bad Swamp Thing mentions something necessitating an "act of God."

The story also includes brief appearances by Etrigan The Demon and Deadman. The latter is notable in that Jones doesn't depict him in the corpse-like designs he gave him during his 1989 and 1992 miniseries devoted to the character, but as more ghostly, with a gauzy white ghost-like head, with black-rimmed bright white eyes in it and, in one panel, a black-rimmed set of teeth.

In addition to these characters, Mister E, Felix Faust and The Enchantress all make one-panel cameos, but aren't really around long enough that we get a feel of what Jones might have done with them, similar to the brief appearance of Shade. 

This second story, and the miniseries, ends happily enough, restoring the status quo: Alec is Swamp Thing again...while Cable is in  a coma in the hospital, and Abby makes a surprise, three-panel appearance.

Swamp Thing Winter Special #1 (2018)

Like the Convergence miniseries, the six-issue one seems to have done well enough that DC was going to have Len Wein and Kelley Jones keep going with the character, with the next story in the collection, "Spring Awakening!" 

Editor Rebecca Taylor refers to this story as "a continuation of" Wein's "Dead Don't Sleep" miniseries in an "Editor's Note" that originally ran in 2018's Swamp Thing Winter Special. The table of contents for this collection refers to it as Swamp Thing #7. I wonder, was the mini going to keep it's numbering and turn into an ongoing, or would DC have relaunched the title with a new #1 when it became an ongoing...? 

It's not entirely clear...but it's moot, as Wein died while working on this very issue. He had written the plot script for the issue, which is what Jones would draw his art based on, but not the "lettering script", so the exact words Wein wanted the characters to say were never written.

In what turned out to be a poignant move, Taylor and DC decided to print the story as it was, unlettered. The result? A silent issue, as if Swamp Thing's creator and writer was now "silenced", and readers get to see his last work...albeit without Wein's most obvious presence included, underscoring his absence.

Remarkably, Wein was a good enough comics plotter and Jones a good enough comics artist that the story reads as fairly complete just as it is, almost as if it were always intended to be a silent issue. Even without narration or dialogue, you can make sense of the story and the intent of the conversations between characters (There was only one point I couldn't quite intuit, involving a bunch of rags on a train box car in the air; consulting Wein's plot script, which follows the story, I see this is meant to be a bundle of rags forming into Solomon Grundy, which wasn't a power of his I knew he had; perhaps it was even a new one...? The script also makes clear that, in the scene in which Cable meets with Sheriff Fox and her deputy, he is telling them he plans to stick around and set up a private investigator's business in Houma).

The story involves Solomon Grundy kidnapping a baby, the awakened Cable meeting with Swamp Thing and then the sheriff, a spectacularly awesome scene involving Swamp Thing water-skiing on a lily pad as he pursues bad guys with rifles riding on a pair of airboats, and an equally spectacular entrance by Batman, who defeats the bad guys and blows up their boats using well-aimed batagrangs before we seem him on-panel, crouched in the bough of a tree to confront Swamp Thing. 

(The Special the story originally ran in also included a Tom King and Jason Fabok story, as well as a text article about Wein, some images by his fellow Swamp Thing creator Bernie Wrightson and a pin-up by Jose Luis Garcia-Lopez, none of which are reproduced here).

Swamp Thing #94 (1990)

The next section of the book is labeled "Other Tales by Kelley Jones", and begins with a 2024 prose piece by Swamp Thing writer Doug Wheeler, in which he describes how Jones' work first came to his attention, how he advocated to DC to hire Jones to work with him, and how that went (Intriguingly, it was at Archie Comics' booth at a New York City comics convention, where they were showing off a Kelley-Jones drawn horror comic entitled The Hangman which, Wheeler writes, Archie "later chickened out of and never published." Does Archie Comics still have those pages in a drawer somewhere?! They should totally publish them! I can't imagine that anything Jones had drawn back then could be too scary, gory or offensive for the post-Afterlife With Archie version of Archie Comics to publish!)

Anyway, this issue is a done-in-one horror story written by Wheeler, with Jones credited as guest artist. 

It's fairly gory, to the extent that Wheeler said he was told by some of those who saw the first pages early that the pair had "gotten away" with a panel featuring a serial killer's victim, chopped up into six pieces and strewn about a field, her bloody head resting atop a stump, an axe still embedded in it (As is often the case, the gore Jones draws is somewhat softened by his exaggerated style; here, there's something almost cartoonish about the chopped-up body, keeping it from looking like anything approaching real.)

Though fairly straight horror, the issue shows just how weird and trippy the post-Alan Moore Swamp Thing had gotten. The hero's first appearance in the story, for example, is as an alien-looking tree with some dozen eyes on its branching stalks (John Totleben's cover, above, shows this; notably, his eye-filled tree looks more realistic and less crazy than Jones' drawing within does). 

This tree sees the result of an ax murder, and Swamp Thing investigates. The story involves an ax murderer who kills victims at the behest of an otherworldly entity and then loans the blood-stained ax to musicians as a percussion instrument.

The whys of the plot become clear during the story, which eventually involves a plot that is more fantasy or sci-fi than horror (or monster...or superhero), and Jones' depiction of that otherworldly entity elevates it into the truly insane. 

We throw the word "Lovecraftian" around a lot these days, often to describe any weird monster with tentacles, but here Jones draws one of those horror and wonders that H.P. Lovecraft was always hinting around, calling them indescribable. 

The creature, revealed in a huge, horizontal panel stretching across the top half of a two-page spread, is an elongated purple mass, it's head (?) a long, snake-like projection with no features save for a gigantic mouth, its gums and teeth stretching beyond its lips (?) as if trying to escape. It has a pair of big bat-like wings, too small to propel it, bizarre spines that look like jutting bones, a mass of writhing jellyfish-like tentacles, another mass of writhing tentacles that look like smaller version of its head, these nested in what look it might be human brain matter or might be intestines, probing black spikes that look a little like claws and a little like the fibrous "legs" of some insect-like creature or perhaps a microscopic organism. 

I kind of wish Wheeler's script was included after this story, as I wonder to what degree he described the creature, or if he just wrote "draw the craziest, most upsetting looking monster you can imagine." Certainly some elements of this entity are familiar from other Jones monsters and supernatural horrors we've seen since. 

Naturally, Abby, Swamp Thing and their still-new baby Tefe are involved in the goings-on, but, ultimately, the malefactors all receive punishment for their actions. 

It's a great story, and one that reads perfectly well in isolation from whatever else might have been going on in the title at the time. 

This was still a few years before the Vertigo imprint, but the book's cover did have a "Suggested For Mature Readers" tag above the familiar DC bullet; given American weirdness about nudity vs violence and gore, one wonders what the publisher thought was the mature part...I am guessing the scene of a nude (but usually covered) Abby was of more concern than the chopped-up corpse.

Swamp Thing #100 (1990)

This over-sized anniversary issue is written by Wheeler, and features art by two distinct art teams. One is, of course, Kelley Jones, here inking himself again, while the other is pencil artist Pat Broderick and inker Alfredo Alcala. The credits list page numbers for who drew what, but they styles are different enough that it is instantly obvious who drew what.

Unlike the previous Wheeler/Jones collaboration, this one isn't a standalone tale, but picks up on an ongoing storyline—baby Tefe has accidentally destroyed her body and plunged into The Green, and Swamp Thing doesn't know how to safely get her back, since he can't explain the process to a baby—and it involves the Parliament of Trees, and events like Swampy's past travels through space and time that seem to be references to events from Alan Moore's and Rick Veitch's runs on the book. 

Essentially, a shaman gives Swamp Thing a quest he must complete to save his daughter: Seek out "a fountain whose waters allow the drinker to communicate with all living beings," which, the Parliament informs him, can be found in the Garden of Eden, which is now located in Antarctica, not an easy place for to grow a plant body, on top of being surrounded by a great wall and defended by angels.

While Broderick/Alcala draw the sections of Swampy with Abby, the shaman and ghost Tefe, as well as some flashbacks and his visits with the Parliament, Jones draws the journey to Eden. Given how little plant matter there is for Swampy to work with, the body grows there is emaciated and skeletal, Jones giving him skull-like visage with extremely sunken eyes and half-finished back from which juts a protruding spine.

There's a turn of a page that leads to a splash page that reveals an angel, an awesome (as in, inspiring awe) and terrifying creature that is partially Biblically accurate, partially Jones-ian flourishes and partially insane-looking. It's a tower of a creatures with multiple animal heads, a "torso" consisting of a coral-like network covered with eyeballs, with strange tentacles that seem as much plant as animal, one of which grips a flaming sword, this structure resing upon a burning fire, which emanates from a chaotic pink-black cloud of geometric shapes, which stands upon a single talon.

This is one angel, and the one Swamp Thing attempts to fight, before two of its fellows join it—one a golden, winged giant humanoid that looks like the "traditional" view of an angel, another a strange pink alien being that is mostly fangs or spikes and wings, more akin to an alien Neon Genesis Evangelion angel than what one might find in Christian art. By the time they join the fight, Swamp Thing must change strategies.

The Broderick-penciled passages involve a lot of conversation and a bit of continuity (and cameos by Etrigan and Abin Sur), but my major takeaway from reading this issue was just how strange a narrative Swamp Thing had become, and how far it had travelled from Wein and Bernie Wrightson's original conception of a monster playing hero in a milieu that would seesaw between a horror comic and a "universe" super-comic. 

By 1990, it's...kind of a fantasy epic of sorts, and one that's sometimes far removed from the world of humans (this issue is, certainly), with the shaman the only human character with a speaking part in this tale full of bizarre entities. In fact, Swamp Thing has, by this point, essentially become its own unique mythology.

Batman #521-#522 (1995)

This two-issue story arc comes from fairly early in Doug Moench, Kelley Jones and John Beatty's run on Batman, which has always been neck-in-neck with the Alan Grant/Norm Breyfogle runs as my favorite chunk of Batman comics. (Whether Breyfogle or Jones is my favorite Batman artist can change by the day, and by whose work I had most recently read; in general, I usually say that I think Breyfogle was the best Batman artist, while Jones is my favorite Batman artist). 

I am actually probably more familiar with these comics than just about any others. Like some of the earliest issues of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, teenage Caleb spent a lot of time studying these, re-drawing various panels and elements, trying to figure out and replicate the way that Jones and/or Beatty drew reptile scales, tree bark, a tree line along the horizon, the moon, ripples on the surface of the water and so on. 

The second issue, #522, is a particular issue of a comic book that I think it's fairly safe to say that I was, for a few months at least, obsessed with (And, for long afterwards, I would draw Jones-style snakes and trees in the margins of my notebooks in college). 

Given that, I probably didn't need to re-read these two issues, but I did so anyway. 

It makes for a pretty great "last" Killer Croc story (the second such "last" Killer Croc story published that decade, following Grant and Breyfogle's Batman #471). Swamp Thing is barely in the first issue; in fact, we simply see a part of him in a few panels. 

In the new Arkham Asylum, an increasingly bestial Killer Croc is raging for his dinner. Unseen by the cooks, a vine has drown up out of the sink drain and shot—"SHLOOB"—some sort of spore onto his dinner plate. When he ingests it, Croc starts tripping balls, the words "the wet dark" and "home" repeating themselves in his mind.

He breaks out of his cell, fights his way outside, stomps around town, repeating his need to find the wet dark and repeatedly complaining about how he doesn't fit in with human society. He ultimately hijacks a steam train headed for Louisiana, Batman giving chase in the Batmobile he was using at the time, which was either the Golden Age one with the big Batman head on it, or a new version of it. (Amusingly, at one point Batman climbs onto its roof, his huge cape flaring behind him, and it's clear that there's no way that gigantic cape could ever fit in the little car. In fact, there's a couple of great cape panels in this sequence, two of which feature it spreading out like gigantic batwings.)

Swamp Thing finally makes his entrance on the cover of #522, which is still maybe one of my favorite Swamp Thing images. 

The various plants and mushrooms growing out of Swamp Thing's hunched back is one thing, but I think it's the presence of the turtles there that really sells him as not just a plant creature, but a living, breathing, intelligent, ambulatory part of the swamp (Also note the trees before the moon on the cover; that's one of the things I remember trying to draw over and over again). 

In the swamp, Killer Croc seems to have found his sought-after "wet dark", a place where he can find some semblance of peace, but, of course, Batman is in pursuit, and they have a pretty intense fight, at one point leading to Croc getting Batman in a bear hug and attempting to squeeze the life out of him, which, it seems to me anyway, happens every time they fight. 

Then, on a two-page splash on pages 17 and 18 of the story Swamp Thing finally makes his entrance, his broad, hunched back covered in all manner of flora and fauna, a snake wrapped around his forearm like a bracelet, a frog clinging to his triceps and a pair of turtles begin to clamber up his leg. 

Swampy separates the pair with vines, then breathes a handful of weird flowers into Croc, changing him, and the villain walks off peacefully into the swamp. 

Batman continues to argue with Swamp Thing over whether Killer Croc is a criminal who has hurt people and broken laws, and must therefore be dragged back to Gotham to pay for his crimes, or a primordial being who can become part of the natural order of the swamp. 

Batman eventually gets physical, punching Swamp Thing, only to have his hand come out of his back with a "SPLTCH." Swamp Thing holds him like this as they continue to argue, and then a couple of tendrils grow from Swampy's chest, popping in Batman's face ("blutch", "poof"), "natural hallucinogens" that show Batman a tormenting vision of the way Killer Croc sees the world and the Batman himself (basically what we see on the cover of #521), and then quickly passes.

Ultimately, Swamp Thing takes Croc into the "custody" of the swamp and The Green, and Batman wanders off, kinda sorta defeated.

Almost every panel of this issue is a little masterpiece, and it's great fun seeing what Jones does with the swamp setting. I don't think his later (or, as it's collected in this book, earlier) stories depict the swamp or the Swamp Thing in quite the same way.

Thinking about it now, I'm not sure why this was. Surely, Len Wein's 21st century Swamp Thing is more of a plant monster than the elemental/god that Moench and Jones were working with in these Batman issues.

I think part of it may be that in these Batman issues, Jones was just penciling, giving him more time and breathing room to filigree the hell out of every panel, with inker Beatty finishing some of the ornate pencil work. That, and colorist Gregory Wright's work is a bit more to my liking than that of Michelle Madsen, but that may have more to do with the technology employed or the style of the time.

And, of course, I haven't discounted the possibility that I may prefer this art to the later art simply because of nostalgia.

Anyway, this is probably more of a Batman or Killer Croc story than a Swamp Thing one, but it's a nice portrait of Swamp Thing (both in characterization and as a visualization), and it has a killer design for the character this collection is devoted to. 

Swamp Thing: Deja Vu #1 

Next? "Lost Tales Written By Len Wein."

The first of these is described in an unsigned prose piece, detailing how, in 1989, DC commissioned a three-issue, fully painted, prestige format series" by Swamp Thing's creators, Len Wein and Bernie Wrightson. 

Set immediately after Alan Moore's run, it would involve Swamp Thing learning he could travel through time using The Green (which would end up happening in the book anyway). Wein plotted the issues, and Wrightson started drawing pencils for them, but he later stepped away from the project.

According to the piece, 

"I thought it was going to be one of the best stories I'd ever written," said Wein at a 2015 WonderCon panel. "So I wanted to see it in print, and I kept suggesting: 'Use Kelley Jones. This kid. Kelley Jones! I think he'd be perfect for this. But Paul [Levitz] said, 'If Bernie can't do it, it won't get done.'"

With Wein and Wrightson both gone now, the closest we may ever see of the what the project might have looked like is what is included here, some 50-ish pages of Wrightson's rough pencils. 

That said, in her foreword, M. Christine Valada mentions that she's still looking for the script for this series. Perhaps if it is far enough along, there's enough for Jones to draw it after all...perhaps presenting it as a silent story, as DC did with "Spring Awakening!"...?

At any rate, after hearing Wein's story on a panel about the project, it's nice to know that the writer did finally get to work on Swamp Thing with Jones. 

Et cetera

There's plenty of back matter, as well, including the aforementioned covers by Kelley Jones and pages and pages of sketches, which I won't get into here.

Perhaps my favorite bit among all of this is, however, this list, which I shared on Bluesky previously: 

This was apparently part of a proposal for an ongoing Swamp Thing series, which it sounds like would have continued from the miniseries. There's plenty of cool stuff in there, and it's hard not to get excited imagining Jones drawing these characters and wondering how Len Wein would get them into conflict with his Swamp Thing.

I mean not just Bigfoot, but Bigfoot and a Yeti, in two separate stories? Presumably off-brand versions of the Creature From The Black Lagoon and C.H.U.D. (WHAT?!). A/the Chupacabra. And...mysterious 19th century American writer Ambrose Bierce...?! 

The pages that follow the list then feature a dozen or so plot descriptions in various degrees of detail, suggesting how we would have gotten the mummies, at least, and further suggesting a few future DC guest-stars, like The Gentleman Ghost and Klarion, The Witch Boy.

For what it's worth, we have seen Jones draw mummies and an Invisible Man before. He and Moench had Batman and Deadman fight mummies in 1996's Batman #530-532, which featured variant glow-in-the dark covers (in one, you could see a glow-in-the-dark Deadman inside Batman's body, in another you could see the skeletons within the bodies of the mummies). And in 2009-2010, Jones again teamed with Moench for the five-issue miniseries Batman: Unseen, featuring the Dak Knight vs. an invisible man.

Okay, that's all I got on this. Now get off the Internet, go find a copy of the book for yourself, and sit back to enjoy a couple hundred pages worth of Swamp Thing comics...

*Actually, the Cable Swamp Thing uses vines to pull the man's limbs in four different directions while also pulling his head off, so I guess he wasn't drawn-and-quartered so much as...drawn-and-fifthed...?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And so on.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

That's beyond me. 

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

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

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

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

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