When Man-Bat met The Demon (On 1978's Batman Family #16)

One of the DC characters I've been thinking about lately is Jack Kirby's Etrigan, The Demon, having recently encountered him in November's The Spectre omnibus, and during a partial re-read of the Moench/Jones/Beatty Batman run and again in Lobo/Demon: Helloween. So, I was of course quite interested to see him show up in a Man-Bat story from the pages of 1978's Batman Family #16, collected in that 2019 Legends of the Dark Knight: Michael Golden in which I found that "Enter the Ragman" story I blogged about the other day 

Unfortunately, Etrigan didn't make the cover, so I'm just using the character intros from the first page of Bob Rozakis and Michael Golden's "There's a Demon Born Every Minute" at the top of this post. 

Now Man-Bat was created in 1970 by writer Frank Robbins, artist Neal Adams and editor Julius Schwartz (the last of whom Wikipedia credits with "concept"). He was originally an antagonist to Batman. After several appearances in Detective Comics, however, he became something of a hero himself and seems to fit into the broader category of monster heroes, a superhero sub-genre that seems to have been rather prevalent in DC and Marvel comics in the 1970s. 

This portrayal now seems strange, given that Man-Bat has primarily been portrayed as a usually bestial, monstrous foe of Batman's over at least the last 35 years or so. (I wonder how much of that might be attributable to the 1992 Batman: The Animated Series episode "On Leather Wings", which was itself based on those early Robbins/Adams Detective Comics appearances?) 

But in late 1975, the character starred his own series—even if it only lasted two issues—and was then given a regular feature in the Batman Family anthology series. In these stories, he seems to have retained enough of his humanity to function as a good citizen, combatting bad guys rather than just going on rampages.

In this particular 19-page story, Man-Bat's human alter-ego, scientist Kirk Langstrom, is pacing the floors of a Gotham City hospital, nervously waiting as his wife Francine is about to give birth to their first child (Is all of that nervousness just the usual jitters of a first-time father, or is he worried his chemically induced transformations into a human/bat hybrid might have some effect on his child, I wonder...?).

When he hears screaming and sees medical personnel fleeing from a delivery room, he thinks to himself "This is a case for-- --Man-Bat!", pulls off his shirt, and transforms into Man-Bat, flying in the direction the doctors and nurses have just fled from. (Unlike, say, The Hulk, Langstrom's transformations don't seem to have any ill effect on his pants, so he's always sensibly dressed in a pair of hunter green slacks while naked from the waist up.)

Inside the delivery room, he finds a new mother and a monstrous three-eyed green baby. The baby is able to magically throw tanks of gas through the air at Man-Bat. He punches the baby (yes, our hero punches out a baby), and it soon returns to its normal form, that of a human baby (and it doesn't seem to have taken any real damage from Man-Bat's punch).

What's going on here...? 

Nattily dressed professional demonologist Jason Blood, with some seriously unkempt eyebrows, is on the case. 

He arrives and presents his very seventies-looking business card to an incredulous police officer. 

Soon, there's more screaming from a second delivery room, and Blood chants "Yarva Demonicus Etrigan!" or "I summon the demon Etrigan!", and soon he's transformed to the yellow-skinned, big-eared, horned demon who, as Golden draws him here, also has some prominent eyebrows, apparently the one feature he shares with Blood (see below).

This Etrigan, by the way, doesn't yet speak strictly in rhyme (While Kirby had his Demon speak in rhyme a bit, Len Wein had him rhyming in a 1984 DC Comics Presents appearance, and that same year Alan Moore featured the character in a Swamp Thing arc in which he spoke in rhyming iambic pentameter; afterwards, whether he rhymed or not seemed to depend on the writer and the circumstances of the character, but it sure seems to be he rhymed more than he didn't ever after that Swamp Thing appearance).

Etrigan also, in this particular story anyway, is unequivocally a good guy, and doesn't seem to harbor any hidden agendas or propensity for evil. 

He too battles a demon baby, this one another great monster design by Golden, using "demon-fire" (not sure why, but Rozakis keeps using that term rather than "hellfire") to restore the baby to its human form.

The two monster heroes quickly get on the same page, with Etrigan explaining that his old enemy Morgaine Le Fey seems to be waiting for a particular baby destined for great power to be born, and she is therefore infusing each one with a spell that temporarily turns it into a demon, but so far she hasn't found the right newborn yet (We already knew Le Fey would be the story's villain though; we saw her escaping the dimensional walls of her prison and stealing the Philosopher's Stone from Blood's office in the opening pages of the story. As to how she made her escape, it apparently had something to do with the JLoA's interdimensional transporter to Earth-2 weakening the walls between dimensions or something. We therefore get two panels of Batman and Batgirl bidding farewell to the pre-Crisis Huntress as she leaves Earth-1 for home). 

Given that he's got a child about to be born any minute, Man-Bat obviously wants to put a stop to this turning-newborns-into-demons thing as soon as possible, and so he and Etrigan leave the hospital to search for Le Fey, Etrigan riding on Man-Bat's back as if he were a horsey:

The creators are fast running out of pages, but there's room for a brief, five-page confrontation with the villain, during which Golden lays out a quite cool page in which we see Le Fey framed in the middle of the page, two tiers of panels on either side of her. One features Etrigan, the other Man-Bat, and in these, she menaces them with giant versions of her own hands that appear through the ceiling and floor.

Luckily for Man-Bat, on of these giant hands grabs him by the wings, and so all he has to do to free himself is to revert back into wing-less Kirk Langstrom, snatch the Philosopher's Stone from Le Fey and point it in her direction, which turns her to stone.

Rushing back to the hospital, he arrives in time to greet his new baby, which he reacts to in shock, before the last-page splash reveals why exactly he is so surprised: The baby he's been referring to as "Kirk Jr." throughout the story is actually a girl, Rebecca Elizabeth Langstrom.

In the lower righthand corner of the page there's a little box reading, "Is Rebecca Langstrom actually the latent demon foreseen by Etrigan and Morgaine Le Fey? Only time and future issues...will tell!"

As far as I can tell, no future issues of Batman Family—or any other comics—would address the possibility of Rebecca Langstrom being a demon of some kind. I wouldn't be at all surprised to find out that she might have turned into a human/bat hybrid at some point, though.  

Review: 1996's Lobo/Demon: Helloween #1

The most striking image in this one-shot special is also one that marks it as a product of the 1990s. That would be the caricatured visage of one William Jefferson Clinton drawn atop the familiar yellow-skinned, red tunic-and-blue-caped body of Jack Kirby's Etrigan, The Demon.

This strange composite figure appears in two panels. The first is a splash page, in which it pounces upon Lobo from behind (above). 

In the second, the figure leaps back from the now prone bounty hunter, bathing him in flames spat from its mouth with a "FWOOOSH!"

It's only then that Etrigan pushes back his President Clinton mask and declares "Trick or Treat, Lobo!" For, as the subtitle of this 1996 one-shot denotes, it's set around Halloween (and was originally published in October of that year). Lobo was on his way to celebrate "Hallowe'en on a planet so rude it doesn't have a name" but lacking the funds to buy booze to bring with him, he takes a last-minute job on Earth...or thereabouts. 

He has come to Earth's moon to meet his new employer. And as for The Demon? Well, he's on the moon to meet his new employee. You can probably guess where this is going. 

The two wildly different characters might seem an odd match from a 30-year remove, but then, writer Alan Grant was associated with them both. He had written Etrigan for about 35 issues of the character's longest ever ongoing series, between 1990 and 1993 and, as of that October, he was on his 34th issue of the Lobo ongoing (after having written or co-written several Lobo miniseries and one-shots before that had ever even launched). Lobo had guest-starred in two different Demon arcs, during the course of which the characters developed a sort of grudging respect for one another. While Grant's The Demon and Lobo were often tonally quite different, they did share a similar sense of dark humor.

How tight are the two at this point? Well, Lobo doesn't even seem upset that Etrigan attacked him from behind and then set him ablaze, responding only to the attack with, "Etrigan--Th' Demon! I might've fraggin' knowed it!"

The specifics of the job that Etrigan has hired Lobo to perform are kind of complicated, and, indeed, a half-dozen pages of the 24-page book are devoted to flashbacks of the backstory...it's a long enough sequence that Grant has Lobo interrupting Etrigan's telling of that backstory more than once, the sequence only ending when Lobo finally puts his hand over Etrigan's mouth to stop him from going on and offers to simply guess the rest.

Briefly, there is an ancient giant monster that emerges from imprisonment every 10,000 years or so, "on th' night o' some ancient pagan festival" and then seeks to destroy the world. Lobo assumes Etrigan has hired him to help stop the monster, but he assumes wrong. Etrigan has hired Lobo to help the monster destroy the world, by fighting off the ancient guardian warrior that awakens at the same time as the monster, ritualistically battling it to keep it from destroying the world. 

While these two characters generally play the role of hero (or at least anti-hero) in their appearances, I suppose it's worth remembering that Etrigan is a demon from Hell, and Lobo is a bounty hunter and mercenary who basically does whatever he's paid to do, there being only a few lines he won't cross (Like going back on his word, or allowing harm to come to space dolphins).

So yeah, the guys with their names in the title of this comic book are here bent on destroying the world, not saving it. 

Of course, circumstances are such that they end up with no choice other than to slay the monster themselves. After they defeat the guardian, the monster looks them over and perhaps encouraged by some taunting from Lobo, swallows them both alive. In order to save themselves, they have to kill it. 

The world is thus saved...by a couple of guys who were, moments before, trying to destroy it.

As I said when I mentioned this book in passing the other day, I had bought and read this when it was originally published...and forgot almost everything about it, which is what prompted me to reread it now.

The reason I had picked it up back then was that, if I recall correctly, there wasn't much else that caught my eye during that particular trip to the comic shop. That and, of course, I was a fan of Alan Grant's writing. And this particular Alan Grant comic was drawn by Vince Giarrano. 

I'm sure I've mentioned him on EDILW before, but I was and am a big fan of Giarrano's. He drew some Batman stuff here and there, and had his own short-lived, 13-issue title in the form of the post-Zero Hour volume of Manhunter. If you ever come across anything he's drawn in a back issue bin, I'd recommend snapping it up. 

His style is very '90s, but in a way that always struck me as somewhat ironic, perhaps even sarcastic, the work of someone who saw what was popular at the time and attempted to do his own version of it. His work was highly expressive, and exaggerated to the point of cartoony, sometimes even silly (In this regard, he reminds me a bit of Kelley Jones; their artwork would never be mistaken for that of the other or anything, but both had a tendency to always go as big as possible). 

He was thus a perfect choice for this book, and I was curious to see how he would handle the two characters. 

Unfortunately, I don't think there's necessarily any particularly potent imagery in this particular comic, the mythological aspects are all more or less generic in conception, though well drawn in a loose, exaggerated, cartoony style (There is a neat splash page where the world-ending monster escapes from a volcano and its tail is all smoke while it seems to solidify as it emerges).

Giarrano's Lobo is pretty much standard issue, the character's hair maybe being a bit bigger and pointier than other artists have drawn it, but his Etrigan is a rather unique one: Big but squat, with sharp facial features, huge ears and a severe underbite. There's something of a bulldog about him. 

Perhaps because Lobo's appearance here is tempered by that of Etrigan, this particular story didn't seem as Lobo-y as many other Lobo appearances of the '90s. That is, it doesn't rely so heavily on the one basic Lobo gag and, given that he's in a story where every other character is as powerful as him or more so, his tendency towards ultra-violence is a non-factor. He can't really kill, maim or bully anyone in this small cast. 

In that regard, I wonder if this isn't a decent place for someone who doesn't particularly care for Lobo—or doesn't really have any prior experience with or interest in the character—to meet him...? 

At any rate, it's a well-made if unremarkable comic from Alan Grant, a man who could by this point write these characters in his sleep (and, perhaps, was doing so here), and an extremely interesting artist. 

Of course, this book, like Lobo/Deadman, has never been collected anywhere, so I don't suppose anyone particularly interested will have an easy time tracking it down anyway...

I'd love to see DC collect Grant's Demon run at some point, as I had only read a handful of issues from it, and maybe, if they did, this would end up with it (That, and Grant's 1989 Action Comics Weekly story featuring The Demon...? And/or maybe his 1989 Detective Comics arc, that culminates with the best Batman/Demon fight ever...?)

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

If you are interested in the work of Vince Giarrano, here are some of the Batman books he drew for DC in the '90s that I read an enjoyed:

•Batman Annual #16 This was a tie-in to the Eclipso: The Darkness Within annual crossover event, with writers Alan Grant and John Wagner (And a cover by Sam Kieth!) It's never been collected, but I hope DC will get around to collecting The Darkness Within eventually, maybe in a couple of volumes of DC Finest, as they did with Zero Hour...

•Batman: Seduction of the Gun #1 This 64-page one-shot special was written by John Ostrander and addresses the issue of gun violence. It's strident enough that I have a hard time imagining DC having published such a book in the 21st century, for fear of offending someone. It's never been collected.

•Batman: Shadow of the Bat #11-12, #19-20, #24 and #48-50 These were all written by Alan Grant. The first two issues introduced teenage villain The Human Flea, a character I loved but who never reappeared; it's been collected in 2016's Batman: Shadow of the Bat Vol. 1. The next two introduced the minor villain The Tally Man, pitting him against then-Batman Jean-Paul Valley, and #24 was a single-issue story also featuring Valley as Batman; all three of these issues have been collected in 2017's Batman: Knightfall Omnibus Vol. 2 or 2018's Batman: Knightquest: The Crusade. Issues #48-49 were chapters of the "Contagion" crossover, and #50 was an anniversary issue with multiple artists; all three issues are collected in 2016's Batman: Contagion.

•Batman: Legends of the Dark Knight #0 This is a "jam" issue with about a dozen writers and even more artists, and was released during the "Zero Month" that followed the Zero Hour crossover event. Giarrano drew the framing sequence, if I recall correctly. You can find this one collected in 2017's Batman Zero Hour.

•Batman Annual #20 This annual was a "Legends of the Dead Earth" tie-in; that year, DC's annuals were thematically tied together by telling stories set in a far-flung post-apocalyptic future but were all otherwise standalone stories rather than chapters of a bigger mega-story. It was written by Doug Moench. It has never been collected.

Scanning through his credits on comics.org tonight, I see plenty more from Giarrano at DC, some from the later 1980s as well as the 1990s. In addition to his work there, he also drew comics for Marvel, Dark Horse and First. I would certainly be interested in tracking a lot of these down...I'm especially interested in how his style might have changed between the '80s and '90s. His last DC credit seems to be 2002's Batgirl #26. I understand he has long since left comics and gone on to devote himself to painting. He's left a great body of work, though.

Review: Demon Knights Vol. 1: Seven Against The Dark

This is the first collection of one of DC’s “New 52” titles, and the first collection of any of those comics that I read all the way through (and, perhaps significantly, purchased).

When the titles were originally announced and published serially, there were only a handful that were created by a creative team of which I knew and liked the work of each member and that I was interested in the character or premise enough to check them out, regardless of reboot (Wonder Woman, Aquaman, Green Lantern, Justice League). Those are the books I read serially in comic book form, as they were being released.

There were another handful that were created by a creative team where I knew and liked one member, was ignorant of the work of another, and thought I’d wait until they made it into trade and I had heard enough positive or negative about the first few issues to see if it was something I might want to read or not.

In the case of Demon Knights, I was sort of intrigued by the premise (a medieval Justice League of several name characters mixed with new character), and the rare chance to see a book set in the DCU’s ancient past (even if it was the past of an all-new DCU, the New52U).

I know and like the work of Paul Cornell quite a bit. For DC, he wrote an excellent run on Action Comics starring Lex Luthor,the Knight and Squire miniseries and a pretty great story arc for Batman and Robin; for Marvel, he wrote the also excellent and (too) short-lived Captain Britain and MI13 and the Fantastic Four: True Story mini.

But pencil artist Diogenes Neves, whose main art credit prior to this series was on of writer J.T. Krul’s Green Arrow runs that I had avoided, and thus I had no real sense of whether or not his work was something I wanted to see or not (DC didn’t help matters by keeping it off the covers of the first issue; filling them instead with pin-up like images by Tony S. Daniel, whose work I know I don’t like).

So we’re finally far enough away from “The New 52” launch that the first trade collections are becoming available. Here’s my reading of Demon Knights, presented as my thoughts while reading it. If you don’t want to sit through this sort of gimmicky review, I can let you know my overall assessment right now: The book is trash, featuring an interesting premise and rather strong script, incompetently told through generic art that lacks the basic elements of comics storytelling.

I don’t think it matters what happens behind the scenes with the book at this point, as Cornell is off the book already and the new writer is launching it in a new direction, but it really seems like it needed a stronger artist, and an editor able to see and correct poor story-telling before issues shipped.

THE COVER: As I mentioned, it is basically just a pin-up drawn by Batman/Detective artist Tony Daniel, featuring the Demon character created by Jack Kirby in 1972, now in a new “costume” of medieval armor (A sharp contrast to his original look, which didn’t involve armor because, like Superman, The Demon was pretty much invulnerable and hardly needs a suit of armor. During the the Alan Moore-scripted Swamp Thing of the 1980s, the Demon did sport some semi-organic hell armor when he was riding off to fight the big, black finger of The Ultimate End of The World or Whatever They Were Fighting).

He leaps in front of coloring effects suggesting fire, and he’s all by himself—since he’s the character after which the book and the team it stars is named, I suppose it makes sense to put him on the first issue’s cover, if one can only include one character on the cover, but it is an odd choice for a team book. Particularly one that moves as quickly as this one, a book that rather thoroughly introduces at least six of the seven teammates by the end of the first issue.

Props to Daniel for at least looking to Kirby for inspiration for the image, presenting his own version of Etrigan leaping, knees up, at the reader below…

…although a quick comparison reveals which of the two artists constructed a fuller image with the greater suggestion of a story (Whether one prefers the inking and coloring styles of 2012 DC over those of 1972 DC or not).

PAGE 1: The first bit of information the reader gets in this book is a caption, reading “Prologue: Four Centuries ago. The last night of Camelot.”

It confused me—400 years ago was 1612, that can’t possibly be anywhere close to right—and by the time I figured it out a few seconds later, a sinking feeling set in. I didn’t even make it through the upper left-hand corner of the very first page before I noticed something wrong. This is not an auspicious start, I thought.

The page, it turns out, isn’t set 400 years ago, but is rather set 400 years before page seven, which is set “Now. The Dark Ages.” Which were, of course, then, not now.

I don’t know when exactly this trend in super-comics started or who is responsible, but there isn’t any “ago” on the very first page of the very first issue of a comic book. That’s “now,” that’s where the story starts. You can can’t flash back before the present—you can just start your story, and then tell us “Four centuries later” when four centuries have passed.

Yeesh.

There’s a big, burly, black-bearded fellow in armor shouting in the direction of the reader on this splash page, telling whoever he’s addressing to flee Camelot.

PAGE 2: And then we see who he’s addressing, a boat full of women in robes, and now he’s apparently calling for them not to flee. I couldn’t make any goddam sense out of these first two pages.

It probably didn’t help that I read this minutes after I finished Uncle Scrooge: Only A Poor Old Man, part of Fantagraphics’ Carl Barks Library, and I suppose it’s not fair to compare Cornell and Neves to one of the universally-acclaimed masters of comic book-making but, at the same time, a little legibility would be nice, wouldn’t it?

We like to think—certainly publishers and creators like to think—that we’ve advanced the art form so much in the last few decades, that the comics and comics-makers of 2012 are so much more sophisticated and mature than those of, say, those geared towards children in the 1940s or 1950s, but, if you believe that, try reading a Carl Barks collection followed by a New 52 collection, and see if you’re opinion remains unchanged.

PGS 3-6: Still 400 years before “The Dark Ages,” we’re quickly introduced to both Xanadu, who dives below the surface in an attempt to retrieve Excalibur from a hand most likely belonging to The Lady of the Lake (Say, Excalibur figured prominently in Cornell’s Captain Britain series too!), and Jason Blood and Etrigan, bonded seemingly in a snap decision by Merlin as Camelot falls to the unseen “beasts.”

PAGE 7: We get to "now," or, as the caption reads in full, “Now. The Dark Ages. The Horde of the QUESTING QUEEN marches North.” Neves reveals that “horde” in a single, vertical splash page; a tight close-up on the “horde” of five guys, maybe as many as ten if you count the shaded-out silhouettes behind them, and a couple of monster-heads they seem to be riding and/or leading.

In the background, we see a giant sauropod of some kind, with a castle on its back, and dialogue coming out of the castle.

PAGE 8: We’re in the castle’s throne room, so upon their initial introduction, we’re given no real visual information of any significance about the Horde. It’s a waste of an opportunity to build up the overwhelming threat our heroes will ultimately try to stave off, and some imaginative visuals, like a castle-carrying dinosaur (think of how Brandon Graham and his collaborators handled such similar entities in Prophet, or Geoff Darrow handled a city carrying monster in Shaolin Cowboy; DC may be A-List in the direct market, but they seem to hire AAA artists).

Here we learn that the Questing Queen hangs out with a sorcerer named Mordru. That name won’t mean anything to new readers brought in to by The New 52, but he’s an old Legion of Superheroes wizard villain created by Jim Shooter and Curt Swan in the late ‘60s. More recently Geoff Johns decided that an immortal wizard would have been around long before the 30th or 31st century, and began using a younger-looking Mordru in his JSA/Justice Society of America stories. Cornell seems to have taken that a step further, and followed Mordru back another 1,000 years or so.

PGS 11-15: Cornell and Neves introduce the rest of the cast, and re-introduce some from the previous era. They all convene in a tavern in the town of Little Spring, which the Horde must pass through on a strict timeline on their way to conquer a kingdom to the North.

Jason Blood and Xanadu are traveling companions and, it becomes apparent before the story ends, Xanadu is "dating" both Jason and Etrigan, telling each of them she’s playing the other.

Vandal Savage is shown as a big, burly, bearded barbarian and, in one panel, walks through a door. Neves draws a nice image of splintering wood falling all around Savage as he enters the closed tavern, but it’s unclear if he simply walked into it so hard it atomized (which doesn’t make any goddam sense) or if he used his axe to shatter it (which does), but since his axe hand is off panel and there’s no indication it was just swung, who knows? Again, bad art. (Fine rendering, but bad comics art).

The Shining Knight is in the bar, and this is the young, female, Sir Ystin version of The Shining Knight from the Grant Morrison-written Seven Soldier multi-book story. Unlike Morrison’s version of the character, it’s no great secret that “Sir” Ystin is really a maiden disguised so she could fight as a man could; perhaps because Morrison already used up that surprise, here everyone immediately guesses that the Knight is a woman trying to pass as a man, and the fact that the Knight thinks she’s fooling anyone at all becomes a running gag.

Al Jabr is a charming character of apparently Muslim origin (although I don’t recall seeing the words “Muslim,” “Islam” or a country of origin ever mentioned). “I bring mechanisms that can make you rich,” he boasts to the barkeep; that’s his thing—inventions ahead of their time.

Exoristos is a dark haired “giantess,” a head or two taller than the other characters; it’s teased for several issues before its made clear she’s an Amazon, as in "from the same place Wonder Woman comes from," although she's living in exile in Man's World.

Finally, there’s “The Horsewoman,” a mysterious red-haired archer with horse powers. She won’t be fully named or introduced for a bit yet.

Is it worth pointing out that Cornell introduces a team of seven “superheroes,” their antagonists and the supporting character/maguffin Merlin in just 20 pages? And that most of these are brand-new characters, or else familiar characters rendered unrecognizable? Meanwhile, in New 52 flagship Justice League, Geoff Johns took that many pages to introduce Batman and Green Lantern, who every reader already knew all about anyway.

I think it might be worth pointing out.

PGS 19-20: When Horde scouts get their asses kicked by all these powerful and magical warriors hanging out in the bar, Mordru and QQ “throw dragons” at them, and in another vertical splash page, we see a Tyrannosaurus-like head crashing through a wooden wall, while man-sized, velociraptor-like dinosaurs wearing bits of armor and wielding weapons appear out of black holes that hang in mid-air (suggestive of the sort used by Spider-Man villain The Spot). It’s unclear where this is happening from the art, as there’s no background, and none of the characters from the bar are shown in the image. The narration suggests that these “dragons” are meant to be attacking there, though.

Dinosaurs as dragons? That is legitimately awesome.

That’s the last page of the first issue.

COVER FOR #2: This one’s also by Tony Daniel, but it’s an improvement over the first, as it shows all seven “Demon Knights” on it.

PAGE 21: Three chaotic panels in which the art doesn’t say anything coherent: One has a group of people trying to escape what is probably the burning inn (which is apparently on fire now), the second has what look like jets of flame shooting in or out of walls, doors or holes in a wooden wall, and the third shows the T-Rex head crashing through a wall to snap up a passerby; whether it is attacking the inside of the inn from outside or outside the inn from inside isn’t clear.

PGS 22-23: A double-page splash featuring the six “Knights” in the inn doing battle with the velociraptors, while a drooling T-rex lurks in the background. One of the raptors breathes fire. A giddy Vandal Savage announces, “Excellent! I haven’t eaten one of these in centuries!”

For much of these first six issues, Savage is played for laughs…in addition to being one of the good guys. It’s an unexpected portrayal for the immortal caveman villain who usually troubles The Justice League and the Flash in the present, and is, I think, therefore even more effective. (I was genuinely shocked when, later in the story, the villain actually does something evil, like the pre-New 52 Savage might have been expected to do).

PGS 25-26: In addition to armor, New 52 Etrigan also has wings. He uses these to fly up to the mouth of the T-Rex (a “true dragon,” as the dinosaurs are called in the book), climb into its mouth, and destroy it from the inside, something you’ve probably seen 10-35 times in comics before (the destroy it from the inside bit, that is).

PAGE 32: His wings are put to better use in a sequence which involves him trying to fly Xanadu to safety, only to encounter pteradon-riding archers. It’s another particularly week scene by Neves: No background, no sense of place, no scale, just figures appearing around other figures. Etrigan isn’t flying here so much as just standing in a void colored blue.

PAGE 33: We get our first glimpse of the “heraldic dragons” mentioned previously; these look like traditional fantasy illustration/comics dragons, but are mechanical, made of metal, and are apparently operated by many men each, judging from the little heads visible through port-hole like slats in their exposed necks.

PAGE 37: Shining Knight’s Pegasus is still in continuity, and it’s named Vanguard, like the Seven Soldiers one, not Winged Victory.

PAGE 44: In the third issue, Etrigan does something pretty wicked to a priest—like even worse than ripping his face off, which he also does. It’s a reminder that even though these guys are the “heroes” of the piece, some of them are evil and/or are struggling with temptations to do great evil.

The majority of this third issue is getting the characters into place for siege/battle. The heroes have erected a magical force field around the village and try to send word to the Horde’s enemy kingdom—if they can hold out against the 1,000-to-1 odds long enough, help will arrive.

They prepare the village for battle, and it was around this time that the Seven Samurai parallels hit me over the head; the 300 parallels will come in the next two issues, although the Cornell/Neves team can’t compete with Miller for visual storytelling (or even, sadly, Zack Snyder).

COVER FOR #4: Michael Choi takes over the cover art. It is greatly improved.

PGS 60-77: The Shining Knight has a vision in which he sees Merlin, and we learn a bunch of stuff that doesn’t exactly make sense so far, but that is more likely because it’s not meant to make sense just yet. Camelot appears to have fallen more than once, though, and we learn a bit about how the Shining Knight gained immortality, how Vanguard did and what their quest is for…and what the Questing Queen is also questing for.

PAGE 77: QQ has cool hair.

PAGE 104: Ex fells “The Wallbreaker,” a species of “true dragon” resembling some sort of ceratopian dinosaur. On Choi’s cover for the sixth issue, she does so by headbutting it.

Within the comic, she does so by…striking it’s beak with a war hammer, maybe…? It’s another poorly executed splash page.

This might be a good time to stop and ponder something.

It was my understanding that Wonder Woman’s great strength was a gift from her gods, but Exoristos seems to be, if not quite as strong as Wondy, strong enough to knock down a giant dinosaur with one blow, a blow that is itself strong enough to knock down the trees behind the dinosaur and turn the ground to dust in all directions with the force of impact.

Her strength may be explained later in the series, but as I was reading, I wondered if maybe the implication isn’t that all Amazons are Wonder Woman-strong in The New 52…? Or perhaps that Ex is meant to be a sort of pre-Wonder Woman, another half-Olympian/half-Amazon warrior sent into man’s world…?

I don’t know.

PAGE 133: Neves gets two opportunities to draw breathtaking scenes, and both are wasted. This issue opens in hell, which doesn’t look much different than the battle in the village, save for the coloring (At this point, I was wondering where John McCrea, whose work on The Demon with Garth Ennis in the ‘90s was so inspired, was when it came time to fill out the New 52 creative rosters; that was the first time I thought of a specific artist, but throughout I couldn’t help but wonder why it is that all of Dark Horse’s comics involving swords, sorcery and fantasy are so wonderfully illustrated, while DC’s fantasy comic just look like shitty WildStorm super-team comics with swords).

The other occurs on this page; Mordru and Xanadu have a magician’s duel and while the spells they shout are almost as suggestive as those in that duel Neil Gaiman wrote in The Sandman all those years ago, the visuals are simply the two characters posing, Mordru glowing green while Xanadu glows pink, and two giant snake heads hover above them. It’s about as magical as any throwaway panel of Green Lantern fighting anyone at all.

This is, by the way, the climax of the trade; while Mordru and Xanadu do magical battle, Shining Knight and the Queen sword-fight.

PAGE 137: Ex quotes Gandalf, and not an obscure line from one of the novels, but the most repeated and remembered line from the movies…the closest thing Ian McKellen’s Gandalf has to a catchphrase.

PAGE 140: And then it ends, and I wish I would have sought this trade out at my local library, rather than buying it.

And then I read Animal Land Vol. 5 and it was really, really good. So only one of the three comics I read that night was actually terrible.

Wednesday Comics vs. The New 52: Catwoman and The Demon

The disguised witch Morgaine le Fay hires super-thief Catwoman to steal a powerful artifact from handsome occult collector Jason Blood which will allow her to commit great evil; when Catwoman discovers she's been duped, she teams up with Blood and Blood's demonic alter-ego Etrigan to save the day. By Walter Simonson and Brian Stelfreeze.

Gotham City cat-burglar Selina Kyle has been targeted by unknown antagonists who want her dead badly enough to blow up her apartment—before she can get to the bottom of that mystery, however, she has Russian mobsters to steal from, revenge to be taken and Batmen to bang. By Judd Winick and Guillem March.

—AND—

The demon leads a sort of medieval Justice League consisting of such characters as Shining Knight II, Madame Xanadu and Vandal Savage in the Dark Ages of the New 52iverse. By Paul Cornell, Diogenes Neves and Oclair Albert.

Eighteen thoughts about Superman and Batman vs. Vampires and Werewolves

—I’m fascinated by the title of this miniseries. There’s an admirable obviousness and, yes, a certain amount of stupidity to it, but it’s the sort of stupidity that is at least leaning in the direction of awesomeness (See All-Star Batman and Robin and Geoff Johns’ Green Lantern for examples of DC comics that have achieved a perfect balance of stupid and awesome).


—Additionally, I’m extremely curious how the title for this project came about. Its construction mirrors that of 2007 series Superman and Batman Versus Aliens and Predator, a of quadruple franchise crossover that possibly did extremely well for DC in trade paperback (I know the trade collection made it onto a Young Adult Library Services Association list of recommended books for teens, for example).

So I suppose it’s possible DC saw that the S&BvA&P trade did unexpectedly well in certain markets and they wanted to replicate that particular formula, but rather than teaming up with Dark Horse Comics again, they decided to pit their Superman and Batman team against public domain adversaries. Instead of choosing, I don’t know, Dracula and Mr. Darcy or Moby Dick and the Headless Horseman they went with two popular species of monster in the generic.

If that wasn’t the case, then I find this project’s existence as a six-issue miniseries a little harder to guess at. Remember, DC already has a Superman/Batman team-up book, in which the two heroes team-up to fight various adversaries about once a month, give or take a shipping delay.

That book is also almost completely divorced from DCU continuity—the stories probably technically all “count” in that they’re not “imaginary stories” or anything, but they rarely reflect what’s going on in a given month or even year within the Batman and Superman titles—so why put this story out under that odd title as a standalone miniseries, instead of as an arc of Superman/Batman?

I was curious enough to look up what sales data was available, and according to The Beat’s monthly sales analysis, the story would have certainly sold more comics as part of Superman/Batman.

According to The Beat, the first issue of Superman and Batman Vs. Vampires and Werewolves sold 27,825 units, and the declined to just 17,273 by the sixth issue. During the same October to December of 2008 period, Superman/Batman only shipped two issues, missing the November ship date. These sold 48,187 and 45,968 units, respectively. So if Superman/Batman pushed back the start of the four-part “Super/Bat” story arc a couple months to accommodate a six-part, bi-weekly “Vs. Vampires and Werewolves” arc, they would have sold a hell of a lot more issues.

Alternately, I wonder if this might have sold better if it was just branded as a Batman book or a JLA book. Batman is the main character, and there are just about enough Leaguers to hold up the weight of JLA branding (Batman, Superman, Wonder Woman, Green Arrow, Nightwing and Jason Blood/The Demon…throw in a few cameos for cover and it’s a JLA story if you want to call it one). In fall of 2008, Batman and Justice League of America were DC’s #2 and #3 best-selling comics.


—One more thing about the title and I’ll shut up about it, I swear. It’s also somewhat curious given the story within. As I mentioned, there are a lot of other superheroes involved, and while Superman gets more panel-time than any of them who aren’t Batman, a new character introduced in the series gets a lot more than he does, and that character and Batman are the only ones present in all six issues. That character, by the way, is a vampire, and there’s a werewolf character that also allies itself with Superman and Batman. So really, this thing is more like Superman and Batman and A Vampire and A Werewolf (and Some Other Superheroes) vs. Vampires and Werewolves and Lovecraftian Monsters (and a Mad Scientist, if You Want to Count Him Too).


—Writer Kevin VanHook and artist Tom Mandrake have the ideal last names to work on horror comics. The names “Van Hook” and “Mandrake” look simply perfect on a spine with the words “vampires” and “werewolves” on it.


—I love Tom Mandrake. Love love love love love him. He’s one of the first comics artists I knew by name and whose work I could tell at a glance. I think his work on The Spectre and Martian Manhunter is underrated, and he’s fantastically well-suited for horror stories.


—Wait, when I said I loved Tom Mandrake above, you know I meant his artwork, right? Because I don’t even know Tom Mandrake, let alone know him well enough to be in love with him.


—I kind of hate the cover of the trade (and the first issue of the series) though. That’s a great werewolf face, and a pretty good vampire face, and there’s nothing wrong with his Superman or Batman, but, I don’t know, this just seems kind of lame for some reason. Maybe I’d like it better if the split vampire/werewolf face were green, and it was supposed to be Composite Dracula or something…


—I was happy to see this trade contains an introduction. I love introductions in trade collections of serialized comics, and I think they should be pretty much mandatory. This may be in large part simple nostalgia on my part, for a time when trade collections were much, much rarer and almost always accompanied by an introduction that argued, at least in part and usually even subconsciously, why the comics in question were even being given a spine, collected between two covers and sold outside of comic shops in the first place.

The fact that trade collections are now so common we don’t see introductions as often is a good sign, demonstrating how much more accepted comics are now then they were in the late eighties and early nineties. But I don’t think it hurts for someone to have to spend a few paragraphs explaining what’s so special about what you’re about to read, you know? Also, it’s just a little value added, so if you are buying a story twice (as serial comics and then as a collection), or are paying a little extra for a hardcover or whatever, you’re getting something extra. (Original graphic novels, on the other hand, probably shouldn’t have introductions, as they need to stand on their own in a way that, say, Superman/Batman #45-#49 might not need to).


—This introduction is by John Landis, director of An American Werewolf in London, making him a good “get” for a comic featuring werewolves.


—Unfortunately, Landis premises part of his intro on Superman’s vulnerability to magic, which Landis suspects might be VanHook’s original invention.

Superman can be weakened and even defeated by Kryptonite, but I discovered in Keven VanHook’s new story that Superman can also be affected by “magic.” Exactly how one defines “magic” can also be broadly defined. Whether or not this “magical effect” on Superman’s powers has been long established or not really does not matter.

Come on, Landis!


—The lettering in this book is huge. Like, gigantic. I think it’s because that instead of bolding and italicizing the stress words in sentences—a peculiarity of DC superhero comics that has long bugged me—letterers Steve Wands and Travis Landham use all-caps on the stress words, so that the narration boxes seem to take up more space than they might actually take up.

And there’s a lot of narration in this thing. Not an ungodly Brad Meltzer amount, and VanHook avoids that irritating Batman and Superman narrating about one another constantly strategy that Jeph Loeb used on Superman/Batman, but there is a narrator in this book, and that means narration boxes getting between my eyes and Tom Mandrake’s lines.


—There are a lot of guest-stars in this, as I mentioned above. Wonder Woman, Nightwing, Green Arrow, Jason Blood/Etrigan, The Demon and Dr. Kirk Langstrom/Man-Bat. That’s not a bad thing in and of itself. I certainly enjoyed seeing Mandrake’s GA for what may have been the first time, and he does a mean Man-Bat too, in a rather cool scene in which Man-Bat fights some werewolves and rips off one’s head (And it takes a pretty good artist to be able to draw a were-bat fighting a werewolf and keep the character’s distinct in close-up).

It’s kind of odd how the characters who aren’t Batman seem to come and go, though. Wonder Woman is in the first issue—appearing well before Superman, who doesn’t enter the story until the last page of the second issue—and she fights a vampire, then completely disappears from the story. Her only other mention is Batman mentioning that she called him to tell him about the vampire.

Nightwing similarly appears, fights a monster, hands it over to Batman and takes off. I didn’t really get a sense of why most of the characters were there and where they went, and found myself distracted by it in a couple of instances. In general, I got the impression that certain Justice Leaguers were always dumping their work on Batman’s lap.

I liked Nightwing’s exit though, as it just made him look like a big wussy. He chases down and KOs a werewolf, brings it back to the Batcave for Batman to examine, talks some shop with his boss for a bit, and then when Batman is ready to take on the source of all the vampire and werewolf activity, Nightwing thinks of something more pressing he needs to do:
Ha ha, whatever Nightwing! I’ve read your comic, you never have things to take care of.

—I like page 13, in which Mandrake frames Batman by the jaws of his mechanical dinosaur:


—The mad scientist seeking to pierce the veil between the world of the living and the dead and accidentally brings Lovecraftian monsters to Earth in the process is named Dr. Herbert Combs. Like Dr. Herbert West, the lead character in Re-Animator, the movie based on the H.P. Lovecraft short story, and Jeffrey Combs, the actor who played him. Get it?

Actually, I probably would have thought that was clever when I first started reading Batman comics….maybe it would have even turned me on to the work of Lovecraft and/or stupid/awesome 1980s horror movies earlier…but now it seems over-obvious. (On the other hand, I suppose complaining about an over-obvious character name in a comic entitled Superman and Batman vs. Vampires and Werewolves is kind of silly of me, huh?)


—In one panel, Batman kicks a demon frog-like fetus creature monster thing so hard in the stomach that a shower of its organs pour out the other side,
and in the very next panel Batman flying kicks its head off.


—Mandrake draws pretty cool Lovecraftian horrors:


—Superman, Batman and Green Arrow all kill the hell out of vampires and werewolves in this. It’s established early on that the monsters are essentially already dead, but it’s still weird to watch Superman and Batman slaughtering their enemies. GA’s killed before, I think, but Superman and Batman?

Even with the caveat that their opponents are already technically dead, it’s somewhat strange to see either of these heroes using lethal force, given the extraordinary lengths each goes to preserve life, in Batman’s case usually going to completely insane lengths (i.e. not only not killing The Joker, but usually going out of his way to save the mass murderer’s life whenever it’s endangered).

It’s made even stranger given that Superman spends the majority of his time in the story trying to save a kid who is infected by the synthetic vampirism disease from going all the way vampire. His reluctance to take a life that might be saved—no matter how slim the chances of success—is a part of the story.

I think pitting these two particular heroes against foes that can only be stopped with lethal force raises some extremely interesting questions about who the characters are and why they behave the way they do. This isnt' a story exploring issues like what constitutes life and where Batman, Superman and their allies draw the line between life and not-life, between killing that’s acceptable and killing that's unacceptable. I’d be a lot more excited to read such a story, though.

I should note that the fact that they can’t get around killing their enemies seems like something of a failure on their part to me. Is it impossible to stop vampires and werewolves without killing them? Is searching for a cure completely hopeless? Maybe, but then isn’t that what Batman and Superman are all about? Finding a way to do the impossible?

And at the end of the day, it’s VanHook manipulating what’s happening on the page. They can find a cure if he can think of one for them to discover; they can take out vampires and werewolves without ending their lives or un-deaths as long as VanHook let’s them, you know?

But perhaps that’s something for a different story.


—I’ve seen Mandrake’s Etrigan before, so it wasn’t a great surprise to see how cool his version of the character is or anything, but wow, I love his Etrigan:
Look at the paws on him!

And that’s 18 thoughts about Superman and Batman vs. Vampires and Werewolves.

JASON BLOOD

likes "hot" chocolate ice cream (chocolate ice cream flavored with a dash of chile powder).

His worser half doesn't care for ice cream; it messes with his fire breath.

Friday Night Fights: Batman Beatdown #2

Slade Wilson isn't the only one who has handed Batman a severe beating. Being one of the world's greatest martial artists, wearing a belt full of bat-shaped anti-personnel weapons and being a bit of a psycho, a bit of a dick and a bit of a cheater may be enough to make the Dark Knight the king of most hills, but whenever he ventures outside his own weight class, he increases his chances of getting his spandex-clad ass beaten.

And you don't get much more out of Batman's weight class than Etrigan, the Demon.

I'm not sure if or when the two caped Gothamites found themselves at odds prior to tonight's fight, but I know they've crossed paths repeatedly since, and, as far as I know, this is their best battle (and all around best story). It also happens to be one of the best Batman stories I've ever read. And one of the best Etrigan stories.

It comes courtesy of Alan Grant, who, I've recently learned, was writing Etrigan for the very first time (Grant would go on to write him a lot more, when DC launched a Demon monthly with Grant in the writer's chair). His portrayal of the yellow-skinned, flame- and rhyme-breathing demon hewed close to that of Alan Moore's version of Etrigan in Swamp Thing, only rather than a sort of buddy-cop team policing the borders between hell and earth, Grant presented Jason Blood as a brooding, conflicted, cursed man, and Etrigan as completely mad—a pretty scary proposition considering his powers.

The art is provided by Norm Breyfogle, whom I consider the definitive Batman artist. Breyfogle found the perfect balance between the realistic portrayal of Batman as a normal man in a costume and the more expressionistic, symbolic/iconic take on the character as a mysterious, almost supernatural creature of the night. Breyfogle's Batman was recognizably human in his expressions and musculature, but his cape and cowl would flare out menacingly and blend into shadows to reduce Batman into a pair of angry white triangles and a set of sneering teeth when he needed to be scary. There have been so many great artists to handle Batman over the years that picking a "best" seems foolish, but I don't think anyone has accomplished as much characterization through the imagery alone as Breyfogle has; certainly not within the last few decades.

It probably helps that the Grant/Breyfogle team was together for so long—From their run on TEC through Batman and then their own Shadow of The Bat, and a handful of specials. Was there a writer/artist team on the character for that length of time before? There certainly hasn't been since.

Breyfogle's style is as well-suited to the Demon as it is to Batman, for the exact same reasons. His Etrigan seems physically real and unreal at the same time, and his bearing whips from mischeivous to noble to horrifying from panel to panel, while remaining consistently the same character (Breyfogle would again draw Etrigan in the Anarky miniseries, also written by Grant).

So, the fight.

It goes down in the last issue of three-part story "Tulpa," which ran from 1989'sTEC #601 through #603. Some criminal types have been shaking Gothamites down for protection money, and one of their targets turns out to be an occultist who summons a demon to protect him, and, like most demon summonings, things go awfully awry—the four-armed, axe-weilding, crown-skulls-wearing giant calling itself Mahakala is too much to control, andit soon starts cutting a bloody swathe through Gotham.

Batman goes to Jason Blood for help, but Blood's all like, "What? No way am I summoning Etrigan to fight that guy! That's like fighting a grease fire with a forest fire!" (I'm totally paraphrasing, by the way). So Batman soldiers on solo. When our fight begins in TEC #603's "When Demons Clash!", Batman has already gone a few rounds with Mahakala, "The Great Black One-- The Angry Destroyer!", which accounts for his battle-damaged look (You know Batman's been getting his ass-kicked when he loses an ear from his cowl.)

Just as he's about to take a battle axe to the face, Etrigan swoops in and saves the day (Blood had caved), making short, short work of Mahakala.

It's worth noting, for our purposes here (i.e. watching Batman get beat down) that Bats is therefore going into this likely weary and a little wounded. So while Batman in top form probably couldn't hang with Etrigan's inhuman speed and endurance, super-strength, flame-breath, energy bolts, magic and poetry, a tired-out, roughed-up, one-eared Batman doesn't have a prayer.

Etrigan's in the middle of gloating over the pile of ashes that was until recently Mahakala, when Batman rolls up to thank the heroic demon and shake hands (Grant's Batman is a little serious and driven, but he's not a sociopath social incompetent). Click on the images to read the dialogue, and better appreciate the unbridled awesomeness that is Breyfogle's Batman.




Etrigan's not here to save Batman or shake hands though, he's here to eat bad guys.



Batman steps up and sets a stern hand on his shoulder, but instead of pulling a Hal Jordan on Batman, Etrigan just free-styles a rhyme while his skin burns through Batman's glove (no one talks shit like Etrigan!) Note an art mistake in above panel—Batman places his right hand on Etrigan's shoulder, but is then shown clutching his burning left hand.

Demon or no, Batman isn't letting anyone get away with murder (unless it's Jason Todd or Cassandra Cain; Batman makes exceptions for people he's personally trained when it comes to getting away with murder). So it's time for a judo throw into a pile of cinder blocks.



What a great page. See how elegantly Grant and Breyfogle detail Etrigan's speed in relation to Batman's—he clears twenty yards in the space of a second, and we get one word thoughts in each panel, to place further context for the rate of the actions. Wow. And that face...see how quickly Breyfogle has Etrigan's face twist from "Did Batman just throw me into a pile of bricks for some reason? That's rather irritating" to "GAAAR! DROOL! FOAM!"





This is another great page. Note how the panels are starting to reflect the action. While the first scenes of their encounter are rigid, straight and formal, now they grow angles and shift perspectives—the page is falling apart and slipping towards oblivion, just as Batman is.

He summons his waning strength for one last strike because if Batman's going out, he's going out with a double-barrelled ear boxing.



Batman's blow accomplishes his goal, but in an unpredictable way. Etrigan finds it so adorable that Batman would even try punching his way out of the situation that Etrigan just cracks up at the thought. This leads to my second favorite Batman panel of all time, wherein Etrigan throws his arm around Batman to tell him he likes his style, and Batman is just completley bewildered.




And there's my first favorite Batman panel of all-time. The one in which Etrigan concludes their conflict the way a raving lunatic from Hell might—with a smek.

In fact, that's so awesome, let's see that again:



Recognizing that Bruce Wayne, like Jason Blood, has a demon living within him, Etrigan sees the Batman as a kindred spirit and spares him, forefeiting the fight.

WINNER: BATMAN