When Batman Met Spawn Pt. 2: On 1994's Spawn/Batman #1

While I have no idea what the sales figures for books from 31 years ago might have looked like, I have to assume that Image Comics' half of the Batman and Spawn crossover event, Spawn/Batman #1, was more popular than DC's, Batman/Spawn: War Devil #1. It was certainly the more exciting of the two, and the one I had preferred when I read them both as a teenager.

A large part of that is, of course, that Spawn/Batman was drawn by Todd McFarlane, and his art was, of course, the main selling point for the comic featuring the character he had created. 

Perhaps an even larger part, though, was that it was written by Frank Miller.

Miller had previously written Spawn in 1993's Spawn #11 (part of a four-issue run in which McFarlane had a series of surprising guest writers, including Alan Moore, Neil Gaiman and Dave Sim), but the character he is most associated with is Batman. And here Miller would be returning to Batman for the first time since his 1986 Batman: The Dark Knight Returns. These days, after Miller has returned to the world of the Dark Knight Returns repeatedly, and written Batman in a couple of other projects as well, it probably doesn't seem like such a big deal, but I have to imagine it was in 1994.

And the Batman that Miller was writing in Spawn/Batman was, indeed, his DKR version of the character, albeit a younger version, as this story would have been set well before the events of that seminal near-future set series. McFarlane hints at that fact on his cover, an homage to the famous Miller-drawn silhouette of Batman leaping before a bolt of lightning cover from Dark Knight Returns, and there's a note on the 2022 Batman/Spawn: The Classic Collection hardcover's credit page for Spawn/Batman making it explicit.

"Spawn/Batman is a companion piece to DC Comics' Batman: The Dark Knight Returns," it reads. "It does not represent current DC continuity."

I'm not sure of the exact wording that might have run in the original one-shot, but it must have been similar, as I remember knowing at the time that this was meant to be a story of the Dark Knight from DKR and not the "real" Batman (Say, if this is the Batman from Dark Knight Returns, only from an earlier point in his career, does that mean that 1994's Spawn/Batman is technically the first appearance of Frank Miller's All-Star Batman, from the pages of All-Star Batman and Robin, The Boy Wonder...?)

So, what's the difference between this Batman and the one then-current DC continuity...?

Well, not much, actually. The main thing seems to be that Miller writes Batman here as an extremely stubborn, unrepentant asshole...arrogant to a fault, and unable to admit he's wrong or change course when that fact that he might be becomes apparent. That, and he's more violent. 

On page three, there's a panel showing him stalking away from eight men sprawled on the floor, saying "Punks.. ...you're lucky I went so easy on you...", while the blue narration boxes read "Tonight's foes are left behind him, broken things."

Later, when he catches Spawn setting two men on fire, "a wanton act of murder," Batman drops thirty feet and drives his heel into his kidney ("Shouldn't cause too much damage," the narration reads, "Six months in the hospital and he'll be ready to face the judge.")

Otherwise, there's nothing here that really signals this as an entirely different Batman; it's more a matter of the character's attitude and voice than any specific facts. And, given how often other writers have tried to emulate Miller's Batman writing over the years, this take on Batman doesn't sound too off.

Somewhat remarkably given that War Devil had three writers so used to working within the constraints of Big Two corporate super-comics, Miller, who by that time had already become something of an auteur, does a far better job of presenting a real team-up comic, one which does a pretty decent job of introducing Spawn to new readers...of which I think it is safe to assume the character had gotten quite a few of with this comic, as Batman fans and Frank Miller-on-Batman fans likely picked this book up and were meeting McFarlane's hero for the first time.

When Spawn appears for the first time, a splash on page 12, the narration tells us that "He is a dead man brought to a wretched life--a slave of Hell who seeks redemption." As Batman investigates the unhoused people in New York ("the dregs of humanity"), the narration tells us that "now and then he hears legends of one of their own named "Al"--a bum possessed with magic powers."

That there is more than War Devil told us about Spawn, really. The story reflected that, of course, but didn't make any of it explicit. We also learn that Spawn is super-strong and nearly invulnerable, that his magic comes from Hell, and that while he seems to be able to do almost anything with it—including, in this comic, bringing a dead Batman back to life, teleporting the pair of them and manage some sort of psychic mind meld with Batman—he seems to have a limited supply of it, so that he prefers not to use it unless he has to.

As I said, the fist 10 pages or so belong to Batman. The very first page is a 12-panel grid, the panels hosting terse, tough-guy narration that, at this point, I find hard to tell if Miller is writing in earnest or in parody. The first panel features the light of the moon and the words "A cold night," and the "camera" slowly pans from the full moon to Gotham City; it is the first of three, four-panel sequences pulling from a white space to reveal some information about the scene.

So yes, the page opens with the words, "A cold night. A dark night." And it ends with, "A cold night. A dark knight:"

Get it? (Oh, and that's not a typo; there's a colon in the last narration box of the first page; a turn of the page reveals a splash page of an angry looking, wounded Batman standing amid a bunch of intricate pipework, his logo and name atop the page, apparently connected to that colon.)

After having beat up the previously mentioned foes, Batman discovers crates of weapons, "sold by agents of a fallen dictatorship to Gotham street gangs":

Weapons--Built for a war that never happened.

Guns. Grenades. Rocket launchers--

--And strange, high-tech devices that hint at the smaller horrors that would have followed the nuclear nightmare.

Batman is investigating these ("A pair of battle gloves, humming with the promise of power"), when he's attacked by a robot that looks silly, almost sarcastic in design; a round-ish body topped with triangles of armor, two big three-fingered fists atop spindly arms and a periscope-like protrusion from its underside, all perched atop a trio of spindly, too-small legs. 

Batman defeats it, using the gloves (although the one he dons is actually different looking then the ones McFarlane originally introduces two pages previous), gloves that seem to give him a degree of super-strength (This will, of course, come in handy later, when he finds himself duking it out with the super-powered Spawn). 

In the process, though, he discovers there's actually a still-living, severed human head wired up into the robot innards; the robot is actually a cyborg, then, using an unwitting victim's head to provide it with computing power. 

Examining the recovered (and now deceased) head back at the Batcave, Batman discovers that it belonged to a presumed dead "vagrant" and "acute alcoholic" last seen in Manhattan.  

"What's the brain of a New York bum doing inside of a Soviet cyborg?" he asks aloud. The Batcave sequence also features Alfred, and Miller handles their typical rapport nicely ("I don't get nightmares," Batman tells Alfred, "I give them."  "No need for punchlines, Sir," Alfred replies, "You're among friends.")

So, Batman goes to New York to investigate, while Miller uses TV talking heads and news broadcasts to advance the plot, as he did so extensively in DKR (Spawn readers may recognize them, as McFarlane had drawn them in his own book before and since). Also investigating the rash of missing homeless men is, of course, Spawn. The narration boxes tell us he has some friends missing. He encounters a pair of men dousing sleeping homeless man with gasoline and attempting to set him on fire, but, using his magic, Spawn redirects the fire towards the would-be murderers.

"When you meet Satan-- Say hello for me," Spawn frowns at them, and this is where Batman comes in with his kick to Spawn's kidney, saying "You must be Al" on the splash page in which he makes contact, sending Spawn reeling and his chains jangling around crazily.

The pair fight for four-and-a-half pages, and it is a much less one-sided fight than the one in War Devil. Batman is shocked at how strong Spawn is ("It's like punching a brick wall"), while Spawn, who here seems to know exactly who Batman is and to address him by name, fights back effectively hand-to-hand, foregoing magic, except for using it to make himself strong enough near the end "to beat the crap out of Batman."

Their exchanges are silly. "I 'm not in the mood-- And I don't have the time," Spawn says, catching a batarang in one hand and using a chain to block two more. Batman flying kicks him, saying "Got time for this, punk?"

Eventually the fight devolves into just mostly dark panels, narration and sound effects (SMEK SMEK, KOOGH, WHUK! and so on), Batman deciding he's over-powered and that, if dead, he's no use to anyone. He ultimately retreats. 

But, having realized that Spawn still needs to breathe (which reminded me of Batman's first fight with The Hulk, where he made a similar observation about that super-powered foe), Batman had dosed him with "nerve gas-- --enough to make a mob take a nap." While Spawn kept fighting through it, as soon as Batman slinks away, he relaxes the magic he was using to make himself strong and starts vomiting from the gas.

Soon Spawn encounters one of the cyborgs, and, using a makeshift Bat-signal, the book's villain, a humanitarian named Margaret Love, sics Batman on Spawn, telling the Dark Knight that Spawn has been attacking her operation and plans to attack her fundraiser aboard her boat that the president himself plans to attend. 

Of course, by this point, we have already learned that Margaet Love is really Nadia Vladova, and, using the cover of helping the homeless, she has been disappearing some of them and installing their heads in her cyborg killing machines.

Her ultimate goal? To fire a nuclear missile at New York City from her boat, setting off World War III and using all the weapons and cyborgs she commands to rule the aftermath.

Before our heroes can stop her, there's another six-page fist fight. This time Batman is armed with the power gloves we saw earlier, and the heroes are essentially now evenly matched. They beat the hell out of one another, desperately trash-talking the whole time. At the end of it, they are both sprawled on the ground and panting for air, unconvincingly continuing to threaten one another.

"I'll rip you to pieces," a bleeding Batman says, "Undisciplined slob." He follows that up by gasping "KHAGG".

"Catch my breath," Spawn replies. "Just catch my breath and I'll break you in half." Adding "Kheff".

Then Love/Vladova's cyborgs attack, inflicting a mortal wound on Batman, who was by then on the ropes and pretty much helpless. Spawn uses his magic to destroy the cyborgs, heal Batman and, in the process, spending about two and a half pages inside Batman's head. In the process, in which they come to know one another's origins and gain a new understanding with one another, Spawn shares the truth about Love/Vladova with Batman.

While Batman isn't exactly grateful for the save ("If there's one thing I can't stand, it's a dead punk that won't shut up," he tells Spawn), they finally team up, share a double-page splash (an image that artist Greg Capullo seems to have recreated for his contribution to the two-image gallery at the back of the Batman/Spawn: The Classic Collection), attack Vladova's boat full of brain-washed elites, a high-tech arsenal and a primed-to-launch, nuclear-tipped missile aimed at the city. 

While the villainess dies during the battle—in maybe the messiest bit of storytelling of the whole comic, the precise circumstances of her death aren't clear—she launches the missile, and it's up to Spawn with his magic powers and Batman with his clear mind, deft hands and all-around know-how to stop it.

The two heroes bicker on the penultimate page, and, when Spawn points out how they just saved the whole city, maybe the whole world together and asks, "What do you say we just bury the hatchet?", Batman replies with, "Bury this."

The last page, an otherwise silent splash page, reveals that the "this" was a batarang, and it has indeed been buried...right in the middle of Spawn's face, his sickly green blood covering the black, metal weapon and gushing from the wound.

The readers, and Batman, know that Spawn will, of course, live, but man, what a dick this version of Batman is, huh? 

I can't help but wonder if this image, and the wordplay leading up to it, wasn't something that Miller conceived of very early in the project and then worked backwards from to tell a story that might get to it. 

So that's Miller's story, a sort of simple team-up one, in which the character's are introduced separately, put into circumstances causing them to fight one another...put into circumstances to fight one another again, and then ultimately must unite to take on a common foe that they could only defeat by working together. Miller's only real innovation of the classic formula, which I feel was introduced and perfected by Marvel (but maybe not), is to add a second round of fighting, and, despite the initial misunderstanding, keeping the heroes at one another's throats throughout the proceedings. 

As for McFarlane's art, he had, of course, drawn Batman before, rather famously in "Batman: Year Two"...at least the early parts of that story, which was, of course, positioned as a direct sequel to the Miller-written "Batman: Year One". Therefore, he had a decent amount of experience with both characters...though he was obviously much more experienced with Spawn, the character he created. 

His Batman reminded me quite a bit of Norm Breyfogle's, especially in the way in which he would often draw the character mostly as a partial silhouette, an angry, jagged black shape with sharply pointed ears, the white of his triangle eyes and bared teeth and the yellow of the bat-symbol sometimes being the only details visible (In fact, McFarlane so often draws Batman's head in shadow, it's genuinely unusual to see the lower half of his face, the flesh-colored chin that juts out from beneath his cowl, at all in this book).

In addition to Breyfogle, McFarlane's Batman reminded me a bit of that of Joe Quesada, who drew the Dark Knight in 1992 mini-series Batman: Sword of Azrael and, most memorably to me, the cover of the 1992 Batman Gallery. And, of course, I think there's more than a bit of Miller's own DKR Batman in there, particularly in the short, more broad triangle-shaped ears (in the mid-90's, Batman's ears tended towards the long) and the big bat-symbol.

McFarlane seems to have contributed a distinctly huge cape, one that flares up like titanic bat-wings in perhaps the most dramatic image of Batman McFarlane draws, and pools around the character when he's standing still. This was, remember, back before Kelley Jones had started as the regular artist on Batman, too; at this point, Jones was only drawing covers for Bat-comics (McFarlane had previously, somewhat famously, drawn a huge bat-cape with a life of its own on a 1988 Batman cover).

There seems to be, in at least one panel, a bit of Spider-Man to McFarlane's Batman too, in the way he gathers his bat-rope in his hands, the slack forming a crazy pattern that trails off at great length. 

Beyond the drawings of the two heroes, I found the art serviceable but not particularly remarkable. Like I said, the cyborgs seemed a little too stylized, bordering on the cartoonish, and the handful of civilian characters, including the villain and Alfred, aren't particularly distinct nor notable.

Oh, one thing I noticed about the art was that McFarlane has Spawn's mask seemingly coming and going at random throughout the story, although given what we know about his costume being something of a living creature, I couldn't tell if this was due to the occasional art mistake in the book's continuity, or if it was intentional, as that's how Spawn's mask actually works (In War Devil, he's shown removing it, as if it was a piece of cloth he wore).

Tom Orzechowski, who seems to have been the original and regular Spawn letterer, handles the letters here as well, and thus the character's signature dialogue balloons look much more at home in this comic than they did in War Devil, where they stuck out as somewhat foreign or alien and, as I had said, seemed to suggest that Spawn was talking really, really, inappropriately loud all the time. 

Overall, I think Spawn/Batman still reads as the superior of the two 1994 one-shots pairing the two characters. On a technical level, Klaus Janson's War Devil might be better drawn, but McFarlane's issue is more expressive, more highly stylized and thus a bit more visually interesting.

In terms of writing, it's hard to judge the two against one another. Miller's script is, like McFarlane's art, more stylized and, I think it's safe to say, more over-the-top. It's also a bit more unique, reading so unlike so many other superhero team-ups and crossovers. It's definitely a better Spawn story, if not a very good Batman story...which, of course, might be why DC took some pains to differentiate it as a story of Miller's Dark Knight Returns Batman, and not, you know, the real Batman.

As for Batman and Spawn's 2022 team-up, I'm not rereading that and trying to write about it again. I covered it here, though, if you would like to read what I thought of it when it came out. 

Review: Uncle Scrooge and the Infinity Dime: Gallery Edition

After his The Other Side and Scalped became successes for DC's Vertigo imprint in the 2000s, writer Jason Aaron began a career at Marvel, one full of generally well-regarded runs on various high profile characters. He wrote Ghost Rider, Thor, The Punisher, Wolverine, The X-Men, Wolverine and The X-Men, Doctor Strange, The Hulk, The Avengers, and even Star Wars and Conan.

In 2023, he announced that he was no longer under exclusive contract with Marvel and he was shortly tackling some...well, some unusual characters for a guy who had spent about 20 years writing so much of the Marvel Universe. He wrote Superman (in an Action Comics arc, followed by the Absolute Superman ongoing), the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (relaunching IDW's ongoing series based on the license) and Uncle Scrooge (for a special Marvel one-shot). 

I wondered if, perhaps free of his exclusive contract, he was setting about working on his bucket list of comic book characters in earnest.

One has to imagine that, if Scrooge McDuck isn't on a lot of comics creators' bucket lists, it's only because writing him might seem so unrealistic. Luckily for Aaron, though, he had a long and fruitful relationship with Marvel, a corporate entity that is now owned by Disney (Although, aside from licensing most of their Star Wars comics to Marvel, Disney has mostly steered clear of having Marvel publish much of anything starring their signature cartoon characters, Fantagraphics seemingly remaining their favored publisher for duck and mouse comics). 

Certainly, Scrooge is one of the all-time greatest comics characters, and, of course, Aaron is a fan—although according to his brief introduction to the hardcover "Gallery Edition" of his comic Uncle Scrooge and the Infinity Dime, he's a rather recent one. 

Under the title "Why I Love This Duck", which begins with the sentence "Uncle Scrooge is one of the greatest adventure characters in comic-book history," he tells of sitting down with his son at bedtime one night to read Don Rosa's "Son of the Sun". After that, he was hooked, and said he spent the rest of his son's childhood reading the Don Rosa library with him, singling out "Guardians of the Lost Library" as his favorite story. 

While he dedicates The Infinity Dime to several people—including his son, Rosa and Scrooge creator Carl Barks—he also says he wrote it for "you," by which he seems to mean readers who aren't already fans of Uncle Scrooge, hoping his comic would serve as a sort of gateway into some of those many great comics, comics you can know fill several bookshelves full of handsome collections of, thanks to Fantagraphics.

After reading that, I was a bit curious as to how well the project might have succeeded. Did Uncle Scrooge and the Infinity Dime find its way in front of the average Marvel Comics fan, or, perhaps Jason Aaron fan, and did such readers not have any prior experience with Uncle Scrooge? (Given the presence of Disney comics in comic shops over the last few decades, and the existence of two different versions of the cartoon Duck Tales, one from 1987s and one from 2017, I have to imagine most comics readers already had a pretty good idea of who Scrooge was and what he was all about. I know I personally met him in repeated viewings of Mickey's Christmas Carol, hung out with him after school during the initial Duck Tales series, spent hours playing the video game based on the cartoon and then followed him into the comics as soon as Fanta started their Carl Barks Library.)

Anyway, Aaron's effort is a rather odd comic, something of an uneasy Marvel/Disney hybrid. Its writer is, of course, a Marvel guy, and the basic idea seems to be to put Scrooge, his cast and basic milieu into a somewhat typical Marvel comic book, although they apparently didn't want to book to look or feel like a Marvel comic, as rather than commissioning a Marvel artist or artists to draw it, they turned to a half-dozen Italian Disney artists, splitting the chapters between them: Paolo Mottura, Fancesco D'Ippolito and Lucio De Giuseppe,  Alessandro Pastrovicchio and Vitale Mangiatordi and Giada Perissinotto, with colors by Arianna Consonni.

The only clue of what members of Marvel's "bullpen" might have done with the character if given a chance came on the covers. Recent Fantastic Four cover artist Alex Ross is responsible for the one above, but there were of course plenty of variants, including ones from J. Scott Campbell, Gabriele Dell'Otto, Steve McNiven, Frank Miller, Peach Momoko, John Romita Jr, Walter Simonson and Skottie Young (This particular hardcover collection includes them all in the back, as well as interviews with many of the artists; we'll get to them later on in the post, as I'm sure you're fascinated to find out what Frank Miller's version of a Disney duck might look like and, if you can't wait, you can always visit Comics.org).

Now, The Infinity Dime was apparently a 30-page, $7.99 one-shot, published in August of 2024. Being currently comic shop-less, I naturally skipped it, deciding to wait until it was republished in trade (I had assumed it was a far longer, multi-issue story, to be honest; I guess when one stops reading Marvel's solicitations month in and month out, one no longer knows exactly what they're getting when picking up the publisher's works).

I never did buy a trade, nor did I ever find one in my library and, recently remembering the comic existed, I checked the library catalog for it, and was somewhat surprised to see that that while an over-sized 9.57-inch by 13.25 inch, 112-page hardcover collection was indeed published back in March, neither my library nor the consortium we share materials with had ordered a physical copy for some reason (Reminder: That consortium consists of 40 different library systems throughout northeast Ohio, including the Cleveland Public Library system). 

And so I read it as an "eComic", borrowed via the Hoopla app.

This meant that I couldn't tell how big the published version's pages actually were, nor could I guess how long it actually was until I had finished reading it. Based on the original comic's cover boasting that it was "The Story of the Century!", and by Aaron's professed interest in the works of Rosa and Barks and company, and by the fact that it was broken into three chapters and an epilogue and the fact that it had so many different artists involved, I was expecting the story to be, well, something of an epic, you know?

It's not. Like I said above, there are just 30 original story pages devoted to The Infinity Dime, making it the length of about one-and-a-half regular Marvel comics. That was, obviously, rather disappointing.

And as for Aaron's story, while it is big in terms of scale and stakes, if not page count, and it does seem to endeavor to offer something of a mission statement on the title character and what makes him so special, it can't help but feel a little small...more of a trifle than an epic, really.

The plot is really quite superheroic, and while many Disney comics have been published that deal with the genre—including those in which Donald Duck and Goofy have their own superhero personas—this one feels much more like a modern DC or Marvel book, rather than an application of the Disney characters to the classic superhero tropes.

The book begins with Donald and Huey, Dewey and Louie diving through a terrible snowstorm, on their way to Bear Mountain, where they would meet their distant Uncle Scrooge for the first time and spend Christmas with him (This is, of course, the same premise of Bark's 1947 story "Christmas on Bear Mountain," the first appearance of Scrooge). Here, things go differently, though: Scrooge's nephews never make it to see him, Donald never proves his mettle to Scrooge and the old miser never becomes part of their lives. This, a caption in the last panel of the first page tells us, is a world "among the myriad of alternate universes arrayed across infinity."

That's right, it's a multiverse story! Sick of the Marvel Cinematic Universe telling multiverse stories? Well, now they've even infected Disney duck comics!

This particular world's Scrooge seems to have still had many of his adventures, enough to fill a massive money bin, but he's grown more bitter and lonely than ever. One day, while stomping through his bin, he happens by a magic mirror embedded in a pile of coins, which he had taken from "that two-bit conjurer, Magica De Spell". No sooner does he finish his exposition, telling readers that it was called "The Mirror of Worlds", then it begins to glow pink, emit a stream of five-pointed cartoon stars and pull on his number one dime, which he wears like a necklace. (For some reason, it's a really big dime, looking more like a fifty-cent piece).

Then he has a revelation: "Why settle for being the richest duck in the world, when I could be... ...the richest duck on ALL the worlds!!!"

Meanwhile, in the "real" world, Scrooge and his nephews are flying back into Duckburg, where they see the Beagle Boys attempting a strange money bin heist, wherein the entire bin is being lifted up off the ground and into some sort of pink energy portal in the sky.

Scrooge goes on the attack, but he soon finds himself face to face with Doctor Doom-like "the Scrooge-Above-All", the evil Scrooge we had just met, now outfitted with a villainous-looking costume (dig the coins on his knuckles). Between the pages, he has apparently busied himself by visiting alternate reality after alternate reality, besting each world's Scrooge and then making off with that fallen Scrooge's number one dime and money bin. He gets those of our Scrooge too.

Scrooge and the nephews go to Gyro Gearloose for help, and the nephews explain the multiverse, using the entry on "multiverse" from their Junior Woodchuck Guidebook. Gyro pulls out this world's Mirror of Worlds, which he has been studying (He does not, therefore, end up inventing anything here to help Scrooge). 

After it's explained that to travel through the multiverse, one needs a "universal constant", "something that exists in all universes at once," Scrooge at first thinks that his number one dime might be it, but Gyro tell his that no, it is Scrooge himself that is the universal constant (And I guess he does exist in our universe, the only one we can be sure is definitely real, in the form of a comic book and cartoon character, but then, we also know that he doesn't exist in other universes we read about regularly, like that of the Marvel Universe or DC Universe...)

To make a not-very-long story short (a "weeks later" caption seems to skip over what a reader might expect to come next), our Scrooge visits the Scrooge-Above-All's Duckburg and infiltrates his gigantic money bin, which is a money bin big enough to encompass all the other worlds' money bins. It's "The All-Bin."

Confronted by Beagle Boys, our Scrooge commands his shadowy allies, revealed on one of the book's several splash pages, a story technique that is definitely more modern Marvel than classic Disney, "Fight like Scrooges!!!"

Scrooge's multiversal army of himself then falls before the magical might of the Scrooge-Above-All, who tells them that this has all happened before, and refers to himself at one point as "Scrooge...Uncle to NO ONE!"

Then the Scrooges unleash their secret weapon, dogpile, er, duckpile the evil Scrooge, and, in a matter of panels of them yelling at him while wrestling, convince him that all of the money in all of the worlds is still just so much metal, and that the sense of adventure, the connections made along the way, and family is the real treasure.

And, a few pages later, there's a two-page epilogue, during which we see that the evil Scrooge too has been redeemed in the same way that the "real" Scrooge was...his redemption just took a lot longer, and a violent intervention by his own multiversal doppelgangers, rather than just, you know, spending a Christmas with his nephew and grand-nephews.

As you can see then, it's quite "Marvelous" a story...Aaron even drops a "'Nuff said" into the proceedings. 

I confess to being somewhat disappointed, but that's mainly because I was expecting something longer and grander (and the way I read it kept me from realizing how short it actually was until I reached "THE END" on the last page; obviously if you get a physical copy of the book for yourself, this won't be a factor for you), but it certainly does its job of putting Scrooge and company into what feels a lot like a modern Marvel story, while extolling the character's virtues: Not only is he smart and tough and super-rich, but his extreme wealth is presented as a symbol of what is really valuable in life. 

And then it's on to the backmatter, of which there is a lot.

In fact, there is some 80 pages of it. All these extras include a short interview with Jason Aaron, another with the artists, one with the artist who designed the "dark" Scrooge including some preliminary sketches, some pages of unfinished art, and each of the variant covers, including interviews with many of the artists who contributed them.  Finally, there's Bark's original 19-page "Christmas on Bear Mountain," reprinted in all its glory.

The Marvel artists who contributed these tended to fall into one of two camps. 

Some simply drew in the Disney style and did so to such a degree that you might not recognize their art as theirs at all. This includes Alex Ross (I mean sure, his is painted, and in a more photorealistic style that suggests a degree of three-dimensionality, but other than that, his Scrooge just looks like the regular Scrooge, right?), as well as J. Scott Campbell, Ron Lim, Steve McNiven, Gabriele Dell'Otto and, I think, even such distinct stylists as John Romita JR and Walt Simonson.

I mean, at a glance, could you tell these covers were the work of JRJR and Simonson?

And then there are artists who drew Scrooge in their own signature styles, design be damned. These include Peach Momoko, Skottie Young and Frank Miller.

Check out Miller's Scrooge:

I think it's quite safe to say that it doesn't look like a piece one might expect to find on a Disney-branded comic (I'm most intrigued by how he handled Scrooge's feathers between the hem of his coat and the top of his legs; it looks like he's wearing a white hula skirt...and man, that beak...! I remember from middle-school trying to draw Scrooge's beak, and damn, it is not easy...!)

I think the artists who fares the best at drawing Scrooge, the one who balances adherence to the design without sacrificing their own personal style at all is Young. Check this out:

It's obviously a Scrooge, and a workable one, but not the Scrooge, right? I imagine it is merely a result of Young's own cartoon-inspired style being closer to that of Disney comics than the style of many of his peers, but it's easy to imagine Young having drawn all of The Infinity Dime, for example, while Miller doing so would seem unthinkable.

Now, while the book doesn't say so, I can say so here. If this really was your first introduction to Uncle Scrooge comics, click this link and start shopping. 

While I've yet to read a book from any of Fanta's Disney series that I didn't enjoy, I'd recommend starting with pretty much any volume of The Carl Barks Library, be they Donald Duck or Uncle Scrooge books. I only have a pair of volumes from the Don Rosa Library myself so far, as I wanted to get all the Barks ones before moving on, but, obviously, those are damn good comics too (And, after reading this, I want to seek "Guardians of the Lost Library" ASAP).

When it comes to Fantagraphics' collections of classic Disney comics, it's really rather hard to think of a better deal in terms of quality of comics to money spent ratio in comics right now....

These are some recent DC books I've read recently:

Batman: The Dark Knight--Master Race

The inherent weirdness of a Frank Miller comic without Frank Miller that saturated the individual, serially-published issues of Dark Knight III: The Master Race was only accentuated when reading the entire series start-to-finish in a single, slightly re-titled volume.

I know that Miller was technically pretty involved in the series, sharing a story credit with Brian Azzarello and providing extremely loose artwork for the mini-comics that appeared in the middle of each of the nine issues--which are here blown-up to full-size and appear between chapters of Dark Knight III--but it's pretty apparent that it was Azzarello who did the majority of the heavy-lifting. At the beginning, it's clear that some work is being done to make it feel like a Dark Knight comic, but that work only accentuates that it's not, that it's an homage, rather than Miller doing Miller and, increasingly as the series goes on, there are more of Azzarello's ticks evident in the scripting.

As for the overarching story, it seems to be set in the Dark Knight-iverse, but there's really not much to it. It's not a story about anything in particular, it doesn't really comment on anything and, in fact, its plot is so similar to one that could be occurring in the regular DC Universe that it already has occurred in the regular DC Universe to a certain extent. It is just a little too palpably an exercise in brand extension, and an apparent variant cover-generating machine (How many variants were there attached to this book? I don't know, but they were so numerous they appear in their own hardcover collection that Amazon is calling Batman: The Art of The Dark Knight: The Master Race--the words on the cover of the book say something different, however--and the solicitation copy says it includes over 150 covers).

What's been going on in the relatively short time that has passed since 2002's final issue of Batman: The Dark Knight Strikes Again...? Well, Batman is recovering from some particularly grievous wounds, so Robin-turned-Catgirl-turned-Batgirl Carrie Kelly is masquerading as him by wearing some kind of weird man suit. Wonder Woman is raising her and Superman's son, who she wears in a little papoose as she runs around the Amazon jungle, home of the Amazons, fighting monsters and shit. Superman has withdrawn even farther than he usually does in these alternate stories, having basically decided to just sit still in his Arctic Fortress of Solitude until he froze solid within a thick block of ice.

Given Miller's politics, the title of this third Dark Knight book might have have been responsible for a feeling of dread in many comics readers, but it turns out that the "master race" here isn't a race so much as a species: Kryptonian.

And the plot involving them is more or less pure pot-boiling superhero stuff. Lara, Superman and Wonder Woman's headstrong daughter, recruits The Atom Ray Palmer to help her free and un-shrink the microscopic Kryptonians living in The Bottle City of Kandor. These are lead by Quar, a psychotic, murderous cult leader who seeks to subjugate all of humanity and take over the world. So, not entirely unlike the year-long "New Krypton" storyline which found 100,000 Kryptonians freed from Kandor and flooding Earth with a whole people who had Superman's powers, but not necessarily his morals.

Lara sides with the Kandorians over her own parents, even going so far as to beat her dad bloody, and it is, as always, down to Batman to save the world. With the help of a rag tag group of allies, including Batirl, The Flash and eventually Superman and Wonder Woman, he does so. He dies at one point, but gets tossed into a Lazarus Pit and comes out young and vibrant again (There is of course a gross scene where the now grown-up Carrie sees the now youthful's Bruce's rejuvenated genitals).

And...that's it, really. Evil Kryptonians vs. Batman and some other heroes. Andy Kubert is the pencil artist with the tough, thankless assignment of trying to draw a Dark Knight comic, and it actually is sort of fun to see his attempts to approximate Miller art. It no doubt helps tremendously that he's working with DKR inker Klaus Janson.

I don't want to say anything too terribly mean about Miller's art--he pencils most of the interlude comics, although Eduardo Risso randomly draws one--as I understand he was in very poor health at the time but, well, the art is extremely rough, to the point where some of the extremely spare images lean towards the unintelligible, and there are strange inconsistencies that the inker, colorist and editor should have noticed and fixed (the placement of Batgirl's bat-symbols, for example).

In the end, what stuck with me about the book is some strong images throughout.

There's Wonder Woman's nipple, something you don't see too often, as she prepares to breastfeed her child. There's Green Lantern Hal Jordan losing his ring hand, and then searching for and ultimately recovering it (He is able to use the ring, but his hand just float around him, rather than attaching itself back to his arm at the wrist). There's the strange, goofy battle armor that Superman dons to protect him from the Kryptonite-seeded rain that Batman causes to fall over Gotham. There's Carrie Kelly's hot pink and yellow Batgirl costume (her final Batwoman costume is pretty nice, actually; it basically just reverses the black and gray portions of Batman's). There's the redesigned Hawks. And I still dig Miller's redesigns for The Flash and Wonder Woman, previously seen in Dark Knight Strikes Again.

Visually, there's a lot in here to interest the eye, particularly of a longtime DC Comics fan. Otherwise, though, there's little to it other than a superhero beat-'em-up with a handful of allusions to Dark Knight Strikes Again.

DC Super Hero Girls: Past Times at Super Hero High

I arched an eyebrow when this DC Comics/Mattel collaboration was first announced. Though I grew up with similar toy/cartoon/comics marketing vehicles like Masters of The Universe, G.I. Joe and Transformers, they seem incredibly cynical to me now, and it struck me as somewhat sad that DC felt the need to essentially create a girl-friendly version of their universe, as it was an indication of just how girl un-friendly the regular version was.

While the toys and cartoons generated by the premise--where DC's heroes and villains attend a high school where Principal Amanda Waller and weird faculty of bad guys and older heroes teach them a superhero-focused curriculum--I was naturally interested in how it translated to comics. As it turned out, quite well. The first original graphic novel, Finals Crisis, was actually a lot of fun, as were those that followed, Hits and Myths and Summer Olympus. All three were the work of writer Shea Fontana, who helped create the concept and recently penned a fill-in arc on DC's Wonder Woman arc, and artist Yancey Labat.

This fourth graphic novel, Past Times at Super Hero High, varies only in that Labat has two other collaborators on the art, Agnes Garbowska and Marcelo DiChiara. They are all working from some pretty strict style guides in terms of character design, so it's not exactly clear who draws which sections, but there are points where the art does feel a little off.

The plot for this particular adventure is essentially just The Magic School Bus in the DC Universe, which is pretty damn charming in its simplicity. Driving the school bus-shaped time machine for a field trip into the Jurassic Period is teacher Miss Liberty Belle, whose mouth Fontana fills with all kinds of old time-y slang. This Liberty Belle is presumably the original one, Libby Lawrence, and something of a time traveler herself. While Golden Age hero Wildcat is SHH's gym coach, Miss Liberty Belle at one points mentions not having had so much fun since "the Coolidge administration" (1923-1929).

Wonder Woman, Supergirl, Batgirl, Katana, Harley Quinn, Poison Ivy and token boy Beast Boy travel back to dinosaur times, where their bus breaks in half and Liberty Belle is abducted by a pterodactyl. Everyone eventually gets back to the present, but due to some meddling withe the timestream--Harley swiped a pterodactyl egg--their present has been altered so that now immortal caveman Vandal Savage is their principal, the kids based on villains are now all super-villainous and the field trippers have to figure out how to reset time.

That mostly falls to frenemies Batgirl and Harley, who travel throughout the past and to the future before bringing the pterodactyl egg, now a baby pterodactyl, back to its own time, where Harley offers a not-very-scientific theory regarding how her baby Bitey McPuddin'-Face prevented Savage from ever encountering his immortality-granting meteorite.

What remains most fun about this series, to me at least, is seeing the occasional deep cut show up, like Batgirl and Harley meeting the giant dalmatian-riding Atomic Knights in the future, or seeing Principal Waller when she was just a teen in the 1980s, sitting on a stoop listening to her boom box.

There are some fun dinosaur moments in here, like Beast Boy's attempts to blend in and preach harmony between predator and prey species, but it's worth noting that this isn't exactly an educational look at dinosaurs, as their depiction seems a few decades out of date. For the latest on dinosaurs in all-ages comics format, I can't recommend Abby Howard's Dinosaur Empire strongly enough.

Justice League of America Vol. 1: The Extremists

The Steve Orlando-written Justice League book, which features Batman leading a rag-tag team of Steve Orlando's favorite characters and thus feels almost as much of a Batman and The Outsiders book than a League book, suffers in the same way that too much of his writing (and far too much of DC's post-Flashpoint output) suffers. It tries very hard to trade on nostalgia, on readers knowing, liking and caring who the individual members of the team are and therefore already being invested in their setting, their history and their villains, but it does so on the other side of a reboot that purposely erased all of that.

This is that worst-of-both-worlds problem I talk about all the time, and Orlando's solution seems to be to just ignore it. Maybe that is the best choice--after all, I think this is something like the third version of Lobo that has been introduced in the last six years, for example--but the end result is a comic book essentially just introducing a team and assuming you'll care about them, without putting any real effort into trying to convince you to care (and certainly the publisher has given us mixed signals, if they were, say, willing to wipe out The Ray and then replace him with a brand new character that no one likes or remembers and then just reintroduce the original shows that they aren't too terribly pro-The Ray, you know?).

While Batman has obviously been front and center in a whole slew of books since the reboot, and some of the other characters like Black Canary and Vixen have been knocking around, and even Lobo 3.0 and Killer Frost had a role in the Justice League Vs. Suicide Squad book that served as an intro this ongoing, other characters, like The Ray and The Atom, we're meeting for basically the first time (This new version of Ryan Choi appeared previously in DC Universe: Rebirth #1, while I don't think we saw The Ray until Justice League of America: The Ray--Rebirth #1...which is collected with three other character introduction one-shots and Justice League of America: Rebirth #1 in the collection Justice League of America: The Road to Rebirth).

From the pages of Justice League Vs. Suicide Squad Batman brings Killer Frost to the Justice League's original Happy Harbor, Rhode Island headquarters, which, um, shouldn't exist any longer, but still does for some reason (that was the last continuity). He then goes about recruiting a League that includes (a) Lobo, Black Canary, Vixen, The Atom Ryan Choi (he's initially looking for Ray Palmer, whose history post-Flashpoint I couldn't begin to make sense of) and The Ray, a new superhero protecting the city of Vanity (the setting of Grant Morrison, Mark Millar and company's short-lived Aztek: The Ultimate Man series).

Batman's rationale for needing/wanting a new League is waved at in passing a few times, but it's not terribly convincing. He basically says he wants a team that consists of real people, standing shoulder-to-shoulder with the people they are protecting, rather than gods. The make-up of his particular team, which include a couple of folks with god-like powers and one literal super-alien, seems to argue against that, however.

After the recruiting issue of Justice League of America: Rebirth #1--which, yes, is double-collected in both this and Justice League of America: Road To Rebirth--they fend off an extra-dimensional invasion of The Extremists, Giffen/DeMatteis era villains who are analogues to Marvel villains. Dr. Diehard has conquered a small, European country, and the League joins the resistance to help liberate it. By having the League do the sort of thing they explicitly avoid all the time, it raises the question of why they don't do this all the time. The question goes unanswered, though.

That's followed by a shorter story in which the team holds a press conference--sans Batman--and then go to liberate an American city that has been taken over by relatively obscure Wonder Woman villain Aegeus, an arms dealer who sells folklore-based super-weapons.

The art is kind of all over the place, with Ivan Reis pencilling the Rebirth special and the first and final issues of the four-part Extremists arc, while a pair of different artists, Felipe Watanabe and Diogenes Neves, pencil the middle chapters. The two-part Aegeus arc features fine art by Andy MacDonald, but it's in pretty sharp contrast to what it's following...and fails to sell a fairly silly scene that really needed to be sold hard to get over.

Like its sister book Justice League and all of DC's post-Flashpoint Justice League books, then, the latest iteration of JLoA isn't very good, but given it's weird line-up and Orlando's ticks, it is at least interesting.

Wonder Woman and Justice League America Vol. 2

When I discussed the first Wonder Woman and Justice League America collection, I speculated what might be in this one. It turns out they skipped the annuals, and stuck to just six issues of Justice League America--plus two issues apiece of Justice League International and Justice League Task Force, which means this trade collects the entire six-issue "Judgement Day" crossover between all three Justice League books, as well as a coda issue, that repurposes the "Funeral For a Friend" slug from the aftermath of Superman's fight to the death against Doomsday. It also concludes writer Dan Vado's time on the Justice League America title.

The first three issues are concerned with the JLA facing off against Dreamslayer of The Extremists yet again, while natural disasters rage the world over and spooky hints about the end of the world are related to heroes and readers: Darkseid writes off the planet Earth, Vandal Savage appears to the League to warn them and T.O. Morrow tries to tell Max Lord the end is near. Then "Judgement Day" begins in earnest, and it's all hands one deck, with the three Justice Leagues fighting one another, and other unexpected foes, as to the best way to proceed against "The Overmaster," a giant alien humanoid and world-ender who has landed his ship atop Mount Everest and announced the end of the world, saying that any move against him will only result in a lessening of the time left.

Because "Judgement Day" ran two issues apiece in all of the books, that means Vado and primary JLA artists Marc Campos, Ken Branch and Kevin Conrad pass the creative team baton on to writers Gerard Jones and Mark Waid and pencil artists Chuck Wojtkiewicz and Sal Velluto.

Visually, the book is very much of its time--1994. Campos is probably the weakest of the artists, and his anatomy features the worst of excesses, so that the women are all boobs and hips--in one early panel featuring the Leaguers in flight, Wonder Woman and Maxima are literally just busts, a limb or three extending from somewhere behind their boobs and heads--and the men universally ripped and wearing fabrics whose tightness fall somewhere between spandex and body paint, even the decidedly non-superheroic Max Lord and Oberon. Campos is at least consistent, but his work is so detailed and overly-inked that each panel just looks like a wall of unnecessary detail.

Sal Velutto, a very accomplished artist, has his own ideas of character design, one that marries the huge, heroic figures of the Silver Age League with the detailed musculature of '90s superhero art, but even that is inconsistently applied. Only Chuck Wojtkiewicz's art really ages gracefully. Thankfully he's the one who draws the climax, wherein an ad hoc group of some of the more powerful Leaguers--Wonder Woman, Martian Manhunter, Captain Atom, The Flash, Fire, Booster Gold and Amazing Man try to take the Overmaster on hand-to-hand in his ship, while Blue Beetle races to figure out a way to shut it all down.

The story is probably best remembered for being the one that killed off  Ice--she spends this collection in possession of greater than usual powers and weird mood swings, before joining the Overmaster and, finally, betraying him--and it's true, there's not a whole lot to it other than that. There are some neat touches though, like T.O. Morrow looking at his checklist of things that will happen as the League seeks to reach Overmaster, and crossing off each event as it comes to pass (That was in a Waid-written issue).

This storyline and its epilogue were  followed by a Zero Hour crossover introducing Triumph as a founding Justice Leaguer who got knocked out of the time-stream almost immediately, and then the creative team of Gerard Jones and Chuck Wojtkiewicz take over Justice League America for the remaining 23 issues. If the Jones and Wojtkieicz issues all get collected, I think we could be looking at two more volumes of Wonder Woman and Justice League America. If the Zero Hour tie-in does, I don't know, maybe three more? It doesn't quite fit in with the rest of this stuff, though, and might makes more sense in a Justice League: Zero Hour collection, or with the Triumph solo series or Justice League Task Force.

Miscellaneous Batmannery

This was one of the variant covers for June 16's Batman #1, by artist Tim Sale. While Sale has never had a regular run as an interior artist on any Batman ongoing series, he has done so many limited series and one-shots featuring the character that, at this point, he's got a gigantic body of Batman work built up. It's a body of work that I imagine eclipses that of many artists who have had regular runs on various Batman ongoing series, in terms of the volume of pages.

I was a little surprised to see him contributing a variant to the new, "Rebirth" era Batman at all, and more surprised still by its content. Sale doesn't draw the current, "Rebirth" Batman, but his own, "Year One" era Batman from his many collaborations with writer Jeph Loeb (Long Halloween, Dark Victory, the Legends of The Dark Knight Halloween specials, etc). Even Neal Adams, an even more classic Batman artist, decided to draw the Rebirth-ed Batman on his variant.

The villains sharing the cover with Sale's Batman are similarly the particular versions from Sale's "Year One" Batman adventures, none of whom look much at all like the New 52 versions and a few of which don't look much at all like the versions other artists draw from any period  (Poison Ivy and The Penguin in particular). Of note is the inclusion of Clayface, who hasn't previously appeared in any of Sale's Batman comics (at least, not this version; I'm pretty sure that Clayface III was in his Showcase story with writer Alan Grant), and whose design Sale seems to have based on that from Batman: The Animated Series (which, in fact, is also the basis for The New 52 version).

The presence of the blond lady baffled me for a while, but I'm like 80% sure she's supposed to be Gotham City District Attorney Janice Porter from Dark Victory, which is a really, really weird choice, considering the villains from the series Sale didn't include, like The Joker, The Riddler, Calendar Man, Carmine Falcone or any of the mob guys. Or a major Batman villain he hasn't drawn before, like, I don't know, Man-Bat or Ra's al Ghul or Harley Quinn or Bane or Killer Croc.

Anyway, it's an interesting piece I enjoyed staring at and picking apart. And much better than the regular cover by the regular artist:

Boo David Finch!

Did any of you read The Dark Knight Returns: The Last Crusade? That was the recent prestige format one-shot in which Batman teams up with Sean Connery to find the Holy Grail before the Nazis can. No, it's the latest of DC release that makes me wonder what on Earth Brian Azzarello is doing with his life (If I had to guess, it would be working on Maus fan-fiction, just to complete the trifecta).

This is his prequel to The Dark Knight Returns, which he is currently writing the second sequel too, as drawn by John Romita Jr. and Peter Steigerwald and featuring vague, nebulous contributions from Frank Miller (He shares a "story by" credit with Azzarello, although "Based on The Dark Knight Returns by Frank Miller" is the first credit; no one is credited with the script). It is a 57-page answer to a question nobody needed an answer to, which is "What exactly happened to the Robin that the old, mustachioed Batman was narrating about at the opening of Dark Knight Returns like 30 years ago?" The answer, of course, was "The Joker killed him," but then, everyone already knew all that.

This is essentially a retelling then; "A Death In The Family" without all the globe-trotting, international intrigue, adventure, super-scary death scene or heroic sacrifice. It's just an older Batman with graying temples and Robin Jason Todd fighting crime in Gotham City together, until The Joker kills Todd. Sort of. Todd is on the escaped Joker's trail when some guys who apparently work with or for The Joker beat him with pipes until red coloring effects fill the bottom of the panels, and The Joker says "Oh, the fun we're going to have little boy... The fun."

Finis!

If it's a worthwhile read at all, it's mostly because it's still kind of fresh and new and exciting to see JRJR draw DC characters, and here he gets to draw classic (or, if you prefer, the real) version of Batman and Robin, rather than the New 52 versions JRJR's been stuck with since leaving Marvel to play with DC's iconic super-characters for a few years.

It served as a pretty good reminder that there was nothing really wrong with the original Robin costume that Jason Todd wore; it's not like it couldn't look cool when drawn really well, and JRJR draws it really well and puts it and the guy wearing it in some very dramatic scenes, that red, yellow and green popping in contrast to the blues, blacks, grays and browns of Batman and everything else around Robin.

I know that a lot of people–myself included–have wondered about how much of this new suite of Dark Knight Returns material is really Miller and how much of it is Azzarello, and to what degree Azzarello is simply trying to do a pastiche of Miller. It was with some amusement that I noticed a line that either demonstrates Miller's involvement or that Azzarello was really asking himself "What Would Frank Miller Write?" during this process.

The above panel is from a scene in which Bruce Wayne visits former Catwoman Selina Kyle, whom his narration tells us he visits whenever he's feeling unsure of himself.

Check out the last two panels at the end of the scene, though:

Superheroes having sex in their costumes for kicks! You don't get a whole lot more Frank Miller than that.

The above panels are the last few in a downright shocking scene in Detective Comics #935, the second issue of the relaunched series, which is numbered #935 instead of #2 because...reasons.

What was so shocking about that scene? It's 13 panels spread across two pages. Red Robin Tim Drake is in Spoiler Stephanie Brown's apartment, taking off his costume in front of her like it's NBD. They're talking about Tim's college plans, when Batgirl Black Bat Orphan Cassandra Cain enters the window holding a plastic bag and wearing an expression of surprise.

"Hey Cass...do you think I could have the place to myself tonight?" Spoiler says. "I need to give my boyfriend a lot of crap for not being honest with people."

That's right, Tim and Stepahnie are dating. They are going steady. They are actually in a relationship.

When did this happen? Off-panel, apparently.

Stephanie Brown was only rather recently introduced into the current, post-Flashpoint continuity during the year-long weekly series Batman Eternal, and she did not meet Red Robin until one of the epilogues of the very last issue. Stephanie walks into her roommate Harper Row's bedroom to see Harper talking with Red Robin. Harper introduces them, and they shake hands...and stare silently at one another for an entire panel before Harper coughs to wake them back up from their apparent reverie, and Red Robin makes a lame, awkward excuse about needing to leave. "Um...Okay. I should go,: he says, rubbing the back of his head "Probably some kind of um...mischief going on."

And as far as I can remember, that's pretty much, like, the extent of their relationship up until this point. Stephanie is in the earliest issues of the sequel series, Batman & Robin Eternal, and shares a scene with Tim. In Batman & Robin Eteranl #2, Red Robin climbs in the window of the apartment Stephanie shares with Harper and Cullen Row and finds Dick Grayson and Stephanie, in her Spoiler costume, standing over a badly injured Harper.

How did he know to show up? He says he bugged the house with cameras and censors, which infuriates Spoiler. "I'm just monitoring for trouble," he says. "I mean, have you met yourselves?" They spend a little more time together with other Batman allies at the Rows' apartment and then in the Batcave, before Stephanie and Cullen get stashed in a safe house while everyone goes off to have an adventure that lasts most of the series (Steph and Cullen both reappear at the end).

And that's about it in terms of Tim Drake/Stephanie Brown interactions.

It therefore feels like a bit of a cheat that writer James Tynion, who is writing Detective and co-wrote the two Eternal limited series, just jumped ahead and we missed all of their flirting, Red Robin's revelation of his secret identity, whether or not it was awkward for Harper and all the humor and drama one would expect in a relationship. I mean, I feel cheated. I liked the idea of Bluebird and Spoiler as roommates, and of a possible love triangle between them and Red Robin. I liked the gradual way Tim and Stephanie's relationship played out in the pre-Flashpoint DCU (under writer Chuck Dixon, who co-created Stephanie and wrote both characters almost exclusively during the various incarnations of their relationship to one another).

I wanted to see Tim and Steph date dammit, not just move from meet-cute to one panel of bickering to suddenly being an item and banging in Steph's new apartment (She no longer lives with the Rows, as she says Batman set both her and Cassandra up with their own places, although Cassandra apparently chooses to instead crash at Harper's or Stephanie's).

I can only assume that Tim and Stephanie are going to break up pretty soon, as otherwise there doesn't seem to be much point of suddenly introducing them as a couple, and that Tynion will focus on that drama rather than the drama of their coming together.

Anyway, note their costumes touching each other on the floor of Stephanie's apartment in that last panel. Symbolism!

The one passage in Luke Skywalker Can't Read that I did not care for at all

Becky Cloonan makes history in 2012's Batman #12, by being the first woman to draw an issue of Batman. The character was around 73 years at that point. 

I've been reading author Ryan Britt's Luke Skywalker Can't Read and Other Geek Truths (Plume; 2015), a fun, funny collection of essays addressing modern geekdom's greatest touchstones–Star Wars, Star Trek, Lord of The Rings, Doctor Who, etc–from various, sometimes rather quirky angles. Like how he learned the birds and the bees from Barbarella and dinosaurs, how discovering the modern Doctor Who helped him overcome depression and whether or not anyone in the Star Wars universe is functionally literate or not (The title answers that question, actually).

I've been greatly enjoying the book, and I assume it must be a pretty good, for the simple reason that many of his subjects are ones I know very little about (Sherlock Holmes, Harry Potter) or have zero first-hand experience with (Star Trek, Doctor Who), and I've still found the pieces all engaging and interesting.

The penultimate essay involves superheroes, something I do know quite a bit about and have quite a bit of first-hand experience with, however. It's entitled "Nobody Gets Mad About Hamlet Remakes: Rise of the Relevant Superheroes," and it is a discussion of the current boom in comic book superhero films and various complaints about them, from fans and critics.

It's a fine essay, but I was actively irritated by this passage:

The idea that the movie isn't as good as the source material because it contradicts the author's vision is another criticism of comic book movies. We might claim Batman was "created" by Bob Kane, but most people will tell you he was co-created by Bill Finger. So, are we seeing a vision of Batman that is true to Kane's or Finger's original conception of him when we go see the latest Batman movie? Absolutely not. From Alan Moore to Frank Miller to Jeph Loeb to Gail Simone to Marguerite Bennet to artists like Neal Adams, Alex Ross, Jim Lee, Tim Sale, Lee Bermejo, Becky Cloonan, and countless more, the image and words of Batman aren't the purview of any one sacred person. And this is true for every single other superhero, too.

The point he makes there is correct (even if there are examples that can be found to make the last sentence incorrect; I would have suggested he changed it to "for almost every other superhero"), but it's the specificity of the character and the creators that bugged me.

Because if you've seen "the latest Batman movie"–which, at the time of his writing, was The Dark Knight Rises and not Batman V. Superman: Dawn of Justice–and are familiar with Batman comics, than you know that list of creators is complete bullshit.

But before we pick it apart, I should note that this is just a portion of a single paragraph in an essay, and not even the focus of the essay. So maybe I should also quote what follows, so as to at least contextualize the passage.

Britt goes on:

Comics have always had several different narrative voices behind the scenes, which means that by the time the stories get translated into big, watchable movies, all of those narrative voices are condensed down into a single composite story. Because there's probably a lot of good stuff left over, who wouldn't want to make another movie?

Now let's look at that list of Batman creators, shall we?

First, the writers. Frank Miller's Batman output is far from the greatest in terms of volume (The Dark Knight Returns, "Batman: Year One," Spawn/Batman, Batman: The Dark Knight Strikes Again, All-Star Batman and Robin, The Boy Wonder), but he remains probably the single most influential Batman writer (and that just for "Year One" and The Dark Knight Returns). Fair enough. Jeph Loeb has also written a lot of very popular Batman comics (Three Legends of The Dark Knight Halloween specials, Batman: The Long Halloween, Batman: Dark Victory, "Hush").

Alan Moore's a little tricky, as he really only wrote a single Batman comic of any note, although, because he's Alan Moore, it is a perennial-seller and a touchstone for a lot of readers: Batman: The Killing Joke (That it set the stage for the transformation from Batgirl Barbara Gordon into Oracle, and that it was one of the ultimate Joker stories, certainly helped keep it relevant for a long time, too).

The other two on the list, Gail Simone and Marguerite Bennet are both spectacularly poor choices, and I'm baffled as to why they were included at all. I know Simone has written the character Batman in the pages of her long run on Birds of Prey and in at least one Justice League comic, and it's certainly possible he popped up in the pages of her relatively short run on the current volume of Batgirl, but I honestly don't remember her ever writing a Batman story for any of the many Batman titles, or doing a miniseries or original graphic novel. Please correct me if I'm wrong.

Bennett is a relative newcomer to comics, and while she has written Batman–co-writing 2013's Batman Annual #2 with Scott Snyder–he's not someone I would even think of including as an influential Batman writer. she's there instead of Denny O'Neil, Chuck Dixon, Alan Grant, Grant Morrison and Snyder, for example. And remember that Dark Knight Rises was a 2012 film; she didn't write any Batman until well after the release of the last Batman movie.

It's possible–all right, probable–that Britt includes the pair because they are both female writers (Something that seems like a pretty good possibility, seeing as he includes the only woman to ever draw Batman when listing artists, even though she drew just a handful of pages, which were likewise published after the last Batman film).

I think that's too bad. Firstly because it gives a mistaken impression to his readers that the Batman comics aren't as inexplicably dominated by male writers and artists as they actually are. And, secondly, there are better choices, or at least a better choice: Devin K. Grayson, who wrote parts of "No Man's Land" before eventually earning her own Batman title, the 2000-launched Batman: Gotham Knights , which she wrote for 32 issues. She also had substantial runs on Batman-adjacent titles Nightwing and Catwoman.

If the idea were to mention writers who influenced the The Dark Knight Rises, and/or the entire Christopher Nolan cycle of films, then that list looks even more questionable. If that were the point of the list, then you'd keep Miller, of course, as not only did his late-80s Batman comics influence just about everything to follow (and, along with Moore's writing, the entire direction of the superhero comics industry), but director Christopher Nolan and company drew plenty of inspiration from Miller's "Year One." Hell, maybe Loeb is an okay fit, too, as he did so much work within Miller's "Year One" milieu in his Long Halloween and Dark Victory comics.

But what about Chuck Dixon, who co-created Bane and wrote swathes of the "No Man's Land" arc that dominated the second half of Rises? Or Dixon's peers on the "No Man's Land" era of Bat-books, like Greg Rucka and the aforementioned Grayson? What about Denny O'Neil, who created Batman Begins heavy Ra's al Ghul and Rises player Talia? Or Len Wein, creator of Lucius Fox?

As for the artists he mentions, Neal Adams is largely credited with making Batman darker and more reaslitic, in addition to creating the first villain in the Nolan cycle–Ra's al Ghul. Alex Ross is kind of an outlier in that he's only really ever drawn a single Batman comic of any length, his 1999 collaboration with writer Paul Dini, Batman: War On Crime, but through his work on Kingdom Come and his paintings of Batman on covers, posters and merchandise, it's certainly easy to see how many could consdier him an influential Batman artist/

No questioning the inclusion of Sale, either, who drew all of the above-mentioned, Loeb-written comics save "Hush," and whose design for Two-Face in Long Halloween was taken almost directly for usage in 2008's The Dark Knight.

Jim Lee seems an odd choice, despite the continued popularity of "Hush" and the fact that the New 52 era of DC Comics was so beholden to his style.

Bermejo just boggles my mind, as his main Batman credits are Batman/Deathblow, the not-very-good 2008 original graphic novel The Joker and the almost-as-bad Batman-ized version of A Christmas Carol, 2012's Batman: Noel; the former featured a character that resembled The Dark Knight's Joker visually, but Bermejo was inspired by the film, not the other way around.

Cloonan has the dubious distinction of being the only woman to ever draw Batman, a fact that sounds shocking at first, and becomes depressing when one starts trying to find a single example to prove it wrong and comes up blank. Listing her there is like listing Dan DeCarlo or Steve Mannion; yeah, they technically drew a few pages of Batman comics, but so what?

Better inclusions would have been David Mazzucchelli (Miller's collaborator on "Year One"), Jerry Robinson (long-time Batman artist and creator of Dark Knight villain The Joker, as well as Alfred) and pretty much anyone who drew Batman for a reasonable length of time: Dick Sprang, Sheldon Moldoff, Carmine Infantino, Marshall Rogers, Jim Aparo, Norm Breyfogle, Greg Capullo and so on.

Aside from the names on those two lists, however, the rest of Britt's book is just fine.

Is Dark Knight III: The Master Race a comic book, or just a vehicle for variant covers?

That's probably not too terribly legible, but it's the credit page for the first issue of Dark Knight III: The Master Race. Those long columns of credits are the artists responsible for the "retailer" variants; there are another handful of "regular" variants. All in all, there are 49 variant covers listed on this page, although I'm pretty sure between black-and-white versions, blank covers and the super-rare incentive variants, there's likely well over 50 variants for this book, making it, perhaps, DC's answer to Mavel's Star Wars #1, which I believe had somewhere in the neighborhood of 10,000 variants, if I put the comma in the right place.

Looking at that list, I can't help but wonder if maybe DC shouldn't have just published a comic book format "gallery" like they used to occasionally did in the 190s, a tribute to Frank Miller's Dark Knight comics by top creators (If you've seen many of the variant covers, you'll notice none are specific to this new series, of which only one issue has been released, after all, but to the original Dark Knight Returns series).

It's a very strong line-up, including some of my favorite artists--

--and at least one from an artist I never would have expected to produce a variant cover for a prestigious DC superhero comics project, Kevin Eastman--

(Although given the fact that it was already announced that Eastman would be contributing variant covers to the upcoming Batman/Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles cover, his presence seems much less out-of-left-field than it might have otherwise.)

On the other hand, I'm sure DC is going to make many, many, many times more money publishing a new Miller-attached Dark Knight comic book series with 50-100 variant covers than they would just publishing a Dark Knight Returns tribute gallery book.

The good news is that the book itself is pretty alright, particularly if you view it for what it is--Brian Azzarello and Andy Kubert doing their best Frank Miller impressions in homage to Dark Knight Returns, with an actual Frank Miller mini-comic embedded in the middle of it. Also, there was at least one incredibly shocking moment in the book, something I never expected to see in a DC comic book. Not because it was over-the-top or anything (it's not; it's a perfectly natural thing, really), but given the particular character and the fact that what she's doing is still deemed "controversial" in some circles, I was surprised to see it appear here, and in the way it appeared.

Anyway, I'm sure I'll be talking in greater length and with (hopefully) greater insight on the book at some point later in the very near future. In the mean time, I just wanted to point out that Good God that is so many variants! and, while I generally think variants are a pox upon the industry, it is at least nice to know that it lead to so many great images from so many great artists, like those whose work is pictured above.