DC Versus Marvel Omnibus Pt. 14: Batman & Spider-Man #1

Two years after their initial meeting in Spider-Man and Batman, the two heroes would re-team once again in an adventure from returning writer J.M. DeMatteis. While that first team-up was drawn by an artist primarily known as a Spider-Man artist (Mark Bagley), this second one would be drawn by an artist primarily known as a Batman artist, the great Graham Nolan, here inked by Karl Kesel. 

By 1997, Nolan had already had a healthy run on Detective Comics (a chunk of which was finally collected in 2020's Batman: Knight Out) and penciled the original graphic novel The Joker: Devil Advocate, working with writer Chuck Dixon on both. He had also, again with Dixon, co-created the villain Bane in the pages of 1993's one-shot special Batman: Vengeance of Bane. 

Teenage Caleb held great esteem for Nolan's work, particularly that during the Tec run, as Nolan's take on the Batman character and his world seemed to strike a precise, perfect balance between the sturdy realism of Jim Aparo and the dynamic, expressionism of Norm Breyfogle.

By the end of the decade, though, Nolan's work with DC, which included a Bane vs. Ra's al Ghul limited series and the extremely weird JLA Versus Predator, seemed to peter out. I had often wondered what had happened to him (it turns out he turned his attention to drawing a couple of legacy newspaper strips) and was quite happy to get new work from him when he and Dixon reunited for the 12-part series Bane: Conquest in 2017. 

A few years later, I looked him up on what was then still Twitter, found him and followed him...and then quickly realized one of the reasons he doesn't seem to be getting much high-profile work in the modern comics industry equivalent to his level of talent. In rapid succession he posted a couple of tweets that I found politically objectionable, including ones hash-tagging or seemingly speaking positively of Comicsgate, of all things. (Nolan is also on an "unofficial listing" of creators who support Comicsgate on comicsgate.org.)

And then I saw his name listed here among comics professionals who participated in a livestream reacting negatively to Superman's son Jonathan Kent coming out as bisexual and DC updating Superman's World War II-era slogan of "Truth, Justice and the American Way" to "Truth, Justice and a Better Tomorrow." (For what it's worth, I like the original just fine and always imagined it to refer to the ideals America as a nation supposedly represented and strove to embody, not an endorsement of the country's often reprehensible actions like, you know, invading Iraq or electing Donald Trump...twice). 

Now obviously Comicsgate is...not company a responsible professional should be keeping, regardless of their political views. But reprehensible views are, I guess, something else that Nolan has in common with his frequent collaborator Dixon, and so I suppose it's unsurprising we're not seeing him drawing Batman or Superman these days. (He seems to be keeping himself busy self-publishing crowd-funded books through his Compass Comics, which he claims are free of the "moralizing and political messages so prevalent at the 'big two' publishers.")

While it is understandable why publishers and other professionals wouldn't want to work with anyone in the Comicsgate orbit, and it is understandable why readers wouldn't want to support creators who hold intolerant beliefs (I know I wouldn't want to buy, say, a new Dixon/Nolan comic today), it doesn't change the fact that Graham Nolan is a hell of an artist, a fact attested to by this very story.

In it, he not only does his usual fine job of drawing Batman and the Dark Knight's perennial foes Ra's al Ghul and Talia, Nolan also gives us a great Spider-Man, one who looks and moves like a classic iteration, evoking the work of John Romita Sr, one of the probably two artists who defined the character's look (The other, of course, being his creator Steve Ditko).

Nolan also draws the Kingpin, who is the Spider-Man villain used in the story. And DeMatteis makes pretty great use out of him here, too. What seems to unite the villains in this particular crossover is their nature as master schemers and plotters, each seeming to exert an impressive degree of control over their particular kingdoms, only really differing in the scale of their ambitions. 

Kingpin, of course, wants to—and sometimes does—rule over all crime in New York City, if not the entire city itself. Ra's' criminal enterprise is global in scale, and he has his sights set on ruling the entire world.

This similarity, and this difference, is at the core of DeMatteis' story, which, more so than anything else, is a great character study of the Kingpin: The lengths he will go to save the woman he loves, the way his mind works and where he draws the line when it comes to his own super-villainy. 

You may remember—if you have a particularly good memory, anyway—that when I was writing about these two heroes during my discussion of their first pairing, I noted the similarity in the types of stories told about each, as they tended to spend the issues of their comic book series defending their home cities from the machinations of their big and colorful rogues galleries. 

I even explicitly said they don't generally engage in globe-trotting adventures, or those in which the fate of the whole world is at stake. 

Well, guess what? 

This story, entitled "New Age Dawning" is an exception. Parts of the story are set in Gotham, New York City, Paris and Tibet, our heroes ultimately travelling to the distant roof of the world just in time to stop Ra's and Kingpin from pressing the button on a doomsday machine that will wipe NYC off the map and ready the world for Ra's' assumption of its complete control.

As I said, while it reads like a character portrait of Kingpin Wilson Fisk, it also scans an awful lot like a Batman story, particularly one of the many in which he faces Ra's al Ghul and the villain's plans to save the world and its environment by drastically, violently reducing its population. 

Although instead of Robin and/or Nightwing around to give Batman someone to banter with, here it's Spidey.

The story opens with a narration-heavy sequence in which a wild-eyed, wild-haired television evangelist preaches about the sorry state of the world—earthquake, flood, a bombing in Jerusalem—as signs that we are entering the end times. And though he plays the role of a Christian evangelist, he doesn't really evoke Christianity, but an unnamed, secular savior of some sort. "There's only one hope for us," he says. "Only one man who can save us from the firestorm that's coming. Look up, children of sin! Look up-- --and see the savior." 

Jesus? 

No. 

The scene then shifts to that would-be savior, dwelling in a hidden, paradisical city nestled in the mountains of Tibet. He is shown praying before an altar filled with candles and the icons of several different religions (a crucifix among them), while his concerned daughter looks on, unseen.

This is, of course, Ra's al Ghul.

Meanwhile, our other villain, Wilson Fisk, is introduced in Paris, where he confronts his apparently estranged love, Vanessa, and embraces her in a kiss.

And as for our heroes? 

Well, Spidey is introduced suiting up and leaving his wife Mary Jane to study while he goes out crime-fighting. (Nolan somewhat surprisingly draws her remarkably less busty than the bombshell version of the character that was more prevalent in the '90s; here her design more closely resembles that of Mark Bagley's Ultimate Mary Jane). Spidey busts up an arms deal that he assumes must be Fisk's work, although readers will note the demon's head symbol tattooed on one of the gunmen's palms. 

And as for Batman, he swings through a rainy Gotham sky to meet his kinda sorta lover/mortal enemy Talia, who tells him she has business in America, but wanted to drop by and see him. Then she sics a bunch of ninjas on him. ("You knew those men would never stand a chance against me," Batman tells her. "I...had to at least go through the motions of an assassination attempt," she replies.)

With all of the players introduced, it is now time to commence with the crossing-over. Talia and Fisk talk business in his penthouse office. Apparently, Fisk has been working for her and her mysterious employer for some months now, and though he suspects them of being a terrorist organization, as long as they leave their "madness" out of his country and his city, he doesn't mind. Talia pointedly corrects him that the real aim of her organization is not terror, but "resurrection", a word that briefly stops Fisk and elicits a shocked expression from him, given what his wife is going through.

As will soon be revealed, Vanessa is apparently dying of cancer—I obviously have no idea how this squares with the events of the regular Spider-Man and Daredevil comics of the time. Fisk is uninterested in Ra's al Ghul's plans, laid out in a few pages of dialogue that jumps from a conversation between Talia and Fisk to another of Batman and Spider-Man. 

This time around those plans involve using special devices that control the weather and tectonic plates to sink the island of Manhattan and cause other such disasters until Ra's emerges from the apocalyptic chaos to "offer redemption to a sick and dying world." 

Again, Fisk is uninterested, but Talia has a very strong closing offer for tailored to him.

"My father has the power to cure your wife's cancer," she tells him. 

During their meetings, Batman has been spying on the pair, and he is eventually interrupted by the arrival of Spider-Man ("I wondered when you'd show up," he says to Spidey over his shoulder without looking at him.) 

Batman is just as reluctant to work with Spider-Man this time as he was last time, and when the web-slinger puts his hand on Batman's shoulder while talking to him, the Dark Knight snatches him by the wrist and twists it. Spidey throws him across the rooftop, Batman landing on his feet and striking a cool, Mazzucchelli-inspired pose in the mist.

This is the only real fighting the two do, ultimately shaking hands again and deciding to work together. Nolan does a particularly good job of contrasting the two heroes, two characters whose basic designs are so far apart from one another, with the sleek, colorful Spider-Man a head or so shorter than the big, black triangularly shaped Batman. 

Faced with the inevitability of Vanessa's death, Fisk eventually makes a deal with Ra's, and Talia delivers he and his ailing wife to the Tibetan stronghold. There, Ra's makes clear his plans for the world and Fisk's place in them, holding the cure for Vanessa's cancer—in actuality, a cancer-like disease that Ra's engineered in his laboratories specifically to infect her—over him as irresistible leverage.

In order to make him prove his loyalty, Ra's insists that Fisk be the one to push the button that will destroy New York.

That is, of course, where Spider-Man and Batman come in. They have chased the villains to Tibet in some rather charmingly silly disguises and, after they are waylaid by Ra's forces along the way, they must travel the snowy wastes with parkas over their costumes, with Batman at one point riding piggy-back as Spidey climbs the sheer face of a mountain cliff.

To say much at all about the ending would risk spoiling a clever and effective twist, but it's safe to say that New York City is not destroyed and Ra's does not take over the world. Even Vanessa's life is saved. 

DeMatteis does a fine job of portraying all of the various and varied characters, including their at-times complex roles, like Spider-Man working to save Vanessa even if it means helping the Kingpin, and Talia's moral ambiguity, as she vacillates between working for and against her father...and against but sometimes with Batman.

The last panel, a half-page splash of the two heroes in a moon-filled big city night sky together, is the very stuff these crossovers are made for, as both look perfectly like themselves and perfectly strange appearing side by side like this, but also, under Nolan and Kesel's pens and Gloria Vasquez's colors, also seeming to belong together.

This would be the final crossover in which this particular pair would appear together, and, in fact, this was Spidey's last standalone DC/Marvel crossover. Both Batman and Kingpin would appear one more time in the DC Versus Marvel Omnibus collection though, in 2000's Batman/Daredevil: King of New York #1, by Alan Grant and Eduardo Barreto.

Next: 1999's Superman/Fantastic Four #1

A particularly rambling and discursive "review" of Batman: Zero Hour

I found this to be a curious collection. On the one hand, DC has been rather focused on going back and collecting or recollecting comics from the 1990s, and the issues between these pages--all of the then extant Batman line's tie-ins to 1994 event series Zero Hour and all the #0 issues that were released the following month--are a near-perfect sampling of the line as it existed at the time. On the other hand, because the focus of Zero Hour was in-story continuity maintenance, with a new, surprise villain destroying all of the universe in order to remake it, the side effects which included time anomalies before the #0 issues offered then-current, canonical origin stories of all the characters, these issues are no longer "relevant" in terms of their original, intended function.

Reading it cover to cover then was, for me, a weird mixture of nostalgia and regret, as DC has changed so much of what is in here in the years since. The Batman origins, of which there are three direct ones and a fourth, more thematic one, still work okay today, as DC and New 52 Batman writer Scott Snyder didn't mess much with his basic story, but the Catwoman and, especially, the Robin origins have been wiped-out and overwritten, replaced by...well, by nothing good (I still wonder about the whys of the New 52 reboot, and it seems like the point of collapsing DC's generations of heroes into a single "now" was simply all about making heroes like Batman, Superman and the others seem younger, something of rather dubious value; this collection ends with a pair of ten-year timelines, which would put Batman at maybe his early thirties...did someone with some power in corporate and/or editorial really think that was too old for the publisher's gray, gray readership to relate to?).

Also of interest was the fact that their was no introduction or preface explaining what the hell Zero Hour was*. All you get is a paragraph on the back cover:

Time is collapsing in on itself. The villainous Extant has ushered in a series of black holes that are swallowing the universe--past, present and future! The Bat-family, like everyone else in the DC Universe, has seen time loops affect their lives. The result? The return of Barbara Gordon as Batgirl, teenage Dick Grayson as Robin, and Bruce Wayne's parents, Thomas and Martha Wayne. Then, after the crisis in time has been averted, new details about the origins of Batman, Robin and Catwoman are revealed.

I guess "time is going crazy, yo" is all you really need to know to make sense of the first half of the collection, but I think some context would have helped, particularly to explain what the #0 issues have to do with the anomaly issues. (DC has collected Zero Hour into a trade of its own, by the way, although looking at Amazon, it doesn't look like Zero Hour: Crisis In Time has been republished since 1994...is that possible? Well, the series was "controversial" among some for its treatment of Hal Jordan and the Justice Society of America and, I don't know, however many Hank Hall fans there still were in the wild back then, maybe, but I liked it a lot, and Geoff Johns gradually un-did everything everyone hated about it over the years in the pages of Green Lantern and JSA.)

This trade is almost 300 pages, and collects 11 issues, so it completely dwarfs Zero Hour, which is only 160 pages and collects the five-issue miniseries, plus two prelude-like shorts from the pages of Showcase '94. Though it represents six different ongoing monthlies, the Batman line at the time was still relatively tidy compared to what it is today; counting all the satellite books, I think we're at around a dozen titles, depending on which you want to consider Batman books and which you don't, in June of 2017.** Back then, Nightwing and Birds of Prey had yet to launch as ongoing monthlies.

In the "anomaly" half of the trade, there's an issue each of Batman, Detective, Batman: Shadow of The Bat, Robin and Catwoman, each by the current creative teams of the time, which means a lot of very familiar names among the writers, and a lot of great artists. For the most part, Zero Hour provided a pretty perfect springboard for tie-ins, as it was a crossover event that presented a world-wide crisis that would find the heroes wherever the heroes were, rather than necessitating them all actively participating in a plot-line of some sort (that active participation was done in the Zero Hour miniseries proper). So the writers and editors were basically free to play with the idea of "time is screwed up," and think of the best way to use that premise to tell interesting Batman stories.

In Batman, Dough Moench, Mike Manley and Josef Rubinstein had an alternate timeline occasionally over-writing the current one, so that a Batgirl Barbara Gordon appears, and Batman and Robin Tim Drake find themselves dealing with a different Joker who killed Commissioner Gordon instead of paralyzing Barbara during The Killing Joke, a Commissioner Harvey Dent and a very confused Barbara (this Batgirl seems to be a different one that the one that appears as a major player in Zero Hour; Batman's Batgirl is apparently from an alternate timeline, while Zero Hour's Batgirl is this timeline's Batgirl from before she retired). The issue ends with Batman heading to Metropolis to meet with Superman so they can begin to figure out how to fight this new crisis, and I believe it leads directly into the fairly awesome Superman: The Man of Steel #37, which technically came out of the Superman office, but was a pretty dynamite Batman comic book, as it involved Superman being barraged with different Batmen.

Just look at all those Batmen!

In Detective, Chuck Dixon, Graham Nolan and Bob McLeod send Batman back to the night of his parents' murder, only to find that this time Bruce Wayne was shot to death in front of them, and, knowing the name of the murderer, Batman runs around pre-Batman Gotham City looking for Joe Chill to avenge his own death and/or that of his parents, only to find that apparently it wasn't Joe Chill after all...at least, not in this timeline (There's some discussion of a point of interest that Batman fans like to talk about, whether it matters if Batman ever catches the guy who shot his parents or not; here the answer is no, and it will be reflected in the "new" origins in the #0 issue portion of the books).

Man, I forgot how great Nolan's art was, and every time I see his pencils from this era I'm surprised anew regarding how clean his lines were and how elegant his figure work is. It really stands out next to the work of Manley and Bret Blevins, too, whose styles are somewhat similar, particularly in the way they draw their Batmen.

In Batman: Shadow of The Bat, Alan Grant and the aforementioned Blevins saddle Batman and Robin with an alternate version of Alfred, the overweight, bumbling, comical version who wanted to be a detective and fight crime alongside his Dynamic Duo. This issue had one of the better Zero Hour related covers, by regular Shadow cover artist Brian Stelfreeze, and it was rather well-suited to what was going on in Gotham City at the time, as the regular timeline's Alfred Pennyworth tendered his resignation towards the end of "KnightQuest," leaving Batman and Tim Drake to figure out how to feed themselves and do their own laundry.

In Robin, Dixon, Tom Grummett and Ray Kryssing team Tim up with a young, time-lost Dick Grayson, previously seen prowling around the rooftops of Batman, where Manley drew him in a charmingly Sheldon Moldoff-esque design. The Boys Wonder crack a case involving a jewel thief, but the main pleasure here is seeing the two together, allowing us to compare and contrast them (post-Flashpoint, Tim was unfortunately given a more Grayson-like background; I liked the fact that, back then, the two Robins had very, very different specialties, even though they were both competent at all-around vigilante crime-fighting and side-kicking). Well, that and seeing Grummett draw the classic Robin costume, which dammit, is a pretty great design, pants or no. This issue, like the one of Catwoman that follows, ends with the panels and art on the comic book being un-drawn as everything fades to white; this happened in many of the Zero Hour tie-ins. As Extant and Parallax un-made the DC Universe, the comic book stories were apparently fading away right before our very eyes!

Finally, in Catwoman, Jo Duffy, Jim Balent and Bob Smith have Selina Kyle waking up to find a Gotham City gone mad. There's a saber tooth tiger in her bed, and a hunky "caveman," who looks more like Ka-Zar than a primitive human ancestor, in her living room. They run around the city, which is full of dinosaurs and randomly transforming vehicles and buildings until the issue disappears at the end. This isn't Balent at his best quite yet, but he's good, and, as I know I've mentioned before, it's easy to forget that the guy could draw pretty good superhero comics, given the peculiarities of the creator-owned project he's devoted his career to since.

At this point, I guess one would need to go read Zero Hour or, at least know that Superman, Damage, Green Arrow Oliver Queen and a handful of other superheroes defeated Parallax and re-created the Big Bang, essentially restarting the universe, with a few tweaks in coninuity...for the purposes of the Batman family of books, these were all pretty minor, and seemed more organizational than anything else. Batman, by the way, did not make it to the climax of Zero Hour, having been eaten by a white blackhole of nothingness while fighting dinosaurs or something in Gotham.

In Batman #0, Moench, Manley and Rubinstein tell Batman's basic origin story and abbreviated history, right up until a few months prior to the book was published, actually. In the present, they have Batman tracking down a series of killings that are a little too close to the one that took his parents for comfort, allowing for the flashbacks, each of which is colored in semi-black and white as if to evoke "Batman: Year One." The book ends, as a few of these would, with Batman thinking portentously about perhaps not being Batman anymore: "Can he really do what he must... ...and walk away from it all?"

These issues are all leading up to the next chapter of the Batman saga, which was "Prodigal," during which Dick Grayson temporarily assumed the role of Batman while Bruce Wayne went off on a mysterious "Sumatran Rat" adventure.

Shadow of the Bat #0 covered much the same ground as Batman, with Alan Grant and Bret Blevins also retelling Batman's origin, hitting a lot of the same notes. In the present, he is trying to capture a pair of thieves who are both pretty great fighters, during which time he scares a gang of young punks into hiding; knowing his reputation, they debate about what to do if they have Batman's attention, unaware of the fact that rather than  laying siege to them he's blocks away on more important business.

The flashback sequences may cover much of the same ground, but there is a slight difference in focus, I guess, playing up Batman's fighting skills and use of fear as a psychological weapon.

 In another teaser to "Prodigal," the penultimate page has Bruce Wayne considering the fact that there are things that being Batman has prevented him from doing, but he knows the city needs a Batman. The last page features someone suiting up as Batman, but the language is intentionally vague: "A hand reaches for the costume," and like that.

Nolan's Batman

For Detective Comics #0, the cover of which was repurposed for that of the trade, Dixon, Nolan and Scott Hanna use the same basic formula of the previous two zero issues, showing Batman on a current case--here, a kidnapping which involves him fighting his way through a building full of bad guys--while flashing back to elements of his origin. In this case, they focus the origin on specific elements, however, so it's much different than those previous entries. Specifically, they tell of how Bruce Wayne and Alfred discovered and created the Batcave, and some of the vehicles and weapons that filled it.

There wasn't a Legends of The Dark Knight Zero Hour tie-in (that is, an anomaly issue), but the title, like all of the DCU titles, participated in "Zero Month." This is a jam-issue of sorts, and a pretty great done-in-one, evergreen Batman story. If I can make sense of the credits correctly, editor Archie Goodwin scripted the framing sequence, in which a cartoonishly evil publishing magnate assembles a room full of writers and storytellers in his cartoonishly evil mansion to try to understand just who or what the Batman really is.

How evil is this guy? Look, he has a koala bear's head mounted on his wall. A koala bear!

And an actual room full of comic book writers and cartoonists offer various, one-page visions of Batman, including Gerard Jones, James Robinson, Steven Grant, Scott Hampton, Jeph Loeb, Mike Baron, J.M. DeMatteis, Ted McKeever, John Wagner and Roy Burdine. The all-star roster of artists that illustrate these passages are Karl Kesel, Tony Salmons, Mike Zeck, Hampton, Tim Sale, Mark Badger, Brian Murray, Steve Mitchell, John Watkiss, McKeever, Carlos Ezquerra, Frank Gomez and Phil Winslade.

The artist who contributes the most, however, is Vince Giarrano, whose work I like quite a bit. I know I've mentioned him on the blog, before, but if you're unfamiliar, Giarrano worked in a highly-exaggerated, almost Kelley Jones-like style that I like to think of as "sarcastic '90s," with huge, overly-muscled, heroic figures with lots of unnecessary lines, lots of points and melodramatic poses that, like the work of Jones, can teeter between operatic and ridiculous.

He draws the "devil bat" conception of Batman (above), which is paired with Kesel's more classic, heroic-looking "Dark Knight" conception, and the framing sequences. So it is Giarrano, of all people, who gets to draw the "real" Batman, despite the presence of so many artists with much more realistic styles.

Here then, is what Batman "really" looks like:

This issue, by the way, features a cover by some kid named Joe Quesada.

For Robin #0, the regular creative team has Robin and Nightwing hanging out on a rooftop, waiting for a group of thieves to finish blow-torching their way through a safe in order to bust them. While killing time, Tim asks Dick about how he became Robin, and they essentially swap stories about their origins--and that of the late Jason Todd. They both know the broad strokes--Dick was even a key player in Tim's origin story--but not the details, as at this point in Bat-history Dick was more-or-less estranged from Batman, and had been spending most of his time with the Titans. This was between "KnightsEnd," in which Dick joined Bruce, Tim and even Catwoman in retaking the mantle of the bat from Jean-Paul Valley, and the aforementioned "Prodigal," when Dick Grayson was returning to the Batman Family fold, eventually getting his own, ongoing book for the first time.

Almost none of this issue is relevant anymore--I guess Dick's origin and Jason's origin still "happened," although they were dressed dumber in the new version and they weren't Robin longer than a year or so, and Tim's origin was completely erased and replaced. It was a nice jumping-on point in 1994 though, providing a brief history of Robin--or Robins--and setting up the Dick/Tim partnership that would be the focus of "Prodigal"...which this issue actually ends with a direct prelude to, with Dick suiting up as Batman to temporarily replace Bruce (for the first time; he would, of course, also do so when Bruce Wayne was temporarily dead-ish around the time of Final Crisis).

Because the previous issue was the end of Jo Duffy's short-ish 14-issue run on Catwoman, regular pencil artist Balent and inker Bob Smith are joined by Doug Moench for Catwoman #0, after which point Dixon would inherit writing duties for a while. Moench, as was typical then, works a theme throughout the issue, comparing Selina to a cat in various ways throughout this story of her troubled childhood, some relatively subtle, some as subtle as a frying pan over the head.

We learn that her mother died when she was young (after pushing her to devote herself to gymnastics), her father drank himself to death shortly after and she ended up in a typically Gotham corrupt orphanage for troubled young girls, where she taught herself rooftop climbing, thievery and overall sneakiness.

There are a few scenes that seem to reference her role in "Batman: Year One," although rather than being an actual prostitute, Moench implies that it was just another form of thievery, wherein johns would hire her as prostitute and she would just mug them immediately, because they were bad guys anyway. Inspired by Batman's costume, she put on her gray, "Year One" costume and becomes a more spectacular cat burglar (That is one of my favorite Catwoman costumes from the comics, by the way). Most of the attention is paid to her childhood in the orphanage, though.

I'm not sure how much of this is relevant anymore though; both Jeph Loeb's Year One-era stories and Batman Eternal gave Catwoman biological fathers who were actually crime kingpins (but different ones at that), and while that doesn't necessarily negate this origin, I've seen just enough of the post-Flashpoint Catwoman to know her childhood was different there than it is here (Fun fact: This run lasted 96 issues, counting #0 and #1,000,000; the 2000 series lasted 82 issues; the New 52 series only lasted 53 issues). I suppose I should really set about tracking down various Catwoman origin stories that I've never read at some point, to try to make sense of the different takes on the character...that, or I guess I could just wait for Tim Hanley's next book.

It ends with the two timelines I mentioned, although I'm not sure where they originally appeared. The first is titled "Batman Timeline," and it spans ten years. The first three years all produced comic book stories with those names--"Year One," "Year Two" and "Year Three"--and while it's a pretty compressed timeline, it seems to hold up okay (Dick was only Robin for three years according to this timeline, which doesn't seem too terribly long, really; Barbara retired from being Batgirl after just three years, two of which were after Dick took on his Nightwing persona). "Year 10" was a very busy one, staring with "Jean Paul Valley becomes Azrael," which means the miniseries Batman: Sword of Azrael, and contains "Knightfall," "KnightQest," "KnightsEnd," "Prodigal," "Troika," "Contagion" and "Legacy."

That's followed immediately by a "Batman Villains Timeline" which starts in 1921 with the creation of Arkham Asylum, and then runs through the same ten-year timeline, ending with the events of "Cataclysm" in "Year 10."

I'm kind of curious what "year" it would be right now had DC not done the 2011 reboot, if we factored in "No Man's Land" and Damian's three years as Robin and so on...I think we would be in Year 15 or Year 16 now, although that seems mostly a matter of the ten-year-old Damian celebrating his 13th birthday in DC Universe: Rebirth. If Talia met Bruce in Year Three, and they had a ten-year-old son by the time "Batman and Son" rolled around, then that would have been Year 13, and then it's been another three years since then. Again, if Flashpoint and the New 52-boot never happened. Now it's Year Eight, and all of the events of the decade represented on these timelines supposedly happened in drastically different form during Years One through Five.



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



While reading this, I began wondering if DC would bother collecting any other tie-ins from the Zero Hour event, and I consulted Wikipedia to see just how many of the damn things there were. (It's a lot!)

A Superman: Zero Hour would certainly be the next easiest trade to assemble, as there were then six titles in that particular franchise: Superman, Action Comics, Adventures of Superman, Superman: The Man of Steel, Superboy and Steel.

A Justice League: Zero Hour title would also be relatively easy, as there were then three League titles: Justice League America, Justice League International and Justice League Task Force. I guess they could fill that out with...well, hell, I guess here it gets tricky, huh? They could use solo titles featuring characters from those line-ups, like The Flash, The Ray, Wonder Woman and Guy Gardner: Warrior.

I'm actually a little surprised to see that there were three Legion of Super-Heroes-related titles going into the event, so maybe they could do a Justice League/Legion of Super-Heroes: Zero Hour collection, and include the relevant issues of Legion of Super-Heroes, Legionnaires and LEGION '94...?

Or, given that none of those Leagues are really remembered at this point, and have been rebooted away anyway, maybe a theoretical Justice League: Zero Hour trade would include the big, non-Superman, non-Batman DC superheroes that we tend to think of as Justice Leaguers, whether or not they were on a League roster in 1994 or not: Aquaman, Wonder Woman, The Flash, Green Lantern, Green Arrow, Hawkman and...Oh, that's all of the solo titles featuring long-time Leaguers. Unless you put Guy Gardner: Warrior in this theoretical collection...?

Looking at the complete list, its interesting to see the participating titles that have long since disappeared (Damage, Anima, Valor, Team Titans, et cetera), and the handful of books that launched following the conclusion of Zero Hour during "Zero Month" (Fate, Manhunter, Primal Force), only one of which really caught on (Starman).

J'onn! Gypsy! The Ray! Triumph! L-Ron-in-Despero's body!

Aside from the Batman books, the #0 issues I remember reading and really liking were Justice League Task Force, when writers Mark Waid and Christopher Priest refocused the title from a book featuring rotating creators and squad of superheroes into a regular book with a regular line-up, premised on the Martian Manhunter training a motley crew of new superheroes (of one kind or another). The Sal Velluto art helped differentiate it from a lot of the super-comics DC was publishing at the time, which suffered from artists trying and often failing to ape that hot new Image Comics style that the kids liked so much at the time.

I also really dug the post-Zero Hour line-up of New Titans; while all of those individual comics weren't great, I loved that particular line-up, and the way it allowed many of the original New Teen Titans line-up to have their endings while carrying on with a rather weird line-up of young heroes from throughout the DC Universe at the time. Sadly, it didn't last too long (18 issues; which I would totally buy a collection of, as I still don't have all of the individual issues from this run).

Arsenal! Changeling! (A) Terra! Damage! Impulse! Green Lantern Kyle Rayner! Mirage! And, not pictured here as they hadn't yet joined the team, Darkstar Donna Troy, Supergirl and Minion!

*Which is weird, I think. I guess they wanted to keep costs down, but would spending a single page on an introduction instead of a house ad really have broken the bank? They didn't have to get a Batman line editor from back in the day or Zero Hour writer Dan Jurgens or Doug Moench or someone to write it. Maybe DC has an intern who they could have assigned it to? Hell, I woulda written it for ten bucks and a free copy of the trade. Oh, you know what? If you need more context on Zero Hour, this is a pretty fun way to learn more about it!

**Batman, Detective Comics, All-Star Batman, Nightwing, Batgirl, Batgirl and The Birds of Prey, Batwoman and Batman Beyond, sure; what about the Gotham-set Gotham Academy, and does Trinity or Red Hood and The Outlaws or Super Sons count? How about Harley Quinn...?

Bane and Osoito, brothers

Chuck Dixon and Graham Nolan return to their greatest creation, and also Bane, in Bane: Conquest #1

You will believe might be persuaded to suspend your disbelief regarding whether or not a Predator can fly.

In recognition of the release of the first issue of Archie Vs. Predator, I put together a little list of what used to be Predator's weirdest hunts for Comics Alliance. You can read the post here. Guess which one tuned out to be the weirdest? The panel above ought to offer a pretty good clue, and do note that it's the work of pencil artist Graham Nolan, rather than Alex Maleev or Ariel Olivetti.

The story of Osoito, Bane's teddy bear

When Bane first arrived in Gotham City, intent on breaking its ruler The Batman and taking his place, he brought with him three colorful allies he had made within the bowels of Pena Duro, the Santa Priscan prison where he was born and where he had spent his entire life up until that point (You remember; it happened in 1993's Batman: The Vengeance of Bane #1, by Chuck Dixon, Graham Nolan, Eduardo Barreto and Adrienne Roy; the folks responsible for all of the panels in this post).

These were Trogg, the hirsute brawler and electronics expert who once saved the child Bane from the hands of a pedophile; Zombie, the gaunt chemical expert who aided Bane when his captors performed experiments involving the super-steroid called Venom; and Bird, the Gotham City criminal who had a way with birds and told Bane of life beyond the prison walls.

Before he hooked up with any of these hardened criminals, however, the young Bane had another, softer, cuddlier friend, one who was there for him when no one else was, and was present during one of the most important, transformative moments in the archvillain's life.

I'm talking, of course, about Osoito.

That's the name young Bane used to refer to his teddy bear, which seems to be oso, Spanish of bear, modified with the "-ito," that means "dear, little." At least, that's what my memories of high school Spanish tell me the name means.

Bane was sentenced to prison for the crimes his father committed while he was still in the womb, and in the above image we see him, Osoito and, in the background, his despairing mother, wasting away. Note how pissed Osoito looks. Is that merely the way Barreto placed the lines above the plus bear's button eye suggesting an angry eyebrow, or is Osoito angered by the injustice of his pal's plight?

We don't know. But we do know that Bane carried Osoito with him everywhere he went in the prison and, together, they witnessed the occasional shiv-ing. Or shanking. Or el lancinar. (High school Spanish never covered prison slang, I'm afraid).

Osoito was with young Bane when his mother died, and the boy was moved to the general population. He was with him when the maybe-a-pedophile-although-the-script-makes-pains-to-suggest-otherwise ("He's mine!," the big, fat, sleazy looking inmate says in a dialogue bubble, "One so small as this can slip beneath the notice of the guards. He will be useful to me." The looks Nolan and Barreto draw on his face suggest something less pragmatic, however).

Just as that inmate lays his hand on Bane's shoulder, Trogg appears to defend the child, and, in the ensuing fight, Bane—and Osoito!—plummet over a railing and fall several stories to the stone floor below, Bane's head resting on a sticky pillow of his own spilled blood.

Bane awakens to see Osoito toddling off towards the light. (No Osoito! Don't go towards the light!)

But it is not heaven Osoito is taking ponderous teddy bear steps towards. Rather, it is a weirdo dream sequence, wherein little Bane meets a golden, glowing ghost of his own future self that tells the child he is "what you will become."

He continues,

A physical and mental paragon. The living embodiment of human superiority. The blood of kings runs in you. The blood of your father

The world is yours and will be yours one day. Men will be like cattle before you. Like sheep.And so on.

There is only one thing standing between that boy and that destiny, the vision tells him, and that is fear, which, conveniently enough given that this is a Batman comic, is in the form of a giant bat.

After clutching Osoito and screaming "Noooo....", Bane awakens from the dream sequence and it's 31 days later.

The child, he says, has died, and so he apparently put away childish things, like Osoito, and took out a knife, which he uses to repeatedly stab that big, fat guy who may or may not have been a pedophile.

Osoito is MIA for much of the rest of Bane's origin story, which involves him reaching adulthood, killing dudes, fighting rats and crabs and fish, doing a bunch of push-ups, sit-ups and pull-ups, reading, and being a human guinea pig for drug experiments, faking his own death and, ultimately, killing a shark with his bare hands (By prying open its jaws and then sticking his hand down it's throat to punch out its internal organs, just in case you were wondering how a guy might kill a shark with his bare hands).

A totally nude Bane then climbs out of the sea, sneaks into the warden's bed (!), takes him hostage, commandeers a helicopter and rescues his three friends. All while nude.

Once the helicopter is off of the prison island and out over the shark-infested sea, Osoito makes a surprise return to the narrative, as Bane hands a box to the warden:

And as he and it plummet into the waiting waves, the lid flies off revealing the contents of the box:

Gasp! To think, after all those years together, after all they had been through together, that is how Bane repays poor, loyal Osoito, by throwing him off a helicopter into shark-infested waters alongside the wicked warden who so abused Bane.

Moreso than any other act that preceded or followed, I think this is the incident which reveals Bane to be a truly evil villain.

But Osoito, like the kid he used to hang around with, turns out to be made of pretty stern stuff, and it takes more than the sharks of Santa Prisca to finish him off. While a cloud of blood in the water announces the fate of the warden, the last image we see of Osoito shows him floating safely to the surface...

...his head breaking the surface, his paws held high it what seems to be triumph! Osoito lives!

Unfortunately, that is, as far as I know, the last Osoito is ever seen. But I like to think he's still out there somewhere, perhaps comforting other prisoners of Pena Duro and starring in their own coma-induced visions as a sort of stuffed animal spirit guide, showing them the way to bigger and better things as Batman archenemies. Or perhaps lying on the beach, biding his time and plotting his revenge against Bane for casting him so callously aside.

Review: Batman Vs. Bane

Well this is a pretty strange packaging of some 1990s comics, recently assembled and published to appeal to readers who might understandably want to learn more about Bane and his dealing with the Ra’s al Ghul in the wake of July’s Dark Knight Rises movie.

The five comic books in here all had “Batman” in the title—this collects the 1998 miniseries Batman: Bane of the Demon the with 1993 special Batman: Vengeance of Bane #1 that first introduced the villain—but Batman himself just barely appears, and never actually fights Bane.

Batman appears in the last 14 pages of the Vengeance story, following clues laid out by Bane and his henchmen Bird, Zombie and Trogg, allowing the freshly-arrived-in-town Bane to stalk Batman and make the plans to break him that he would engage in during the “Knightfall” storyline.

He doesn’t appear at all in Bane of the Demon, save for a one-panel flashback and a one-panel prelude to the next story (the “Legacy” crossover story/event, which I’m not even sure is available in trade any more).

So Batman: Bane of the Demon might have been a more sensible title for the trade.

Both are by the same creative team of Bane co-creators Chuck Dixon and Graham Nolan, the latter inked by three different inkers throughout the collected comics, each of ‘em dynamite at their craft (Tom Palmer, Eduardo Barreto and Bill Sieknkiewicz).

The origin story in Vengeance is a solid one that aged pretty well. I remember being extremely impressed by it and by Bane when I first read it as a teenager—Dixon sure put in the work to thoroughly introduce Bane as a credible figure of menace, a feat that seems even more impressive when one compares it to more recently-arrived Batman villains like, say, Hush, or any of the many new characters created by Grant Morrison during his run.

By spending the first half of the book showing us the doomed Bane growing up in one of the world’s worst prisons, it also goes a way toward making the villain seem sympathetic. Even once he crosses the line and starts killing dudes by the dozen, one can still appreciate the up-by-the-bootstraps nature of his origin story, which included millions of push-ups and sit-ups, daily underwater fights with fish (his prison cell was under sea level), and a lot of reading.

They take Bane-as-sympathetic figure even further in Bane of the Demon, as he is essentially the hero of the piece—he’s still pretty monstrous, and continues to kill his opponents by the roomful, but Dixon plays him as extremely cunning and ruthless, a brainier villain than a brawny one, and the entire story offers an interesting exploration of the character by contrasting him to Ra’s al Ghul, who bests him in some ways and is bested by him in others, and Batman, who is barely present, but whose boots Bane finds himself in when Talia takes a (verytemporary) sexual interest in him and Ra’s considers him as a potential heir.

The book concludes with three of the two-page origins that ran at the end of 52 and Countdown (Say, did DC ever collect all of these from both weeklies into a trade? It’s kind of too bad they went to all that trouble and then rebooted, negating all of the relevant information in these; they oughta do ‘em again for the New 52 continuity, but then, DC obviously doesn’t actually know it’s own phantom five-year continuity at this point).

There’s two from Countdown, both written by Scott Beatty.

The one for Bane is drawn by Graham Nolan, which sees the artist basically redrawing the same scenes from his Vengeance, only inking himself and given better, more modern coloring.

The Ra’s al Ghul one is drawn and colored by Cliff Chiang, and it’s kind of a mess, using the first five panels to retell Birth of the Demon, one panel to retell the original Denny O’Neil/Neal Adams Ra's storyline and then closing with three panels covering Batman: Death and the Maidens and “The Resurrection of Ra’s al Ghul” storyline. It’s a lot of story, and Beatty has to over-stuff the pages with narration boxes to get it all in. Revealing a weakness in the Grant Morrison spearheaded “Resurrection” storyline, I’d read it as it was published, and had no idea that much of what Beatty says happened in his summary actually happened in that mess of a storyline.

From 52, there’s the Mark Waid-written, Andy Kubert-drawn two-page, six-panel origin of Batman. It’s notable, perhaps, for its variance from “Year One,” at least in the staging and dressing of the bat-through-the-window scene, which isn’t the fevered, semi-religious event it is in Frank Miller and David Mazzuchelli’s telling, but a more calm and casual one in which Bruce Wayne is writing a letter rather than bleeding to death after wounds sustained while trying to fight crime not dressed up as a creature of the night.

Despite the questionable decisions of titling and packaging the trade, these are fine stories from Batman’s fruitful 1990s, featuring superior art from one of the better of his artists of that era. Personally, I had a blast re-reading Vengeance and reading Bane of the Demon for the first time. I picked this up after Dark Knight Rises, so I read all of Bane’s dialogue in Tom Hardy’s voice, which…oh man, I want to go reread “Knightfall” and Secret Six in Hardy’s Bane voice now…

Like Steven Seagal, J'onn J'onnz is...Hard To Kill.

What's with all this talk about killing the Martian Manhunter, lately? DC's not seriously considering killing off one of their "Big Seven" heroes in the upcoming Final Crisis series just because they think people can't possibly be interested in universe-wide stories that don't involve death, do they?

I'll be pretty bummed out if J'onn J'onnz is killed, even though I'm sure it will be temporary. While he's never really broken through and become a transcendant sort of character, he's been around for decades, which indicates a certain amount of lingering appeal. Something about the Martian Manhunter clearly works on some level, even if it's not often the company and/or itss creators find the right way to isolate and capitalize upon what it is exactly. And this perpetual second banana status is something that I personally find enormously appealing; like his slightly more popular unpopular Justice League peer Aquaman, J'onn is a cool character that its easy to feel proprietary about. Like, as a fan, you feel that you see his true greatness, even if so few others can, you know?

If Rich Johnston's rumor reporting proves to be something more than a rumor, and if Netzer's Save J'onn campaign is unsuccessful and DC does kill off the big guy, then it looks like the person who will be acting as executioner would be Grant Morrison, and this is a somewhat odd role for Morrison, given that he clearly seems to like and "get" J'onn.

Morrison kept J'onn front and center throughout his run on JLA, and a great deal of what John Ostrander and Tom Mandrake would put into their short-lived Martian Manhunter monthly came from plot points, changes and innovations suggested by Morrison's JLA and DC One Million work. Speaking of which, Morrison imagined a future of the DC universe one million months after the debut of Action Comics, and in the 853rd Century, J'onn J'onnz was still alive, albeit transformed into some sort of Martian god, having bonded with his entire planet.

According to Morrison's take on the character, J'onn J'onnz controls his body on a molecular level—that is, he can control every single molecule of his body. That's a pretty impressive power, and coupled with all his others (Superman's + Charles Xavier's + The Vision's), make J'onn J'onnz probably the most unbeatable superhero of them all.

He is just not going to be easy to kill (Note that in boty The Dark Knight Strikes Again and Kingdom Come the creators found ways to take J'onn out of the future of the DC Universe without killing him). Now, if anyone can come up with a good way to off J'onn, it would be Morrison, who has proved time and time again that he's got a pretty good imagination between his ears.

He'll need it to come up with a convincing way to off J'onn.

Let's look at a couple examples of J'onn's unkillability, shall we?

First, let's examine a scene from 2001's prestige format JLA Versus Preadator, by John Ostrander, Graham Nolan and Randy Elliott. Now, stop your sniggering. This is actually a pretty good comic book, particularly by the standards of crossovers between DC superheroes with Dark Horse's Predator or Aliens comics (I just read Superman and Batman Vs. Aliens and Predator a couple weeks ago, and it was seriously one of the stupidest things I've ever read; it was the sort of comic that I had a hard time believing actually existed and wasn't just a bad dream I was having).

The story is pretty basic, leaning more toward the DCU side of things than the Predator side. The alien hunters who had previously vexed Superman and Batman decide to hunt the JLA en force, and they are given super-powers by The Dominators (whom you can learn more about in Invasion!; or at least you could if DC would collect the damn series into a trade!). So we get to see things we should never see, like a stretch-powered Predator vs. Plastic Man, a shrinking Predator vs. The Atom, and so forth.

What I found most appealing about it, beyond the fact that it wasn't anywhere as near as stupid as a lot of the DC/Dark Horse crossovers, was Nolan's art. He has a real nice clean, smooth, classic-looking line, and he's an ace storyteller who handles action and acting superbly. The production values on this thing really draw attention to how great Nolan is, and after seeing his work on the Batman books for so long in the '90s, it was quite a kick to see him drawing thre rest of DC's biggest heroes.

Anyway, what does this have to do with killing J'onn? Okay, check it out. Superman and Green Lantern Kyle Rayner are just returning to the JLA Watchtower and what do they find but


Oh my God! Someone totally cut off J'onn's head! And put it on a spike! He's clearly, definitely dead now! You just don't get up and walk away from a wound like that! Superman explains Predator aliens to Kyle, having met them in Superman Vs. Predator, and concludes that they must have killed J'onn...



But what's this? Aaaa!



J'onn survived decapitation by moving his brain into another part of his body. Then it's a simple matter of someone handing him his head and sticking it back on top of his neck hole. A quick sit down in a ring-generated easy chair, and he's as good as new. Gross, but good as new nonetheless.

Let's look at another of J'onn's near death experiences, this one from his own title. It was part of the story that introduced us to his evil twin brother Ma'alefa'ak, which is anglicized into the rather evil-sounding "Malefic." This is again by John Ostrander, and features art by Tom Mandrake. I think their Martian Manhunter series was vastly underrated, and makes for a great read for anyone interested in the DCU at the time (the amount of guest-stars made it something like a Brave and the Bold style team-up book most of the time). If there's one storyline that should be collected into a trade, it's this one, as it is essentially a Morrison Era JLA story, which happens to focus on J'onn.

Anyway, in Martian Manhunter #8, Superman unequivocally declares J'onn J'onnz dead. He recovered his skull, all of the flesh burned off of it, from a crash site on the moon, and laid it on the table in front of his teammates (luckily it was just a meeting table and not one anyone actually ate off of, because that's hella unhygenic).



How did J'onn end up as just a skull in Superman's hands? Well, in the previous issue, Malefic tricked him into a booby-trapped Martian jump ship, the interior of which exploded into flames, the only thing that can rob J'onn of his powers and, as his belly mouth told Superman in that Predator story above, it's the only thing that can truly destroy him. Here's how that went down:




How can he possibly survive that?

With some really, really weird foreplanning, of course. The next time we see J'onn, it's as a little hand with a face on it, which he teleported down to Z'onn Z'orr, the Martian city that the Hyperclan used as their base in JLA: New World Order, and which was serving as J'onn's version of a Fortress of Solitude afterwards.



In flashback we learn what he did, exactly:




He created a "mirror self," which included both duplicating his brain in his hand and then moved his "Ta'ash," or "soul" in English, into his hand, Martian vision-ed it off and teleported it to safety, allowing the rest of his body and his other brain to walk into a death trap.

Then he simply borrows mass from the planet Earth (Martians borrow mass from their planet, which is how they're able to change sizes and desnsity), and looks for some threads:





These come from the semisntient Martian flower the Zo'ok, which was Ostrander's post-Crisis version of this guy:


Of course, J'onn recently changed his clothes after touching the super-evil mind of Black Adam in World War III, and it's not clear if he's wearing a Zo'ok which just zip, fwip, twip, whipped into a different configuration, or if Ostrander's work on Martian culture is all out the window post-Infinite Crisis (J'onn's new skull shape, for example, is neither his native Martian private one nor his Martian public head-shape). At any rate, old-school Zook is back in continuity, appearing in that dumb-ass Superman/Batman story that was a six-part sequel to a not-very good story by Mark Verheiden and Ed Benes in the pre-Infinite Crisis Superman titles.

So what have we learned? Killing J'onn J'onnz is a lot more difficult than it may look. And, also, never listen to Superman if he tells you J'onn's is dead. He's 0-2 when it comes to pronouncing his teammate dead now.