Detective Chimp and Rex the Wonder Dog re-team in 1992's Green Lantern/Flash crossover "Gorilla Warfare"

While The Flash is technically Gorilla Grodd's archenemy, a couple of DC writers must have so enjoyed the match-up between the psychic super-gorilla and Rex the Wonder Dog during William Messner-Loeb's Flash run that they decided to stage a rematch a few years later. Of course, the story would unfold in a pair of issues of 1992's The Flash and Green Lantern, and so the title heroes of those books are the real stars of the story "Gorilla Warfare."

I, of course, am more interested in a pair of guest-stars, however: Rex the Wonder Dog and Bobo, the Detective Chimp. Here the pair of old animal heroes both have new jobs, working for a new top-secret government agency, one that would never actually appear again.

The story arc was collected in 2017's The Flash by Mark Waid: Book Two. Waid wrote the two Flash issues participating in the crossover, which were both pencilled by Greg Laroque and inked by Roy Richardson. As for the Green Lantern issue, these were written by Gerard Jones, pencilled by M.D. Bright and inked by Romeo Tanghal. 

Yeah, this is a Gerard Jones story. As you likely already know, Jones was a prolific and talented writer who produced plenty of Green Lantern and Justice League stories for DC Comics and co-created Prime for Malibu Comics...and then, in 2018, plead guilty to possession of child pornography and served a prison sentence. 

That fact thus complicates the reading of his past work, and it makes it hard to enjoy a fun superhero comic about gorillas and animal heroes, knowing what one knows about the darkness of the writer and his appalling crimes. He's one of the comics creators I have struggled with whether or not it was even worth engaging with his work at all at this point. I've decided to do so here in order to be complete in my following of the history of particular comic book characters, but I also wanted to make sure I noted this aspect of Jones' biography while doing so.

I certainly wouldn't buy any work from him, and I don't think DC will give anyone the opportunity to do so. This collection, which I borrowed from the library, was published between the time Jones was first arrested and when he plead guilty. I'm not sure if DC will republish it in the future or not; I just noticed the other day that 1990's Secret Origins #48, which contains an eight-page Rex the Wonder Dog origin by Jones and pencil artist Paris Cullins, is one of the few issues of that series not available on Amazon's Comixology. 

Oddly though, Rex's entry in the timeline in New History of the DC Universe is illustrated by the title panel from that comic, including Jones' writing credit:

One imagines that was a mistake that was overlooked in the editing process. 

With Jones' crimes thus acknowledged, let's try to focus on the story he and Waid told for a bit.

The first two chapters, Green Lantern #30 and Flash #69 are interesting in that they run parallel to one another, rather than occurring in strict consecutive order. 

Both open with the same scene, Justice League Europe moving into their new headquarters in an English castle, the team's new leader Green Lantern Hal Jordan spotting Flash Wally West from the air and calling out "Hey! Twinkletoes!" The pair then chat a bit, their teammates Power Girl, Crimson Fox, Elongated Man and Sue Dibny all putting in brief appearances (In the GL issue, Jones has Sue scolding Ralph, "If you paid as much attention to your step as you do to Power Girl's chest-- we might survive this experience!")

And both issues end with Flash and Green Lantern unexpectedly running into one another in an African jungle near the cloaked Gorilla City, shouting simultaneously, "What are you doing here?!"

In between those scenes, each of these issues show what their respective heroes are up to...as well as what's going on in Gorilla City.

In Green Lantern #30, the first part of the crossover, we see the young super-gorillas of Gorilla City talking politics at a cafe. Some of these are loyal to the worldview of the imprisoned criminal Grodd. And in n his cell, Gorilla Grodd receives a message from big-headed Green Lantern villain Hector Hammond and he then psychically informs his young gorilla followers, "The time is now!"

They break him out of jail, and all flee the city for the jungle. Grodd's plan, he tells his followers, is to find a nearby third chunk of a special meteorite that fell to earth; the rays of one such chunk had gifted their tribe with the brain power they now enjoyed, turning them into super-gorillas, while Hammond had long ago found the second chunk, the rays of which evolved his mind and gave him his powers...and unfortunate appearance. (Jones here seems to be ignoring the new, post-Crisis origin of Gorilla City from Secret Origins #40, in which it was a crystal aboard a crashland-ing alien spaceship that gave the gorillas their smarts; ironically, that comic was edited by Jones' co-writer here, Mark Waid.)

King Solovar immediately calls his old ally Barry Allen for help, his distress call coming through a special radio that is now housed in The Flash Museum. When the museum calls the JLE HQ looking for current Flash, he's MIA, but Hal goes to the museum in his stead.

There he's met by a mysterious blonde man with a receding hairline I did not recognize (and I imagine you won't either, if we've been reading the same old comics lately), probably because his hair is blonde instead of red. The man offers to explain everything if GL accompanies to a place in Washington D.C. where "few...people...have ever been."

Jones draws the scene out and layers on suspense. 

They go to the zoo, where this happens:

Then they take an elevator down, pass by some guard dogs and enter a room filled with desks at which sit chimpanzees working on computers. 

The man, who is psychically referred to by one of those dogs as "Sheriff", tells Green Lantern:

I don't blame you for being a little boggled, GL. I've been an aide here for years, and it still throws me. 

Welcome to the Bureau of Amplified Animals.

Where animals who've been given unnaturally high intellects--either through sports of nature or scientific experiments--have been gathered to help mankind!

This is, of course, Sheriff Chase, formerly of Oscaloosa County, Florida. And who is he an aide to,exactly? 

Who else? 

Bobo doesn't seem to have started using his middle initial or last name just yet. He's also going without his signature hat, but instead wears a vest and, perhaps most surprisingly, seems to be capable of psychic speech now. 

Like the guard dogs, he "speaks" out loud, but his dialogue bubbles lack tails, and have those little lines about them, indicating that he is communicating telepathically. How? Well, this story never offers an explanation, but as this follows "Whatever Happened to Rex the Wonder Dog?" and Secret Origins #40, we can assume it is either due to his having drank from the magical fountain of youth or because microscopic aliens had meddled with his brain back in Africa all those years ago.

Bobo and the sheriff explain that while some "amplified" animals want to work with humans, others work against them, animals like Grodd. Bobo refers to the events of Keystone City we recently read about as the first time the Bureau took on Grodd—a bit of a retcon, as it wasn't clear how or why Rex appeared then; at the time, it seemed as if Rex was working with the United States army—and so Bobo assigns GL a partner, "the one agent who's gone head to head with Grodd." 

Rex the Wonder Dog, of course. 

On their flight to Africa, Rex communicates with Hal in the same psychic fashion that Bobo had earlier, although he notes "without Major Dennis as my 'familiar' you'd never be able to pick up my thoughts." So, having Dennis—presumably Daniel Dennis, although here he is a major instead of the lieutenant colonel he was in DC Comics Presents, which I think is a demotion, isn't it?—seems to allow Rex to communicate with humans. I wonder if it is the same with Bobo, and the sheriff is his human familiar? 

And what has Flash been up to while King Solovar and Green Lantern were looking for him? (Don't they have communicators for these purposes? Or, this being 1992, beepers?) For that we check out Flash #69.

There we see that, after ogling Laroque's Power Girl, who then had a triangular cut-out in the chest of her costume rather than a circular one, and chatting with Hal, The Flash heads back to his home in the states and spends a few pages getting ready for a TV interview with Linda Park at super-speed.

On his jog over to the meet her, however, he sees Hector Hammond sitting in his flying chair and using his telekinesis to attack a bus. They fight a bit, but Hammond eventually overcomes Flash mentally, and then uses him as transportation. Using psychic reins of pink energy, Hammond forces Wally to pull him to Africa, where he's to meet Grodd and join him in harnessing the power of the third chunk of meteorite. 

That brings us to Green Lantern #31, where the heroes Flash and GL finally literally get on the same page again. The two heroes make short work of Grodd's gorillas, but Hammond takes out Hal in an amusingly brutal and embarrassing way...

...and then uses his powers to extract Grodd from his grudge match against Rex, escaping their fight with the heroes so they can instead seek out the meteorite. 

They soon find it, having essentially followined the trail of wildly mutated animals affected by the special rays. 

When the heroes catch up with them, Hammond tries to betray Grodd, as Grodd knew he would, and Grodd takes the power for himself, producing an interesting new look for himself in the process: 

Grodd then uses his new amplified powers to mutate the title heroes. Flash gets a preposterously big head, one so big he can't balance well enough to get up and run (this is likely an homage to the cover of 1968's Flash #177), while we're told that Hal has been transformed into a caveman...but he basically just looks like he now has big, weird hair and needs a shave. 

Oh, and Grodd has also turned Hammond into a bestial caveman, albeit one with a normal-sized head. 

While the now wild Hal seeks to destroy the big-headed Flash, Wally is able to defeat him through a well-aimed toss of his yellow boot—this was back when GL was powerless against the color yellow, remember—and then, using his big old brain, he is able to harness the power of the meteorite to restores himself and Hal to normal.

Not everything is normal, though. Rex can now talk out loud,  just like a human being:

To make a long story short, the trio then manages to find Gorilla City, break through its forcefield and battle the big-headed Grodd and his army of armed super-gorillas. Bobo literally parachutes in, first saving Major Dennis from the caveman-ized Hammond and then leaping on Grodd's back at a pivotal moment to save Rex who, given the respite, is then able to use the"force of mind" abilities of Grodd's that the new meteorite gave him to defeat the evil gorilla, reducing him to the intelligence of a normal gorilla.

Solovar and his people imprison the villains—Hammond still having the mind and body of a caveman with an appropriately-sized head, and Grodd with an oversized but not gigantic head, Laroque drawing him with smaller head than Bright did—and our heroes head home, Rex retaining the power of speech, but not sure how long it will last.

Well, not all of the heroes head home. Bobo, last seen being fed peeled fruit by a pair of gorilla women, says he intends to take his eight weeks of comp time in Gorilla City, among similarly intelligent apes.

And that seems to be where DC would leave Rex and Detective Chimp for a while. 

Rex wouldn't reappear until 1996's Superboy and The Ravers #1, after which point he would join the team and appear in most issues of the short-lived series (Unless, of course, you want to count Rex's one-panel cameo among the crowd of heroes in 1995's Guy Gardner: Warrior #29). 

Bobo would next appear in a one-page scene in 1998's Martian Manhunter Annual #2, part of that summer's JLApe annual event story (Which I plan on revisiting in the near-ish future). (That is, unless you want to count Bobo's cameos among crowds of heroes in the just-mentioned Warrior #29 or the new "Afterschock" story in 1998's Crisis on Infinite Earths collection).

And the Bureau of Amplified Animals? Well, apparently "Gorilla Warfare" was the sole arc in which it appeared. 

Perhaps after Bobo and Rex left the government decided to shut it down...

I don't really want to talk about 2003's JLA/The Spectre: Soul War, but I do want to talk about how Batman and Hal Jordan finally make up

I was such a fan of Grant Morrison, Howard Porter and John Dell's JLA that I continued to read the series long after their run concluded (I kept reading until the very end of the book, in fact) and to pick up most if not all of the JLA-branded spin-off one-shots and mini-series. Some of these were good, many of them were not. 

One that I had put in the "not" category was 2003's two-issue JLA/The Spectre: Soul War, which, in 2026, I remembered nothing about other than the fact that I didn't like it at the time and that it featured the Hal Jordan Spectre, not the Jim Corrigan one. 

In the spirit of revisiting later JLA stories from the remove of twenty-some years in addition to having read or re-read a bunch of Spectre comics lately, it seemed natural enough to give Soul War another try. 

The series was written by J.M. DeMatteis, who had written Hal Jordan-as-The Spectre meeting with the JLA in 1999's JLA #35 as well as the entirety of the 2001-2003 fourth volume of The Spectre, the one starring Hal (In fact, Soul War was released the same month as Spectre #25, the third-to-last issue of the series; given that, I wonder if this mini-series was planned as a mini-series, or if the cancellation forced DeMatteis to repurpose a planned Spectre story arc here). 

Joining DeMatteis were pencil artist Darryl Banks and inker Paul Neary. 

This series came out in January and February 2003, the same month as JLA #75 and #76, just after the Joe Kelley, Doug Mahnke and Tom Nguyen team had completed their "Obsidian Age" epic. Therefore, a real stickler might have a hard time trying to orient the particular Justice League line-up that appears in DeMatteis' miniseries with the goings on in JLA. 

That's because the team here consists of the one from Mark Waid's run, the Big Seven plus Plastic Man, although Aquaman had been MIA for a while by that point. 

Complicating things further, Green Lantern Kyle Rayner is drawn wearing his new, terrible, Jim Lee-designed costume seen on the cover of 2002's Green Lantern #151 (the one with the dog collar) in Soul War. He had started wearing in the pages of JLA by the ramp up to "Obsidian Age", but that was a good year since Aquaman had been on the team, having been "killed" during the "Our Worlds At War" event (Actually, he was shunted into the prehistoric past; "Obsidian Age" was partially about a rescue mission to find him, although he wouldn't rejoin the team again until somewhere around 2004 arc "Syndicate Rules"). 

Wait, I guess I'm that sort of stickler, huh?

Anyway, enough set-up. I don't really want to discuss the series at great length, or at least not in great detail, because I still don't like it...although it's not a terribly objectionable comic in any particular way, and we've certainly gotten many, many far worse Justice League comics since its release. 

It's just very much of a piece with DeMatteis' Spectre, and indulges in quite a bit of sometimes heady, psuedo-scientific New Age-y concepts, a sharp 180 from the more simple, black-and-white Spectre of volume three (A likely result of Hal and DeMatteis trying to turn the Spectre from the Spirit of Vengeance to the Spirit of Redemption). I

t's also awfully wordy, the first page of each issue making me blanche and, inevitably, wait a few days between reading issue #1 and #2.

It's also not much of a Justice League story. Of the eight Leaguers, most of them are more-or-less irrelevant to the proceedings (This is in sharp contrast to DeMatteis' own JLA #35). The Flash, Aquaman and Wonder Woman get a few lines apiece, but hardly do much that demands their presence in the story at all (There is a panel or so in which Wonder Woman's lasso of truth play a role, I suppose, and one instance where Aquaman uses his telepathy to give J'onn's a boost). For the most part, they could be replaced by pretty much any other DC character, as they are there just to make this seem more like a JLA story than it might were they not.

Additionally, Plastic Man is fairly superfluous. He appears in many panels and gets a lot of lines—more than the three heroes I just mentioned—but he is mostly limited to dumb jokes, jokes which aren't really funny or insightful enough to truly serve as comedy relief, and jokes which all of the other characters more-or-less ignore, as if they aren't even aware he's around. (There is a short sequence in the second issue where, Hal's narration tells us, Plas is best suited to combat in the "imaginal" realm of the mind that has become the setting, as he is used to immediately, effortlessly transforming himself, and thus, better than any of the heroes understands "the fine line between mind and manifestation"; this was a good eight months or so before Kelley would make a similar point about Plas' imaginative, almost instinctive transformations making him perfectly-suited to a shape-changing battle with a Martian at the climax of the "Trial By Fire" arc in JLA).

Otherwise, DeMatteis really could have just used Superman, Batman, Kyle and maybe Martian Manhunter here and the story wouldn't change much, aside from maybe being a bit shorter and tighter. This is, really, the story of how Batman finally came to accept Hal Jordan as a hero again after the events of "Emerald Twilight" and Zero Hour and nearly a decade of being a relentless critic of the Justice Leaguer-turned murderous supervillain-turned Spirit of Vengeance Redemption.

That's the bit I want to focus on here.

But first, let me briefly summarize the story that DeMatteis embeds Batman's finally coming around within.

Earth is being invaded by alien giant monsters, and the Justice League is trying to fight them off. The twist here is that the alien invaders aren't from outer space, but rather from deep within the minds of humanity, somehow manifesting from within the consciousness of the population and, at times, taking god-like shapes pulled from the collective unconscious. They also have a rather unfortunate name: The Trans.

The Spectre is joining the League in their fight, in the most literal way possible. He meditates for a few pages on the nature of Superman's character and then, as The Trans are dissolving The Man of Steel, he steps in and fuses with him, becoming a giant Spectre/Superman hybrid that blasts the Trans monster away with eyebeams.

He then moves on to Batman and the sequence repeats. A two-page spread shows the process also occurs with Aquaman, Green Lantern and Wonder Woman...sort of. In the case of Diana, Hal doesn't directly fuse with her, and seems to either empower a bunch of Amazon warriors, or perhaps divide into several green-cloaked Amazons...? The art, which is usually strong and clear, can't explain exactly what's happening here like DeMatteis' Hal narration can. It makes me curious if the writer or DC were somehow reluctant to have Hal-as-Spectre take on a female form, if only for a panel here...

In a meeting around the table in the Watchtower, Batman suggests all nine of them "merge with the Spectre--creating an amalgam being capable of defeating these trans-creatures." (I wonder if DeMatteis would have used that particular word were it not for the DC/Marvel crossover event, and instead went with "hybrid" or "composite" or "gestalt"...? At any rate, it was a safe bet that superhero readers were by this point quite familiar with the word "amalgam"...)

The resultant amalgam being is pretty dumb-looking, calling to mind Marvel Comics' and Combos' Combo Man. 

Though that's good for a few pages, Martian Manhunter finally realizes the Trans can't be beat on the physical plane. A little investigation into memories of a world the invaders have conquered later, The Spectre instructs Superman and Flash to build a device with eight beds at super-speed, and then The Spectre will temporarily kinds sorta kill the League, allowing them to fight the Trans on their true turf, "the realm of pure consciousness."

"Physical force is useless in this...soul-war we're fighting," J'onn says, saying the title of the comic book out loud.

That's the end of the first issue. The second begins with our heroes in the new setting, where each of them is immediately seduced by potential paradises of their minds' own making. We get glimpses of some of these, but not what it is that makes Batman...or, at least, his consciousness or soul or whatever, which is here shaped just like Batman, smile and cry at the same time ("What Batman saw...what he created out of his buried wounds and longings...is not for me to share," Hal narrates). 

Batman is able to shake these fantasies off, though. There are many, many pages of battle in this mental plane, but the Trans eventually takes everyone out of the fight...except for Batman, who argues with them by fighting them, and eventually seems to win, punching them out. (This is very much a Batman-is-the-best kind of story).

When the Trans are seemingly defeated, The Spectre finds that the machinery keeping the League in suspended animation has been sabotaged by a human agent of the Trans (a TV psychic introduced in the first four pages of the series) and, to bring them all back to life, he has to sacrifice his "existence"; this means the League awakens while Hal is drifting in a "non-place" towards complete oblivion.

The heroes won't let this occur to Hal, though, and J'onn suggests that since humanity's belief in the League helped them defeat the Trans (somehow, I can't claim that I picked up everything DeMatteis was laying down here), perhaps their belief in Hal can now save him. 

So with the TV psychic, an actual medium who was able to channel The Trans, they all sit around the meeting table and hold hands, a ring-generated crystal ball that Kyle created to be "a focal point for our collective unconscious" in the middle of the table.

Here Banks' imagery is evocative of Mike Sekowsky's iconic cover of 1963's Justice League of America #21, depicting the original Justice League seeming to conjure the Justice Society in a seance around a crystal ball. (Which was certainly no accident).

The plan seems to be working for a few panels, but then stops, and when Aquaman demands of the psychic to explain why, she sadly says there was a "weak link among you....one mind, one heart that didn't believe."

Wonder Woman and J'onn look immediately to Batman, who Banks draws standing up, his hands flat on the table, shadow completely obscuring his face, even the white triangles of his eyes.

Batman explains:

I can't give--what I don't have. 

The Hal I knew and respected--the Hal I called friend...died--a long time ago. 

Let him stay dead. 

Just as J'onn begins to argue that the fate awaiting Hal is now far worse than death, Batman screams in pain, as something Hal had implanted in his brain and called a "parting gift" earlier in the story is activated. Batman begins to rationalize what he's seeing, but a voice tells him that the pain is the result of his own resistance, and that his heart knows what he's seeing is true.

The voice is that of his mother, and his parents appear before him (Although Banks draws Thomas Wayne clean-shaven, so maybe it's not them...or maybe there are no mustaches in Heaven, I don't know).

Martha Wayne explains that the vision Batman saw of them in "imaginal space" earlier, that deepest desire that Hal said in narration he couldn't share with the readers on Batman's behalf, was a trick, which is why Batman was able to see through it and save the League from their own individual false paradises, but that this vision really was real, The Spectre answering Batman's "deepest prayers."

Rising from the floor after the episode, Batman demands everyone circle around the table, join hands and try again, and this time he shouts into empty space at The Spectre. I'll quote it at length here:

If we can't reach him--it's because Hal is still clinging to his guilt and shame!

It's because he believes he DESERVES an eternity of non-existence! Well, I don't Jordan! I don't!

Listen to me, Hal--I was wrong about you!

You were the best, the brightest, among us! And when you fell--it...rattled me--and it made me wonder:

If a man as good and decent as you could go wrong...what hope was there for the rest of us?

But I see now--that one of the reasons you were reborn as The Spectre--was to give all of us hope! I see now--that you're more of a hero than ever!

And it works. Hal reappears, and Batman takes his old friend's hand, saying he meant every word of what he said, and ending with "Welcome home."

It's not the last word of the comic. The Flash says "Whaddya know? Bats is smiling! Almost." And Hal's narration concludes with "And 'Almost'... ...is good enough for me." 

But it might as well be. For all the weird-ass gobbledygook on the mental plane or within "the imaginal" or wherever this soul war was fought, this is the real development of the story, DeMatteis—and DC—finally resolving the enmity between Batman and Hal that has defined their relationship for about a decade, from the end of Hal's life to his afterlife. 

Re-reading this scene today, I'm curious if Geoff Johns had read this series or not. Most obviously, Johns' 2004 Green Lantern: Rebirth included a big, blunt, clumsy retcon that more or less excused the atrocities Hal committed as Parallax (the whole possessed by a space god thing) and, if I recall correctly, he even added a twist in explaining why it was The Spectre had bonded with Hal. 

In the process, Johns retroactively changed, or perhaps a better term would be that he overwrote, the work of previous writers of Hal Jordan going back years, including that of Ron Marz, Dan Jurgens and others. Because Johns kept writing Hal and Green Lantern books for so long though, and did so much work on the mythology (mythology I suspect was cut short by the New 52 reboot that he himself had kinda sorta initiated with Flashpoint), I think it ultimately worked, proving a clever way to thread the needle of Hal's journey from hero to villain to hero again make sense, for all of Marz's Hal stories to remain canonical but to let the character off the hook for his heel turn. 

But I wonder how it might have affected DeMatteis' work on the character as The Spectre. (As I've said before, I didn't read most of that series, and the issues I did I did mostly because Norm Breyfogle had drawn them). 

At the very least, Soul War doesn't seem to have factored into Johns' take on Hal Jordan, as Johns went right back to writing Batman as being highly suspicious, even hostile toward Hal. 

Of course, Soul War, like a lot of those JLA spin-offs I kept compulsively buying, has never actually been collected into trade which, I've increasingly begun to think, could be an indication of whether or not DC considers a story canonical, or, at least, how important the publisher might regard a story. 

I suppose that may change at some point, it's not hard to imagine DeMatteis' Spectre getting its own omnibus for example, but for now at least, this is a story only available to those who were reading DC Comics in 2003...and those, I suppose, who can find it in back issue bins or on Amazon. 

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

 I wanted to share two particular images from this story with you before I go. 

First, when The Spectre joins the League around their meeting table in the first issue, he is fairly giant, towering above them all.  Batman sasses him—"Do you think you could possibly come down to our level--or are you just too far above us?"—and Hal apologizes, shrinking and changing from his Spectre form into that of Hal Jordan.

Notably, here Hal is still looking more middle-aged than his peers, and he's wearing that dumb bomber jacket that I hate. 

My hatred of it is perhaps irrational, and might just tie to the fact that I dislike Hal Jordan as a character but, I don't know. It just seems to give off this Baby Boomer, divorced dad, mid-life crisis vibe to me. Maybe that's not fair—Hal is, or was, literally a pilot after all—but rather than looking cool, it's always struck me as lame but trying too hard to look cool. 

I've long associated the jacket with Geoff Johns—I think he had Hal start wearing his dad's jacket after his dad died in a plane crash?—so I was kind of surprised to see it here. Was DeMatteis (and/or Banks, I suppose) the first to put Hal in such a jacket? Was it present throughout that volume of The Spectre? Or was Hal wearing it back when he was still Green Lantern the first time?

I don't know. But I still think it looks lame. 

My favorite image from the whole adventure is also from the first issue. When The Spectre imports the League into his own psyche, where they investigate Hal's memory of an alien world that has already fallen to the Trans, they are attacked.

Hal is being taken by the Trans, and Batman leaps to his rescue, at one point reaching up to grab the giant Spectre by the cape and shake him awake.

I don't know, I just like that image of a tiny little Batman shaking a giant by the lapels...

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

Is this my last post on The Spectre for a while...? Maybe! I confess that while writing this, I read a synopsis of the first issues of DeMatteis' Spectre, which featured guest-appearances by Batman, Superman and Zauriel, and now I'm curious to revisit those. Reading JLA #35 and the interactions between Hal-as-The-Spectre and Zauriel did make me curious about their relationship.

 I think I have them in a longbox somewhere...

Revisiting 1999's Day of Judgment

The 2005 Countdown to Infinite Crisis-branded miniseries Day of Vengeance that we discussed the other day was preceded by the five-issue Day of Judgment event series back in 1999, which also centered on the threat of a rampaging Spectre...and the title of which Day of Vengeance was apparently meant to echo. 

I just re-read it. Unable to find a copy of the 2013 collection of it in the library, I was forced to pull the single issues from one of my long boxes; luckily it was fairly easy to find among my fairly disorganized collection. 

I found it a very pleasant reminder that DC's crossover events don't have to be about cosmic goings-on to rewrite, reboot or rejigger their continuity; that's just a choice the publisher seems to keep making. Over and over and over again.

This one was written by Geoff Johns, fairly early in his career in comics. By the time the first issue of Day of Judgment hit the stands, he was only a few issues into his Stars and S.T.R.I.P.E. (the fourth issue of which was a Day of Judgment crossover) and he hadn't yet replaced James Robinson as David Goyer's JSA co-writer. (I guess DC is a little quicker to hand their iconic heroes over to a new writer if said writer was already working in Hollywood, as Johns was...?).

I am curious about just how much of the plot was conceived by Johns himself and what points editorial may have mandated, as one of the big things to occur in the series is that the dead Hal Jordan, a character Johns has long since demonstrated a love for, is rescued from Purgatory and becomes the new host of The Spectre. 

Although this didn't quite bring Hal back to life, it did put him back in circulation and allow for him to continue the redemption arc that DC had started with 1996's Final Night. Still, it would be Johns himself who would decouple Hal and The Spectre a few years later, in 2004's Green Lantern: Rebirth, so it doesn't seem like Hal-as-The Spectre was a concept that Johns loved or anything.

For this series, Johns was paired with artist Matt Smith, who had previously done a little work for DC, including issues of Sandman Mystery Theater, Starman and the short-lived 1996 reboot of Marv Wolfman's Night Force. The comics he drew just prior to Day of Judgment were Lobster Johnson and Abe Sapien back-ups in Mike Mignola's Hellboy: Box Full of Evil, which might help explain just how Mignola-esque the art in Day of Judgment looks. (I've tried to include a bit more art than I usually do in my reviews, as Smith isn't as popular an artist as many of those I write about here; do note that the colors might be slightly off).

Smith's figures are thick and somewhat squat, and the imagery simple yet bold. Working with inker Steve Mitchell and layout artist Chris Jones, Day of Judgment reads a lot like Mike Mignola drawing a script intended for Howard Porter. I would say it answers the question of what a DC crossover series drawn by Mignola might look like but, of course, we already got one of those in 1988's Cosmic Odyssey.

But artwork evocative of the Mike Mignola of the late '90s is pretty much perfect for comic set partially in Hell and is full of demons and devils, including Jack Kirby's Etrigan, The Demon and the by that point increasingly Hellboy-esque Blue Devil. 

The story, told across five weekly issues that kicked off with an over-sized 29-page #1, is fairly simple. The conflict imperils the Earth—and Hell and, to a certain degree, perhaps even Heaven itself—and facing it involves various configurations of superheroes to form ad hoc teams and perform different missions. 

It also moves the DC Universe story forward a bit—brining back Hal, giving The Spectre a new host, and seemingly priming a magic super-team book that never actually materialized at the time—and it provides a very easy way to tie any and all other DC books into it, and to do so without derailing them all that dramatically.

So, remember Asmodel? The rebel angel and leader of the Bull Host who planned to overthrow Heaven and invaded Earth in an attempt to get to Zauriel in the pages of 1997's JLA #7-8? We open with him in Hell, where he was consigned at the end of 1998's not-very-good miniseries JLA: Paradise Lost, written by a young up-and-comer named Mark Millar. 

After Neron gloats over him for a bit, Asmodel receives a visitor in the form of Etrigan, who has big plans for Asmodel. First, Etrigan frees him from his bonds, then he summons the then host-less Spectre (Jim Corrigan and The Spectre were split from one another in 1998's The Spectre #62), and then he performs a bit of magic he says he learned from Merlin, which bonds Asmodel to The Spectre, making the new host of The Spectre a bad guy!

The new Spectre, distinguished from the old one by being a solid green-ish blue in color rather than a white-skinned dude with bits of a green costume, wastes no time. First, he sucks up all the hellfire in Hell, literally making it a cold day in Hell. Second, he freezes Neron solid in a block of ice. And, third, he invades Earth, an army of demons behind him. 

(These demons, by the way, are mostly generic in appearance, with horns and batwings. We'll later learn Hell is more or less emptied out, with devils, demons and even the dead rising all over the Earth. This, then, is what gives the heroes something to do in their own books that tie-in to the crossover: Fight the legions of Hell or any specific underworld threat that particular book's writer might want to use).

The Spectre, Etrigan and their demon horde make their beachhead in New York City. Meanwhile, Martian Manhunter J'onn J'onnz calls out the JLA and their reserves, members of other super-teams show up to rumble (Damage and Argent from the Titans, the just-formed JSA) and Zatanna spends an issue gathering a group of magical characters that will introduce themselves as "The Sentinels of Magic" on the last page of the first issue.

The Sentinels manage to drain much of The Spectre's energy and temporarily trap it in Madame Xanadu's crystal ball, giving the assembled heroes time to split up and take on a couple of different missions to save the day.

The JLA's resident angel Zauriel leads Sentinel Alan Scott, Wonder Woman, Mister Miracle and Supergirl to Heaven, teleported there by Raven (whose demonic nature forces her to flee immediately). Their job is to bring Jim Corrigan back to Earth in order to reclaim The Spectre, but, after some 50 years of avenging the murdered dead and finally knowing peace, he no longer wants the gig. The angel Michael instead directs the heroes to Purgatory where, as you probably know, they'll find Hal Jordan among a small group of fallen heroes, heroes who, Zauriel explains, are all there "due to their own mistakes, their own shortcomings." (There are a few panels outside the gates of Heaven where Alan meets a handful of dead members of the Justice Society, but no one seems to think to ask if, say, the original Mister Terrific or Hourman might want to come back to Earth and be the new host of The Spectre). 

Meanwhile, Zatanna, Superman, Green Lantern Kyle Rayner, Firestorm, The Atom, Faust and Deadman-in-Enchantress' body go to Hell, where they hope to rekindle the flames, drawing back the army of demons (Interestingly, Kyle and Firestorm just there a few years ago, in the pages of Underworld Unleashed, but no one mentions this). 

And, finally, Batman sends Captain Marvel, Starfire and S.T.R.I.P.E. into space, in order to recover The Spear of Destiny, the only known weapon that can hurt The Spectre (The last Spectre, the one bonded with Corrigan, had deposited the dangerous artifact there, out of the reach of most of humanity, during Ostrander and Mandrake's Spectre run).

Despite unexpected events—which, in Hell, means the resurrection of Blue Devil and the murder of Enchantress—the three missions are more or less successful.

At the climax, The Spectre is wounded, and both Neron and the dead Hal Jordan, having changed his form so that he's wearing his old Green Lantern costume rather than the Parallax get-up he wore in Purgatory, enter into The Spectre's body, where they wrestle with Asmodel over control of the Spectre-Force. 

That, which is described as a parasite and, as drawn by Smith, appears as a green-cloaked skeleton whose ribs stab into Asmodel, listens to the three as they each make their appeal for why they should be the new host. Halfway through his pitch, Jordan breaks down in tears, confessing his crimes. 

"I don't deserve power," he says. "I deserve punishment."

At this, The Spectre seems to perk up. "You believe you deserve punishment?" it says. "THEN FACE YOUR PENANCE!" 

And so Asmodel and Neron are both ejected from The Spectre's towering form, each of them prone and bound, while The Spectre has taken on a new shape to accommodate its new host, an interestingly hybridized costume mixing elements of The Spectre's with that of Hal's Green Lantern costume, including a domino mask under the hood and a blazing ring of green fire on his chest where the GL Corps symbol used to be. 

In the last few pages of the series, everything is set more or less right. Corrigan's soul briefly returns to Earth to bless Jordan's new mission, which Jordan indicates will not be about vengeance, Corrigan saying that The Presence (that is, God) approves of Hal Jordan-as-The Spectre. The Sentinels of Magic, which now seems to include Blue Devil and the new Doctor Fate Hector Hall, again announce their name and mission, and return to their daily lives. Asmodel is not returned to Hell, but taken to Heaven, where he is the sole inmate in The Silver City's first prison. And Neron returns to Hell, where he is punished for this whole fuck-up, demoted from an infernal Prince down to a rhyming demon, which, apparently, is why Etrigan kicked this mad plot off in the fist place: He just wanted to mess with Neron. 

(Having spent so much time with DC's devils and demons of late, I was interested to see that, in this short passage, a human-sized Neron is shackled in front of a huge, skeletal demon on a throne, one with enormous horns and batwings. This character is never named but is presumably meant to be DC's answer to "The Devil" or "Satan", although, to my knowledge, DC never really had a direct analogue to the devil/Satan before, just Lucifer and a sort of court of sub-devils...?).

In addition to its various tie-in issues in ongoing series—of which there were 14 issues, plus a Batman: Judgment Day special—DC also published a Day of Judgment Secret Files and Origins special. The Secret Files and Origins specials were fairly common in the late '90s, and contained a full-length comic book story, the "Secret Files" pages that paired a pin-up like image of a character or team with stats and short paragraphs of prose about the character (essentially an abbreviated, '90s answer to a Who's Who entry), plus some shorter features.

In this case, the features were mostly epilogues. 

The main story was written by Scott Beatty and drawn by Hitman's John McCrea (I remember it being a great pleasure to see him draw so many different super-characters here originally, and it was just as much of a pleasure to revisit it in 2025; we'll take a closer look at this story in a few days). In it, the new Spectre secretly, magically gathers the Sentinels of Magic in a field around the Spear of Destiny, explaining at the end to The Phantom Stranger that he had essentially convened them as a sort of jury to judge him, while handing them a weapon with which they could take him down if they so decided. 

There were also a couple of short, two-page stories: One by Mark Millar and Yanick Paquette in which Madame Xanadu does a tarot reading for Blue Devil, another by Millar and Phil Winslade following Zatanna over the course of a date and one by Geoff Johns and a Jason Orfalas following Faust—the son of Justice League bad guy Felix Faust, the "white sheep" of his family introduced in the 1993-1995 Outsiders series—and what his actions in Hell mean for June Moon. 

This was obviously pretty early in both Johns' and Millar's comics careers, but still, reading the issue in 2025, it's strange to think of these future superstars basically taking any writing job they could get like this.

Some other thoughts...

•As mentioned above, Zatanna puts together another ad hoc super-team of magic-based characters in the series, and they are repeatedly referred to by the name "Sentinels of Magic." 

The first issue ends with a splash depicting her with The Phantom Stranger, Deadman, Ragman, Doctor Occult, Sentinel, Raven, Madame Xanadu and Faust and declaring, "You might call us-- --The Sentinels of Magic!", those last words in a big, colorful, almost logo-like font. 

The scene repeats itself on the first page of the second issue, with captions naming the members of the roll call. 

Near the end of the fifth issue, the team—now missing Raven and The Stranger, but with Blue Devil and the newest Doctor Fate added to their line-up—all pose in one panel, while Zatanna tells the other superheroes, "The Sentinels of Magic will be on center stage whenever you need us." 

And in Secret Files special, the Sentinels star in the main story, wherein they all put their hands together like a sport team before a big game, and Alan declares them "Sentinels of Magic!" ("Oh well...guess it beats 'Justice League Europe'," Blue Devil says in the next panel). That's the image above, drawn by McCrea.

And, finally, the team gets a two-page "secret file" entry following the story.

I now find myself curious if DC was perhaps planning a Sentinels of Magic series following Day of Judgment and, if they were, why they ultimately decided against it. As I said in the post about this crossover's kinda sorta sequel Day of Vengeance the other day, DC seemed to have been flirting with a magical super-team since at least 1995's (excellent) Underworld Unleashed one-shot special Abyss—Hell's Sentinel #1. 

That was the first time I had personally encountered such a grouping, anyway. (That one, like this one, included Sentinel Alan Scott, presenting him as something of a bridge between the world of superheroes and the supernatural.) Looking back, though, Alan Moore and company's 1986 Swamp Thing #50 gathered together many of DC's magical characters for an assault on Hell and a sort of seance, and, in writer Neil Gaiman's 1990 mini-series The Books of Magic, new character Timothy Hunter is introduced to DC's various magical characters by what John Constantine jokingly refers to as "The Trenchcoat Brigade," a quartet of magic characters who got a Vertigo mini-series under that name in 1999.

While the Sentinels of Magic never got a book of their own, Day of Vengeance introduced the Shadowpact (whose number included the Sentinels' Blue Devil and Ragman), and that team would go on to star in a 25-issue ongoing series. And then the magical super-team concept reemerged in 2011 in the Justice League Dark, which lasted 72 issues across two volumes. 

•I kind of love how catty Zauriel is throughout the series regarding the belief systems of other superheroes, especially considering that theirs are just as concretely real as his, as has been repeatedly demonstrated throughout DC history. 

When Wonder Woman volunteers to go with Zauriel's team, for example, she notes, "I've been to Olympus...I've some experience with the divine." 

"Hmph," Zauriel says, "I'd hardly call Olympus divine..." 

When they reach Heaven's gate, Mister Miracle refers to himself as "a New God". You can see Zauriel's reply above. "A new god?" he says, "Unlikely, Mr. Miracle." (He does have a smile on his face while saying this, though.) 

•Whether or not it's a good idea to give Hal Jordan, a guy who had, in addition to murdering a bunch of his Green Lantern Corps colleagues later went on to unmake all of time and space, (temporarily) killing uncountable billions in the process, almost unparalleled, god-like powers seems to be an issue that is rather under-discussed in this series.

Alan Scott is Hal's cheerleader throughout, noting that he is the only person other than Jim Corrigan he knows with the willpower to control The Spectre. (Alan doesn't mention that he had fought Hal repeatedly since his heel turn, including in 1994's Guy Gardner: Warrior arc "Emerald Fallout" arc and Zero Hour, nor that the only reason so many of Alan's old JSoA colleagues were in Heaven to greet him at all is because Hal's henchman Extant killed them during Zero Hour.) 

Batman is a skeptic. Most of the other heroes don't even get to voice an opinion on the matter, let alone discuss it (Johns does have Wonder Woman put her hand on Alan's shoulder in Purgatory and ask him if it's "wise" to try to give Hal control of The Spectre's powers, given that Hal "couldn't even control himself".)

I've got to say, I'm with Batman here. Interestingly, while Batman's take seems the more reasonable of the two in this book, over the years of writing Hal, Johns would continue to present Batman as doubting Hal, but, gradually, it seems like Johns would present Batman as too cynical and judgmental about Hal. 

In the penultimate issue, we get as close to an argument between heroes regarding this course of action that we get in this series (above). 

I have to admit, I found sarcastic Batman pretty funny in that exchange. 

•Reviewing the list of tie-in issues, I see that I had bought and read eight of the 15 that DC published. These were all books I was already reading regularly—Anarky, Aquaman, Hourman, JLA, Martian Manhunter, Stars and S.T.R.I.P.E., Titans and Young Justice—plus Supergirl, which I only bought because the cover so prominently featured Zauriel, a favorite character of mine.

My memories of most of these comics are pretty dim at this point, which probably doesn't speak well of their quality. I do remember the Anarky issue pretty well, as it was an extremely unlikely team-up with The Haunted Tank (and I'm pretty sure it was my first exposure to that weird concept, as I don't think I had yet read Gath Ennis's 1994 "Haunted Glory" arc of The Demon at that point). And the Hourman issue was basically a Snapper Carr solo story, in which he teaches a stray demon about free will. And the Martian Manhunter issue pit the hero against undead versions of past Leaguers who had died in the line of duty. 

•As for the big change that this event story wrought within the DC Universe, making Hal Jordan the new host of The Spectre? Well, that state of affairs lasted almost exactly five years, which seems a respectable amount of time. At the very least, DC seems to have given Hal-as-The Spectre a healthy chance of succeeding, before reverting Hal back to his pre-"Emerald Twilight" status quo as a Green Lantern, relying on a retcon to excuse his fall from grace and heel turn. 

DC launched a new volume of The Spectre starring the Hal Jordan version of the character in 2001, and it ran 27 issues before being cancelled in 2003 (For context, the three previous Spectre ongoings had lasted 10 issues, 31 issues and 62 issues). That series was written by J.M. DeMatteis and drawn first by Ryan Sook and then by Norm Breyfogle (with a handful of fill-in artists coming and doing during both artists' runs). I appreciated what DeMatteis was trying to do with the character and concept, particularly the effort to have Hal trying to remake The Spectre into a Spirit of Redemption instead of a Spirit of Vengeance, but I didn't much care for the series. Of course, I mostly only read the Breyfogle issues, and those only because I was a fan of Norm Breyfogle's. 

This Spectre also shared a DeMatteis-written mini-series with the JLA, 2003's not very good JLA/The Spectre: Soul War (I'll write about that in the near-ish future), and he had some notable appearances during big doings in the DCU, like playing a key role in the resurrection of Oliver Queen in the pages of the 2001 Green Arrow series and cameoing in JLA/Avengers (Hal would get much more time in that mini-series as Green Lantern though, able to appear as part of some time-travelling shenanigans). (Oh, and he also appeared in one scene in 2004's Identity Crisis, telling Green Arrow that he was "working on" being brough back to life...)

I'm sure there were others.

Anyway, Hal's career as The Spectre ended in the aforementioned 2004 Green Lantern: Rebirth mini-series, restoring Hal Jordan to his original form and, seven years later, The Spectre would return to his original form too, character development and ongoing narrative be damned, with the New 52's Spectre once again bonded to Jim Corrigan. 

On some particularly strong panels from The Green Lantern Vols. 1-2

I was honestly a little surprised when Grant Morrison and Liam Sharp were announced as the creative team for the new Green Lantern title, in large part because it seemed like a character/franchise that was somewhat beneath the stature and talent of each (Maybe it's just me, but I've traditionally considered Green Lantern a B- to D-List character/comic, depending on who's bearing the ring and when it'be being published), and nothing I knew about either gentleman's past work necessarily suggested a natural affinity for DC's very 1960s space cop character, Hal Jordan (the least interesting of the...seven Earth-born Green Lanterns, in my opinion). That...really just goes to show that, for as much as I like to play armchair DC Comics editor, I'm not terribly qualified to do it real-life (Of course, I do recognize that if Grant Morrison and Liam Sharp want to do anything together, you let them; were I at DC, I would have greenlit a Morrison/Sharp Infinity, Inc, Primal Force or New Guardians revival, if that's what they wanted to do).

It didn't take too many pages of reading their The Green Lantern (a better title for an Alan Scott book than a Hal Jordan one, you ask me) to realize that the character/concept is actually kinda perfect for them, though. By three pages in, we've seen a self-pitying Green Lantern who is also royalty, a microscopic Green Lantern "super-intelligent all-purpose" virus named Floozle Flem (Floozle Flem doesn't catch you... ...You catch Floozle Flem") and a giant alien spider pirate dressed in like a particularly fancy old-timey Earth pirate.

While I can't say that Morrison had all that much to say about Hal Jordan as a character within the 200+ pages of comics collected in these two volumes, a 12-issue run on a title that was then kinda sorta canceled only to be relaunched as The Green Lantern Season Two, he certainly had things to say about the concept, and he certainly seems to have had a great deal of fun mining the character/franchise's history and setting for cool comics material, which he and Sharp deftly organize into a series of comics that generally contain a single, done-in-one story with a beginning, middle and end (and, as often as not, a particular theme, premise, tone or even genre of its own...something that, I hate to say given the history between the writers, reminded me of Alan Moore's run on the Swamp Thing character) that nevertheless tell an ongoing, overarching story line about various beings' plans to instill order in a chaotic universe.

As he did during his rather messy tenure on Batman and, to a lesser extent, his seminal late-'90s JLA run, Morrison draws inspiration from the character's Silver Age adventures, presenting them as straight-faced as possible, with the greater verisimilitude and more sophisticated storytelling that modern, adult readers have come to expect, rather than what, say, Gardner Fox was writing for kids in the 1960s. This...is a pretty good way to tackle Jordan who, for all of Geoff Johns' valiant efforts to make him more relevant, continues to work best as the mid-twentieth century American idea of a leading man. (Tellingly, this Hal Jordan, like Johns', has all but chucked any remnants of his old, original cast and premise. Characters like Tom and Carol, or his old fighter pilot job, appear and are acknowledged as things from his past, but they are not integral parts of him or his story. Similarly, Green Arrow appears in one 20-page story, but Jordan makes an interesting distinction between himself and the superheroes. He's not a hero, he says, he's a space cop who hangs out with superheroes. Sometimes.)

All the attention on space and aliens also means that Morrison has pretty free rein to use all the magic, fantasy and science fiction he cares to; there's really nothing so weird that it can't be included in a DC Comics' Green Lantern comic with no more justification than "It's an alien" or "That's from a different dimension." And so a Green Lantern who is perfectly humanoid, save for the fact that he has an active volcano for his shoulders, his face appearing in the cloud of smoke and ash that lingers above it? Sure, why not?

In Sharp, Morrison has a partner who can not only draw anything, but he can draw it in a great deal of detail, and no amount of detail, no size of crowd or ornate setting seems to be too much for him to handle. I don't know if Sharp had a three-year head-start on this title or what exactly, but he fills his pages with the number of characters and the amount of details that can look quite uncommon outside of a George Perez or Phil Jimenez comic these days.

And that's important, because Morrison's comics all but live and die on the strength of their artists, as his horribly uneven Batman run so vividly attests; there are issues of that massive, years-long Batman story line that are all but unreadable in their shoddiness, and there are others that are among the better comics of Morrison's career.

Morrison and Sharp's The Green Lantern is therefore not only pretty great, but far greater than I would have imagined, given my relative antipathy toward the character, and the amount of time I have spent reading about various Green Lanterns (but mostly Hal Jordan) during the last 15-20 years. But rather than me trying to restate that for a couple hundred more words, or having just crafted a one-sentence post of "Look, just read it," I thought I'd pull out some particularly noteworthy panels from the first two volumes of the series, Intergalactic Lawman and The Day The Stars Fell.

PAGE 13, PANELS 5-8:

This is by far the dirtiest thing I have ever read in a DC comic book.


PAGE 33, PANEL 5:

Hey look, it's Evil Star! I don't have any firsthand experience with Evil Star, but I always liked the goofy costume and name. He's one of those characters—along with Goldface—that I knew was a Silver Age Green Lantern villain that doesn't get seen all that often. When Geoff Johns turned his attention away from Earth and GL's earthbound rogue's gallery pretty quickly into his run on the relaunched Green Lantern title in 2005, I remember being at least partially disappointed we didn't get to see how Johns would Batman-ize the likes of Evil Star, Goldface, and I don't know, The Invisible Destroyer in the same way that he had The Shark and Hector Hammond (and, later, The Black Hand). I suppose it was ultimately all for the best, given the new characters and concepts Johns introduced into the Green Lantern mythos, but I'm glad to see Morrison making use of the likes of Evil Star.

It's worth noting that Sharp's design barely varies at all from Gil Kane's original one. This Evil Star has a bigger, floppier star on his face, and is missing his cape, but that's about it.


PAGE 43, PANEL 4:

The Blackstars who rescued Evil Star from where the GLC had imprisoned him give him some shit about his name, suggesting it's why people judge him and that it's "almost inviting trouble with the law."

I kinda liked his explanation, even if they remain unconvinced.

Speaking of the Blackstars, there's an explanation for why their leader Controller Mu changed the name from "Darkstars," having to do with the more absolute of "black" vs. "dark," but it's probably also worth noting that it also makes them sound closer to Blackwater, maybe the best-known of the sorts of private security contractors that the team echoes in its earliest appearances in the title.


PAGE 50, PANEL 1:

Controller Mu meets with a trio of Dhorians lead by a Volgar Zo. If the Dhorians look familiar, that's because one member of their species was a pretty early Justice League villain, Kanjar Ro, who first appeared in Gardner Fox and Mike Sekowsky's Justice League of America #3, way back in 1961.

Though Ro's appearance has varied a bit over the decades as he's been reinvented and redesigned in various comics and other media, his pink skin, pointy nose and segmented, insect-like eyes are constants. Here Sharp's designs for Ro's fellow Dhorians are both faithful to Sekowsky's original design for the character, while also bizarrely alien, an effect achieved mostly by exaggerating a feature here or there, putting the leg joints in the "wrong" places, having the eyelids close horizontally instead of vertically, and so on.

Hell, they're even wearing outfits similar to Kanjar Ro's get-up!

Here Sharp proves to be perfectly aligned with Morrison in terms of a basic approach that has served Morrison extremely well both in this title and during his fairly lengthy run on the Batman character—that is, again, taking things pretty much straight from the Silver Age and Bronze Age of DC Comics, the weirder the better, and presenting them matter-of-factly, with just enough of realism to suit the tone of modern, more sophisticated comics storytelling in an age when they are made for adults, rather than children.

So while Morrison has extended the particulars of Kanjar Ro to the people of his planet, including their occupation of slave-trading, and even "The Gamma Gong" and a spaceship resembling a many-oared slave ship, Sharp gives what was a somewhat silly alien design from the 1960s a realistic veneer that makes it viscerally repellent; their six-fingered hands and goat-like gait are truly creepy on the page. We'll see rather a lot of them in the fourth issue of the series.


PAGE 54, PANEL 3:

Look! Look at them all!

The Dhorians have stolen planet Earth, shrunken it to a manageable size, and are now preparing to sell it to the highest bidder. The above image shows some of those attending the auction. It is a single panel on a five-panel page, and yet Sharp has not merely filled it with distinct, individual, wicked-looking alien villains, but he has filled it with name ones: There The Overmaster (from the six-part 1994 Justice League line crossover "Judgement Day"), Mongal (Mongul's daughter, first introduced in an issue of Showcase '95 by Peter Tomasi and Scott Eaton, and seemingly killed off during Geoff Johns' Green Lantern tenure), Steppenwolf (Jack Kirby's Fourth World villain, in his updated New 52 look), a female White Martian (in the look Howard Porter gave their race in the initial story arc of Morrison's own 1997-launched JLA), Grayven (the son of Darkseid introduced in 1996 by Ron Marz and Daryl Banks in their run on Green Lantern), Agamemno (from the Mark Waid-masterminded 2000 event The Silver Age), The Queen Bee (in the design she first appeared in during the 1999 "World War III" arc of Morrison's JLA), what appear to be a trio of aliens conquered by Starro and...11 other characters so distinct-looking that I would not be at all surprised to find out that they too are all pulled from past DC comics, even if I can't place them.

(UPDATE: I asked for help identifying the others on Twitter, and Patrick Carrington responded by pointing me to this post from Jesse Russell's blog, The Shared Universe, which was obviously extremely helpful. He seems to have gotten them all, although I still think the three guys with stars on their faces are Starro conquerees rather than Starlings, based on the fact that they only have one eye apiece. Russell's blog will prove useful later on too, when Morrison and Sharp start throwing alternate Green Lanterns at the reader. I...probably wouldn't have bothered with this post had I known how thoroughly Russell dissected the so much of the series).

This is the sort of panel that makes me love shared-setting comics, though, and DC Comics in particular. A whole huge swathe of DC Comics history is packed into that one single panel, a panel that rewards lingering on, and seems to have been specifically created for no reason other than to impress the hell out of the reader and, perhaps, remind them of all sorts of other cool characters and comics from the publisher's history (Honestly, I bet that if we can figure out who all of these characters are and when and where they first appeared, we could compile a pretty good reading list out of it).

Most of them, I should note, don't actually say or do anything in the pages that follow. Steppenwolf gets a few lines, threatening a trio of Dominators (first introduced in 1989 crossover event Invasion!) not to attempt to out-bid him. They ignore him.

Anyway, this is a glorious panel, and whether Morrison's script mentioned each of those characters by name and asked that Sharp somehow find a way to squeeze them all in, or if Sharp took it upon himself to do so, it demonstrates a mainstream comic artist who not only gives a shit, as one would hope and wish all artists would, but actually, genuinely cares about the comic he's drawing. 

The panel immediately preceding this one, by the way, is less-detailed and filled with cameos, but it  has even more characters in it, showing as it does the crowd of assorted auction-goers from further away. They're much harder to make out, but I suppose one with a magnifying glass could do so; Sharp drew about 100 distinct figures into that practically-impossible-to-see crowd, including Death's Head II and what appears to be a Skrull.


PAGE 70, PANELS 4-6:

A representative of the United States "and everybody else" tells Hal that they are perfectly okay with the Earth being completely destroyed in a thousand years, so long as they get to live the rest of their lives on a stable planet...and that they all get super-powers, to boot!

The basic premise of this issue, the series' fourth, is that this being called "The Shepherd" has bought planet Earth from the Dhorian slavers for "then thousand jilli-stellars," hangs it in his gigantic ship among many other planets, and is ready to take off for his space sanctuary where his planets "may roam free and grow fat in paradise." Hal and the Green Lantern Corps intervene, and Hal gets in a heated argument with The Shepherd, who looks and talks like a stereotypical image of the Christian God, but is actually a monstrous-looking "Terravore," who will eat the Earth when it's ready.

I'm not sure why Hal's so surprised that Earthlings are ready to sacrifice the lives of their descendants for short-term gain; I mean, that's basically exactly how we got into our current, existential crisis with the climate, and we did that without the promise of 1,000-years of paradise and superpowers in the plus column.

Hell, too many people today would sacrifice their grandchildren and children—let alone great-grandchildren and descendants—for short term convenience.

Anyway, this whole issue is fucking brilliant.


PAGE 99, PANEL 3:

Countess Belzebeth, the daughter of cosmic vampire Starbreaker, a Justice League villain introduced in 1972 by Mike Friedrich and Dick Dillin, takes Hal to Vorr, "Planet of vampires." It is apparently a have for all sorts of vampires, including Marvel's Morbius, The Living Vampire, Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt from Interview With The Vampire, and plenty of other cameos.

PAGE 34, PANELS 1-3:

Hal Jordan returns to Earth to crash with his old pal Green Arrow, who encourages him to spend some time with his feet on the ground, hanging out with normal people. It...doesn't go as planned.

After breaking up a weird drug deal involving the selling of souls, they find a warehouse with a giant green arrow stuck in it, a huge, green Robin Hood hat laying outside it, and then, well, what you see above.

The first and only time I encountered a "Xeen Arrow" (and remembered doing so) was in Tom Scioli's incomparably good (and tragically short) Super Powers back-up in the pages of Cave Carson Has a Cybernetic Eye. In presenting Green Arrow's new origin in just 16 panels, Scioli had Queen wearing clothing made of foliage and using a bow and arrow to survive on a "Starfish Island," which was secretly alive (and resembled Starro). In the last few panels of the page, a blue-skinned, purple-garbed alien appeared to Ollie and announced himself as "Xeen Arrow of Dimension Xero," telling him to heed his words:

String your bow to the vibration of the universe. Fight greed in all its forms. Use trick arrows.

Ollie naturally takes Xeen Arrow's advice, and even takes his name and he starts out on his new, super-heroic mission, but his new superhero name gets muddled by the papers, who call him Green Arrow instead.

Googling it later, I see that Xeen Arrow is actually far older than Scioli's use of the name, and the character actually hails from a 1958 issue of Adventure Comics, from back when Green Arrow was basically a Batman clone (In the sequence above, note that Ollie says, "Speedy and me ran into this cat one time! Weird period in both our lives"). That particular issue, it turns out, was collected in the 2001 collection Green Arrow By Jack Kirby (perhaps explaining Scioli's familiarity), which I had read, but just the once, and I apparently forgot about the giant Green Arrow from Dimension Zero. (I should really try to dig that book out of my comics midden though, as I see it also includes "The Green Arrows of The World," which was basically GA's answer to Batman's Club of Heroes, which Morrison reinvented into Batman, Inc. Maybe I'll give it a read and write those and other notable stories from it up in a future post)

At any rate, props to Morrison and Sharp for reintroducing Xeen Arrow...alongside a Xeen Lantern.

This particular issue, entitled "Space Junkies," also emphasizes just how much Morrison and Scioli have in common, in the way they glom on to odd bits of superhero continuity and remix and reinvent it in cool, sometimes crazy ways.


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A smiling Sinestro sips tea...? His costume looks off here, too, with the colors reversed. This is the character's first appearance in the series, and we'll find out much later that this is actually "Thal Sinestro of the Anti-Universe," where everything is opposite of our universe. "Good Guy Sinestro," Jordan says when he hears that, to which this particularly charming version of Hal's archenemy replies, "I don't know iv I'd go that far, dear boy. Lovable rogue at best!"

I actually do kinda love this Sinestro, although the last few Sinestros I've encountered have been pretty dull and one-note, including the resurrected version from J.M. DeMattei's run on The Spectre (read during my weeks of quarantine) and the one that has been part of the Luthor's small, five-person Legion of Doom throughout Scott Snyder's Justice League run.


PAGE 68:

After an issue fighting against Abin Sur, the devilish-looking Green Lantern from Morrison's own Multiversity, Hal is greeted by a trio of other multi-dimensional GLs: Flashlight (also of Multiversity), Magic Lantern (from Morrison's Animal Man run) and a Batman-who-is-also a Green Lantern (also also of Multiversity).

At first I suspected the last of these was the Green Lantern of Mike Barr and Jerry Bingham's 1994 Elseworlds book, Batman: In Darkest Knight (the one in which Bruce Wayne becomes Earth's Green Lantern, rather than Hal Jordan), but then I recalled that Barr and Bingham's Batman-as-Green Lantern didn't have ears on his cowl.

Apparently this Bat-Lantern is literally named Bat-Lantern and hails from Earth-32, a world in the Multiverse in which DC characters are amalgamated with one another (It was listed in the Multiversity Guidebook).


PAGE 71, PANELS 1-3:

The other reason I thought that Bat-Lantern might have been Barr and Bingham's character was that Darkest Knight featured a rather clumsy (in the opinion of teenage Caleb) amalgamation of The Joker and Sinestro, which seemed like it went a bit too far in terms of smooshing Batman and Green Lantern together. And here, of course, we see another amalgamation of a Batman and Green Lantern villain, and the mention of yet another.

The Shark is apparently just a humanoid shark dressed like the Penguin, sans umbrella, top-hat and cigarette holder. It's a good look. Like, most anyone looks like pretty cool villain when dressed in a tuxedo with tails and a monocle. As great a visual as that is, I must confess a great deal of curiosity about this "Masked Hand" that the Shark mentions, an combination of Black Mask and Black Hand. I am assuming that The Masked Hand is a villain who wears a tiny little mask, perhaps one that resembles the one Black Mask originally wore, over his hand, which he holds as a sideways fist all the time, and makes it talk by moving the thumb up and down.


PAGE 103, PANEL 4:

This flaming giant appears a few times, battling a powerful team of superheroes, before this page, in which a character refers to him as "Some immense Anti-Matter Titan!"

This appears to be another reinvention of an old Fox/Seksowsky character from Justice League of America, although it's not a connection I made until I read that description of the character. If so, then here's yet another example of a Morrison and Sharp giving a somewhat goofy-looking old character the same treatment they gave the slavers of Kanjar Ro's planet.


PAGE 110, PANEL 5:

I really like this particular Green Lantern, who isn't too terribly green. I don't know who she is, what Earth she hails from or what previous comic or story she appeared in (if, indeed, she did, and isn't original to this comic). You can get another, better look at her on the cover of The Green Lantern #10).

PAGE 112, PANEL 2:

As Hal's adventures with the various Green Lanterns from across the Multiverse comes to a close, we see him flying alongside Bat-Lantern, Magic Lantern, Flashlight, the Tangent Green Lantern, Abin Sur, that cool lady Lantern, an alternate universe Star Sapphire and a whole bunch of other Green Lanterns. I recognize the Green Lanterns from Earth-2, Just Imagine Stan Lee With Dave Gibbons Creating Green Lantern, Batman Beyond, Kingdom Come (I think and...that's all I got for sure. That leaves a Kyle Rayner and two John Stewarts I'm blanking on, and what looks like a caricature of Chinese immigrant from the 19th Century with upsettingly yellow skin, but I hoping that's just the result of the green aura blending in with the flesh-colored coloring of his skin, or even my eyesight starting to go now that I'm in my fourth decade, because otherwise YEESH. He does appear in another cameo earlier in the story, and doesn't look anywhere nearly as yellow, so that's good.


PAGE 123, PANELS 1-4:

I just really like the word "Scorpedoes".