Revisiting 2005's Day of Vengeance

As you've surely noticed, reading the first half of John Ostrander and Tom Mandrake's 1992-1998 The Spectre via November's omnibus collection piqued my interest in the character, and I became especially curious about how DC proceeded to use him after the Ostrander/Mandrake series, given the pretty perfect ending he received at its end.

As DC hasn't collected every one of those appearances, and some of those that the publisher has collected aren't readily available in library-borrowed trade, I've been pretty much just reading what I can find, in whatever order I can find it. 

Now I come to the 2005 miniseries Day of Vengeance, one of four miniseries the publisher launched as lead-ins to 2006's Infinite Crisis, each of which dealt with a different aspect of the DC Universe. This one covered DC's various magical and supernatural characters and prominently featured The Spectre and Eclipso.

While I was curious to revisit it in light of Ostrander and Mandrake's take on those two characters, I was also curious if, like those last arcs from JLA that I recently reread, the book now reads better at the remove of a couple of decades, when one isn't reading it in regular installments as a part of an unfolding story, with the various expectations that can entail. 

While I have the six-issue miniseries in singles, I opted to borrow the 2005 trade from the library. That includes a not-very-good three-issue arc that Judd Winick and Ian Churchill did in the Superman books that doesn't seem entirely necessary, as well as some fun bonus features. 

I've opted to go with random thoughts and bullet points, rather than something more formal, so feel free to skim. 

•I had completely forgotten until I started rereading Day of Vengeance here that it was drawn by Justiniano. If you're not familiar with that name, it belongs to a very talented artist who did a great deal of admirable work for DC Comics between 1999 and 2010...and, in 2011, was arrested for possession of child pornography. He plead guilty and was sentenced the following year. 

How do we assess the work of a comic book creator who has committed such a heinous crime? Well, while it's certainly possible for two things to be true at once—that is, that Justiniano could draw comics very well and that he is a bad person who is responsible for something terrible—in general, I'm inclined to ignore the work of such creators. 

I don't think DC will even give you the option of spending money that might in any way support Justiniano at this point, as I'm fairly certain nothing he drew for them has been collected since his arrest, which seems fair. After all, no publisher would want to be associated with such a person. 

But regardless of buying work Justiniano has drawn, should we even read it? Should we write about it? I don't know that I have a good answer. I think it's a discussion worth having, especially as there are now a good handful of mainstream superhero comic book creators who have done terrible things that have victimized others. 

For today anyway, I'm going to go ahead and write about this collection and try not to focus on Justiniano's contribution to it any more than I have to. 

•The single most impressive part of this collection is the one to which no name is attached, and thus I am unsure who produced it. 

That would be the 16-paragraph prose piece entitled "The Nature of Magic" that starts on the title page, preceding any of the comics content. It is, in essence, the history of magical beings and the practice of magic in the DC Universe setting, from the point of creation to the rise of Gemworld following cosmic events in "what humans called the 15th century."

The opening few paragraphs blend ideas from comics across decades from various writers on quite different books, like Jerry Siegel's "The Voice" from his 1940 "The Spectre" strip, Jack Kirby's "The Source" from his 1970s Fourth World comics, Marv Wolfman's Destiny from 1972's Weird Mystery Tales, and elements from Neil Gaiman's Books of Magic and The Sandman, Grant Morrison's JLA and John Byrne's Genesis, all from the 1990s. 

And on and on it goes, a coherent, consistent cosmology created piecemeal over many years by many hands, but here presented as a whole. It's both a remarkable bit of synthesis by whoever wrote it, and an eloquent example of what is so appealing and so unique about the two main comics "universe" settings, those of DC and Marvel, and how they evolve writer by writer and story by story over many years. 

•The Judd Winick, Ian Churchill and Norm Rapmund three-part story "Lightning Strikes Twice" that is collected here is pretty unnecessary to the events of Day of Vengeance. Sure, it includes a bit about a black diamond shard of The Heart of Darkness finding its way into Jean Loring's cell in Arkham Asylum and reveals that Eclipso would take her as a new host, but then, the first pages of Day of Vengeance tell us that too. 

Still, I guess there's no reason to complain about getting more comics in your collection, is there? (This whole 200+ page collection only cost $12.99, by the way. These days, thirteen bucks would only get you, what, three DC comics...?)

•"Lightning Strikes Twice", which originally ran through an issue apiece of Action Comics, Adventures of Superman and Superman, centers on a fight between and Eclipso-possessed Superman and Captain Marvel...as did 1992's Action Comics Annual #4 (Collect 1992's annual event, Eclipso: The Darkness Within, I say!). 

Here, we open with Bruce Gordon doing action movie stuff in South America, the wizard Shazam having Captain Marvel standing by on the Rock of Eternity and a disembodied Eclipso trying to maneuver closer and closer to Superman in Metropolis, somehow manipulating various civilians to take their own lives very publicly and violently. 

Eventually, Eclipso eclipses a S.T.A.R. Labs doctor, who strips to her underwear and then suits up in a LexCorp battle suit specifically modified for Superman-fighting (It fires red sun energy, and is built with a kryptonite alloy). Plan A seems to be to duke it out with Superman, pissing him off enough that Eclipso can use the diamond shard aboard to eclipse the Man of Steel.

When that fails, it's time for Plan B, secretly eclipsing Lois (she isn't drawn with an eclipsed face or red eyes, nor does she speak in Eclipso's purple-rimmed dialogue balloons), having her snipe at Clark in their apartment until he loses his temper, and then press the diamond to his forehead, finally giving Eclipso possession of Superman again.

Then, in the final chapter, it's finally time for the eclipsed Superman vs. Captain Marvel rematch, as Eclipso wants Marvel as his new host. They knock one another around a bit, Marvel resorting to the same move he used against Superman in Kingdom Come, shouting "Shazam!" and positioning himself so that the magic lighting strikes Superman, over and over.

As Winick runs out of pages, Shazam himself appears to blast Superman with lightning. And then the then host-less Spectre appears and...does something. The art is kind of confusing, but it seems The Spectre does something to pull Eclipso out of Superman. 

The Spectre and Shazam have a brief, portentous chat, during which the Spirit of Vengeance says something that seems like it might be important when reading the curious events of Day of Vengeance, wherein his actions don't actually make a whole lot of sense:

Without a host, my memories fade in and out. Only my instinct survives. 

My purpose. 

And the diamond? Well, the narration isn't really much clearer than the art on this point. After The Spectre tells Shazam that it has "disappeared again...pulled away by hate," Winick writes the following in white boxes that appear on the penultimate page: "The black diamond was taken by something or somebody."

However it got there, it ended up in Jean Loring's padded cell in Arkham Asylum, where Eclipso has apparently taken over her mind. The last page of the story is a splash, showing a smiling Loring in a gray Arkham jumpsuit, her facial features making it clear that she has been eclipsed. 

•Say, do you think Jean Loring being committed to a home for the criminally insane is supposed to be an admission that the nonsensical plot to get back together with her ex-husband—by murdering Sue Dibny, taking out a hit on Jack Drake and threatening Lois Lane—was crazy...?

•I was kind of surprised at just how horny Churchill's art is in this story arc. There are only three female characters in the whole story, if you want to count Jean, who only appears in a single panel. The others are Lois Lane and S.T.A.R. Labs scientist Doctor Jeanine Tracey.

When Lois is introduced, she's shown striding though the office of the Daily Planet, dressed in a tight-fitting shirt showing lots of cleavage, and a skirt with a slit that goes almost to her hip. Later we see her in her apartment, and she's wearing a tight-fitting babydoll t-shirt and a pair of skimpy panties (Clark, meanwhile, is fully dressed).

When we first meet Dr. Tracey, she's sensibly dressed in a pantsuit and coat, but she will spend the remainder of the story in a strapless bra and panties (I guess you have to strip down to your underwear in order to pilot this particular make of LexCorp battlesuit...?)

•When Eclipso possesses someone in this comic—Jeanine Tracey, Lois Lane, Superman, Jean Loing—Churchill employs the visual signifiers introduced back in 1992's Eclipso: The Darkness Within. That is, their face bears a bluish "eclipse" symbol, their eyes turn red, their ears and teeth get pointy. He also adds an additional flourish, giving them weird, somewhat alien-looking ridges on the sides of their faces and their foreheads. It reminded me a little of the way vampires look in Buffy the Vampire Slayer, although they're not really all that similar in appearance. 

Somewhat frustratingly, Churchill doesn't always draw an eclipsed person with all of these signifiers, as in the case of Lois Lane mentioned above. In that case, I think it was to keep the fact that she was eclipsed from the reader as much as from Superman, although it got me wondering...Do you think the various signifiers are just there for the benefit of the readers, or do Eclipso's victims literally transform like that within the world of the comic, so that, say, Superman can tell at a glance whether Lois Lane has been eclipsed or not...? 

I've been wondering about this off and on (the same day I reread Day of Vengeance, I read the trade paperback Eclipso: Music of the Spheres), as the various "rules" as applied to Eclipso seem to change story to story.

Here, for example, he seems to be driving various civilians to kill themselves, although they don't appear as if they are eclipsed (nor do they seem to ever be exposed to a black diamond), and, in the case of Tracey, he seems to be goading her into a particular action before he finally does take over her body. 

While the suicide scenes are quite heavy in narration, they don't ever explain just what Eclipso is doing or how, which is, obviously, the sort of thing that can irritate a reader like me.

•Between the end of "Lightning Strikes Twice" and the beginning of Day of Vengeance, the collection includes a three-page prose feature. Under the heading "The World of Heroes and Sorcerers", there are five paragraphs devoted to explaining the existence of numerous super-people on Earth today and recapping the plot of Identity Crisis, concentrating on Jean Loring, who, as we just saw, was possessed by the hostless Eclipso while imprisoned in Arkham.

"So begins the story," the first section ends, "but first let us introduce you to the dramatis personae..."

The rest of the three pages is devoted to the six main characters, those that would later star in Shadowpact: Blue Devil, Enchantress, Nightmaster, Nightshade, Ragman and Detective Chimp. Each of them get a long-ish paragraph detailing their biography and history, including their current status quo.

This seems pretty valuable, given how relatively minor some of these characters are (For example, this was the first time I had ever read anything featuring Nightmaster—that I actually remembered him in, anyway. He was introduced way back in 1969). 

Actually, not all of the six heroes get all that thoroughly explained here. The entry for Detective Chimp just says "Bobo tells his story better than anyone, and you'll find it four chapters in." Indeed, while writer Bill Willingham will allude to events in the other characters' lives throughout the series, Detective Chimp is the only one who gets an entire passage of the comic devoted to retelling his origin and history.

•One imagines that Willingham, like the writers of the other "Countdown to Infinite Crisis"-branded miniseries, was given a few particular plot points by editorial before he ever sat down to write this story. Not only does it feature DC's magical and supernatural characters, but it also seems to be working through a particular checklist, in order to get certain characters to certain places and accomplish certain events, moving a bigger mega-plot forward so that Geoff Johns could resolve certain things in Infinite Crisis, and some books that followed that event series would have something to work with that seemed like part of a bigger DC Comics story (For one fairly minor example, original Blue Beetle Dan Garrett's mystical scarab artifact is shown being thrown from the Rock of Eternity to El Paso, Texas...where we know it will be found by Jaime Reyes, who will become the third Blue Beetle in the 2006 Blue Beetle series).

As for that checklist, it seems to include 1.) Presenting a host-less Spectre as a serious worldwide threat (again, I guess, following Johns' own 1999 Day of Judgment, which only ended upon The Spectre getting a new, heroic host), 2.) Killing off of the wizard Shazam and destroying the Rock of Eternity, setting up a new, dumb and ultimately very temporary status quo for the Marvel Family and 3.) Setting up an ongoing series about a magic team in the DCU, something DC seems to have been continually flirting with since at least 1995's Underworld Unleashed: Abyss—Hell's Sentinel, if not earlier. 

I'm not sure how successful this was, long-term. Sure, the new Blue Beetle has managed to stick around, starring in four different ongoings of various lengths in the years since, but as for the other changes wrought by the events here?

Well, The Spectre got a new host during Infinite Crisis, recently killed-off Gotham City Police Detective Crispus Allen, but he never got his own ongoing series, just a three-issue Infinite Crisis Aftermath-branded mini, and when DC rebooted their line a few years later, Jim Corrigan was again the Spectre's host. 

The Judd Winick-written 12-issue maxi-series The Trials of Shazam had Captain Marvel wearing a white costume and changing his name to just "Marvel" to replace the wizard, while Captain Marvel Jr. changed into a red costume and started going by the name "Shazam" (Which, now that I type it out, sounds exactly backwards, doesn't it?). Johns and co-plotter/artist Jerry Ordway undid these changes three years later in the pages of JSoA (And, two years after that, the New 52 rebooted and reset the Marvel Family's status quo yet again anyway). 

And while the Shadowpact did indeed get their own series, it only lasted 25 issues (For comparison's sake, the Gail Simone-written Secret Six, which spun out of Day of Vengeance's sister series Villains United, lasted 36 issues, only ending when DC rebooted their whole line in 2011). The magic hero team concept would return in the New 52 though, with different creators and a different line-up, under the title Justice League Dark. That book lasted over 70 issues across two series. Maybe what DC magic hero team needed to thrive was the "Justice League" branding...? Or, perhaps, to feature former Vertigo characters like John Constantine, Swamp Thing and Black Orchid...? 

•This is the plot of Day of Vengeance. Eclipso has taken over Jean Loring, giving her a dramatic make-over that includes a black "eclipse" symbol over her face, and a costume featuring a bustier/corset with lots of cleavage. She then seduces—the comics' word, not mine—the still host-less Spectre, who was shown to be wildly out of control, punishing even the most minor of offenses severely, as in one case in which a boy who stole who stole six dollars from his mother's purse is caught in a wave of coins (It's unclear whether or not the kid survived).

Here's the part that doesn't quite make sense. Eclipso, The Spectre's enemy stretching back millennia, manages to convince him that in order to eradicate all evil from the world once and for all, he need only destroy any and all forms of magic, from magical locales to magic-users (Never mind that the Spectre's raison d' etre isn't to wipe out evil, but to "confront" it and, at least in all the comics I've ever read, punish the murdered dead). 

So, the Spectre then begins waging a war on magic in the DCU, wiping out hundreds of magic-users. These are, of course, mostly unnamed characters. The only IP DC seems to sacrifice here is minor Firestorm villain Black Bison and, at the end of the book, Shazam (Both have since returned to life, of course). 

As for the "big guns", Spectre takes them out without killing them: Doctor Fate is entrapped in his helmet, Madame Xanadu is blinded and The Phantom Stranger is turned into a mouse ("I don't think even you could kill me, Spectre," The Stranger says during their fight. "I doubt the universe would allow it.")

A bunch of magical heroes gather/hide out in Nightmaster Jim Rook's inter-dimensional bar for just such a clientele, The Oblivion Bar (As does Animal Man; Willingham must have a generous definition of magic). Eventually, Nightmaster, his bouncer Blue Devil, Nightshade and Detective Chimp all decide to step up and tackle The Spectre head-on, joining forces with Ragman and The Enchantress, who have just escaped a fight between The Spectre and Blackbriar Thorn (Oh, I guess he dies too, but he's shown already growing back to live before this series ends).

The half-dozen heroes confront The Spectre in Budapest, where he's throwing down with Captain Marvel (Throughout this series, Spectre mostly just zaps energy bolts and throws punches, rather than using his powers in imaginative or visually interesting ways, so the multi-issue Spectre/Marvel fight isn't really much of a read). 

While Detective Chimp and Nightshade go to recruit a character that the former thinks can actually vanquish The Spectre, Enchantress borrows magical energy willingly donated by volunteers around the world, channeling it into Captain Marvel and, ultimately, making him a giant (See the cover at the top of the post). (And yes, this did remind me of Goku creating his spirit bomb during his fight with Frieza on Namek in Dragon Ball Z.)

Temporarily vanquished by Marvel's powered-up punches, The Spectre flees, carrying the wounded Eclipso with him. 

For round two, Detective Chimp's stratagem is employed: Black Alice, a character introduced by Gail Simone, Joe Prado and Ed Benes just previously in Birds of Prey, uses her meta-human ability to temporarily steal magic powers to completely drain The Spectre.

The only problem with this is, of course, without a host, The Spectre is pretty much nothing but magic powers, so when Alice takes those away, he's nothing but a formless ghost, which the Shadowpact is unable to affect in anyway, their attacks going right through him. He again flees, but this time without Eclipso; Nightshade had used her powers to create a portal to an orbit around the sun, through which they had thrown Eclipso.

Finally, The Spectre goes to the Rock of Eternity to duke it out with Shazam. During their battle, the Rock explodes over Gotham City, showering the world with magical debris, and seemingly scrambling the world of magic to such a degree that a full-time magic super-team will be needed to deal with it going forward, as opposed to the ad hoc unions of magical characters that had been semi-regularly popping up in DC Comics over the last decade or two.

The book ends with the Shadowpact vowing to stay together, but, as for the threat of The Spectre and other fall-out of his attack, that won't be addressed until Infinite Crisis proper. I am not rereading that.

•As stated previously, Day of Vengeance opens with Jean becoming Eclipso's host. Here, that is much more involved than was shown in "Lightning Strikes Twice." There's a good two and a half pages of argument between Jean and Eclipso; we're not privy to what he seems to be saying to her through the black diamond in her cell, only her responses to him which, oddly, sound kind of dirty at times ("And what do you expect in return?" she asks at one point, followed later by, "Oh, no, I could never do that! What kind of woman do you think I am?" and "Because I was raised better than that--that's why!").

Anwyay, once Eclipso finally eclipses her, a seven-panel sequence depicting a painful process, she is transformed, and, pointy-ears and eclipsed face aside, doesn't look much like any of the eclipsed from the previous story...which, in this collection, is, like, five pages ago.

Also, her dialogue bubbles don't have a ring of purple around them, seemingly suggesting that she's talking in Jean's own normal, human voice, rather than in Eclipso's distinct voice.

•Willingham's take on Ragman, who narratees much of the first issue, is a distinct one. While we would have last seen him in a 1998 Batman arc—which you and I have just seen quite recently——here he's not only not resistant to taking the lives of evil people but seems to regard doing so as his job. "Once upon a time I used to be a superhero," he says, "Now I'm just the guy who picks up the trash."

In this scene, "the trash" refers to a man who apparently murdered his wife and business partner. Ragman chases him down, throws him around, enwraps him in the rags of his cape, and then ultimately sucks the man's soul out of his body to become another rag in his suit of souls, leaving behind a desiccated husk. 

Here, Ragman seems to be intimately familiar with each and every rag/soul in his suit, able to recall their name, their crime and their willingness to help him, by lending them their strength. His power seems to correspond to the number of souls in his suit, and, when he needs to lift a large tree trunk to save someone trapped beneath it, he narrates, "I take energy from dozens...And when that doesn't work, I increase the enlistment to hundreds."

•As to how Eclipso is able to convince The Spectre to attack magic, well, that gets explained (or as explained as it ever is), in the second issue. We listen in as Eclipso talks directly to The Spectre in purple narration boxes, referring to him as "Darling" and "Handsome."

When The Spectre lays eyes on Eclipso and hears his/her name, he says only that it sounds familiar. Willingham than has Eclipso expound on The Spectre's confused state, referred to by Winick in "Lightning Strikes Twice":

I know you're a bit confused these days, right? Old memories all a jumble?

It shows.

Not your fault, though.

This is the first time in ages you've been without a human host. Someone to anchor you to this reality. 

I'm here to remedy that. 

Eclipso isn't going to be his new host, although that might be a bit more believable, if one spirit of divine retribution can indeed host another ("I have my own part to play, in the grand scheme of things," she answers, when he asks if Eclipso is to be his new host). (Of course, what would make the most sense would simply be to have Eclipso eclipse The Spectre. Then The Spectre's evil actions could be explained as his being controlled by an evil entity, rather than this talk of seduction and belief that magic is the source of evil.)

Rather, she says she has been sent by "the higher powers" to advise him and give him direction.

That conversation, and Eclispo's thoughts, are shared with readers in a scene wherein The Enchantress channels Eclipso, speaking his thoughts aloud to her new allies. Eclipso boasts that her logic "is subtle, but flawless." "Law and order are all about following the rules," Eclipso-through-Enchantress says, "And magic is all about breaking the rules of nature."

Maybe. I think there were better ways to "sell" this conflict which, again, I think was dictated to Willingham rather than being entirely his own invention, and perhaps another would simply be the host-less Spectre deciding that magic was a sin in the eyes of God, an unnatural usurpation of God's dominion over the world and its workings. After all, there are passages in the Bible forbidding witchcraft and other forms of magic and divination, and certainly for centuries now the church has associated magic with the devil and dark powers.

Anyway, Willingham continues to make it weird. The first words we hear Enchantress speak when the scene shifts to her are "I'm doing it...I'm actually seducing The Spectre." And, a few panels later, after mentioning how lonely The Spectre has been without a host and how happy he is that Eclipso has befriended him, she says, "And oh, the new feelings I've woken in him! He wants me in more than just a spiritual sense."

I...don't like to think of The Spectre as a sexual being at all, but I suppose DC has done something similar before. 

At any rate, the recent Spectre omnibus includes a panel wherein Madame Xandadu says something cryptic about how, in the past, "both natures of The Spectre fed me the tantric power by which I maintained the spell," and the art shows her with her hand on the grim face of The Spectre, next to another image of her happily embracing a shirtless Corrigan. (She seemed to be referring to the events of the 1987-1989 Spectre series written by Doug Moench, which I've never read, but heard a bit about.)

And in 1999's Day of Judgment, a caption refers to Madame Xanadu as, in part, "former lover of The Spectre", again likely referring to the Moench series. 

•Hmm, all this talk about magic being the root of all evil aside then, could Eclipso have really seduced The Spectre simply by showing interest in him...and showing so much cleavage? That's something the old Eclipso never had, anyway. 

If Jean wanted to get back together with The Atom, maybe she should have tried putting her boobs in his face, rather than that whole murder-his-old-coworker's-wife stratagem...

•Rex The Wonder Dog makes an unnamed cameo, appearing in a panel of the origin story that Detective Chimp shares with Black Alice's dad ("On our circuit was a show in rural Florida, where a doggie pal of mine led me to the Fountain of Youth," he says in a brown narration box with a magnifying glass in the corner, while the art shows a still-naked Bobo and a white dog drinking from a pool). 

If DC had only released a complete collection of the 1986-1990 Secret Origins series, maybe Bobo wouldn't have had to take up so much of this mini-series telling his story.

His origin was told in 1989's Secret Origins #40, the infamous all-ape issue featuring one of the greatest covers DC has ever published. Andy Helfer and Mark Badger were responsible for that Detective Chimp origin story, although it sounds pretty different than the one presented here (The Fountain of Youth story appears to originate in a story from 1981's DC Comics Presents #35). The issue also included origins of Gorilla Grodd and Congorilla (on the motorcycle). 

I've been meaning to devote a post to how badly I wish DC would collect that Secret Origins series for a while now. Maybe they can do so in a couple of DC Finest volumes in the near future...? Sure, continuity has changed repeatedly since the last issue of the series was published, and thus many of the specifics of those stories might have likewise changed, but there's a real who's who of talent involved in those comics.

•Excuse me, Captain Marvel? You have too been in a bar before. I saw you there. You ordered a milkshake. Remember L.E.G.I.O.N. '91 #31? The "War of the Gods" tie-in where you fell on top of Lobo and, despite your resistance, you eventually fought him until you were teleported away again? That was totally in a bar. I mean, it was a space bar, sure, but it was still a bar...

(If you, dear reader, missed that particular barroom brawl, which was drawn by Barry Kitson and appeared under a cover by the great Dan Brereton, DC collected it in 2015's Shazam! A Celebration of 75 Years, which is a pretty good book to have on your bookshelf.)

•Okay, so as stated above, Eclipso-in-Jean-Loring's-body was teleported to "a perpetual, non-decaying orbit around the sun."

Now, as far as I knew in 2005, sunlight was Eclipso's one great weakness, and exposure to sunlight would drive him out of the whatever body he happened to be in possession of. Had that changed somewhere between 1992 and 2005...? (I don't think it did, as I had read all of his appearances between The Darkness Within and Day of Vengeance, but I suppose it could have in, say, JSA, and I just don't remember). 

Anyway, I'm pretty sure that as soon as the eclipsed Jean Loring appeared in orbit around the sun, Eclipso should have been driven from her body, and she would have then immediately died by virtue of being in the vacuum of space.

•After Day of Vengeance concludes, with a cliffhanger ending of sorts, it's dangling plot threads eventually picked up on in Infinite Crisis, Day of Vengeance: Infinite Crisis Special #1 and Shadowpact (Oh, and the previously mentioned Blue Beetle, I guess), the trade includes a few more features. There's a cover gallery (Churchill drew the "Lightning Strikes Twice" covers, while Walt Simonson drew the Day of Vengeance ones), Justiniano's character designs for the eclipsed Jean Loring and Enchantress, and two pages that offer a character key for all of the cameos in the first Oblivion Bar scene.

Justiniano filled these scenes with plenty of original character designs, but there's also a ton of extant DC characters, like Jennifer Morgan, Arion, Black Orchid, Witchfire, Janissary and The Ghost Patrol...it was a fun scene in the comic, rewarding one scanning the background and seeing which characters could be recognized, and it was equally fun to have the "answers" to the scene in the back like that. 

EDILW Presents: Wonder Woman Wednesdays!

Wonder Woman’s had a rough time of things lately.

She’s the First Lady of Superheroes, a position she’s earned by, um, being the first lady superhero. She’s one of only three Golden Age comic book characters whose adventures have been in continuous publication from the time she was created to the present (You know the other two). She’s one of the most widely recognized comic book characters in the world, even among the “civilian” population.

The lady deserves some respect, you know?

But what does she get instead? I don’t know—what’s the exact opposite of respect?

The rejiggeirng of DC’s fictional universe that occurred in Infinite Crisis drastically changed Wonder Woman’s status quo in the company’s shared setting, so that the decades-old rejiggering of Crisis On Infinite Earths was de-rejiggered, apparently knocking George Perez’s run on her title out of continuity/canon (And here’s a dispiriting thought: This is apparently no longer canon, but this is).

At the same time, her series, which was experiencing one of it’s rare peaks in quality thanks to writer Greg Rucka’s acclaimed run on the title, was cancelled to make room for a brand-new Wonder Woman series, to be written by relative newcomer Allan Heinberg (Whose previous comics credits included maxiseries Young Avengers and co-writing a JLA arc with Geoff Johns).

In relaunching the title, Heinberg took his clues from the 1970s TV show, introducing a new, nostalgic/retro status quo that was more in keeping with the Wonder Woman of the ‘60s and ‘70s then the one readers have followed the last 20 years in comics (and, in the past few years, on the Justice League cartoon).

This Wonder Woman had a Clark Kent-like secret identity (Diana Prince, an Amazonian secret agent who wore her hair up and a pair of shaded glasses) and worked for the U.S. government’s Department of Meta-Human Affairs. She’d stepped down from her role as ambassador, thus leaving the world stage to be a secret agent and fight supervillains. Heinberg delivered the first four-issues of an intended five-issue run over the course of a year before DC removed him from the schedule due to missed deadlines.

Next up was a not-very-good one-issue fill-in story, making way for best-selling author Jodi Picoult. Rather than giving Picoult the sort of carte blanche they’d given best-selling author Brad Meltzer with the Justice League characters in Identity Crisis and Justice League of America or Heinberg on Wonder Woman, Picoult was assigned to write a six-issue arc that built on Heinberg’s new version of the character. (Imagine instead a Picoult-written miniseries or original graphic novel, in or out of continuity).

If Heinberg’s Wonder Woman was mediocre, Picoult’s was actually terrible.

Like Heinberg, she ignored much of the last 20 years or so worth of Wonder Woman stories (Perhaps rightly so, perhaps not, depending on Wondy’s continuity, which no one knows the status of post-Infinite Crisis). In addition to keeping Heinberg’s innovations of a secret identitied-up ex-Goddess of Truth who’s trying to learn what it’s like to be an ordinary human buy hunting superhumans as a secret agent, Picoult played Wonder Woman as a fish out of water character who can’t order coffee, pump gas or work turnstiles, all of which seems…off. (If she’s a founding Justice Leaguer again post-Infinite Crisis, as IC and JLoA have made clear, that means she’s spent at least the last 11 years living in the United States, on more than one occasion living with normal American families and even working in a fast food joint).

It’s hard to say just how much of the title’s current suckiness is Picoult’s fault and how much is editorial’s. At any rate, the results have been a story featuring the dense continuity that keeps new readers from easily getting into a comic (at the least, you'll have to have read about Max Lord's killing and the previous story arc of the title, and Manhunter sure wouldn' hurt) accompanied (ironically) by the sort of continuity errors that keep hardcore fans from supporting the book.

Picoult on Wonder Woman should have been a creative, public relations and sales slam dunk for DC (and were she writing a miniseries or original graphic novel, it probably would have been), but instead it’s simply turned into strike two on their Wonder Woman relaunch.

DC’s already announced the next writer: Gail Simone. Simone is a very good comic book writer (in addition to being a woman), a writer who at her absolute worst is still guaranteed to be able to deliver stories at least as good as Heinberg’s, but on a monthly rather than quarterly schedule. Which is great news.

The bad news? Simone’s Newsarama interview intimates that she’ll be working with the post-Infinite Crisis status quo, and, of course, there’s still four more issues of Picoult’s run, and another two-issue fill-in stint, before Simone takes over.

But not all is bleak for the Amazing Amazon! We at EDILW are planning to do our part to make things a little less grim for our favorite star-spangled shorts rocking heroine, which is why we’re launching a new feature this week—Wonder Woman Wednesdays. Each Wednesday we’ll have a Wondy-centric post, and the plan is to keep ‘em up coming at least until Simone begins her run on Wonder Woman or we run out of funny Golden Age panels to post out of context and make bad jokes about, whichever comes first.

Infinite Crisis 2.0: The Completely Complete List of Changes Made to the Original Series When it was Colletcted

If any of you out there in Internet Land ever wondered whether or not I actually had an actual life, this post ought to answer that question for you definitiely.

I wasn’t too terribly shocked when I heard the Infinite Crisis trade was going to have a few minor changes; reading Infinite Crisis #7, it was quite clear that it was extremely rushed, so rushed that even the ever growing number of artists couldn’t get it done in time, hence that three-fourths done “Battle of Metropolis” spread.

I was pretty surprised at the number of and nature of the changes made in the book. This is the first time I know of where a publisher took the opportunity of collecting a story to retouch it, in much the same way that George Lucas retouched his original Star Wars trilogy for their twentieth anniversary releases.

Since I’d already spent some $21 on the story, I wasn’t planning on buying the hardcover collection, so it wasn’t until recently I sat down with the collection (borrowed from the library) and spread it on the floor with the originals. And then, like a lunatic, I went about reading every page of both versions of Infinite Crisis, looking for changes.

They seemed to fall into three major categories. Cosmetic changes either major or minor (the Battle of Metropolis, minor coloring here and there), corrections made for either the sake of accuracy or clarity (Johns referring to Tempest’s son as a girl, dialogue that didn’t really make much snese), and major changes in dialogue that effected the story.

It’s the third one that is most troubling, and sort of falls along the lines of Greedo shooting first, but with greater impact. Somewhere between the time Infinite Crisis was finished being written and the time it was collected into book format, the decision seems to have been made that the traditional DC Multiverse, that which was destroyed in the original Crisis on Infinite Earths, was going to return.

During the course of Infinite Crisis, we meet six survivors of COIE who weren’t properly rejiggered with the billions of people from the five surviving earths, and one of them manages to recreate the Multiverse for a few minutes before it is again collapsed into one earth, an action which causes it’s history to be altered.

But according to the trade, Earth-Two might never have been destroyed after all, and is apparently still out there. Or it was destroyed, but when the just-re-created Multiverse is collapsed again, it somehow survives. Or something. It’s not all that clear here, but what is clear is that this story went from not saying something at all to hinting very strongly to something.

Though these changes, which increase in frequency as the story unfolds, are each relatively minor, their existence raises all sorts of questions about the relationship between monthly comics and how they’re collected. The trade came out later and will be around far, far longer, giving it the final say and, eventually, the wider readership. We can assume then that what it says is the “real” story, and what we originally read in the single issues is no longer the real story.

It’s not exactly the ideal way to treat your direct market readership/fanbase (“Thanks for following our big-ass event faithfully but, um, we changed it up a bit, would you mind buying it all over again in this format, please?”), and it underscores the fact that Infinite Crisis, for all the hard work and exceptional talent that was poured into it, wasn’t done as thoughtfully and methodically as it probably should have been. If DC had started planning it a few months earlier than they did (and/or not tinkered with the story so much during production, as the interview in the back of the collection implies happened quite a bit), maybe Jimenez and Perez would have had the opportunity to finish drawing the whole thing, and maybe they DC wouldn’t have need to go back and rewrite so much of it.

At any rate, here’s the list of changes. I’ve formatted it to correspond to the issues of the original series that the changed pages are new versions of.


Infinite Crisis #1


Page 20: In the third panel, Vril Dox of LEGION is on the Omega Men’s ship, and talking to Kyle Rayner. The monitor directly in front of him, one of a bank of several such monitors, shows some random looking Rannian soldier on it. In the hardcover, Kyle Rayner’s face is now on the monitor; it seems to be the exact same image of Rayner from the previous panel. The random looking Rannian has been bumped to another monitor further down the bank.

Presumably this was done so as not to confuse readers, who might think Dox is talking to Rayner via space-TV. I had just assumed he was talking to him via some sort of space-radio, while watching a variety of space-TVs, but whatever.

Page 34: Dialogue added. Superman has knocked Mongol flat on his back, and Wonder Woman flies at the fallen alien warlord, her sword drawn back over her head, while saying, “I’m going to keep him there!” Superman blocks her swing, and Batman asks, “What are you doing?”

In the original series, she says “What did you think I was going to do?” Superman responded, “I…I don’t know who you are anymore.”

In the trade, Wonder Woman responds to Batman by saying, “What did you think I was going to do? Kill him? I was going to pin him to the floor.”

Why the change? The original certainly read better, as it essentially put the reader in Batman and Superman’s positions—now that we know Diana has killed before, we’re not sure what to think of her. Will she kill this time, too? The changes clear up that ambiguity, but they do so a little too obviously.

That is, if she never was going to kill him. Looking at the art, and trying to deconstruct the script from it, it’s fairly clear that if she wasn’t going to kill him, she was at least going to inflict a rather grievous head wound on the poor bastard. If she was just going to pin him to the floor, then why is she swinging the edge of the sword at him from over her head, instead of pointing the tip of it at him? And why is she using her sword to “pin” him at all? It’s not like she doesn’t always carry a means of magically capturing and holding her opponents around her hip at all times.

Pages 36 and 37: Art added. Three images of Uncle Sam getting kicked around by the Society villains who decimated the rest of his Freedom Fighters are interposed on top of these two pages. It doesn’t really add anything or change any meaning, and seems more like a simple aesthetic choice.


Infinite Crisis #2


Page 61: Coloring change. Alexander Luthor’s little glowing energy computer things are green on this page in the original series; they’re re-colored red in the trade.



Infinite Crisis #3


Page 76: Dialogue corrected. In the original series, when the host-less Spectre turns his attention to Atlantis, Tempest shouts to his wife, “Dolphin…get… get our daugther out of here.”

Their child Cerdian is a boy, and thus actually their son. The trade corrects the mistake.

Page 79: With an army of OMACs attacking their island, the Amazons retaliate with their ultimate weapon, the offensive version of their purple healing ray.

In the original series, the second panel of this page has the PDR’s operator saying,“We already have. The purple death ray has been completed.”

But in the trade, the operator says simply, “We already have.”

I have two problems with this change. First off, yes, “purple death ray” is a pretty silly word, and it might be a little difficult to explain in mixed company (i.e. comics readers and non-comics readers). But you know what else is a silly word? Wonder Woman. And Batman. And Superman. And parallel worlds with cute little nicknames like “Earth-One” and “Earth-Two.” How about Booster Gold, Skeets, Detective Chimp, Psycho-Pirate, Dr. Psycho and a flying dog with superpowers?

Infinite Crisis may very well be the single nerdiest story in DC’s entire publishing history, so it seems strange to see Johns and DC visibly recoiling form the nerdiness of a single name. Is this really where they draw the line?

Secondly, it’s sort of confusing just to see some random Amazon sitting in some random giant gun shooting out purple energy. Just what the heck is that thing supposed to be, now that it’s name is taken out of the story?

Page 86: Dialogue corrected. In the original series, Superman appears in time to catch the top half of a falling sky scraper that was knocked down by a chunk of the Rock of Eternity. He looks down at the Shadowpact and declares simply “I got it.”

In the trade, his grammar has improved, and he says instead, “I’ve got it.”


Page 97: Dialgoue changed. In panel seven, the Superman from Earth-Two is trying to talk Batman into helping him recreate Earth-Two, where everyone is better off then they are on the “real” DC Earth.

In the series, Batman asks E-2 Supes about Dick Grayson, “Is he a better man on your earth than he is on mine?”

In the trade, Batman instead says “You said this earth corrupts everything. Is the Dick Grayson of my earth a corrupted version of yours?

It’s not really a big deal, and seems to be a slight improvement over the original, which is a little confusing (The original could be read as Batman insulting Grayson, as if he thought he wasn’t a good man).


Page 99: Dialogue added. In panel six, Lex Luthor shoots one of Alex Luthor’s computers, which shorts out Alex’s holographic disguise. In thetrade, the line “My hologram…” was added, apparently to clarify that Luthor had a holographic disguise on.


Infinite Crisis #4



Page 112: Coloring change. In panel nine, a great deal more energy and lighting effects are added around the Alex Luthor/Power Girl kiss for whatever reason. The closest I can come up with is an editor staring down at it and thinking, “You know what this image needs? More lighting.” Actaully, I still haven’t figured out how Luthor knocks her out with a kiss anyway, regardless of the amount of lighting it causes.

Page 113: Coloring change. In the trade, in panel six, there’s a red and blue striped tornado in the middle of the destruction in the background, presumably to show Superman at work. (Nightwing says in the next panel “Superman’s already in the heart of it”). It’s kind of goofy, and doesn’t add anything. And unless Superman is eight stories tall and wearing an eight-story long red cape, the blur is incredibly out of scale anyway.

Page 119: Dialgoue subtracted. IN the original series, the eight panel of this page shows Superboy emerging from the rubble, saying “ Come on, you mother—“ In the trade, his language has been cleaned up a bit, and he says simply “ Come on--! (Of course, Phantom Lady is still shown with her top torn off and impaled to death on a sword; different standards for language and violence against women, natch.)

A better change would have been “Come on, you—,” which sounds more natural and avoids an implied “mother fucker” between two Superboys.

Infinite Crisis #5



Pages 140-141: A two-page spread by Jimenez is inserted. It’s a gigantic one with a bunch of people standing around, some of whom are making their last appearances here before getting killed in IC #7. Members of the Seven Soldiers, various members of various Doom Patrols, Samurai from the Superfiriends, the Power Company, Angel and the Ape, Outsidersrs new and old, New Bloods and even Anima, who hasn’t been seen since the Wonder Woman arc guest-starring all of the DCU’s female supeheros and supervillains, which, incidentally, was written and penciled by Jimenez. (Are Jimenz and I the last two people who remember Anima? Even her entry in the big-ass DC Comics Encyclopedia (co-written by Jimenez) had a picture of supporting character Liv shown instead of Anima herself).


(Above: A detail from Jimenez's crowd in the church scene; anyone know who that little red bat thing is? I have no clue. What about the white dude with the star on his belt? Or the black person right behind Black Lightning? Or the kid with the teddy bear? Man, Jimenez broke out some obscure cameos in this one, didn't he?)


To make the spread fit in slightly more naturally, the box of dialogue from the last panel of page 139 was moved to the bottom of this spread. It’s still forced pretty forced (to Jimenez’s credit, the characters seem to be talking to one another rather than just standing they’re posing), as this huge assemblage of characters sort of mills about in a big, open, back-groundless part of a church. Still, it’s awesome to see so many of these characters appear here, and this spread is definitely one of only two reasons to pick up the trade if you already have the original series.

Page 149: Dialgoue change. Returning multiverse clue! Earth-Two Lois is dying, Earth-Two Superman says to her, “I can’t be another survivor of a dead world. Not without you.”

In the original series he responds, “With all your powers, with everything you saw and did… you still never…”

But in the trade she responds, “I see the truth now, Clark. A truth even Alexander didn’t see… there’s something else out there…out there…”

On the one hand, this could just be a clarification of what she was going to say (she never finishes her thought in the original series), but it adds a rather significant amount of meaning. Originally she didn’t say anything that could be read as a hint to the multiverse’s existence, now she does.

Page 156: Dialogue change. Multiverse Clue #2! In the original series, Earth-Two Wonder Woman says, “But now that I’ve left Olympus, the gods’ blessings are fading. Soon I’ll no longer exist.”

In the trade that line becomes, “But now that I’ve left Olympus, the gods’ blessings to keep me here are fading. I’m being pulled…somewhere.”

Page 165: Coloring changes. In panel four, the male Marvel pictured was wearing a blue costume in the original series, which would make him Captain Marvel Jr. In the trade he’s wearing a red costume, which makes him Cpatian Marvel.

In the next panel, the color of the fading Marvels has also been changed. Instead of a bluish color it’s now much brighter (which distinguishes them from Firehawk’s flames). Oddly, even though someone thought to recolor certain things on this very page, nobody fixed the coloration on Mr. Miracle’s collar, which was mis-colored red in both the singles and in the trade.

Infinite Crisis #6



Page182: Diaglouge changes. In the sixth and seventh panels, the exchange between Psycho-Pirate and Alexander Luthor has been pretty dramatically changed.

Originally, Psycho-Pirate said, “I can feel them. Phantom beings fom the fabric of Earth-One and Earth-Two, pulled from their restful peace, reborn in pain and given essence-- --then destroyed. Billions at a time.”

To which Luthor replies, “ I planted this garden, Psycho-Pirate. I have every right to tend it.

In the trade, Pscyho-Pirate instead says, “I can feel phantom beings pulled from the fabrics of the multiverse, recreated and destroyed. For some reason Earth-Two remains vacant. Why when billions of other beings appear across the multiverse like ghosts. Reborn… …then destroyed.”

Luthor responds, “The anomalies of Earth-Two are not my concern. Finding the perfect earth is.”

Infinite Crisis#7



Pages 212-213: This is the infamous un-finished spread, a giant battle between as many heroes and villains as Jimenez could draw in combat in the streets of metropolis. It looked horrible in the original series, and it was quite clear that although Jimenez seems to have finished penciling it in time, there wasn’t time to have all of it inked, and to cover that up, everything but a few of the figures in the foreground were colored red. The effect was that of a rush-job being poorly concealed with an unusual artistic choice. It was an ugly, ugly page, and stuck out like a sore thumb from the rest of the book. It’s pretty remarkable that it was unfinished, considereding DC had four pencillers and six inkers working on this particular issue of the series.

In the trade, they rightly went back and finished the spread. With inks and colors, many more characters that Jiminez had sketched out in the originally are now much more visible (I didn’t even notice Plastic Man saving a derailed train in the original, and I was wondering where the hell Plas was through the whole Crisis). It’s worth noting that even inked and colored, the spread still looks off, like the characters were cut-and-pasted into the scene rather than designed there. For example, what are Sivana and Aquaman looking up at? This should be one of the climaxes of the book, and it’s one of the most disappointing spreads.

Page 214: Dialogue added. This page is a random, seven-panel montage of the Battle of Metropolis. Some of the panels were completely silent in the original series, and dialogue has since been added. In the first panel, we see an image of Band breaking Judomaster’s back over his knee (complete with a KRRAKK sound effect). In the trade he says, “I finally know who I am. I am Bane. I break people.” (No, I don’t know what he’s talking about either).

In panel four, we see Shining Knight II leaping off her Pegasus to bash the Riddler’s head with a mace (Is this the headblow that made him forget Batman’s secret identity and become a relatively good guy in the pages of OYL Detective?). In the trade, she shouts, “Good night, jester!” while doing so.

Finally, in the sixth panel, a quintet of New Bloods (Nightblade, Razorsharp, Geist, Ballistic and Mongerel) struggle with a silent Solomon Grundy. The trade adds the word “RRRARRR—“ coming from Grundy for some reason.

Page 215: Dialogue changed. More Alexander Luthor dialogue confusion! In the third and fourth panels, he argues with a temper-tantrum-throwing Superboy-Prime when SbP calls the DCU’s Earth, the one we’ve been reading about since Crisis on Infinite Earths, “Earth-One.”

In the original series, Luthor says, “This isn’t Earth-One, Superboy. It never really was. And now this “unified” world, this New Earth, has been altered again. There are changes within it’s history.” When Superboy says he wants Earth-Prime back, Luthor responds “We can’t bring it back again.”

Meanwhile, in the trade, Luthor responds to SbP’s reference to Earth-One thusly: “This isn’t Earth-One, Superboy. In fact, it never was. I miscalculated. I tried to divide a new earth. Instead, I only altered its history” (I\Interestingly, forgot the period at the end of the sentence. Another actual mistake made in the correction process). When Superboy-Prime asks for his earth back, Luthor now says, “I need time to rebuild.”

I don’t really understand the changes. And this is the one part of the IC that should be crystal clear, as this is the part where Alexander Luthor explains that continuity has been re-jiggered. When he temporarily re-created the multiverse, and then it re-collapsed, history was altered. He lists a few examples (Wonder Woman founded the League, Batman caught his parents’ killers, etc). This is the central event of IC, and it seems to have changed between the publication of the series and the trade.

Orginally, it was clear that Luthor recreated a multiverse and the heroes re-collapsed it, altering continuity in the process. Now it sounds like Earth-Two at least has always existed, or at least survived the multiverse collapse. If there even was a multiverse collapse…perhaps the multiverse Luthor recreated simply started vibrating at it’s original frequency again, and all those Earths slid back into parallel dimensions. (And this is the biggest weakeness of IC versus Crisis on Infinite Earths. During COIE, DC at least told readers what happened; with IC not only have they been coy about their fictional universes current cosmology, they seem to not know themselves, as many of the more significant changes here indicate).

Page 217: Art change. In the first panel, in which Superman says “Like hell”, we get a spread of some of the biggest heroes swooping to the rescue.

In the singles, this panel is very rough and sparsely drawn (Black Canary’s missing an arm, there’s little to no detail on anyone, etc).

In the trade, it looks like Jiminez may have penciled on top of someone’s roughs (Bennett’s?), and Lanning most certainly re-inked the, adding all sorts of details to everyone (adding an arm on to Canary, fishscales on Aquaman’s shirt, wounds on his body, etc), but still not making sense out of a couple details (What’s Aquaman holding? What’s up with Hal’s torso?). It’s also been re-colored with all sorts of effects on the metal objects and light sources.

The last panel has different dialogue, making a confusing bit about the multiverse less confusing. In the original, E-2 Superman says it’s good to fight with the Justice Society again, and Wildcat asks who he is, to which Power Girl responds, “Who do you think?”

In the original, he says, “I think I remember. That’s him,” as if he remembers his time on Earth-Two Pre-Crisis. But in the trade, he instead responds simply, “It looks like Superman.”

Page 223: New page added. There’s an all-new six-panel sequence inserted showing the Bat-family duking it out with Deathstroke (hee hee!) in which Batman questions why Slade is working with the Society.

Page 229: Dialgoue added. On the last panel of the page, the two Supermen grab Superboy-Prime and fly off with him. In the original series, its a silent panel. But in the trade, one of the Supermen shouts telepathically, “For tomorrow!” (How is that any less cheesy than the term “Purple Death Ray?” God!)

Page 230: New page added. Four more panels are added to the Battle of Metropolis. The first is another big fight scene, in the the second some villains notice Robin and the wounded Nightwing, and rush at him. Then the new Flash and an assortment of not-massacred Titans show up to push the villains away. In the last panel, Raven and Dr. Mid-Nite crowd around Nighwing, and Robin asks fairly calmly, “Dr. Mid-Nite? Is Nightwing--?”, to which the good dctor responds, “He’ll be all reight. I give you my word.”

This doesn’t add much, other than a scene making the Titans look a little less like cannon fodder than they did earlier in the story. It does detract from the drama on the very next page, however. When an image of Nighwing’s (much bloodier) head and a clearly freaking out Robin are inserted among panels of Batman and Luthor squaring off, it seems sort of nonsensical after the page we’d just read. We (and Robin) were just told Nightwing is definitely cool, so why should we worry, and why should Robin be acting like his fellow Bat-protégé is dying before his eyes?

Page 231: Sound effect subtracted. This here’s a big change. Batman knocks Alexander Luthor down, and picks up a handgun that Deathstroke has dropped (this is a pretty big deal right here; it’s the equivalent of Indiana Jones picking up a snake with his bare hands). Batman points the gun at Luthor, asks “What do you deserve?” and then we get a close up of Batman’s narrowed eyes, followed by the gun barrel an inch from Luthor’s brow, with a “CHAK” sound effect.

In the trade, the “CHAK” has been removed, so there’s only the image of Batman holding the gun barrel to Luthor’s forehead.

Why the change? Apparently, there was some confusion as to whether Batman pulled the trigger and it was empty, the “CHAK” the sound of an empty gun clicking, or if it was instead him cocking the gun, getting ready to fire, the “CHAK” being the sound of the gun loading.

Johns and company say (and they say so again in an interview in the back of the book), that it was supposed to be the sound of Batman loading the gun. That probably makes the most sense; “CHAK” or “Ch-CHAK” are pretty universal loading gun noises in comic books, whereas an empty chamber usually has a “klick” or “click” sound.

Page 232: In the original, Batman looks away from the avalanche of rubble that separates him from Alexander Luthor and sees Robin kneeling over Nightwing (now with no blood nearby, and Raven and Dr. Mid-Nite mysteriously missing). The only dialogue is in a narration box, and is actually coming from the next scene.

In the trade, the narration box is missing, and a voice comes from somewhere behind Robin saying “He’s going to be fine.” Is this Batman assessing the situation from off-panel, or Dr. Mid-Nite re-reassuring Robin from off-panel? Who knows.

Page 240: Dialogue added. More Multiverse-related changes! Earth-Two Superman is dying after the fight with Superboy-Prime, and Power Girl leans over him, while he says his last words to her. In the original series, there are two silent panels on the page. In panel seven, we see Superman-2’s
eyes half-closing, and then, in panel eight,an image of a glowing star he seems to be focusing on.

In the trade, more last words are added to these two panels. Superman says “…one day you’ll see…they’re still out there…”

Pages 246-247: New art. Remember that awful two-page spread Apparently by Joe Bennett that showed all of the 52 and “One Year Later” heroes in one big image? That extremely hurried-looking, badly composed and half-assedly colored image where we got our first looks at “Shazam”’s stupid new look, Captain Marvel II, and J’onn Jonn’z horrible makeover?

Well, George Perez has redrawn it, as only George Perez could have. He’s packed it with even more characters, and filled up the space so that there’s very little left blank. He’s also put some thought into the characters and their posing on the page. Originally the heroes were all drawn willy nilly, most of them flying toward the viewer, whether they could fly or not (Lobo, Cyborg, the Metal Men, et cetera). Perez has those that can fly flying, and those that can’t running toward the viewer.



(Above: A detail from the lower left-hand corner of the Bennet spread, followed by a detail from the lower left-hand corner of the Perez spread)

He also seems to have drawn the entire 52 and “One Year Later” DCU. Or at least all of the heroes. All all of them. In addition to those that were in the original spread, he’s added Katana, Lady Blackhawk, Gypsy, Kid Devil, “Jade Canary,” Isis, Doc Magnus, the Helmet of Fate, a new Metal Man, Thunder, the OMAC from that stupid OMAC series, Teekel, Elongated Man, Plastic Man, Adam Strange, Donna Troy, Firestorm, Firehawk, Manhunter, The Doom Patrol, Black Lighting, Animal Man, The Monolith and Dr. Mid-Nite’s owl Charlie. Whew!

This spread is reason to buy the trade #2, following Jimenez’s church spread of random heroes. Like the covers and an awful lot of the interior panels of Perez’s JLA/Avengers series, the spread rewards long minutes of staring hard at it and drinking in its many details.