Review: Justice League of America: The Rise of Eclipso

The 2012 Justice League of America: The Rise of Eclipso trade paperback collection is a complete mess, which probably shouldn't be surprising. After all, the entire 2006-2011 volume of JLoA was a bit of a mess, especially after its initial writer, Brad Meltzer, left. "Rise of Eclipso" was the final story arc in the series, followed by a sort of one-issue epilogue—"Adjourned"—after which the series was cancelled. 

Not, it's worth stressing, because the series was a mess, of course, nor because its last few arcs were any worse than its first few, but because DC cancelled all of its books at the time, closing out their post-Crisis continuity for their biggest, hardest reboot ever, September of 2011's The New 52 initiative. 

This trade, then, represents not just the end of the JLoA series, but the end of the 25-year post-Crisis Justice League saga. 

It is, I am disappointed to say, not very good, and the sort of historical nature of the story makes it more disappointing still. Were 25 years of stories all leading up to this? No, this was just a placeholder story, something to keep a Justice League comic on the shelves while DC worked on a new, New 52 version of their flagship team title, one that would prove to be a sales hit (and, if you ask me, creative flop).

But let's stay on topic.

The comics collected herein are all written by James Robinson, and drawn by pencil artists Brett Booth, Daniel Sempere, Jesus Merino and Miguel Sepulveda and inked by Sepulveda and three other artists. That may seem like a lot of artists, but Booth draws most of the book, including all but one chapter of the title story, with Sampere and Sepulveda penciling the one issue he does not. 

Booth's presence, by the way, is why I had never before read these comics. I was not (and am still not, I find) a fan of Booth's style, so this is the point at which I finally dropped JLoA, after faithfully reading JLA and JLoA month in and month out since 1997. 

Therefore, I opened the cover—a featuring a fairly nice image by Ivan Reis that originally ran on the cover of the final issue of the series, JLoA #60—somewhat tensed, expecting the worst. Even so, I was sort of surprised to find, on the second page of the trade, the words, "A Dark Things Epilogue." The book starts with an epilogue to a different story...?

Indeed. Even odder, the issue doesn't feature any members of the current Justice League. Instead, it is one long scene in which Green Lantern Alan Scott and his son Obsidian talk to one another on the moon, the rest of their team, the Justice Society of America finally showing up on the last page. The only Justice League of America characters that show up during the course of this particular issue, do so in crowd scenes filling its many splash pages, depicting possible futures. 

I would discover the why of this later. This particular issue isn't even an issue of JLoA, rather it is JSoA #43. The "Dark Things" story arc was a crossover involving both of the Justice...of America titles. My guess is that this ended up in a JLoA trade because DC probably published "Dark Things" under the more popular JLoA title in trade. That, or maybe DC didn't collect the last issues of JSoA into trade at all, and thus there was nowhere else to stick this. It does have some bearing on "Rise of Eclipso," introducing readers who might have skipped "Dark Things" (or, like me, read it like 15 years ago and forgotten it), to The Emerald City.

This is a massive city on the moon, built by the Starheart, the magical source of Alan Scott's Green Lantern ring and its magical powers. I'm not sure when exactly the Starheart entered DC lore, but it's been around since at least the '90s. It was a way to incorporate Alan into the greater Green Lantern mythology, from which he was originally had nothing to do with when Hal Jordan and the Green Lantern Corpse were created in the Silver Age.

Anyway, whatever happened during the course of "Dark Things," the Starheart's power has now created a massive city composed of Green Lantern construct buildings, and various magical creatures from Earth have been "called" there and have made it their home. Alan is sort of its sheriff and administrator. He gives his son a tour of the place, and they angst about a current bit of drama involving their family: Obsidian and his sister Jade can no longer come within a half mile of one another, or risk combining into some weird composite form that will bring about the end of the world.

Alan says that he and Dr. Fate ran through every conceivable scenario to fix things, but all they found were alternate futures in which, say, Earth's vampire and fairy populations go to war and superheroes get caught in the middle or all of the superheroes with Earth powers will go insane.

The issue is notable for two reasons. First, despite Merino providing the best pencil art of the whole trade, this issue looks like it must have been thrown together in a hurry: Of its 22 pages, six are spent on double-page splashes and three on single-page splashes. (There are also a couple of pages with only two panels apiece, which are practically splashes.)

Some of those double-page splashes do have a lot of figures in them, like the one depicting the aforementioned war, but man, 2011 Caleb would have been so pissed if he spent three bucks on a comic that was, like, half splash pages...

The other notable thing is just to what degree Robinson seems to be treating the endeavor as a "toybox" comic. He's always set his work deeply into the DC Universe setting, of course, often finding and using lesser-known characters in interesting new ways and keeping an admirable fidelity to DC continuity. Here, though, that aspect of his work seems turned up to 11 (and it will stay so throughout the trade). Aside from various JSoA character, Mordu, Nightmaster, Gemworld, Monolith, Zara, Andrew Bennet, Geomancer and Tara II are either namedropped or make cameos of sorts and, of course, that spread with depicting the war is full of various superheroes, at least one of whom I couldn't even identify.

That out of the way, "Rise" begins in earnest and it, too, gets off to a bad start.

Take a look:

The very first page of "Rise" consists of two panels. The first has narration, white type in black boxes (just like Obsidian's dialogue in the previous chapter, although this is not Obsidian talking). It reads:

At a time of grave crisis, the world's greatest heroes banded together to combat evil.

The name of this team...

...The Justice League of America.

The image in this first panel shows the original (pre-Crisis, post-Infinite Crisis) Justice League founders, the seven heroes from 1960's The Brave and the Bold #28, but, in the background, we see the Hall of Justice...which wasn't actually the headquarters of any Justice League in the comics until Brad Meltzer imported it from the Super Friends cartoons in the early issues of this particular volume of JLoA, so circa 2006 or so. 

The second panel, accounting for the bottom half of the page, has narration reading:

Other heroes joined this group...other champions. The roll call changing year by year. 

Here Booth draws a mostly random assortment of later Leaguers, stretching from the likes of Green Arrow and Hawkman to Red Arrow and Black Lightning. 

Between these two panels, but more on the bottom than the top, is...a mysterious object, a colorful box with what looks like a "7" on it (It's on the right edge of the page above). I could not for the life of me figure out what the hell this was supposed to be, especially since it seemed to be reaching onto the page from somewhere off page. I flipped to the next page to see if this was a mistake of layout, and maybe something on the next page explained it, but no.

Eventually I decided it must be a TV news microphone, from a Channel 7, perhaps being pointed at the JLoA founders, as if they were giving a press conference (If you look closely, there's the tip of another tiny microphone in the bottom right corner of the first panel, near Batman's crotch). 

I'm not sure why Booth drew it, but I am sure he should not have. 

And then onto the second page of the issue, a full-page splash featuring the current line-up fighting what, upon close inspection, turn out to be green hard-light constructs of Alan Scott, presumably generated by Jade during "Dark Things." 

Here the narration tells us the team has changed again, and that this version of the team came together during the events of "Dark Things." The line-up during this volume of JLoA seemed to shift each story arc, something I have to assume was not Robinson's doing, nor to his liking (His predecessor on the title, the late Dwayne McDuffie, complained about editorial taking characters he was using or planning to use out of circulation on a regular basis. If you've read much of Robinson's run, you'll find the "official" line-up more fluid still). 

I did appreciate this page, as it tries to contextualize this team as a Justice League, and make the constant changes in team make-up seem like part of the overall Justice League story. That, and it told me who was actually supposed to be on the team at this point: Jade, Supergirl, Congorilla, Donna Troy, Jesse Quick, Batman Dick Grayson and Starman Mikaal Tomas.

So, notably, it's a couple of fun, unlikely characters (Congorilla and Starman), and a bunch of legacy characters plucked from the extended "families" of founding Leaguers (everyone else), some of whom might not have been the second, third, or even fourth choice to fill those roles (Green Lantern-like Jade and speedster Jesse Quick, for example).

Still, it's a noteworthy line-up in just how many women are on it. In fact, I think this may be the first and only time the number of women outnumbered the number of men on the team...?

From here, the scene shifts from the battle scene on the moon to Earth, where Bruce Gordon takes over the narration, and, ultimately, somehow transforms into Eclipso, despite there not being an eclipse. From here on out, the book will mostly be narrated by a conversation between Eclipso and Gordon, the latter of whom is reduced to a voice in the former's head.

Gordon's words appear in very light gray, almost white narration boxes. Eclispo's appear in purple boxes. There is occasionally omniscient narration too, with this in white boxes, which can easily be confused as Gordon's thoughts. And there is at least one instance where Eclipso's dialogue appears in a light gray box, as if it were Gordon's. Again, it's remarkably slipshod for a DC comic, I thought, and I was kinda surprised that mistakes like this made it into the trade, as surely someone would have noticed it the first time the book was published, and then fixed it before it was published a second time, no? 

This first chapter of "Rise" is, aside from that splash page introducing them, devoid of the Justice League, instead following Eclipso as he goes around gathering allies with various shadow-based powers and "eclipsing" them: The Shade, Nightshade, Acrata and Shadow Thief, plus two more I had never heard of, Dark-Crow and Bete-Noir (this Bete-Noir character being a skull-faced gorilla who speaks French, not to be confused with Martian Manhunter villain Bette Noir). (Oh, I guess there's a good reason I never heard of these two; they are new characters appearing here for the first time. Neat.)

Oh, and Eclipso also awakens a slumbering elder god for his team, an off-brand Cthulhu, named Syththunu.

As for what Eclipso is up to this time, well, it's a very complicated plan, and it is revealed only gradually throughout the story arc, but essentially he plans to kill God by destroying the Earth, Robinson proposing a rather interesting idea that, in the DC Universe, Earth is a sort of conduit between God and the universe, transferring energy back and forth (I'm not entirely sure if this is all Robinson's idea, though, as the events of Brightest Day are referenced in relation to this, specifically the White Lanterns and that weird White Lantern entity). 

On the last pages of this chapter, we see Alan Scott in the Emerald City. He is now bald and emaciated, laying in a bed with an IV. What happened to him between the first issue collected in this trade and the second? No clue. 

(Oddly, when events from other books are reflected in the issues, there are no asterisks and editorial boxes letting a reader know where they might have occurred...but there are a few editorial boxes referring back to very old stories, like one reading "Way back in Brave & The Bold #115", which was the 1974 issue in which The Atom entered a braindead Batman's brain and hopped around, "piloting" it).

The next issue is a good example of just how messy this series is. Though it's entitled "Eclipso Rising Part Two: Mayhem", it's actually also a tie-in to a Superman event (The original cover, which you can see here on comics.org, includes a "Reign of Doomsday" banner along the top). 

Supergirl, wearing a black and white costume, is floating around the wreckage of New Krypton, when Batman shows up in a spaceship. And so does cyborg "Alpha Lantern" Boodikka. And then Doomsday, who can now fly...? And then Starman and Blue Lantern Saint Walker (Though not officially a Leaguer, Walker is in this book more than Supergirl and, in the final issue, Dick mentions him as a potential future Leaguer).

They fight. 

The last page of this issue features two reveals. On the moon, Eclipso has eclipsed Jade, and the Cyborg-Superman pops out of Boodikka on the team's satellite base. 

Whatever is happening with the latter, it's not addressed in this book at all. Cyborg-Superman doesn't reappear at all, so apparently that unfolds in the Superman books, where one assumes "Reign of Doomsday" must be playing out. Those events seem to take Supergirl out of the story as well, as she won't reappear until the final pages of the JLoA #59, the concluding chapter of "Rise". (When she does, she's in red and blue again, and, when Congorilla asks where she was, she simply replies, "Long story, Bill...").

On the moon, Eclipso starts eclipsing all the elves and fairies and other magical residents of the Emerald City. The reserves are called in (which, I was surprised to see, included The Bulleteer, who I don't think was ever actually on any incarnation of the League...?), but they too get eclipsed.

Caleb-favorite character Zauriel is among the reserves, and, rather than eclipsing him, Eclipso sword-fights him, captures him, and forces him to send out some kind of weird divine distress signal, which summons The Spectre. Eclipso kills The Spectre (!), cutting him in half vertically with his giant black sword on a double-page splash printed sideways, and Eclipso thus absorbs his power. (I'm not sure who The Spectre's host is at this point, or if this is a host-less Spectre-Force. The story doesn't address that at all; at any rate, this Spectre doesn't have a goatee, so it doesn't look like the Crispus Allen version, although I would have thought Allen was still The Spectre at this point...)

Things seem very bad, but eventually the League rallies and, with the help of Obsidian, a healthy-again Alan Scott and The Atom Ray Palmer, they defeat Eclipso and save the world...and, I guess, the universe and God himself. (As for The Spectre, is he dead-dead? Unclear, but since the universe is rebooted immediately after all this anyway, I guess it doesn't matter. Corrigan is The Spectre again when introduced into New 52 continuity). 

And then we get issue #60, the final issue. In it, all seven official members of the League take turns telling the rest of the team why they are deciding to quit at this particular juncture. Sure, it strains credulity—all seven decide they need to step away simultaneously?—but then, Robinson was writing these characters off for the final time here, and I don't know the best way to close out the series in these particular circumstances might have been. (Me, I think I would have had them stay together, maybe rushing off into their next adventure on the last page, at least implying that this version of the team, and of the DC Universe, might still go on, if only in the readers' imaginations...)

Between the various team members telling one another what they plan to do next, there are splash pages devoted to adventures that they apparently had in the weeks between the end of "Rise" and this particular meeting: A Construct-led robot uprising, "The Saturn-Thanagar War" and "The Battle for Gemworld". 

At first, I assumed this was Robinson using up his ideas for future JLoA stories, a way of getting them into the book before he left it, but the more I thought about it, the more I began to doubt that a writer would "waste" such ideas in such a way, and so perhaps these were just plots he thought up while writing this particular issue, random off-panel adventures that he considered the basic outlines of without really having fleshed them out, or intended to use anywhere else.

The most interesting bit, I thought, was on the last page, when Dick Grayson and Donna Troy are about to teleport back down to Earth, as the rest of the team already did. They have a short exchange about their version of the Justice League, which really sounds like Robinson talking about his run more than anything else.

"Do you think they'll remember us?" Donna asks Dick and, when he replies, "Who? Bill and the others?" she answers in such a way that it seems as if she's talking about the readers:

No, dummy, the people. The world. Think they'll remember this version of the J.L.A. and all that we did?

To which Dick responds:

Who can say? We did what we could with what we were given and I'm proud. I'll remember. Other people? Honestly who cares, it's not why I'm in this anyway.

Well, I hope that's how Robinson felt...and still feels. Because, despite the fact that I'm reading this story arc and writing about it 15 years later, I feel like Robinson's run has been somewhat forgotten, as has been most of the final stories of DC's books immediately preceding The New 52. 

Though DC has since de-rebooted The New 52, restoring pre-Flashpoint continuity...while keeping some of the The New 52 developments that didn't contradict the previous continuity too badly...I think the Justice League continuity is more screwed-up than that of other characters and concepts within the DCU. 

I'm trade-waiting Mark Waid and company's New History of the DC Universe; perhaps that will reveal if this Justice League is still canon or if it was over-written by all the various cosmic timeline altering events of the last decade or so. 

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

Among all of the things that were wrong with this trade paperback, the wrongest thing is something I didn't yet mention. 

I don't know why this is the case, or if it was the case with all of the copies of the trade that were published, or just the one I happened to borrow from the library, but there was apparently some kind of printing mess up.

For some reason, all of the narration boxes and dialogue balloons that were on the far side of the pages were cut off throughout. Here's an example; note Jesse's dialogue in the first panel:

In all cases, there is enough of the cut-off words to guess what they are supposed to be, but it's really weird, isn't it?

**********************|

Oh, and if you're wondering why on Earth I'm writing about this particular book at this particular time, well, I'll tell you.

As I mentioned a while back, after reading the last half-dozen or so JLA arcs, I had considered re-reading the book that followed the end of JLA, Justice League of America. I ultimately decided not to because a) I didn't care for it the first time around and b) my library system didn't have every volume of it available in trade (They do have them all available electronically, but I'm not a fan of reading comics on my laptop or phone).

So, the idea of revisiting JLoA was already in the back of my mind.

And then I read The Spectre by John Ostrander and Tom Mandrake Omnibus Vol. 1, which made me curious about more recent Spectre comics that followed their series..specifically, the character's storyline after Hal Jordan stopped being the host of The Spectre. Also, during the events of Ostrander and Mandrake's Spectre, the title character seems to rather definitively defeat Eclipso, smashing him to ashes, and I found myself wondering how he came back from that, so I was a bit curious about later Eclipso stories too.

When looking for later Spectre comics, then, I saw that "Rise of Eclipso" featured both Eclipso and the Spectre and, given when it was published, these would have been the last appearances of each character in the Crisis to Flashpoint timeline, so that was two reasons to check this story arc out. 

I plan on writing a few more Spectre-related posts in the near future too, so I hope that's something you guys are interested in reading about...

And then what?: Briefly on 2006-2011's Justice League of America

The final issue of JLA might have been 2006's JLA #125, but that obviously wasn't the end of Justice League comics from DC. The team has starred in at least one book pretty much continuously since 1960, when they first graduated from a Brave and the Bold feature into the first volume of Justice League of America, so of course we all knew that, despite JLA's cancellation, we wouldn't have long to wait before we got a new Justice League ongoing series.

The "JLA" branding actually continued for a few years after the series ended, thanks to JLA Classified. Launched in January of 2005, around the same time that Kurt Busiek and Ron Garney's "Syndicate Rules" arc was starting in the main title, the secondary JLA book was intended to be an anthology series giving rotating creative teams a chance to tell Justice League stories that weren't necessarily bound to the month-in, month-out continuity.

The title started strong, with Grant Morrison returning for the first arc, in which he was paired with pencil artist Ed McGuinness for a sequel to Morrison's own JLA #24-26. He was immediately followed by the former "JLI" era team of Keith Giffen, J.M. DeMatteis and Kevin Maguire, returning to their "Super Buddies" concept from their 2003 miniseries Formerly Known as the Justice League. And their arc was then followed by one written by the then still popular, not-yet-disgraced Warren Ellis.

While creators with sizable fanbases would continue to show up for the remainder of the book's run, including the likes of John Byrne, Howard Chaykin, Jose Luis Garcia-Lopez, Dan Jurgens and Gail Simone, the tile seemed to grow increasingly less relevant. Its final issue was 2008's #54. Only a handful of its arcs ever ended up making it into trade paperback collections. 

Whatever the exact provenance of its various arcs—specifically commissioned for the book, inventory stories, repurposed miniseries—it was always clear that Classified was the B-title of the two. 

The actual, official, totally-in-continuity Justice League would return with their own book in September of 2006 in the pages of Justice League of America #0, published just a few months after the last issue of JLA and, perhaps more importantly, the last issue of event series Infinite Crisis, which reset DC's superhero line (and tinkered with its continuity a bit).

The new Justice League series, which was using the Justice League of America title for the first time since 1987, was written by Identity Crisis' Brad Meltzer, pencilled by Ed Benes and inked by Sandra Hope. 

It broke rather sharply from the "Big Seven" formula that powered JLA. Sure, the new line-up featured Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman and The Flash, but that was it of the core JLA team. They were joined by former Leaguers Black Canary, Red Tornado, Vixen and Green Lantern Hal Jordan. Also joining the team were former Outsiders Black Lightning and Geo-Force, the JSA's Hawkgirl Kendra Saunders and former Titan Roy Harper, who changed his codename from Arsenal to Red Arrow for the occasion (ala Kingdom Come).

Most notably missing was probably J'onn J'onnz, who had been in one Justice League or another for at least the previous 20 years, as well as Aquaman, who had been on the team throughout much of JLA (disappearing for a while when he was temporarily dead, and then taking a sabbatical after his resurrection) and John Stewart, the team's Green Lantern for the last three years. Oh, and Plastic Man, who was on the League for the previous eight years or so (a short sabbatical during Joe Kelly's run aside). (I've never reread Metlzer's run—it wasn't very good the first time around, to be honest—and now I can't remember if, when putting the team together, Superman, Batman and Wonder Woman offered rationales for why some of their long-time teammates weren't included.)

While it certainly wasn't the League I would have put together in 2006, it was at least an interesting line-up. I was thrilled to see Black Lightning finally on the team, for example. And Wonder Woman was joined by three other women (one of whom, Vixen, was also Black, so neither she nor Black Lightning seemed like a token character). And there was certainly some interesting potential in Roy, like Wally West before him, essentially "graduating" from the Titans to the Justice League.

Not that Meltzer would stick around long to do anything with the characters, though. And his line-up didn't last all that much longer than he did.

Meltzer only wrote the first 13 issues of the series (all of which were essentially one big story arc, devoted to assembling his new team, a crossover with the Geoff Johns-written Justice Society of America falling in the middle of it), and then he left the title.

Meltzer was replaced by Dwayne McDuffie, a comics writer and editor who had been working on DC's animated shows, including the Justice League one, and was thus probably an even better "get" for people who might actually read a Justice League comic than Meltzer ever was. 

McDuffie immediately started tinkering with the line-up he inherited (His first issue featured Green Lantern John Stewart, for example, and thinking about it now, I don't know if Geo-Force even ever officially joined the team or just managed to pose with the others on Alex Ross' variant for JLoA #12, above). 

McDuffie stayed on through #34—missing only four issues, three scripted by Alan Burnett and another by Len Wein—for a total of 19 issues. Benes had stayed on the title through McDuffie's run, although there were obviously fill-ins. A lot of fill-ins. Joe Benitez, Rags Morales and Joe Luis each penciled two issues apiece, while Ethan Van Sciver, Carlos Pachecho, Allan Goldman, Chris Cross, Shane Davis and the team of Ardian Syaf and Eddy Barrows each drew an issue apiece. 

Oh, and then there was issue #25, for which Benes was joined by five more pencil artists, presumably because it was an anniversary issue: Doug Mahnke, Darick Robertson, Shane Davis, Ivan Reis and Ian Churchill.

That is obviously a lot of pencil artists for so few issues, and I remember McDuffie's run as being particularly chaotic, with characters coming and going more quickly than ever, and the increasingly inconsistent art often being rather poor (To be fair, I didn't care for the work of "regular" artist Benes at all, either). 

That chaos was apparently because of what was going on behind the scenes, as McDuffie reportedly kept finding his plans for the title thwarted, characters he might be able to use one month suddenly being off-limits the next in accordance with the goings-on of other comics (Last-minute changes to his plots and scripts would certainly help explain all those guest artists). (I suppose one could speculate as to why McDuffie seemed to get none of the same deference Meltzer did in terms of his plans for the book, given that the latter seemed to have a greenlight to do whatever he wanted in Identity Crisis and his 13 issues of JLoA, but maybe we shouldn't get into that here.)

After McDuffie's final issue, Wein returned for a three-issue fill-in arc drawn by Tom Derenick and several different inkers.

Finally, Starman and Justice League: Cry For Justice writer James Robinson came on with issue #38, and he would remain on the title until it was cancelled with 2011's #60, a total of 26 issues. He was originally paired with pencil artist Mark Bagley and inker Rob Hunter, who drew 15 of Robinson's first 16 issues (only needing a single fill-in, wherein pencil artists Pow Rodrix and Robson Rocha split duties for an issue). 

Bagley and Hunter were then followed by the team of Brett Booth and Norm Rapmund, who drew four issues, and they in turn were followed by pencil artist Daniel Sampere, who closed out the title, drawing the last three issues of the series (one of which he got an assist from Miguel Angel Sepulveda on).

While the creative team was obviously a bit more stable for Robinson's run, the team line-up was more chaotic than ever. Robinson added some fun (and extremely unlikely) characters into the mix, like Congorilla, Starman Mikaal Tomas or Dick Grayson-as-Batman, but his line-up could and would change issue to issue. Even ones whose covers (and scripts!) seemed to promise new line-ups (like #41, for example) could see many of those characters completely disappear within the space of an issue or two. 

At this point, I'm not entirely sure how long Robinson could have kept the title going, but by fall of 2011, it was a moot point anyway, as DC cancelled all of their titles for the new, rebooted (and, ultimately, temporary) continuity of "The New 52."

It included a new Justice League title, of course, this one simply called Justice League, by Geoff Johns, Jim Lee and Scott Williams. It resumed a "Big Seven" approach, only with Titan Cyborg replacing Martian Manhunter (J'onn was appearing instead in a new Stormwatch title, for some reason). There was obviously still a bit of chaos behind the scenes, as the book didn't always match up neatly with the continuity of other New 52 titles, some of the plans Johns mentioned in interviews never came to materialize and, if you look at one of the many covers for the first issue, you'll see characters in the background who never ended up appearing in the book (Like The Atom and Element Woman). On, and Lee drew Wonder Woman in the long black pants that were apparently supposed to be part of her new, New 52 costume, but DC ended up backing off of.

That volume lasted 52 issues (of course), sometimes overlapping with other Justice League-branded titles (a new Justice League International, a new Justice League of America, Justice League Dark, Justice League United), and has since been followed by other Justice League books (another Justice League, another Justice League of America, Justice League Odyssey), but I kind of stopped paying attention and/or caring, which "The New 52" reboot seemed to encourage me to do. 

After reading the last few years of JLA and then taking a look at the series that followed it, I confess that part of me considered re-reading this volume of Justice League of America. Like those last few JLA arcs, I had only read Meltzer, McDuffie and Robinson's runs the first time around, as they were originally being released (in large part because I didn't much care for them), and I am a little curious if they read better or worse now, divorced from the context in which they were originally published, and without the weight of expectation being a factor (If I had to guess, I would imagine the Meltzer run might read a bit better, while the McDuffie and Robinson ones, which had to dance around other comics so much, probably aged particularly poorly). 

I looked into my local library consortium's holdings, though, and while Meltzer's run is collected in a pair of trades, the first volume of McDuffie's is only available digitally, and I don't really want to spend the time re-reading comics I didn't like the first time around in a format I dislike. Especially since there are so many great comics out there that I've yet to read. (I'm only eleven volumes into Haruichi Furudate's Haikyu!! as I write this, for example; that means I've still got 34 volumes of it left to go!)

The latest Justice League book, Mark Waid and Dan Mora's Justice League Unlimited series, is fairly promising though...

James Robinson and Greg Hinkle's Airboy collection addresses the criticism of Airboy #2

You may recall that James Robinson and Greg Hinkle's extremely off-beat, kinda sorta-but-not really reboot of the Golden Age Airboy character for Image Comics received some pretty negative attention upon the release of its second issue, which repeatedly used the word "tranny" and had other problematic content that some found offensive. Here's a pretty decent summary of that problematic content that ran on Comics Alliance, which also links to James Robinson's own apology about the scene in question.

I originally read the series as it was serially published, but the other day I noticed a hardcover collection of the series on the shelf of my local library. Given that Robinson himself had expressed some regret over the scenes in Airboy #2, I was curious if Robinson and Image would take the opportunity that the publication of the collection offered to correct those scenes.

Some of the fixes would obviously be pretty easy, as they would only involve a bit of re-lettering of a few panels. The other concern that Charlotte Finn (and others) raised were more key to the story, and to address those concerns, an entire scene would need to be re-written and re-drawn. I don't really want to wade too deeply into the issue, as I found the use of the word "tranny" to be more problematic than the issues involved in the sex acts, but that is largely because of my reading of the story that the Robinson, Hinkle and Airboy characters are supposed to be somewhat repugnant (And, for better or worse, a Golden Age superhero would probably be bewildered, freaked out and disgusted to find himself in the type of "trap" Finn explained; maybe it's wrong to make excuses for the elderly, but I know I hold my sister and nieces to different standards of societal enlightenment than I hold my 91-and-a-half-year-old grandfather, who was born about the same time as Airboy).

Well, having checked out the collection, my curiosity has been satisfied: Lines of offending dialogue have been changed, but nothing has been redrawn. If you yourself are curious, below are the three changes I noticed in Airboy #2, the third of which I was surprised by, because it meant that Robinson realized that it wasn't just the word "tranny" that offended some readers.

I don't know if the changes will necessarily satisfy those who were offended, but they are interesting to see nonetheless.

Airboy #2

Airboy collection

Airboy #2

Airboy collection

Airboy #2

Airboy collection

I'm not entirely sure the term "Celestial" means the same thing in the Marvel Universe that it does in our universe

In the previously reviewed Age of Ultron Vs. Marvel Zombies, the Hank Pym from the Old West domain of 1872 is introduced by the modern Marvel Universe version of OT* Jim Hammond to his girlfriend in this universe, Ryoko/Radiance, who is Japanese. Pym immediately refers to her as a "Celstial," and she responds quite awkwardly.

I actually had to read through this sequence twice before I realized what writer James Robinson was getting at. By having 19th Century Pym refer to Radiance as a "Celestial," he meant "a Chinese person," as that was a common term for Chinese immigrants to English-speaking countries at the time, as China was sometimes referred to as "The Celestial Kingdom."

It obviously fell out of disuse, and I'm honestly not entirely sure how derogatory a term it actually was at the time. Using it today would be similar to using "colored" or "negro," I suppose, as those were once widely acceptable terms in mass media in generations past, but are so archaic that they are know only used negatively, and guaranteed to cause offense. There are certainly much stronger racial slurs to use for both Chinese people and black people today...as there were in the late 19th century, too.

And then there's the whole thing about applying an old-timey term for Chinese person to a Japanese person.

Of course, in the Marvel Universe, a "Celestial" is also a term that refers to a race of astronomically ancient, god-like alien beings that are part of that fictional shared-setting's creation myth, being responsible for the creation of the universe, life and death (They were, of course, created by Jack Kirby, like so many of the foundational elements of the Marvel Universe; he created the Celestials in 1976 in his book Eternals).

Since the Ryoko of this particular scene (and comic) is apparently the one from the modern Marvel Universe (where Robinson and artist Marc Laming created her in Robinson's short-lived All-New Invaders book) and the grand-daughter of a World War II vet, I wonder, wouldn't she think of those Celestials first (um, as I did), before the 19th term for people from China in the U.S., England and other English-speaking countries?

On the other hand, the Kirby Celestials are generally depicted as gigantic humanoid creatures encased in Kirby-esque armor, so maybe she would think of the old-timey term first...




*Original Torch

Review: Fantastic Four Vol. 1: The Fall of The Fantastic Four

I was a mildly surprised last month when Marvel announced the cancellation of Fantastic Four, but not shocked or distraught or anything. While the comic book and the team of characters that star in it have long since faded from the center of the Marvel Universe (and line of comics), the characters remain foundational elements in much of what Marvel publishes.

For example, meetings or teleconferences with, or at least namedrops of, Reed Richards are all but mandatory in any Marvel comic plot involving super-science, and you can't have a big, line-wide crossover story without featuring him and his family fairly prominently. Given that Marvel is now always running a big, line-wide crossover story, well, you see a lot of Reed Richards and the gang.

In other words, The Fantastic Four have been present in Marvel Comics constantly, no matter what's going on in their book, and I can't imagine that will change just because their book isn't going to be published monthly for a while, even though the book's primary (even if only symbolic or totemic) importance to the publisher is such that I just kind of assumed it was one Marvel would always publish no matter what, in the same what that DC will never cancel Action Comics.

The reason I wasn't shocked or distraught was because this didn't seem to be all that sudden a decision by Marvel, and it's not like they haven't given the book plenty of chances to become a huge hit over the last few years, granting a seemingly "Do Whatever You Want" level of creative leeway to superstar teams like Mark Millar and Bryan Hitch, or Jonathan Hickman, Dale Eaglesham and other artists, or Matt Fraction, Mark Bagley and Mike Allred. They let Hickman give the team new costumes, found a school for little super-geniuses and launch a sister book (Future Foundation); they let Fraction have two books too (With FF replacing Future Foundation, and featuring a different team). They killed off Johnny Storm and added Spider-Man to the line-up.

The late, great Dwayne McDuffie got to write a short, mildly gimick-y (but ultimately awesome) run in which The Black Panther and ex-X-Man Storm replaced Mr. and Mrs. Richards temporarily. Brian Michael Bendis made The Invisible Woman one of the major players in his Age of Ultron.

And then there was this run, the post-Fraction one that relaunched the title as part of Marvel's "Marvel Now!" rebranding campaign. In addition to the new #1, the book also got a new creative team consisting of the recently-imported-from-DC writer James Robinson and pencil artist Leonard Kirk and the team got snazzy new red costumes for no immediately apparent reason other than the fact that they looked kind of cool (I liked Bully's theory, though).

The new costumes as Arthur Adams drew them on a variant cover for the second issue.

I didn't read Fantastic Four #1 when it was recently released, despite my default setting being one of Interested In The Fantastic Four, my appreciation for Kirk's artwork and the fact that I was curious about and attracted to those red costumes (Oh, and the fact then when I flipped through it in the store, I saw it included a fight with Fin Fang motherfucking Foom!). It was one of Marvel's $3.99/20-page books, which aren't really worth purchasing serially. I figured I'd wait for the trade but, by the time I got my hands on the trade, Marvel had already announced the book's cancellation.

And, as I said, I was mildly surprised, but not shocked or distraught by that news. Now that I've actually read the first five issues of the book, I have a new emotional reaction to the news of the cancellation—disappointment. Robinson and Kirk's Fantastic Four is actually pretty good.

Granted, the tonal shift from the last Fantastic Four comics I read is pretty drastic. If I'm remembering correctly, the last issue of FF ended with everyone literally having a big party, and the first image in this issue is of The Invisible Woman sitting at a little desk in a pitch black room, writing a letter to her children (With pen and paper? Invisible Woman is 400 years old), in which she talks about how terrible everything has become while tears stream out of her eyes. After previewing the dark events of the near-future—Reed is "a broken man," Ben is in a laser jail for murder, Johnny "a lost soul" drinking himself stupid in a bar—the narrative then jumps backwards to the point where everything started to go wrong.

Which is the point where everything looks awesome: The Fantastic Four Vs. Fin Fang Foom!

(Incidentally, the first page of the first issue is a full-page splash; the second and third pages each have two panels on them, so that the two-page spread they form consists of four panels, each featuring a member of the FF; the fourth and fifth pages are a two-page splash. So there are only six panels in the first five pages of Fantastic Four #1; that's one-quarter of the length of that first issue. That's one of the four dollars you would have spent on this comic. They are very nice drawings and all, the pacing reads nicely in a trade, but good God, is it really a surprise the book shed readers so fast? This first issue—which contains two more two-panel pages and one more splash page—took less than four minutes read).

After Sue's letter presages doom, we follow the FF into a pretty typical FF adventure, in which their characters, powers, personalities and generally positive relationship with the rest of society is illustrated. It's a nice reminder/primer on the FF, a necessary start for a story about their "fall."

Later that night, a secured portal to a dangerous pocket dimension Reed keeps in the Baxter Building for study opens up, and a horde of strange alien space bug monster creatures pour out and start wreaking havoc all over the city. A generous helping of guest-stars cameo in the battle, and Reed eventually figures out a way to stop them all, but it comes at a very high price: Johnny loses his Human Torch powers in the process.

Over the course of the first four issues, the characters each get a conflict arc, with Reed and Sue worried about daughter Valeria (who has moved to Latveria to try and bring out the good in Dr. Doom) and Johnny struggling with the loss of his powers while trying to put on a brave face (I liked the scene where Reed promises to try and figure out how to restore his powers, to which Johnny replies "I won't hold my breath...Look at Ben. How long have you been working on a cure fore him to no avail...and you're the smartest man alive."). And as for Ben, he tries to rekindle his relationship with Alicia, and it seems to be going well, although her one concern is that every time things go well for them, something big and terrible happens.

And, of course, there's some superheroing, as The Wizard's latest Frightful Four, which consists of himself and three of The Wrecking Crew, attack the city, the Wizard letting slip that all of these recent events may be connected to a single, mysterious puppetmaster (Shocking, I know). The substitute FF from FF—She-Hulk, Ms. Thing and Ant-Man show up to help in this battle, in their snazzy uniforms; I really like those costumes, and that group of characters (Medusa, the fourth of their foursome, is probably off doing whatever The Inhumans are up to post-Infinity).

Kirk's cover for FF #4

And then, in the fifth issue, it's the trial of the Fantastic Four, as they're summoned to court to answer for every bad thing they've ever done. They have She-Hulk as their attorney, defending them.

Robinson writes the opposing attorney pretty well, well enough to at least sell the blatantly ridiculous nature of the proceedings: That anyone on Earth could really be all that mad at The Fantastic Four about anything. Each of the events mentioned basically boil down to a story in which the FF save the city and/or the entire world and/or universe, but the attorney objects to the way they save it.

I suppose that too will prove to be part of the mystery villain's plan, but, in the meantime, it allowed for a string of amazing guest-artists to line up and draw the flashback scenes, each to a fairly well-remembered or momentous event in FF history: Chris Samnee, Dean Haspiel, Paul Rivoche, Phil Jiminez, Mike Allred*, Jim Starlin, Jerry Ordway, Derlis Santacruz and June Brigman. About a half-dozen of those are artists whose names alone are usually enough to get me to pick up a book.

The result is that the kids of the Future Foundation are taken away from Reed and Sue, and placed in SHIELD custody at Camp Hammond, where The Avengers Initiative was based. Camp Hammond has a new commander, however, Jim Hammond himself, and the original, Golden Age Human Torch will apparently be playing a role in Fantastic Four going forward (I guess this explains what Robinson had in mind when he had Captain America asking Hammond to join SHIELD at the end of the first story arc in Robinson's All-New Invaders book).

I get the sense that many of these sub-plots are ones we've seen repeatedly, even in relation to these characters, but this particular franchise is old, old-fashioned and rickety enough that even the most cliche super-comics elements feel comfortable here in a way they wouldn't in other comics or with other comics characters. Is this simple, old-school, soap opera-style superhero comics, but with a modern, more sophisticated model of storytelling? Yes. But what's wrong with that, exactly?

I really love those new uniforms, too. I don't know that red is necessarily, inherently better than blue, black or white, but it's new, and that alone is pretty interesting, giving this particular batch of Fantastic Four comics a radically different look than the hundreds of other ones that preceded them (If DC really wanted to shake-up the visuals of their star characters when they launched The New 52? Instead of taking away Superman's shorts and giving him seams and a high collar, they should have turned his costume red. And dressed Batman in brown).

I like too that they are all slightly different. Reed and Sue's costumes are the same basic design and in the same colors, but the red and black parts are swapped on each. I like Ben's "4" symbol on the hip of his shorts, and the way the black is attached to the "belt buckle" element of them. Johnny's looks just like Reed's, as if there's a boy version and a girl version of the costume (although Johnny's out of his costume and in civilian clothes before too long).

Franklin's costume is red, but the rest of the Future Foundation kids keep their white "school uniforms."

In addition to the slick new costumes**, Kirk also designs a pretty awesome new Fantasticar that splits into four segments, one for each member of the team.

Man, I would have loved to play with a toy of that when I was in third grade.

I also really, really like the new logo.

One final note, as I stop reviewing and just start listing observations at random (Note to self: Don't forget to polish up this review before posting; it's not very good, even by your usually lax standards, Caleb, and just sorta deteriorates at the end). While the main attraction of the court room jaunt through Fantastic Four history was getting to see things like Mike Allred draw Galactus or Chris Samnee re-drawing panels of Jack Kirby's from the first Fantastic Four #1, it was also neat to see some of the more obscure bits of their history mentioned.

Many of these events I never actually read in their original comic book form, but have seen referenced repeatedly in other comics (Kurt Busiek and Alex Ross' Marvels version of the fight with Galactus, for example) and/or multiple cartoon series and/or the live action films: I think the Silver Surfer/Galactus story has been adapted into every multimedia version of the FF I've seen (save the Roger Corman live-action omvie), for example, and I've seen multiple cartoon versions of the Thing/Hulk brawl.

One story I have never seen adapted elsewhere*** or referred to in another comic, however, is the one where Sue was possessed by the Hate-Monger and became Malice, which, because she was a woman who became evil, meant she had to dress like this:

Ordway

Oh, wait, a second, she also had a spiked leather gimp mask to go over it too...?

I know superhero comic books are weird and pervy now, but it's sometimes easy to forget that they were always weird and pervy.



*The ideal Fantastic Four artist in our post-Kirby world. Behold:

**As for why they are red now, there's no in-story explanation, but editor Mark Paniccia explains the decision in a little editorial feature on the back page. The original thought, Paniccia explains, was to return to blue uniforms after wearing the white for so long:

...but since this was a bold new direction, we thought now was the perfect opportunity to do something completely unexpected. Leonard did about nine versions. Since this arc is about the fall of the Fantastic Four, we decided red would help message that our characters were in danger.

***Actually, the Internet tells me she was turned into Malice in an episode of the 1994 FF cartoon, which I watched a complete DVD collection of around the time the first live-action movie came out, but I have no memory of it. I'm pretty sure they toned toned the dominatrix aspects a bit...if only because I feel reasonably certain I would remember a cartoon show in which Sue Storm was wearing a spike-covered leather gimp mask.

Review: Earth 2 Vol. 4: The Dark Age

Probably without even intending to do so, DC Comics pulled something of a bait and switch with their Earth 2 title. It originally launched, under its original writer James Robinson, as a sort of rebooted version of the original Earth 2 concept. This Earth would apparently be where all the Golden Age heroes lived, but rather than their stories starting in the 1940s, they would begin in the present. After an issue spent killing off Earth 2's Superman, Wonder Woman and Batman, the focus for much of Robinson's run was on new versions of other Golden Agers with no analogues on Earth-New 52: Green Lantern Alan Scott, Flash Jay Garrick, The Atom Al Pratt, Hawkgirl, Dr. Fate and so on.

Near the end of Robinson's run, which comprised the first three collections, and with the start of new writer Tom Taylor's run, collected herein, there doesn't seem to be any real logical, organizing principle anymore.

A Red Tornado is introduced, and while she's a she as the original Golden Age Red Tornado was, she's also an android, like the Earth-1 Red Tornado*...and she has Lois Lane's consciousness in her. Jimmy Olsen is introduced, and he's a metahuman on this Earth. Red Arrow Roy Harper (a character from Earth-1/New Earth) is introduced, as is an Aquawoman. Finally—in this issue at least—the dead Earth-2 Superman returns, now a slave of Apokolips (shades of John Francis Moore and Kieron Dwyer's 1998 Superman: The Dark Side), Earth-2 Batman gets a rather unlikely successor (unless you've previously read Flashpoint) and Superman's successor appears but isn't yet properly introduced.

It's basically an Elseworlds series that crisscrosses in and out of New 52 continuity—Power Girl, Huntress and Mr. Terrific have all traveled between the two Earths—but one with no unifying theme...which sort of defeats the purpose of Elseworlds-like stories.

This fourth volume collects four issues of the monthly and the second annual, which accounts for two stories, both by Taylor. The monthly issues chronicle the Evil Superman and his army of Parademons' attack on Earth, with Superman just wrecking the heroes and the forces of the World Army. Meanwhile, in the bowels of of a World Army facility, a mysterious—and mysteriously powerful—new Batman is gathering allies for a showdown with Superman, including the new characters (well, new versions of old characters that are new to this series) mentioned above.

As for the story of the annual, that's the secret origin of Earth 2's Batman II**, presented as a story he's telling his new allies during a momentary lull in the battle against the Apokolyptian Superman.

The artwork is something of a mess, reflecting the disintegrating focus of the series. The original art team of Nicola Scott and Trevor Scott handle the first two issues by themselves. With the third, a second art team joins them. With the fourth, a third art team joins the second art team, and the Scotts are no-shows. The annual is penciled by by Robson Rocha, who was half of the just-mentioned second art team. None of the artists are particularly bad, but they don't mesh together too well, as in it's quite obvious when an art team changes, and it gives the book a rushed, confused visual look. I suppose it doesn't help that the book consists mainly of very unpleasant, alternate versions of the already fairly unpleasant New 52 characters doing extremely unpleasant things to one another.


*I know, I know. But it's so complicated, I'm just going to stick with the fact that in post-Crisis continuity, the android Red Tornado is a native of DC's only Earth, which was Earth 1 with some grafts from a handful of other Earths. Red Tornado spent most of his time on Earth 1, back when there was an Earth 1, anyway. For more on stupid Red Tornado and his dumb origin and stupid continuity, I'll refer you to Wikipedia.


**Of possible interest to some is the fact that, when the annual was originally printed, Batman II tells his new allies that he gets his enhanced strength from a drug called Miralco that lasts about an hour, which he stole from Rex Mason. Rex Mason is the secret identity of Metamorpho, not the Golden Age Hourman, who is Rex Tyler. In the collection, the mistake has been fixed, so that now Batman II says he stole the drug from Rex Tyler. It was apparently a typo all along then, and not an intentional decision to change the inventor of the Miralco drug on New 52 Earth 2.

Review: All-New Invaders Vol. 1: Gods and Soldiers

I was initially a little surprised, and even slightly put off, by the announcement of this new series featuring Marvel's original Golden Age superhero team (from back before Marvel was even Marvel).

There didn't seem to be any real organic need for such a team book at this point in time, not with Avengers books sprouting like weeds all over Marvel's shipping schedule, and most of those seemingly co-starring Captain America who would, of course, be anchoring this series as well.

Additionally, the team's line-up was no bigger than that of the Fantastic Four: Captain America, Namor, The Winter Soldier and the original Human Torch, Jim Hammond (The original, Golden Age Vision appears about halfway through this five-issue story arc as well). The last Invaders story I read was a trade collection of the 2010 series Invaders Now, and featured a much more robust team of characters: SHIELD Commander Steve Rogers (formerly Captain America), Captain America James Buchanan "Bucky" Barnes, Namor, The (original) Human Torch, Toro, Spitfire, Union Jack and The (original) Vision. That series, by Alex Ross, Christopher Gage, Caio Reis and others, was very open-ended in its conclusion, with the final pages featuring The Vision intoning, "Though we pursue separate destinies, I have no doubt that should this world have need of us...should freedom ever again be threatened...The INVADERS will answer the call."

Apparently, freedom was never again threatened, and the world had no need of them, as the book did not lead directly into an Invaders ongoing, as it seemed to be positioning itself to do so: All those previously mentioned Avengers teams mush have been doing a pretty alright job defending the world and freedom without any help from Marvel's World War II vets not named Steve Rogers.

While Invaders Now had the super-team reuniting to face the consequences of a terrible decision they were forced to make during the war, the premise for this new, that is, this all-new Invaders series dealt with Marvel super-aliens The Kree, which, at first blush, seemed an usual source of conflict for this handful of Golden Agers. The creative team was an intriguing one, at any rate: Writer James Robinson, who had years of success working with DC Comics' Golden Age character during Starman and JSA and had just left DC (where he was scripting Earth 2) for Marvel (where he was writing not only this book, but also Fantastic Four), and Steve Pugh, also fresh off a DC super-comic assignment (Animal Man).

Despite my reservations and initial puzzlement, the book—or at least the first five issues that make up this collection—are actually pretty good. The collection begins with a completely unnecessary eight-page sequence taken from a goofily titled preview book—All-New Marvel Now! Point One #1—in which new Kree villain Tanalth The Pursuer chats with floating head The Supreme Intelligence about an Asgardian-controlling weapon known as Gods' Whisper that is on Earth, broken into pieces and hidden by three heroes.

The Kree must got there to retrieve the components of the weapons, "even if it makes us Earth's invader." (Get it? Invader? GET IT?!)

Then the book starts over with the first issue of the series. The Kree go after Bucky, Namor and the original Torch, who is trying to live a normal life, posing as a normal, human mechanic in a normal, small town. An attack by a powerful alien warrior scuttles all  that, obviously, and before long, he finds himself in the company of Bucky and Captain America and The Vision.

It turns out that not only did Tanalth and company get the parts of the weapon, they also captured Namor, which necessitates the others going to the Kree homeworld to rescue The Sub-Mariner. Here then it becomes clear how Robinson approached the idea of a new Invaders series. He's taking the team name literally, and having the Invaders invade the Kree. I don't know if it's necessarily clever, or if it's enough to build an ongoing series rather than a miniseries around, but it certainly makes sense.

As to why it's only a handful of heroes—Cap, Bucky, Torch and The Vision—who are planning on taking on the whole Kree empire in order to save Namor, Robinson's answer to that is actually pretty amusing: Namor is such an ass that no one else really likes him enough to try and save him, so it's down to his former Invaders allies to make the attempt (I don't know how true that rings; certainly Captain America's veritable armies of Avengers would follow Cap to do just about anything just because it was him doing the asking, and Namor's own current team of The Illuminati may not love him, but they would likely feel they need him enough to help save him from the clutches of aliens captors, but it's funny, which is good enough for me).

There are a few twists to the story, the biggest of which involves the target of the Gods' Whisper, and how those victims plan to retaliate against the Kree using the same weapon, and Robinson writes three pages of a really great scene between Marvel's original heroes—Cap, Torch and Namor—and then, after Namor flies off, between Cap and Torch, where the former talks the latter into joining the world more fully alongside him.

I'm not sure where Robinson plans on taking the series, and if he plans to include other characters who are in similar situations (Toro in particular, and perhaps Spitfire), but I really like the idea of Captain America keeping some form of The Invaders around just so he has some superheroes his own age to relate to, just as I like the idea of Namor hanging out with the Invaders because they're the only superheroes he really respects enough to enjoy spending any time around.

Pugh has proved to be rather flexible in his art style over the last decade or so, his work on the latest volume of Animal Man not looking much like that of his work on the previous volume of Animal Man and his lush, almost photo-realistic looking work on Hotwire not looking much like either.

His work here finds a nice balance between big, bombastic, classic Marvel superheroics and the more realistic style of modern superhero comics. It reminded me quite a bit of what John Cassaday was doing on Uncanny Avengers, but more smooth and fluid.

I'm not crazy about Captain America's NFL SuperPro-esque current costume, which I think is meant to suggest the costume from the movies, but that's not Pugh's fault. He doesn't make it look cool, but he doesn't draw it any worse than any other artist.

He does tweak the Human Torch's costume, and that looks fantastic—

—classic and modern at the same time. It's a nice, simple, elegant look for the character, who is, of course, going to spend much of his time during action scenes sheathed in flame anyway.

I approached this first volume curious but wary, but I closed it eagerly awaiting the next volume.

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

The Skottie Young variant cover for the first issue, included unencumbered in the back, is awesome:

I think it's the fact that only The Human Torch seems happy about the travel arrangements that gets me.

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

Not crazy about the new Invaders logo though, as it looks a little too much like they just plugged "Invaders" into the "Avengers" logo-style, which they did:

Review: Earth 2 Vol. 2: The Tower of Fate

The second collection of the James Robinson-written, mostly Nicola Scott-drawn Earth 2 series collects the second half of the first year of the series, containing issues #7-12, plus the September 2012 #0 issue.      It's only at that end of that last issue that the "Justice Society" team starts to really coalesce, with four of the superheroes—Green Lantern, Flash, Hawkgirl and the newly-introduced Doctor Fate—deciding to stick together and set up a sort of headquarters. That makes it pretty clear that Robinson is—or, rather was—playing a rather long game with the plotting of the series, which, it turns out, ends up being to its detriment, as Robinson leaves the title just four issues after that, replaced by new writer Tom Taylor.

Whatever it was that Robinson was trying to accomplish then, he spent a lot of time getting there, without ever actually arriving. It should be noted, too, that this series has been rather confoundingly weird. The expectation was that, given the stars—Green Lantern Alan Scott, Flash Jay Garrick, The Atom Al Pratt, etc—it would be a sort of New 52 JSA title, set in modern times and on an alternate Earth from the one the rest of the DCU was set on.

It sort of is, but the setting varies quite dramatically from the real world. That is, it's not really the real world + superheroes, but a sci-fi, alternate history world + superheroes. The world is organized into a one world government, with a one-world army—the creatively named World Army—employing nasty, soldier versions of familiar DC Golden Agers—the aforementioned Atom, Wesley Dodds and The Sandmen, Terry Sloane—to hunt rebel superheroes like GL, Flash and Hawkgirl. The world was warped, deformed and depopulated by a full-scale invasion from Apokolips, one that killed some heroes and left Steppenwolf stranded on this world.

It's an unlikely fusion of Jack Kirby's Fourth World mythology and the old Golden Age characters of National Comics, as filtered through the now defunct, millennial JSA series that James Robinson helped found (and David Goyer and Geoff Johns continued in various combinations). I originally thought the use of the Apokoplyptian armies in the opening issues was meant merely as a way to compare and contrast Earth 2 with Earth-New 52 (as the new continuity's first comic, Justice League, opened with the League's founders rallying together to stave off an invasion by Darkseid himself), and as a way to kill of this world's Superman, Batman and Wonder Woman to make room for the second-stringers who would eventually star, but Robinson is apparently keeping the plot going indefinitely.

Issue #0 heavily features the Earth/Apokolips war, #8 is entirely devoted to Steppenwolf conquering the fictional country of Dherain, and there is a brief teaser appearance by Mister Miracle and Barda (apparently squeezed into the end of an issue just to give DC something "shocking" to put on the gatefold cover during what was once going to be called "W.T.F. Certified" month). At one point, the spirit of Nabu refers to Hawkgirl as a warrior of Horus, and indeed her helmet does look a little Egyptian in design, and with Fate, Flash and GL all endowed with magical powers here—Flash literally given the speed of Mercury/Hermes by the dying old god—I thought perhaps Earth 2 was setting up its heroes as the "New Gods" who would battle Darkseid and his evil armies, but that doesn't seem to be the case after all, as the conflict following this series seems to involve new, evil versions of the dead trinity (An evil Wonder Woman, Wondy's grown-up daughter Fury, is introduced here as Steppenwolf' thrall, fighting with a glowing red combination whip/noose).

So really, I have no idea what's going on with this book. As of the end of the second volume, it seems like it's still putting a team together, and is almost there, but I also know that the next trade will feature the end of Robinson's run...and maybe two godawful Villains Months one-shots (Earth 2 #15.1, the Desaad issue was, if I'm remembering correctly, one of the most unreadable of those issues).

So this volume opens with the zero issue, which is split between telling two stories narrated by Terry Sloane (The Golden Age Mr. Terrific, who is here some sort of ruthless Lex Luthor type whose superhero identity was Mr. 8, and Mr. Terrific II, who, post-reboot, is now the only Mr. Terrific, and has bounced between Earth 2 and Earth New-52 in a way that confuses me). I honestly couldn't make heads or tails out of the second story, which is especially weird in that a) I read the previous volume of this series and b) it was a #0 issue, and meant to explain things to new readers and serve as a good jumping-on point.

From there we get a check-in-with-our-heroes story and then the introduction of Steppenwolf and Fury, and then the title story actually starts, with Nicola Scott's art finally appearing in this volume. The World Army, Atom and Dodds go after Jay Garrick's mom, and he rescues her with the help of Khaled, a young student who discovered the Helm of Fate on the same mission that gave Hawkgirl her wings, and a young, handsome version of the green-skinned Wotan.

Wotan summons the trio to Nabu's realm, where the Tower of Fate is, and commands that the Khaled and the Flash retrieve the Helm for him. Khaled reluctantly finds and then dons the helm, becoming New 52 Doctor Fate, and then he has to fight Wotan.

The title story in this collection is actually pretty good, and Robinson and Scott reinvent aspects of the Fate story in interesting ways, including rebuilding Fate's Tower into something spectacular (and very different) looking, and putting a guardian monster in it, one with a twisted set of horns of various sizes forming a sort of crown atop its head. The insides of the tower is still Escher-like, but filled with all sorts of classical and ancient architecture, not unlike George Perez's version of Olympus, only drawn-out into a rectangular box, rather than a sphere. Scott's are on one spread of the tower interior—reproduced in the backmatter as pencils only—is so intricately drawn, it seems a shame they bothered coloring it at all, and one wonders what a black-and-white Nicola Scott book might look like.

Their Fate is pretty well conceived (Kent Nelson is involved, even if, like Hawkgirl, he's no longer the person under the mask and using the codename), and seems like a strong enough concept to carry his own title, if they ever start spinning solo books out of Earth 2.

I'm not crazy about the costume design, in which the blue and gold are now black (with a bright blue starfield that seems to come and go) and highly-polished, ornate gold accessories that reflect light and the images of objects and people close to them. In other words, it's a little busy, and far too realistic, but, compared to the way a lot of New 52 redesigns have turned out, it could have been a lot worse (And, in fact, there have been worse Fate designs. It was a reminder, however, how weird it is that DC didn't ask Alex Ross to redesign their line rather than Jim Lee; his Kingdom Come Doctor Fate was one of the man great redesigns in that seminal series, in which most of the Golden Age characters came out looking better than most other attempts to update them. Take it's Mercury's helmet-wearing version of The Flash and compare it to Earth 2's Flash, for example).

While Scott pencils the four-issue origin story of the new Doctor Fate (and Trevor Scott inks it), the earlier chapters of the book are from a variety of fill-in artists of generally inferior skills. Tomas Giorello (whose Wonder Woman's skirt won't stay down and chest-plate just barely stays up) and Tom Derenick split the zero issue, while Yildiray Cinar pencils #7 and #8 (Trevor Scott inking the former, Ryan Winn and Ruy Jose the latter).

I'm kind of curious to see where this title goes in the next trade or two, given the seemingly sudden departure of its writer, but not quite as curious as I would have been to see where it would have gone had Robinson stuck around to finish whatever the hell he was going for with it.

Some notes and thoughts on Earth 2 Vol. 1: The Gathering

•This is a hardcover collecting the first six issues of Earth 2, a "second wave" (i.e. replacement) title in DC's New 52 line. The series is written by James Robinson, and the artwork comes primarily from the team of pencil artist Nicola Scott and inker Trevor Scott, although a second penciller and a second inker are also credited, as are three different colorists. As with other recent DC collections, it's not clear who did what page, but based on the fact that the Eduardo Pansica and Sean Parsons art team produces work similar enough in style to that of Scott and Scott, there aren't any terribly drastic shifts in visuals, and both teams do a fairly great job, particularly by New 52 standards.

•I trade-waited this series, but not because of misgivings about the creative team (I really like Nicola Scott's artwork quite a bit, and while Robinson's written some really quite incredibly terrible comics for DC of late, he has a large body of work full of more good comic book writing than bad comic book writing). Rather, I wasn't really sure what to make of the premise of the series, as suggested in its title.

•Most DC readers know that "Earth-Two" was the name of the parallel Earth where the Golden Age superheroes used to reside, a conceit the publisher used for a whole host of cosmic crossover adventures between Earth-Two's Justice Society of America and Earth-One's Justice League of America, between the time Gardner Fox introduced the concept in 1961 to the 1986-1987Crisis On Infinite Earths, which smooshed the two worlds and their sets of heroes (along with those of several other Earths) into one, single world with one, single history. Post-Crisis, there was no Earth-One and Earth-Two, just the "Earth" of the DC Universe, in which the Golden Age versions of most of the heroes had their adventures between the late 1930s and mid-1950s or so (excluding Superman, Batman, Robin and Wonder Woman, whose Golden Age versions more-or-less ceased to exist), while the other heroes of the DC Universe, including the Silver Age reboots of The Flash and Green Lantern and company, "The Trinity" and original Silver Age characters like Martian Manhunter began their careers on a sliding timeline of about ten years ago.

I liked that solution quite a bit, as it gave the world of the DC Universe a longer, more complicated, more interesting history, and sort of promoted some of the Golden Age characters to, if not co-equal, than at least more equal status to their Silver Age replacements. So while Flash Jay Garrick and Green Lantern Alan Scott might not have been in cartoons or appeared in the toy lines, while they might have looked like they threw their costumes together based only on the contents of a high school drama club's costume trunk, they were now portrayed as trailblazers and pioneers, the founders of a heroic legacy. They were fighting Nazis while Barry Allen and Hal Jordan were just twinkles in Julius Schwartz's eyes. Looked at from the real world, I like the way these characters' place in the fictional DC Universe acknowledged the work of their creators and the guys writing and drawing them in the 1940s; they were kind of like symbols of that era of creators, and their being a part of the DC Universe's story felt like an in-story acknowledgment and hat-tip to those creators as well as that era.

I understand that it never felt quite right to certain folks though, because it implied that Superman, for example, wasn't the father of all DC's superheroes, and it made Batman seem somewhat derivative of, say, Dr. Mid-Nite and The Sandman, rather than vice versa (And, unfortunately, it did de-couple Wonder Woman from the best era of Wonder Woman comics, the war-time efforts of her creator and artist H.G. Peter).

When DC rebooted their universe once again with The New 52, they deliberately did away with the Golden Age of superheroes altogether, and even cut their timeline of ten or so years in half to five or so, so that the heroes of the DC Universe can trace their careers only as far back as the final year of the Bush administration—The George W. Bush administration.

This title re-instated the multiple, parallel Earths concept then, and Earth 2 once more became the home of the Golden Age heroes like Flash Jay Garrick and Green Lantern Alan Scott, only with a twist—it would be presenting new versions of these Golden Age heroes in the present day, so rather than World War II veterans, the heroes of Earth 2 would be millennials and members of Generation Y, same as their counterparts in the regular DC Universe.

I wasn't really sure what to make of this, and given that the series was starting with an alternate take on the conflict from the first story arc of Geoff Johns, Jim Lee and company's New 52 Justice League, which I loathed, I figured this would be a comic I'd want to hold off on.

•To complicate matters more, a few years prior to the New 52 relaunch, DC started using the term "Earth One" to refer to a line of original graphic novels set in their own, distinct and (apparently) unrelated continuities (In easier to understand terms, "Earth One" now translates into DC's version of Marvel's "Ultimate," differing only in their format and the fact that the titles don't seem to interlock). So far there have been two volumes of J. Michael Straczynski and Shane Davis' Superman: Earth One and one volume of Geoff Johns and Gary Frank's Batman: Earth ONe, with a long in-the-works Grant Morrison-written Wonder Woman: Earth One expected in the near future.

So the DCU of The New 52, The New 52iverse, isn't ever explicitly referred to as Earth 1, even though there is now an Earth 2.

•Earth 2 differs rather significantly from Earth-New 52. For one thing, it only has 3-5 superheroes: Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman and, depending on whether you want to classify them as superheroes or sidekicks, Supergirl and Robin (These two young ladies come to Earth-New 52, find themselves terrible costumes, adopt the personalities Power Girl and The Huntress and star in Worlds' Finest, another "second wave" New 52 series).

•Also, they don't call superheroes "superheroes" on Earth 2. They call them "wonders," as in 2003's JLA: Age of Wonder Elseworlds series (republished rather recently as DC Comics Presents—JLA: Age of Wonder)

•Earth 2 opens in more or less the same place that Justice League did: It's five years in the past of the narrator (television producer Alan Scott, providing narration for a documentary he's produced), and an army of alien invaders is threatening to overwhelm the Earth. This Earth having fewer heroes, the aliens—which are, of course, Apokaliptian Parademons, here led by a redesigned Steppenwolf rather than a redesigned Darkseid—are doing a much better job of it, and Earth looks like it's in real trouble. Batman has a plan to stop the Parademon invasion, by infiltrating one of the towers they've erected and downloading a maguffin virus that will knock them all off-line, cutting them off from their home dimension.

•Also as in Justice League, the heroes are all, like, crazy violent.

Superman heat-visions them in their faces, grabs them by their throats and smashes their heads into pieces. Robin (Helena Wayne) guns a parademon down from the Batplane, and Batman even shoots one through the head. Wonder Woman chops off the heads of, let's see...five of 'em, on-panel, and uses the word "kill" repeatedly.

This being an alternate world with alternate versions of the characters, and ones that don't need to survive even one entire issue, Robinson certainly has more leeway in how he depicts their morality, and these alternate versions of the Trinity are depicted as being backed into a corner and fighting for survival. Wonder Woman, for example, is the last surviving Amazon: Steppenwolf and the Parademons have already killed every single one of her sisters.

The violence is also somewhat muted by the fact that these versions of Superman and Wonder Woman know that the Parademons are robots of some kind, or, at the very least, cyborgs, as Batman's plan is to knock out the towers remote controlling them (without which they will "fall from the sky," he says), and Scott goes to some pains to show wires, tubes and oil spurting from their wounds every time Wonder Woman chops a head or limb off, or Superman smashes one to bits.

In Justice League, remember, the heroes (and, presumably, the readers, if the New 52 was doing its job) were seeing Parademons for the first time, and Superman and company were just murdering them left and right, with no line of dialogue dedicated to explaining that they were mechanical monsters made of machinery and corpses or whatever and that, since they were already dead, it was okay to, say, sever their heads. Weirder still, the Parademons were just kidnapping people in that story, which, while certainly a crime and a scary experience for the victims, doesn't exactly merit execution on the spot from the likes of Superman and Aquaman, you know?

•Batman's plan works, downloading the virus is a suicide mission for him, and he doesn't survive the resulting explosion. Superman and Wonder Woman's part of the plan is to buy him some time. Both of them get killed as well. Superman by some kind of bomb the parademons attach to him, while Wonder Woman gets Geoff Johnsed:

•I know hindsight's 20/20 and all, but I think I found one way to improve upon Batman's plan. Rather than Batman himself climbing a tower and downloading the virus, which resulted in an explosion that killed the mortal Dark Knight, maybe he could have had Superman fly to the tower at top super-speed and install the virus for him; not only would the job get done a lot quicker, but chances are Superman might have survived the resulting explosion (Or maybe not; he did get blown up to death by an Apokoliptian bomb).

But in any case, Superman would have had a better chance of surviving. When it comes to suicide missions, enlisting the invincible, indestructible guy on your team is usually your best bet.

•I think opening a new title featuring new-ish characters with an adventure starring three other characters is kind of a weird strategy. It's not until the last five pages or so of the first issue that the stars of Earth 2 really appear. Alan Scott is revealed as the narrator, on private plane to Beijing. And Jay Garrick gets the last four pages; having just been dumped by his girlfriend, he's brooding alone on a hill at night with a six-pack, when the Greek God Hermes—seen earlier in the issue telling Wonder Woman that he and the other Olympians were trying to fight off Apokolips as well, and were getting their divine asses handed to them—appears to him (It works okay here in the trade, but was likely rather frustrating to those reading the monthly, serially-published installments).

•Most of the second issue is devoted to Jay Garrick's origin, which is here sort of like a mash-up of myth and Hal Jordan's origin; the dying Hermes gifts Garrick with his super-speed powers (which would certainly explain Garrick's old hat, but, this being the New 52, he has to have a new costume, which resembles his old one in some ways, but is heavily modified: His Hermes hat, for example, is now just a Hermes-inspired helmet, and looks more 1950s/1960s sci-fi than something truly mythological, like his old hat.

•Mr. Terrific II Michael Holt, who had a quickly-canceled title in the first slate of New 52 books (set on Earth-New 52), appears teleporting onto the Earth 2. He's immediately confronted by Terry Sloan, who introduces himself as the "smartest man on earth." That's the secret identity of the original Mr. Terrific. Sloan appears throughout this volume, and seems to be somewhere between an anti-hero and a villain.

•The same scene features an ad for Tyler-Chem (Hourman Rex Tyler was a chemist) and an add for a boxing match between Grant and Montez (Wildcat's secret ID being heavy-weight boxing champ Ted Grant; his first successor was Yolanda Montez, although the Montez in the ad isn't her, but a big, bearded, bald burly guy).

Later, a character mentions a man named Fate, and there's a "Commander Dodds and His 'Sandmen'" working for the World Army.

•Alan Scott's origin starts in this issue. He's riding a bullet-train with his boyfriend Sam, and pulls out a ring to propose to him, just as the train explodes (This is more-or-less in-keeping with his Golden Age origin, minus the boyfriend part).

•While Garrick received his super-powers from a dying god, Scott gets his from a glowing green fireball, that reminded me of the burning bush of Moses' story. A big deal was made out of Alan Scott being rebooted as gay at the time of this comic's original, serial release, but it is, of course, anything but controversial. It's very much a situation of a hero who happens to be gay, rather than a gay superhero. The gender of either Scott or his boyfriend could have been changed, and nothing about the story itself would have changed.

•Sam is "fridged" within an issue of being introduced...sorta. The main thing accomplished by having Scott in the midst of a proposal when his train explodes and the flame finds him is that it allows a rationale for him to be a hero who fights with a ring: "You must have a token or weapon with which to focus your power," the green fire says, "Something close to your heart." (Later, Scott is briefly tempted to stay in the land of the dead with Sam rather than returning to the land of the living to fight on, I suppose that's a second reason to include the Sam character's death in Scott's origin).

•The only other heroes introduced in this volume are Hawkgirl (Kendra), who has an unusually not-so-bad redesign, complete with a new color scheme and a hawk-helmet with a hint of Egyptian design about it, and The Atom, diminutive World Army Sergeant Al Pratt, who gains both size-changing and nuclear powers after exposure to Apokaliptian energies and a nuclear weapon the World Army was planning to use against the enemy.

Both are part of the government's plans to manufacture their own Wonders, but Kendra escaped and went rogue, while The Atom remains a loyal soldier (and thus is in conflict with the other three heroes of Earth-2).

•The four heroes—Flash, Green Lantern, Hawkgirl and The Atom—are united by the common foe of Grundy, who is here a hulking, zombie-like creature wearing a sort of butcher's apron and commanding tendrils of dead plant-life. He's the champion of The Grey, a death-force in opposition to The Green, of which Green Lantern is the new champion, and his plan is to draw out GL and kill him. Obviously, that doesn't happen, as the four heroes defeat him (after spending some time with The Atom trying to capture Hawkgirl and The Flash).

•All in all, this turned out to be an all-around pretty good New 52 superhero comic, although, ironically, even if I had tried out the first issue when it was initially released serially, I probably would have ended up dropping the book. Scott's art on that issue is nice and all, but the plot of the first issue amounts to little more than "Superman, Batman and Wonder Woman all die horribly," and that's not the sort of first issue that makes me wanna read a second issue.

By the end of this trade though, I was eager to see what would happen next, and I find myself looking forward to the next trade.

Naturally, this creative team doesn't last long; Robinson is already departing the book. And DC Comics in general. Not that we should read anything into Robinson being the 27th or so professional with long-standing DC ties to run away from the publisher screaming!

I think I was most surprised by how good this turned out to be because Robinson, like Johns, is a writer whose best work for DC has been fairly grounded in arcane continuity and recycling and reusing the publisher's many pre-fab characters—generally, the more unloved and obscure the better—and doesn't exactly have a reputation for radical reinvention. But he does a pretty good job of recreating some of DC's best-known characters into something completely new here, fusing their Golden Age secret identities with more Silver Age power-levels and concerns and distinguishing his origins of them greatly from pre-existing versions.

•I remember making fun of the cover for the second issue of the series—which shows Jay Garrick running through a sewer, covered in rats—when it was released. The cover of issue #3 shows Alan Scott on fire, the flesh of his left hand literally burning off of the bone. The following issue? A crowd of zombies pulling Hawkgirl out of the sky.

I don't know what the idea of these particular covers were, but Earth 2 really seemed to go out of its way to advertise superheroics as something truly nightmarish (and, in all of the above cases, the cover makes the events inside seem much worse than they are; The Flash handily traps a bunch of vicious mutant rats in a garbage can, rescuing a couple being swarmed by them in an alley, in a two-page sequence of standard superheroics, for instance).

After the first issue, which shows the Trinity killing Parademons, it's not until issues #5 and #6 where the covers depict the heroes doing something heroic (Although, even in these images, being a superhero seems to be more about fighting for your life, rather than, I don't know, being able to run super-fast or to fly.

•Despite my initial revulsion to these designs when I saw some of them released on cover solicitations and so forth, I actually kind of like most of them. The Flash costume certainly lacks the charm of the original, and putting the character in such man-made looking clothing given his divine origins here (The Kingdom Come Flash is probably the best blessed-by-Hermes Flash design), the more time I spent with it the more I liked it.

The Green Lantern costume also lacks the flair, charm and individuality of the original, but rather works here, striking a compromise between the Silver Age costumes and the Kingdom Come green knight loook. This Lantern costume wouldn't work if Scott were still sharing an Earth with a half-dozen or so other Green Lanterns similarly attired, as he'd get lost in the crowd, but here he's his Earth's only GL, so that's not a concern.

I actually like Hawkgirl's look, and how much it differs from the original (specifically in the color scheme). It certainly sets her apart from all the the other Hawks that have preceded her, and offers a strong contrast to the colors of her teammates (although the trio haven't really formed a team of any kind by book's end), whereas if she were in her old green and orange orgold, she'd be sharing a color with each of them.

I even kinda liked The Atom's costume, which looks like a cross between the costume of post-Infinite Crisis Damage and that of G.I. Joe bad guy Firefly.

Grundy looks pretty dumb, but his original look would have seemed out of place here as well, given his function in the story.

As for the Trinity, Superman's costume is a vast improvement over his New 52 duds: He's lost his shorts (but has red "paneling" around his hips, not unlike the weird metal space girdle he wears in the Man of Steel movie), a different cut to his boots, and a much bigger S-shield, but otherwise he still looks like Superman. Much better than Jim Lee's high-collared, darker-colored, heavily-armored Superman on Earth-New 52.

Wondy's costume has quite a bit of tinkering, her tiara becoming a heavy-dut, heavy-metal headband that threatens to eat her face, and instead of a bracelet on her left-hand, most of the arm is covered in armor. She also wears a sort of battle skirt instead of shorts or pants.

I prefer even the New 52 version (which is basically just an over-accessorized, darker version of her standard costume) to this, but not by much, really; a toned-down version of this costume (which exists in the sketch gallery in the back of the trade) could have worked justt fine in The New 52.

Batman's costume is pretty drastically different, looking closer to Damian Wayne's future Batman costume than one Bruce Wayne could conceivably wear in a normal continuity, but it's kinda hard to judge Batman costume's too closely, since we've seen somewhere around 700,000 different Elseworlds Batman costumes.

The book ends with a six-page sequence of Scott's pencils (which are so great it seems a shame they had to be inked and colored at all), and nine pages of character sketches.

According to these, Jim Lee came up with the Solomon Grundy, Teh Atom, The Batman and a Steppenwolf (Although the one used int he story looks nothing like his version). Scott apparently designed The Superman, The Wonder Woman (the final version of which differs greatly from the one shown here, which basically just looks like the sort of Wondy costume that could have been put together in ancient Greece), The Flash (with several different lightning patterns and color schemes apparently run through) and The Sandmen. Joe Prado gets a credit for The Green Lantern.

•Hey, check it out! I finally figured out how to make bullet points!