So, did the Justice Society travel back to 1945 and then stave off Ragnarok or nah...?

As we just saw the other day, 1986's Last Days of the Justice Society Special #1 temporarily wrote the Justice Society out of the DC Universe through a complicated chain of events stemming from Crisis on Infinite Earths, with the heroes travelling back in time to 1945 and then entering a rift in the sky to join an eternal battle to save the world. Adolf Hitler had used the Spear of Destiny to bring about Ragnarok, and the only way to keep the villains of Norse mythology from destroying the world was for the heroes to merge with the Asgardian gods and fight fire giant Surtur and company until the end of time. 

So that happened, right...?

Sure. At the time. But this being DC Comics, nothing is safe from a retcon.

In 1991's Sandman #26, the fifth chapter of the "Season of Mists" arc, writer Neil Gaiman* refers to the events of Last Days, shading them in such a way that honors that story but alters it in a way that freed up the Norse gods to appear in other stories, like his own.

The plot of "Season of Mists" is that Lucifer has decided to abandon Hell, and given dominion of it to Dream, the titular Sandman of this particular DC series of that name. As Dream tries to figure out what to do with it, various gods and other entities meet with him in his realm, each making their case for why they should get possession of Hell.

One such god is Odin. He tells Dream that the only thing that frightens him is Ragnarok, and that "These days, too much of my time is spent hatching schemes to circumvent the darkness of me and mine."

Here are the panels that refer to Last Days, although, with no asterisks or editorial boxes, a Sandman reader might not even know that that Gaiman and company's story was referring back to a then five-year old superhero comic: 

The art in those panels, by the way, is penciled by Kelley Jones and inked by George Pratt (And while I don't always mention the colorists or letterers, I will also note that here the art is colored by Daniel Vozzo and that Todd Klein is responsible for the letters, which play a bigger-than-usual part in the storytelling of Sandman).

If you don't want to squint to read Odin's words in those panels, I'll transcribe them here:

Some years ago, it occurred to me that it is easier to fight something one knows something about.

I created a world--a notional dimension--and in it, I fashioned a tiny Ragnarok.

In my world, the last battle is fought, day in, day out, forever. I have learned much from it.

One thing that surprised me, though, was when my little world gained further warriors--ones I had not created. 

I do not know how they got there, nor why they fight, these little mortal heroes.

Odin brings this up because one of those little mortal heroes is, of course, The Sandman Wesley Dodds, pictured along with a quite janky looking little Hawkman in the orb in Odin's hand. Odin says has that Dodds has some of Dream's essence, a fraction of his soul within him, and he will trade Dodds for Hell.

So, according to Sandman, the Ragnarok in which the Justice Society fights is not the true Ragnarok, but a little artificial version of it that Odin had created in an alternate dimension (or, perhaps, a pocket universe...?) in order to study the last battle. 

It is this version of Ragnarok that Hitler summoned, and the Justice Society entered, with neither the Fuhrer nor the heroes realizing the difference...and their actions were apparently beneath Odin's notice, at least until he checked in on his experiment. 

There are probably some theological issues raised here, given that the Justice Society took its actions in Last Days on the word of The Spectre, an aspect of God...the God with a capital "G", as opposed to a lower-case "g" god, like Odin. Wouldn't The Spectre know better than to be taken in by a pseudo-apocalypse generated by a lesser god...?

I don't know. I'm not sure if The Spectre was, in 1986 or 1991, yet thought to be an aspect of God, as opposed to simply being a powerful spirit working at the behest of God (or, in the parlance of earlier Spectre stories, The Voice).

The following year, 1992, DC published the four-issue miniseries Armageddon: Inferno, written by John Ostrander and drawn by a half-dozen different all-star artists. The plot involved an extradimensional entity trying to conquer the DC Universe by sending his servants to different time periods in order to build bodies for him to inhabit, and the then new character Waverider assembling teams of heroes from different time periods to stop them.

In the third issue, The Spectre tells Waverider he knows where they can get another batch of heroes, provided Waverider uses his powers over time to temporarily stop the Ragnarok cycle the Justice Society was then stuck in. 

During this issue, Ostrander has The Spectre retell the story of how the Justice Society ended up in Ragnarok (the page atop this post, pencilled by Luke McConnell is from that passage of the book), and this version differs quite sharply from what we read in Last Days. Here, Ostrander removes the time travel element and decouples the events of Last Days from Crisis on Infinite Earths entirely. 

In the Armageddon: Inferno version, during World War II Hitler had tried to use the spear "to link the fall of Germany with Ragnarok" but "he hadn't the sorcerous power or training to accomplish his intentions." Still, apparently after shooting himself, Hitler's blood flowed over the tip of the spear, and "his hate was great enough to imprint his desire on the spear, waiting for a sufficient influx of magic power to complete the spell."

That magic power wouldn't come until decades later, around the time of Last Days. Ostrander has a scene in which Kobra uses the spear to wound The Spectre, and then The Spectre stumbles into the cemetery where "The Justice Society had gathered to mourn some of its fallen comrades." (There's no mention of Earth-2's Robin or Huntress here.) 

And from there the Justice Society enters into Ragnarok to begin their never-ending battle; the confusing bits in the original story involving The Spectre's powers traveling through time and space to 1945 during the events of COIE and Doctor Fate taking the Justice Society back in time having been removed.

A few years later, Ostrander would also refer to the events of Last Days in 1994's The Spectre #20, the second chapter of the "Spear of Destiny" arc (While Tom Mandrake was the Spectre's regular artists, this particular issue was drawn by guest artist John Ridgway). In this chapter, entitled "Strange Friends", Professor Nicodemus Hazzard is interviewing the surviving members of the Justice Society, now all old men, about their history with the Spear of Destiny.

When he gets to Wesley Dodds, the former Sandman talks to him about his dreams. 

"I have...such strange dreams," Dodds says:

I dream of people...friends...who are no more...who never could have existed as I dream of them.

I dream of events, not as they occurred, but as they might have been. One dream occurs over and over again...

That dream involves what appears to be either the Justice Society and/or All-Star Squadron (Liberty Belle and Johnny Quick are pictured in one panel) rushing at Hitler, who holds the Spear of Destiny. One by one they are killed off, and The Spectre reaches towards Hitler, only to be felled by the spear, after which point "the sky cracks and fire rains down...it's the end of the world."

These events don't quite line up with those in Last Days, if that's what they are meant to be referring to (it's possible this scene is meant to reference something from All-Star Squadron though, given Liberty Belle and Johnny Quick's presence; also, The Sandman, Doctor Fate, The Atom and Hawkgirl are all wearing different costumes than what they wore in Last Days).

The point that Dodds seems to be making, however, is that his dreams allow him to see things that are no longer canonical/in continuity. 

A third page of his flashbacks definitely does refer to Last Days, though, and artist Ridgway even reproduces a panel from that comic (although his panel featuring Ragnarok is quite different in terms of designs). 

"We're now in a graveyard," Dodds says:

It's sometime after the war. Most of us are still alive. We gathered to honor those who had died.

Then The Spectre is there, stumbling towards us, and he's dying. 

And we wind up in some sort of limbo, fighting to stave off Ragnarok, fighting the same battle over and over again.

Except, of course, that last part really did happen. 

Of course, these stories referencing Last Days all date from the '90s. I would not be surprised to learn that stories later in that decade or the early 2000s, from the pages of JSA or Justice Society of America or any of their spin-offs, also referred back to Last Days of the Justice Society, but that's just too many comics for me to reread for so minor a matter. (If you remember any, though, do let me know). 

At any rate, it is now 2026, and we're on the other side of Infinite Crisis, Final Crisis, Flashpoint, Convergence and some big events I didn't read, like Geoff Johns' dumb-looking Superman vs. Watchmen series and Dark Crisis on Infinite Earths. 

Where does the Justice Society fighting in Ragnarok stand now...? Well, the history of the JSoA was something I was particularly interested to see in the pages of the 2025 Mark Waid-written New History of the DC Universe, the purpose of which was to delineate what is currently in continuity and, well, I was disappointed. 

The Justice Society isn't really mentioned at all between the page featuring Infinity, Inc. (which immediately precedes Crisis on Infinite Earths in Waid's narrative) and the team's reformation as the JSA in what would have been the late '90s, our time. 

Did Last Days still happen in any way, shape or form? Did the Justice Society fight in Ragnarok? It's unclear from New History. There's a cryptic mention of the original JSoA's members having "subsequently undertook missions in secret, culminating in an adventure in another realm that extended their lifespans greatly," but that comes in a paragraph about their "disbanding under government pressure" (That is, during the House Un-American Activities Committee hearings). 

That scene is set in the 1950s, though, and where they were between then and first Flash Jay Garrick and then the others reemerging around the time of the early days of the Justice League for regular team-ups is never touched upon. At any rate, that would seem far too early for the events of Last Days to have occurred, wouldn't it?

The timeline that followed Waid's story in New History, written by Dave Wielgosz based on he and Waid's research, similarly doesn't address the issue. In that, the Justice Society isn't mentioned at all between the founding of Infinity, Inc. and the events of Zero Hour. 

So, did Last Days of the Justice Society still happen? Did the Justice Society spend time fighting in Ragnarok (or a Ragnarok)...? I don't know, and it doesn't seem as if DC has an answer at this particular point. 

*Whose name always needs an asterisk now, I guess, as it feels wrong to mention him without also mentioning the credible allegations of horrible sexual misconduct that multiple women have made against him. 

On 1998's Batman #551-552, guest-starring Ragman

In 1991, DC published a limited series by Keith Giffen, Robert Loren Fleming and Pat Broderick, starring the relatively obscure character Ragman. Though it was not the first appearance by the character—he was introduced in an extremely short-lived "ongoing" series in 1976 by creators Robert Kanigher and Joe Kubert—it was a pretty good place to start.

After all, this was the first post-Crisis appearance by the character, and writers Giffen and Fleming has revised his origin, giving him a new, mystical nature, and one tied directly to Jewish legend. The eight-issue series wrapped in 1992, and I probably read it sometime that year, as I had bought it in back issues from my local comics shop.

I was still quite new to comic books back then, but I was attracted to the character's name, the book's logo and, especially, the character design (All of which you can see on the cover of the first issue). I'm sure the Gotham City setting and the appearance of Batman late in the series didn't hurt, either. 

That series made me a fan of the character, although there weren't many other Ragman comics to track down at the time (I eventually found 1976's Ragman #1, but none of the four issues that followed it). Still, the character stayed in my head, and he was a character I delighted in drawing sketches of; like the Tim Sale version of The Scarecrow from 1993's Legends of the Dark Knight Halloween Special, Ragman would often appear in the corners or along the edges of various spiral ring notebooks and class handouts in high school and college.

The Giffen/Fleming/Broderick limited series lead to another mini-series by a different creative team, Elaine Lee and Gabriel Morrrissette's 1993-1994 Ragman: Cry of the Dead, probably most notable for featuring gorgeous covers by Joe Kubert, after which point the character re-entered limbo again. 

I kept wishing for a return, though, thinking the fact that he lived in Gotham City meant he had to turn up in one of the Bat-books eventually. I mean, what he was doing during "Knighftall", for example, or "Contagion"? Did Eclipso not try to eclipse him in The Darkness Within? Did history going crazy during Zero Hour or the sun going out in Final Night not affect his neighborhood?

You can imagine my delight, then, when he finally turned up in 1998's Batman #551. Sure, that was just a few years after the last issue of Cry of the Dead, but it's forever in teenager years, and do you have any idea how many different Batman books and comics set in Gotham City that DC had published during those years?

Better still, here Ragman was appearing in a comic drawn by the art team of Kelley Jones and John Beatty, who had already done such an amazing job of drawing whatever guest-stars witer Doug Moench was able to work into the series by this point, like Swamp Thing, Deadman, The Spectre and The Demon. (For the purposes of this review, by the way, I'm rereading Batman #551-552 via digital copy of Batman by Doug Moench and Kelley Jones Vol. 2 borrowed through the library. Same place I found the two-parter featuring The Spectre, which I covered here).

First, it should be noted that, as always, the art is great—if over-the-top in every conceivable way, as is Jones' wont—starting right there on the cover of the first issue (at the top of the post), in which we see Ragman's rags attacking Batman, bending one of his rabbit-like ears in the process. 

Spooky, dramatic and wearing a living costume that is like half billowing cape, Ragman is a character that seems almost as if he was specifically created for Kelley Jones to draw. 

Let's look at a few of Jones and Beatty's renderings of Ragman, shall we...?

While it's of course hard to compete with the images of Ragman terrorizing a Nazi, or that badass image of him as a ragged, living green cape flying through the air, I think I like that last image the best, the way his cape is drawn so large that it seems to fill the room, draping itself over crates.

I like how Jones draws capes, usually Batman's, as gigantic, a bit of artistic flair. I like it even more though when he draws them in such a way to suggest that No, it's not just artistic license, the cape I'm drawing is literally thirty-feet long and twenty-feet wide, see? 

Because Ragman's costume has a life of its own, it makes a certain sense that his cape's size might vary from image to image and move in dramatic, unnatural ways that real fabric might not in real life. In that respect, I think Ragman, like Spawn, is a perfect character for Jones to draw (Sadly though, he he's never drawn Spawn, not even on a variant cover). 

Jones doesn't draw his Ragman with the same prominent "bow" that Broderick did at the front of his cape. You can see some cords dangling from beneath his hood in a few of those panels, but they are not as big and prominent as Broderick drew them; Broderick's bow is a bit more like tentacles crossed with a ribbon on a Christmas gift.

Now Ragman's origin, at least the revised Giffen/Fleming one from 1991, was that each of the rags that comprise his costume is actually a human soul, that of an evildoer that the Ragman has punished and absorbed (Broderick actually depicted this occurring on the actually kinda scary cover to that series' second issue). 

The Ragman costume then, is a sortof  living "suit of souls." It was originally created in 16th century Europe by the same Jewish mystics who had created the legendary Golem of Prague. They eventually deemed the golem a defective defender of the Jewish people, as it lacked a human soul to guide it, so they then created the suit of souls, which could be worn by a human defender. The costume and mantle were thus passed on from champion to champion, ultimately going to Gerry Reganiewicz. 

After World War II, Gerry emigrated to the U.S., where he opened the Rags 'n' Tatters junk shop. But when he was killed by gangsters, his adult son Rory Regan found the suit, becoming the new Ragman, now the sort of spirit of vengeance type of character that populate "universe" comics, not unlike DC's own Spectre or Marvel's '90s iteration of Ghost Rider.

Don't worry; you don't need to know any of this before picking up these comics, as Moench recaps it all elegantly enough in the space of a page or two.

In the two-part Batman story, entitled "Suit of Evil Souls", Regan returns to Gotham City, having apparently been in New Orleans ever since the Cry of the Dead minieseries. The reason for his return is a rather unhappy one: Benjamin Mizrahi, a man who used to visit his junk shop, has just been murdered in his synagogue by a member of the Aryan Reich, a racist prison gang-turned-street gang now terrorizing Regan's old Jewish neighborhood.

Both Batman and Regan-as-Ragman pursue the killers. In fact, the first issue opens with an image of Batman swooping down on one of them:

Batman brings the skinhead he was chasing in. 

While Regan talks to his late friend's rabbi about the Reich and how they have been terrorizing Jews and others in the neighborhood, one of their number throws a brick through the window. Regan and his rags give chase. The rags wrap tightly around the evil man they were pursuing, seeking to smother him, but Regan calls them off, and they form his Ragman costume around him.

After he's dealt with the threat though, some of the rags detach again, rebelling against his control, and they then smother the man to death. To his horror, Regan learns he can no longer control the rags. And, what's worse, the soul of the man they killed turns into another rag in Ragman's suit of souls, adding to their evil, and thus making it still harder for him to control them.

The rest of the story then, will revolve around Regan and his rebellious rags. Apparently, the new hate crimes in the neighborhood are exacerbating the evil in the suit, and Regan's own hatred—his hate of the hatred of others—further affects his control of the suit. 

He asks for help from the rabbi (with whom he shares the story of Ragman, from the suit's creation to his own inheritance of it) and, later, from Batman. 

Meanwhile, Vesper Fairchild, the late-night radio host that Bruce Wayne is falling in love with, has a guest on to talk about the rash of hate crimes, and the Aryan Reich prepare to escalate their murder campaign, opening a new crate of weapons in their headquarters. The guns are, of course, lugers. 

Ultimately, the rabbi's lessons about the power of God's love are enough to help Regan regain his control of the rags, and Batman helps him round up the rest of the gang—without allowing the rags to smother them all to death or let them burn up in a warehouse fire that accidentally starts during the confrontation. 

Luckily, there are less than a half dozen members of the Aryan Reich, so the heroes are able to defeat this particular threat once and for all by the end of the second issue. 

Jones does a great job of depicting the rags themselves as a threat. When they go after their victims, they don't do so in the form of the suit, but as a swarm of individual rags, seemingly growing rigid and flying as if by an agency of their own. 

Not only do they attack their victims by clinging to them, wrapping them up like mummies and suffocating them, but they also hold Regan captive at one point, some binding him at his wrists and ankles, while the others swirl menacingly above him. 

They fly through the air, shattering a window to escape and, in one panel, they form a little tornado shape. 

Obviously, antisemitism and racism aren't so easily defeated in the real world, and so we are obviously still dealing with it today. In fact, it seems worse now than at any other point in my life, with the mainstreaming of various racist conspiracy theories and masks-off appreciation of Nazis (often in the form of nihilistic, irony-soaked "jokes" that give those who espouse them a degree of deniability) being mainstreamed by the right. 

Given that, it was interesting to re-read this 27-year-old story today. That the skinhead gang that plays the villains are Nazis is never in doubt. The first one we meet has a swastika and the words "Hitler Youth" tattooed on his arm. Another has the double-lightning bolt "SS" tattooed on his arm. While one of them holds the rabbi at gunpoint and raves about how Jews always cheat, and how they had apparently "tricked" America into joining the "wrong side" of World War II, Jones super-imposes a realistic image of Adolf Hitler in the panel's background.

The victims are here all Jewish, and the interview scene discusses antisemitism, but the rabbi tells us that it isn't just Jews who are the focus of the gang's predation.

And as for the obviously white Batman, well, as the man he pursues in the first issue's opening scene tells him, "And if you're siding with them-- --It's time you were stomped too!"

I don't think Moench ever uses the word "white" though, nor "white supremacy" to describe the Aryan Reich, which is too bad, I think, as I would prefer "white supremacy" be as directly linked to racism and Nazism as much and as often as possible, personally. I wonder if there's a space here in America where people stake out their own thinking as pro-white (rather than anti-Black or anti-Jewish, etc) and, in their minds at least, wall it off from racism or Nazism, despite how close those thoughts might be, or how the former might lead to the latter.

At any rate, Moench has the Aryan Reich refer several times to the "pure" man, as opposed to the white man. 

Moench obviously paints with a very broad brush here—this is mainstream superhero comics, after all, and from a time when a lot of kids were still reading them—and some of the story might seem a bit preachy. Especially the radio interview section, which is essentially a little lecture in the form of a scene.

In fact, in 1998, I might have thought that villains were a little bit too cartoonish to be realistic, but, well, here it is 2025, and in the news the week I am writing this post? The Secretary of Defense, who prefers to refer to himself as the "Secretary of War" and has several controversial tattoos associated with the Crusades and white supremacy, has been accused of ordering the illegal killing of survivors of illegal military operations to kill presumably innocent Venezuelan men accused of drug-trafficking. And the President of the United States has been publicly calling African immigrants "garbage" that he doesn't want in this country. 

At this point, our cartoons aren't even as cartoonish as our real-life villains. 

But back to the comics. These two issues comprise a pretty good superhero morality tale, one about the power of God's love to conquer hate...and, as ever, how strong, good men can and should overcome the work of weak, evil men. And the art is great, as Jones and company make great use of two extremely potent comic book character designs. 

The final of these issues, Batman #552, would ultimately prove a significant one. It is actually the final issue of the Moench/Jones/Beatty team, which had begun their run on the title in 1994's #515. The issue's last page has Batman in the Batcave, remarking on strange balls of light drifting through the cave, "some sort of geomagnetic anomaly...the phenomenon known as earthlights? Or something else...?"

No, they were earthlights, of the sort that some people believe sometimes presage earthquakes. The very next issue of Batman would be part of the "Cataclysm" Bat-books crossover about a massive earthquake striking the city, followed by stories bearing an "Aftershocks" logo, followed by a couple of those with a "Road to No Man's Land" logo, and then the start of the "No Man's Land" mega-story/status quo.

And what became of Ragman? 

Well, if he had anything to do with "No Man's Land", DC never showed us what it was. (I presume he continued to defend his own Jewish neighborhood of Gotham throughout that state of affairs just as Tommy Monaghan and his friends defended their neighborhood The Cauldron. In Regan's case, he must have done so completely off-panel, while Hitman at least devoted a single story arc to its cast during "No Man's Land"...that's 1999's #37 and #38 "Dead Man's Land," in which vampires try to move into Gotham City, if you're interested. It's great!).

The next place I remember seeing Ragman was a short story in 1999's Day of Judgment Secret Files and Origins #1, wherein he is part of a group of magical superheroes deciding where to put the Spear of Destiny (There he was drawn by another of my favorite artists, Hitman's John McCrea). He would later appear in 2005's Infinite Crisis lead-in Day of Vengeance, chronicling The Spectre's war against magic, and the 2006-2008, 25-issue Shadowpact series (the magical superhero team book that DC seemed to have been flirting with launching for years), and he seems to have appeared in the final issues of the New 52 Batwoman for a bit, although I didn't read that. 

As a headliner, this version of Ragman's last appearance was in the 2010 one-shot Ragman: Suit of Souls by Christos Gage and Stephen Segovia. In 2017, writer Ray Fawkes and artist Inaki Miranda were responsible for a six-issue Ragman series that gave the hero a new origin and new, much blander look. As that last series fell between the New 52 reboot and the Death Metal de-reboot, whether it's now meant to be canonical or not, I can't say.

Personally, I liked it better when DC rebooted their continuity only once every generation or so. 

Review: 1997's Batman #540-541

It's been a while since I revisited any comics from the 1995-1998 Batman run by Doug Moench, Kelley Jones and John Beatty, but my recent reading inspired me to do so. First, I've been reading a lot of Kelley Jones comics, thanks to that huge collection of all of his Swamp Thing comics from October and this month's Dracula Book Two: The Brides. Secondly, The Spectre has been on my mind a lot, thanks to the Spectre by John Ostrander and Tom Mandrake Omnibus Vol. 1, which collects the first half of their 1992-1998 series.

Jones drew the Spectre in both Swamp Thing and The Spectre collections, albeit it briefly in both. 

All that got me thinking of the first time I had seen Kelley Jones' Spectre...as well as curious to see how Doug Moench might have handled a conflict between Ostrander's vengeful, killer ghost and the never-take-a-life Batman. 

The Spectre appeared in a two-part story in 1997's Batman #540 and #541, and DC made a little event out of it at the time. Just as The Spectre was appearing in the pages of Batman, Batman was appearing in the pages of The Spectre; though being published simultaneously, they were two distinct stories (If I recall correctly, the Spectre issue had the two heroes in conflict over whether or not to kill The Joker, and the villain ultimately, temporarily gaining control of the Spectre's powers). 

To re-read these issues of Batman, I turned to an electronic copy of Batman by Doug Moench and Kelley Jones Vol. 2, available through my library (I hate trying to find particular old comics in the 20-ish long boxes I have upstairs now). 

I was a little surprised to find that, while these issues were indeed a Batman/Spectre story, with the latter appearing on both covers (the second one, unencumbered by the logo and text, is above) and his name even appearing along the top of the covers so that they read "The Spectre & Batman", there's actually a lot of Bruce Wayne content in these issues.

So much so, in fact, that there's a bifurcated plot running through the issues.

One half of that plot deals with Batman and The Spectre's intersecting criminal investigations that lead to their collision and, given their differences on how to deal with criminals, conflict. The other deals with Bruce Wayne romancing his then new love interest, late night radio host Vesper Fairchild (Who, like so many of Batman's girlfriends over the years, would eventually meet a bad end; here they seem to be meeting for the first time and having their first few dates, though). 

The former plot, obviously, plays to Jones strengths more than the latter. To dispense with the Bruce Wayne plot first, it features various listeners around Gotham City hearing Vesper's show, on which she announces Bruce will be an upcoming guest; Batman is one of those listeners and has to hurry to change and get there in time.

Apparently, Alfred had booked the interview, trying to get Bruce to dust off the rich playboy/Gotham philanthropist persona after a relatively long absence. Things get out of hand when Bruce seems genuinely interested in Vesper, though—Jones draws an image in which Alfred, hearing Bruce hit on Vesper over the air, is sweating as profusely as a stool pigeon Jim Corrigan/The Spectre was working previously—and they have a couple of dates, which Alfred isn't all that thrilled about ("But sir, if you'll recall what happened the last time with Shondra Kinsolving..." he says at one point, bringing up another Batman girlfriend who met a bad end).

Anyway, Bruce Wayne does an interview with Vesper Fairchild, they go to a diner after, and then set up a lunch date for the following day, which requires Bruce to visit his office for the first time in about a year-and-a-half, and lets Moench write the faux-fop version of the character we don't see all that often. 

The scenes between Bruce and Vesper are almost all banter, with the pair lobbing lines back and forth like they were playing tennis. Like much of Moench's Batman writing at the time, it feels somewhat stagey and unrealistic, but it suits the melodramatic tone of Moench and Jones' vision of the book (The Spectre and Batman will banter rather similarly, although obviously less flirtatiously).

As for the portions of the story involving muscular guys in capes, Jim Corrigan—who here seems like he might actually be a police officer again?—and Spectre supporting character Nate Kane are at the scene of a deadly arson, which they believe to be the work of Tony "Sparks" Weal. In an interrogation room, Corrigan uses the Spectre to scare info of Weal's whereabout out of an informant: Weal has apparently gone to Gotham City, to meet with the lieutenant of the Black Mask Gang.

Batman, meanwhile, is busy busting that same lieutenant, one Damon Shugrue, which he does during a pretty great fight in a pool hall (Jones' Shugrue, by the way, is an amazing design, looking like the sort of stereotypical criminal that Jack Cole might have drawn; a big, hulking guy with beady little eyes and an almost Frankenstein-shaped head).

Because Batman showed up at the meet instead of Weal, Shugrue thinks Weal must have tipped off the Dark Knight, and so he sends three of his soldiers to kill Weal. Just before they gun him down, one of them says, "Relax, Sparks--we just came to deliver a Gotham welcome... and three more kisses from the Batman."

Okay, it's a bit purple—Moench's writing in this title so often is—and it is perhaps a strained way to make Weal think Batman has something to do with his killing but, well, Moench needed something to send The Spectre after Batman, right? 

The spirit of vengeance finds Weal in Gotham, but not until after he had died. And so, he enters his corpse through the eyes, and visits his soul in Hell, where it is secured to an x-shaped cross amid flames. During questioning, Weal says it was Batman who had him killed, and so the Spectre turns his hands into a big green bellows to fan the flames and then makes for Wayne Manor.

There's a whole series of great images of The Spectre in Gotham. As a semi-transparent giant creeping around the corner of the morgue, dissolving into a cloud to enter and exit Weal's body, streaking out of the morgue like a comet, descending from high above the manor with an impossibly long cape trailing behind him and, ultimately, appearing as a giant face pushing through the stalactites to accuse Batman in the Batcave. 

I kind of love how cool, calm and collected Batman remains when a giant, screaming ghost face emerges from his ceiling, but then, I guess this is just, like, another Tuesday for Batman (Well, another Wednesday, I guess, this being comics). 

Satisfied by Batman's denials, The Spectre leaves and the two conduct separate, parallel investigations, ending at an abandoned night club where the three men who gunned down Weal are in hiding, protected by other Black Mask gang soldiers.

Batman has to fight his way in, giving The Spectre, who just magically appears before the killers, time to kill them all. He appears with his hands in the form of giant Swiss army knives with which he impales one, he turns his hand into a chainsaw to cut down another, and, in the most spectacular killing, he calls them cowards for wearing masks and says "And so it is time to face-- --the wrath behind my mask!"

Here The Spectre pulls apart his own face and out slithers a snake-like projection that is all teeth, gums and spine, looking vaguely Giger-esque (and resembling elements of the bizarre alien creatures Jones drew in 1990's Swamp Thing #94, collected in that Swamp Thing by Len Wein and Kelley Jones book mentioned earlier). Do note the evocatively specific sound effects Moench came up with, and letterer Todd Klein brings to gorgeous life. 

The bad guys thus either colorfully exterminated by The Spectre or beaten up by Batman, the two heoes have a brief, banter-y argument. It is noteworthy, I thought, for Batman talking, ever so briefly, of elements of his own beliefs and faith, something that doesn't come up too often in Batman comics, but which Batman fans seems to have a lot of opinions about.

Their argument, which spans a couple of pages, goes about just as one might expect given the particular vocations and crimefighting practices of the characters. The Spectre ultimate leaves, telling Batman that he reminds him of his friend Amy (This is Amy Beitermann, Corrigan/The Spectre's kinda sorta love interest in the early issues of The Spectre; she gets killed off surprisingly early...but given how much the book deals with aspects of the afterlife, she still shows up in various capacities for a while). 

My favorite part here is how the relatively tiny Batman's ears go back as he points at The Spectre. One of the many, many things I have always loved about Jones' Batman is the way he draws Batman's ears as if they are a literal part of his body, and they thus sometimes move as if to reflect his feelings.

The most interesting part of the entire story is what happens next, though. 

As you can see on the bottom of that page, Batman calls for The Spectre to wait as he's in the process of leaving, seemingly jumping backwards through the ceiling.

Noting that The Spectre said he spoke to Weals in Hell, Batman then asks if that means there's really a Heaven too, and Spec is equivocal in his answer: "I have seen such a place...but whether in reality or illusion, I know not."

Batman says that, while he himself doesn't need, as The Spectre puts it, "the crutch of such a promise" of Heaven in order to live his life well and do good, there were two people that he cared about who were murdered, and Spectre then guesses what it is Batman wants to ask him.

"And you wish to know if they are at peace in Heaven," Spectre says. He then cuts Batman off before he can name them, but readers will know that he is of course talking about his parents:

Preserve your mind and soul where they belong, mortal--in the misted struggle between doubt and faith.

...

What I know is not yours to know. 

Besides, I am far more familiar with the denizens of Hell...than the geography of Heaven.

The Spectre then takes his leave on this, the penultimate page. I found the conversation sort of fascinating, as it's one of the relatively few instances in comics where I can recall Batman's encounters with various spiritual or magical entities or brushes with the afterlife including the obvious, his questioning of what he sees or learns might mean for the souls of his parents.

Another tack Moench might have taken here is questioning if The Spectre had avenged the death of the Waynes or, perhaps, if he has such vast powers, why he doesn't prevent murders, but instead only avenges them after the fact. (Questions, by the way, that John Ostrander deals within the pages of The Spectre, but, of course, Batman doesn't know that). 

I also find this exchange kind of interesting because surely this isn't the first, second, third, fourth or fifth time that Batman has crossed paths with The Spectre, and so surely he has had previous opportunities to chat with him about the afterlife during, say, one of those social gatherings between the annual JLA and JSA (although perhaps many of those were no longer meant to be canonical post-Crisis...?) or during some other team-up (although, again, The Spectre's meeting with Batman in the pages of The Brave and The Bold would have predated Crisis On Infinite Earths).

But perhaps Batman wasn't previously convinced that The Spectre was who he said he was, or perhaps he didn't necessarily know that The Spectre could visit the afterlife...?

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

The other comics featuring The Spectre that I've read in the last year or so were in the DC Finest collections of the Golden Age All-Star Comics, DC Finest: Justice Society of America: For America and Democracy and DC Finest: Justice Society of America: Plunder of the Psycho-Pirate. 

In those stories, it's clear that The Spectre is the ghost of a dead man and, like his fellow Society member Doctor Fate, his powers seem more or less unlimited, as he's able to do completely crazy things like, for example, deposit a criminal on the surface of Pluto (Although, more often than not, The Spectre, like Doctor Fate, takes on criminals using only his fists). 

The idea of The Spectre transforming his body into outlandish shapes or using his powers to sentence evildoers to harsh, ironic punishments doesn't seem to have been part of the character's depiction yet back in the 1940s. 

One element of these stories I found particular surprising though, and the reason I bring them up in a post about Batman and The Spectre at all, is that the writer Gardner Fox repeatedly referred to The Spectre by the nickname of "The Dark Knight"...which, these days, we associate with Batman, rather than The Spectre. 

Review: Swamp Thing by Len Wein and Kelley Jones: The Deluxe Edition

I actually bought this 430-ish page hardcover collection when it was released last month, but I didn't get a chance to read it before November, which is why I didn't include it in the last A Month of Wednesdays column. So now it gets a standalone review of its own.

The organizing principle seems to be all of the Swamp Thing comics that writer (and Swamp Thing co-creator) Len Wein did with artist Kelley Jones, which consists of some nine issues between 2015 and 2018. But also included are all of Jones' other Swamp Thing work, which means 1990's Swamp Thing #94 and Swamp Thing #100 and 1995's Batman #521-522. Plus Jones covers for other book's featuring Swamp Thing, like a couple that he did for Justice League Dark and that for 2018's Young Monsters in Love anthology, depicting Swampy stealing Frankenstein's girl. 

Also included are some interesting looking Wein/Jones Swamp Thing collaborations that could have been, like notes for an ongoing continuing from their six-issue 2016 series and, more intriguingly still, what was to be a 1989 three-issue, fully-painted, prestige format series by Swamp Thing creators Wein and Bernie Wrightson. (In that particular case, Wein had written it and Wrightson did rough pencil layouts for some of it, but the latter eventually left the project. Wein apparently suggested Jones draw it, but DC decided to cancel it; so here we to see what the late Wrightston had managed to complete.)

Having become an ardent and devoted Kelley Jones fan during the artist's nineties run on Batman, I have already read most of the stories contained in this collection (and own them in singles). In fact, I had bought and read everything in here except the two 1990 issues of Swamp Thing, so...11 out of the 13 issues within...? 

Despite my relative miserliness, I went ahead and dropped $50 on this anyway though, as it is of course nice to have so much Kelley Jones art so easily accessible in one place. 

Let's look at the features in order, shall we? 

Foreword by M. Christina Valada

M. Christina Valada, her bio says, is a photographer, lawyer, writer and podcaster, although she writes this substantial foreword as Len Wein's wife. As such, she played a substantial role in finding the materials that are presented in this book, as she has looked through his computer and office for much of what ends up in the back matter.

She shares Wein's medical difficulties over the course of the last few years of his life, which included heart surgery and being on dialysis, a toe amputation, neck surgery and more. In fact, Valada said that, in the last 13 months of his life, Wein was in constant pain, and "had more surgeries in the last year than I can actually count." 

Nevertheless, he kept working, mostly on Swamp Thing comics and other projects and, from what Valada said, made some truly heroic efforts to attend conventions.

The piece is also full of touching personal anecdotes, and even some advice that Wein shared with Kelley Jones about making comics...and, I suppose, is here being shared with everyone: "Remember, this is supposed to be fun."

Introduction by Kelley Jones

Kelley Jones' piece is far shorter than Valada's and begins with a fun anecdote: Upon first reading Len Wein and Bernie Wrightson's Swamp Thing as an 11-year-old child in 1972, Jones hated it. 

It was issue #2.

From cover to last panel, it was just disturbing and creepy and sad. It featured a mad doctor/sorcerer named Arcane and his awful creations, the Un-Men, and Swamp Thing...who was supposed to be the hero of the book and a monster! "Monsters can't be heroes!" my still-unrotted brain screamed. Remember, I was 11.

And, when I was done, like I said, I hated. it.

But it stayed with me. I thought about it and turned it over and over in my mind. As with all things taboo. I had to look into the abyss that was Swamp Thing again.

And then I loved it. I mean, really, really loved it.

In just two hours, I went from disgust to joy.

As many of you know, Jones is one of my all-time favorite comics artists, and it was an unparalleled delight to hear so much so directly from him here. 

This is hardly the point of his introduction, but in recounting his history with the Swamp Thing character, he of course mentions his Batman two-parter with Dough Moench (which we'll get to in more detail below). This was, of course, part of the pair's1995-1998, 40-ish issue run, and he notes that Moench "would always ask me who I wanted to draw." That certainly explains something about that run.

Like a lot of modern Batman runs, this one covered a fair amount of Batman's rogues gallery, including some of the bigger characters: The Joker, The Penguin, Two-Face, The Scarecrow, Man-Bat, Clayface, Killer Croc, Mister Freeze, even Black Mask (a Moench creation) and  Black Spider (In addition to several original creations, although none that caught on). But the run also included a bunch of guest-stars, which was then a bit more unusual, and those guest-stars seemed specifically chosen for the fact that it would be cool to see Kelley Jones draw them. And so Batman found himself either teaming-up or at odds with Deadman, The Spectre, Etrigan, Ragman and, of course, Swamp Thing. 

From what Jones said here, using a character from the Vertigo line in a Batman comic then required permission from both Batman group editor Denny O'Neil and Vertigo editor Karen Berger, but both gave their blessing on Swamp Thing appearing in Batman at the time.

Which is how we got one of my favorite Batman comics ever, I guess...!

Convergence: Swamp Thing #1-2

DC's Convergence event series was long on page count, with some 80 issues of tie-in issues published, but short in terms of how long it went on for, the entire thing running between April and May of 2015. The main Convergence mini-series ran for nine weekly issues, and was written by Dan Jurgens, Jeff F. King and Scott Lobdell and drawn by a bunch of different artists. There were 40 (That's right, 40!) two-issue tie-in miniseries, but most of these were pretty inconsequential to the event, which meant readers could basically just pick up those featuring characters and/or creators they like, and ignore the others.

The premise involved cosmic being Telos (who I think was a version of Brainiac, maybe?) collecting cities from throughout various DC timelines in impenetrable domes, kinda like how classic Brainiac had collected cities like Kandor in bottles. During the events of the series, the domes came down, and Telos ordered the heroes of various cities to fight one another. 

In the miniseries, this basically translated into an issue spent establishing the cast and setting, and then a second issue pitting them against antagonists from entirely different world or timeline. (The one I remember best, for example, was the John McCrea-drawn Plastic Man and The Freedom Fighters, which featured Plas and other old Quality Comics heroes fighting robots from The New 52: Futures End.) 

Having only read the main series that once 10 years ago, I don't remember it too terribly well at this point. I think it's main lingering effect was the birth of Jonathan Kent to a Superman and Lois from within one of the domed cities—delivered, if I recall correctly, by Batman Thomas Wayne from the world of Flashpoint—and the child somehow made it into the pages of the Superman books going forward. 

I think there was also a cosmic reboot of continuity of sorts, but, coming between 2011's New 52 reboot and 2017's Dark Nights: Metal, I'll be damned if I know what it changed. At the time, I just read it as another example of random, unenumerated changes to continuity, which future writers would make up as they went along anyway. (Oh, and the logo, which you can see on the cover I grabbed from comics.org above, has stuck with me, as I always thought it looked like a coffee ring from someone using a comic as a coaster.)

You won't find any of this background in the pages of Convergence: Swamp Thing; this trade collection refers to the storyline as "Blood Moon" and then gives a title for each of the two chapters, the actual name of the comic these stories occurred in appearing below those. And, because the Jones-drawn covers are presented sans logos and credits, they're not labeled as Convergence tie-ins. (A page featuring a paragraph of text explaining the basics of the event might have been a helpful inclusion in the collection.)

This sure made me wonder what a reader encountering this story for the first time here would make of it. Divorced from the event it ties into, it's not very good, as Len Wein doesn't attempt to explain the premise of Convergence to readers (And, to be fair, anyone reading it off the racks when these issues were originally published  wouldn't have needed him to), and, if that premise is left unexplained, then the events feel rather random and unmoored from anything else.

I also wasn't sure the when and where of the Swamp Thing and Abby that star in the book; the big event of Alan Moore's run is mentioned (That is, that Swamp Thing is actually a new and unique plant being that thought it was Alec Holland, rather than Holland himself transformed), and there is talk of The Green and  Swampy's Moore-era powers), so I assume they were trapped by Telos maybe sometime after that...? Although the pair are also just friends, rather than lovers or husband and wife, so maybe it's from sometime during the Moore run...? I don't know; I suppose we could ask Mike Sterling; he surely knows.

At any rate, during the first issue/chapter of the story, the Swampy and Abby notice that the skies have turned red, and, seeking to find out what might be going on, Swamp Thing decides to visit Gotham City and ask Batman what's up. He's about to dive into the dirt to travel there by growing a new body there and transferring his consciousness, when Abby says she wants to go along, and so the pair arrive there via bus, Swamp Thing wearing a trenchcoat and wide-brimmed hat as a disguise.

They go to the park, but, Wein's narration tells us, "And that was the moment when the dome came down-- --completely sealing off Gotham City from the rest of the world." 

Kelley Jones' art, meanwhile, doesn't show us anything about a dome coming down, only Swamp Thing "AARRGGHH!!"-ing in pain as he is severed from The Green. He's unable to leave his body to travel outside the dome either, and so the pair are now trapped, Swampy more than Abby, as he is stuck in the park, slowly dying, with her occasional gifts of plant food and fertilizer just enough to keep him alive. 

This is the state of affairs for a year; the most exciting thing that happens during that time being Batgirl Barbara Gordon chasing Poison Ivy through the park (The fact that Barbara is in-costume then would mean this Swamp Thing and Abby come from somewhere in time between Moore's "The Anatomy Lesson" and Moore's Batman: The Killing Joke, huh?).

The plot finally gets some foreword movement again around page 19, when the hexagonal pattern of the dome is visible in the sky for the first time, and a disembodied voice announces itself as Telos and explains that champions from each city must fight one another to save their respective cities.

And then our heroes are set upon by a horde of vampires. The champion Swampy will have to face won't be introduced until the next issue, then, but it's a perfect character from a particular DC reality for Jones to draw: The vampire Batman of Jones' own Batman & Dracula: Red Rain, Batman: Bloodstorm and Batman: Crimson Mist trilogy with writer Doug Moench. 

The second issue is then devoted to vampire-fighting. Contrary to Telos' expressed wishes, Swamp Thing and Vampire Batman don't fight one another, though. First they fight off the vampires menacing Swampy and Abby, and then this Batman tells Swampy his Gotham isn't really worth fighting to save, since it's overrun with vampires. Instead, he asks the muck-encrusted mockery of a man to help him fight vampires with whatever time they might have left, and he does. In the end, they kill the main vampire, resulting in those she has turned becoming human again.

Vampire Batman, who was of course turned by Dracula himself, does not, and he voluntarily watches the sunrise with Swampy and Abby, sacrificing himself. I guess Swamp Thing's version of Gotham thus "wins", but I don't recall what that means for the state of either city/world, as I don't recall much about Convergence. 

So, this 44-page story is basically just half set-up, half fight. Wein does make the bloodless Swampy into a formidable vampire-slayer, though, turning his fingers into oaken stakes that he can shoot along vines into their hearts and, later, emitting a cloud of raw garlic spray that dissolves his foes. 

All of this obviously gives Jones lots to work with, as the two monster lead characters kill vampires in often spectacularly over-the-top images, as in a panel where a trio of vampire women melt into piles of collapsing bones. 

I particularly like the sequence in which Swamp Thing kills his first wave of vampires though, Jones drawing skull encased in clouds in mid-air around a crouching, lumbering Swamp Thing, who explains to Abby the vampires were already dead, and he had "merely sent them...to their final rest...!"

I'm not 100% clear if these skulls are what remained of the vampires after Swamp Thing staked them, and they were in the process of falling to the ground, or if they are meant to represent the vampires' souls escaping their slain bodies, but it looks cool (In the panel immediately preceding this one, a spirit leaving a small pile of bones and viscera that was a vampire). 

The second-to-last panel features a big, stylized "RRRUMMMBBBLLL" sound effect, and Swamp Thing remarking upon an earthquake, which seems pretty random, but was likely meant to be an acknowledgement of something that happened in the pages of the main Convergence series. 

It is perhaps noting here how much Jones' Swamp Thing here resembles that from the original, 1970s comics, as designed and drawn by Bernie Wrightson. He's a big, hulking, lumbering brute of a humanoid figure, and is a fairly solid, uniform green most of the time, vines only appearing on his figure here and there.

It's a sharp contrast to the Swamp Thing Jones had drawn in Batman, and the more god-like version of the '80s and '90s Swamp Thing series, where the character increasingly transformed and borrowed elements from other plant-life to incorporate into his own appearance (Readers can see this contrast for themselves as they make their way through the book, Wein and Jones' 21st century Swamp Thing stories eventually giving way to '90s depictions of the character).

Swamp Thing #1-6 (2016)

While many of the virtues of the Convergence miniseries were likely only enjoyed by Swamp Thing fans who happened to be reading DC comics in the spring of 2015 (and/or Len Wein fans and/or Kelley Jones fans), the two-issue series lead to at least one positive development: It was successful enough that Wein and Jones got a six-issue mini-series out of it.

The collection lists this as "The Dead Don't Sleep", which is the title Wein gave the story of the first issue (And, when the mini was collected, that was the subtitle of the trade paperback doing so). It's a rather unusual mini-series, as, rather than one, complete story, it tells two different, distinct stories, as if these were the first few issues of an ongoing (I just double-checked the original comics covers though, and #1 has a big "1 of 6" in the upper righthand corner, as you can see above). 

It seems to pick up...wherever Swamp Thing was left off in whatever comic preceded this, not necessarily the Convergence issues (Abby's MIA here, for example). 

The first two issues tell one story, the last four are devoted to a different arc, and there's little in the way to connect them; The Phantom Stranger appears to Swampy in the first issue to give him cryptic warnings that, in retrospect, refer to the events of #3-6, but that's about all that ties the stories together. (Jones' Stranger, by the way, is obviously pretty cool. His coat and cape billow dramatically, of course, and while the top half of his face is usually in shadow, his eyes are two inscrutable white dots staring from out of that shadow; it looks an awful lot like how the filmmakers depicted the eyes of The Void in the Thunderbolts* movie.)

Oh, and a new local sheriff is introduced: Darcy Fox from Gotham City, the niece of Lucius Fox. She appears throughout the series. (If it seems like the Fox family is growing rather large, well, if anyone is entitled to invent a new relative for Lucius Fox, it's the character's co-creator, Len Wein.)

These first two issues are essentially Swamp Thing versus a zombie...not of the now common Night of The Living Dead sort, but here an undead guy who is incredibly strong (not only does he hold his own against Swamp Thing in their fights, but he rips him in half vertically at one point) and who also has rudimentary intelligence, enough to talk (although, like Swampy, he does so with lots of ellipses in his dialogue). 

In this story, a couple with the unlikely surname of Wormwood come to the swamp seeking our hero's help. They tell him that their son was killed in an experiment at the unlikely named Cowley College that abuts the swamp (and thus makes it Swamp Thing's business...?)...and he then apparently came back from the dead to murder those he holds responsible for his death, in grisly fashion. ("Next morning, the custodial staff found the mutilated remains of Professor Crisp in the chemistry lab... ...and the gymnasium... ...and the bio lab... ...and the... Well, anyway, you get the point.")

Swamp Thing ultimately triumphs, thanks to some advice on re-killing zombies from Shade, one of the many spooky and/or magical characters to appear in this miniseries (He only appears in about a half-dozen panels though, and he spends those mostly in an armchair, so we don't see how Jones might have depicted his powers, or done much more with the character rather than treat him as a talking head...although the angles and shading are quite dramatic, given that this is Kelley Jones we're talking about.)

The last panel of issue #2 features a man giving his name standing before a window, with a rainstorm raging outside, a lightning bolt splitting the sky in half. 

"The names Cable," he says, "Matt Cable."

Yeah, him! And if you're thinking hey, didn't Matt Cable die (He did! In 1989's Swamp Thing #84!) and then get resurrected as a raven in Morpheus' The Dreaming (Uh-huh, in the pages of The Sandman)....? Well, I can't explain what he's doing here. Both his death and en-ravening happened in those comics before they were labeled Vertigo comics, so the fact that the line was separated from the DCU at one point doesn't seem to explain it. 

Of course, since 1989 DC had hard continuity reboots in Infinite Crisis and Flashpoint/The New 52, among other rejiggerings, so perhaps DC continuity was altered in such a way that Cable never died...? 

Anyway, his presence is kind of important for the second story of the series. In it, Cable explains to Swamp Thing that he had retired from the FBI and devoted himself to searching the world for a "cure" to Swampy's condition, one that could return him to human being Alec Holland (The actually-a-plant-that-thought-it-was-Holland-who-is-actually-totally-dead doesn't come up here; if I recall correctly, I think Geoff Johns might have changed that during the climax of Brightest Day...?). 

Anyway, he's here because he found it, in Deadman's Nanda Parbat: The Hand of Fatima (Again, an unlikely name, given Nanda Parbat's Himalayan setting and history as a fantastical exotic location, whereas the name "Fatima" is associated with Islam and a Portuguese Marian apparition). All they need is a powerful sorcerer to cast the spell to grant Cable's wish. 

They find one in a scantily clad Zatanna (who actually literally disrobes in one scene, albeit off-panel), and the spell produces a result that surprises Swamp Thing: He is turned into Alec Holland, as promised, but, to his surprise, Cable has now become Swamp Thing. (He's distinguished from the Holland Swamp Thing by differently colored dialogue balloons, with fewer ellipses, as well as redder eyes, and more prominent, woody-looking spinal projections.)

Despite regaining his humanity, Alec faithfully hangs around, training Cable on how to use Swamp Thing's powers, but it quickly becomes apparent that this new Swamp Thing isn't going to be such a good guy, as seen when he uses his powers to cause roots to draw and quarter* a lippy poacher, a brutal, gory act that Alec seems a little too quick to forgive when Matt says, "I...I'm sorry, Alec...I guess I didn't know my own strength."

Eventually, the new Swamp Thing captures Alec, builds a huge throne in nearby Houma and tells the world via TV news camera they have to surrender to him or be destroyed. With the Justice League and Titans conveniently off-world, according to SHIELD's ARGUS' Steve Trevor and Etta Candy, it's decided to simply nuke Houma to take out Swamp Thing...unless Alec can gather sufficient spooky allies and formulate a plan to regain his powers from the bad Swamp Thing (There's a bit of a twist here regarding Cable's heel turn, which I won't spoil here). 

He does so, giving us a chance to see Jones draw not only The Phantom Stranger and Zatanna (now in fishnets and top hat), but also The Spectre, who he did a pretty phenomenal version of (See 1997's Batman #540 and #541). There's a particularly great panel here in which a fiercely grinning Spectre says, "Yes...I know" when the bad Swamp Thing mentions something necessitating an "act of God."

The story also includes brief appearances by Etrigan The Demon and Deadman. The latter is notable in that Jones doesn't depict him in the corpse-like designs he gave him during his 1989 and 1992 miniseries devoted to the character, but as more ghostly, with a gauzy white ghost-like head, with black-rimmed bright white eyes in it and, in one panel, a black-rimmed set of teeth.

In addition to these characters, Mister E, Felix Faust and The Enchantress all make one-panel cameos, but aren't really around long enough that we get a feel of what Jones might have done with them, similar to the brief appearance of Shade. 

This second story, and the miniseries, ends happily enough, restoring the status quo: Alec is Swamp Thing again...while Cable is in  a coma in the hospital, and Abby makes a surprise, three-panel appearance.

Swamp Thing Winter Special #1 (2018)

Like the Convergence miniseries, the six-issue one seems to have done well enough that DC was going to have Len Wein and Kelley Jones keep going with the character, with the next story in the collection, "Spring Awakening!" 

Editor Rebecca Taylor refers to this story as "a continuation of" Wein's "Dead Don't Sleep" miniseries in an "Editor's Note" that originally ran in 2018's Swamp Thing Winter Special. The table of contents for this collection refers to it as Swamp Thing #7. I wonder, was the mini going to keep it's numbering and turn into an ongoing, or would DC have relaunched the title with a new #1 when it became an ongoing...? 

It's not entirely clear...but it's moot, as Wein died while working on this very issue. He had written the plot script for the issue, which is what Jones would draw his art based on, but not the "lettering script", so the exact words Wein wanted the characters to say were never written.

In what turned out to be a poignant move, Taylor and DC decided to print the story as it was, unlettered. The result? A silent issue, as if Swamp Thing's creator and writer was now "silenced", and readers get to see his last work...albeit without Wein's most obvious presence included, underscoring his absence.

Remarkably, Wein was a good enough comics plotter and Jones a good enough comics artist that the story reads as fairly complete just as it is, almost as if it were always intended to be a silent issue. Even without narration or dialogue, you can make sense of the story and the intent of the conversations between characters (There was only one point I couldn't quite intuit, involving a bunch of rags on a train box car in the air; consulting Wein's plot script, which follows the story, I see this is meant to be a bundle of rags forming into Solomon Grundy, which wasn't a power of his I knew he had; perhaps it was even a new one...? The script also makes clear that, in the scene in which Cable meets with Sheriff Fox and her deputy, he is telling them he plans to stick around and set up a private investigator's business in Houma).

The story involves Solomon Grundy kidnapping a baby, the awakened Cable meeting with Swamp Thing and then the sheriff, a spectacularly awesome scene involving Swamp Thing water-skiing on a lily pad as he pursues bad guys with rifles riding on a pair of airboats, and an equally spectacular entrance by Batman, who defeats the bad guys and blows up their boats using well-aimed batagrangs before we seem him on-panel, crouched in the bough of a tree to confront Swamp Thing. 

(The Special the story originally ran in also included a Tom King and Jason Fabok story, as well as a text article about Wein, some images by his fellow Swamp Thing creator Bernie Wrightson and a pin-up by Jose Luis Garcia-Lopez, none of which are reproduced here).

Swamp Thing #94 (1990)

The next section of the book is labeled "Other Tales by Kelley Jones", and begins with a 2024 prose piece by Swamp Thing writer Doug Wheeler, in which he describes how Jones' work first came to his attention, how he advocated to DC to hire Jones to work with him, and how that went (Intriguingly, it was at Archie Comics' booth at a New York City comics convention, where they were showing off a Kelley-Jones drawn horror comic entitled The Hangman which, Wheeler writes, Archie "later chickened out of and never published." Does Archie Comics still have those pages in a drawer somewhere?! They should totally publish them! I can't imagine that anything Jones had drawn back then could be too scary, gory or offensive for the post-Afterlife With Archie version of Archie Comics to publish!)

Anyway, this issue is a done-in-one horror story written by Wheeler, with Jones credited as guest artist. 

It's fairly gory, to the extent that Wheeler said he was told by some of those who saw the first pages early that the pair had "gotten away" with a panel featuring a serial killer's victim, chopped up into six pieces and strewn about a field, her bloody head resting atop a stump, an axe still embedded in it (As is often the case, the gore Jones draws is somewhat softened by his exaggerated style; here, there's something almost cartoonish about the chopped-up body, keeping it from looking like anything approaching real.)

Though fairly straight horror, the issue shows just how weird and trippy the post-Alan Moore Swamp Thing had gotten. The hero's first appearance in the story, for example, is as an alien-looking tree with some dozen eyes on its branching stalks (John Totleben's cover, above, shows this; notably, his eye-filled tree looks more realistic and less crazy than Jones' drawing within does). 

This tree sees the result of an ax murder, and Swamp Thing investigates. The story involves an ax murderer who kills victims at the behest of an otherworldly entity and then loans the blood-stained ax to musicians as a percussion instrument.

The whys of the plot become clear during the story, which eventually involves a plot that is more fantasy or sci-fi than horror (or monster...or superhero), and Jones' depiction of that otherworldly entity elevates it into the truly insane. 

We throw the word "Lovecraftian" around a lot these days, often to describe any weird monster with tentacles, but here Jones draws one of those horror and wonders that H.P. Lovecraft was always hinting around, calling them indescribable. 

The creature, revealed in a huge, horizontal panel stretching across the top half of a two-page spread, is an elongated purple mass, it's head (?) a long, snake-like projection with no features save for a gigantic mouth, its gums and teeth stretching beyond its lips (?) as if trying to escape. It has a pair of big bat-like wings, too small to propel it, bizarre spines that look like jutting bones, a mass of writhing jellyfish-like tentacles, another mass of writhing tentacles that look like smaller version of its head, these nested in what look it might be human brain matter or might be intestines, probing black spikes that look a little like claws and a little like the fibrous "legs" of some insect-like creature or perhaps a microscopic organism. 

I kind of wish Wheeler's script was included after this story, as I wonder to what degree he described the creature, or if he just wrote "draw the craziest, most upsetting looking monster you can imagine." Certainly some elements of this entity are familiar from other Jones monsters and supernatural horrors we've seen since. 

Naturally, Abby, Swamp Thing and their still-new baby Tefe are involved in the goings-on, but, ultimately, the malefactors all receive punishment for their actions. 

It's a great story, and one that reads perfectly well in isolation from whatever else might have been going on in the title at the time. 

This was still a few years before the Vertigo imprint, but the book's cover did have a "Suggested For Mature Readers" tag above the familiar DC bullet; given American weirdness about nudity vs violence and gore, one wonders what the publisher thought was the mature part...I am guessing the scene of a nude (but usually covered) Abby was of more concern than the chopped-up corpse.

Swamp Thing #100 (1990)

This over-sized anniversary issue is written by Wheeler, and features art by two distinct art teams. One is, of course, Kelley Jones, here inking himself again, while the other is pencil artist Pat Broderick and inker Alfredo Alcala. The credits list page numbers for who drew what, but they styles are different enough that it is instantly obvious who drew what.

Unlike the previous Wheeler/Jones collaboration, this one isn't a standalone tale, but picks up on an ongoing storyline—baby Tefe has accidentally destroyed her body and plunged into The Green, and Swamp Thing doesn't know how to safely get her back, since he can't explain the process to a baby—and it involves the Parliament of Trees, and events like Swampy's past travels through space and time that seem to be references to events from Alan Moore's and Rick Veitch's runs on the book. 

Essentially, a shaman gives Swamp Thing a quest he must complete to save his daughter: Seek out "a fountain whose waters allow the drinker to communicate with all living beings," which, the Parliament informs him, can be found in the Garden of Eden, which is now located in Antarctica, not an easy place for to grow a plant body, on top of being surrounded by a great wall and defended by angels.

While Broderick/Alcala draw the sections of Swampy with Abby, the shaman and ghost Tefe, as well as some flashbacks and his visits with the Parliament, Jones draws the journey to Eden. Given how little plant matter there is for Swampy to work with, the body grows there is emaciated and skeletal, Jones giving him skull-like visage with extremely sunken eyes and half-finished back from which juts a protruding spine.

There's a turn of a page that leads to a splash page that reveals an angel, an awesome (as in, inspiring awe) and terrifying creature that is partially Biblically accurate, partially Jones-ian flourishes and partially insane-looking. It's a tower of a creatures with multiple animal heads, a "torso" consisting of a coral-like network covered with eyeballs, with strange tentacles that seem as much plant as animal, one of which grips a flaming sword, this structure resing upon a burning fire, which emanates from a chaotic pink-black cloud of geometric shapes, which stands upon a single talon.

This is one angel, and the one Swamp Thing attempts to fight, before two of its fellows join it—one a golden, winged giant humanoid that looks like the "traditional" view of an angel, another a strange pink alien being that is mostly fangs or spikes and wings, more akin to an alien Neon Genesis Evangelion angel than what one might find in Christian art. By the time they join the fight, Swamp Thing must change strategies.

The Broderick-penciled passages involve a lot of conversation and a bit of continuity (and cameos by Etrigan and Abin Sur), but my major takeaway from reading this issue was just how strange a narrative Swamp Thing had become, and how far it had travelled from Wein and Bernie Wrightson's original conception of a monster playing hero in a milieu that would seesaw between a horror comic and a "universe" super-comic. 

By 1990, it's...kind of a fantasy epic of sorts, and one that's sometimes far removed from the world of humans (this issue is, certainly), with the shaman the only human character with a speaking part in this tale full of bizarre entities. In fact, Swamp Thing has, by this point, essentially become its own unique mythology.

Batman #521-#522 (1995)

This two-issue story arc comes from fairly early in Doug Moench, Kelley Jones and John Beatty's run on Batman, which has always been neck-in-neck with the Alan Grant/Norm Breyfogle runs as my favorite chunk of Batman comics. (Whether Breyfogle or Jones is my favorite Batman artist can change by the day, and by whose work I had most recently read; in general, I usually say that I think Breyfogle was the best Batman artist, while Jones is my favorite Batman artist). 

I am actually probably more familiar with these comics than just about any others. Like some of the earliest issues of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, teenage Caleb spent a lot of time studying these, re-drawing various panels and elements, trying to figure out and replicate the way that Jones and/or Beatty drew reptile scales, tree bark, a tree line along the horizon, the moon, ripples on the surface of the water and so on. 

The second issue, #522, is a particular issue of a comic book that I think it's fairly safe to say that I was, for a few months at least, obsessed with (And, for long afterwards, I would draw Jones-style snakes and trees in the margins of my notebooks in college). 

Given that, I probably didn't need to re-read these two issues, but I did so anyway. 

It makes for a pretty great "last" Killer Croc story (the second such "last" Killer Croc story published that decade, following Grant and Breyfogle's Batman #471). Swamp Thing is barely in the first issue; in fact, we simply see a part of him in a few panels. 

In the new Arkham Asylum, an increasingly bestial Killer Croc is raging for his dinner. Unseen by the cooks, a vine has drown up out of the sink drain and shot—"SHLOOB"—some sort of spore onto his dinner plate. When he ingests it, Croc starts tripping balls, the words "the wet dark" and "home" repeating themselves in his mind.

He breaks out of his cell, fights his way outside, stomps around town, repeating his need to find the wet dark and repeatedly complaining about how he doesn't fit in with human society. He ultimately hijacks a steam train headed for Louisiana, Batman giving chase in the Batmobile he was using at the time, which was either the Golden Age one with the big Batman head on it, or a new version of it. (Amusingly, at one point Batman climbs onto its roof, his huge cape flaring behind him, and it's clear that there's no way that gigantic cape could ever fit in the little car. In fact, there's a couple of great cape panels in this sequence, two of which feature it spreading out like gigantic batwings.)

Swamp Thing finally makes his entrance on the cover of #522, which is still maybe one of my favorite Swamp Thing images. 

The various plants and mushrooms growing out of Swamp Thing's hunched back is one thing, but I think it's the presence of the turtles there that really sells him as not just a plant creature, but a living, breathing, intelligent, ambulatory part of the swamp (Also note the trees before the moon on the cover; that's one of the things I remember trying to draw over and over again). 

In the swamp, Killer Croc seems to have found his sought-after "wet dark", a place where he can find some semblance of peace, but, of course, Batman is in pursuit, and they have a pretty intense fight, at one point leading to Croc getting Batman in a bear hug and attempting to squeeze the life out of him, which, it seems to me anyway, happens every time they fight. 

Then, on a two-page splash on pages 17 and 18 of the story Swamp Thing finally makes his entrance, his broad, hunched back covered in all manner of flora and fauna, a snake wrapped around his forearm like a bracelet, a frog clinging to his triceps and a pair of turtles begin to clamber up his leg. 

Swampy separates the pair with vines, then breathes a handful of weird flowers into Croc, changing him, and the villain walks off peacefully into the swamp. 

Batman continues to argue with Swamp Thing over whether Killer Croc is a criminal who has hurt people and broken laws, and must therefore be dragged back to Gotham to pay for his crimes, or a primordial being who can become part of the natural order of the swamp. 

Batman eventually gets physical, punching Swamp Thing, only to have his hand come out of his back with a "SPLTCH." Swamp Thing holds him like this as they continue to argue, and then a couple of tendrils grow from Swampy's chest, popping in Batman's face ("blutch", "poof"), "natural hallucinogens" that show Batman a tormenting vision of the way Killer Croc sees the world and the Batman himself (basically what we see on the cover of #521), and then quickly passes.

Ultimately, Swamp Thing takes Croc into the "custody" of the swamp and The Green, and Batman wanders off, kinda sorta defeated.

Almost every panel of this issue is a little masterpiece, and it's great fun seeing what Jones does with the swamp setting. I don't think his later (or, as it's collected in this book, earlier) stories depict the swamp or the Swamp Thing in quite the same way.

Thinking about it now, I'm not sure why this was. Surely, Len Wein's 21st century Swamp Thing is more of a plant monster than the elemental/god that Moench and Jones were working with in these Batman issues.

I think part of it may be that in these Batman issues, Jones was just penciling, giving him more time and breathing room to filigree the hell out of every panel, with inker Beatty finishing some of the ornate pencil work. That, and colorist Gregory Wright's work is a bit more to my liking than that of Michelle Madsen, but that may have more to do with the technology employed or the style of the time.

And, of course, I haven't discounted the possibility that I may prefer this art to the later art simply because of nostalgia.

Anyway, this is probably more of a Batman or Killer Croc story than a Swamp Thing one, but it's a nice portrait of Swamp Thing (both in characterization and as a visualization), and it has a killer design for the character this collection is devoted to. 

Swamp Thing: Deja Vu #1 

Next? "Lost Tales Written By Len Wein."

The first of these is described in an unsigned prose piece, detailing how, in 1989, DC commissioned a three-issue, fully painted, prestige format series" by Swamp Thing's creators, Len Wein and Bernie Wrightson. 

Set immediately after Alan Moore's run, it would involve Swamp Thing learning he could travel through time using The Green (which would end up happening in the book anyway). Wein plotted the issues, and Wrightson started drawing pencils for them, but he later stepped away from the project.

According to the piece, 

"I thought it was going to be one of the best stories I'd ever written," said Wein at a 2015 WonderCon panel. "So I wanted to see it in print, and I kept suggesting: 'Use Kelley Jones. This kid. Kelley Jones! I think he'd be perfect for this. But Paul [Levitz] said, 'If Bernie can't do it, it won't get done.'"

With Wein and Wrightson both gone now, the closest we may ever see of the what the project might have looked like is what is included here, some 50-ish pages of Wrightson's rough pencils. 

That said, in her foreword, M. Christine Valada mentions that she's still looking for the script for this series. Perhaps if it is far enough along, there's enough for Jones to draw it after all...perhaps presenting it as a silent story, as DC did with "Spring Awakening!"...?

At any rate, after hearing Wein's story on a panel about the project, it's nice to know that the writer did finally get to work on Swamp Thing with Jones. 

Et cetera

There's plenty of back matter, as well, including the aforementioned covers by Kelley Jones and pages and pages of sketches, which I won't get into here.

Perhaps my favorite bit among all of this is, however, this list, which I shared on Bluesky previously: 

This was apparently part of a proposal for an ongoing Swamp Thing series, which it sounds like would have continued from the miniseries. There's plenty of cool stuff in there, and it's hard not to get excited imagining Jones drawing these characters and wondering how Len Wein would get them into conflict with his Swamp Thing.

I mean not just Bigfoot, but Bigfoot and a Yeti, in two separate stories? Presumably off-brand versions of the Creature From The Black Lagoon and C.H.U.D. (WHAT?!). A/the Chupacabra. And...mysterious 19th century American writer Ambrose Bierce...?! 

The pages that follow the list then feature a dozen or so plot descriptions in various degrees of detail, suggesting how we would have gotten the mummies, at least, and further suggesting a few future DC guest-stars, like The Gentleman Ghost and Klarion, The Witch Boy.

For what it's worth, we have seen Jones draw mummies and an Invisible Man before. He and Moench had Batman and Deadman fight mummies in 1996's Batman #530-532, which featured variant glow-in-the dark covers (in one, you could see a glow-in-the-dark Deadman inside Batman's body, in another you could see the skeletons within the bodies of the mummies). And in 2009-2010, Jones again teamed with Moench for the five-issue miniseries Batman: Unseen, featuring the Dak Knight vs. an invisible man.

Okay, that's all I got on this. Now get off the Internet, go find a copy of the book for yourself, and sit back to enjoy a couple hundred pages worth of Swamp Thing comics...

*Actually, the Cable Swamp Thing uses vines to pull the man's limbs in four different directions while also pulling his head off, so I guess he wasn't drawn-and-quartered so much as...drawn-and-fifthed...?