When Batman Met Spawn Pt. 1: On 1994's Batman/Spawn: War Devil #1

DC Comics and Image Comics collaborated on a Batman/Spawn crossover in 2022, a book that seemed likely to have been occasioned by the fact that artist Greg Capullo, once primarily known as the artist of Spawn, had since had a long run as the primary artist on Batman. In other words, the popular artist had become pretty much the ideal candidate to draw a Batman/Spawn crossover. 

Spawn creator Todd McFarlane rounded out the creative team for that one-shot special, writing the script and inking Capullo's pencil art (Despite the fact that, as quickly becomes evident when reading the resultant book, McFarlane is not the greatest of writers).

I went ahead and bought it, because hey, how often does Batman meet Spawn? (Three times. The answer is three times.) 

While I didn't really care for it, it did make remind me of the first two times the characters met, in a pair of one-shots from 1994, and I thought about revisiting those comics to see how they compared...and, of course, to see how they had aged over the course of some three decades.

DC and Image made it easy to do so, collecting those comics into the hardcover Batman/Spawn: The Classic Collection...although I missed it upon its initial release, and just remembered it recently (Perhaps put in the mind of 1990s crossovers by recently writing about the two Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles/Flaming Carrot team-ups here and here, or perhaps being reminded of the each-publisher-does-its-own-version style of crossover by hearing folks on social media discuss Marvel's recent Deadpool/Batman, with a DC-produced Batman/Deadpool to follow).

Regardless, I finally got around to revisiting these 31-year-old comics via their 2022 collection. That collection looks surprisingly slim at just 112-pages—Of course, the two one-shots in collects weren't very long, so that does make sense—but it's a nicely designed package.

It looks like it features new cover art by Capullo and McFarlane, featuring the two characters confronting one another, bathed in the sickly green of Spawn's hell-spawned magical powers. And I see they used one of the Batman logos of the 1990s for the cover, the same style logo that was atop the cover of the DC crossover, entitled Batman/Spawn: War Devil (the wraparound cover of which is atop this post).

There's not much in the way of additional features, either, just a pin-up "gallery" of two images. One is a double-page splash featuring a tight close-up of the two heroes flying through the sky, drawn by Greg Capullo (and dated with a "'93"). It's certainly interesting to see how much Capullo's art has changed over the years, particularly his Batman. 

The other pin-up is a "jam" piece by the Spawn/Batman creators, Frank Miller and McFarlane, depicting the two heroes kinda sorta standing in air, a big full moon and a city skyline in the background, and bats flocking everywhere. McFarlane obviously drew Spawn and Miller Batman, and as for the rest, I'd guess those were Miller's buildings and McFarlane's bats (His bats are prominently featured on the cover of Spawn #1 and #3, for compaison's sake). 

I'm going to tackle each of the two crossovers in two separate posts. This one will be devoted to the DC-produced Batman/Spawn: War Devil #1. 

I always found the creative team for this book, which I had of course bought and read upon its initial release, to be a curious one. It has not one writer, not two writers, but three writers. These are Doug Moench, Chuck Dixon and Alan Grant, who were at the time writing the three ongoing Batman titles, Batman, Detective Comics and Shadow of the Bat. 

Why did DC, or perhaps the book's editor Denny O'Neil, decide to enlist the entire Batman line's writing staff for a relatively short and extremely straightforward 48-page story? I didn't know then and I still don't know for sure, as certainly any one of these gentlemen could have handled the assignment and done an admirable job of it. If I had to guess, I would guess that O'Neil, and probably the writers themselves, wanted them all to share in what I imagine must have been fairly decent royalties accompanying what I have to assume was a potentially very good selling book. 

I have no idea how popular Spawn was in 1994, of course. The character's book launched in 1992, and in May of 1994, the month War Devil was released, the most recent issue of Spawn was February's #18, which I see was written by Grant Morrison (!) and drawn by Capullo and Art Thibert. (Me, I had dropped the book after the first five issues, then returned for 1993's #8-11, those written by Alan Moore, Neil Gaiman, Dave Sim and Frank Miller. Other than the three Batman crossovers, I don't think I ever read another issue of Spawn*.) The character's not-very-good live-action film was still three years away, as was the HBO animated series, so I assume the character's popularity had then yet to climax.

As for the art on War Devil, it was provided not by one of the then-regular artists of the Bat-titles (or all of them, as with the writers), but by Klaus Janson, who also colored his work (with Steve Buccellato).  Janson wouldn't have been my first choice for the project at the time. I thought (and still think) Norm Breyfogle would have been perfect. In addition to being my favorite Batman artist, I always thought there was some aesthetic similarity between he and McFarlane when it came to drawing their caped heroes, particularly in terms of their dynamism (In fact, one of the things that attracted me to McFarlane's Spawn originally was that it looked somewhat Breyfogle-esque to my teenage eye). 

Those two artists could tend towards the cartoony in their expressions sometimes, they sometimes drew similar bats (compare the one to Harold's right on this cover to those on those Spawn covers I linked to earlier, for example), and there's this one trick they would both occasionally employ, which I don't have any examples to point to in front of me, nor the words to describe it; basically, when something exciting, shocking or extremely dramatic might happen, the panel itself would sort of "scream", with jagged white lines biting into the image (Next time I see examples, I'll try to post some). 

But by 1994, it had been almost a year since Breyfogle's last issue of Shadow of the Bat, and he was about a year into his series Prime for Malibu, a series I never read and, unfortunately, may never read, given who Breyfogle's collaborator was on that series and what became of him...somehow, I don't see any publisher collecting any of his work ever again. 

My other choice to draw a Batman/Spawn crossover would have been my other favorite Batman artist, then Batman cover artist Kelley Jones, whose preference for drawing gigantic capes, billowing and flapping as if they were alive, makes him a perfect artist for Spawn, a character I don't think he's ever officially drawn (Not even, I was surprised and disappointed to find, on one of the coves for the 2022 crossover, accompanied as it was by variant covers from so many Batman artists). 

Instead, they went with Janson, who even then was a veteran artist with a long list of solid, quality comics on his resume (At the time, I knew him best as the guy who inked Miller on The Dark Knight Returns, though).

Whoever DC went with, though, I think it would have been interesting, given that the Spawn character was so associated with the art of his creator. I'm not sure how many other artists might have actually drawn Spawn by spring of 1994 (Capullo had done a few issues of Spawn by then, but perhaps the character appeared in pin-ups by other artists, or had guest-appearances in other Image books...? Not sure if Hilary Barta's Stupid cover counts or not...). But I can't imagine it was very many, and thus seeing any other artist drawing Todd McFarlane's Spawn character would have probably been something of a novelty.

I think Janson does a decent job with Spawn. He honors the massive cape and streaming chains of McFarlane's version, although they do tend to look a little off at times. Though Batman's cape is similarly sometimes unrealistically big and billowing, Janson's style is realistic enough to make the exaggerated, expressive flourishes feel less than natural. 

I also think seeing Janson's take on Spawn somewhat underlines some of the weaknesses in the design. As striking as the character might look, it's pretty clear he wasn't designed to be a character that could be drawn over and over again by anyone, the many fussy details—the skulls, the randomly-placed spikes, the white stripes—making him a figure an artist has to linger one, and a reader's eye might get stuck on. 

What surprised me most about re-reading the book today, however, was the discordant clash of the various lettering styles. The book was lettered by Todd Klein, who, in addition to being one of the handful of names of letterers most comics readers will actually know is, I think it's safe to say, one of the best in the business. As a reader, he is who I would want to be lettering the comic I'm reading. And, were I producing a comic book, he's the letterer I would want handling it.

Klein honors the exact style of Spawn's signature dialogue balloons and narration boxes. The former have a very specific font with bigger than usual sized letters, the border of the balloon thick and black, and surrounded by a second, thicker, gray-colored border. The tails are also quite distinct, dramatically hooking like little sickles in Spawn's direction. 

As for the latter, these are the customary yellow, but feature the same too-big type size, jagged irregular borders and an underlying layer of green that make them look somewhat 3D. (Tom Orzechowski lettered the first issue of Spawn, and I assume is responsible for the distinct style of Spawn's visual "voice"). 

The intent, I think it's safe to say, is to suggest that Spawn's voice doesn't really sound like anyone else's and, given what else we know about the character, it's probably meant to sound a little deeper, a little louder and perhaps spookier than the voices of normal people.

But now, after decades of communicating via email, text and social media, long, long after we all agreed that writing in all-caps suggested shouting or yelling, reading panels of Spawn in conversation with Batman, wherein the Image Comics hero's dialogue is so much bigger and bolder than Batman's, it now looks like Spawn is always talking in an inappropriately loud voice, like perhaps he's hard of hearing or something. 

The most fun aspect of the book for me in 2025, though, was reading a script written by Moench, Grant and Dixon, three writers who, by this point, I have read untold hundreds of pages of comics by and have long since become familiar with their individual styles and personal tics. 

I didn't notice at all in 1994, but now it seems apparent that, if they all collaborated on the plot, they apparently took turns scripting the pages, as some read as obviously the work of Dixon, for example, while others sound just like Grant or Moench. (The first clue that they are taking turns is in the lettering, too; one page will feature the regular bolding and italicization of certain words in the sentence, as some comics writers practice, while the facing page will hardly have any bolded, italicized words at all.)

I'm not saying I could necessarily tell who was writing each page in all 48 cases—a Grant script and a Moench script are closer to one another than either is to a Dixon one, for example—but it's often quite clear when the baton is passed, and it's a lot of fun trying to parse who's writing which page. 

There are, of course, some obvious tells. For example, when the two heroes fight a literal demon from hell at the climax, there's a panel in which Batman throws three objects in the direction of the monster, and, in his thought cloud, he thinks, "Percussion caps!". Grant would often have Batman announce, either to himself or his opponent or the reader, what weapon he might be pulling from his utility belt to use. 

Earlier, when the Dark Knight is fighting a couple of security guards over the course of a mostly word-less page, the sound effects are all pure Moench: KUNCH, TUNCH, THROK, HWOK, SWUKK.

And so on.

Perhaps unsurprisingly given the writers, War Devil is a pretty good Batman story, and a fairly weak Spawn one (I do wonder how it might have read if the Batman writing staff added a fourth writer, in the form of McFarlane). Re-reading it today, I didn't really get any sense of who Spawn actually was. What's his status quo? What's his background? What exactly are his powers, and how do they work? There are few clues here. From this particular comic, all that is evident is that he is a semi-amnesiac former hitman who now has undefined magic powers he uses when encountering supernatural opponents sent to attack him. 

That, and that he is somewhat new to being a superhero. "You're new at this, aren't you?" Batman asks, after beating "the living crap" out of Spawn. And, in the last panels of the comic, Spawn watches as Batman swings away, thinks about the kind of man Batman is and, in the story's very last words, thinks "The kind of man I'll be."

It would take very little retooling to adjust this script so that, instead of Spawn, it featured pretty much any supernatural hero helping Batman on a case involving the forces of the underworld: Doctor Fate, The Spectre, John Constantine, whoever.

The comicopens in the Roanoke colony in 1587 North Carolina, with the birth of Virginia Dare, the first British child born in America, and the mysterious disappearance of the 100 people who lived there, the only clue as to what might have happened being "a single word carved or burned into the trunk of a tree, far higher than a man could reach: 'Croatoan'."

In this telling of the real-life historical mystery, though, there's also a second clue, "although no one could see it." Janson draws the settlement from above, and it's clear the trees of the surrounding forest have been cut down in a very specific pattern, forming a five-pointed star around its walls and buildings.

In modern Gotham City, beneath a sky full of blimps, Batman is looking for a Virgil Dare, who has something to do with a shipment of explosives and Gotham real estate ("Bombs and buildings," Batman thinks to himself, "A bad combination... ...if ever the twain are permitted to meet"). The search for Dare leads him to eccentric architect Simon Vesper, a man who has been missing for years, a man who, in fact, Batman had seen shot to death before his eyes, although the body immediately disappeared. Vesper resurfaces suddenly, just as Gotham Tower, a long-time project of Vesper's, is about to be completed and opened for the public.

Meanwhile, Spawn, who we meet sitting among the boxes at the back of an alley, has a newspaper blown into his lap, and its front page has a story and image about Gotham Tower, which prompts his memory of being hired to kill Vesper, back when he was still Colonel Al Simmons. He strides off towards Gotham.

Batman visits the tower, where he finds a blood-splattered elevator ("It looks like a slaughterhouse"), and the body of Virgil Dare, his throat cut, laying in the middle of a five-pointed star drawn in blood, the word "Croatoan" written in blood on the floor.

As Batman is leaving the tower through a window and swinging away, Spawn spots him, drops on him from several stories above, delivering a flying kick to the Dark Knight's abdomen on a two-page splash.

"So, he sent another of you losers?" Spawn says, while Batman responds with a pained, "UNNH!" 

When they reach the ground, Spawn talking the whole way down, his fist glows green and he points it at Batman, who has broken his fall by grabbing a flagpole and landed atop a nearby parked car. 

In maybe the book's only funny moment, Spawn is surprised to find that nothing has happened to Batman.

Apparently, Spawn saw Batman's costume and assumed he was some kind of demon from Hell (In this story, Spawn has apparently never heard of Batman, despite the fact that they share the same world, rather than, like, coming from different dimensions or realities or whatever). He had tried to magic him back to Hell, but it doesn't work, because Batman is not actually a demon from Hell. 

Batman then flying kicks Spawn, punches him in the face three times, and ultimately kicks him through a nearby store window. The fight part of the fight-and-then-team-up ritual is short, and decidedly one-sided. Though Spawn readers will know that the character has genuine super-powers that would make him more than a match for Bats, here Spawn finds no reason to prove himself, simply pointing at Batman from the ground, and saying, "You don't know how close you came." 

It's not super-clear, but I think that Spawn's powers somehow shut themselves off when he was confronting a regular human being and then turned themselves back of when the fight was over. Is that how they work? It's not how they work in this book's sister publication, Spawn/Batman #1, which we'll discuss in the next post. 

Wait, I guess this part is actually kind of funny too:

Once on the two heroes get on the same page, they head back to Gotham Tower. There, the undead Vesper has gathered Gotham City elite for his diabolical plan. He's blacked out all of the city save for Gotham Tower, had fires set all over in order to create a burning pentagram around the tower, and magically emptied the graveyard, its revived corpses shuffling towards the tower in order to feed on the rich and powerful who Vesper had gathered there.

The plan is, apparently, to open a gateway to hell, offer the souls of all his victims to the/a devil (Vesper rants about "him who is more evil than you can even begin to imagine!", "my dark master," and "the armies of Satan!"), in the hopes of garnering his own corner of Hell to rule.

Vesper tosses Batman around while Spawn is busy investigating the gateway to Hell in the basement, the apparently undead businessman soon transforming into a big, red brute that grows out of Vesper's suit, Hulk-style. When Spawn then arrives to confront him, "Vesper" says, "You're confusing the clothes with the man, Spawn...Vesper is a shell I'm wearing."

He then transforms again, growing bigger still, and taking on a green, vaguely reptilian humanoid form, with a big head and bent limbs and posture that kinda sorta suggests that of McFarlane's Violator from the Spawn comics. The creature then introduces itself, talking in a special, unique font and dialogue bubbles suggesting someone big, ancient and powerful: "BEHOLD THE ARCHFIEND IN EXILE! HE WHO WAITED BUT WAITS NO LONGER-- THE DEMON CROATOAN!"

The fight is mostly Spawn's, Batman's sole contribution being the aforementioned "Percussion caps!", which explode THOOM! THOOM! THOOM! behind Croatoan, distracting it long enough for Spawn to gesture with his hands, shooting sickly green fire that first shrinks and then seems to kill the demon, while he narrates cheesily, remembering the vision of his ex-wife Wanda that he had seen through the portal of Hell earlier: "I pour it out, the hate-- the lust for revenge. Then I remember her face-- --and it's love that finally tears him apart."

Did whoever write this particular page—my guess is Grant, but maybe Moench—want the reader to think of Joy Division at this point? I don't know, but "Love Will Tear Us Apart" was certainly stuck in my head for the rest of the night after reading it.

The day saved, Spawn's powers sending the army of undead to crawl back into their graves, the two heroes stand atop a nearby rooftop to debrief. Batman asks Spawn what happened, and McFarlane's hero responds, "Something evil...If you need a name, call it...'Terrorism of the soul.'"

He then proceeds to ask Batman a rather philosophical question: "You know the darkness, Batman...What is it that makes one man good, the next man evil?"

Batman responds with an unattributed quote that I can't find by plugging into Google, although all the results that did come up were of things written by Nietzsche:

That's beyond me. 

But somebody once said--"Good and evil are not determined by the intercourse of people with one another, but entirely by a man's relationship with himself."

Then the Dark Knight politely excuses himself—Literally saying, "Now if you'll excuse me"—and Spawn has his moment of reverie regarding Batman as a role model.

When the two would next meet, in Spawn/Batman #1 by Frank Miller and Todd McFarlane, they wouldn't be nearly as polite, nor would Spawn find much to admire in Batman, nor would there be any mediation on the nature of good and evil.

There would be a lot of tough guy narration and posturing and a lot of violence, though...

*What about you guys? Have any of you read the Morrison-written Spawn? Should I seek out those issues? As I assume most of you know, I am a fan of Morrison's comics-writing.

On 2017's Ghost Rider/Wolverine/Punisher: Hearts of Darkness (again, apparently)

(UPDATE: So funny story, and by "funny" I mean "slightly alarming." I wanted to revisit 1991's Hearts of Darkness due to some of my recent reading of Ghost Rider comics, so I looked for it in my library catalog, found the above 2017 collection, checked it out, read it and then spent a few hours writing, oh, almost 4,000 words about it. Once I was finished and was attaching tags to it, I noticed that I already had seven for "ron garney" which seemed like a lot to me, so I clicked on that to see which of the comics he drew I had already reviewed and—surprise!—I had already reviewed this very trade, back in 2017, when it first came out. What's worse, that review was much shorter, punchier and funnier than the one I had just written. So not only is my memory deteriorating to the point that I can't remember which comics I've already written about—hell, I didn't even remember having read Dark Design before, and thought I was doing so here for the first time—but my comics-writing-about skills are apparently deteriorating, as I've grown increasingly used to writing super-long posts and publishing once or twice a week, rather than writing something daily-ish. So that's...great. Just great. Anyway, since I wasted an afternoon re-reviewing this book, I might as well go ahead and post it. But do keep in mind there's a shorter 2017 review that makes pretty much the exact same points as this one, only in fewer words. Ugh...)

This trade paperback collects a pair of Howard Mackie-written team-ups featuring three of Marvel's most violent, most badass and most popular heroes of the 1990s: Ghost Rider, Wolverine and The Punisher. 

The first, sub-titled Hearts of Darkness and featuring art from John Romita JR and Kalus Janson, was released in 1991 as a $4.95 special, with a spine and sturdier cover, essentially what DC Comics used to call "prestige format." 

The second, 1994's The Dark Design, was a fairly direct sequel, gathering the same heroes, the same villains and even a supporting character, but this one was drawn by Ron Garney and Al Milgrom (And, I see, cost a buck extra, which seems like a lot of inflation for just three years). 

As I mentioned in the first of my recent posts about Marvel's Ghost Rider character, I had actually read Hearts of Darkness before, shortly after it came out, when I was around 13 or so. If I recall the circumstances correctly, my grandfather had taken my sister, brother and I to downtown Ashtabula on a Saturday afternoon, and I convinced them to let me stop into the comic shop that was then on Main Street. My grandfather offered to buy my little brother a comic too, even though he wasn't a regular reader like I was. 

I suggested he try a Marvel comic, as I figured it made no sense for both of us to read DC Comics, and if he started reading Marvels that would double my access to comics. This book, which had a neat wraparound cover, the right half of which was reused for that of the collection, is what he chose (Why my grandfather agreed to pay almost $5 for a comic book, given that he grew up buying them for a dime, I can't imagine).

At the time, I knew almost nothing about the title characters beyond what I read in that comic (and had gleaned from the covers of their books I had seen previously in the shop), and less than that about the book's villain Blackheart, and his adversary/father, Mephisto. 

I didn't remember too much about it, other than that I kinda liked the art (At that point, the only name I was familiar with on the cover was "Klaus Janson", which I knew from reading a friend's copy of The Dark Knight Returns). That and, despite the chains, claws and guns, it must not have really spoken to me, as I didn't start following the adventures of any of these characters after that. (My brother went on to read Wolverine #48-50, which I still have in a longbox somewhere....Say, that fiftieth issue with the claw marks through the outer cover didn't ever end up being worth anything, did it...? Oh, and I did pull Ghost Rider #33 off the new rack out of desperation a few years later, but otherwise it wasn't until about 2000, when Marvel started hiring favorite DC creators and launching their new reader friendly Ultimate line that I started reading any Marvel comics regularly.)

I was curious to revisit the comic now, in part because reading Wolverine: Evilution and the first couple hundred pages of the '90s Ghost Rider comic put me in something of a mood to see more of those characters from that time period, and in part because I was curious to see how much the experience of doing so at this point might differ, decades and hundreds of comics later, when I was so much more familiar with the characters, having seen them in various cartoons, movies and TV shows...in addition to the comics.

Oddly, I have to admit my regard for Hearts of Darkness hasn't changed all that much. I still think the art is pretty great (in the years since 1990, I got to know the name John Romita JR, and gained a great esteem for his work, although I think this is maybe the earliest of his comics I've read), and the story so-so, a somewhat strained plot offering little in the way of characterization, beyond a very tell-not-show summation of these darker superheroes as belonging to a newer, more modern breed of Marvel champion.

The 46-page story opens in the town of Christ's Crown, apparently so named because of a nearby hilltop ringed in thorns, like Jesus' own crown of thorns. There some people in hoods and cloaks have gathered by torchlight to sacrifice a pretty blonde woman, her modesty preserved by a blanket, in the name of a devil that sounds more like that of an X-Men character than something from the Bible: Blackheart. 

Apparently created by JRJR himself just about a year or so previous, with writer Ann Nocenti for their Daredevil run, the character is the son of Marvel's devil figure Mephisto, and has an interesting look: He's an all-black humanoid with a tail, giant red eyes, thorny skin and a huge mane of hair that looked more like porcupine quills than dreadlocks to teenage Caleb (Wes Bentley played him in the 2007 Ghost Rider movie, although he looked far more like Wes Bentley than JRJR's weird design in that movie). 

He bubbles up from the blood spilled to summon him, strips the flesh from the bones of all of his worshipers, and then seems to have a nervous breakdown of sorts, complaining to himself about his lot in life, that his father stripped him of his free will and, holding the skull of one of the victims' head aloft like Hamlet, he talks about how "There is a new breed of man...one whose fall towards the corrupt will not be so far", a breed of man that will help him kill his father. 

Cut to Dan Ketch motorcycling into what seems like a pretty typical small town, arriving at a local boarding house with a big sign reading "BOARDING HOUSE" on it, and meeting its proprietor, a woman named Flo, and her daughter, a little girl with a ponytail bouncing a ball in the driveway.

He's only the latest boarder there, and he meets the other two at dinner: A "Mr. Logan", who, thanks to his distinctive hairstyle, any reader would immediately recognize as Wolverine, and a "Mr. Frank," who looks a lot like The Punisher wearing sunglasses indoors...save for his pencil-thin mustache.

"Something about these two," Dan thinks to himself. "I feel like I've met them before."

He has, of course. According to Comics.org, Hearts of Darkness was cover dated December of 1991; Ghost Rider met Punisher in issues #5 and #6 of his own book, September and October of the previous year, and he first met Wolverine in a string of issues of Marvel Comics Presents during the winter of 1990-1991. 

Dan apparently can't see through their disguises and aliases though, and they don't recognize him without his skull on fire, I guess, although Wolvie will later tell The Punisher "something about him tickles my nose," regarding Ketch.

This happens at night, when Wolverine sticks a claw through Punisher's door with a "SNIKT" and a "Guess who?" 

"Mr. Logan?" Punisher says, opening the door. "Thought it was you. Didn't think you'd recognize me."

"The phony mustache ain't that good of a disguise," Wolvie answers. "Besides you've got the stink of death on you, Punisher-- --Just like me!" 

Here Frank peels off his mustache, which, sadly, never reappears throughout the rest of the comic.

They compare notes, and we learn what brings the three anti-heroes to the Christ's Church boarding house: All three received short, hand-written notes signed "B.H.", each promising what might seem like their heart's desire. Knowledge about the Ghost Rider, Wolverine's true origins and how he received his claws, and who really killed Castle's family.

So not really all that sophisticated a plan, for a demon, really, this anonymous mail scam. For some reason, they had to come to Christ's Crown, too? Is that where Blackheart lives? Can he not tempt long-distance?

Anyway, that night Blackheart appears to all three separately in their rooms, apparently simultaneously, tempting them further, and talking about them as a new breed of hero:

All three of you represent humanity's newest breed of hero.

A hero that isn't afraid to approach the edge when need arises.

It's an intangible thing. A gray area which resides within each of you, in a place that my father would call your soul. 

I mean, I guess...? But it seems more of an aesthetic thing, at this point. The Punisher and Wolverine seem to kill enemies without compunction, and not fret over the morality of doing so all that much (I wouldn't exactly say The Punisher works in a "gray area," for example; he just seems to murder bad guys and save good guys). 

And while I'm obviously not sure about what happens later in his career, but at this point, Dan's Ghost Rider has never killed anyone.

Anyway, Blackheart's pitch involves making them more powerful, helping them tap into the gray area of their souls and, in exchange, all he wants from them, he says, is their help in killing "the greatest evil your race has ever known, my father, Mephisto." A little later, Blackheart refers to Mephisto as "your world's devil," which seems pretty appropriate.

Still, all three don't want to work with Blackheart, and all three answers in a curt declarative: "No."

Blackheart then, realizing he will have to try a different approach, disappears from their rooms. Flo and seemingly all of the people in the town start to walk as if in a daze towards the top of the hill. As for Blackheart, he's stolen Danny's bike and abducted Lucy.

Punisher and Wolverine struggle to get through both the mass of innocent people and then, later, the thorns. Dan, meanwhile, shouldn't be able to transform into Ghost Rider without his bike, but then looks at his palms, and sees symbols on each. His hands then burst into flame, the flesh melting off of them, and then off his face, and, transformed, he jumps onto a motorcycle stolen from a sports store and speeds through the thorns.

After a bit more tempting (during which Blackheart refers to Ghost Rider as "Zarathos! If that is who you are"; it is, we will eventually learn, not who this Ghost Rider is), the heroes all follow Blackheart to hell in an attempt to free Lucy, and there they fight hordes of little green, frog-like creatures (those seen on the wraparound cover), and, eventually, take on Blackheart. 

One would think such a thing would be impossible, but Ghost Rider takes off his gloves to reveal boney, burning fists, and shouting "Feel the pain!" he lays into Blackheart, punching him so hard he pulps half his face. Another punch, and his fist breaks through Blackheart's torso, exiting the demon's back.

From there, Wolverine lops off one of Blackheart's arms, and then Punisher spends a few panels shooting him with what I think are a machine gun ("BUDDA BUDDA BUDDA") and a grenade launcher, maybe? ("POOM POOM POOM POOM"). I don't know; I've never read an issue of The Punisher Armory, so I'm not sure what guns he carries when. 

Soon, Blackheart is just a severed head sitting in a pool of black goo, but as much punishment as his physical body seems to have taken, he can't be killed like this, and his body starts to reform. Before he can do so though, the heroes are all dismissed by Blackheart's dad, Mephisto.

This Mephisto looks nothing like the red-skinned devil with the cape and fright wig that John Buscema and Stan Lee created for Silver Surfer in the late-sixties. Rather, he looks more like a behemoth red humanoid frog of sorts, with a prominent beak, a long, long tongue and prominent breasts, each with a long, ribbon-like nipple. His weird head is crowned with an explosion of thick red hairs or tentacles, and he's surrounded by gingerbread-shaped forms that I assume are meant to be human souls in long-shot.

He scoops up the puddle of Blackheart and swallows him, making a vague threat to Ghost Rider: 

Go now, Ghost Rider-- 

--But we will meet again. 

Soon. And there will be no gray areas involved.

The truth will be revealed.

And that's pretty much the entirety of the adventure, our heroes reappearing atop the hill with Lucy, who they reunite with her mother. And while the skeptical Punisher asks Wolverine if all of that was real, and what he thinks of the business about "us being close to the edge," Ghost Rider gets the last word in, saying that, "As long as the innocent are protected-- --our cause is just."

The price tag would have been fairly steep for a book that's only twice the length of a regular comic book—that month's issue of Ghost Rider was only $1.75, after all—but I have to imagine Marvel fans appreciated the opportunity to see three of their favorite heroes in a single story like that, and Mackie certainly writes them all well (even if Ghost Rider, whose book Mackie was then writing, seems to get the most attention), and he does a fine job in the tough guy, alpha male personas (Originally, I took this as 100% straight; re-reading it today, I wonder to what degree Mackie might have been parodying a certain kind of action hero with Mr. Logan and Mr. Frank's macho portrayals).

I really can't say enough good things about JRJR and Janson's renderings of the characters (colored by John Wellington). They are big, thick and bulky as one comes to expect from JRJR, but they all also look like "themselves" in ways that other artists aren't always able to pull off (And I appreciated JRJR making Wolverine so short, particularly when standing next to the big Frank Castle).

Did the story deserve a sequel? Well, probably not, but it got one anyway, in the form of Ghost Rider/Wolverine/Punisher: Dark Design.

Things have changed a lot in Christ's Crown in three years, and things have changed a lot for at least one of the heroes. At this point, Wolverine has exchanged his brown and yellow costume with the big red belt for his blue and gold one, complete with the shoulder pads I don't think make any sense.

Additionally, he seems to have lost the metal on his claws, as here he has those jagged bone claws he sported for a while.

Oh, and for some reason, his eyes are red much of the time, whether he's wearing his cowl or not. Other times, they are white. Should we blame colorist Paul Mounts for this? Maybe, but we'll come back around to the coloring in a little bit.

The plot begins in media res, with Ghost Rider on foot, carrying a now much bigger and older Lucy, while a woman wearing a tank top crop top with no bra and carrying a big shotgun urges him on. Garney's Ghost Rider has the same basic design as the one I had gotten used to, save for in his drawings of him, G.R.'s skull seems to float in a pillar of flame rather than be connected directly to his torso, and, for some reason (the nineties, I guess?), there is often strings of spittle between his skeletal jaws.

They are on the run from Blackheart's followers, who are apparently members of the town who have been corrupted by his touch. They now all have prominent black veins visible in their skin, they dress in revealing, tight-fitting black clothes that look like they might have been worn to a goth dance club or a fetish ball, and they wield weird-looking sci-fin guns that seem to shoot lasers.

They are after Lucy, who seems to have maybe developed some kind of (mutant?) power around the time she "began...coming of age". 

The town has been physically transformed into some sort of weird hellscape with scary-looking buildings more bizarre than those even the most creative artists might draw in Gotham City. And the population divided between Blackheart's corrupted, who want to capture Lucy for him, and the regular folk, who are trying to defend Lucy from them.

Our three heroes have returned to the city, compelled by psychic distress signals from Lucy who, as Garney draws her, has apparently hit puberty in the intervening years, although her breasts aren't as prominent as those of all the other women he draws in this issue, corrupt and uncorrupt. 

Meanwhile, Blackheart is hanging out in a cathedral of some sort, looking much as he did before, only now wearing a trench coat. He talks to himself, ranting about his descent into madness, while his father, in the form of a dove, seems to torment him.

Ghost Rider, the first hero we see, has his hand touched by one of the corrupt, which spread their infection to him. In order to try and stave it off, he turns back into Dan Ketch.

Wolverine, who Garney draws not with that weird wolfman hairstyle and prominent muttonchops he always sports, but with a long, lion-like mane; after his first skirmish with the corrupt, when The Punisher saves him by gunning down a wave of a half-dozen attackers from a rooftop, Wolvie suits up, and I can't imagine how all that hair fits so snugly beneath his cowl. 

Shortly after the heroes all meet up at a camp, the corrupted attack and make off with Lucy who, back at Blackheart's cathedral, is dressed in a white wedding dress (complete with veil), where she is apparently to become his child bride, and the key to his victory over his father.

Our heroes attack, are briefly strung up on strands of ink black something-or-other and subjected to mental images to torment them. A naked Wolverine, his hair seemingly having gotten even longer, has no patience for this when he seems to find himself in the snow Canadian wilderness: 

GRRR! The north country...Canada! 

Pretty original takin' me back to my roots.

It's been tried too many times.

Don't even know what's real myself anymore.

Don't really care! Get out of my mind, Blackheart!

He's able to get through to Ghost Rider and Punisher, and once again the three triple-team the demon, Ghost Rider beating him with flaming fists, Wolverine slicing him with his claws, Punisher pumping rounds into him.

What's different this time? Well, this time Lucy runs from the heroes back to the fallen Blackheart, seemingly offering him forgiveness, at least according to Mackie's narration. But when Mephisto again arrives to collect his son, Blackheart pulls a knife, the tip of which is dripping with blood.

"I do not need the child," he says. "Only this! The blood of a child. INNOCENT BLOOD!"

So I guess Lucy either slipped him a knife with her blood on it, or, when she went back to forgive him, allowed him a bit of her blood...? That, or he cut her just deeply enough to get a few drops of her blood on his blade a few pages earlier, when the heroes first stormed his base and he briefly held a knife to Lucy's throat.

At any rate, that's apparently all one needs to kill Marvel's devil (temporarily, I assume), as Blackheart stabs his dad to death, and the last panels shows Blackheart standing triumphant, having doffed his trench coat and raised his arms in victory: "Mephisto, King of Hell, is DEAD... Long live the new king!"

I imagine that was a significant event in the Marvel Universe and was probably reflected in a few comics for a while, but I also imagine it was relatively short-lived. Certainly, I've seen Mephisto alive and well since (notably in Jason Aaron's Avengers run, which I read the first two-thirds of or so. And now that I think of it, I can't remember the last time I saw Blackheart in a comic...).

For Mackie's part, I think the script for Dark Design suffers from the classic affliction of so many sequels, that of repeating something because it was popular and there was demand for more of the same, and not because there was anything new to say. The story thus suffers from diminishing returns.

Also, because it is essentially just a few action scenes strung together, only interrupted by Blackheart ranting at his father, it doesn't have anything as fun as seeing the characters in their secret identities...or The Punisher's clumsy attempts at a disguise that we saw in Hearts of Darkness. 

And then, of course, there's no real need for Mackie to meditate on the dark nature of these heroes, because, well, he already did that three years previous, and, in that time, they all just kept on doing what they've been doing with, I imagine, little change (In this story, for example, Ghost Rider refuses to kill human beings, even those corrupted by Blackheart, while Wolverine and The Punisher mow them down without a second thought). 

I did not care for the art at all, which came as a bit of a surprise to me, given that I genuinely like Garney's art on JLA about a decade or so later (He drew the "Pain of The Gods" and "Syndicate Rules" arcs toward the end of the series). I suppose we can blame much of that on the times, as even a quick flip-through will reveal this to be a very nineties looking book.

Aside from his specific design choices, the colors, the letters and their various fonts and special effects, the layouts, the inset panels...the story reminded me a lot of the look of the earlier issues of Spawn I had read, and seemed a significant departure from the first year or so of Mackie and company's Ghost Rider, or Hearts of Darkness. 

Indeed, because it's just a page-turn away from Hearts of Darkness, I think Dark Design suffers in comparison, although I wonder how much of this is really a matter of, say, the JRJR/Janson team being better at telling a comics story than the Garney/Milgrom one, and how much of it is due to the first being published in 1991, and the second in 1994. 

Certainly, the advances in comics coloring technology and lettering style (and/or technology?) seems to have informed the latter book, which seems to take full advantage of all the new choices a colorist had to work with in the mid-nineties, whether it necessarily ended up benefiting the book in the long run or not. 

Reading both stories back to back today, Dark Design looks much darker, muddier and harder to read than Hearts of Darkness. (Also, one can't tell from this particular collection, but Dark Design was apparently published on glossy paper, which might have accounted for its higher cost, whereas I don't think Hearts of Darkness was. I'm now a little curious what similarly glossy paged books from the time might now look like in trade collections, but I'm not even sure where I could look to see...). 

Anyway, I disliked Dark Design as much as I liked Hearts of Darkness, and I would hesitate to recommend this particular collection to any reader...unless, of course, said reader was simply curious about Marvel Comics in the first half of the nineties, in which case I guess this book is a decent encapsulation, both good and bad.

Oh, and as I mentioned on Bluesky, after reading this particular trade paperback, I now find myself, for the first time in my life, as a person with opinions about Wolverine. Those being that the brown and yellow costume > than the blue and gold one, and that metal claws > bone claws. 

DC Versus Marvel Omnibus Pt. 7: Punisher/Batman: Deadly Knights #1

A mere two months after Batman/Punisher: Lake of Fire, a second DC/Marvel crossover featuring the two characters hit the stands, this one featuring the actual Batman, Bruce Wayne, rather than his temporary fill-in, Jean-Paul Valley. 

I thought it was the better of the two comics, and not simply because of the fact that it was what a reader might expect from a crossover of the two characters. The creative team also seemed better suited to the task, with the art especially being of a magnitude greater than that of the previous comic, at least according to my own personal tastes.

That creative team was writer Chuck Dixon, pencil artist John Romita Jr. and inker Klaus Janson.

By 1994, Dixon was both a prolific Punisher writer and a prolific Batman writer, and thus an ideal choice for a book in which the pair cross paths with one another. While I've never read his Punisher output, I have read a lot of Dixon's Batman comics (and those featuring other members of the Bat-Family, particularly from his long run on the first Robin ongoing). 

While not my favorite Batman writer (that would have been, at the time, probably Alan Grant), and never one for particularly inspired, imaginative, wild stories, Dixon was still an incredibly solid comics writer, a stalwart whose name on a book guaranteed a certain level of competency and quality. 

I always thought he excelled at coming up with plots for his heroes to challenge and foil, often with interesting crimes that seemed perfect for action movies (And yes, as a fan of his work, it saddens me that his personal politics seem to have alienated him from much of the mainstream industry, and lead to him working on truly bizarre comics like 2016's Clinton Cash: The Graphic Novel, a comics adaptation of Peter Schweizer's election cycle hit book). 

JRJR was an extremely familiar presence at Marvel Comics and had drawn Punisher War Journal, but this comic was his very first time drawing a DC Comics character officially. That was, in and of itself, rather exciting at the time.

And as for Klaus Janson, not only was he a frequent JRJR collaborator, but his work with Frank Miller on 1986's Batman: The Dark Knight Returns meant his was a name every Batman fan would know. 

So the art, which was colored by Christie Scheele, was obviously great, and the intense, dynamic cover of the two characters wrestling the pouring rain you see above is but a small taste.

Romita's drawing of the lead characters' figures are big, blocky and imposing...muscular, but with a sense of animated grace about them. His many mobster characters that populate the panels of the book are similarly big and bulky, with jagged edges to their suits and faces.

Under Janson's heavy inks, there's a tactile sense of grit to the art, and lots of blackness, from busy crosshatching to the rings around the stalactites in the Batcave to the wrinkles and shadows on the suits to the driving black rain of the climactic encounter.

Dixon's script gives a few great opportunities to really show off the Romita and Janson art, too, and they do not waste it.

Both characters are introduced in interesting splash spreads that require the reader to turn the open book from the standard horizontal orientation to a vertical one (no easy feat with a 1,000-page hardcover omnibus!) and read them that way, not unlike a pin-up in an old girly magazine.

The Punisher is introduced first, in a low angle standing atop some crates, a series of muzzle flashes and arcs of spent bullet casings emanating from the guns he has in both hands (They look like uzis to me, although he calls them "MACs" in narration later in the story; are those different things? I am not a gun person). 

JRJR's Frank Castle is bigger and thicker than Barry Kitson's was, and his face is covered in stubble and shadow. A strip of two inset panels along the bottom of the image of Castle keep it from being a true two-page splash; these panels feature regular Batman supporting characters Harvey Dent, Renee Montoya and Commissioner Gordon. 

Batman appears a few pages later, in similar fashion, although he's on the "bottom" of the spread, with a strip of panels above him. He's shown leaping into action, seemingly falling from the sky, with his hands outstretched like claws (and his fingers looking particularly, peculiarly flat, as JRJR tends to draw hands), his face and cape all black.

Later in the book, at the climax, when the pair come to blows for the second time, there's another two-page spread requiring one to turn the book to see it right-side up, featuring The Punisher punching Batman in the face.

I'm not sure about the image, as it affords the moment of biggest impact in the entire story to that particular blow in a fight, and it's not exactly the most dramatic moment of their conflict. It also devotes all that comic page real estate to a moment in which Castle "wins" the fight with Batman, although in both of the instances in which they fight one another in this book, Dixon's script makes clear that Batman would ultimately be victorious in a hand-to-hand fight with Castle (Actually, Lake of Fire also presumed the same about a fight between Punisher and that Batman, although the Punisher won the conflict by resorting to using a gun and a bit of trickery). 

It's perhaps worth pausing to consider JRJR's Batman, as this was his first time drawing the character (He would of course get another crack at the character during his 2016-2020ish stint at DC Comics, where he drew the first arc of writer Scott Snyder's All-Star Batman).

This is, of course, Batman in his "classic" costume, blue and gray with a form-fitting utility belt and a yellow circle around his bat-emblem (Batman would debut his new, all-black, brief-less costume the following year; that's what he would be wearing in his next Marvel crossover, a 1995 team-up with Spider-Man). I say "blue" of course, but it may look black to you, given how many lines Romita and Janson use, and how heavy the inks are; it does appear to be the same color as The Punisher's costume in this crossover, so I guess one could say they are both blue-black or, perhaps, comic book black.

JRJR's Batman is as big and imposing as his Punisher, but, in the few instances where we see him with his cape unfurled and flying behind him, he's also a bit more lithe and athletic, his waist looking almost comically slim below his huge barrel chest.

On the ears front, JRJR is on the longer side of the spectrum, which was the fashion at the time. Unusually for many Batman artists, however, his bat-ears are very thick at the base, forming two big black triangles atop his head.

As for Dixon's plot, it's pretty straightforward, and somewhat perfunctory, basically maneuvering the pair into a rainy Gotham City alleyway so they can hit one another and focus on their differences in crime-fighting philosophy in as perfect a test case as possible: Unrepentant mass murderer The Joker, put a bullet in his head or beat him up and take him to Arkham?

There's no big supervillain plot like Jigsaw's plan to turn the Gotham City reservoir into a lake of fire as in Lake of Fire, nor is there any focus on the interior lives of the characters, as with Valley's struggling with his delusions, and the conflict between his religious programming and his inherited crime-fighting mission. 

There's also, perhaps surprisingly, little real connective tissue between Deadly Knights and Lake of Fire. The characters make passing references to it (The Punisher noting that Batman's fighting style seems as different as his costume, for example, or Batman noting that The Punisher was in Gotham while he was "absent"). It obviously doesn't matter now that the two comics are collected back-to-back in the omnibus, but one could easily have read Deadly Knights in 1994 without ever having read Lake of Fire. 

We open with The Punisher in a massive firefight with generic gangsters in a Gotham City paint factory, his narration telling us he's returned to the city looking for Jigsaw, who never returned to New York as he had expected. Just as Castle is about to execute the last surviving gunman, Batman lands on the back of his head and they fight for a few pages.

"Something different here," Castle narrates. "Last time I was in Gotham this guy was a reckless brawler. Now he seems more skilled. Something refined about him."

Batman, meanwhile, is somewhat dismissive of The Punisher's abilities: "Punisher's tough. Strong. At heart he's just a brawler. All rage and brute strength." 

Though The Punisher gets in a few hits, including breaking a crate over Batman's head, Batman is in the process of throwing him across the room when the burning building collapses, and The Punisher escapes.

Meanwhile, Jigsaw, now drawn with his face bandaged up like a mummy, the work of "the best plastic surgeon that extortion could buy" in the words of his new partner The Joker, is trying to consolidate power around himself, and become the new leader of Gotham's criminal underworld. 

It is perhaps here worth noting that JRJR's Jigsaw looks entirely different from Kitson's. He's a great deal smaller, his hair far longer and shaggier (and a different color, although I suppose that's between the colorists), and he's lost the weird metal neck brace he had seemed to be wearing. 

As for The Joker, I really like JRJR's version, which manages to convey a full range of emotions through the eyes and brows alone, despite the smile being fixed. 

Dixon writes The Joker more as a typical gangland figure than he's usually portrayed, even if a crazy one with something of a schtick. Here he's not as wild or theatrical as in most of his other appearances, even those that Dixon himself had written. And there's no real plan that he's executing here, either; he's simply working to help Jigsaw consolidate power because...well, because Dixon wanted both title characters' archenemies in the relatively short, 45-ish page story, one assumes. 

While the two vigilantes pursue parallel investigations—and their respective computer-savvy sidekicks Micro and Robin have a computer fight, leading to this immortal panel—they both end up in a nightclub with The Joker, Jigsaw, a local crime boss and a whole bunch of generic guys with suits and guns, leading to a big, long 12-page fight scene ("The caped choirboy is holding his own, but he's throwing fists in a firefight," The Punisher observes).

At the end, the crime-fighters end up facing one another's villains, which means The Punisher putting a gun in The Joker's face and saying, "I've got all the therapy you need right here, comedian."

Batman, of course, would appear just before Castle could pull the trigger, leading first to a brief argument, and then that splash of The Punisher decking Batman.

A short fight ensues, in which Dixon has Batman assure us he could totally kick Castle's ass, if so inclined: "I let you have that one because you probably think I deserved it," he says, and when Castle throws another punch, Batman catches his fist and tosses him into a pile of boxes. "I said one...Don't test me, Castle."

Batman threatens him that if The Punisher ever comes to Gotham City again he'll see him locked up with "the other murderers," but seems awfully complacent about The Punisher's last few nights of killing a dozen or two guys in his city, and, rather uncharacteristically, seems content to just let The Punisher go (To be fair to Dixon, he had run out of his allotted pages).  

The Punisher, meanwhile, gets the last word in, but otherwise slinks away. And, to date anyway, has obeyed Batman's command and never returned to Gotham. 

This would be the pair's final meeting...unless you count an off-panel scene in JLA/Avengers, wherein the Justice League, visiting the Marvel Universe, are apparently delayed in their mission by some 20 minutes when Batman stops to beat up The Punisher. But, again, that was off panel.

If Deadly Knights was what we might expect a DC/Marvel crossover of the mid-1990s to be—two popular, top-tier headliners with interestingly opposing philosophies running headlong into one another by a creative team perfectly suited to the occasion—the next collaboration between the two publishers was anything but. 

Which isn't to say it wasn't interesting, of course, just not predictable.

Next: 1995's Darkseid Vs. Galactus: The Hunger #1

On New Challengers #1

*This is the seventh of "The New Age of Heroes" books out of the gate and, like The Immortal Men, it's one that should probably have been the first or second one released, helping to get the troubled line off on the right foot. It, of course, has the benefit of being written by Scott Snyder, who conceived of and wrote the Dark Nights: Metal event series that the "New Age" books are supposedly spinning out of (although the degree to which this is the case varies from book to book). And while the the "New Age" books don't exactly follow up on the events of Metal--you'll want No Justice and the upcoming Justice League line for that--they are supposedly books inspired by Metal. Challengers Mountain, for example, played a role in the series, so Metal likely made some readers think, "Oh yeah, The Challengers! I wonder what's up with them these days...?" Well, Snyder prompted the question, so now he's providing the answer.

Additionally, the artist getting top-billing here is Andy Kubert. I'm not sure if any Big Two artist is a big enough deal at this particular moment in time that their presence on a book alone is enough to make it a hit--not even Jim Lee, who is probably the closest to still being so--but a new Andy Kubert book seems like a bigger, more exciting deal than, say, a new Tony Daniel or a new Philip Tan book.

*While the line's exact remit has been pretty fuzzy ever since it was announced, regarding not only if and how the books were related to Metal,  but also to what degree the artist creators were going to be involved and for how long, and even the line's very name. This particular release underscores another muddy aspect: Just how "new" the characters and concepts are supposed to be. Some books have featured brand-new characters, like The Silencer and Sideways. Some feature brand-new characters making use of old names, like Damage and The Curse of Brimestone. One, The Terrifics, has taken a quartet of pre-existing characters and put them together into a new team. Others, like The Immortal Men and the yet-to-be-released The Unexpected, seem to be mixing pre-existing characters, with new characters using old names and brand-new characters with new names.

New Challengers is...none of the above, exactly, although close to the new characters with old name/concept strategy. This is, after all, an update of DC's old Challengers of The Unknown concept. The Challs are the creation of Jack Kirby (as something like two-thirds of all Big Two IP seems to be some days), from way back in the pre-Silver Age Superhero Revival days. A group of four two-fisted adventuring types with manly-man nicknames, the original team miraculously survived a plane crash, and came to the logical conclusion that they are now living on borrowed time, and therefore they should form a team that takes on extremely dangerous missions investigating occult phenomenon, monsters, mad scientists and the like. Given that they were a group of four adventurers in matching uniforms who addressed fantastic challenges, they are a pretty obvious forerunner of Kirby's more famous co-creation, The Fantastic Four (a fact acknowledged in 1997's Amalgam one-shot, Challengers of The Fantastic by Karl Kesel, Tom Grummett and Al Vey, which amalgamated the two teams into one).

After the initial, successful run in Showcase and then their own book, DC has attempted to bring them back repeatedly, but they never really hit. In 1991, Jeph Loeb and Tim Sale gave it a shot (you can probably find that in its collected form, The Challengers of The Unknown Must Die!). In 1997, there was a short-lived revival attempt by Steven Grant, Len Kaminsky, John Paul Leon, Shawn Martinbrough, Jill Thompson and--Hey, that sounds pretty good! Maybe that should be collected in trade--that lasted just 18 issues. And in 2004, Howard Chaykin did an equally forgotten miniseries. The last time we saw the Challengers was in a 2012 issue of the DC Universe Presents title, wherein Dan DiDio and Jerry Ordway introduced The New 52 iteration of the team in a three-issue arc that involved reality television.

In other words, the Challengers are probably due for another attempt at their own title, and making that title something that can survive, let alone succeed, is going to be, well, a challenge.

*So, the cover. As I've mentioned with, like, every one of these "New Age" books so far, the artists really struggle with the vertical gatefold space. Kubert's strategy for the cover was to make use of the hourglass motif, which has served as the icon for past incarnations of the team--that whole borrowed time motif--but in order to fit an hourglass into that space, he has to elongate it so that it is much, much, much taller than it is wide, to the point it doesn't really look all that much like an hourglass anymore.

The other weird thing about the cover? See the rather ugly guy who appears as a giant head behind the team? I'm not entirely sure what his deal is--I've barely read any past Challengers comics, so I'm not sure if he's a pre-existing character or not--but the cover gives us a pretty good look at his face. The opening scene of the comic, however, features that very character, his face almost completely wrapped in bandages, Unknown Soldier-style, so that pretty much the only thing we can see of him are his two mismatched eyes. Obviously the reveal of what he looks like under those bandages is going to be something of a moment in the story eventually, but Kubert spoils his own moment by putting the guy right there on the cover, un-bandaged. I suppose it would be a little like having a helmetless Darth Vader on the Return of The Jedi movie poster. (Only not really.)

*Snyder and/or Kubert have come up with a pretty decent set-up for the new series. Instead of trying to come up with a brand-new, completely original take that will definitely work where all the other, post-Silver Age revival attempts failed, theirs seeks to incorporate all previous takes. So instead of all surviving from the same plane crash, the New Challengers all survive different deaths, and are brought at the instant of their deaths to Challengers Mountain via teleporter by a mysterious Professor character. (Actually, he says they did all die, and are being given additional time to serve as the latest Challengers of The Unknown, tweaking the borrowed time aspect so that he's essentially the one loaning them their borrowed time, and they will have to repay him through their service).

At one point, he shows them a room full of holographic memorials to Challengers past, and while I couldn't pick out any faces save for the ones he points out as the longest serving ones (that is, the originals), the implication is that there has been a long, long line of various teams of Challengers before, some known and some unknown. Thus, all of the other teams that have been introduced in various revival and reboot attempts could be incorporated into the narrative of this new series.

It is a rather Grant Morrison-y, "everything counts" kind of take.

*The other tweaks to the borrowed time elements are that these Challengers can only remain alive while inside Challengers Mountain; once outside on a mission the little hourglass tattoos they have start counting down the allotted time they have been given to complete their assignment and, when it runs out, they die pretty horrible-looking deaths. So for each and every mission, they seemingly need to "borrow" enough time to fulfill their mission. It's somewhat Suicide Squad-y, in that they are forced into taking on these dangerous missions on pain of death, but it is yet to be revealed if The Professor is all that Amanda Waller-y or not.

*Our four new Challengers are Trina Alvarez, Moses Barber, Bethany Hopkins and "Krunch," whose name whose name is apparently spelled the way so he can't be sued by any candy bar manufacturers. Of them, we only spend much time with Trina, and by "much time" I mean five pages. She is--er, was--a Gotham City herbalist struggling to carry on her grandmother's legacy by helping those in her neighborhood. Her old life comes to an end during a Justice League vs. aliens fight (So Kubert draws the pre-Metal Justice League for one whole panel here). One assumes we'll see the deaths of the other three Challs in the coming issues.

*They get their matching costumes, and go on their first mission, which is just beginning when the issue ends with a cliffhanger.

*Beyond what I said up top about this being a better comic to start the line with, it's also one of the better ones in terms of quality and in terms of being a first issue. Like, there are still a lot of questions left unanswered by the end of the first issue, but there's a sufficient amount of information to get an idea of where the comic might be going and what future issues might be like, so a reader can probably make an informed-ish decision about whether or not they want to read #2.

*I would, but I think I'll just trade-wait this. My prior experience with Snyder's work has lead me to believe it reads better in trade than single issues...although Metal was a pretty great read on a serial basis...



Previously...

On The Immortal Men #1

On The Curse of Brimstone #1

On The Terrifics #1

On Sideways #1

On The Silencer #1

On Damage #1

Review: Ghost Rider/Wolverine/Punisher: Hearts of Darkness

Hey, I remember this one! It was an extra-long prestige format comic published in 1991. My grandfather and my siblings were shopping downtown, back when my hometown's downtown still had stores in it, including a comics shop, and my little brother, then considering maybe getting into comics, asked my grandfather to buy it for him. My grandfather, for whom comic books used to cost a dime, was taken aback by the $4.95 price tag (which was actually steep even for 1991), but ultimately relented.

I wonder what he would make of this new trade paperback edition, which costs $15.99; hell, having read the 1991 one-shot, I couldn't imagine how Marvel could get away with that price tag. Turns out they did so by including a sequel I didn't know existed until I started reading this new edition, the 1994 Dark Design (plus a five-page Marvel Age interview with Hearts pencil artist John Romita Jr).

The premise of Hearts of Darkness was that the three characters whose names came before the sub-title--Ghost Rider, Wolverine and Punisher--represented a new* breed of hero with levels of darkness in their hearts that pushed them so close to evil that the demon prince Blackheart thought he could tempt the three of them to assist him in assassinating his father, Mephisto who was, of course, one of Marvel's various Satan analogues.

It was probably just a happy coincidence that, in the early 1990s, these were also three of Marvel's most popular characters. Writer Howard Mackie certainly knew what he was doing in terms of proposing a comic book.

It's an extremely simple, straightforward story. Blackheart invites Danny Ketch, Frank Castle and Logan to the town of Christ's Crown--apparently named because of a hill surrounded with thick thickets of thorn bushes nearby--via letters promising them information they might want, signing the missives B.H.

All three show up on the same day at the same boarding house, run by a woman whose little girl Lucy is extremely trusting and takes to each of the dark, scowling men immediately. Her mother portentously notes her daughter strange trusting nature, and how it's almost like there isn't a bad bone in her body.

That night, Blackheart reveals himself to the three anti-heroes simultaneously, and, when they all tell him to get bent--they may occasionally kill their foes, or, in Frank's case, constantly kill their foes, but that doesn't mean they are going to sign up to work with the a devil (There's a lot of hair-splitting and semi-silly speechifying about how they all walk the razor's edge without falling over the cliff, and other such metaphor mixing).

To try to convince them, Blackheart snatches up Lucy, the only pure soul in Christ's Crown, and takes over the minds of the rest of the city, all of whom have enough sin in them that they can control them. He also steals Danny's bike.

Together, the three popular badasses are able to claw, shoot and hot-chain their way through hordes of little frog-like demons, journey to hell, turn Blackheart into gory chewing gum and save Lucy.

The chief pleasure of the book, then as now, was John Romita Jr.'s artwork, inked by a perfectly compatible Klaus Janson. I really loved his Blackheart design. He looks a bit like a giant, humanoid porcupine, with a head, shoulders and back covered in a mane of bristling spines. He has a tail, bit red eyes and no mouth; additionally, Romita and Janson give him what look like thorns all over his skin. It's a sharp, uncomfortable, jittery, anxious design. It's a hell of a devil, really (I wish that's what the version in the first Ghost Rider movie looked like; it might have gone a ways towards improving that film).

The version of Mephisto who appears here was pretty unfamiliar to me, looking like a gigantic, bloated humanoid with large breasts (and long, string-like nipples), and a vaguely avian head that looks like a primitive ceremonial mask of a bird. There's something of a primitive fertility goddess statue about him. He never gets up off his haunches, but is shown big enough to grab the mooshed-up Blackheart in his hand and throw him into his mouth.

JRJR draws the three title characters exceptionally well, of course. I particularly liked seeing how small and stocky his Wolverine looked; perhaps it was the influence of the films, or simply the slackening of Big Two style guides over the decades, but Wolverine tends to be as tall whoever is drawing him these days wants him to be, so it was kinda refreshing to see a little Wolverine standing next to a giant Frank Castle.

Dark Design is...not very good. Mackie writes it, but Ron Garney pencils and Al Milgrom inks. I like both artists, and Garney in particular has evolved in style into something I quite like now, but back in 1994 he was very much working in a 1990s Jime Lee-like style. Unlike Hearts, this sequel doesn't age well at all, and seems to be, visually at least, inextricably linked to the time in which it was published.

Blackheart has returned to Christ's Crown, and is now sort of insane. He has somehow transformed and twisted the town into a goth sci-fi big city, and enslaved portions of the population, who are called The Corrupt. They wear dumb spandex costumes, have visible black veins, and wield weird laser guns.

Lucy, now a tween or teen, is protected by a small and dwindling band of rebels. I'm not sure why Blackheart didn't just take over their minds too, but it may have something to do with her burgeoning psychic powers, with which she summons Ghost Rider, Wolvie and Punisher back to town. After killing their way through The Corrupt, they take on Blackheart again, this time interrupting his wedding to Lucy (Ew).

He gets what he needs from her, though: Her innocent blood on the tip of his knife, with which he seemingly kills his father.

As I said, Garney's style here is pretty much just default early '90s superhero art. His Blackheart lacks all the pointy parts of JRJR's, looks smaller and wears a coat; he reminded me of an extremely off-model Nightcrawler throughout. He draws the weird bird version of Mephisto, but with a few alterations, like some sort of make-up or mask on his face, and huger, blacker nipples.

Wolverine has traded his brown and yellow costume in for his blue and gold one at this point, but Ghost Rider and Punisher have barely changed (the latter traded in his white boots for black ones, but that's the most drastic wardrobe change he made during the years between these comics). The coloring, by Paul Mounts, is much more garish and nauseous in the second story, but that likely has a lot to do with the changing technology of comic book coloring of the day. There were many more new options suddenly available, and colorists went for them.

I'm not sure what the originals cost these days, should you find them in back-issue bins, but I'd be shocked if they had increased in value so much that you couldn't find them there for cheaper than the cost of this collection. On the other hand, new collections are easier to buy. If you really want to. Like I said, this is a nice showcase of JRJR's art from a previous stage in his career, and serves as a nice time capsule of a certain time in Marvel comics history, but it's not exactly literature.



*Created between 1972 and 1974, these characters weren't exactly brand-new in 1991, although they were definitely among the second generation of Marvel characters. This Ghost Rider was introduced just around the time this comic was originally published though.