Review: 1996's Lobo/Demon: Helloween #1

The most striking image in this one-shot special is also one that marks it as a product of the 1990s. That would be the caricatured visage of one William Jefferson Clinton drawn atop the familiar yellow-skinned, red tunic-and-blue-caped body of Jack Kirby's Etrigan, The Demon.

This strange composite figure appears in two panels. The first is a splash page, in which it pounces upon Lobo from behind (above). 

In the second, the figure leaps back from the now prone bounty hunter, bathing him in flames spat from its mouth with a "FWOOOSH!"

It's only then that Etrigan pushes back his President Clinton mask and declares "Trick or Treat, Lobo!" For, as the subtitle of this 1996 one-shot denotes, it's set around Halloween (and was originally published in October of that year). Lobo was on his way to celebrate "Hallowe'en on a planet so rude it doesn't have a name" but lacking the funds to buy booze to bring with him, he takes a last-minute job on Earth...or thereabouts. 

He has come to Earth's moon to meet his new employer. And as for The Demon? Well, he's on the moon to meet his new employee. You can probably guess where this is going. 

The two wildly different characters might seem an odd match from a 30-year remove, but then, writer Alan Grant was associated with them both. He had written Etrigan for about 35 issues of the character's longest ever ongoing series, between 1990 and 1993 and, as of that October, he was on his 34th issue of the Lobo ongoing (after having written or co-written several Lobo miniseries and one-shots before that had ever even launched). Lobo had guest-starred in two different Demon arcs, during the course of which the characters developed a sort of grudging respect for one another. While Grant's The Demon and Lobo were often tonally quite different, they did share a similar sense of dark humor.

How tight are the two at this point? Well, Lobo doesn't even seem upset that Etrigan attacked him from behind and then set him ablaze, responding only to the attack with, "Etrigan--Th' Demon! I might've fraggin' knowed it!"

The specifics of the job that Etrigan has hired Lobo to perform are kind of complicated, and, indeed, a half-dozen pages of the 24-page book are devoted to flashbacks of the backstory...it's a long enough sequence that Grant has Lobo interrupting Etrigan's telling of that backstory more than once, the sequence only ending when Lobo finally puts his hand over Etrigan's mouth to stop him from going on and offers to simply guess the rest.

Briefly, there is an ancient giant monster that emerges from imprisonment every 10,000 years or so, "on th' night o' some ancient pagan festival" and then seeks to destroy the world. Lobo assumes Etrigan has hired him to help stop the monster, but he assumes wrong. Etrigan has hired Lobo to help the monster destroy the world, by fighting off the ancient guardian warrior that awakens at the same time as the monster, ritualistically battling it to keep it from destroying the world. 

While these two characters generally play the role of hero (or at least anti-hero) in their appearances, I suppose it's worth remembering that Etrigan is a demon from Hell, and Lobo is a bounty hunter and mercenary who basically does whatever he's paid to do, there being only a few lines he won't cross (Like going back on his word, or allowing harm to come to space dolphins).

So yeah, the guys with their names in the title of this comic book are here bent on destroying the world, not saving it. 

Of course, circumstances are such that they end up with no choice other than to slay the monster themselves. After they defeat the guardian, the monster looks them over and perhaps encouraged by some taunting from Lobo, swallows them both alive. In order to save themselves, they have to kill it. 

The world is thus saved...by a couple of guys who were, moments before, trying to destroy it.

As I said when I mentioned this book in passing the other day, I had bought and read this when it was originally published...and forgot almost everything about it, which is what prompted me to reread it now.

The reason I had picked it up back then was that, if I recall correctly, there wasn't much else that caught my eye during that particular trip to the comic shop. That and, of course, I was a fan of Alan Grant's writing. And this particular Alan Grant comic was drawn by Vince Giarrano. 

I'm sure I've mentioned him on EDILW before, but I was and am a big fan of Giarrano's. He drew some Batman stuff here and there, and had his own short-lived, 13-issue title in the form of the post-Zero Hour volume of Manhunter. If you ever come across anything he's drawn in a back issue bin, I'd recommend snapping it up. 

His style is very '90s, but in a way that always struck me as somewhat ironic, perhaps even sarcastic, the work of someone who saw what was popular at the time and attempted to do his own version of it. His work was highly expressive, and exaggerated to the point of cartoony, sometimes even silly (In this regard, he reminds me a bit of Kelley Jones; their artwork would never be mistaken for that of the other or anything, but both had a tendency to always go as big as possible). 

He was thus a perfect choice for this book, and I was curious to see how he would handle the two characters. 

Unfortunately, I don't think there's necessarily any particularly potent imagery in this particular comic, the mythological aspects are all more or less generic in conception, though well drawn in a loose, exaggerated, cartoony style (There is a neat splash page where the world-ending monster escapes from a volcano and its tail is all smoke while it seems to solidify as it emerges).

Giarrano's Lobo is pretty much standard issue, the character's hair maybe being a bit bigger and pointier than other artists have drawn it, but his Etrigan is a rather unique one: Big but squat, with sharp facial features, huge ears and a severe underbite. There's something of a bulldog about him. 

Perhaps because Lobo's appearance here is tempered by that of Etrigan, this particular story didn't seem as Lobo-y as many other Lobo appearances of the '90s. That is, it doesn't rely so heavily on the one basic Lobo gag and, given that he's in a story where every other character is as powerful as him or more so, his tendency towards ultra-violence is a non-factor. He can't really kill, maim or bully anyone in this small cast. 

In that regard, I wonder if this isn't a decent place for someone who doesn't particularly care for Lobo—or doesn't really have any prior experience with or interest in the character—to meet him...? 

At any rate, it's a well-made if unremarkable comic from Alan Grant, a man who could by this point write these characters in his sleep (and, perhaps, was doing so here), and an extremely interesting artist. 

Of course, this book, like Lobo/Deadman, has never been collected anywhere, so I don't suppose anyone particularly interested will have an easy time tracking it down anyway...

I'd love to see DC collect Grant's Demon run at some point, as I had only read a handful of issues from it, and maybe, if they did, this would end up with it (That, and Grant's 1989 Action Comics Weekly story featuring The Demon...? And/or maybe his 1989 Detective Comics arc, that culminates with the best Batman/Demon fight ever...?)

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

If you are interested in the work of Vince Giarrano, here are some of the Batman books he drew for DC in the '90s that I read an enjoyed:

•Batman Annual #16 This was a tie-in to the Eclipso: The Darkness Within annual crossover event, with writers Alan Grant and John Wagner (And a cover by Sam Kieth!) It's never been collected, but I hope DC will get around to collecting The Darkness Within eventually, maybe in a couple of volumes of DC Finest, as they did with Zero Hour...

•Batman: Seduction of the Gun #1 This 64-page one-shot special was written by John Ostrander and addresses the issue of gun violence. It's strident enough that I have a hard time imagining DC having published such a book in the 21st century, for fear of offending someone. It's never been collected.

•Batman: Shadow of the Bat #11-12, #19-20, #24 and #48-50 These were all written by Alan Grant. The first two issues introduced teenage villain The Human Flea, a character I loved but who never reappeared; it's been collected in 2016's Batman: Shadow of the Bat Vol. 1. The next two introduced the minor villain The Tally Man, pitting him against then-Batman Jean-Paul Valley, and #24 was a single-issue story also featuring Valley as Batman; all three of these issues have been collected in 2017's Batman: Knightfall Omnibus Vol. 2 or 2018's Batman: Knightquest: The Crusade. Issues #48-49 were chapters of the "Contagion" crossover, and #50 was an anniversary issue with multiple artists; all three issues are collected in 2016's Batman: Contagion.

•Batman: Legends of the Dark Knight #0 This is a "jam" issue with about a dozen writers and even more artists, and was released during the "Zero Month" that followed the Zero Hour crossover event. Giarrano drew the framing sequence, if I recall correctly. You can find this one collected in 2017's Batman Zero Hour.

•Batman Annual #20 This annual was a "Legends of the Dead Earth" tie-in; that year, DC's annuals were thematically tied together by telling stories set in a far-flung post-apocalyptic future but were all otherwise standalone stories rather than chapters of a bigger mega-story. It was written by Doug Moench. It has never been collected.

Scanning through his credits on comics.org tonight, I see plenty more from Giarrano at DC, some from the later 1980s as well as the 1990s. In addition to his work there, he also drew comics for Marvel, Dark Horse and First. I would certainly be interested in tracking a lot of these down...I'm especially interested in how his style might have changed between the '80s and '90s. His last DC credit seems to be 2002's Batgirl #26. I understand he has long since left comics and gone on to devote himself to painting. He's left a great body of work, though.

Review: 1995's Lobo/Deadman: The Brave and The Bald

I quite clearly remember seeing the house ads for this 1995 one-shot—that sub-title is a memorable one—but I passed on paying $3.50 on a Lobo one-shot. A fan of writer Alan Grant and artist Simon Bisley, I had previously read the 1990 miniseries the pair did with the character's co-creator Keith Gifffen, as well its 1992 sequel, Lobo's Back and 1991's Lobo Paramilitary Christmas Special. I had read a few of the one-shots (like 1993's Lobo Convention Special, drawn by Kevin O'Neill) and, of course, by the early '90s the character was regularly appearing in DC's crossover events. 

By the time The Brave and The Bald had hit stands, I had heard the character's one-note played often enough—that he is, get this, really, really violent—and would have needed something sort of extraordinary to get me to plop down some of my then precious few dollars on another Lobo comic. (And by that point, Lobo had graduated from miniseries and an endless string of one-shot specials to his own ongoing series, also written by Grant. There was no shortage of Lobo comics available for those who were interested.)

I was reminded of this particular one-shot's existence recently when looking up Deadman titles on comics.org for something else I was blogging about. Since I have been writing about so many '90s comics in the past few months anyway, I figured why not check this book out now? After all, is there anything more '90s than a Lobo one-shot...? 

Now, looking back at this comic from a remove of 30 years, I see there are a couple of things that are sort of unusual about it.

First, Lobo was sharing billing with another character here, something that was a bit rare. In the '90s, the only other times this happened was in 1996's Lobo/Judge Dredd: Psycho-Bikers vs. The Mutants from Hell (by Grant, John Wagner, Val Semeiks and John Dell), Lobo/Demon: Hellaween (by Grant and Vince Giarrano) and 1997's Lobo/Mask (by Grant, John Arcudi, Doug Mahnke and Keith Williams). It wouldn't be until after the turn of the century that we got further Lobo team-ups, featuring Hitman, The Authority, Batman, The Roadrunner and Superman. 

And, as you can see, Lobo/Deadman actually predates all of those, so this was his first team-up comic.

Second, the comic's art was by New Zealand artist Martin Emond. He had a handful of prior Lobo credits, and while his art here differs from that of Simon Bisley in quite a few ways, it very much is following in Bisley's conception of the character as something of a compromise between a cartoon and a heavy metal album cover. 

Finally, Deadman seems like a completely random character to pair with Lobo, the two characters literally coming from different worlds (Earth and Czarnia), different sub-genres (supernatural superhero and sci-fi superhero) and different tones (serious melodrama and brash, broad parody). I don't think they had ever crossed paths before this, and I don't think they ever crossed paths since (Although given all the crisis comics DC has published in the last 40 years or so, chances are they both appeared in crowd scenes within the same issue of some comic or other).

Grant and Emond divide their story into three distinct chapters, and there are several surprises of one sort or another, although I will go ahead and spoil the last and biggest surprise, as you've already had 30 years to read this comic unspoiled.

In this first chapter, Lobo is speeding towards Earth on his flying space motorcycle (or a "far-out fragger of a space hawg," in Lobo's words), talking to the reader through the device of a little alien hitchhiker he has picked up (and will ultimately leave hanging from its tied-together antennae from a satellite. This being a Lobo comic, the setting is very much of a painted-looking Looney Tunes sort, with a floating sign pointing an arrow toward Earth.

Lobo is headed to Earth on a bounty-hunting job, and if he's not excited, then at least his interest in piqued:

This guy I gotta arrest sounds like a real hard dude--an' I ain't never met no hard dudes from Earth afore!

'Ceptin' Etrigan The Demon, of course. But he ain't really from Earth...

An' he ain't all that hard, either!

By this point, Lobo has thrown hands with Green Lantern Guy Gardner, Captain Marvel and Superman before, so apparently none of those powerhouses count as hard dudes. As for Etrigan, it's worth noting that Grant wrote The Demon for about 40 issues between 1990 and 1993, and if Lobo and Etrigan weren't exactly friends, they were at least frenemies, showing up in one another's books (And sharing that Hellaween one-shot mentioned above, which I had bought and read for Grant's name and Giarrano's art, although it must not have been very good, as I don't remember anything at all about it now; maybe taht's another old '90s comic I should revisit...). 

Meanwhile, Deadman is floating above a map of the United States, in a very uncomfortable looking, folded-up position. (He is, of course, the "Bald" in The Brave and The Bald). Emond's Deadman looks a bit like Carmine Infantino's original design for the character, and a bit like the emaciated corpse version Kelley Jones drew in 1989's Deadman: Love After Death. He's extremely boney, maybe even skeletal, but doesn't quite look rotten in the same way Jones' does. Also, Emond's version of his long, pointed collar trails off into thread thin curlicues.

Emond's work with Deadman is perhaps the most visually interesting aspect of the book. 

I found his rendering of the ghost a little off-putting, as, in terms of color and texture, Deadman seems to be made of the same "stuff" as everyone and everything else in the comic. There's no visual indicator that he may actually be a ghost, or made of ectoplasm or something, so it looks kind of weird and wrong when Emond draws him climbing into a particular body to possess it. It looks a bit more like they are just being smoothed together, rather than Deadman going inside the person.

You can also see this on the cover, where Deadman's arm is extending through Lobo's chest, but Lobo's flesh also seems to be poking out along with the arm, suggesting some sort of stretchiness to Lobo's body, rather than Deadman simply sticking his insubstantial arm through Lobo's quite substantial chest.

While Emond's Deadman may look as solid as Lobo and the other non-ghost characters, he's unnatural looking in the way he moves, constantly stretching and bending, his limbs often extending behind him and resembling long strings of spaghetti or, perhaps given the red of his suit, licorice. More than once while reading this I found myself wishing Emond had drawn a Plastic Man comic before he had passed away.  

According to his narration, Deadman's therapist has said he needs a vacation, and so he heads for Pismo  Bizmo Beach. He proceeds to take over the body of an apparently good-looking "skurfer" (That's "sky" + "surf") and is in the process of enjoying having oil rubbed on him by various beach babes when their boyfriends from the Steroid Biker gang arrive. A fight ensues, Deadman body-hopping in order to defeat the bad guys.

After a few pages of Lobo wandering around the beach, giving Grant a few scenes to play the hyper-violent "Main Man" off of Californian beachgoers, he arrives at the fray, and we begin chapter two, and the first of those surprises.

Deadman is the bounty that Lobo is hunting! I suppose that should have been obvious from the title, huh? But it still surprised me. This panel, by the way, features what is my favorite joke in the comic, the "Wanted: Alive!!" poster for Deadman.

Okay, maybe it's not much of a joke, but I liked it...

Lobo is armed with a spook-detector and a spook-collector with which to find and capture Deadman, but it is ultimately Deadman who captures Lobo, taking over his body...although not without some difficulty, due to Lobo's alien physiology and single-minded will ("His mind is a seething cauldron of undifferentiated rage, hatred and boredom...Somewhere, really ugly heavy metal music is playing.") 

In order to find out who put a price on his head, Deadman-in-Lobo's body flies to the meet point in outer space...only to be Boom Tube-ed to Apokolips, which is the other, bigger surprise: It is Darkseid who hired Lobo to capture Deadman!

Well, in actuality, it is one of Darkseid's minions. Not Desaad, but a new, original-to-this-book one, a Doctor Kroolman. (If you're wondering why Grant made up a new New God for this story rather than using Desaad or someone, well, this is a Lobo comic, so you can probably guess how it will ultimately turn out for the villain, and obviously this isn't the place to lose valuable IP). 

What does Kroolman want with Deadman? Well, his is a rather weird, though amusingly audacious, plan and, refreshingly, it isn't just another attempt to secure the Anti-Life Equation. We'll get to said plan in a moment.

As Deadman-in-Lobo fights his way through hordes of Parademons—which Emond draws as bat-winged demons from his own imagination, rather than hewing to Jack Kirby's designs—he accidentally uses the gun on his hip, which is the spook-collector, and thus Deadman gets sucked out of Lobo and trapped, ready for delivery to Kroolman. 

The trapped Deadman is a great image, by the way. Here are the first few images of him in the collector, a tiny little head, pair of hands and a mass of red squiggles:

It's only after Kroolman tricks Lobo into accepting a hit on himself—which, unable to ever go back on his word, he goes through with, killing himself to complete the contract—that Kroolman finally explains his plan to Lobo:

Both you and Deadman have been to Heaven. Therefore, you must know your way back--not consciously, perhaps, but deep down inside you--on the spiritual level.

By interrogating Deadman, and matching his buried knowledge with yours, I will be able to locate it with pinpoint precision!

And why does Kroolman want to get to Heaven? Well, he explains, in order for Darkseid to be "the one true God", he has to unlock the secrets of the old gods, secrets that can be found in Heaven. 

So Apokolips plans to make war on Heaven. (I have to assume in an earlier draft of the script, Grant had Kroolman saying something about Darkseid trying to bump off God and take his place, which seems more direct than this business about finding secrets, but maybe DC balked at that). 

Once they're both dead, Lobo and Deadman finally meet face to face, and they do not get along. Kroolman uses his special equipment to start disassembling the pair's spirits but, as the stars of superhero comics so often do, they manage to escape the— Well, I was going to say "death trap", but I suppose that's not quite the right word, since at that point they are both already dead.

Suffice it to say that the guys whose names are in the title are not erased from existence, and the villains' plans to conquer Heaven never come to pass. This is thanks to a pep talk from Lobo ("'S loser talk...dude!"), Deadman's possession abilities and the stupidity of a henchman (Although to be fair to that henchman, I would have done the exact same thing had I found myself in his circumstances).

In the end, Kroolman dies, Lobo flicks off Darkseid and gives him the business and, after a few more neat images of Deadman, he walks off into the background of a panel, one ridiculously long leg trailing behind him as a raincloud forms above his head. 

While there are definitely some fun elements to the book—and I suppose it's something of a must-read for fans of Deadman, if only to see Emond's rather unique take on him—it's still very much one of Alan Grant's Lobo comics, and thus your mileage may vary, depending on how funny you happen to find Lobo. 

Do take that into consideration if you decide you might want to track this book down. It hasn't been collected, so doing so would require either finding a back issue or turning to Amazon's Comixology. 

I do feel it is something of a waste of the "Brave and The Bald" joke, though. I think that might have been better suited to a Lex Luthor team-up book, as baldness is associated with Lex in a way that it isn't with Deadman, even if, yes, Deadman is technically bald...

Two more by Tom Taylor

Today at Robot 6 I reviewed the first collected volume of Injustice: Gods Among Us, the comic book adaptation of that dumb-looking fighting game, written by Tom Taylor and drawn by about seven artists too many. As the thing I liked most about the book—hich I ended up really rather liking, to my own surprise—was Taylor's writing, so I thought this would be a good opportunity to check out a few more things he wrote for DC that were just recently released, Injustice: Gods Among Us Annual #1 and Earth 2 #17.

Now one of the reasons I found Injustice to be such an unexpected pleasure, I suspect, was that in many ways it reflected the pre-New 52 DC Universe, and I found myself in more familiar territory than I've been in a long time when reading many DC comics.

Obviously, the status quo is pretty different—Superman and Wonder Woman are killers imposing their will on the world, and gradually getting more and more bonkers in the process—but even that is a sort of pre-New 52 thing, a good old-fashioned Elseworlds story.

Beyond that though, Injustice presents a DC Universe where The Joker has a face, Green Arrow has a beard, Hawkgirl exists and so on. The series' first annual is pretty much premised on a very pre-New 52 version of a character entering the world of Injustice: A totally '90s, "bastich" this and "frag" that, albino space biker version of Lobo.

As the cover indicates, the story of the annual is that of Lobo taking out a contract on Harley Quinn, and running into some unexpected trouble.

In keeping with Injustice's apparent refusal to ever let a single artist draw more than one consecutive scene, this 38-page comic features four different artists—Xermanico, Mike S. Miller and Bruno Redondo and Jonas Trindade, who it looks like is only inking the Xermanico-pencilled pages that Xermanico didn't ink himself—and two different colorists.

I haven't read anything past issue six of the (paper version of) the series so far, so I think there's about a four-issue gap between where I left off and where this annual picks up; apparently in that time Green Arrow started hanging out with Black Canary (whose costume I actually rather like; it looks like her traditional bathing suit and fishnets look, but with some armor plating here and there), Robin started hanging out on the Justice League's satellite and Superman "punched a god ta death" and Lex Luthor has started working with Superman, developing a glowing green pill that gives people super-powers.

Lobo comes to earth in order to collect a bounty on Superman, but finds the Man of Steel very changed, which Superman demonstrates by forcibly flying Lobo to the sun and threatening to throw him into it, as that would destroy even the, um, Main Man, who needs at least a single drop of blood to regenerate from.

After thinking about it for all of one panel, Superman then hires Lobo to hunt down Harley Quinn for him, and Lobo agrees—in exchange for a super-pill. Harley gets her hands on the pill, and with her newfound powers, plus the help of Green Arrow and Black Canary, she is able to defeat Lobo, first through extreme violence and then through the power of psychotherapy.

Once the plot is adequately set up, it's a pretty fun and funny comic; the best scenes of Injustice so far have all been the ones in which Harley and Green Arrow banter, so naturally putting the two of them together with Canary and Lobo works really well. There's even a single page that felt an awful lot like an old Giffen/DeMatteis/Maguire Justice League page (That would be page 31, which comes during Bruno Redondo's section of the book; Redondo is probably the best of the way too many artists working on Injustice, from what I've seen so far).

I love the expressions in that last panel.

Anyway, this was a pretty excellent installment of the surprisingly entertaining series, and one I suspect will be especially welcome to any long-suffering Lobo fans in DC's reading audience.

As for Earth 2 #17, it's the start of Taylor's run on the book, which follows that of James Robinson. It's nice to see DC giving Taylor something else—and something in-continuity—to work on, even if it's not  a Green Arrow/Harley Quinn book. Trouble is, this doesn't really feel any more a part of the DC Universe than Injustice does.

Set on the New 52 version of Earth-2, where the Justice Society lives, this series began by introducing new versions of traditional Earth-2 natives like Flash Jay Garrick and Green Lantern Alan Scott, only rather than being aged Golden Age heroes, they were young men whose careers were contemporaneous with that of Superman, Wonder Woman and Batman (all three of whom died in the first issue).

I haven't read past the first story arc (and the two awful Villains Month decimal point-ed issues), so I was a little lost as to what was going on in this issue. The dead Superman, returns to Earth wearing a new, evil Superman costume (all red and black) and proceeded to beat up this world's superheroes (called "Wonders") and kill "a god", whom I think is supposed to be the New God villain Steppenwolf.

While the heroes fret over how to deal with an evil Superman, a new Batman, secret identity unrevealed, (and also wearing red and black) appears with a plan to stop Superman and save the world. Given the premise of Injustice, Batman fighting an evil version of Superman on an alternate earth maybe isn't the smartest place for Taylor to start his run, certainly not if he doesn't want to be pigeon-holed as the guy who only writes story about Batman fighting evil versions of Superman on alternate earths, anyway.

While this isn't a terrible jumping-on point, I was a little surprised that Taylor seemed to be picking up on a story in-progress (perhaps Robinson left extremely unexpectedly?), and there were a few characters I didn't recognize at all. The Flash, Green Lantern, The Sandman, The Atom, Mr. Terrific, Terry Sloane and Amire Khan all appear, as does the Dr. Fate and Red Tornado. There's also an archer character, whose identity I couldn't even begin to guess at. Oddly, there are little text bubbles and arrows identifying some of the characters, but among those identified are the most obvious characters, like Fate and the Flash. No bubble for archer-guy.

Oh, and this version of Red Tornado is a female robot. And she's Lois Lane, for some reason.

I feel the book has drifted pretty far from what seemed like its original premise—a brand-new, "Ultimate" Justice Society on a parallel world with no Superman, Batman and Wonder Woman—given that this issue featured Superman, Batman, Lois Lane-in-Red Tornado's android girl-body and Lois' dad, General Sam Lane.

Given the roughly ten million awesome Golden Age characters in DC's character catalogue, many of whom have some connection to the Justice Society, it would be nice to see pretty much anyone other than Superman and Batman in this comic.

The art is still quite strong though, thanks to pencil artist Nicola Scott, who has been drawing the book since it launched.

Oh yeah hey, comics used to be kind of insane, didn't they?

I have a friend who works at a used book store that deals in comics, and a recent collection they bought included two loose sheets of the above stickers, sans the books they would have come with—one of the two editions of 1994's Superman: The Man of Steel #30. The gimmick was that the issue had a "do-it-yourself" cover.

It was basically just a familiar background scene in Metropolis—
—upon which you could arrange Superman and Lobo however you saw fit.

As that strange decade's cover enhancements went, you gotta respect the creativity of this particular one.

I think I like the image of the untouched sheet of stickers as it is more than I'd like any arrangement of those stickers upon the cover, though. There's something oddly appealing about those Superman and Lobo heads and torsos floating around in white space, surrounded by multiple versions of their limbs.

Unfortunately, DC neglected to include a sticker of Superman's old haircut, so no matter how you arranged the scene, Superman had to have his mullet.

Dream Trades: The Complete Hitman

Garth Ennis and John McCrea's two-issue JLA/Hitman miniseries wrapped up last Wednesday, having served as both a welcome visitation to the characters from the old Hitman series, and a sort of belated epilogue to it.

The miniseries was, by just about any standards, a pretty good comic, but I do wonder why exactly DC published it. I mean, publishing pretty good comics doesn't exactly seem like their regular MO these days, does it?

It could be that it was a sort of test balloon for embarking on a trade program of the series, something Comic Book Resources’ rumormonger Rich Johnston has been pushing for.

I don't know how Hitman sold back in the late ‘90s, when it was still being published monthly, but from interviews at the time, I got the impression that it was a borderline title, not selling all that great, yet not selling poorly enough to be canceled. Rather, DC kinda suggested that maybe it could be canceled at some point in the near future, and afforded Ennis and McCrea time to wrap it up to their liking.*

When they did collect it into trade, they stopped at Who Dares Wins, about halfway through the series (the point where Tommy essentially has a mid-series crisis, and things start looking increasingly bad for our heroes). According to dccomics.com, only the last two of the five trades they did are still in print.

Considering that it's the work of Garth Ennis, whose name alone is enough to sell comics these days, I've always found it odd that the series wasn't a bigger hit, and a perennial seller in the backlist—a "from the creator of Preacher" likely should help sell some books, no?

Now that Ennis' name has been built into brand of its own, thanks in part to his adding a long run on the Punisher to his Vertigo credits, perhaps that’s changed.

And if you can get an Ennis fan, any Ennis fan, to crack open just one cover, I would think that a collection of Hitman collections would do quite well in trade, as it has the best of all of the attributes Ennis is known for: Superhero parody, action, crime, western and war movie tributes, homages, parodies and riffs, plus great character work, almost monthly celebrations of male friendships, and lots of guns, cigarettes and beer.

Of course, if DC were to give trade collections of Hitman another try after their first, aborted attempt, I would hope the would do it right this time around.

And to help ensure that they do, this installment of extremely infrequent EDILW feature Dream Trades is dedicated to laying out a blueprint for a practically obsessive-compulsive collection of all Tommy Monaghan stories.

Here's how I think it should go down...




Hitman Vol. 1 The first Hitman trade was a tad inadequate, featuring only the first three-issues of the series, a short Batman Chronicles story, and the Demon "Bloodlines" tie-in annual which introduced Tommy Monaghan.

Well, The Demon Annual #2 is a given, as it’s the first appearance and origin of Tommy Monaghan, a Gotham City hitman who gains superpowers after an attack by the “Bloodlines” aliens (Unimaginatively known in the DCU as “The Parasites”).

Monaghan had two other Demon story arcs, which should definitely be included. “Hell’s Hitman” ran through The Demon #42-#45, and it guest-starred Tommy Monaghan and Bat-villains Tweedledum and Tweedledee. The story revolved around a battle between Etrigan and Asteroth, and climaxed with the raising of the Gothodaemon, Gotham City’s own patron demon. I think this storyline is also the first appearance of GCPD officer Tiegel, who would become Tommy’s love interest in Hitman.

Monaghan also appeared in “Suffer the Children,” which ran from #52-#54, but I’ve never been able to track those singles down.

Both storylines would be good candidates for collection in a new version of Hitman Vol. 1, unless DC is planning on collecting Ennis and McCrea’s Demon run at some point (which they really should—it’s only 19 issues, and features a couple of Hitman stories and a three-part Haunted Tank story, introducing us to a legacy version of the tank’s commander, whom I don’t think anyone, even Ennis, has used since).

Following all the Demon appearances, but just prior to Hitman #1, Monaghan would appear in a short story in the “Contagion” crossover issue of The Batman Chronicles. Thanks to his mind-reading abilities and X-Ray vision, Monaghan’s able to get the jump on Batman, diss his Darth Vader vibe and, with some Bugs Bunny logic, trick the other one-third of their Mexican stand off into training his gun on Batman.

Monaghan escapes, and Batman follows him into the first three issues of Hitman. It’s a pretty good arc, about someone hiring Monaghan to take out the Joker, and Batman doing his level best to save his mortal enemy, an unrepentant mass-murderer. A lot of great moments, and sly observations about the DCU, although I was always a little disappointed that neither the Joker nor Batman ever fulfilled their promises of vengeance on Tommy. But I guess Ennis was just doing what he had to to launch a new DC series—start with a Batman appearance.

This first story amounts to the bait portion of a bait and switch, as the set-up for the series Monagahan gives us—that he’s a super-powered Hitman who only takes cases involving evil metahumans that normal hitmen couldn’t take—recedes to the background almost immediately (The fact that he even has superpowers is often unclear, based on how infrequently he uses them as the series progressing, occasionally vaguely complaining of them causing him headaches).




Hitman Vol. 2: Ten Thousand Bullets The next story arc is the four-part “Ten Thousand Bullets,” which I personally found to be the weakest of the lot, and I actually considered dropping the title with #4. Some big things happen to the supporting cast here, though, setting the tone for the rest of the series—in the world of Hitman, anyone could die at any moment.

It was followed by a one-issue tie-in to 1996’s big DC crossover, Final Night. I actually liked that one quite a bit. The idea was simply that the sun was going out, it was really the end of the world this time, and there wasn’t much chance of anyone saving the day. Obviously someone did, but a lot of the tie-ins just dealt with the heroes spending their last day with loved ones and so forth. In Hitman, Tommy and the boys at Noonan’s sealed themselves in the bar and told one another stories until the super-guys fixed the sun. This was the issue in which his social circle of killers—retiree-turne-barkeep Sean, best friend and unofficial sidekick Nat the Hat, Chow Yun Fat analogue Ringo, and big dumb guy Hacken—really started becoming sharply defined.





Hitman Vol. 3: Local Hero Next up was a four-issue arc called “Local Hero,” in which Tommy was forced to deal with some left-over Bloodlines crap courtesy of some shady CIA types, and has a very memorable team-up with poor Green Lantern Kyle Rayner, who takes a lot of shit from not only Tommy, but also Tiegel. I love that cover of GL reacting to the bill. I could seriously look at that thing all day.

That was followed by perhaps the two greatest issues of the series, “Zombie Night at the Gotham Aquarium.” It’s just what it sounds like. A mad scientist tests his zombie gas out on the fish and animals at the Gotham Aquariaum, and Tommy and the boys must fight their way through zombie seals, penguins, octopuses, dolphins and at least one great white shark.

It’s pretty much the greatest thing ever.






Hitman Vol. 4: The Ace of Killers Next up was a somewhat sprawling six-part story arc entitled “The Ace of Killers,” which brough guest-star Catwoman (rocking the Jim Balent suit) and Jason Blood and Etrigan into the mix, as The Mawzir, a six-armed monster made out of dead Nazis, seeks to procure the titular rifle, the only gun capable of killing demons. Featuring the debut of the Cat-Signal, and local drunk Sixpack’s very own super-team, Section Eight, which included such sensational character finds as The Defenestrator (who carries a window with him to throw people through) and Dogwelder (who, um, welds dogs to people).

“Ace” is followed by two done-in ones, which would round out a trade quite nicely. There’s the “Big Head” issue of Hitman (from a theme month at DC where every cover featured a close-up of the protagonists face, and a good-jumping-on-point story). It was one of the more charming issues, in which Tommy and Tiegel make it official (and Ennis still finds time for a Mexican stand-off gag that ends in wholesale slaughter). Steve Pugh handles the art, giving McCrea one of the few breaks he takes on the series.

Then there’s a one-issue Christmas story in which Tommy and Nat hunt down a radioactive guy in a Santa suit. I actually hate that issue; probably the weakest of the series.





Hitman Vol. 5: Who Dares Wins This five-issue arc sends SAS agents after Tommy and Nat, to wreak British vengeance on them for a friendly fire incident during the gulf war. I think this is the first Ennis story about Britain’s super-soldiers, which he’d follow with plenty more (see all of the WildStorm Kev stories, for example). Given that the first story established anybody can die at any time, this is a pretty dramatic story, in which our badly out-classed heroes flail against a superior force. (There’s also a scene in a restaurant where a morbidly obese man is pushed over and used as a bullet shield). This is where the last round of trades quit.

Hitman #28 is a nice one-issue epilogue to “Who Dares Wins,” in which Monaghan regrets his life of violence, and begins casting about for something good to do. And he finds it in the very next story arc…





Hitman Vol. 6: Tommy’s Heroes This five-issue storyline, interrupted by the #1,000,000 issue, finds Tommy leading Nat, Ringo and Hacken into Africa as mercenaries in a crappy little war there, one which involves evil superheroes. Ennis gets to indulge in his love of war comics and movies without having to leave the comfort of his regular monthly, and McCrea gets to draw our heroes in different outfits, and the color palette changes quite dramatically. One of the few times the boys get out of Gotham City.





Hitman Vol. 7: For Tomorrow From there, things get weird, and it becomes clear Ennis is starting to wrap things up. “Tommy’s Heroes” is followed by one-issue “Of Thee I Sing,” the Eisner-winning Superman issue And the best Superman story I’ve ever read. Believe it!), a dark, dark, dark two-issue story in which Tommy learns of his real father and mother and returns to Ireland to face a past he never knew he had, and another two-issue arc about vampires seeking to invade “No Man’s Land”-Era Gotham, with the Cauldron as their beachhead.

And that brings us to the first Hitman story I cried (Manly, manly tears) during, four-part For Tomorrow, in which the long-foreshadowed conflict between Tommy and Ringo finally arises.





Hitman Vol. 8: The Old Dog A one-issue epilogue is followed by another of my favorites, a three-issue storyline in which Tommy and Nat go back in time, and a pack of Tyrannosaurs led by “Scarback” come to the Cauldron and quickly develop a taste for human flesh. Tackling the dinosaurs, McCrea proves he really can draw anything he’s asked to, and Ennis riffs on the old Judge Dredd strips about the Tyrannosaurus whose name I forget, narrating the stories from the dinosaur’s perspective.

And then Sean gets his spotlight arc, “The Old Dog” and we get flash backs to his youth, allowing Ennis to work a war comic into the middle of this story about two old, retired killers facing each other one last time.





Hitman Vol. 9: Closing Time After the two-issue Sixpack spotlight arc “Super Guy,” we plunge into the eight-issue finale, “Closing Time.” Ennis does an incredible job of bringing things to a close here, dusting off surviving characters from throughout the run, some of which we haven’t seen for years, in a tale that deals with the Bloodline crap that spawned Tommy, and gives him the chance to do that something good, and, if he’s lucky, die in exactly the way he’s always wanted.

I admit it: I bawled.





Hitman Vol. 10: That Stupid Bastard and Other Stories Well, since most of the cast is dead as of the last volume, you would think that would be a good place to stop the trade collections. But it wouldn’t be. After all, JLA/Hitman was really an epilogue for the series—set years after, and flashing back to when Tommy was still alive, before revealing Superman’s personal memorial to and feelings toward the dead Tommy. Surely that needs traded, and it should be somewhere after Closing Time. Hence, a post-Closing Time trade.

To fill out the rest of the trade, DC could stick in the various Hitman crossovers and specials that have nowhere else to go.

For example, this would be where you’d want to put Hitman/Lobo: That Stupid Bastich! #1. This 2000 one-shot was reportedly something Ennis wrote under duress, having no real affection for or interest in the character of Lobo. And oh boy, does it show. Essentially 38 pages of making fun of Lobo, the story has the unstoppable bounty hunter from outer space stopping in Noonan’s to drink a few pitchers of beer after completing a contract on Earth.

“I hated him on sight an’ I wasn’t eve lookin’at him,” Monaghan narrates the first panel. “He dressed like an idiot, talked like a moron, an’ smelled like he wore his bowels outside his body.” Artist Doug Mahnke helpfully draws some cartoon flies orbiting Lobo’s head, just in case it’s not clear that the character stinks.

So Lobo’s spouting catchphrases, all “Main Man” this and “Frag” that, until he notices there’s a cape in the joint:


(I love this panel, and that sentence gets funnier the longer I think about it, with each Leaguer having their own dubious sphere of influence. I can just see Oracle staring at a bank of monitors, and calling things in along the lines Sixpack established: "Batman, we have a rabid raccoon in Chicago that needs your attention! Wonder Woman, there's a bank robbery in process in Chicago—and the culprit's a she! Green Lantern, hostile aliens have just touched down in L.A., and they have green skin, so they’re all yours!")

When he starts picking on ‘Pack, Tommy pours a bottle of cheap whiskey all over himself, shoots out Lobo’s eyes, and takes off running. That’s page 7. The next 31 consist of Lobo, tracking Tommy by scent while waiting for his eyes to grow back, chasing him spouting increasingly ridiculous phrases based around the syllable “frag.” (“Gonna give ya a taste o’ Lobo’s frag a l’orange—served with a side dish o’ frag!” or “Ground control ta Major Frag!”).

Drawing inspiration from Luney Tunes once again, it’s essentially one big, long chase scene, with lots of mafia gangsters getting in the way. Now, given that Lobo is in Superman’s weight class, how does Tommy take the Main Man down? With a little help from Section Eight, a wedding dress, a video camera, and a promise not to tell if he just goes away. Mahnke handles the art, and his experience as a great superhero artist and a great comedy artist made this a perfect project for him. His Lobo is a mountain of a man, towering over everybody and everything, and Mahnke is quite creative as well as detailed in his gore.

This issue is actually a lot like JLA/Hitman in the way it blends the world of Hitman with a DCU regular, and flashes back to do it (The first panel contains an editorial box saying, “Clearly, this story takes place before most of the cast was slaughtered.”)


This hypothetical volume would also be a good place for Hitman Annual #1, which featured Ennis riffing on westerns in a story entitled “A Coffin Full of Dollars.” This was part of DC’s “Pulp Heroes” annual event, which is the best kind of DC annual event—one that’s thematic instead of part of an interlocking crossover.

The idea was basically to put the various DC heroes in genre stories of the sort the old pulps might have featured, although the main distinguishing detail was the cover dress and the fact that each of 1997’s annuals had a painted cover.

Hitman got “Weird Western Tales,” and we got an extra-length story about Tommy heading west to kill some guys for money, as drawn by Steve Pugh and Carlos Ezsquerra.

This might also be a good place to put Hitman #1,000, 000, which featured Tommy traveling to the 853rd century, meeting the heir to the Gunfire legacy, and discovering the ways in which the future is better than the present (mostly pertaining to vomiting).

There’s also supposedly a Sixpack/Superman short story from a Superman special somewhere, but I’ve never been able to find it.

As for non-Ennis Hitman appearances, there’s only one that I think would be worth collecting, and a sort of grab-bag trade like this would be the place to do it, if DC wanted to bother with the non-Ennis stuff.


That would be Resurrection Man #9-#10, by Dan Abnett, Andy Lanning and Jackson Guice, which featured DC’s two trenchcoat-wearing, costume-less super-heroes of the time crossing paths. In addition to some great art, Abnett and Lanning write Tommy and Nat just right, and have a great scene in which the pair exploit Mitch “Resurrection Man” Shelley’s peculiar power—every time he dies, he comes back to life with a different super power.

There are a handful of other appearances of Tommy outside his own title, but the Resurrection Man ones are really the best of the lot.

Grant Morrison wrote a fun few panels of Tommy trying out for the Justice League in JLA #5, but Martian Manhunter was unimpressed with his sales pitch (“I kill people for money”) and his smoking. Not bad, but certainly not enough to justify reprinting that whole issue in a trade.



The Denny O’Neil written Azrael #35 features a team-up between the one-time Batman stand-in and Tommy, but it’s pretty inessential, and doesn’t actually read like a Hitman story at all. It could have been anyone in the green trench coat trying to slot the merman gang boss (Although, may I say—Merman gang boss? Not bad, O’Neil).



Finally, there was Sovereign Seven #26, part of the short-lived and now mostly forgotten Chris Claremont DC series of the late ‘90s. I actually just reread it, since I had trouble remembering anything about it, and it’s about as painful to read as any Claremont DC book, particularly the parts where Claremont tries to capture the voice of an Ennis character.

Tommy only has a few pages, as he’s spying on the S7, and when he catches a few of their names, Rampart and Crusier**, he thinks, “Love the names.” Which would be funnier if it weren’t the same guy who came up with the dumb ass names in the first place writing the line.

The only things I liked about the issue were that his coat was mistakenly colored black instead of green (which is obviously a much cooler color), and there’s a pretty cool panel in which Tommy shoots a dude in the back of the head, the bullet exits through the dude’s eye, hits Power Girl in the eye, and bounces off.

And just to be super-anal, Hitman also had a panel or two in Bloodbath #2, a book I rather enjoyed at the time but is completely negligible for it's Hitman content, and one of those Secret Files & Origins specials dedicated to the leftovers of the DCU, cramming all of the less-popular characters (Tommy, J'onn J'onnz, Wild Cat, etc.) all into one story featuring Chase.

But I’d hate to close on that note, so let’s take one last look at That Stupid Bastich!:


Yes, who did weld a dog to Lobo's butt?

Garth Ennis, John McCrea, and a handful of great artists, that's who. Just as they've welded Hitman to our hearts.








*This wrapping-up went a long way toward making Hitman one of the best big-company comics of the decade, as few super-comics get the opportunity to tell a complete story. It's just the nature of the beast, to squeeze every available dollar out of every property. When you think about DC's best ongoings, however, it's likely no coincidence that several of them had proper endings, happy or otherwise (Hitman, Starman, The Sandman).



**Cruiser?! Seriously? Man, if you’re not a giant alien robot that turns into a car, or an out and proud gay superhero with a sense of humor, you really have no business using that name. However, it does kind of fit in with the rest of the team, all of whom sound like X-Men rejects: Indigo, Reflex, Finale and Cascade. Does anyone know if the Sovereign Seven every appeared again after their series ended? This is the only issue I read, and it sucked pretty bad, but it did have Claremont and Ron Lim, plus Power Girl. I always liked the logo, anyway.