Either Charles Soule is mistaken about the nature of J'onn J'onnz's Martian vision or I am.

Martian Manhunter THROOMs General Zod, and then gets THWAMmed in return, in this page from Superman/Wonder Woman #3 drawn by Tony S. Daniel and Matt Banning

It has always been my understanding that J'onn J'onnz's "Martian vision" eye-beams were rather different than Superman's heat vision.

The latter is just what it sounds like—blasts of intense heat that blast out of Superman's super-eyeballs in a concentrated ray, usually drawn as a visible red eye-beam (Comics being a visual medium and all). But it was my understanding that the former was some form of laser beam or concussive blast, rather than simply heat-vision under a more local name (Examples of the pair of them shooting their eye-beams in the same panel are relatively rare, but I do recall it happening at least once during the Morrison/Porter/Dell JLA run, and in that case J'onn's martian vision beams were colored darker than Superman's heat-vision, more purple than red.

In Superman/Wonder Woman #3, however, it seems like J'onn's martian vision is basically heat-vision, of a sort.

Seeking to capture a mysterious and powerful visitor from a different dimension (General Zod, actually), the Justice League of America's Steve Trevor has Vibe use his, um, vibrational powers to kick up a cloud of sand around Zod, and then says the following to J'onn:

J'onn complies, his martian vision here transforming the sand into glass, as extremely intense heat would (No, I don't know why they thought glass would be the best way to contain him; prisons are rarely built of the same material as green houses for a reason).

Note that not only is the martian vision here clearly a heat beam, setting the cloud of sand on fire as it fuses it to glass, but Trevor indicates (and J'onn seems to agree with him) that the Martian aversion to fire is so powerful that it includes even a fear of their own vision powers, which is a little, well, nuts, isn't it?

Just how vulnerable J'onn is to fire, and the whys and wherefores of it, have changed over the years, of course. Pre-reboot, it was more of a psychological fear than a physical weakness, more debilitating phobia (like Storm's claustrophobia) than Achilles' heel (like Superman's kryptonite), although during his JLA run Joe Kelly played with it in a way to suggest that it's a psychological block meant to keep a monster of the Martian collective unconsciousness at bay.

After the New 52-boot, I don't know J'onn's status in regards to fire (His history is a bit confused, to say the least, at this point, most of it having occurred off-panel, in the undocumented five missing years), but if he's afraid of or somehow vulnerable to his own eye-beams now, well, that's a pretty big change.

To answer the question suggested in the title of this post, however, I would assume that Soule is right and that I'm wrong, given the fact that he's a professional writer hired by DC Comics and is writing comics edited by editors at DC Comics, while I'm a guy who reads DC comics and then complains about their shortcomings (if any) on the Internet.

And perhaps the New 52 continuity reboot changed the very nature of J'onn's Martian Vision...?

Except that would be really weird if they actually sat down to redesign and reimagine J'onn J'onnz and were like, "Okay, let's streamline this character to make him more accessible to more readers. We changed the shape of his head, added a loin cloth over his pants, put him on StormWatch instead of the Justice League...what else? Oh! Let's alter the nature of his eye-beams, so now they are even more like Superman's, and also he doesn't like using them, because he doesn't like heat, because heat comes from fire."

Review: Stormwatch Vol. 1: The Dark Side

DC Comics seems to have always struggled with what, exactly, they should do with the WildStorm imprint they bought from founder Jim Lee, a move which, in retrospect, seems like a move reluctantly taken not because they necessarily wanted to publish comics featuring any of the WildStorm characters or concepts, but because they wanted founder Jim Lee working for them (That, or they wanted to get their hands on more Alan Moore material they could sell in graphic novel form for pretty much ever).

After messing about with the imprint for a long while, including rebooting the WildStorm "universe" a couple of times, when they last restored their multiverse, they gave the WildStorm Universe it's own Earth, one of the 52 parallel worlds that made up the DC Multiverse. When they decided to reboot everything, they folded the WildStorm Universe (along with the handful of DC Universe characters whose books were published under the mature readers Vertigo imprint umbrella) into the DCU proper, forming The New 52iverse in the cosmic climax of the Flashpoint miniseries.

For the most part, the WildStorm imports haven't fared well. Voodoo was one of the first New 52 books to be canceled, Grifter has been canceled and books prominently featuring WildStorm characters like Ravagers and Team 7, later launching titles meant to replace canceled books, were themselves canceled almost immediately.

Stormwatch is still standing, although probably not for much longer. It's about to pass into the hands of its third writer in the year-and-a-half since it was launched in 2011, and that third writer is going to Jim Starlin, who will be launching the book in a new direction, including Jim Starlin creation Jim Starlin's The Weird.

Having just read the first collection of the series, which includes the first six issues by original writer Paul Cornell and artist Miguel Sepulveda (plus Al Barrionuevo on parts of the second issue), I'm kind of surprised its lasted even this long. Like Cornell's other New 52 book Demon Knights (which has also since passed into the hands of another writer), Stormwatch features a pretty good script with some fairly sharp writing, but poor art that all but nullifies it. In this case, the artwork is much worse than that in Demon Knights however, and I found myself struggling just to make it through the whole volume. I think I would have preferred to just read a collection of the scripts.

Stormwatch was originally a Jim Lee creation, a sort of U.N.-sanctioned super-group of the sort Image Comics had a surfeit of. After runs by a few writers of note, including Ron Marz, writer Warren Ellis slowly but surely started turning it into higher and higher-quality book, ultimately remaking it into his The Authority, a millennial hit he produced with artist Bryan Hitch. They were followed by Mark Millar, who made his name on the over-the-top superhero series, with artist Frank Quitely and others.

Cornell gets the title Stormwatch, but the cast, their headquarters and other elements he uses are taken more from Ellis' Authority. His Stormwatch is an ultra-secretive group of power superhumans whose sole mission is defend earth from alien invasion, which they do from The Carrier, an alien warship parked in hyperspace. They are managed by a shadowy group known as The Shadow Cabinet (a name from another abandoned DC imprint).

At the book's opening, Stormwatch consists of The Engineer, Jack Hawksmoor and Jenny Quantam (all from The Authority) and The Martian Manhunter (featuring his third costume redesign and second head-shape redesign since 2006), plus new characters Adam One (an immortal born infinitely old during the Big Bang and aging backwards since), The Projectionist (whose superpower is the ability to control information media) and The Eminence of Blades (history's greatest swordsman, who has special lying powers).

Adam One is the team's nominal leader, but his spaciness born of his de-aging process frustrates many of the other characters, each of whom think they would make better team leaders. Their attention is divided among two tasks: There's an alien entity taking over the moon and using it to attack Earth for its own mysterious agenda (it wants to toughen Earth up, essentially training the planet to help prepare it for an even greater threat that is apparently on its way), and the team would really like to recruit reluctant superhero Apollo (another holdover from The Authority), something The Midnighter (ditto) also wants. Midnighter thinks he and Apollo should form their own team, and could do more good together than they could working with or for Stormwatch.

And that's pretty much the plot of the first six issues. The surface conflict is about as simple as superhero comics get; "the moon" attacks Earth by showering it with meteors and monsters, of the generic teeth and tentacles variety. That really shouldn't take up more than 22 pages—40 tops— stretched out to over 100. To Cornell's credit, that stretching allows room for plenty of characterization, and interpersonal conflicts between the characters, but the narrative can't help but feel a little flabby, due in large part to all of the stops for splash pages that show off nothing of any great interest—bad renderings of indistinct objects, mostly.

I didn't care for Sepulveda's art at all. Certainly, some of that is stylistic. He goes for "realistic," something there is certainly precedent for with this group of characters, but because of the over-the-top nature of Cornell's story, it's not particularly well-served by that style.

In any case, the art isn't very good. At the risk of sounding overly cruel, it looks like someone who can't draw at all trying to produce Bryan Hitch-like imagery using only coloring effects and photo-collaging, with the only actual drawing going on around the faces of the characters. Many pages look a bit like Barry Kitson drew faces in the middle of a bunch of coloring effects. These effects are so prominent that it can be hard to see the art underneath them at all, and on nearly every page I found myself asking "What am I looking at?" and answering "I don't know or care, but I don't like looking at it."

Here, look at this sequence, in which Martian Manhunter's shape-changing powers are revealed:

Sepulveda's affects this by overlaying the form J'onn is in with the form he's taking in one panel between the two forms, the comics equivalent of a cheap TV special effect from the 1960s or so. There are lots of ways to intimate shape-changing powers—during his JLA run, for example, Howard Porter drew J'onn and the White Martians semi-dissolving into little sandstorms of molecules when transforming—and this method isn't invalid or anything. But note that his arm doesn't move at all in that second image, and his size increases so dramatically that he moves closer to the reader.

Basically, Sepulveda didn't want to draw John in human form twice when he could get away with doing it once, so while the script says John lost concentration and slipped back into Martian form by accident, he does so without moving his arm, which was lowering his sunglasses. In other words, his body parts haven't transformed into a different shape, but he turned from one immobile shape to another; his forms aren't action figures so much as sculptures (He changes shape twice more; in one instance, the super-imposed image process is used again, while in the other a special effect suggesting light being bent ripples over his limbs).

Oh, and Sepulveda's Jenny Quantam?

She's a hobbit.

While the art is pretty terrible, it's not all Sepulveda's fault. The book's colorists Alex Sinclair, Allen Passalaqua and Pete Pantazis deserve some castigation, as well—maybe if every millimeter of every page wasn't flashing, glowing and resembling a photograph, the book wouldn't look so terrible (Oh hey, was that the problem? Did all three colorists all color ever page? No wonder the art looks so busy!).

And he's not responsible for these terrible character designs. The Engineer and Jack look unchanged (Well, Sepulveda seems to draw Jack in capris instead of suit pants, but otherwise...). Jenny is just a little girl wearing little girl clothes. Apollo's costume looks okay, and the most radical change with his look is his haircut.

I have no idea what to make of Midnighter's redesign. He originally looked like movie Batman with his ears sanded off, and his cape exchanged for a black trench coat. Now he looks like a leatherboy nightmare, and, for some reason, he wears a lot of bulky armor for a fighter who is so good he should rarely if ever get hit, and he has big spike on his chin because...um...some reason, I'm sure.

Martian Manhunter looks...man, I don't even know where to start with him.

There's a sketchbook section in the back of the book that notes how much trouble they had coming up with a design for J'onn (I thought the last redesign, a variation of his classic costume, but with pants instead of a pair of panties and pirate boots, looked fine). Ultimately, Jim Lee had to step in for a final design, and, in Lee's sketch, we see J'onn's arms are armor-like, and his head is super-weird now, sunken on the sides with a raised, ribbed ridge on either side and funny earl-like shapes. There are sketches of earlier versions by Cully Hamner in which he was apparently also flirting with giving J'onn a new nose.

What I found most interesting in this portion of the book is how many artists were involved with these designs: Hamner (Jenny, Adam, Apollo, Midnighter, Jack), Lee (J'onn), Sepulveda (Engineer, Projectionist) and even Joe Prado (Eminence of Blades). Crazy Jane, a character featured rather prominently in Grant Morrison's Doom Patrol run, was apparently also considered for inclusion in the cast, and even designed. They apparently did a lot of work and had a lot of talented folks behind these designs, but when it came time to actually draw the comic, the designs are almost always buried by coloring effects or weird storytelling choices (The Eminence of Blades, for example, spends most of the first six issues wearing a space suit, so he just looks like a generic astronaut holding some glowing blue swords).

The Hamner drawings show a lot of life in them, life lacking form the characters in the actual story and are also drawings, and thus suggest comic book characters in a way that the comic itself fails to. Paul Cornell and Cully Hamner's Stormwatch might have been an alright comic. Hell, Paul Cornell and Miguel Sepulveda's pencils-only Stormwatch might have been an alright comic.

But the comic DC actually published? I think it's probably the worst of New 52 I've read so far, and I've only been reading the ones that at least look or sound promising to me.

DC's new direction—Pants!

This past February, DC Entertainment announced their new executive team, ending months of speculation by comics industry watchers. Four months later, exactly how the new team will ultimately shape the publisher's line of comics remains to be seen, but one pattern is clearly emerging.

Martian Manhunter's traditional look:

Martian Manhunter gets a new costume in May's Blackest Night #8, refined in Brightest Day until it looked like this:


The original Aqualad costume:

DC announces the new Aqualad on June 11:


Wonder Woman's traditional look:

DC unveils's Wonder Woman's new costume on June 29:

The Showcase Presents Justice League Pt. 4

Previously, on Every Day Is Like Wednesday...
Part 1
Part 2
Part 3

























Next: Cain of The House of Mystery

Man Up, Martian Manhunter! Pt. 4: The villains of Salvation Run

Welcome to the latest installment of "Man Up, Martian Manhunter!" our occasional series on how the Martian Manhunter is constantly getting his ass handed to him by vastly weaker opponents. Today we're going to discuss Salvation Run, a terrible, terrible miniseries about the Suicide Squad capturing pretty much every supervillain on earth and then teleporting them to a cosmic Australia penal planet for a few weeks. It was collected as JLA: Salvation Run, and I reviewed it here if you want to know more about it.

Before we get to the scene in which the Martian Manhunter gets wrecked by a bunch of Flash and Batman villains, let's first review his vast catalog of powers:

—Super-strength, super-speed, super-vision powers, super-breath and invulnerability all comparable (but somewhat weaker then) Superman's

—The ability to change shape

—The ability to reduce his density to the point of complete intangibility

—Invisibility

—Psychic powers that allow him to read minds, communicate telepathically and control the thoughts of others to a certain extent

In other words, he's kind of like Superman with a bad cold + Charles Xavier + Plastic Man + The Vision, and most of his panels should last about two panels, and go something like this.

They never do, of course. And why is that? Is it because it is just too hard to write such a powerful character? Is it because most of the people who write stories featuring Martian Manhunter just aren't terribly creative people? Yes. Or maybe, just maybe, J'onn J'onnz has a death wish, and is always deliberately throwing fights in the hopes that someone will kill him. Suicide by super-villain. There's really no other way to explain some of his losses.

Like the one he suffers in Salvation Run.

So let's first set the stage. Martian Manhunter, who has changed clothes and the shape of his head since the last time we did one of these (if you want to find out exactly why, I'd suggest you read World War III, but really, no one should have to read that), has used his powers to disguise himself as a new version of the villain Blockbuster in order to infiltrate the villains on the prison planet and report back to Batman about them.

When Lex Luthor and the other villains catch Catwoman spying on them, she attempts to deflect their suspicion, by outting the Martian Manhunter. (She knew J'onn was disguised as Blockbuster, because she caught him resuming his normal shape to call Batman; apparently, he gets better reception when he's Martian Manhunter shaped).

Having been busted by Catwoman, he resumes his Martian Manhunter shape, raises his hand like a Shakespearean actor, and explains that he's infiltrated them to see why they were sent to this planet. At that point, Catwoman adds, "And what's more? He's got some kind of communicator!"

That's when someone bounces a piece of fruit off his face, and Resurrection Man villains The Body Doubles and Titans/Outsiders Mammoth attack him. He absorbs some physical blows that a guy who can turn intangible shouldn't have to, but nothing actually threatening to him.



I like how frustrated he is by the fact that the villains won't stop to listen to his explanation. If only there were some way he could communicate information directly to their brains without having to bother having the sound of his voice heard...

Catwoman narrates her escape, thinking that at least J'onn has superpowers and can take care of himself, whereas she couldn't have fought them all off. Although he has superpowers, he hasn't eyt deiced to use any of them besides flight, and continues to gesticulate grandly while Bane and Manticore grab his cape.




Finally convinced he's going to have to fight rather than talk with the villains, J'onn stubbornly refuses to become intangible or flee, but trades punches with his attackers.



J'onn continues to think to himself how this is getting him nowhere, while Luthor and the Rogues plot. Here things get a bit confusing. (This is written by Matthew Sturges, and drawn by Joe Bennett and Belardino Brabo, so if the narrative gets murky here, I guess we have to blame them).



"I can't even see the green punk!" Captain Cold shouts, which would make sense if J'onn had turned invisible which, remember, is one of his very useful powers, but he hasn't, as the reader and all of the characters who aren't Captain Cold are able to see him. Perhpas Captain Cold simply can't see him because the slots in his glasses are so thin?

Abra Kadabra broadcasts the plan by...shouting? A magic shout? Or something? J'onn, who, remember, is also telepathic and can read minds, so should be privy to any information passed between the villains, even if it wasn't spoken out loud, as it seems to have been on this page.

Anyway, J'onn finally realizes that it might be time to leave ("I've stayed too long. There's nothing more I can do"). Wonder Woman villain Silver Swan and DC's most famous rapist Dr. Light distract the still tangible, still visible Martian Manhunter, while Heat Wave, Effigy, Tarpit, Deadshot and whoever the guy in the third panel with the red visor is shoot their fire weapons at J'onn. (Fire is, of course, his only weakness).

That's followed by a two-page splash spread of J'onn falling out of the sky, and then he hits the ground...



...and Bane checks his pulse. They've done it! They defeated the Martian Manhunter! He's not dead, by the way, just knocked out in that last panel.

I like the first of those three panels though. Let's zoom in on a few specific parts of it.

Here's a close-up of J'onn J'onnz's crotch:



This is one instance where his new costume is actually preferable to his older one. With a full pair of pants rather than the little blue briefs he used to wear, he's now free to splay himself wide open without fear of pushing any comic books he's starring in into mature readers territory.


And in the background, there's former Batman villain, longtime Suicide Squad member and current Secret Six member Floyd "Deadshot" Lawton, doing the lamest thing he's ever done:


High-fiving Green Lantern villain—Kyle Rayner Green Lantern villain—Effigy.

So you see, the Martian Manhunter is not the only one to lose his dignity in the course of Salvation Run.



Related:
Pt. 1: Doomsday
Pt. 2: Superboy-Prime
Pt. 3: Bishop

Welcome to Welcome to the Working Week

I was perhaps a little hard on comedian/comics fan Patton Oswalt last week in discussing his not particularly accurate or well-written introduction to Brad Meltzer and company's Justice League of America: The Lightning Saga hardcover. Not that I agree with him that it was a good group of comics, or that Meltzer is a very good comic book writer, or that writing-for-the-trade is a good a thing, or any of the other questionable statements Oswalt made there.

But when I questioned why DC was making a big deal out of Oswalt’s intro on the cover of the book (he got a credit for the intro, but none of the artists involved got cover credits), wondering aloud why he’s someone who’s opinion on comics is worth paying attention to (aside, of course, from the obvious “He’s famous, and not comics-famous, but famous-famous argument), I spoke a little too soon.

It wasn’t until a reader asked just who this Oswalt character is in the comments section that I realized he actually has written some comics before, including a Justice League comic that I liked a lot.


That would be JLA: Welcome to the Working Week, a prestige format one-shot that dropped in 2003, during the first year of Joe Kelly’s run on the parent title.

It may just have been the last good JLA spin-off. After the Morrison relaunch, one-shot specials like this were coming out like clockwork, but as Kelly’s run neared its end, they all but stopped, perhaps in part because the confusion that set in over the whole franchise.

They’ve since re-named and relaunched the monthly JLA comic, and yet it still hasn’t had a stable creative team since Kelly and company left (Meltzer was technically a “regular” writer, but he only stuck around a dozen issues; Dwayne McDuffie is currently the “regular” writer, but he doesn’t even write half an issue’s worth of pages).

Oswalt’s story is set firmly between the “death” of Aquaman during “Our Worlds at War” and the League rejiggering in “The Obsidian Age.”

The team consists of Morrison’s Big Seven line-up, only with Plas in for Aquaman. The real star of the piece is Marlus Randone, a young man from Portland, Oregon who writes and self-publishes a fanzine dealing with superheroes called Save Us!.

When Marlus’ neighborhood is attacked by aliens, he and every civilian there find themselves mass-teleported onto the League’s lunar Watchtower, while the League swoops in to deal with the aliens.

The Leaguers somehow miss Marlus when returning the civilians, and he’s left behind. He spends a whole week as a stowaway on the Watchtower, watching the League from the shadows as they go about their day-to-day work. (Revisiting this after having just read The Lightning Saga collection, I realize that Meltzer’s twelfth issue story “Monitor Duty” was somewhat similar in that it was a day in the life of the League, but Oswalt’s story is obviously much richer in detail, given its size. And the outsider narrator gives the reader a somewhat reliable narrator to listen to, whereas Meltzer’s story had each of the Leaguers take turns thinking out loud for a few panels).

There is an overarching story, involving that horde of aliens, Marlus’ dreams, his past and an alien being named Feast, but mostly the plot seems to serve as an axis on which Oswalt’s observations can revolve around.

He’s quite ably aided and abetted by the art team of Patrick Gleason and Christian Alamy, artists whose style are similar enough to the monthly’s art team of the time, Doug Mahnke and Tom Nguyen, that one could almost mistake them for one another (Oh, and Gleason and Mahnke are two more names that can be added to the Should Be Drawing JLoA Instead Of Ed Benes list).

Gleason’s style is quite adaptable, being perfect for straightforward superheroics and comedy, and he’s able to pull both off in the same panel. He also provides some pretty complex layouts, many of which are jam-packed with crowds and cameos and background details.

Oswalt’s vision of the League is one I like a lot. It’s seemingly heavily influenced by Morrison’s run, based on not only the characters he uses, but the ways he uses them, and the other stories referenced. His League is a super-professional, well-oiled machine of a team, in which the characters finish each other’s sentences, and they all bark half-orders, status reports and jargon to one another in snatches of dialogue as they go about saving the world.

Because of the nature of the story, we get to see a lot more of their down time than we normally do (Essentially, this is a book about the League’s downtime), and yet its clear that the team is the hub of DC’s superhero universe; they’re who all the other heroes check in with, and they’re expected to be the world’s first line of defense.

And his takes on the individual heroes are all great. I think he nails what’s special about all of them to some degree.

When Marlus first comes across J’onn J’onnz, we see the Martian Manhunter seated in the lotus position, hovering while meditating.

Here’s how Oswalt-through-Marlus describes him: “If Superman is Elvis, than this is Dylan. When you’re a kid, you’re all for the spitcurl. But by the time you hit college, you’re forehead all the way. That thinker’s skull, on top of a linebacker’s bod… Like if Socrates played for the Steelers… For every time the world’s been saved in the sunshine by Superman… …it’s been saved in the shadows by this guy.”

Perfect.

His views on Superman, Batman and Wonder Woman all hew pretty close to the modern day standard, although he notably sums up Batman’s position in the League and superhero community perfectly with this one sentence: “Everyone’s always pissed at Batman.”

The Flash and Green Lantern (still Kyle Rayner at this point) are the playful rivals that Morrison set them up as during his run; the two “normal” guys on the team that readers can relate to. Theirs was one of the few relationships in the millennial Justice League that seemed like a real one, and it was too bad when Kyle was switched out for John Stewart (Not because I dislike Stewart, but no one seems to have done anything interesting with him that they couldn’t have done with Kyle).

Plastic Man is similarly played the way Morrison reintroduced him—as the “wacky” superhero. Oswalt seems to be reaching for something to say about the character, as Marlus says, “What’s Plastic Man’s deal, anyway? Does he fight crime, or just react to it?”

But the scene spotlighting Plas is fantastic.

I mean, look at this:

Keith Giffen’s Ambush Bug and Heckler, throwing a kegger with Plas? Of course they’re all pals! Man, that sure does fire the imagination. That’s the kind of story I wanted to see in the wasted, now-cancelled JLA: Classified.

In fact, this isn't the only time Plas an Ambush Bug shared a panel. A.B. was on Plas' "Justice League of Anarchy," which appeared in just one panel of 2001's Justice Leagues: Justice League of Amazons #1:


Anyway, Plas and pals are throwing a big party. The guest-list for which is somewhat…off. Like, I have a hard time believing Ganthet, Animal Man or Batgirl would be interested in attending, but Gleason’s double-page spread is a fun one to pore over to look for cameos.

Let’s see, you’ve got some JLI era Leaguers…


The Inferior Five and someone who looks an awful lot like Bueno Excelente from Hitman…


and Hitman’s Baytor…

(Gleason was apparently a fan of the series. Earlier in the issue, Batman’s shown getting in someone’s face in front of Noonan’s….)

While the party’s going on, Superman, Batman, J’onn, Flash and GL huddle in the locker room, with Superman saying “It’s not my scene,” Batman responding “Not mine, either,” and GL pointing out that the fact neither of them party is the one thing they have in common. (“And the under-wear-on-the-outside-thing,” Flash adds).

Our hero Marlus passes out in Aquaman’s pool room, and flashes back to an Aquaman scene. He recalls the time he saw Aquaman bust some scuba gear-wearing, jet ski-riding kidnappers who had captured a mermaid.

This is the Peter David/Morrison Aquaman, by the way: Hook-handed, bearded and bad-ass. We watch him bust the bad guys siccing a horde of crabs on their leader while passively staring down her harpoon gun.


And Marlus narrates:“Rivers must be to Aquaman what dark alleys are to the Batman… getaway routes for the bad guys from the surface world, secret traveling networks for whatever evil lurks and plots in the deep… A king is a king in every corner of his kingdom… And when he’s not in his kingdom? He’s still a king.”

And when the League ultimately triumphs over Feast, the villain says, “I’m saddened your sea king isn’t here, giving Marlus the opportunity to declare in the last panel of this sequence:

Pretty cool.

Re-reading this for, like, the fifth time, I realized I think I would have preferred to have read a hardcover collection of Oswalt’s run on JLoA with a short prose introduction by Brad Meltzer.

I’m not sure if Oswalt could have turned out a solid 12- or more issue run, or if this one-shot amounted to everything he had to say about the Justice League, but he’s certainly written more good League stories than Meltzer has at this point, with far fewer tries.

And, because it was Sally’s comment that ultimately reminded me that the Patton Oswalt who wrote that intro and hyped up Secret Invasion recently is the same one who wrote Welcome to the Working Week, here’s an image of one of her favorite things, as drawn by Gleason and Alamy in the book: