DC Versus Marvel Omnibus Part 1: All the non-comics content

I'm not a fan of the giant omnibus format. 

The inches-thick hardcovers are just too big, too heavy and too unwieldy. Those that I've handled before, both the ones I've bought and the ones I've seen at the library (where they tend to suffer a lot more damage than smaller comics collections and need repairs far more often), tend to make unwholesome sounding creaks if I hold them at the wrong angle or open them too wide, as if threatening to break on me. 

They're certainly hard to take with you anywhere, barely fitting in a messenger bag and threatening to bust out of it, so they aren't books that I can read on my lunch breaks, or when dining out alone at a restaurant. And even in the comfort of one's home they can be difficult to read, as one can only read them in certain positions.

If publishers must release giant omnibus format books, I would prefer they do so in paperback form, like the recent-ish Sandman Mystery Theater Compendium Vol. 1 that DC released last year. At 980 pages, it was of course still very big, very heavy and very unwieldly, but it was doable, and its basic integrity didn't seem threatened by its own weight or seem unstable like an old rickety, ramshackle house in a storm.

All that said, I do find myself occasionally attracted to the books that get published in the format and have even bought one: DC's 2022 Batman No Man's Land Omnibus Vol. 1, a thousand-pager collecting the many stories published under the "No Man's Land" banner. I only made it about 100 pages into it before giving up, though; it was just too hard to read. 

Despite my dislike of the format, I couldn't resist the DC Versus Marvel Omnibus, a huge hardcover collecting about half of the stories the two publishers have collaborated on over the years, with the other half relegated to a second volume, DC Versus Marvel: The Amalgam Age Omnibus, which looks like it's currently slated for a late December release (More on which publications are in which books below). 

While there's some historical significance for these rare-ish publications, and an awful lot of work by some of the greatest and best-known talents to work in mainstream comics among them, I've read remarkably few of them, partly because many were published before my time, partly because of my ambivalence about the Marvel characters (I didn't really read any Marvel until a good decade after I started reading comics, and never developed the sense of loyalty or ownership of their characters and universe that I felt for DC's) and partly because they were relatively hard to find. 

This then, offered a chance get them all in one fell swoop, even if it was awfully pricey for a single comic book. Still, I've been buying fewer and fewer comics in any format, I could afford it. (As long-time readers have surely noticed, I gave up on serially-published comics some years ago—with only very rare exceptions—and I now try to buy as few trades and collections as possible, given how quickly they can fill up my bookshelves, and my bookshelves then fill up my living space.)

Given the enormity of the book, which contains almost 20 over-sized comics stories and hundreds of pages of extras, it would simply be too big to review in a single "A Month of Wednesdays" blog post, or even in a single blog post devoted to the book alone.

So, as I mentioned the other day, my plan is to tackle the book crossover by crossover, and basically review my way through it. 

Before reading the first crossover story, though, I decided I should devote a post to all the...stuff in the book, given how much of it there actually is. So let's here take a look at all the stuff other than the comics content, before digging into the first of the crossovers. 

Let's start with the basic outline of the tome. 

The 960-page collection includes almost every DC/Marvel character crossover, from the classic 1976 Superman Vs. The Amazing Spider-Man to the millennial Batman/Daredevil. That means that, in addition to those two stories, the omnibus includes (deep breath) Marvel Treasury Edition #28 (Superman and Spider-Man again), DC Special Series #27 (Batman vs. The Hulk), Marvel and DC Present: The Uncanny X-Men and The New Teen Titans #1, Batman/Punisher: Lake of Fire #1 (featuring the Jean-Paul Valley version of Batman, weirdly enough), Punisher/Batman: Deadly Knights #1, Darkseid Vs. Galactus: The Hunger #1, Spider-Man and Batman #1, Green Lantern/Silver Surfer: Unholy Alliances #1, Silver Surfer/Superman #1, Batman/Captain America #1, Daredevil/Batman #1, Batman/Spider-Man #1, Superman/Fantastic Four #1 and Incredible Hulk Vs. Superman #1. 

So, what's missing? 

Well, most obviously given the title of this cinder block of a collection is 1996's four-issue miniseries DC Vs. Marvel. That's slated to be collected in the upcoming DC Vs. Marvel: The Amalgam Age Omnibus, along with all of the Amalgam one-shots, and the two sequel miniseries, DC/Marvel All Access and Unlimited Access. This makes sense, given that the Amalgam comics, each of which featured brand-new heroes that combined DC and Marvel characters, resulted from the events of the DC Vs. Marvel series, as at one point during the proceedings the two fictional universes are fused into a new combined universe.

Also missing is 2003's JLA/Avengers, which is not slated for inclusion in the Amalgam Age Omnibus. It's a curious, and quite unfortunate, omission, as that four-issue crossover series by Kurt Busiek and George Perez is the best of the DC/Marvel crossovers (at least of those that I've read) and one of the better inter-company crossovers of all time. 

It's also, one imagines, the single crossover that would be of the greatest interest to the largest number of readers, given not only its quality and the reputation of its creators, but also the current high profile of the two teams, particularly the Avengers, who weren't exactly the household name they are now 20 years ago.

JLA/Avengers was first collected in a 2004 hardcover set, and then again in 2008 as a trade paperback. An extremely limited edition was released in 2022 to help the now late Perez with his medical bills, and demand then was quite high, which made me assume it would be collected herein. Perhaps if these two omnibuses sell well enough DC and Marvel will see fit to also re-release JLA/Avengers. 

As for this collection, it actually starts out with some Perez art, as the cover is a Perez piece referencing the first couple of DC/Marvel crossovers, repurposed from the 1991 Crossover Classics collection. (If you bought or buy the omnibus through the direct market though, you also have the opportunity to choose a variant cover edition featuring a new image by Jim Lee and Scott Williams; it's not the greatest work from Lee, and, compositionally at least, is nowhere near as strong or dynamic an image as the Perez cover, but, given Lee's early years as a superstar artist at Marvel followed by a career as an executive at DC, he's probably one of the best choices to produce a cover for a book like this.)

Given just how many pages of comics content there are in this book, it might be surprising that the publishers found room for other miscellanea to include, but there are several introductions and forewords, two afterwords and plenty of backmatter.

First here's a brand-new introduction from Paul Levitz dated February of this year. Levitz notes that he was "in the room where it happened" when it came to that first Superman/Spider-Man crossover that was the very first collaboration between the two publishers, which for a majority of their history were among the most bitter rivals in the industry. 

Levitz was, at that time, an assistant editor to DC editor to Gerry Conway, who was chosen by the executives to write the crossover, as he was, at the time, the only person to have written both characters. The art team was similarly chosen to best represent the two publishers and their respective flagship characters: Pencil artist Ross Andru was the only artist to have drawn both characters and was then working as Spidey's primary artist, and inker Dick Giordano was chosen because he was widely regarded as the best inker in the business.

Levitz would go on to be involved in the next round of inter-company crossovers: The next Superman/Spider-Man crossover, that of Batman and The Hulk, and that of the X-Men and Teen Titans, after which things fell apart, and the publishers wouldn't see fit to try again for another decade or so (That decade, of course, was the '90s, the decade in which the vast majority of the stories in this collection were published).

Levitz's introduction is followed by not one, not two, but three forewords, each of which was previously published in the previously mentioned Crossover Classics collection. These are by Conway, Giordano and Tom DeFalco, and all focus on that initial Supes/Spidey book. 

The next prose piece, also culled from the pages of Crossover Classics, is by Marv Wolfman, and details how he almost wrote the second Supes/Spidery crossover (Instead, Jim Shooter would get the honor, though the comic's credits include a notation reading "Special thanks to Marv Wolfman for plot suggestions.") He also mentions being pegged to write the second X-Men/Teen Titans crossover...a crossover that never actually came to pass. 

That's followed by two story-specific introductions from Crossover Classics, one by Batman/Hulk writer Len Wein and another by X-Men/Teen Titans writer Chris Claremont. 

About 300 pages in we get another prose piece original to this volume, this one from long-time Marvel and DC editor Mike Carlin, dated March 2024. In it, he discusses the resumption of DC/Marvel crossovers with 1994's Batman/Punisher: Lake of Fire #1. This comic, and the dozen or so crossovers that followed, resulted from, as Carlin explains, a new generation of writers and editors coming in at both publishers, ending the "cold war" between Marvel and DC (And it helped that these newcomers were all comics fans turned comics pros, and thus had an entirely different attitude about the characters than their predecessors). He also seems to intimate that a new cold war began in the early years of the century (with JLA/Avengers being the sole exception of new DC/Marvel collaborations), seemingly because "some new players would join the mix in the early 2000s."

After the last pages of 2000's Batman/Daredevil: King of New York #1, we get a pair of afterwords, both written specifically for this collection.

The first is from writer Ron Marz, who is quite familiar with the intercompany crossover, having written the DC Vs. Marvel miniseries, as well as Green Lantern/Silver Surfer (and several DC/Dark Horse crossovers). He cites one of the crossovers collected in this book as having reignited his passion for the medium when he was a teenager and had drifted away from super-comics: Claremont and Walt Simonson's X-Men/Teen Titans book, which he reveals he still keeps a copy of in his desk to pull out and flip through whenever he feels the need for inspiration.

That's followed by a very interesting piece by Tom Brevoort, who reveals the original idea for the Superman/Spider-Man team-up was not for a comic book at all, but for a movie. That was the idea of David Obst, the literary agent that kickstarted the first DC/Marvel crossover, anyway. (The idea of such a film sounds pretty insane to even imagine in 1976, two years before the first Superman movie and 26 years before the first Spider-Man movie. Even today, in the years after characters as unlikely as Ant-Man, Aquaman, The Guardians of The Galaxy and Blue Beetle III have all had a movie or two or three, the idea of a DC/Marvel crossover movie still seems so unlikely as to sound crazy.)

Brevoort also discusses a few tidbits about that original Superman/Spider-Man crossover, like the fact that Neal Adams and John Romita Sr. did some uncredited touching up of the art, and the mathematic specificity that went into the story, with each hero appearing in the exact same number of panels and being drawn at the same size in aggregate (If Superman appeared in the foreground and Spider-Man in the distant background of one panel, for example, there would be another panel where Supes was in the background and Spidey foregrounded).

And if you're beginning to think that this sounds like an awful lot of bonus material for a book that pretty much sells itself, wait—there's more!

There's Conway's nine-page story outline for the original Superman/Spider-Man crossover, about 100 pages of art (much of it in black and white) with notes from many of the creators who worked on the pages (Darryl Banks, J.M. DeMatteis, Barry Kitson, Ron Lim, Ron Marz, Roger Stern), the covers from the four Crossover Classic collections (pencilled by Perez, John Romita Jr., Salvador Larroca and Ed McGuinness), Alex Ross' homage to Superman Vs. The Amazing Spider-Man (from a 1999 issue of Wizard Magazine), a fold-out of Dan Jurgens' and Ross' cover to Superman/Fantastic Four, a fold-out by John Byrne and Terry Austin promoting DC Vs. Marvel (which also adorns the cover of the collection, under the book jacket), a few pages of house ads promoting the various crossovers and, in the edition I got anyway, a fold-out of Jim Lee's variant cover for the omnibus, full-color on one side and black and white on the other.

It's an awful lot of stuff, without even accounting for the comics stories themselves. As much as it is, it's welcome. This is, after all, a book selling for over a $100—it's labeled for $150, though I didn't pay that much for my copy—so it's nice to see the publishers seemingly doing as much as they can to make it worth that high price. 

Now, with all that out of the way, I guess I'm ready to start actually reading the comics themselves, huh?

Next: 1976's Superman Vs. The Amazing Spider-Man #1

Review: DC Primal Age

Walmart is no longer the only big box retail giant with exclusive DC Comics; Target gets its own 100-Page Giant in the form of DC Primal Age, a $9.99 one-shot featuring all-new material from a surprising line-up of comics talent, ranging from Marv Wolfman, Louise Simonson and Jerry Ordway to Scott Koblish, Phil Winslade and Brent Anderson.

The comic is based on Funko's DC Primal Age toy line. The line appears to be one big, elaborate Masters of the Universe homage, with DC Comics characters applied to the original MOTU template, from the proportions of the figures to the beast mounts to the Castle Grayskull-like Batcave playset. For the purposes of the comic then, the idea seems to be an Elseworlds Justice League story in a sword-and-sorcery setting (A cover blurb reads "DC's Heroes As You've Never Seen Them Before!", but 1996's League of Justice and 2001's JLA: Riddle of The Beast both did something similar).

For increased veracity, I suppose the ideal format for a DC Primal Age comic book story would be character-specific 15-page mini-comics packed with the toys, but instead DC seems to have gone with an extra-length comic book of their usual dimensions.

The bulk of the special consists of a 32-page story written by Wolfman and drawn by Scott Koblish, with Tony Avina coloring the art. In it, a mysterious hooded figure is stealing glowing orbs of mystical power, and Batman--wielding a logo-shaped bat-tle axe and riding upon a horse-sized Ace the Bathound, seeks to stop her. This thief turns out to be Wonder Woman, and she is trying to steal the orbs before The Joker, who here looks like a chalk-white He-Man figure with a Joker head atop its shoulders and "HAHAHAHA" scrawled across this chest*, can use then as part of his nefarious plans. Joker wants to use the maguffins as part of he and King Shark's plan to sink Themyscira below the sea and rule the world and suchlike.

Together, Wonder Woman and Batman visit Aquaman in Atlantis, and then travel to Themyscira, where allies Superman, The Flash and Green Lantern (Hal Jordan flavor) meet them. There's a big battle between good and evil, during which The Scarecrow uses his powers to turn some of the Leaguers evil for a bit, but ultimately the good guys win, Themyscira isn't sunk and there's talk of formalizing this alliance of heroes into some sort of Justice League, although the suspicious Batman doesn't quite trust Superman, because he is an alien.

Koblish

On a mechanical level, Wolfman's story works just fine, but there's not much in the way of style or flair to the writing. Indeed, it's strange how little the story has to do with the unique--or at least, unusual--setting of the so-called "Primal Age." The characters' dialogue all sounds just as it would were this story set in our modern, mundane, magic-less world and, indeed, it wouldn't be difficult to rewrite the story to set it in a version of the regular DCU; it would mostly be a matter of having Koblish draw Batman on a motorcycle instead of a giant dog, for example, or calling "Apollo's Solar Orbs" something like "Solar Super-Batteries" instead.

It's frankly quite disappointing, as there is obviously a lot of potential to do something fun, funny or at least just different and interesting with these characters in a Robert E. Howard by way of He-Man setting, but Wolfman doesn't seem to take the opportunity. I suppose, given the nature of the project, it's quite possible that doing anything beyond providing a script that gets all of the characters in it at some point just wasn't in his remit, however.

That leaves a lot up to Koblish, though, as a bland, unimaginative super-comic script means it's all on the artist to make the story worthwhile. Koblish too is hamstrung, though, as the designs for all of the characters were established by the toys themselves before the comic was being drawn, so unless he was involved in the design process for the action figures as well, Koblish doesn't really get to go crazy with the "Justice League, but as barbarians" aesthetic.

As for those designs, there's not a lot to them either. The characters all basically resemble their "normal" selves, which I suppose is something of a must since they need to recognizable as Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman and so on, and so the alterations are relatively minor. You can see stitching in some of the costumes, so they look as if they were made long before the invention of spandex. Everyone's got harnesses, arm-bands, furry underpants (in primary colors) and fur-trimmed boots. Superman has a spiked metal ball over his hand like Machiste from Warlord**, for some reason. That's...really about it. Because most of the book takes place in either Atlantis or Themyscira, settings that are always more-or-less depicted as islands of sword-and-sorcery oases within the modern DC Universe, they don't even really need to be reimagined.

Taken altogether, the main story is thus pretty dull and disappointing, and did little to grab my interest or fire my imagination. Granted, I am likely aged far beyond the target/Target audience, but, on the other hand, I've been reading/re-reading the original He-Man mini-comics as I gradually work my way through Dark Horse's 2015 He-Man and The Masters of The Universe Mini-Comic Collection***, and many of those still have pleasures to offer me.

It is fortunate then that this book contains an additional 68 pages. These are five shorter stories--about ten pages apiece, with title pages pushing the book up to meet the "100-Page Comic Giant!" size boasted on the cover--by different creative teams, each focusing on a particular character within the DC Primal Age--and these are all actually pretty engaging, each offering at least something for a reader to grab on to.

These five shorts were all strong enough that, in retrospect, I wish the entire book was an anthology, and rather than a full-length Wolfman/Koblish story, the book opened with a short comics prologue or framing sequence that made room for more shorts featuring different characters and different art styles by different creators (As a Scarecrow fan, for example, I would have liked to spend ten-pages with that character, rather than the handful of panels he gets in the opening story).

Ordway

Jerry Ordway both writes and draws the first of these short stories, "Born On A Monday," and you can probably guess which villain appears in it. Ordway's art, here colored by Wendy Broome, is as highly detailed as ever before--perhaps even more so--and is an immediate and dramatic departure from Koblish's art in the previous pages.

It opens with Wonder Woman atop a horse, charging to rescue a young boy from a mountain lion. Wonder Woman looks like "herself," with a slimmer build and more natural-looking hair than in Koblish's take, and given that her current costume is just ancient armor, the costume she wears here looks not unlike what she could be wearing in the DCU comics. It's different, of course, with golden rather than silver bracelets, a nose guard built into her tiara, and something rather weird going on with her boobs, which seem to be separated by a chest plate with special holes cut out for them, but there's not much about it that says "barbarian" rather than just "alternate Wonder Woman costume."

After she saves the child from the cat, she tries to take him home, and he leads her to a swamp full of orphaned children, each of whom has a crutch or rag over their eyes to denote some physical imperfection. Wonder Woman is then attacked by Solomon Grundy, dressed in a ripped-up black robe and sandals rather than his usual ripped-up black suit and boots, but as they fight Wondy learns that Grundy has adopted the children, each of whom was tossed into this swamp by the rich assholes at the nearby castle, so she goes off to have words with them.

Again, this is a story that doesn't necessarily need to be told in this setting, and would work just as well in the regular DCU setting, but if there's not much to the story, Ordway nevertheless tells it masterfully, and his art here is just as good--if not better--than I've ever seen it.

Winslade

The next story, "Ice & Fire," carries the highly-detailed, high fantasy aesthetic of Ordway's story forward, thanks to some quite gorgeous artwork by Phil Winslade (colored by Carrie Strachan). This script is written by Louise Simonson, and it stars Mr. Freeze, who does not appear in the lead story. Here Freeze is a blue-skinned mage with magical ice powers. Engaged to a woman named Nora who felt faint in the heat of his desolate, desert kingdom, he built a magnificent ice palace for her, but he became overwhelmed by his powers and, touching her, froze her solid, and now strives to find a way to free her from the curse.

That tragic story is told in flashback, while the majority of the action involves a really rather cool-looking fire-breathing dragon attacking Freeze's palace. He arms himself with a helmet, gauntlets and a sword of ice and does battle with it, ultimately freezing it solid. On the last page, King Shark approaches to recruit him, and Winslade's King Shark is as cool as his Freeze or Dragon; rather than the silly, Street Sharks-style version on Jon Bogdanove's cover, Winslade's King Shark is tall and thin and dark, looking more like an eel in shape than a shark, and bearing black pin-point eyes and an upside down smile full of triangle teeth.

Anderson

Simonson scripts the next short too, "Darkest Knight," a Primal Age Batman origin story drawn by Brent Anderson and colored by Broome. Batman is an ordinary man in a blue fur cape fighting crime with sword and shield when, one night, he saves a mage named Lucius Fox from a pack of demons conjured by a generic evil wizard. Fox uses his own magical abilities to heal a wound Batman sustained in the battle, and then follows him back home to the Batcave playset.

This Batman's origin is told in a few lines of conversation--Prince Bruce's parents were killed by a wizard, and he was tossed into a deep dark, crevasse filled with bats. There he adopted his new identity and set up his base, intent on fighting the mages who "run roughshod over the non-magical folk." Fox helps him by giving him a crime-detecting crystal ball, a new and stronger costume and then transforming his throwing daggers into Batarangs.

Derenick

Ordway scripts the next story, but doesn't draw it. Instead, two-thirds of it are drawn pencil artist Chuck Patton and inker Karl Kesel, while Tom Derenick handles three pages (Kelly Fitzpatrick colors the whole shebang). It's called "The Joker's Wild"--there's not a title among these stories that hasn't been used at least 300 times before--and it naturally stars The Joker. He rides atop a giant purple lizard, who looks at bit like a sharp-toothed dewback from Star Wars, and he and his hyena horde--a small army of men dressed in hyena skins--are pillaging a town, searching for a vague treasure that I think is meant to be one of the Apollo orbs from the opening story.

There's a neat bit about a peasant boy who shows kindness to the giant lizard--feeding it a pumpkin and beer--and The Joker deciding to spare the boy. The act of seeming mercy isn't actually mercy, but a sort of reward for making his lizard monster funny, which was an interesting bit of character work in an otherwise generic-ish story.

Pollard and Marzan Jr

The final story is "Not A Bird," and its written by Wolfman, drawn by Keith Pollard and Jose Marzan Jr and colored by Strachan. This too is one more story that is your average DC superhero story--Superman appears to go rogue and start committing evil acts, a suspicious Batman fights him, but it turns out that Superman was innocent and it was Bizarro who was doing all the bad stuff--made medieval. At least in this particular case Wolfman puts some extra effort into finding pre-industrial age analogues to elements of their stories, so that Superman hails from Metropolis Shire and Batman from Gotham Village, for example, or that Batman is summoned by a signal fire shining through a bat-shaped hole in a tent, or that the authorities try to fight the rogue Superman with kryptonite-tipped arrows.

Pollard and Marzan's art is pretty incredible, and filled with images of dynamic human figures in action, with most of the images of the super-people drawn to resemble the "real" Superman and Batman, only with a touch or two of the Primal Age designs to remind a reader this isn't supposed to be set in the 20th or 21st century, despite how far Pollard has strayed from the toy designs.

And then, presented almost at random, is the best page of the book, a pin-up of the Ace-mounted Batman charging The Joker and his lizard monster, by Michael Wm. Kaluta:

I certainly wouldn't mind reading 100 pages that looked like that.

The strengths of the back half of the book makes up for the weakness of the front half, but I'm not entirely convinced the whole package is really worth $10. Regardless, I won't be at all surprised if we get more DC Primal Age specials in the future, as Aquaman, The Flash, Green Lantern, Scarecrow and King Shark don't really get much of a spotlight compared to the other heroes, and, obviously, there are so many more characters that can be Primal Aged. This issue's cover, for example, features Luthor and Krypto, neither of whom appear within the book.

If more comics do appear, I hope that DC will continue to assign the stories to artists of this caliber, and that the writers lean harder into the setting.



*Unfortunately, he never says "Just call me Ha-Man" at any point in the story.


**I was actually thinking about Warlord a lot while reading this comic, for the rather obvious reasons.


***The new-ish Netflix series She-Ra and The Princesses of Power re-ignited my interest in the goings on of Eternia and Etheria, and after watching that I wanted to refamiliarize myself with the source material which is, obviously, quite different. That show, by the way, is really great.

So, who created Nightwing...?

Here's something I've been wondering about off and on over the course of the last month or so, ever since I saw the above credit at the beginning of Nightwing Vol. 2: Night of the Owls, which makes it pretty clear that Nightwing was created by Marv Wolfman and George Perez.

Now, please don't misunderstand me. I am not going to argue with the credit, and I'm happy those two men—both of whom are very talented men, whose work has certainly given me hours and hours of entertainment in my life—are recognized for their contribution to the character and I assume (or, perhaps I should say, hope) that such credits bring with them some sort of financial remuneration.

I am simply curious as to why some DC Comics heroes, for example, always have the names of their creators cited in comics they appear in, why some characters never have the names of their creators cited, and why some sometimes do and sometimes don't. There's probably a degree of legal reasons (There certainly is for the current way the credits for Superman's creators appear in Superman comics now, as not only are Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster credited, but there's also a "By Special Arrangement with the Jerry Seigel Family" following it these days).

Nightwing seems like a particularly murky character for anyone to be assigned credit for creating, though.

The character Dick Grayson, the secret identity of the original Robin, who would grow up to abandon that identity and take on the new one of Nightwing, was created in 1940 by Bob Kane and Jerry Robinson and Bill Finger.

The superhero codename "Nightwing" was created by Edmond Hamilton and Curt Swan in a 1963 issue of Superman; it's the name that a disguised Superman takes on while fighting crime in The Bottle City of Kandor, where he has no superpowers, but operates as a sort of Kyrptonian version of Batman (with Jimmy Olsen in the sidekick role as Flamebird). That version of Nightwing was returned to repeatedly in the Silver Age (as in the story under the above cover).

And then in a 1984 issue of Tales of the Teen Titansm (not the one above, but that's the nicest cover image of the original costume I could find), Grayson finally sheds his Robin identity in favor of the codename Nightwing, complete a new costume.

That comic was written by Marv Wolfman and drawn by George Perez, so they get the creation credit. But they didn't create the character or the codename, merely assigned the latter to the former, and Perez created a new costume for him, although that's been changed repeatedly over the years, and, obviously, bears no real resemblance to what Nightwing is currently wearing (I'm not sure who designed his New 52 costume, but whether it was Jim Lee, who was originally credited as redesigning the whole universe, or one of the many other artists who helped him, it's worth noting that it is essentially a refinement of his previous costume, which was itself a refinement of the costume before that, and so on back to Perez's original, I suppose).

It seems then that more accurate credits would be something along these lines:

Dick Grayson created by Bob Kane, Jerry Robinson and Bill Finger

Nightwing created by Edmond Hamilton and Curt Swan

Dick Grayson-as-Nightwing created by Marv Wolfman and George Perez

Nightwing's current costume designed by Jim Lee or Whoever

This particular character seems like one of the trickier and murkier when it comes to assigning aspects of creation, as there's over 40 years difference between the introduction of the character "Dick Grayson" and the introduction of his Nightwing identity and costume.

But Nightwing is hardly alone and having a knotty creation story. For example, how to deal with all of those Golden Age superheroes re-created as new versions in The Silver Age under Julius Schwartz's direction? You know, The Flash, The Green Lantern, The Atom, Hawkman?

Gardner Fox and Harry Lampert created a super-fast character named The Flash who wore a lightning bolt symbol over a red shirt in 1940, but Robert Kanighter, John Broome and Carmine Infantino created a whole new character with a different costume, keeping just the name, powers and the lightning bolt and red top.

Or, more dramatically, Martin Nodell and Bill Finger created their Green Lantern, a character who had the power to manipulate green energy channeled through magic ring he charged with a magic lantern the same year the original Flash debuted. But in the '60s, John Broome and Gil Kane gave a new character that name and some of the same powers, but with a vastly different back-story. And man, what about a character like Green Lantern Kyle Rayner, another new character with the codename of the original, but who spins out of the elaborate back-story that spun out of the second Lantern...?

I guess it just goes to show how collaborative these sorts of shared-universe, corporate super-comics can be.

I'm all for giving credit where credit's due, and money to creators whose creations are making money (Either because doing so is a contractual obligation or simply because there's so much money to throw around it wouldn't kill a movie studio to give the guys who forge their golden geese a coupla extra bucks here and there).

I'm just glad I'm not the guy who has to determine who created how much of what, and how to assign the credit.

Review: Teen Titans: Deathtrap

You know those occasional issues of super-team comics which focus on the changing of the line-up? Where the plot more or less stalls for 22 pages while the writer checks in with the various characters, who take turns explaining to one another why they’re leaving the team, or why they’re joining the team?

After slogging through two trade paperbacks’ worth of Sean McKeever’s disappointing run on Teen Titans, I realized that during that period the series had begun to seem like an entire regular, monthly series comprised of nothing but issues like that, or perhaps a single changing-of-the-line-up issue decompressed into a year’s worth of comics, McKeever’s plotting and characterization too often taking a back seat to explaining changes in the cast.

So I was quite surprised when I got to Teen Titans: Deathtrap to find out just how focused and tightly-plotted a book it was. It collects a crossover between three different titles—Teen Titans, Titans and Vigilanted—and featured McKeever and Marv Wolfman taking turns writing chapters, and yet it was the most consistent, straightforward and accessible of the Titans trades I’ve read recently.

I won’t go so far as to say that it’s a good comic book, but it is a more-or-less complete story, but it’s definitely a better chunk of comics than On The Clock and Changing of the Guard. It has a beginning, a middle and an end. I could make sense of it without having to consult Wikipedia, creator message boards and interviews, and my memory of past DC solicitations. It was also the only one of the three that seemed to know where it was going from chapter to chapter.

It’s got a lot of problems, big and small, but it doesn’t dare you to keep reading it, the way those other Teen Titans trades did, and, as an added benefit, there’s less splatterstick gross-out gore and creepy sexual bits.

The most apparent problem is probably just how ugly a comic book this is; if the scripting seems better thought-out here than in the Teen Titans trades immediately preceding it, the art is just as slap-dash and drawn-by-whichever-artist-had-a-hole-in-his-schedule as the earlier chunks of the title. There are five artist credited as pencillers, and six as inkers, and it shouldn’t surprise you to learn that very few of them have anything approaching similar styles.

What surprised me most about the art were the fairly obvious mistakes sprinkled throughout, which not only passed the original editors of the various titles unnoticed, but apparently that of the editors assembling this trade collection as well (Unless they were noticed, but the general philosophy is something along the lines of “Eh, fuck it—no one buys these trades for the art anyway, it’s just not worth redrawing a half-dozen panels.”) These include the smooth, bald head of Cyborg sprouting hair between pages, Static changing his costume design during a plane ride and Eddie changing clothes three times during the same flight, including taking off his street clothes to don his old Red Devil costume, complete with the red skin he wore under it….? Or Something?

Perhaps less apparent, but somewhat fundamental, was the slow realization that it’s rather weird that this is story is collected as Teen Titans: Deathrap instead of Titans: Deathtrap (The spine has the number “11” on the cover too, so this is apparently Teen Titans Vol. 11). The teen team, the one appearing on the cover of the trade, is the focus of only the first chapter of the book, in which Cyborg apparently tries to kill them all using the high-tech defenses he built into their headquarters.

After that, they jump into a jet plane to fly to New York City and join the adult Titans in their hunt for the hero-turned-villain Jericho, and don’t reappear until near the climax of the book. So there’s about 100 pages or so which are Teen Titan-free, and focus on the grown-up Titans and Vigilante trying to track down Jericho—the Titans to apprehend him and save him from himself, Vigilante to kill him.

Perhaps Teen Titans trades sell better than Titans ones, and thus that was simply the best way to brand the book? I don’t know; it was simply something that confused me (And, I admit, disappointed me a bit, since that is such a weird and interesting line-up, and it seemed to be composed of characters that McKeever would have more-or-less exclusive control over, making future issues of his smoother and less likely to have to explain comings and goings).

Here’s the story: After Cyborg, working through Titans Tower, tries very hard to kill the new and improved Teen Titans team, it’s revealed that someone is possessing Cyborg and that someone is Jericho, the body-possessing Titan who went from being the second-hairiest character during the classing Marv Wolfman/George Perez run to being a crazy maniac attempting to kill all the made-up presidential candidates in DC’s ill-advised, chicken-shit piece of garbage 2008 miniseries DC Universe: Decisions (A book so damn bad that DC never even collected it…? They collected Countdown!).

The new Vigilante, Vigilante IV? (…or V? Maybe VI…?) is on Jericho’s trail for…some reason. He also has a back-story and motivations I never really figured out, as this storyline seemed to run parallel to several ongoing sub-plots of his own title that crossed over with the two Titans books here. It wasn’t a negative type of confusion I felt when these elements would come up, though. That is, I knew what I didn’t know, and I knew why I didn’t know it and where I could learn about it if I cared to, and it was made clear I wasn’t missing anything important—for all intents and purposes, all one needed to know was that this Vigilante was of the Punisher-type, rather than the original singing cowboy type. (Well, I didn’t understand why the Vigilante narrated all of the chapters of the story featuring him, but not the other chapters, which were narrator-less…I’ll never understand why so many comics are written with inconsistent points-of-view like this).

Jericho’s deal is that all of the body-possessing of villains and other’s that he’s done over the years has left psychic residue in his own mind, so he picks up bits of other people’s personalities, including an awful lot of villains’ personalities. He wants to prove himself the world’s greatest assassin, one-upping his father Deathstroke by killing all of the current Titans, and he plans on doing it with a really stupid death trap.

The idea is to create an elaborate hostage situation, get all of the Titans in the same room with him and the hostages and then—wait for it—blow them all up. With dynamite.

It’s a pretty Wile E. Coyote kind of plot, and it falls apart if one thinks about it too long (that is, at all). I got the impression that Wolfman and/or McKeever came up with the nature of the death trap first, and then plugged whatever Titans were on the teams at the time into the scenario, but it’s the sort of trap that you might spring on, say, Batman and Robin, but the Titans?

Regardless of how much dynamite you use, it wouldn’t be enough to blow up Miss Martian (who is invulnerable and can turn intangible) or Bombshell (who absorbs energy). I don’t know for sure, but I would expect Blue Beetle’s armor and or force fields could protect him. I think Donna Troy’s as strong as Wonder Woman, and can take an explosion. Raven can teleport herself…and everyone else. The Flash could outrun and explosion, or vibrate through the concussive force. Or, um, just run everyone out of range of the explosion in a split-second before it goes off.

Obviously the Titans don’t all get killed anyway, but it’s a pretty drama-free climax, given the mundane nature of the threat and, more disappointingly for me, the lack of imagination in its creation. If you’re going to be using The Flash in your comic, you really have to at least think of half-assed, comic book science explanations for why it might be possible to hurt someone who can move at light speed, you know? Sure, it ain’t always easy, but seeing writers wriggle through the obstacle course previous writers have established for them is at least part of the fun of reading corporate, serial super-comics that have been around for decades.

Not that the Flash plays a very big role in the story. Few of the characters actually do…in fact, most of the characters are lucky to even get a few lines. Cyborg, Beast Boy, Donna Troy and Vigilante have fairly large roles, and Ravager gets a bit of a spotlight near the end, but after the first, Teen Titans-focused chapter, it’s very much a Vigilante vs. Jericho story, with a few of the Old New Teen Titans in supporting roles.

So Teen Titans: Deathtrap? Not very good—but much less not very good than some of the other Teen Titans trade paperbacks one could read instead.