I also just recently learned that Alan Moore and Todd McFarlane had actually collaborated on a second issue of Spawn.

To his credit, Image Comics co-founder and Spawn creator Todd McFarlane must have realized quite early on that, despite the fact that he was now writing and drawing his own massively successful creator-owned series, he was primarily a comics artist and not a comics writer. So less than a year into his new title, he hired not one, not two, not three but four guest writers, each producing an issue apiece, and each of those running back-to-back-to-back-to-back. 

And they weren't just any writers, either. Rather they were probably three of the bigger names in mainstream superhero comics of the time* (two of these, I think, being among the best writers of such comics, even though we've since rightly canceled one of them, and thus "lost" his once admirable body of work), and the fourth one of them being one of the better-known cartoonists responsible for an ambitious and long-lived creator-owned series, of the sort McFarlane and his fellow founders probably looked to as a form of inspiration.

Alan Moore. Neil Gaiman. Frank Miller. Dave Sim. They teamed with McFarlane for issues #8-11 of the series, providing the phenomenally popular artist-turned-writer/artist with some important building blocks for his comic, characters and elements that would continue to inform what became the Spawn franchise for years...decades, even**. (I just checked, and the latest issue of Spawn listed on comics.org is Spawn #368, so the main title has since surpassed Sim's 300-issue run of Cerebus, although McFarlane wouldn't personally write and/or draw all of those issues. Erik Larsen's Savage Dragon, by the way, seems to be closing in on Cerebus, the latest issue of that series listed on comics.org being this past July's #277.)

Looking at the table of contents of Spawn Compendium 1, the massive 1,000+ page tome collecting the first 50 issues of McFarlane's series, I noticed other guest-writers from these first years of the series. There was a three-issue arc by Grant Morrison, two issues by letterer Tom Orzechowski and an Andrew Grossberg, a second issue by Alan Moore and an issue by a writer named Julia Simmons. 

That second issue by Moore was 1995's Spawn #37, another done-in-one collaboration with McFarlane handling the art. I must have so thoroughly stopped paying attention to Spawn by that point that I don't remember even hearing about Moore returning for an issue that year and thus didn't realize it even existed until I perused the Compendium (Of course, I had just started college that fall, so what might have been going on with Image Comics then wasn't exactly high on my list of priorities at the time).

Since I had checked out the collection anyway, I figured I might as well read that issue as well. And, of course, write about it here.

First, I suppose I should note that it is not as good as Moore's Spawn #8, which I just reread after reading this. That first issue was something of a side story, starring Billy Kincaid, the ice cream man/child killer that Spawn killed in Spawn #5 (the last issue of the series I had bought before the guest-writers, the one that finally made teenage me realize, "Say, this isn't actually a very good comic, is it?").

Kincaid awakens in a bizarre Hell of sorts, which, like Dante's, is comprised of circles. Along with a band of others in his circumstances, he journeys through the setting, dreaming every time he sleeps of Spawn killing him, and finally meeting the demon "The Vindicator, one o' the five famous Phlebiac Brothers," who gives him a more guided tour, recruits him into Hell's army and introduces him to Spawn's devil figure.

It's basically 22 pages of wildly imaginative world-building, it's only one weakness—depending on how one feels about McFarlane's art or Orzechowski's letters, I guess—being the ending, in which the childish word "Ca-ca" is used instead of "Shit" at a pretty pivotal moment, a moment that basically provides the moral or punchline to Moore's interpretation of Spawn's mythology. (I don't see a Comics Code Authority stamp on those early covers of Spawn, so I wonder if saying "Ca-Ca" instead of "Shit" was McFarlane or Moore self-censoring, perhaps aware of how many younger readers must have been fans of Spawn at the time...? Although, those first few issues sure are violent, so I don't know...)

Spawn himself doesn't really appear in Moore's first issue, save for in Kincaid's nightmares of his dealing with the character at the end of his natural life. ("i dream about it all night long," he says, in the all lower-case signature lettering Orzechowski gives him, "the sound of the chains. the cloak flapping. spikes. skulls.")

In contrast, Spawn is on-panel throughout much of Moore's second issue, although the story Moore is telling actually has its own protagonist, The Freak, and Spawn is more of a guest-star in his own comic. Notably, I think Moore could have told this particular story with just about any other superhero or crime-fighting character.

Moore and McFarlane introduce The Freak gradually over four panels on the first page: A longshot of him, his body in silhouette, at the entrance of a rubble-filled alley; a close-up of his hands gesturing; a close-up of his bare feet; a close-up of his gritted-teeth grin.

The whole time he is babbling, Orzechowski giving him his own distinct dialogue bubble shape and lettering as well, some of the capital letters that form his words being smaller than the others, and thus not quite lining up right.

His dialogue mostly reads like free verse poetry, and, while it's not great poetry, it's remarkable just how much work Moore must have put into this otherwise somewhat clever but fairly straightforward (and, honestly, rather British) plot.

The Freak will talk incessantly throughout the book, sometimes seeming to narrate to the reader, sometimes seeming to be talking directly to Spawn or another character, but always in quite colorful (and, honestly, mostly purple) imagery.

A turn of the page gives us our first clear view of the character. He's very thin with knotty, sinewy muscles, and he's dressed only in a pair of raggedy jeans and a medallion. He sports a wild mane of long, grayish white hair and overgrown, pointy fingernails, and his face is clearly that of a comic book madman, with bulging eyes, arched and angry eyebrows and a Joker-like toothy grin (On the next page, in which we get a close-up of his face, he's also drooling).

The Freak is set upon by quartet of bad guys, whom McFarlane has drawn to resemble characters one might expect in some sort of post-apocalyptic, Mad Max-inspired movie. They too are shirtless, there are Chapel-like skulls painted on their faces, and their hair is...weird. 

Rather than saying what I really think of these particular designs, I'll just share a picture of them.

I imagine Moore's story called for generic street criminals, but that's not what McFarlane drew (Additionally, and more oddly still, they are armed with various blades, at least one of which looks like some kinda fantasy weapon, with blades extending from both sides of the hilt). Maybe not, though. Moore's first script for Swamp Thing was famously, notoriously detailed, spelling out every single detail he envisioned; I'm not sure if that remained the case fo his later work with unlikely collaborators like the Image guys.

Anyway, because these blade-wielding men are so outlandish looking, it's weird when one of them says, "Looks like Hallowe'en came early," in reference to The Freak, who is obviously more under-dressed than dressed-up, and later, when Spawn says of them "You and your fellow rodents prey upon the homeless and the weak and then go home to mom!" as if they are play-acting at being bad asses.

Anyway, they set upon The Freak, and a huddled figure wrapped in red and wearing a wide-brimmed hat that we saw on the first pages suddenly rises to reveal himself as Spawn. 

The bad guys have literally stepped on Spawn to get to get at The Freak, and so the hell-powered superhero and apparent defender of New York City's homeless sends the would-be killers running, lifting two of them by the neck and throwing them at the other two, and levelling a threat: "Believe me, you know nothing about Hell... ...But I can TEACH you."

The Freak and Spawn shake hands, the wordier of the two saying, "It seems that we are fellow knights; brothers within this putrid, decadent domain of fly-blown shadows...I, sir, am a freak of nature, and proud to be called one."

Spawn asks him why he's in an alley "dressed up like that," which, again, suggests that maybe McFarlane should have The Freak in a costume of some kind, rather than just being mostly naked, like a castaway on a cartoon desert island. And when Spawn then asks, "So what's your story?" The Freak replies "My story? What, you mean my origin?"

There's a double-page splash—the second such splash in the issue's first nine pages—where he explains how his loved ones were killed, at the behest of the villainous "Doctor Delirium", who further experimented on The Freak's mind, turning him into what he is today.

Spawn agrees to help him, and eventually the two infiltrate Doctor Delirium's lab, outfitted with all kinds of weird, sci-fi equipment, and they are then confronted by the doctor's men, one of whom says, "Looks like a couple of the doctor's special projects decided to go walkabout."

The Freak and Spawn fight their way through them, and Spawn jumps through the door of the doctor's office. The Freak confronts the doctor ultimately throwing him out a window to his death while Spawn holds off the doctor's men/the orderlies, gripping them with the living folds of his cape. 

As becomes increasingly clear, The Freak is insane...I mean, he's obviously insane, and talks about his own insanity all the time, but not just "mad" in a comic book kinda way, but actually delusional. The doctor is just a regular doctor, not a supervillain—and, on the penultimate page, on which The Freak's very much still-alive ex-wife talks to someone in an office about his attack on the institution, we learn that it's Dr. DeLorean, not Doctor Delirium. 

After The Freak kills his old doctor, he and Spawn fight their way out through a crowd of policemen—McFarlane's art showing us that The Freak murders at least two or three of them with the gun he took from the doctor, while Spawn brushes them aside with his animated chains; it seems an important detail, as by this point The Freak is gunning down innocent men, and Spawn is helping him do so. It's a purely visual detail, though, and nothing Spawn remarks upon later, so I can't help but wonder if there is here another disconnect between the two creators. 

Debriefing in the sewer after their shared adventure, Spawn tells The Freak, "I'm not your conscience. You did what you had to."

The Freak says he has his next target already picked out, and Spawn walks off with the words, "Well, good luck. Hope you succeed." 

So essentially The Freak is a crazy person who escaped from an institution, and then returned to murder his former doctor, having spun a rather superheroic-like fantasy about his own past and his time in that institution...a fantasy that could have been helped along had McFarlane drawn him with a costume of some kind (That also might have helped explain how and why Spawn got swept up in The Freak's delusions in the first place, as if Spawn had more directly bought into him as a hero figure).

The story makes Spawn look a bit foolish—although, this is Alan Moore and the year is 1995, so what superhero couldn't stand being made to look at least a bit foolish? On the last page, before their farewell, Spawn does finally question The Freak about what just happened, and while it's clear that The Freak is an armed maniac with plans to kill again, Spawn lets him walk. Perhaps Spawn isn't ultimately as foolish as he is morally ambivalent then...?

There are some hiccups in the storytelling though, like all that bizarre equipment Spawn sees when they introduce the institution, and the orderlies referring to the doctor's "special projects", which suggests that maybe the doctor was up to something hinky, and maybe it wasn't all in The Freak's head...?

Anyway, while strong in several aspects, one certainly expects more from Moore, and he and McFarlane don't seem to be on the same page in the telling of this particular story. 

Unlike Moore's first issue, then, I don't think this one is quite as well worth tracking down at this point, some 30 years later. 

The Freak would return in future issues of Spawn, comics.org saying he makes some 13 more appearances in various Spawn books, the latest of which seems to be a 2010 issue of Spawn written by McFarlane. 

That's about twice as many future appearances as The Vindicator made. So, despite the weakness of the story, McFarlane seems to have gotten a decent return on his investment, and I'm sure Moore got a decent enough paycheck for his writing duties.

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

And despite having another 40 issues or so of Spawn comics I have never read sitting there in front of me in the Compendium, that's just about as far as I got into the world of '90s Spawn. 

I did see that the very next issue, written by another of those guest writers, Julia Simmons, apparently featured the first appearance of a cybernetically-enhanced gorilla named "Cy-Gor", and so I read that. 

It's not great, and the gorilla only makes a one-panel appearance after much build up, so I kept reading, telling myself I would do so at least until Spawn fights the gorilla, but when I hit the first page of issue #41, half of which is devoted to seven paragraphs of text which is probably some 500-800 words worth of prose, I decided to give up on Spawn again. 

I'm not so interested in cybernetic gorillas that I'll read an essay in a Spawn comic to get to it. (By that point, the character seems to have built himself a throne, started hanging out with a character that looked like McFarlane's version of R. Crumb's Mr. Natural, and there was also a character who wore a weird hat/mask like sorta like the one worn by Dumb Donald from Fat Albert and The Cosby Kids...)

And as for Cy-Gor? Well, he seems to have gotten his own six-issue miniseries in 1999, written by none other than Rick Veitch...!

*Although Gaiman's 1989-1996 Sandman rather quickly deviated from its initial premise as a sort of horror book set in the DC Universe into something far more literate and interested in its own original characters and mythology, I think its origins as such make it a superhero comic, albeit a very odd one. That and, of course, the fact that it began as a reimagining of Jack Kirby's 1974 Sandman series, itself a reimagining of the original Golden Age comics character created by Garnder Fox and Bert Christman (A character that Kirby had also worked on as a much younger man). I forget who first made this argument—my best guess is Mike Sangiacomo, whose writing about comics I would have read in the Cleveland Plain Dealer in the mid-nineties—but a good part of the way Gaimain's Sandman might have took off in the direct comics market was the way in which it adhered to standard superhero comics conventions despite rapidly becoming very much its own thing. Think the monthly-shipping floppies, the shared universe setting, the DCU continuity and guest-stars, the specials and miniseries...there was even a gimmick cover (a glow-in-the-dark one on 1991's Sandman Special) and an imprint-wide crossover event series running through the annuals, 1993's "The Children's Crusade". 

**Although given the later legal fight between McFarlane and Gaiman over the character Angela, I wonder if the future stories that the various Spawn comics got out of her conception were ultimately worthwhile for McFarlane. She, of course, eventually—and rather oddly—ended up a Marvel character, being folded into their Thor mythology, although given the toxic nature of Gaiman's reputation now, I highly doubt we'll ever see Angela again anywhere.

When Batman Met Spawn Pt. 2: On 1994's Spawn/Batman #1

While I have no idea what the sales figures for books from 31 years ago might have looked like, I have to assume that Image Comics' half of the Batman and Spawn crossover event, Spawn/Batman #1, was more popular than DC's, Batman/Spawn: War Devil #1. It was certainly the more exciting of the two, and the one I had preferred when I read them both as a teenager.

A large part of that is, of course, that Spawn/Batman was drawn by Todd McFarlane, and his art was, of course, the main selling point for the comic featuring the character he had created. 

Perhaps an even larger part, though, was that it was written by Frank Miller.

Miller had previously written Spawn in 1993's Spawn #11 (part of a four-issue run in which McFarlane had a series of surprising guest writers, including Alan Moore, Neil Gaiman and Dave Sim), but the character he is most associated with is Batman. And here Miller would be returning to Batman for the first time since his 1986 Batman: The Dark Knight Returns. These days, after Miller has returned to the world of the Dark Knight Returns repeatedly, and written Batman in a couple of other projects as well, it probably doesn't seem like such a big deal, but I have to imagine it was in 1994.

And the Batman that Miller was writing in Spawn/Batman was, indeed, his DKR version of the character, albeit a younger version, as this story would have been set well before the events of that seminal near-future set series. McFarlane hints at that fact on his cover, an homage to the famous Miller-drawn silhouette of Batman leaping before a bolt of lightning cover from Dark Knight Returns, and there's a note on the 2022 Batman/Spawn: The Classic Collection hardcover's credit page for Spawn/Batman making it explicit.

"Spawn/Batman is a companion piece to DC Comics' Batman: The Dark Knight Returns," it reads. "It does not represent current DC continuity."

I'm not sure of the exact wording that might have run in the original one-shot, but it must have been similar, as I remember knowing at the time that this was meant to be a story of the Dark Knight from DKR and not the "real" Batman (Say, if this is the Batman from Dark Knight Returns, only from an earlier point in his career, does that mean that 1994's Spawn/Batman is technically the first appearance of Frank Miller's All-Star Batman, from the pages of All-Star Batman and Robin, The Boy Wonder...?)

So, what's the difference between this Batman and the one then-current DC continuity...?

Well, not much, actually. The main thing seems to be that Miller writes Batman here as an extremely stubborn, unrepentant asshole...arrogant to a fault, and unable to admit he's wrong or change course when that fact that he might be becomes apparent. That, and he's more violent. 

On page three, there's a panel showing him stalking away from eight men sprawled on the floor, saying "Punks.. ...you're lucky I went so easy on you...", while the blue narration boxes read "Tonight's foes are left behind him, broken things."

Later, when he catches Spawn setting two men on fire, "a wanton act of murder," Batman drops thirty feet and drives his heel into his kidney ("Shouldn't cause too much damage," the narration reads, "Six months in the hospital and he'll be ready to face the judge.")

Otherwise, there's nothing here that really signals this as an entirely different Batman; it's more a matter of the character's attitude and voice than any specific facts. And, given how often other writers have tried to emulate Miller's Batman writing over the years, this take on Batman doesn't sound too off.

Somewhat remarkably given that War Devil had three writers so used to working within the constraints of Big Two corporate super-comics, Miller, who by that time had already become something of an auteur, does a far better job of presenting a real team-up comic, one which does a pretty decent job of introducing Spawn to new readers...of which I think it is safe to assume the character had gotten quite a few of with this comic, as Batman fans and Frank Miller-on-Batman fans likely picked this book up and were meeting McFarlane's hero for the first time.

When Spawn appears for the first time, a splash on page 12, the narration tells us that "He is a dead man brought to a wretched life--a slave of Hell who seeks redemption." As Batman investigates the unhoused people in New York ("the dregs of humanity"), the narration tells us that "now and then he hears legends of one of their own named "Al"--a bum possessed with magic powers."

That there is more than War Devil told us about Spawn, really. The story reflected that, of course, but didn't make any of it explicit. We also learn that Spawn is super-strong and nearly invulnerable, that his magic comes from Hell, and that while he seems to be able to do almost anything with it—including, in this comic, bringing a dead Batman back to life, teleporting the pair of them and manage some sort of psychic mind meld with Batman—he seems to have a limited supply of it, so that he prefers not to use it unless he has to.

As I said, the fist 10 pages or so belong to Batman. The very first page is a 12-panel grid, the panels hosting terse, tough-guy narration that, at this point, I find hard to tell if Miller is writing in earnest or in parody. The first panel features the light of the moon and the words "A cold night," and the "camera" slowly pans from the full moon to Gotham City; it is the first of three, four-panel sequences pulling from a white space to reveal some information about the scene.

So yes, the page opens with the words, "A cold night. A dark night." And it ends with, "A cold night. A dark knight:"

Get it? (Oh, and that's not a typo; there's a colon in the last narration box of the first page; a turn of the page reveals a splash page of an angry looking, wounded Batman standing amid a bunch of intricate pipework, his logo and name atop the page, apparently connected to that colon.)

After having beat up the previously mentioned foes, Batman discovers crates of weapons, "sold by agents of a fallen dictatorship to Gotham street gangs":

Weapons--Built for a war that never happened.

Guns. Grenades. Rocket launchers--

--And strange, high-tech devices that hint at the smaller horrors that would have followed the nuclear nightmare.

Batman is investigating these ("A pair of battle gloves, humming with the promise of power"), when he's attacked by a robot that looks silly, almost sarcastic in design; a round-ish body topped with triangles of armor, two big three-fingered fists atop spindly arms and a periscope-like protrusion from its underside, all perched atop a trio of spindly, too-small legs. 

Batman defeats it, using the gloves (although the one he dons is actually different looking then the ones McFarlane originally introduces two pages previous), gloves that seem to give him a degree of super-strength (This will, of course, come in handy later, when he finds himself duking it out with the super-powered Spawn). 

In the process, though, he discovers there's actually a still-living, severed human head wired up into the robot innards; the robot is actually a cyborg, then, using an unwitting victim's head to provide it with computing power. 

Examining the recovered (and now deceased) head back at the Batcave, Batman discovers that it belonged to a presumed dead "vagrant" and "acute alcoholic" last seen in Manhattan.  

"What's the brain of a New York bum doing inside of a Soviet cyborg?" he asks aloud. The Batcave sequence also features Alfred, and Miller handles their typical rapport nicely ("I don't get nightmares," Batman tells Alfred, "I give them."  "No need for punchlines, Sir," Alfred replies, "You're among friends.")

So, Batman goes to New York to investigate, while Miller uses TV talking heads and news broadcasts to advance the plot, as he did so extensively in DKR (Spawn readers may recognize them, as McFarlane had drawn them in his own book before and since). Also investigating the rash of missing homeless men is, of course, Spawn. The narration boxes tell us he has some friends missing. He encounters a pair of men dousing sleeping homeless man with gasoline and attempting to set him on fire, but, using his magic, Spawn redirects the fire towards the would-be murderers.

"When you meet Satan-- Say hello for me," Spawn frowns at them, and this is where Batman comes in with his kick to Spawn's kidney, saying "You must be Al" on the splash page in which he makes contact, sending Spawn reeling and his chains jangling around crazily.

The pair fight for four-and-a-half pages, and it is a much less one-sided fight than the one in War Devil. Batman is shocked at how strong Spawn is ("It's like punching a brick wall"), while Spawn, who here seems to know exactly who Batman is and to address him by name, fights back effectively hand-to-hand, foregoing magic, except for using it to make himself strong enough near the end "to beat the crap out of Batman."

Their exchanges are silly. "I 'm not in the mood-- And I don't have the time," Spawn says, catching a batarang in one hand and using a chain to block two more. Batman flying kicks him, saying "Got time for this, punk?"

Eventually the fight devolves into just mostly dark panels, narration and sound effects (SMEK SMEK, KOOGH, WHUK! and so on), Batman deciding he's over-powered and that, if dead, he's no use to anyone. He ultimately retreats. 

But, having realized that Spawn still needs to breathe (which reminded me of Batman's first fight with The Hulk, where he made a similar observation about that super-powered foe), Batman had dosed him with "nerve gas-- --enough to make a mob take a nap." While Spawn kept fighting through it, as soon as Batman slinks away, he relaxes the magic he was using to make himself strong and starts vomiting from the gas.

Soon Spawn encounters one of the cyborgs, and, using a makeshift Bat-signal, the book's villain, a humanitarian named Margaret Love, sics Batman on Spawn, telling the Dark Knight that Spawn has been attacking her operation and plans to attack her fundraiser aboard her boat that the president himself plans to attend. 

Of course, by this point, we have already learned that Margaet Love is really Nadia Vladova, and, using the cover of helping the homeless, she has been disappearing some of them and installing their heads in her cyborg killing machines.

Her ultimate goal? To fire a nuclear missile at New York City from her boat, setting off World War III and using all the weapons and cyborgs she commands to rule the aftermath.

Before our heroes can stop her, there's another six-page fist fight. This time Batman is armed with the power gloves we saw earlier, and the heroes are essentially now evenly matched. They beat the hell out of one another, desperately trash-talking the whole time. At the end of it, they are both sprawled on the ground and panting for air, unconvincingly continuing to threaten one another.

"I'll rip you to pieces," a bleeding Batman says, "Undisciplined slob." He follows that up by gasping "KHAGG".

"Catch my breath," Spawn replies. "Just catch my breath and I'll break you in half." Adding "Kheff".

Then Love/Vladova's cyborgs attack, inflicting a mortal wound on Batman, who was by then on the ropes and pretty much helpless. Spawn uses his magic to destroy the cyborgs, heal Batman and, in the process, spending about two and a half pages inside Batman's head. In the process, in which they come to know one another's origins and gain a new understanding with one another, Spawn shares the truth about Love/Vladova with Batman.

While Batman isn't exactly grateful for the save ("If there's one thing I can't stand, it's a dead punk that won't shut up," he tells Spawn), they finally team up, share a double-page splash (an image that artist Greg Capullo seems to have recreated for his contribution to the two-image gallery at the back of the Batman/Spawn: The Classic Collection), attack Vladova's boat full of brain-washed elites, a high-tech arsenal and a primed-to-launch, nuclear-tipped missile aimed at the city. 

While the villainess dies during the battle—in maybe the messiest bit of storytelling of the whole comic, the precise circumstances of her death aren't clear—she launches the missile, and it's up to Spawn with his magic powers and Batman with his clear mind, deft hands and all-around know-how to stop it.

The two heroes bicker on the penultimate page, and, when Spawn points out how they just saved the whole city, maybe the whole world together and asks, "What do you say we just bury the hatchet?", Batman replies with, "Bury this."

The last page, an otherwise silent splash page, reveals that the "this" was a batarang, and it has indeed been buried...right in the middle of Spawn's face, his sickly green blood covering the black, metal weapon and gushing from the wound.

The readers, and Batman, know that Spawn will, of course, live, but man, what a dick this version of Batman is, huh? 

I can't help but wonder if this image, and the wordplay leading up to it, wasn't something that Miller conceived of very early in the project and then worked backwards from to tell a story that might get to it. 

So that's Miller's story, a sort of simple team-up one, in which the character's are introduced separately, put into circumstances causing them to fight one another...put into circumstances to fight one another again, and then ultimately must unite to take on a common foe that they could only defeat by working together. Miller's only real innovation of the classic formula, which I feel was introduced and perfected by Marvel (but maybe not), is to add a second round of fighting, and, despite the initial misunderstanding, keeping the heroes at one another's throats throughout the proceedings. 

As for McFarlane's art, he had, of course, drawn Batman before, rather famously in "Batman: Year Two"...at least the early parts of that story, which was, of course, positioned as a direct sequel to the Miller-written "Batman: Year One". Therefore, he had a decent amount of experience with both characters...though he was obviously much more experienced with Spawn, the character he created. 

His Batman reminded me quite a bit of Norm Breyfogle's, especially in the way in which he would often draw the character mostly as a partial silhouette, an angry, jagged black shape with sharply pointed ears, the white of his triangle eyes and bared teeth and the yellow of the bat-symbol sometimes being the only details visible (In fact, McFarlane so often draws Batman's head in shadow, it's genuinely unusual to see the lower half of his face, the flesh-colored chin that juts out from beneath his cowl, at all in this book).

In addition to Breyfogle, McFarlane's Batman reminded me a bit of that of Joe Quesada, who drew the Dark Knight in 1992 mini-series Batman: Sword of Azrael and, most memorably to me, the cover of the 1992 Batman Gallery. And, of course, I think there's more than a bit of Miller's own DKR Batman in there, particularly in the short, more broad triangle-shaped ears (in the mid-90's, Batman's ears tended towards the long) and the big bat-symbol.

McFarlane seems to have contributed a distinctly huge cape, one that flares up like titanic bat-wings in perhaps the most dramatic image of Batman McFarlane draws, and pools around the character when he's standing still. This was, remember, back before Kelley Jones had started as the regular artist on Batman, too; at this point, Jones was only drawing covers for Bat-comics (McFarlane had previously, somewhat famously, drawn a huge bat-cape with a life of its own on a 1988 Batman cover).

There seems to be, in at least one panel, a bit of Spider-Man to McFarlane's Batman too, in the way he gathers his bat-rope in his hands, the slack forming a crazy pattern that trails off at great length. 

Beyond the drawings of the two heroes, I found the art serviceable but not particularly remarkable. Like I said, the cyborgs seemed a little too stylized, bordering on the cartoonish, and the handful of civilian characters, including the villain and Alfred, aren't particularly distinct nor notable.

Oh, one thing I noticed about the art was that McFarlane has Spawn's mask seemingly coming and going at random throughout the story, although given what we know about his costume being something of a living creature, I couldn't tell if this was due to the occasional art mistake in the book's continuity, or if it was intentional, as that's how Spawn's mask actually works (In War Devil, he's shown removing it, as if it was a piece of cloth he wore).

Tom Orzechowski, who seems to have been the original and regular Spawn letterer, handles the letters here as well, and thus the character's signature dialogue balloons look much more at home in this comic than they did in War Devil, where they stuck out as somewhat foreign or alien and, as I had said, seemed to suggest that Spawn was talking really, really, inappropriately loud all the time. 

Overall, I think Spawn/Batman still reads as the superior of the two 1994 one-shots pairing the two characters. On a technical level, Klaus Janson's War Devil might be better drawn, but McFarlane's issue is more expressive, more highly stylized and thus a bit more visually interesting.

In terms of writing, it's hard to judge the two against one another. Miller's script is, like McFarlane's art, more stylized and, I think it's safe to say, more over-the-top. It's also a bit more unique, reading so unlike so many other superhero team-ups and crossovers. It's definitely a better Spawn story, if not a very good Batman story...which, of course, might be why DC took some pains to differentiate it as a story of Miller's Dark Knight Returns Batman, and not, you know, the real Batman.

As for Batman and Spawn's 2022 team-up, I'm not rereading that and trying to write about it again. I covered it here, though, if you would like to read what I thought of it when it came out. 

On 1991's Flaming Carrot Comics #25-27, guest-starring the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles

The Flaming Carrot! Cartoonist Bob Burden's bizarre superhero parody character debuted in a 1979 magazine and, after the 1981 self-published one-shot Flaming Carrot Comics, would go on to carry a series of black-and-white comics from publishers Aardvark-Vanaheim, Renegade Press and Dark Horse Comics throughout the '80s and '90s (In the 21st century, he would reappear at Image Comics). 

The Carrot wore a white button-down shirt, red pants, green flippers on his feet (early on, one character intimates this is because he does not know how to tie his shoes, while later he will tell a character he wears them "In case I have to swim") but he is, of course, best known for seemingly having a giant carrot for a head (this is, of course, a mask), an ever-burning flame where the green, leafy part might be ("Strike fear into criminals! Confuse them..." he kinda sorta explains his costume at one point).

The earliest issues of his comics read a lot like a witty, self-aware take on Golden Age superhero comics: Primitive, child-like and weird unto randomness. His origin? "Having read 5,000 comics in a single sitting to win a bet, this poor man suffered brain damage." 

Apparently once a great hero, when Burden introduces readers to him in the Aardvark-Vanaheim series, he's all washed-up, living the life of a hobo (And talking in a sometimes hard-to-parse syntax apparently reflective of that brain damage). His comics adventures are therefore his "second act," as he returns to fighting crime and defending his home of Iron City. 

He still drinks a lot, spends a great deal of time out on the town carousing, and associates with various street people, colorful characters and lots and lots of beautiful women, Burden never passing up an opportunity to fill his panels of often strange, ugly men with lots of character in their faces with buxom, scantily clad women. 

Though the general public has mixed feelings about him, he's feared by criminals, worshiped by children (he's once saved by a Junior Carrot Patrol) and he's always a friend to any societal outsider. His early adventures featured a lot of communists, mad scientists and a communist mad scientist. The words "absurd" and "surreal" are most often used to describe his comics adventures.

The Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles! Begun as a visual gag, artists friends Kevin Eastman and Peter Laird drawing images of a masked turtle with nunchucks to amuse one another. That masked, nunchuck-wielding ninja turtle and three more like him eventually appeared in a 1984 self-published comic, a deadpan funny animal parody of Frank Miller's Daredevil comics whose title referenced popular trends in mainstream super-comics of the time (The teenage heroes of New Teen Titans, for example, the mutants of Uncanny X-Men). 

It was an incredible hit, and so Eastman and Laird's one-off became an ongoing series, deadpan parody becoming something semi-serious, and the unusual juxtaposition of the four words in the title becoming something of a magic spell, one that can conjure any sort of strangeness they or their later collaborators could imagine. I mean, when your protagonists are Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, there's really no genre, no plot and no tone they can't be made to fit into.

By the time they became the stars of a cartoon show in 1987 and a toy-line in 1998, they were well on their way to being a pop cultural phenomenon, with multiple cartoons, TV shows, movies and video games to follow. Forty-one years later, they're among the most successful comic book creations of all time, beloved by multiple generations of fans. They're also still regularly starring in comics books.

It had to happen! The Flaming Carrot and the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles naturally crossed paths. Eastman and Laird were very generous with their creations, and their characters often teamed-up or guest-starred in other 1980s black-and-white comics. 

Most famously, Leonardo first crossed swords with Stan Sakai's Usagi Yojimbo in a Sakai-drawn short called "Turtle Soup and Rabbit Stew" which appeared in the 1987 anthology Turtle Soup #1. It was the first of many meetings between Eastman, Laird and Sakai's characters in the comics (all of which are collected in IDW's 2018 Usagi Yojimbo/Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: The Complete Collection, save for 2023's Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles/Usagi Yojimbo: WhereWhen) and, more occasionally, in other media.

And then, of course, there was the crossover with Dave Sim's Cerebus the Aardvark in 1986's Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles #8, an over-sized issue by Eastman, Laird, Sim and Gerhard that introduced time-travelling Renet and horn-headed sorcerer Savanti Romero into the mythos.

But the TMNT also appeared in the 1990 and 1991 Last of The Viking Heroes Summer Special #2 and #3, appeared in a back-up tale in 1986's Grimjack #26 and appeared in 1987 Fantagraphics anthology title Anything Goes #5. 

The TMNT are up there with Archie Andrews and Batman as the comics characters most likely to crossover with another publisher's characters, and over the decades they have gone on to meet Mark Martin's GnatRat, Matt Howarth's Those Annoying Post Brothers, Jim Davis' Garfield, Erik Larsen's The Savage Dragon (repeatedly), some kid named Creed, and the characters from Ghostbusters, The X-Files, Mighty Morphin' Power Rangers, Street Fighter, Stranger Things and the Masters of the Universe toy-line/cartoon. And, of course, they had also crossed over with Archie Andrews and Batman (Four separate times, in the case of Batman!) 

(But, somewhat frustratingly, never Marvel's Daredevil, the star whose book they owe so much).

So, yeah, meeting with The Flaming Carrot, the star of another popular underground black-and-white comic of the 1980s with which Eastman and Laird's TMNT shares a bit of DNA and, according to Eastman in his introduction to Dark Horse's 2019 Flaming Carrot Omnibus Vol. 1, even influenced him a bit? 

As the old Marvel Comics used to say, it had to happen. 

And so it did, in three issues of Burden's Flaming Carrot Comics in 1991, by which point the series was being published by Dark Horse Comics. 

For context, by 1991 the Turtles had become mass media stars. While their Mirage title was still ongoing, it was at a particularly weird point of its great fill-in era, that year publishing the first two issues of a three-part story by the great Michael Zulli, a done-in-one by the great creative team of Rick McCollum and Bill Anderson and the comedic "Spaced Out" three-parter by Rich Hedden and Tom McWeeney. Meanwhile, the first TMNT film had played in theaters the year previous, and the cartoon had been on TV for about four years. 

Despite being completely representative of the contents, the cover of Flaming Carrot Comics, the first installment of the three-part TMNT crossover (that's it at the top of the post), isn't too terribly dramatic. Far better is the opening splash page, featuring the Carrot and Raphael racing across a rooftop together, the Carrot's intentionally ironic narration discussing his intention to make something of one of the much more popular, much more successful Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.

This may be the Carrot's comic book, but after the splash, Burden starts his tale with the Turtles, who are here in their New York City sewer lair (Which would seem to place this story somewhere within the first ten issues of the TMNT volume one continuity, but, of course, TMNT continuity is a sucker's game, especially when it comes to volume one). 

Raphael is quietly studying a stack of books in the corner, while his brothers sit on the couch, watching TV and bickering. What is he studying? The spines of the books have titles like Human Psychology and Love and Will (and though the first half of the title is cut off, one seems to be Ayn Rand's The Fountainhead). When April scolds the other Turtles with "Let's see some adult behavior around here!", we see what's going on inside Raph's head.

Apparently, Raphael is curious about the world of adulthood—here Burden actually seems to remember the "Teenage" part of "Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles", something that's never really emphasized in a majority of their stories—and so he decides to go topside to observe adults in their natural habitat. To do so, he dons the costume he wore when visiting the city streets in that first movie, a trench coat and wide-brimmed hat.

After encountering a series of strange people, he leaves the streets for a rooftop and spots The Flaming Carrot below. As he looks so interesting, Raph decides to follow him around for a while. 

And what is Iron City's hometown hero The Flaming Carrot doing in New York City, anyway? Well, as will eventually be revealed, he and his fellow Mysterymen have heard rumors of a big crime of some sort being planned there by their enemies The Vile Brotherhood, and so they have come to investigate (The Mysterymen, by the way, are a misfit team of oddball superheroes like Mister Furious, The Shoveler, Screwball, The Spleen and Bondoman and more; you may have seen some of them in the weird, Flaming Carrot-less 1999 film, Mystery Men. Sometimes the team's name is one word, sometimes two. I'm going to stick with one word, which seems to be used most often in these comics, and was the way it was spelled in the title of Burden's book about the team).

The Carrot eventually gives Raphael the slip, and then begins following him. Then Raph sees someone who might be even stranger than the Carrot. A man in a bowtie and suspenders sitting on a chair atop a nearby rooftop. When the man stands up, his hand falls off, and he reattaches it. Investigating the man's apartment, full of strange Bob Burden-y details, Raph has to suddenly hide when a second man, identical to the fist, appears.

They don't seem to be human, talking in a strange alien language, getting drunk on Sprite, dancing with dolls and, upon finding one of Raph's sai, their Little Orphan Annie-like blank eyes extend from their sockets on wires to closely look the weapon up and down. 

When they discover Raph, they blast him with a ray gun, lay him on a table and subject him to some kind of device that apparently gives him amnesia. 

The Carrot is able to recuse Raph and takes him to a secret hideout. Eventually, he decides to train the amnesiac Turtle to be a superhero. He gives him a pair of purple pajamas, a black cape with the word "Bread" on it, a sack for a mask, as well as a utility belt and pair of plungers for weapons. He dubs him "The Dark Avenger."

They set about fighting street crime and, in the last three panels of the issue, the other Turtles finally realize that Raphael is missing. 

Note the cover of the second issue of this Flaming Carrot/Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles crossover, #26. While Raph appeared on the cover of the previous issue, this one features the other three Turtles, and they are all wearing their color-coded masks, thus appearing as they would in the cartoon and movie (and the Archie Comics series), rather than how they would appear in the Mirage comics. The interiors being black-and-white, though, the only time we see their masks in color are on this cover and the next. 

The first chunk of this issue is devoted to the Mysterymen, who are busy tackling zombies in New York City. When they are interviewed on the TV news, the Turtles catch the broadcast in their lair. And then there's some footage of "some other Mysterymen in action on the Lower East Side...Flaming Carrot Man and someone called Bread Boy!"

Though in his Carrot-designed Dark Avenger get-up, the Turtles immediately recognize Raphael's moves...and his feet and hands, and so they grab their weapons and are soon racing across rooftops in search of Raph. 

Meanwhile, F.C. and Raph encounter Leaf-Blower, a Canadian superhero in town hunting The Evil Umpires, a criminal team of performance artists, whose bizarre crimes the Carrot rattles off to Raph after he consults his "crime computer", which is really just a Rolodex (A card from which lists a half-dozen other crimes of theirs). 

And where might a team of evil umpires be planning to strike in New York City? Raph guesses "The Umpire State Building", and the Carrot likes the way he thinks. They head to the Empire State Building and, indeed, it has been taken over by the Umpires, who have allied themselves with the severed but still living head of Frankenstein (the monster, not the doctor). 

Raph goes to the Mysterymen for help while the Carrot distracts the umpires, and then Raph's brother turtles jump him, helping jog his memory.

The concluding chapter of the crossover features the Flaming Carrot and all four Turtles and guess who drew it? Did you guess Bob Burden? If so, you guessed wrong. 

Look closely in the lower lefthand corner, and you may see a familiar signature on a little scroll...That's right, it's Todd McFarlane! Granted, it's not very Todd McFarlane-y looking, but then, this was 1991, and perhaps McFarlane wasn't quite at his McFarlane-iest just yet...? (For a more McFarlane-y looking Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle, see below). 

Former Dark Avenger Raphael returns to the Empire State Building with his brothers, and the four of them team up with the Carrot to stop the Umpires' plan to steal the building by means of attaching powerful rockets to each of its corners. 

There's a lot of combat in this action-packed finale. There is the usual punching and kicking, of course, and a game of keep-away with Frankenstein's head. And, as one might expect at this point, some of the combat is just really, really weird: Raphael curls up in a little ball and the Flaming Carrot bowls him into an on-rushing v-formation of umpires, the Carrot traps a group of Umpires in a room and tosses in his nuclear pogo stick to bludgeon them, the umpires' leader holds off our heroes with a ray that, he says, will make them smell like barbecue sauce for the rest of their life, and so on.

Oh, and the police have surrounded the building, but the umpires are holding them off by dropping pennies at them. 

But isn't that just an urban legend...?

The unsung hero of the day? Mysteryman Screwball's pet shoelace. 

Our heroes make their escape from the Empire State Building by commandeering the hot air balloon the umpires had planned to use (hence the scene from the cover), and, in the very last panel, we see Frankenstein's head, now bearing a red nose, attached to the body of a reindeer.

There are some loose ends. Like, whatever happened to those weird aliens (?) that zapped Raphel? Well, a later scene shows them leading a sentient skeleton into the apartment, finding the bed Raph was on empty and then they all laugh hysterically and...that's the last we see of them.

What of Leaf-Blower, who said his partner was kidnapped by the umpires? Shruggy emotion. Raph's quest to learn more about adulthood? Completely dropped. And the Vile Brotherhood? Well, they never ended up making the scene.

Still, compared to some of the earlier Flaming Carrot comics—those collected in Dark Horse's 2019 Flaming Carrot Omnibus, which is where I read these issues via Hoopla through my public library's website—this is a rather remarkably tightly-written comic, and the artwork and storytelling are a stronger and more refined. 

Perhaps unsurprisingly given the similarities of their real-world origins, the Flaming Carrot and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles characters and milieus fit together rather seamlessly. This might also be because the first decade or so of TMNT comics weren't just Eastman and Laird's, but also included all of those many weird fill-ins, and contributions from various artists in anthology books, so that a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle comic could really be any comic in which the Turtles were featured, no matter how out there, how silly or how comedic it might be. 

Visually, the characters are perfectly at home in the black-and-white world of Flaming Carrot Comics and, in fact, look and feel more natural and, well, like themselves here than they would in many other of the comics that followed, like the second and third volumes of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, their various Image Comics guest-appearances and the IDW years. 

Speaking of color Turtles comics, the next time the TMNT would cross paths with The Flaming Carrot and Mysterymen, it would be in color, in the pages of the 1993-1994 Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles/Flaming Carrot Crossover miniseries, written by Burden and drawn by Jim Lawson and Neil Vokes and published by Mirage Comics.

Those comics have never been collected, but, luckily, I have the single issues, which we'll take a look at in the next post. 

In the meantime, here's that more Todd McFarlane-y Ninja Turtle I promised, a pin-up from the back of 1992's Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles #50:

On two invasions, one secret and one emphatic

Or: The Invasion! trade comes out tomorrow, and Secret Invasion still doesn't make any goddam sense to me

Tomorrow sees the long-awaited (by me) release of Invasion!, the three-part 1988 series by Bill Mantlo, Keith Giffen, Bart Sears, P. Craig Russell and little known artist Todd McFarlane.

Now, I’m not going to buy it (at least not tomorrow), as I have the originals, and like the way they smell just fine, but I always thought it was kind of insane that DC didn’t have the series collected in trade, if only because it includes pages and pages of McFarlane art, which it seems safe to assume a lot of people might want to check out now that they know who this McFarlane fellow is, and new examples of his art are getting fewer and farther between.

The story itself won’t teach you any great truths about human existence or make your teeth whiter, but it’s not at all bad for a superheroes vs. alien invaders story. Sure, there’s probably a bit too much space politics for my taste, but it’s still your favorite DC heroes of the late ‘80s whaling on alien ass. And, like each of DC’s big line-wide crossovers, it provides a nice snapshot of the ever-changing DCU; for that purpose, I think trades of each of these things, good or bad, are worthwhile (at least for fans of DC super-comics, anyway. (You know what would make me buy this tomorrow? If DC collected this, with all 30 of its tie-ins, in a black and white, cheap paper stock Showcase Presents style collection. If I did my math right, that adds up to a 900-page story. So maybe Showcase Presents: Invasion! Vols. 1 and 2. How awesome would that be?).

I’m not sure why DC decided to finally collect this series in trade now (Is it me, or has McFarlane’s star really faded in the last five years or so?), unless they simply saw Giffen’s somewhat resurgent popularity, nostalgia for the era, and the fact that DC and Marvel readers were sufficiently interested in space stuff to support books like Green Lantern Corps, Annihilation, Nova Rann/Thanagar Trade Agreement of 2007, Jim Starlin Draws Hawkman and so forth.

Personally, I think it may just be the same reason that DC decided to finally publish Millennium in trade this summer—just to be dicks to Marvel.

(I don’t mean that as a criticism; I think they should have gotten Legends out in trade the same year as Civil War, and The Flash: Hell To Pay as “One More Day” was going on. Marvel may be selling loads of these books, but it wouldn’t hurt DC to tweak their rivals by saying, “Yeah, great job on that hot new story, guys; remember when we did it, twenty years ago?”)

As I’ve spent probably way too much time already discussing, Secret Invasion shares some surface similarities with the 20-year-old DC crossover Millennium, in that both are about sinister alien forces invading earth by posing as friends and family of the superheroes there.

It also bears some similarity to Invasion!, not simply in the fact that it’s about an alien invasion because, come on, aren’t like, one-fourth of super-comics about alien invasions? It even echoes the title of the DC version.

So maybe after not making a big deal out of the similarities of other highly-hyped Marvel events to old DC stories, DC simply decided they were going to take the time to tweak their rivals here, and get Millennium and Invasion! in front of Secret Invasion readers to, if not rain on Marvel’s parade, at least piss on the corner of a street on its parade schedule.

Now, Invasion! and Secret Invasion are still very, very different stories. The latter is secret, the former is not. Also, the former makes perfect sense, whereas I’m having a hard time figuring out what the Skrull battle plan is in the latter.

In Invasion!, the race of aliens called The Dominators (who look like every sinister oriental villain fro Golden Age comics, only without the noses) convince an alliance of hostile aliens to invade Earth and remove the threat of meta-humans from the universe once and for all. So the Khunds (What if Genghis Khan’s mongol horde was pink?), the Thanagarians (Known fascist asshole Hawkman’s even more fascist asshole bretheren), the Durlans (shape-shifters familiar to Legion nerds), the hilariously named Gil’Dishpan (someone for Aquaman to fight) and several races form the Vega system who don’t use animal products and thus brought vegan culture to earth in the late ‘80s, all unite to invade earth and capture, kill or killpture all the super-heroes. They do so by dropping bombs, and shooting laser guns and suchlike, conquering Australia and hoping to go from there.

It was a pretty straightforward invasion plan. Basically, just step one, invade, step two, accept the enemies surrender, or, if they refuse to surrender, keep invading until they do.

But what the hell are the Skrulls up to, exactly? They’ve spent years planning and preparing for a very gradual invasion and, once they’ve just about rearranged earth politics to the point that they’re practically running the earth without anyone even knowing they’re there, they say, “Screw it, let’s just do it old school with infantry and so on after all.” While also pulling an elaborate bit of mental warfare on some Avengers that doesn’t really make much sense. And also appealing to the people of the world (or maybe just America?) to willingly join the Skrull Empire, while they’re simultaneously sending their shocktroopers to conquer various regions.

Pick a plan and stick with it, Skrulls!

Their main plan—infiltrating the superhero community with their own, undetectable agents—seems like a good one. They may have been involved with engineering the superhero civil war, the ejection of Hulk into space, the assassination of Captain America, the SHRA that made half of Marvel’s heroes outlaws, the Fifty-State Initiative. With a few more agents in the right places—one in for President Bush, one in for Maria Hill, one in for Tony Stark—they could rule the world without anyone being any the wiser, although they seem to shoot this idea down on account of wanting to make the likes of Tony Stark and Reed Richards suffer in a way that doesn’t include replacing them.

So this plan makes sense. If they keep it up, a good PR campaign could surely sell the American people and or the population of Earth that joining the Skrull Empire voluntarily is actually a pretty good idea.

But then, the Skrulls do their Savage Land psi-op thing, which consists of taking a group of brainwashed suicide soldier Skrulls who think they’re Marvel characters from the ‘70s, putting them on a spaceship, and crashland-ing them in the Savage Land. This sends both teams of Avengers scrambling there, and they are suddenly very confused for, like, an hour. Oh man, who do they trust? Are the heroes on the ship Skrulls, or are the heroes not on the ship the Skrulls?

You can see how this will mess with the Avengers’ minds a bit, but so what? What’s the point exactly? Especially if the Skrulls don’t even know they’re really Skrulls, like Captain Skrullmerica and Skrullckingbird? Wouldn’t they end up joining forces with the Avengers to fight off the other Skrulls?

While they’re doing that stupid little gambit, the Skrulls also attack as Skrulls. They don’t pretend to be X-Men and Avengers teaming up to destroy New York, and push public opinion against the superheroes even harder, they just start pouring Super-Skrulls into New York City (and, if you read the tie-ins, San Francisco, Portland, Oregon, Wakanda and England) to start blowing shit up and fighting superheroes. Oh no, the average citizen of earth might think, alien invaders are invading and they’re completely destroying everything!

And then the really, really stupid part. There’s a weird two-page spread in Secret Invasion #5 with a million little boxes on it, and in each box, a well-known earth celebrity is shown smiling on a TV screen, each saying a snippet of the same speech: “We’re not here to hurt you. We’re here to save.” They say they want the Earth to join the Skrull Empire, and in return they will end “poverty, hardship disease and greed.”

This might be a convince argument, if the Skrulls weren’t also in the middle of a violent invasion. At the center of the spread, we see a Skrull shaped like Tony Stark speaking on one of those Times Square jumbotron screens, and he says “We wish no harm or bloodshed…” and the building the screen is mounted on has a big smoking hole in it.

I was rather confused by this whole sequence, not only because it seemed to contradict the other two major aspects of the Skrull plan (secret infiltration to run the world behind the scenes, and open military attack), but because I was unsure why the Skrulls took the shapes they did. Some are celebrities here in the real world, some are Marvel characters (Dr. Doom, Namor, Magneto) and two are Marvel characters we know isn’t a Skrull (Tony Stark, Reed Richards).

So does that mean that all of these Skrulls simply took these shapes for this address, or that these people have been Skrulls all along?

See, we’re talking Ann Coulter, Stephen Colbert, Paris Hilton, Barack Obama, John McCain, The Pope, Tom Cruise, Osama bin Laden, Tiger Woods, Chris Rok, Opra, the Dali Lama, Kim Jong Il, and some others I’m less sure of (Mitt Romney? Hilary Clinton? South Park’s Cartman and Homer Simpson for some reason?).

If all of those people were just Skrulls all along, why come out and say, “Hey, we’re Skrulls! Join the Empire or die!” wouldn’t it have made more sense for them to stay in character? Like Skrullprah do some shows about how it’s time for one world government over the course of the year, and then, when a Skrull delegation comes along, start talking about how it seems like the smart thing to do? Have Skrullbama and John SkrullCain both insert “Joining the Skrull Empire” into their political parties’ respective platforms?

That is a much better plan, Skrulls!

But, like I said, it’s unclear if these are just Skrulls adopting faces they know earth people like to look at while they make their pitch, or if Tom Cruise has actually been a Skrull since Days of Thunder.

Either way, the plan is overly complicated, and each prong of attack seems to be at odds with itself. The majority of the superheroes could probably just sit the rest of this one out and watch the Skrulls defeat themselves, the way things seem to be going.

Why isn't there an Invasion! trade yet?

DC owns the publishing rights to thousands of comic book stories in a staggering number of genres from as far back as the late 1930's, so the decision of what to collect and re-release is probably a pretty complicated one, governed in a large part by the formats the company is comfortable with and their understanding of what their markets will support.

I can understand that some of these decisions might be difficult, and the company wanting to take as few risks as possible. One thing I don’t understand, however, is why in God’s name 1988 crossover event series Invasion! isn’t available in trade.

The main part of the story was told in three 80-page, ad-free issues (that’s 240 pages right there!), though it also stretched out into plenty of ancillary tie-ins, some of which were completely unimportant, others of which were fairly integral (And at least one of which has already been collected, in Vertigo's Animal Man trade series).

The size of the thing might be one of the factors making a collection difficult—Armageddon 2001, Eclispo: The Darkness Within, War of the Gods and Millennium aren’t available in trade either—and putting a book together would likely mean making some decisions regarding what tie-ins to include and which to axe, and if they should include just pats of certain books (a la the DC One Million trade).

Perhaps it’s also that the series no longer seems relevant. Like all of DC’s big event series, it was used to lay the groundwork for future series and new directions for older titles, and I don’t think any of these directions are at all still in play in the modern DCU (Although I guess it does explain why Black Lightning, Fire and other characters now have powers they didn't have before Invasion!).

The series did, however, if not create many of the most prominent of DC’s outer space alien races, then at least popularize them—races like The Dominators and The Khunds, for example, have been appearing pretty regularly in DC comics ever since Invasion!.

But what really surprises me in terms of this book not being collected is who was responsible for making it. The book was plotted and laid out by Keith Giffen, a creator whose star has risen and fallen a few times in the years since, but seems to be on the ascent at the moment (A space story from someone so heavily involved in the modestly successful Annihilation books for Marvel ought to get some newer readers to give it a look, right? Particularly since you can say “52’s Keith Giffen” in the solicitation copy?) The actual scripting was handled by Bill Mantlo, who knew a thing or two about crazy-ass space stories.

But it’s the artists involved that should have made an Invasion! trade a slam-dunk. Bart Sears penciled the third book and Giffen the second half of the second book, but they’re not the marquee name involved. No, the first half of the story was penciled by none other than Todd McFarlane.

Perhaps you’ve heard of him?

Now I don’t want to go off into a tangent about the quality of McFarlane’s work, in part because I’m hardly an expert. I haven’t seen any new work from him in well over a decade, and didn’t follow any book he did religiously (Maybe the first dozen issues of Spawn, a trade from the library of his Spider-Man, some back issue bin finds of his Infinity Inc. work). In general, I like his style and figure work but have a hard time actually reading books he's drawn and/or written.

Whatever your own thoughts on McFarlane's abilities, I think it's quite safe to say that the work in this book isn’t his best. For an example of the not-so-hotness, take a look at this panel and tell me what you think is happening in it:



If you said Peacemaker appears to be shooting a flare gun at The Creeper, whose shin The Atom was pretending was a bucking bronco that needed to be broken, then you’d be wrong. But I could see where you’d get that. No, actually those three heroes are actually fighting off an alien invasion. Obviously.

But his best work or not, DC had some 100 plus pages of one-time super-star artist Todd McFarlane drawing their biggest heroes in an epic story just…sitting there. And they've been sitting there for almost 20 years now.

Once McFarlane hit it big with Spawn, why didn’t DC release an Invasion! trade to capitalize on his fame and gigantic fan base? Or how about when Spawn and Batman met up in those two 1994 Batman/Spawn crossovers? (The DC one drawn by Klaus Janson, and the Image one written by Frank Miller and drawn by McFarlane). Or a few years back when Joe Quesada was publicly calling McFarlane out for never drawing anymore? Or a few years before or after Quesada’s stunt, since new McFarlane art was so hard to find? Or how about, you know, right now, since new McFarlane art is still hard to find, and the guy’s at least popular enough that Spawn is still being published, despite the fact that it hasn’t ever really been any good at all?

I would assume that an Invasion! trade would sell pretty well on the strength of fans of the era (JLI, Suicide Squad, etc.), the other creators involved, and McFarlane’s name, which DC could be sure to highlight on the cover and spine. I mean, the fucking Tangent event is available in trade now; what has that got that Invasion! doesn’t?

Well, since DC stubbornly refuses to reprint Invasion!, for any Todd McFarlane fans in the reading audience who may have missed it the first time around (and/or haven’t found it in the dollar bins like yours truly), here’s late-80’s McFarlane’s versions of some of DC’s biggest heroes...


















While McFarlane seemed to do okay with the characters who had giant-ass capes, cool-looking masks, or interesting means of locomotion—all of which his brand of expressionism could latch on to, he clearly had a little trouble with some of the other DC characters, particularly these poor bastards...





I guess Countdown isn't the home of the worst drawing of Jimmy Olsen ever after all...