How good a writer was Peter David? Well, he made Aquaman cool.

I obviously can't speak to the early decades of the character, but certainly by the time I was growing up, Aquaman had become something of an easy joke, especially compared to his more powerful and popular peers in the various Super Friends cartoons. 

But then Peter David got a hold of him.

He wrote the character and fleshed out his fantastical setting over the course of some eight years between 1990 and 1998, writing not only an almost 50-issue run on an Aquaman monthly series, but also the miniseries Aquaman: Time and Tide and the underwater fantasy The Atlantis Chronicles. 

He fleshed the character out, immediately making drastic, provocative changes, like the beard and longhair, having him lose his left hand in battle and replacing with a harpoon, and trading in the familiar orange shirt for a gladiator-style harness. And me made the character feel moody and dangerous. 

I think Grant Morrison gets a lot of credit for writing a cool Aquaman in the pages of his 1997-2000 JLA run, depicting the character in such a way as to make him seem worthy of standing shoulder to shoulder with the likes of Superman and Batman, but, well, that was Peter David's Aquaman that Morrison included in his line-up (And the Aquaman of artists Martin Egeland and Jim Calafiore). Even when later creators would take the character on, rejecting David's aesthetic changes and hewing closer to the classic version of the character, like Alex Ross and Geoff Johns did, their work seemed to build on David's interpretation of the character as a badass. 

Though they obviously owe a lot to Johns' work on the character, I don't think we get two Aquaman feature films and the character in the 2017 Justice League movie without David's refurbishing of the character in the '90s. We certainly wouldn't have had Jason Momoa playing him. 

David's Aquaman was my first introduction to the writer's work. When I was still getting into comics and being increasingly drawn into the DC Universe setting in the '90s, I would regularly check the back issue bins at Books Galore in Erie, Pennsylvania and pick up copies of that Aquaman series, more or less at random, generally guided by what unlikely guest star might appear on the cover (Swamp Thing, Animal Man, Martian Manhunter). 

David's frequent use of guest stars and the wider DC Universe made even random issues easy to get into, but they were all well-written enough that each one was complete and enjoyable by itself, rather than being a piece of a story that didn't make sense on its own. I eventually read the whole thing, getting new issues monthly and reading the back issues in order, and I was sorely disappointed when David eventually left the title (A title, it's worth noting, didn't survive too much longer without him).

While that was my introduction to the writing of Peter David, it was hardly the work he is best known for (Nor the work of his that lead most obviously and directly to a big Hollywood production; that would instead by his co-creation of Miguel O'Hara in 1992's Spider-Man 2099, a character who played a major role in 2023's animated blockbuster Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse). 

Rather, I imagine he's best known for his long, influential run on Marvel's The Incredible Hulk, during which time he made multiple innovations to the character and introduced versions of him that have been reverberating throughout the Marvel Universe ever since (Sometimes written by David himself, sometimes by other creators who followed him). That run too seems to have influenced screenwriters and directors, notably so in Ang Lee's 2003 Hulk. 

David also wrote a lot of Spider-Man comics for the publisher, a previous version of the Captain Marvel character, and an extremely well-regarded run on X-Men spin-off X-Factor. 

Having not gotten into Marvel before the turn of the century, I missed all of these comics (although I did read his 2005 Madrox miniseries, and the first arc of the 2006 X-Factor revival it led to). But I knew his original X-Factor run must have been something special, because I read about it in a newspaper article in the Cleveland Plain Dealer (probably written by Mike Sangiacomo) in the '90s, long before it was common for editors to deem comics worthy of coverage in newspapers. 

David also wrote a long-ish run on DC's Supergirl, created Spyboy for Dark Horse (with artist Pop Mhan) and Fallen Angel for first DC and then IDW (with artist David Lopez), co-wrote the big 1996 DC Vs. Marvel crossover event series and wrote scores of other comics over the course of the last 45 years. 

In addition to Aquaman, I am most familiar with his work from the 1998-2003 Young Justice, which he wrote for its entire five-year run, working with pencil artist Todd Nauck. A team comic featuring the then most current crop of superhero sidekicks, it was notable for foregoing the soap opera-ish melodrama and teen angst that permeated the previous decade's most popular comics featuring young heroes, like the X-Men and New TeenTitans books, and instead embracing comedy, making for a particularly light-hearted superhero comic that could be in sharp contrast to the often overly serious super-comics of the era. (It also inspired a popular television cartoon series of the same name that began airing in 2010, a series that David also worked on.)

That's a career that any comics writer would be happy to have, but then, David was so prolific that comics only accounted for part of his resume. He also wrote what must be in the neighborhood of some 100 novels, including lots of licensed work on the Star Trek franchise, various Babylon 5 books, movie novelizations (many of them of films based on comics, of course) and plenty of original science-fiction, fantasy and other books. 

And then there's his short stories, his non-fiction, his essays and his writing for television. 

Despite all of that work, David and his family found themselves in rather dire financial straits of late, with a GoFundMe campaign set up on their behalf a few months ago. 

It is a failing of both the comics industry (and the major corporations that make astronomical profits based on work like David's) and of the United States of America that anyone's medical problems should lead to such devastating amounts of debt. 

Put simply, David and his family should not need to resort to crowdfunding, certainly not in a country as rich as ours, and certainly not considering how much money David's characters and stories have helped make other people. 

As David's fans and the industry as a whole spend the week noting his loss and offering their condolences to his friends and family, I hope we can all also use this opportunity to do two things.

First, to recommit ourselves to reforming both the industry's treatment of its creators and the country's healthcare (which, unfortunately, seems to be getting worse, as Republicans are in the process of shrinking Medicare coverage; I don't think it's exactly controversial to note that, had David been a Canadian or a British writer, he and his family would have been in far better shape).

 And, second, to celebrate our favorite comic book writers and artists and to let them know just how much they mean to us while they are still alive to hear it. 

DC Versus Marvel: The Amalgam Age Omnibus Pt. 1: DC Versus Marvel/Amalgam Comics

After resuming inter-company crossovers in 1994 and publishing a handful of 48-page specials, DC and Marvel initiated the big one in 1996: A big "crisis"-style crossover that would imperil both universes and star both publishers' line-ups of characters (or, at least, the most popular ones), with 11 champions from each publisher battling one another to decide which universe would live and which would die. 

In other words, it would essentially be an official version of a sort of game comic fans were forever playing, who would win in a fight between so-and-so and whoever.

The comic would play out across four over-sized issues in a special mini-series, plus a suite of 12 special tie-in one-shots. To encourage fan interest and engagement, the publishers would even have five of those 11 fights decided by popular vote.

I can't tell you how DC Versus Marvel (every other issue of which was technically entitled Marvel Versus DC) went over for the comics shops at the time, as I was only about 17 at the time, but it definitely worked on me. A teenager still new-ish to comics, I bought the main series and a handful of the tie-ins, despite my then complete ignorance of and disinterest in Marvel Comics. (At the time, my experience with Marvel characters was basically limited to what I had seen on the X-Men cartoon and childhood memories of a pair of Spider-Man cartoons.)

In assembling the creators, the co-editors—Marvel's Mark Gruenwald and DC's Mike Carlin—chose writers and artists from each publisher's talent pool, so there would be a pair of writers switching off on each issue, and two different art teams, with these changing every eight pages.

The DC writer was Green Lantern's Ron Marz (although he had written for both publishers, including runs on Thor and Silver Surfer for Marvel), and the Marvel writer was long-time Incredible Hulk writer Peter David (who was, at the time, also writing DC's Aquaman). 

Both seem to have done a fine job, although there doesn't seem to have been too much room in the overall plot's construction to matter overmuch who was actually writing the comics; the broad mechanics of the story seem to have already been determined by the editors, and then there was, of course, the fact that fans would be determining the winners of many of the battles, leaving the writers to only come up with the hows for those bouts with fan-picked endings.

Which isn't to suggest that the writers' jobs must have particularly easy on this obviously big assignment, of course. In addition to moving the story from plot beat to plot beat, Marz and David also had to write all the characters so that they felt and sounded like themselves and stick to the continuity of the time while simultaneously being as welcoming to new readers as possible. 

In this, both Marz and David seem to have succeeded...although I suspect the book might have been better served by having a single writer rather than two, if only for a slightly more consistent tone. (Re-reading it today, David's tendency to insert humor in his stories is definitely more noticeable in his sections of the series, with the various characters all cracking wise. It is perhaps most notable in his scenes featuring a particularly chatty, quippy Aquaman, who sounds more like Spider-Man than his usually grumpy himself (Odd, really, since, again, David was writing Aquaman at the time).

As for the artists, according to Marz's introduction in the DC Versus Marvel Comics: The Amalgam Omnibus, which of course collects the series, the first choices were Jose Luis Garcia-Lopez and John Romita Jr., "both understandably seen as emblematic of each publishing house." 

That...that would have been awesome. 

That pair of artists do indeed represent the characters of each universe well in their particular styles, but, beyond that, both were (and are) phenomenal artists. Their styles are so different that I don't think they could have overcome the main problem with the two-art team approach to the book, though, which was the distracting visual inconsistency...one that was only emphasized by how often the pencil artists handed the baton back and forth. But still, Garcia-Lopez and JRJR on DC Versus Marvel would certainly have been a book to see...!

For whatever reason though, Marz said both had declined. (Garcia-Lopez would contribute pencil art to the Marz-written Amalgam Comics tie-in, Dr. Strangefate, which gives us an idea of how his DC Versus Marvel pages might have looked, at least). Thus the publisher sought out different options (No mention of whether or not George Perez, who was, at the time, the ideal artist for the assignment, was considered or approached). 

Ultimately, it was decided that Dan Jurgens would be the DC artist and Italy's Claudio Castellini would be Marvel's artist.

Jurgens was, of course, a solid choice. His work on the Superman titles and its various "event" stories like "Panic in the Sky!" and the "Death of Superman" cycle (not to mention his early '90s Justice League America run and 1994's Zero Hour) meant that he had drawn pretty much the entirety of the DC Universe at that point...many of the characters repeatedly. I don't know that I would say that the DC Comics of 1996 had much in the way of a house style, but a glance at Jurgens' art sure looked like DC Comics, especially at that time. 

Castellini was more of an unknown quantity, his only American work at the time seemingly being a 1996 one-shot with Marz, Silver Surfer: Dangerous Artifacts, as well as some Marvel covers. 

One thing is certain though: Their styles did not match up well at all, and were, in fact, so different it was actually quite jarring to see every time they would trade off on art duties, which was, of course, quite often. 

Jurgens, inked by Josef Rubinstein, created solid figures with more realistic shapes and builds, usually grounding them in recognizable backgrounds (Having so recently re-read parts of Zero Hour in the new DC Finest collection, in which Jurgens was inked by Jerry Ordway, I think I prefer his work under Ordway's pens far more than I did here). 

Castellini's art looked much more of the moment than Jurgens', which is to say it was more '90s...a fact that many readers might now consider a drawback more than a virtue. It was definitely more dynamic, though, his characters always seeming poised and ready to move, if not already engaged in some act of running, punching, jumping or flying.  

They were also all incredibly muscular and statuesque in build, which could actually often make them look "off", especially when compared to Jurgens' versions of the same characters (Castellini's Superboy and Spider-Man, for example, were towering bodybuilders, rather than, say, a typical if well-muscled teenager and a slimmer, acrobatic type).

Castellini also had a tendency for cheesecake, his female heroes all having the sort of '90s default "babe" proportions of a Jim Balent figure, sometimes paired with huge size and musculature, as in his Wonder Woman. 

Where it is most noticeable, however, is in his drawings of Lois Lane. While Jurgens would draw her in business attire, Castellini would give her short, skin-tight dresses that look more appropriate for the club than the office. In one odd sequence (Page 18 and 19 of issues #2), the blazer she's wearing over her dress even disappears between panels. 

Castellini, who also had a much thinner line than Jurgens and tended to eschew backgrounds altogether in many instances, was inked throughout by Paul Neary. Castellini is obviously a good artist, and I thought he handled both publisher's diverse array of characters well enough; in 1996, teenage Caleb would have even told you he was the better of the two artists. 

But the vast gulf in styles made the book something of a mess visually, and hard to ever really lose oneself in. The obvious solution would have been to find a single artist equally adept at the look and feel of both superhero publishers'' lines (which is why I thought of George Perez); I think either Jurgens or Castellini would have been a fine choice to pencil the series, but both of them? Not so much. 

The first issue, which was written by Marz, begins with a Jurgens-drawn splash page of Spider-Man (or a Spider-Man, I guess), swinging through a rainy big city. He's not in his classic suit, but one he was apparently wearing in 1996. Marz writes in his introduction that there was some consideration given to whether or not the creators should use the original, classic (and thus more recognizable) versions of the characters, or keep their portrayals consistent with the comics being published at the time. They had decided on the latter, as the whole idea was to interest new and lapsed readers into picking up other comics from DC's and Marvel's respective publishing lines.

For the DC characters featured, I don't think that matters all that much; they were in 1996, for the most part, as they always were and would mostly always be, with a few minor tweaks. Superman's hair was still being worn long, for example, and Batman was in an all-black costume akin to that of his movie. But Captain Marvel, for example, was wearing what he had been wearing since the 1940s. In all, I think only the bearded, hook-handed Aquaman and the presence of then-new Green Lantern Kyle Rayner really stand out as particularly 1996 versions of themselves.

With the Marvel characters, though, Thor seems to be costumed particularly egregiously, The Hulk is in one of his "smart Hulk" phases, and then there's Spider-Man. I didn't really pick up on this back in 1996, but it felt far more glaring re-reading the series today: I had no idea what was going on with Spider-Man, and whether this was a Spider-Man or the "real" Spider-Man. 

Not only is the costume a different one than that of the original cartoon or Spider-Man and His Amazing Friends that I knew Spidey from, but, when he introduces himself to Clark Kent and Lois Lane, he does so thusly: "It's really Ben Reilly, but my professional name is Peter Parker, so I guess that's what you can call me." 

And in the little character profiles in the back of the first issue, Spider-Man's lists his "Real Name" as "Peter Parker" and, under "Other Current Aliases" it says "Ben Reilly." (Under "Hair" it says "Brown (dyed blonde)", but colorist Gregory Wright has it as brown throughout the book.) 

So I honestly had no idea if this was really the real Peter Parker, or if it was Ben Reilly...and if the Spidey used throughout the series was a clone or not. Turning to Bluesky for help after just rereading the series in the new omnibus collection, I got an answer, I think: This was Ben Reilly, the clone of Peter Parker, although at the time he thought he was the real person, and the real Peter Parker was the clone...? Is that right...? (I just looked up "Clone Saga" on Wikipedia but had to stop reading the synopsis in order to preserve my sanity.)

Anyway, whoever he really is, Spider-Man soon meets The Joker on a rooftop, and the Clown Prince of Crime recognizes him as Spider-Man, presumably because they had recently-ish met in the pages of 1995's Spider-Man and Batman. (Which, um, shouldn't be possible, as that story would have been non-canonical, if the very premise of this series, which is that the DC and Marvel Universe are two separate and inviolable universes within the multiverse, is to be believed.) 

From there, much of this first issue is devoted to page-long sequences that introduce the various characters shown on the cover and then have them disappear in bursts of light. Eventually, there's the beginnings of various crossovers, like Bullseye holding Robin hostage in the Batcave and J. Jonah Jameson and Ben Reilly/Peter Parker showing up as new employees at The Daily Planet. (Which, while fun, doesn't make a lick of sense; Spider-Man, and apparently Jameson, find themselves transported to an entirely different universe than their own, and the first thing they do is...apply for new jobs in their field...?)

There are also a rather rapid-succession of mini, one-panel team-ups and battles—Daredevil vs. The Riddler, Batman vs. Venom, The Punisher vs. Deathstroke, Etrigan vs. Ghost Rider—that won't be expanded upon in any future scenes (In a relative rarity, a panel showing Bane punching Captain America's shield will get explored in a future issue, though). 

The gist of it all is that characters from the two universes are bleeding into one another's realities, an event that a strange old man in an alley with a glowing cardboard box seems to be trying to prevent. So too are The Spectre and The Living Tribunal. 

In the second issue, written by David, we see more of the characters interacting with one another—Wolverine fighting Killer Croc and then joining Gambit to steal the Batmobile, for example, or Marvel and DC's villains both named The Scarecrow teaming up to kidnap Lois—before the premise of the series gets explicitly spelled out for the characters and the readers. 

Each universe is represented by a god-like cosmic entity, one of two "brothers" that look a little like Jack Kirby-inspired space knights, one red and one blue. The pair have apparently just become aware of one another and are coming into conflict. They will combat one another by choosing 11 heroes from each universe to participate in fights for the sake of their home universe. When one opponent is defeated, which can be as simple as "pinning" them immobile for a few seconds, the match ends. Whichever brother/universe/publisher loses, their universe will cease to exist entirely.

The chosen combatants are, for the most part, the very ones readers and fans have long debated and argued about, regarding who is stronger, smarter, faster, a better fighter, etc. Again, it's basically who would win in a fight between so-and-so and whoever. 

And so speedsters The Flash and Quicksilver will face off, as will power-houses Superman and The Hulk, and water-going Kings of Atlantis Aquaman and Namor. Some of the matchups are fairly odd, though, and seem to exist mainly to give a popular character from one publisher a reason to be featured. 

Wolverine, for example, is paired with Lobo, despite the fact that the Dc character vastly overpowers him, and is more in Superman's weight-class than that of the mutant scrapper's. ("Who is meaner?" the back cover of the first issue asked of this particular pairing, their attitudes apparently accounting for their being chosen to fight one another...?)

Or, for another, in order to get Robin involved, the writers needed the Marvel equivalent of a premiere sidekick...of which the then sidekick-less Marvel had none, and so they went with teenage X-Man Jubilee, who, during the decade, was sometimes portrayed as something of Wolverine's sidekick.

And then there's Wonder Woman. While I would have chosen Marvel's Hercules or Thor (who is actually pitted against DC's Captain Marvel) to pit against her, or maybe Wonder Man, Ms. Marvel, Rogue or She-Hulk, Marvel apparently went with its most prominent original female character at the time, resulting in the X-Men's Storm facing her.

The fights, which then occupy most of the second and third issues, are all short, lasting between two and four pages and, I should note, fairly predictable. 

In the six whose outcomes were chosen by the writers, there's usually a clear winner on paper (Like, The Flash being much faster than Quicksilver, for example, naturally leads to his victory), or an easily plausible way for the ultimate victor to win (Thor's storm powers disrupting Captain Marvel's magic lightning, for example). 

The one that felt wrong or off to me in 1996 (and again in 2025) was Aquaman's defeat of Namor; I was obviously a DC partisan, and liked Aquaman more than Namor, but with the latter's superhuman strength and ability to fly, it seemed like he would easily best Aquaman. Not so, as Aquaman writer Peter David had the hero use his ability to communicate with sea life to summon a whale to jump on Namor and pin him. But it was just a killer whale; surely Namor could have lifted that off himself easily, right? 

As for the five fights chosen by fans, well, in most cases the more popular character was also either the more powerful and/or more experienced hero, and so who would really question Superman out-punching The Hulk, for example, or a Spider-Man besting the new Superboy, who had only been around about three years at the time?

The two that felt most forced to me were, of course, the Lobo/Wolverine and Storm/Wonder Woman fight. In both instances, the X-Men characters won. 

As I said, Wolverine, as unkillable as his healing factor might make him, shouldn't have had the strength to go too many rounds against a guy who could uppercut him into orbit. Marz, who had to write the scene, seems to have been aware of the fact it would be hard to write a Wolverine victory in such a way that would please fans, and so the characters' extremely brief fight happens off-panel, the pair tumbling behind a bar for two panels before a hand reaches up, grabs a cigar and takes a puff. 

In the published book, it was, of course, Wolverine who did so (Marvel heroes were still allowed to smoke in the '90s). The omnibus does contain alternate art that would have been used had the fights gone the other way, though, and so there is, later in the collection, a page in which it's Lobo who takes up the cigar. (There are similar pages showing alternate results for each of the voted-upon fights.)

And as for Storm, as powerful as her weather powers are, they just don't seem a match for Wonder Woman's various goddess-given strengths. In their fight, Wondy is essentially just zapped with lightning and crumbles. (In the alternate scene revealed in the unused art, where Wondy wins, she does so by blocking the lightning bolts with her bracelets and then punching Storm out.) 

In his intro, Marz writes that the Wonder Woman/Storm fight was the only one of the voted-upon matchups that they weren't really sure of how it would play out and, as it turns out, it actually ended up being the closest vote. (He also says in passing that fans should get over the Lobo/Wolverine fight ending as it did.)

Anyway, the results of the fights are 6-5 in Marvel's favor, and so that would seem to spell doom for the DC Universe...were it not for the actions of that old man in the alley, an apparent guardian who keeps the worlds separate from one another, and the newly deputized Axel Asher, who gets a snazzy red and blue costume and the superhero codename Access (along with some various super-powers, the most notable of which would ultimately be the ability to travel between the DC and Marvel Universes).

Because of Access' efforts—not to mention those of the old man, The Spectre and The Living Tribunal—there's a very unexpected, last-ditch effort to save both universes. This is, of course, by creating a third, shared universe that would combine the DC and Marvel universes into a single new universe. 

The result? Amalgam Comics, a new line of comics presented as if they had always existed (and DC and Marvel Comics never had), featuring amalgams of various DC and Marvel characters. 

So, for example, there was no longer a Captain America or Superman, but there was a Super Soldier, who was a combination of them both. Just as Logan never became Wolverine, but instead the dark, caped guardian of Gotham City, whose adventures played out in the pages of Legends of the Dark Claw. 

There were a dozen of these special one-shots produced, all of which featured a "#1" on the cover, but all of which also presumed an imaginary past and future, editorial boxes referring to events in comics never published, next issue boxes hinting at futures that would never be and even letter colums in the back of each book.

It was, as I have said, weird, wild and, at least for me in those days, completely unexpected, maybe the last thing one would expect DC and Marvel to do if they had 12 22-page tie-in comics to produce as part of the DC Versus Marvel event series. 

I think, for me at least, this idea really seemed to redeem the whole event, which was otherwise pretty predictable and not all that fun or engaging, with many of the attendant crossovers and interactions between the different groups of characters limited to either single panel suggestions of stories, or short, often unsatisfyingly executed fight scenes. 

(The main exception? The unexpected but fun star-crossed romance between Robin and Jubilee that played out throughout DC Versus Marvel; not only were they forced to fight when they would rather be making out, they came from two entirely different universes...! I always regretted we didn't get a full Romeo and Juliet-inspired Batman/X-Men crossover exploring their doomed attraction, although Marz would prominently feature the pair in DC Versus Marvel's first sequel series, DC/Marvel: All Access.) 

From what Marz and co-editor Mike Carlin wrote in their introductions to the omnibus, it seems to be editor Mark Guenwald who came up with the Amalgam concept, including some of the specific amalgams.

Now, in 1996, back before I had an actual job and thus money to waste on things as frivolous as comics, I had only read a pair of these: Karl Kesel, Mike Wieringo and Gary Martin's Spider-Boy (featuring an amalgamation of the '90sSuperboy and Spider-Man) and Larry Hama, Jim Balent and Ray McCarthy's previously Legends of the Dark Claw. 

(Remember what I said about never having read an entire crossover event series in its entirety before, in discussing the opportunity that the DC Finest: Zero Hour collections offered?  Well, I guess this omnibus does present the same opportunity, on a much more manageable scale, as there are far fewer Amalgam issues than Zero Hour tie-ins).

Something of a feat of editing and coordination, the new, temporary Amalgam Universe necessitated a degree of world-building to make for a cohesive whole and keep the writers from re-using different characters in different amalgams (I noticed a few mistakes, here, though. There are two Huntresses, one named Barbara who appears in Bruce Wayne: Agent of SHIELD and another named Carol Danvers who appears in Dark Claw. Catwoman seems to have been a component in both Bruce Wayne's Selina Luthor and Assassins' Catsai. And while Jimmy Olsen is the editor of the Daily Planet in the pages of Super Soldier, there's a red-headed, freckled reporter named Jimmy Urich in Assassins).

While some simply mashed two characters together (Or, in the case of the title characters of Speed Demon and Dr. Strangefate, three characters), some had bigger, weirder takes. 

Chief among these is Karl and Barbara Kesel, Roger Cruz and Jon Holdredge's X-Patrol, which combined the X-Men and the Doom Patrol (which, at their start, anyway, were both about men in wheelchairs assembling teams of outsiders to serve as heroes), and was full of weird composites that actually kinda sorta worked, like Beastling (Beast + Changeling), Dial H for H.U.S.K. ("Dial H for Hero" + Husk) and Shatterstarfire (Shatterstar + Starfire). With Cruz drawing them in a high-90's X-Men style, it was delightfully weird. 

And then there was John Ostrander, Gary Frank and Cam Smith's Bullets and Bracelets, starring Amazon Princess Diana, in her short-lived biker-shorts and bra look, and The Punisher Trevor Castle fighting The Hand and the forces of Thanoseid's Apokolips to save their kidnapped son. 

I actually rather enjoyed most of this suite of comics, with Mark Waid and Dave Gibbons' Super Soldier (Confession: I didn't actually know who either of those men were in 1996, or I probably wouldn't have skipped it) and Spider-Boy being particular standouts. 

There were two I was a little iffy on during this reading via the omnibus, though.

The first of these was Chuck Dixon, Cary Nord and Mark Pennington's Bruce Wayne: Agent of S.H.I.E.L.D., which had a fantastic logo, but didn't really sell me on the idea of a Batman-ized S.H.I.E.L.D. or do too much with the concept beyond the requisite action scenes. 

And then there was John Byrne and Terry Austin' Amazon, which starred a new version of Wonder Woman, who is literally, unimaginatively named "Wonder Woman" (which seems counter to the whole Amalgam narrative, doesn't it?). This is basically just Storm in a Wonder Woman-ized version of her own costume. Here, she's a young girl who was lost at sea and rescued by Hippolyta, who raised her alongside her own daughter, who would of course end up growing up to be the Diana from Bullets and Bracelets. The story is an extremely wordy affair that weaves Storm-as-Wonder Woman's origins into a conflict with the god Poseidon. It was honestly something of a chore to get through.

With the 11 fights between DC and Marvel characters all fought and the Amalgam books published, there's relatively little for David and the artists to do in the fourth and final issue, aside from the process of putting the toys back in their respective boxes and returning things to the status quo (Unlike DC and Marvel's individual crossover event series, there's little pretense here that this story will change either universe forever; indeed, the only real lasting change seems to have been the creation of Access, who could potentially provide an ongoing rationale for future DC/Marvel crossovers...although, as we've seen from the crossovers collected in the first DC Versus Marvel Omnibus, those comics mostly ignored him...and the two separate universes premise in general). 

David and the artists do use the space in this issue to offer up scenes of the heroes who were forced to combat one another now cooperating and taking on various villains, with Elektra and Catwoman facing The Abomination, Flash and Quicksilver getting stuck in Venom's goo, and a whole mess of heroes tackling Thanos and Darkseid. 

Ultimately the universes are separated again through the efforts of Access and his new powers, with the help of Batman and Captain America, who seem to have impressed the universe brothers with their personal resumes enough that the cosmic giants call off their conflict and shake hands. 

And then everything returns to normal. 

The ending seems a bit of a let-down after the fights and the Amalgam Universe, and, rather curiously, the conflict is ultimately resolved with fairly minimal participation from the DC and Marvel heroes (Batman and Cap excluded, of course). 

While many of the heroes do make mention of the fact that they should be working together to solve the problem instead of fighting like pawns throughout the series, they never actually do all band together to save their universes. Instead, they basically spend the entirety of the crossover engaged in small scale fights, unknowingly leaving the issue of the warring universes to Access and the old man to fix for them.

Access, a character jointly owned by DC and Marvel, was, of course, the biggest new thing to ultimately come out of this story, and he would reappear almost immediately in the same-year sequel, DC/Marvel: All Access, a series that was smaller in scale, but did manage to explore more interesting character interactions than DC Versus Marvel, and bring with it another round of Amalgam comics. 

But that will be the subject of the next post.

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A few other things of note...

•I sort of mentioned this in passing when I included the DC Versus Marvel: The Amalgam Age Omnibus in January's "A Month of Wednesdays" column, but it was quite striking just how white, male and straight both the DC and Marvel Universes come across in this series today. Certainly compared to what the shared settings look like right now, or would have looked like ten years ago, or even 20 years ago.

The participating heroes are overwhelming male. Of the 22 heroes participating in the 11 matches, there are five women: Wonder Woman, Catwoman, Elektra, Storm and Jubilee. And, as discussed above, those last two X-Men seem to be there mainly because there weren't any better choices for Marvel characters to throw at their chosen opponents, Wonder Woman and Robin.

Few other female characters even appear throughout the pages of the series, though. Supergirl and She-Hulk both share a single panel, Jean Grey and Psylocke both appear once apiece in panels featuring other X-Men, a blonde X-Men member I didn't recognize appears alongside Jubilee in one panel (this was Husk, according to Bluesky), and that's about it for female heroes in the main DC Versus Marvel series. 

Superhero girlfriends Betty Ross and Tanya Moon briefly appear alongside The Hulk and Superboy, but the female character who is most prominent throughout the entire series was Lois Lane. 

She gets the most panel time and the most dialogue of any other woman, by far. Her portrayal isn't necessarily all that flattering, though, as she needs to be rescued from the Scarecrows by Ben Reilly/Peter Parker.

And Ben/Peter will later, erroneously think to himself, "Jeez...I think she wants me!" He'll eventually even ask her out and get shot down, when she flashes him her ring and tells him she's engaged, at which point a giant Clark Kent appears to loom over Ben/Peter. 

As for characters of color, there are hardly any, and they are mostly limited to the X-Men Storm and Jubilee again. They are the only heroes of color among the 22 in the multiversal matchups, and about the only ones who so much as cameo.

Steel appears briefly, seen fighting The Absorbing Man in two panels and then flying alongside Iron Man in a massive, character-filled two-page spread. That same spread also features a tiny image of then-Green Arrow Connor Hawke, who is of mixed race (including Black and Korean ancestry), although he is there colored pretty white.

And that's it, really. No Black Panther (which seems crazy in 2025), no Luke Cage, no Blade, no Falcon and no War Machine. Not even Bishop, in this X-Men heavy tale. On the DC side, we don't see any of their more prominent black characters either, like Cyborg, Black Lightning, Vixen, Bumblebee or John Stewart. 

Finally, as for gay characters, I don't think either publisher had terribly deep benches in the mid-90s, with Marvel's Northstar and DC's Obsidian being the most high-profile gay characters at the time. Neither even cameos in the story, though. (Wait, was Obsidian officially out in 1996? Now that I think of it, he may not have been...)

•Rereading it in 2025, it was rather weird to see who wasn't in this crossover, which really demonstrates how much the Ultimates-inspired Marvel Cinematic Universe did in raising the profile of the Avengers characters in the years since the late '90s.

Completely absent from the main series are the previously mentioned Black Panther, as well as Scarlet Witch and The Wasp. Black Widow, The Vision and Ant-Man only appear in one panel apiece. Hawkeye and Iron Man appear in two panels each. 

Dr. Strange—who, like Black Panther and Iron Man is now a staple of Marvel's line-wide event stories—is also mostly absent, only appearing in a single panel. Also MIA, somewhat surprisingly, were Mister Fantastic Reed Richards (no battle against Plastic Man...or even The Elongated Man?) and Invisible Woman Sue Richards. (The other half of the Fantastic Four, The Human Torch and The Thing, only appear in a single panel, facing off against Firestorm and Martian Manhunter.)

And then there's Carol Danvers, who would of course be promoted to Captain Marvel in the 21st Century. She doesn't so much as cameo either. 

Granted, I have no idea which Marvel characters were retired, dead, in comas or in alternate universes at the time, so maybe all of the above had very good excuses for not being featured or even making cameos. But after having read so many line-wide Marvel event series in the last 25 years or so, it was striking how greatly the players differed in the '90s. 

•So if DC Versus Marvel were published today, who do you think the main "champions" from each universe forced to fight one another would be, aside from the absolute certainty of a Harley Quinn vs. Deadpool matchup? 

I thought about this off and on while reading, as it is certainly the case that Lobo and Superboy would not be participating were the event held in 2025...or at any point in the 21st century, probably. 

On Marvel's side, it's fairly certain Storm wouldn't be involved; she mainly seems to have been chosen to give Wonder Woman a similarly high-profile woman to fight and, in 1996, that's probably the closest Marvel had to a Wonder Woman of its own (Today, I'm sure they would pit Wondy against Captain Marvel Carol Danvers). 

And, as I said, I think Jubilee was mainly involved because Robin needed an opponent.

Otherwise, of the five main fights that readers could vote on, I think the other participants are mostly as popular today, and/or seen as the preeminent in their respective universes, as they were in the late '90s: Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman, Captain America, Spider-Man, The Hulk and Wolverine. (Maybe they would have replaced Hulk with Thor in a fight against Superman, were one held today, though? I'm not sure what sales or fan esteem for Thor and Hulk are at the moment, of course, but I've obviously seen much more of Thor in various Marvel events and team books than I have The Hulk in the 21st Century).

As for the six undercards, I think we'd definitely see some of those same matches repeating, like speedsters Flash vs. Quicksilver and Atlantean monarchs Aquaman vs. Namor. Others I'm not so sure about. 

If we saw a Robin today, it wouldn't be Tim Drake, but Damian Wayne, and I would therefore be surprised if Jubilee showed up at all. I think DC and Marvel would now be more likely to pit a Green Lantern against a Nova (instead of the Silver Surfer). And with both universes filled with more female characters, I don't know that a Catwoman vs. Elektra fight would even be included. 

With Green Arrow Oliver Queen now alive and well and Hawkeye more prominent, I imagine we would get an archer showdown, just as I assume Black Canary and Black Widow would be pitted against one another.

At any rate, I have to assume were the crossover published today, Marvel's participants would be tilted more toward the Avengers than the X-Men than this one was. 

Next: 1997's DC/Marvel: All-Access/Amalgam Comics

On a few collections of DC comics from the '90s: Aquaman, Green Lantern, Robin and Superboy

Aquaman By Peter David Book One

Peter David started writing Aquaman almost as soon as the previous ongoing series had ended. The thirteenth and final issue of the Shaun McLaughlin-scripted series shipped in 1992, while Peter David's four-part miniseries, Aquaman: Time and Tide, was released in 1993, paving the way for David's ongoing series, which began in 1994.

So hardly any time at all had really passed between the end of one series and the start of another, and yet reading David's Aquaman, it felt more like an entire age had passed, he so completely reinvented the character. His Arthur Curry--whose real Atlantean name Orin is used more and more--is a brooding, grumpy, self-pitying misanthrope, a former king more or less forced to continue his career as a superhero, because no one will leave him alone.

It is the visual shift that occurs in the early issues of Aquaman that are best-remembered, though. This is when Aquaman grew his hair long and grew a beard--it's more or less impossible to imagine Jason Momoa having been cast to play Aquaman in the Warner Bros live-action movies without this run of Aquaman comics having been published--and it's when he lost his left hand in perhaps the most ironic fashion imaginable, replacing it with a harpoon. By the end of this first collection of David's run on the character, he is wearing his new costume, too, his makeover complete.

The visual changes were all quite intentional, signalling not only a break with the character's clean-cut, Silver Age past, but an attempt by David, as he has his protagonist explaining within the scripts, to come up with an iconic symbol of his own, in the form of a weapon...specifically a weapon that surface-dwellers used against the creatures of the sea, repurposed and turned back on them by the sea's greatest defender.

Say what you will about the darker, more bad-ass take on Aquaman, it certainly worked. The series was the longest-running one Aquaman has ever had (David left after the 46th issue, but it continued under writers Erik Larsen and then Dan Jurgens, making it all the way to 75 issues). It was also, in my opinion, the best. This is the version of Aquaman that appeared throughout Grant Morrison's JLA, and has been around ever since...to a degree. During the New 52, Geoff Johns reasserted the character's original, Silver Age origins over those of David, Robert Loren Fleming and other Aquaman writers of the 1980s--in addition to upping his power levels to Golden Age Superman levels--but otherwise kept much of the character's chip-on-his-shoulder surliness.

Much of the strength of David's run came from neither reinventing the wheel--this isn't the self-conscious, revisionist, "Ultimate Aquaman" of Johns' more recent run, for example--nor jettisoning continuity, but rather of picking the character up where he was last left, giving him something new and life-changing to deal with (not the hand thing, so much as his discovery of The Atlantis Chronicles and coming to terms with what he learned in them), while fashioning for him interesting adventures dependent on interpersonal drama and as much mythology as superheroics. David never fell into the trap of recycling Aquaman's rogue's gallery--in this volume, Ocean Master and Black Manta both only appear briefly, and in flashbacks or dream sequences--or thinking of him as a reactive superhero who had to deal with, like, sea-going crime.

There was also a great deal of rewarding long-term plotting, some of which you can see here, as the events of Time and Tide inform those of the first year or so worth of the ongoing, as well as just good old-fashioned, shared-setting comic book scripting. The first issue of Aquaman I read monthly was #26, although I was easily coaxed into the series by well-executed guest appearances, each of which felt organic to an ongoing narrative, while also doing the job of drawing eyeballs to the book (For example, in this volume, Aquaman fights Superboy in one issue, and Lobo in another; the former is there because his turf is Hawaii, where there happens to be a pretty big naval base that Aquaman has business with, while the latter comes to Earth in order to avenge some dolphins, the only thing he cares about in the universe).

It also helped that David had a hell of a creative partner in Martin Egeland, the pencil artist who draws the bulk of this collection. I really liked Egeland in the 1990s, and his work remains pretty solid today, too. His characters are all quite expressive, and though he is prone to the excesses of the era--and there's an image or two where the muscles get out of control  and one shouldn't look too long at them or one will wonder why said pages were ever even allowed to go to print--there's a nice, fluid grace to the characters' implied movements. There are some incredibly dynamic scenes of Aquaman and Aqualad swimming, leaping and, in one memorable image, sort of skipping along a tunnel.

Looking back form 2018, I see a bit of Todd McFarlane in Egeland's style, although his fundamentals seem far better than McFarlane's ever were. (Does anyone know whatever happened to Egeland? I searched the name on comics.org after finishing this volume, and found relatively little beyond Aquaman and some superhero work from that time. Did he quit comics, or is Egeland a pseudonym, or...?).

This Book One collection begins with Time and Tide, which was drawn by pencil artist Kirk Jarvinen and inker Brad Vancata. The premise of the series was that Aquaman had retreated to his Aquacave in an attempt to continue the Atlantis Chronicles by writing about his own life, leading to a series of flashbacks. The first issue depict his first encounter with a superhero--The Flash Barry Allen--at the dawn of the Silver Age.

The second is devoted to his childhood, in which he is rescued from Mercy Reef as an infant by Porm, a friendly dolphin, who raises him as her own among her pod. It's a very Tarzan of The Apes sequence, and, in fact David takes quite a bit of inspiration from Tarzan in his portrayal of Aquaman, who he sees as something of an Atlantean answer to Lord Greystoke.

In the third, he is a teenager, and visits an Inuit village in Alaska, where he befriends--and inadvertently makes a baby with--a young woman named Kako. He also fights a polar bear and the first of the mythological deities he'll face during David's run.

And finally, in the fourth, we see Aquaman and Aqualad at the height of their Silver Age status quo, as they encounter Ocean Master who, at that point, is just another supervillain to Aquaman.

When Aquaman begins, Garth pulls Aquaman out of his cave--where he's sprawled like Conan on a throne of coral--to help him investigate a downed nuclear submarine for the US Navy. It turns out to be a trap set by new, short-lived villain Charybdis, who has already captured a minor DC aquatic adventurer, Dolphin. It's in this battle with Charybdis that Aquaman ultimately loses his hand.

After he's slightly healed--or at least has managed to affix a harpoon to the stump--he and his new running crew head to Pearl Harbor in order to get answers about the trap the Navy sent them into, where they have to fight Superboy (whose Spider-Man-like fight chatter makes him a better fit for David than Aquaman, whose jokes sometimes feel out of character). Before they get their answers, they are sent to Japan in order to rescue Porm, and there meet Lobo.

The last four issues of the collection are an arc of sorts in which Aquaman returns to Kako's village with Dolphin, only to discover the son he never knew he sired--Koryak, who will become a supporting character in the series--and a group of Fourth World villains, The Deep Six. Meanwhile, Garth goes off on a mission of his own, to follow a lead that he thinks might indicate that his late girlfriend Tula (or Aquagirl, as you and I know her) is still alive, meeting Letifos, who will play a role in the Tempest miniseries. It's during these issues that Jim Calafiore's work appears for the first time; he's just there to fill-in for an issue or so, but he will eventually take over as the series' primary artist...to the detriment of the series, if you ask me.

This collection, which includes 13 issues altogether, also includes a new introduction from Peter David, in which he describes how he approached the series and how he tried to sell it. I was glad to read it; as I always say, all trade collections should have introductions. If they don't deserve introductions, then maybe they don't deserve to be collected at all, you know?

Green Lantern: Kyle Rayner Vol. 1

I was a fan of the Kyle Rayner version of Green Lantern, DC's sole Green Lantern for much of the 1990s and the one that was featured in the Grant Morrison, Mark Waid and Joe Kelly runs on JLA. I could go on at some length about the virtues of the character versus that of his predecessor, Hal Jordan, but the two main things that attracted me to the character was that 1) he was new and debuted around the time I started paying attention to the DC Universe outside of Gotham City and 2) a coffee-obsessed, twenty-something, freelance artist based in New York City was a lot more appealing to me than a middle-aged, former test pilot-turned-space cop from a blandly generic imaginary city.

I never quite understood the vehemence with which so many Hal Jordan fans hated the change at the time. Of course, the very first issue of Green Lantern I read was 1996's Green Lantern #76, which featured Kyle Rayner soaring through the sky above Gotham City, the bat-signal in the background. This was the first issue in the three-part "Hero Quest," in which the green Green Lantern went from city to city seeking some form of guidance from his more established peers: Batman and Robin in Gotham, then Captain Marvel in Fawcett and, finally, Wonder Woman in Gateway (He had already met Superman, The Flash, Donna Troy and the Titans in his adventures).

That issue, for what it's worth, was a good 20 issues of Green Lantern into Kyle's career, plus Zero Hour and several issues of New Titans and whatever other appearance he made in his first two years or so wearing the ring. While I read earlier issues too, I did so out of back-issue bins, meaning out of order. I had never read Kyle Rayner's first year or so as Green Lantern in the way it was meant to be read, the way it was published. DC is making that possible though, collecting his adventures into Green Lantern: Kyle Rayner, which begins with his very first appearance...that means three issues of "Emerald Twilight," in which Hal Jordan was still officially the Green Lantern of the title.

These issues are rough. It's not until #57, when Kyle moves to New York City, that the book starts to feel like the Green Lantern I knew, and thought the book was; that's a good six issues into his time as Green Lantern. Writer Ron Marz is the poor guy who had the job of turning stalwart Silver Age hero Hal Jordan into a cosmic-scale villain, doing away with the Green Lantern Corps and The Guardians of the Universe and all the trappings of the franchise from the past few decades and introducing a new character--in just three issues.

He doesn't do as good a job in the space allotted as I always assumed he had done, but then, I think Dan Jurgens also did a lot of the work in (retroactively) justifying Hal Jordan's heel turn in the pages of Zero Hour. I guess I had just filled in the blanks in my imagination, or imagined that they were filled in in the pages of Green Lantern.

So the book begins with "Emerald Twilight." The first issue, penciled by Bill Willingham and inked by Romeo Tanghal and Robert Campanella, is really quite good. In the crater that was Coast City, utterly destroyed in the events of "Reign of The Supermen," Hal uses his wish-granting ring in an attempt to bring it back...although this mostly amounts to his conjuring holograms or hard-light constructs of it as he remembered it, and having conversations with his loved ones...though he's essentially just talking to himself through the medium of his ring. Anyway, it's all handled pretty well; I've always thought having your city completely erased from existence, including just about everyone you know except your friends from work (with "work" being "the Justice League" and "The Green Lantern Coprs") is as good as any other contrivance to drive a fictional character mad more-or-less overnight.

In the last few pages of part one, the Guardians tell Hal to quit fucking around and come back to Oa. Pissed at them, them streaks off to comply, while Kyle makes his first appearance; seeing Hal in the distance, he thinks he sees a shooting star.

The next two chapters? Things get dicey. (Visually, as well as in the story. Part two is penciled by a Fred Haynes, in a very '90s style with lots of splashes. Darryl Banks, who draws much of the rest of the book and is the artist most closely associated with Kyle, comes on during the third chapter)

During the second chapter, Hal is confronted by a series of allies from the Corps, each trying and failing to either calm him down or beat him up, as at this point it's pretty clear his trip to Oa isn't going to be a friendly one. He fights and defeats eight Lanterns, stealing each ring and adding them to his own fingers, increasing his power as he collects rings. When he gets to Oa, he's faced with Killowog. He tells Killowog that he didn't kill any of the Lanterns, but left them with enough power to survive. The two of them fight though, and The Guardians play their last, desperate attempt to stop Hal: They release Sinestro, newly empowered with a GLC power ring.

The bulk of the last issue is a fight to the death between Hal and Sinestro, with our hero breaking his archenemies neck and then killing Kilowog and destroying the main power battery and, apparently, The Guardians...?

In the last pages, the lone surviving Guardian, Ganthet, meets Kyle Rayner in an LA alley, seemingly at random, and hands him the last power ring in the universe, then disappears forever or so.

And the torch is thus passed.

Regarding "Emerald Twilight," what surprised me most is how few Lanterns Hal actually faces. It was my understanding that he killed the entire Green Lantern Corps which would have meant some 3600 Lanterns, right? Although I have absolutely no idea what was going on in Green Lantern comics just prior to this storyline, so maybe there were only a handful of Lanterns left at that point...? Or did destroying the battery somehow kill everyone? I have no idea.

Things stay rough for the next five issues, the first of Kyle's career. These issue's are pretty notorious, mostly because of what happens to Kyle's girlfriend, Alex DeWitt--this is the storyline from which the term "women in refrigerators" came from. And while it doesn't read any better in 2018, I do now wonder if perhaps this story wasn't a sort of necessary evil? Like, if it wasn't so egregious that it served as a sort of straw-that-broke-the-camel's back, drawing so much attention to the trope, giving it a name, that it was easier for other creators to avoid in the future? (Not that the phenomenon of killing off or visiting violence upon the female loved ones of male heroes as a way to motivate their actions went away afterwards, of course, but it's always easier to address a problem once that problem has been named.)

I'm also a little curious about how on-the-fly these decisions were made (This comic book series at this time in comic book history is a nexus for so many aspects of the mainstream comics industry and fandom that followed, that I think there could probably be a book written about it). The Kyle Rayner that seems to be getting introduced in the first few issues is a completely different one then the one who emerges a few issues later. When we first meet Kyle, he's a slacker in LA with a girlfriend trying to break into news photography, making for yet another superhero-with-a-media girlfriend pairing (Superboy, introduced just before Kyle, would also get a media girlfriend, in the form of Tana Moon).

She is killed off-panel and infamously stuffed inside of a refrigerator within issues of her first appearance, however, and after Kyle contemplates killing her killer in an act of vengeance, he ultimately leaves the city to begin a new life, at which point what would emerge as steady aspects of his turn as the main Green Lantern would emerge: His job, his city, his landlord, his relationships with super-women (First Donna Troy, then Jennifer-Lynn "Jade" Hayden). It makes me wonder if the sharp change in direction was intended to be subversive, or if Marz was making it up as he was going along, reacting to input from his editors.

In the middle of all that, DCU events intervene. Kyle briefly meets long-haired Superman and teams up with him against Mongul, the guy responsible for Coast City's destruction in the first place. Directly after Alex's death, Kyle finds Green Lantern Alan Scott--or perhaps he was Sentinel Alan Scott at that point?--waiting for him in his dark apartment, wanting to recruit him into helping with the whole Zero Hour thing (He does, but you have to read Zero Hour for that; here Scott does give Kyle a quick history of the Green Lantern Corps, told across four very full pages).

In Green Lantern #0, which seems to follow immediately on the heels of Zero Hour, Kyle and Hal battle on Oa, and there's a pretty interesting fake-out where it seems like Kyle might return the ring and legacy back to Hal, as if maybe his time as Green Lantern was meant to be more story-line specific, like when Jean-Paul Valley replaced Bruce Wayne as Batman, rather than when Wally West replaced Barry Allen as the Flash.

The collection includes two issues of New Titans, part of a crossover with that series that initiated Kyle's brief stint as a Titan (This era of Titans comics weren't all that great, but that was honestly my favorite line-up of Titans, with the possible exception of the Devin Grayson-written team), and the first issue of REBELS '94.

I suspect the next volume will be when the series starts to get pretty good, but these issues are all still intensely interesting, particularly from the perspective of what was going on with DC comics in the early 1990s, and various trends that were waxing and waning. Knowing how things have changed since only make some elements of these comics even more interesting too. For example, it's easy to imagine a young Geoff Johns reading these comics and getting pissed off, daydreaming about one day being able to undo all of the changes Ron Marz wrought.

And young Geoff Johns' dream came true!

Robin Vol. 5: War of The Dragons

One problem with these complete packages of particular series is evident from the first pages of the fifth issue of Chuck Dixon and company's long, healthy run on the Tim Drake version of Robin. This particular collection covers Robin #14-22, Robin Annual #3 and Detective Comics #685 and #686. Robin #14 was part of the four-part "Troika" story that introduced Batman's then-new costume and ran through the four main Batman books of the time. Actually, Robin #14 was the fourth part of it, so this collection opens with the conclusion of a story; it's beginning and middle somewhere else, probably uncollected (The solution, I suppose, would have been to either stick the first three chapters in here, or just collect "Troika" as its own, 90-ish page trade).

There's another multi-book arc collected in this trade, the title one, but the two Detective Comics chapters of "War of The Dragons" are included, perhaps because that entire arc was written by Dixon, who was then writing 'Tec as well as Robin, or because of how Robin-y that story was, as the warring dragons were King Snake, Lynx and The Ghost Dragons, the villains from the very first Robin mini-series.

So after the opening, in which Robin must try and hold his own against The KGBeast, there's a two-part story penciled by Tom Grummett featuring Batman, The Spoiler and Cluemaster; the three-part "War" featuring art by penciller Steve Lieber and inkers Klaus Janson and Enrique Villagran (Huntress and Nightwing put in guest-appearances, and The Silver Monkey is introduced) and then the volume contains the transition from Grummett to new pencil artist, the late, great Mike Wieringo, which accompanies a series of extremely well-made shorter one and two-issue stories, which are something of a relief after the relative chaos of the Bat-family titles up to that point, with their years worth of inter-book crossover epics.

The unfortunately also late, but also great Mike Parobeck and Stan Woch draw "The Mouse That Ate Gotham," in which Robin meets an unlikely foe that causes chaos by attacking key points of key infrastructure. Ringo then takes over as penciler for a two-parter involving the return of The General (a badly bowlderized version of whom has been appearing off and on in the James Tynion-written Detective), which is followed by a second two-parter, this one sending Tim undercover to infiltrate a ninja-themed summer camp in order to stop a string of robberies by faux ninja second-story men (and women).

The final chunk of the book is the third Robin annual, one of 1994's Elseworlds-themed annuals. In this one, Batman is a samurai in feudal Japan, and Robin is his orphaned apprentice, who must try to complete his final mission after Batman is killed off. There are a clan of cat-eared female ninja , but beyond those Batmanly touches, it is mostly just a pastiche of samurai flicks. Villagran handles the art.

Reading and/or re-reading all these comics today--the annual, The Mouse and the ninja camp stories were the only ones I hadn't read when they were originally published--what seems most striking to me is how much effort Dixon put in to trying to make the teenage characters seem semi-realistic as crime-fighters. Batman was very protective of Robin, and Tim had to be very careful about who he fought and how, so as not to risk his life needlessly; when he confronted someone like The KGBeast, it stuck out as a dramatic moment because it was so relatively rare. In this volume, for example, he mostly deals with younger opponents, and/or the sorts of crimes that might not necessarily warrant Batman's undivided attention.

Dixon's Spoiler is as different from Tynion's Spoiler as his Tim Drake is; rather than hyper-competent, she's very much an amateur and work-in-progress, and it's a lot more fun to see her arguing with the Dynamic Duo, as, on the one hand, she's totally right to call Batman and Robin out for being sanctimonious jerks to her, but, on the other hand, they're proven right that she's really not ready to be a crimefighter (as when Robin takes two in the chest due to her recklessness, for example; thank God for Kevlar!)

I was also struck by how much The General--a ridiculously brilliant and mature military strategist who just so happens to still be a little kid--seems like a precursor to Damian, right down to his look. Here he basically looks like Damian with a different haircut. All of which kind of makes me want to read a comic featuring the current Robin and the original version of The General, although I suppose the New 52 reboot and Tynion's version of The General would make that impossible-ish.

Robin was in pretty great hands with Grummett handling the art for so much of the first year or so of the book, but Ringo was pretty much born to draw the character, and it is great to see the energy he pours into these early issues. I can remember being a teenager and finding myself much more excited about the book when Ringo's art started appearing under the covers. My esteem for all of these artists have only grown in the years since then, but yeah, there's a pretty clear line in the book's look as Grummett gave way to Ringo.

Looking ahead, it looks like the next dozen or so issues will contain the "Underworld Unleashed" tie-in (during which Killer Moth becomes Charaxes, something I recall hating and writing a letter to the editor about), a few issues of "Contagion" and probably "Legacy" tie-ins, and guest-appearances by Green Arrow Conner Hawke and Wildcat.

Superboy Book 1: Trouble In Paradise

DC begins its perhaps belated collection of the 1994-2002, 100-issue Superboy series with this 270-page, 11-issue trade paperback. The particular Superboy in question is, of course, the '90s one, the clone who was introduced in the post-"Death of Superman" 1993 storyline "The Reign of The Supermen" and then graduated to his own title, by his creators writer Karl Kesel and artist Tom Grummett.

This volume makes for some curious reading, as it starts off with what appears to be four issues of a very solid ongoing comic book series, then detours into four issues of almost impossible to make sense of crossovers, before getting back on track for a few issues.

Kesel writes all 11 of the issues included herein, and Grummett pencils most of them, usually inked by Doug Hazelwood. As for those first four issues, they are most remarkable in for how quickly they establish a premise for the series, which needed a pretty dramatic form of differentiation from the then-four Superman monthlies, and how quickly the creators start filling out Superboy's cast with new characters.

That differentiation turned out to be geographic, as Superboy, his manager Rex Leech, his manager's teenage daughter Roxy Leech, and Superboy's Cadmus-appointed chaperone Dubbilex, a psychic "DNAlien", arrive in Hawaii for the next leg of their "Superboy National Tour," an attempt to turn a buck on Superboy merch, and they more or less decide to stay...in large part because Superboy's crush Tana Moon has relocated there from Metropolis, where she firstmet and was covering Superboy for a time.

We immediately meet Sidearm, a low-level bad guy whose gimmick is a couple extra robot arm attachments; Silversword, the curator of a Hawaiian cultural museum who comes into the possession of a super-powered "animetal"; The Scavenger, a collector of mystical and super-powered artifacts (not to be confused with the Aquaman villain of the same name) and, of course, Knockout, a super-powered stripper who develops a sort of Batman/Catwoman sort of relationship with the Teen of Steel. In the first issue we also meet Sam Makoa, a federal agent working on the islands to combat villainous organization the Silicon Dragons.

Again, all of those new characters appear in just the first 80 or so pages. Then things get a little messy. This is a problem with all of these collections. On the one hand, if the goal is to make them complete collections, then naturally they should include all of the issues of the series. On the other hand, because comics of the time so frequently included crossovers to other books--and Superboy, like Robin, would find this happening a lot, as in addition to line-wide crossovers like Zero Hour, it would also participate in the family-specific crossovers--that means including random chapters of larger stories that sometimes don't make much sense when read alone.

So by the fourth issue, Superboy is showing signs of the "clone plague," and heads to Metropolis to participate in "The Fall of Metropolis" crossover in the Superman books (there is no participating issue of Superboy though; he just heads off to Metropolis in one issue, and then the story picks up with Superboy cured).

Then there are two issues from "World Collide," the 14-part, 1994 Superman family/Milestone crossover that ran through seven different titles, and a one-shot. The third and eighth parts appear here, and they don't really make much sense at all read like this; the first of these is mostly intelligible, involving Superboy and Superman fighting The Parasite in the ruins of Metropolis, but the latter finds the storyline in full-swing. Superman and The Blood Syndicate are dealing with the results of a towering, omnipotent giant's attack on one side of a dimensional rift between the DCU's Metropolis and Milestone's Dakota, while Superboy teams up with Static and Rocket to tackle the giant head-on. There's some nice interaction between The Kid and his fellow teen heroes from the Milestone-iverse, but plot-wise? It reads a lot like the eighth issue of a 14-issue storyline. (I'm not sure what the market for it would be, but if DC's going to go ahead and publish these little slices of it, they might as well release "Worlds Collide" as a trade paperback of its own.)

And then we get two issues of Zero Hour tie-ins. As I've noted before, as tie-ins to line-wide crossovers, the Zero Hour tie-ins are generally pretty easy to read on their own, as most of them deal not with the plot mechanics of the main miniseries per se, but with the fall-out of those mechanics, which mainly means a standalone story in which the title character must deal with time going crazy. Those issues were then immediately followed by loose, thematic tie-ins--#0 issues recapping the heroes' origin stories and setting up future storylines. They were, essentially, jumping-on point comics.

For the tie-in, Kesel and Hazelwood introduce Superboy to the original Superboy; pre-Crisis Clark Kent when he was a boy. That Superboy arrives in Smallville, Kansas just as a plane carrying Dubbilex and our Superboy crashlands outside of town, and his Smallville occasionally appears and overwrites modern Smallville. It's a pretty great comic, really, and includes my favorite page in this whole book. Clark is confronted with the modern Superboy, and then walks off panel saying "Excuse me. I'll be right back." Just as our Superboy turns to the adult Lana Lang to ask what's up with Clark, he comes streaking back on to the scene, now in his Superboy costume, and clocks his modern incarnation. It's a wonder that guy even had a secret identity so long...

For the zero issue, Superboy has a rematch with Sidearm, and then he and Tana Moon spend some time with vacationing Metropolis super-scientist Emil Hamilton, who runs tests on Superboy as his origin is retold...including his first encoutner with Sidearm, from Metropolis on his first night outside of Cadmus. This is the issue in which Superboy acquires his special sunglasses--the first bit of tinkering with what would prove to be a very flexible costume--which gives him X-Ray vision, as well as approximating other Superman powers (Remember, at this point, Superboy was a clone whose sole super-power was tactile telekenisis, which he used to approximate Superman's strength, speed, invulnerability and flight, but didn't grant him Superman's various visions; Geoff Johns would later retcon the character to be an actual clone of Superman, with all of Superman's powers).

It is there that the series resumes the momentum Kesel had planned for it, free of crossovers. The final two issues collected herein introduce King Shark, one of the characters most formidable and, perhaps, longest-lived villains (although Kurt Busiek, Gail Simone and others would rather radically change his personality and, ultimately, his design, in the next decade or so), and a shape-changing character named B.E.M., who can transform into monsters based on whatever the last thing he touched was. These two issues were penciled by Humberto Ramos, whose style was a sharp departure from that of Grummett's, and was, at this point in his career at least, still rather rough. Ramos would get a lot better rather quickly though, and would eventually become a favorite of mine.

These comics are now almost 25 years old, and it certainly shows. The art, particularly that of Grummett, aged quite nicely...if anything, it looks better today, compared to what you might see in too many other DC Comics on the shelves at the moment (seriously, compare this to the insides of the New 52 Superboy or Teen Titans, originally starring a new version of this character, for example). The costume design, well, that's another matter. Superboy's fashion choices look downright bizarre now, and if you scan the covers of the series on comics.org, you'll see him gradually adopting differing costume elements as artists try to find something less 1994 for him to wear. Other than the main character, though, most of the other new characters look more or less timeless; certainly compared to the Milestone heroes, almost all of whom look as early 1990s as super-characters can look (Even poor Icon, who should have a pretty iconic costume, has that weird thing going on around his eyes).

Kesel's use of slang--and Superboy was very much in the constantly chattering, Spider-Man mold of quipping superhero--is dated to the point where it can be kind of crige-worthy, although, perhaps ironically, we are now so far removed from 1994 that it's easy to assume that maybe that's just how people all talked back then...? Like, when I read Silver Age Stan Lee-written comics, I just assume every one in the 1960s talked like, say Benjamin Grimm and Johnny Storm, you know?

Somewhat intriguingly, this collection is more thoroughly designed than the others in this post. While the figure of Superboy on the cover is re-purposed from Grummett and Hazelwood's image from Superboy #1, the background of that image is removed, the figure is enlarged so that his extremities extend beyond the borders of the space, and even the logo has been redesigned. There's a sort of Trapper Keeper aesthetic to the collection, which is...well, which is appropriate.

I had previously only read two of these 11 issues--Superboy #1 and Superboy #0; my comics budget was a lot more limited in 1994 than it is now--and I enjoyed this book immensely. I do hope DC continues collecting Superboy. Looking ahead, it appears that the next 11 issues includes "Watery Grave," a Suicide Squad story, in which Superboy, Knockout, King Shark and Sidearm work alongside Captain Boomerang and Deadshot, and, depending on whether or not they include Superboy Annual #1, guest-appearances by New Blood Loose Cannon, Green Lantern Kyle Rayner and maybe The Legion of Super-Heroes.