"Night of the Monster Men," reviewed

It might seem a little early for a crossover story, given that DC Comics' "Rebirth" initiative is only a few months old and that the first story arcs of this period are just now wrapping up, but you know how it is in Gotham City. One night it's a paramilitary organization attempting to assassinate citizens with drone-mounted weapons, the next giant monsters are rampaging.

"Night of the Monster Men" was a six-part story that ran weekly through two issues a piece of Batman, Detective Comics and Nightwing, detailing Batman and his many allies' attempts to safeguard the city from bizarre monsters created by Hugo Strange and set loose on the city as part of an elaborate (and rather silly) attempt to dramatize the renegade psychologist's diagnosis of Batman's flawed psyche.

Before we get into the story itself, it is probably useful to remind ourselves what's been going on in Gotham City just prior to this event story.

Batman recently took Duke Thomas under his wing and began training him as a new partner, here taking the unusual step of not naming him Robin (Duke wears a black and yellow, bat-themed costume when on the streets, but thus far hasn't taken a codename of any kind). Among their very first challenges were facing two metahuman superheroes–Gotham and Gotham Girl–driven mad by Psycho-Pirate's Medusa Mask. Gotham died, but Gotham Girl survived, and has been living in the Batcave with them (For more on Duke, check out All-Star Batman; he's been appearing in both the main story and starring in a back-up feature).

At Batman's behest, Batwoman has been training Spoiler (Stephanie Brown), Orphan (Cassandra Cain) and criminally insane supervillain Clayface (Basil Karlo). Their first big mission was trying to stop her father and his secret splinter group of the U.S. military from killing dozens of Gothamites that they believed were part of a conspiracy that may or may not even exist. Batman's new team succeeded, but at the cost of Red Robin Tim Drake's life...or so it seemed. In reality, he was saved only to be imprisoned by the mysterious Mr. Oz (This was the first story arc of the recently de-relaunched Detective Comics).

The original Robin, Dick Grayson, recently retired from his brief career as a super-spy for Spyral and resumed his Nightwing identity. He's currently working alongside a sketchy new partner named Raptor to stop the Court of Owls from going international (in the pages of Nightwing, obviously).

As for Batman's other allies, current Robin Damian Wayne is MIA (apparently off founding a new iteration of the Teen Titans, as can be seen in the pages of Teen Titans), Batgirl is traveling Asia (in Batgirl) and Red Hood is semi-undercover as a bad guy in an effort to infiltrate Black Mask's criminal organization (in Red Hood and The Outlaws).

Now, if the Monster Men sound familiar to you, there's a good reason for that. Batman first faced off against Hugo Strange's Monster Men in 1940's Batman #1, in a story entitled "The Giants of Hugo Strange." In that story, most likely written by Bill Finger and drawn by Bob Kane and Jerry Robinson (although credits weren't exactly trustworthy in that particular franchise at that particular point in time), Strange injected five insane men with a super-serum that turned them into 15-foot-tall ogres bent on mindless destruction–a perfect cover for his robberies.

Matt Wagner returned to that material for his 2006 miniseries Batman and The Monster Men, which expanded and updated the story to fit into modern Batman continuity and meet modern comic story-telling style. Both would have been knocked out of the character's official history with 2011's Flashpoint-driven reboot, making this third version of the story the official one. The monster men in Wagner's telling were still very man-like; not so in writer Steve Orlando and company's version.

Batman #7 ("Night of the Monster Men," Part 1) by writers Steve Orlando and Tom King and artist Riley Rossmo

Even without the threat of monster men, this is going to be a pretty terrible night for Gotham City, as Hurricane Milton is bearing down on it. That's right, a hurricane. Gotham City not only sits atop a massive fault line (see "Cataclysm" and "No Man's Land"), it's also in the path of hurricanes, making it the most dangerous place to live on the eastern seaboard, and that's just when considering the natural disasters!

This is explained via a radio announcer, for which I blame the issue's co-plotter Tom King, as he used that device in "Robin War" as well. Batman is meeting with his top lieutenants Batwoman and Nightwing atop a building, telling them that they are going to make sure no one dies at all, no matter what, to which they both essentially reply not to be so crazy, Batman; it's not like you can punch out a hurricane. Batman is really upset about Tim Drake's fake death, though, and so he calls "everyone" in.

Here "everyone" merely means Spoiler, Orphan, Clayface and the Gotham City Police Department. I've already mentioned where his other sidekicks are, although I'm not sure why he hasn't called in the Justice League, as presumably Superman, for example, actually could punch out the hurricane...or at least use his various spectacular powers to divert it. Of course, one could always ask why Batman doesn't just call his bro Superman to come solve any problem he's faced with, and readers of Batman comics generally have to just accept the fact that Batman won't call in the League because they are reading a Batman comic and not a Justice League comic. That's a little more difficult in this case, though, as he just called the League in two issues ago to help him take down Gotham (the mad superhero, not the city), and, as we'll see, the League eventually shows up during the course of this story, right when they are needed the least.

The plan is for Clayface to split into a bunch of selves, each of them in the shape of GCPD officer, and his clay-selves, Spoiler and Orphan will help evacuate the city and keep peace at the caves outside of town.

And then a monster shows up, so Batman takes Batwoman and Nightwing to deal with that while the others handle crowd control.

Said monster is very, very different from the previous versions of the monster men. These monsters begin their "lives" as corpses laid out on tables in a morgue, and then start...dripping. Red goo. Hugo Strange, meanwhile, is working out in the nude.

You can see his butt and everything. He looks at his watch and says, "It is time to start." And bam, the corpses start going "FSSSSSS" and swelling and bubbling and dripping and mutating (one of these, I should note, is a woman, not a man, so maybe this should have been called "Night of the Monster People").

The first monster looks like a two-story tall baby, one fat baby arm bigger, redder and fatter than the other, with a massive, swollen, mushroom cloud-shaped head with a huge red eye in the middle of it.

Batman loses his Batplane to it immediately, then starts buzzing it in a cool little "combat capsule" jetpack thingee that Steel apparently built for or with him ("Remind me to thank John Henry. Steel was right. Handles like a dream"). Batman then manages to kill the monster with fire, but don't worry; as Alfred and Duke, oracle-ing from the Batcave inform him, it's not "traditionally alive." Besides, we saw it mutate from a corpse, so we know it was dead before the battle began, meaning Batman is free to "kill" these monsters.

Using giant syringes to take tissue samples and with Alfred and Duke on the computers, Batman and team are able to determine that the giant baby monster was the guy who slit his own throat in front of Commissioner Gordon the previous Batman arc, warning "The Monster Men are...coming." Also, it has heavily modified cells, "like programmable stem cells, but super-charged."

But this is, of course, only the first monster. A second appears on the final splash page (that's the one at the top of the post), this one even less human in appearance, bearing a body something like that of a huge pteradon, but with a long, maned neck terminating in a fang-filled animal head with six red eyes. At this point it becomes pretty clear what this story is going to end up being all about: Batman vs. kaiju, basically.

I immediately thought of Steve Niles and Kelley Jones' series Batman: Gotham After Midnight, during the course of which Batman broke out a giant monster-fighting machine he had made, which was essentially just a giant metal punching machine.

Batman's giant monster punching machine, from Batman: Gotham After Midnight #3.

If you'll recall, he used that device to fight Clayface, who, in that story, had grown to giant proportions. As Clayface is now on Batman's side, perhaps he would grow giant and fight a monster hand-to-hand in this too...? One could only hope.

My next thought? Okay, maybe now you call in the Justice League. Multiple giant monsters seems more like a League-level threat than Gotham (the guy, not the city) was in issue #5, you know?

This chapter is drawn by Rossmo, who is probably the strongest of the three artists involved in this story. I'm not sure who designed the monsters, but they deserve high-fives; they are all very different from one another, and some of them look like Guy Davis-level weird; more anime monsters than old-school kaiju (Cover artist Yannick Paquette unfortunately does a poor job of featuring the monsters themselves on these covers, as you can see above; I can't tell you how disappointed I am that they didn't have Jones draw these covers, as Batman and monsters are pretty much his exact wheelhouse).

The most noticeable thing about Rossmo's Batman? Goodness are his ears tiny! I mean, Paquette draws fairly small ears on Batman, but Rossmo's Batman has ears that are smaller than Bob Brown or Dick Sprang's Batman ears; they are only slightly longer than those of Kingdome Come Red Robin's or Midnighter's bat-ears, and, if you say, "But Kingdom Come's Red Robin and Midnighter don't have bat-ears," then I say to you, "Exactly."

I wonder where Sims would place Rossmo's bat-ears on the Sprang-Jones scale...?

Nightwing #5 ("Night of The Monster Men," Pt. 2) by writers Steve Orlando and Tim Seeley and artist Roge Antonio

In the Batcave, Duke is whining to Alfred about having to stay indoors with him doing computer stuff instead of being out there fighting giant monsters with Batman, while Gotham Girl, wearing Duke's old Robin jacket over her superhero costume like they are going steady or something, remarks that she can hear buildings crumbling and giant heartbeats with her super-hearing. Guys, there's an entire mansion a short elevator ride above you; surely you can find Gotham Girl something to wear aside from Duke's old coat.

In the city, Batman and Batwoman take on the second of the monsters, the one that looks a bit like a huge furry pterosaur with a weird head, while Nightwing is tasked with tracking down Hugo Strange, starting with the morgue where the corpse that grew into the first monster was last seen.

Before he goes, Nightwing mentions that Batman does have a giant-monster fighting plan (Ooh, I hope it's that Kelley Jones contraption!), which he calls "The Tower contingencies" and Batman calls "The Wayne Watchtowers." By whatever name they are called, however, we are told that they are too dangerous to activate before the city has been completely cleared.

Does Batman have giant-monster fighting mechas all folded-up inside a few of his properties? Is the climax of this series going to involve our heroes launching giant, bat-themed Evas?

We'll just have to wait and see.

In the meantime, Batman activates Duke's "special project," "The Bat-Beacon." This is essentially Batman's own emergency broadcast system, which projects holograms of Batman out of all the street lights, so he can tell people to evacuate and to keep a stiff upper-lip and everything.

From there, he and Batwoman grab some super-motorcycles to fight the monster with; by the time they've engaged it thusly, it has grown two more heads.

As for the girls, they are helping Detective Harvey Bullock and other members of the GCPD move evacuees into the cave system outside of town, but something weird is going on there. Everyone is getting irritable and angry, as is prone to happen in such situations, but there's a red liquid covering them, so maybe their anger isn't entirely natural?

At the morgue, Nightwing does not find Strange, nude or otherwise, but he does find evidence that there are not two, but four monsters that have burrowed their way out of there. Our Oracle Bros Alfred and Duke help determine the identity of one of the dead guys-turned-monster, and Nightwing realizes that it is headed for Blackgate prison.

This is the monster on the cover. Monster #3 is roughly human-sized from the waist up, with a Nosferatu-like head, a desiccated torso and insect-like arms and legs. It drags a gigantic, bloated mass behind it, likely containing something super-gross.

Nigthwing is in the process of hurriedly assembling a hang glider or something to fly out to Blackgate with when Gotham Girl rockets passed him on her way to save the day. If you missed Tom King's initial Batman arc, her deal is that she and her brother were both given Superman-like powers, but the more they use them, the quicker they burn out their life forces. Additionally, she is suffering the effects of a the Psycho-Pirate's Medusa Mask, so Batman and Duke would both prefer she just hang out in the Batcave, rather than fly off to fight giant monsters.

In this scene, it becomes clear why she is still wearing her superhero costume with a zip-up jacket over it; it's so she can un-zip that jacket to reveal the big, one-letter logo of her superhero costume, Superman-style.

Detective Comics #941 ("Night of The Monster Men," Pt. 3) by writers Steve Orlando and James Tynion IV and artist Andy MacDonald

Batwoman, still fighting Monster #2 atop a motorcycle, checks in with everyone via radio, so that during the course of a five-panel sequence we can be reminded of who is doing what where (and also see incoming artist Andy MacDonald's renditions of all the characters right off the, um, bat). Batman continues to try to talk Gotham Girl out of flying to confront Monster #3 at Blackgate, saying Nightwing will be there soon, and she talks a bit of smack: "Whoever Nightwing is he isn't fast enough or strong enough."

Much of the action in this issue is divided between two battlegrounds: The caves outside Gotham where Spoiler, Orphan and the GCPD have corralled the evacuating citizens, and Blackgate prison.

The people in the caves have gradually started questioning authority and fighting one another and, thanks to the red goop, begin to act with a sort of hive mind, turning on the heroes and law enforcement.

In an incredible act of being-smart, Spoiler starts thinking about the way plants, molds, fungi and algae communicate, and thus how to combat this goop, which is apparently another monster of sorts. New 52 Stephanie Brown, who is now apparently a genius (she sure made out in the reboot, huh?) comes up with a plan to neutralize the goop without killing or harming the people it's possessing: Raising the heat in the caves. So she, Orphan and the un-gooped cops start shoving road flares all over the cave walls and ceilings. This explains in part what Stephanie keeps in her many pockets and pouches--so many road flares.

At Blackgate, Gotham Girl lands in a superhero pose that shatters the cement beneath her, accompanied by the sound effect GA-THOOM. That is the sound of Gotham Girl smash-landing on cement: "GA-THOOM." What does she find there? Dog-sized creatures that look a bit like giant toads crossed with superman villain Doomsday, attaching themselves to the shoulders and heads of inmates and snaking their long, gross Venom tongues down around them. These are the things apparently hatching out of the huge, gross egg-sack that Monster #3 drags behind it. Nightwing arrives and tries to talk Gotham Girl down a bit, suggesting that maybe tearing the monster to pieces isn't the best course of action, but she basically goes into berserker mode and tearing through the monster's egg sac and then just ripping and ripping and ripping in one of the grossest sequences I've seen in a long time: She and Nightwing are just covered in dead monster gore by the time she's done.

As for the Bats, they are still motorcycle-fighting Monster #2, which continues to grow heads along its long neck. By the end of this issue, it's up to five heads, the topmost of which SPLURTs out a huge knife-shaped horn somewhat reminiscent of Gamera's goofiest-looking opponent, Guiron. They call Nightwing to check in on him and Gotham Girl, but they get no response: Nightwing can't come to the Bat-radio right now, because he's too busy being transformed by the monster blood and guts into a monster himself! Both he and Gotham Girl are turning into monsters, and, in Dick's case, ironically so, as his new monster form is that of a half-bird, half-bat creature.

Batman #8 ("Night of The Monster Men," Pt. 4) by writers Steve Orlando and Tom King and artist Riley Rossmo

The five-headed, building-sized Monster #2 has taken flight, and Batman is still crouched atop his motorcycle, which is attached to the monster by a grappling hook. That's right, he and Batwoman are still fighting the five-headed, blade-horned furry pteradon-esque creature. Surely at this point a call to Superman wouldn't be out of the question, right? He could be in Gotham knocking that thing out and back in Metropolis in less than a minute. I'm sure it would be no trouble at all!

After another quick recap of who is where, the increasingly eager to join the fight Duke reveals to Batman that he and Alfred have discovered what it was that created the monsters: A super-steroid with notable similarities to Venom, the super-steroid that Bane used to take to get super-jacked (and Batman was briefly addicted to, pre-reboot).

Nightwing and Gotham Girl, both mutated into monsters--albeit human-sized ones--by the viscera of Monster #3, both arrive on the scene for some more fighting. Batwoman keeps them busy while Batman finishes off the kaiju via a judicious application of electricity, and joins Batwoman by popping a wheelie and slapping Gotham Girl across the face with it. Oh, that Batman!

That's actually just the first of the cool tricks he tries out here, including wearing Clayface as a big suit of battle armor to go hand-to-hand with Gotham Girl.

It's not enough though, and the day isn't saved until Duke Thomas arrives on the scene with a monster cure in a giant syringe, which he pokes G.G. with. Meanwhile, Batwoman and the monster-ized Nightwing fight in the sky and, outside of town, Spoiler's gambit with all the road flares worked, and the red goop making the Gothamites act all crazy melts off them, forms a river of black goop, and streams out of the cave, where it transforms into Monster #4, the biggest, scariest of the monsters so far.

It's humanoid in shape, but with four long arms, and a body that looks a little like a robe, with a long, dangling red veil. Sprouting from its shoulders are a pair of huge trees with red leaves.

Again, Paquette's cover really rather sells the monster short. With giant monsters, it's all about scale guys...although I suppose it's understandable that the artist might want to focus on the human-sized hero whose name is on the book in the cover image rather than on his titanic opponents.

Nightwing #6 ("Night of The Monster Men," Pt. 5) by writers Steve Orlando and Tim Seeley and artist Roge Antonio

Batwoman and the de-monsterized Gotham Girl manage to administer Duke's de-monstrification serum to Nightwing by the former essentially roping and riding the mutated Nightwing into the syringe the latter was holding up. Nightwing pukes up a bunch of monster juice, and is back to his old self, only missing his mask and a few small pieces of his shirt. Really, he could have stood to lose his entire shirt. I mean, don't you guys want to sell comics, DC? Then lets get Dick Grayson more shirtless more often!

Monster #4, the last of the Monster Men People, strides towards downtown Gotham, scooping up a train car in one of its massive hands. Ah, giant monsters and trains! A classic combination.

Spoiler and Orphan arrive in a station wagon (?) to join the rest of the Bat-squad, just in time to dodge the train engine the latest monster chucks at them. Nightwing takes Spoiler to the top of a Wayne Tower, where she plugs her...super-computer staff?...into the floor and she and Nightwing start reviewing various clues regarding Hugo Strange's whereabouts on the Iron Man: The Movie like hard-light computers it projects...?

Again, I'm not sure how or why Spoiler is fucking Oracle all of a sudden, but I don't really like this new, hyper-competent version of a character whose original charm came from the fact that she was an extremely willful amateur with more heart and guts than actual skills. I suppose this is just the way James Tynion IV, Scott Snyder and other Bat-writers and editors decide to characterize her post-reboot, but for someone who has been reading her for a very long time, it sure feels off, like she was absorbing Tim Drake's mad computer skills through his kisses or something.

By way of explaining how she's able to crack encryptions in a matter of seconds and follow a money trail involving the Monster Venom and the facilities to process it, she tells Nightwing, "I'm The Cluemaster's daughter, Dick." Um, yeah, exactly my point, Steph.

Meanwhile, Dick watches a few seconds of recorded sessions between Strange and the four patients of his that he ended up turning into his Monster People, showing no respect for patient doctor privilege. Those few seconds are enough for Dick to boil each patient's diagnosis down to a single word--Manipulator, Fear, Grief and Child. He's starting to put it together.

The monster knows what they are up to, and starts scaling the tower to get to them, so Batman must activate the Wayne Watchtowers. Is this where one of his buildings transforms into a giant monster-fighting robot? No, sadly nothing that dramatic. The activation does apparently knock all power out of the city and then maybe divert it to the building or something, as it heats up and sets the monster on fire or something with a "SCHWUFF" as Spoiler and Nightwing jump to safety, Strange's location uncovered just in time.

So that's all four monsters down and out, has The Night of The Monster People ended so soon, with a whole issue yet to go?

Ha, Batman and friends wish!

No, the "dead" monsters have all been linking some kind of pink goo that has been gradually sliming its way together, forming an even bigger monster than the biggest of the first four. This final monster isn't too sensational of a design; he looks a little like Spider-Man villain The Rhino, but with a giant Sarlacc Pit mouth for a face.

So this is the climax: One final, big-ass monster for Batman's team to fight while he goes to face Strange. As he's about to go, Nightwing tells Batman what he's figured out about Strange's plan. They monsters aren't just monsters, but they are a statement. People wrestling with childhood trauma, facing grief and fear and manipulating others around them, all of them combining into one, single monster. The Monsters are, Nightwing says, Strange's diagnosis of Batman.

So Batman does the sensible thing: He calls The Justice League and asks them to come take care of this monster for him while he and his team go beat the crap out of Strange.

No, I'm just playing. He tells his team to use The Watchtowers--special fortified buildings bristling with high-tech weaponry that Batman built after Darkseid's "Year One" invasion--while he goes to fight Strange himself. On the final splash page, we finally see Strange again. He is not nude, but he is wearing a Batman suit. Not the cape and cowl, just the suit from, like, the neck down. Which is really too bad, because I'd love to see what he would look like wearing the cowl. Like, it's hard to imagine a Batman with a beard and glasses, isn't it?

And that's the final page of the penultimate chapter of "Night of The Monster Men"...! Just one more issue to go!

Detective Comics #942 ("Night of The Monster Men," Pt. 6) by writers Steve Orlando and artist Andy MacDonald

This is page four of this comic book, in its entirety:

That totally looks like they are all jumping into their own individual robot lions or vehicles or Megazords or whatever, and they are totally going to combine them to form a giant robot, right? I mean, everything about that page, right?

I found the third tier the most intriguing, because it shows that each of the four Watchtowers is apparently programmed with a particular symbol for a particular member of Batman's Bat-squad to light up on its side. I have to imagine those symbols change depending on who is in the individual towers' cockpits, as it's really hard to imagine that Batman had a tower all set up for Spoiler and Orphan, neither of whom even really have symbols, but not ones for Robin, Red Robin, Red Hood or Batgirl.

As for the symbols, the girls have some terrible ones. Spoiler's icon is...a pink "O"...? Not even an "S" for Spoiler? Or something, anything, purple? And Orphan, whose name does begin with the letter "O" gets, what, a hashmark indicating five? A symbol representative of the stitching over the mouth of her current, dumb mask? That's kinda dumb.

A friend of mine pointed out to me that Orphan's symbol looks a little like a crudely drawn, hobo version of the bat-symbol--imagine the little lines in the middle as its ears and two of the lower points on the serrated bottom of the traditional bat-symbol, and the two larger lines on the edges as the largest points of the wings--which kind of works for Cassandra Cain.

Damn I wish she'd hurry up and re-adopt the name Black Bat and a better, more bat-like costume...

Batman arrives in Hugo Strange's penthouse hideout to confront him, and Strange is an all-around amazing decorator! The walls have all these weird, Batman-specific medical charts. Like, there will be a profile of Batman's head, with the mask and skull cut away to reveal Batman's brain, and then all these little (unfortunately illegible) scribbled notes and lines, pointing to which part of Batman's brain thinks about what (Justice? Bat-shapes? Vengeance? Black? His mom's pearls?). There's even a Vitruvian Man, only with Batman in it--so, a Vitruvian Batman, I guess. It's like Strange took a bunch of medical textbooks, and then drew Batman costumes on all the figures.

These are plastered everywhere on the walls, while Strange himself sits atop a throne of psychology books (My favorite title? "Crazy People"), some thick, sticky substance along the bottom (I would assume it's that red stuff that Monster #3 leaked to make people crazy.

Before Batman can strike across the room and punch out Strange, the doctor warns him that he's wearing a "suicide suit," and therefore if Batman strikes him at all, it will kill him, breaking one of Batman's cardinal rules about crime-fighting. They begin their long talk about Batman's psychology, which essentially amounts to Strange's belief that Batman's mental health issues are flaws that make him a weaker crime-fighter, whereas Batman believes they are actually strengths, or at least he's been able to master them and turn them into strengths, which help make him a better crime fighter. Guess who's right?

Meanwhile, the watchtowers prove to not be able to transform into robots. Rather, they are just kitted out with a bunch of laser guns and giant harpoons and stuff like that. These are enough to temporarily stop the monster, but not enough to do so permanently. And this monster's hide is so tough that the giant syringe of monster cure won't pierce its hide. What are they to do? Spoiler alert: Nightwing run across one of the harpoon lines anchoring the monster in place, dives into its open mouth and administers the cure to its softer insides, causing it to vomit him out. And keep vomitting. Re-reading it now, it looks like the monster may actually have vomited itself out through it's mouth, if that makes any sense.

And back to the Batman vs. Strange battle, the latter talks himself into unconsciousness, as Batman secretly brought back-up with him. Clayface blanketed the top few floors of the building with his own malleable body, completely sealing the flow of air into the room. Apparently, Batman can just go without air a lot longer than Strange, who passed out during his speechifying. (It here occurred to me that this particular move was a very Plastic Man-like move, and made me reevaluate Clayface's role on the team. I wondered if at some point Tynion hadn't considered using Plas or Metamorpho or maybe eve Elongated Man in the book, but either changed his mind or had it changed for him by DC; it would explain Clayface's presence, given that as a villain who has pretty much never shown a "good" side before he is a definite odd one out on this Bat-squad team of Tynion's Detective.

And then, after all give giant monsters have been defeated by Clayface, Gotham Girl and a half-dozen physically fit people with masks and capes but no powers, guess who shows up? The Justice League has the gall to arrive to help with clean-up. Yeah Green Lanterns, that's cool you guys can use your power rings--the so called "most powerful weapons in the universe"--to lift and move rubble, but where you a few pages ago? You couldn't have been using those rings to beat up Godzillas with giant boxing gloves!

(By the way, one of the things I don't like about the new Cyborg is his undefined, apparently limitless powers. Like, what's he doing there? I thought he just shot sonic weaponry out of his hand-cannon things, but here he's apparently lifting girders and masonry as if he had a blue-tinted Green Lantern ring. I love that The Flash, The Fastest Man Alive, is literally just standing there next to him though. What's Flash doing exactly, supervising? )

On the final pages, we see Bruce Wayne and Kate Kane in a cemetery, remarking on the headstones erected for the four victims that Strange used to make his monsters, which an anonymous donor paid for (I bet you five dollars it was Bruce Wayne; no, ten dollars!). They talk to one another in a brief conversation meant to set up future storylines. When Kate asks Bruce if Strange was sent to Arkham, he says no, but "somewhere...better equipped for his mind." (Hm, maybe Bruce Wayne bought Oolong Island?). He also said that Strange's Venom was given to him by Bane, in exchange for the Psycho-Pirate, and that he's "not waiting to find out" why. If you've been reading Tom King's Batman, you already know why, because that storyline, "I Am Suicide," just ended.

Batman further tells Kate that SHIELD ARGUS has "pulled eminent domain" and built a big research facility around the mostly-vomit body of the final monster, and since the monster goop can be weaponized, it "bears...watching." This will apparently be followed up on in Tynion's Detective and the upcoming Batwoman book.

And that is that.


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

Since DC re-relaunched Batman last year, they have been having Tim Sale providing variant covers for the series. I personally find this kind of ridiculous, as Sale's covers are almost always superior to those of the "regular" artists and, while I continue to not understand the specific economics of variant cover sales, it always seemed more logical to me to pay one artist to draw a single cover for a single issue of a comic, rather than paying two or more to provide multiple covers for the same damn book.

Anyway, as I've stated repeatedly above, Paquette's "regular" covers may have included pretty decent images of Batman, Batwoman and Nightwing, they usually failed to depict the monsters in any way that demonstrated their size and/or scariness. That was definitely not the case with Sale's variants, the first and fourth of those below.

As you can see, he makes the monsters look huge, while also putting Batman at the center of the action, and he does so using some fairly basic visual tricks. The Nightwing variants are penciled by Ivan Reis (the second and fifth of the images below), and Rafael Albuquerque drew the Detective variants (the third and the sixth).

Overall, Albuquerque and Sale do the best job of making the giant monsters look like giant monsters; Reis' images aren't really all that fair to compare to Paquette's on that score, as the monsters he draws are more less human-sized.

Anyway, for comparison's sake, here are what the other artists involved in drawing the Monster People came up with:

Afterbirth: DC's "Rebirth" initiative, week seven

Hal Jordan and The Green Lantern Corps: Rebirth #1 by Robert Venditti, Ethan Van Sciver and Jason Wright

Ethan Van Sciver, who has collaborated with Geoff Johns on Green Lantern: Rebirth, Flash: Rebirth and DC Universe: Rebirth, obviously really like Green Lantern. Given the artist's talent, prestige and past sales, one assumes he could pick whatever titles he wants to work on for DC, and yet he keeps returning to various Green Lantern comics, most recently a minor miniseries about John Stewart, Guy Gardner and other members of the GLC lost in an alternate universe.

And here he is again, teamed with Johns' successor on Green Lantern, writer Robert Venditti.

This particular Rebirth one-shot is more of the bridge variety than the sample of what to expect variety (as is the Nightwing special, below, actually), essentially moving us from where Venditti left Hal Jordan (rather abruptly, it must be said), catching us up on where everyone else in franchise is at the moment and then having a rather pivotal, if slightly silly scene altering Jordan's current status quo.

That status quo? Well, last time we saw him, he was battling a version of his post-Crisis, pre-Flashpoint self (the "Emerald Twilight" Parallax from the pages of Convergence who made it into the New 52-iverse much like a Superman, a Lois and their son Jonathan did). He won the fight, but in the process turned himself into a being of pure green energy.

In this special, in an event that is both kind of awesome and kind of stupid at the same time (something it shares with the best of Johns' Green Lantern writing), the big, green, energy version of Hal creates energy constructs of a rock, an anvil and a huge hammer, and then forges his own Green Lantern ring, each blow knocking him back into his flesh and blood form and sending ripples throughout the extended cast: The Corps, White Lantern Kyle Rayner, Agent Orange Larfleeze, Star Sapphire Carol Ferris and so on.

Naturally he's successful, he says his oath and he wills away his trench coat in favor of his traditional GL costume and flies off and towards the pages of Hal Jordan and The Green Lantern Corps #1. Venditti seems to be now doubling down on business from Johns' run, with all of the variously-colored Lanterns and a mysteriously aged Sinestro (who, after goring gray, looks remarkably like a pink Vincent Price) in a Parallax-powered Warworld taking Oa's place in the center of the universe.

The continuity is a little glitchy if one tries to match this up with various other books. For example, I guess there are still two Hal Jordans and two Parallax entities in the universe (The Convergence Jordan will have a Parallax entity semi-possessing him too, right?), and I have no idea how this matches up to what we've been seeing the pages of Justice League in the "Darkseid War" arc, or even Green Lanterns...although I suppose this issue could be set before Green Lanterns: Rebirth...?

That aside, I imagine if you've liked Johns' Green Lantern, particularly from about the "Emotional Spectrum" business on, then Venditti and Van Sciver have successfully set the stage for a new comic that you will more than likely also like, although do be warned that Van Sciver was here for the special and not the ongoing, which will be drawn by Jordi Tarrogano and Rafa Sandoval.

Nightwing: Rebirth #1 by Tim Seeley, Yanick Paquette and Nathan Fairbairn

The Grayson iteration of the Dick Grayson character--who became Agent 37 of super-spy organization Spyral after having his secret identity outted to the world and faking his own death--was never built to last, and, personally, I never thought it made a whole lot of sense if you thought about it for too long (like, a minute), but co-writers Tom King and Tim Seeley managed to tell some really surprisingly great stories during the two years or so of that particular status quo, and had a great handle on the character of Dick Grayson.

It's something of a relief then to see that Dick is reclaiming the codename and costume of Nightwing (even if how they put the secret identity genie back in the bottle was fairly cheap), and that Seeley is sticking with the character in the new, upcoming Nightwing book.

For the Rebirth special, Seeley's paired with Yanick Paquette, and the pair devote themselves to tying-up various loose ends left over from Grayson and other Dick-specific storylines (like "Robin War"), as Dick narrates (pointing out, on the first page, where he got the name Nightwing) his way through a hang-out session with Damian Wayne and, later, Batman, all the while saying goodbye to various characters from Grayson. He attempts to say goodbye to his former Spyral boss "Matron" (Helena Bertinelli, who is about to become The Huntress and, in fact, is shown suiting up; she'll be in next week's Batgirl and The Birds of Prey: Rebirth #1), he hangs out with Midnighter in order to defeat "Project: Killicorn" (My favorite part is when Dick says that Midnighter refers to them as "arch-frenemies" or "nemesisters," although the Killicorn is, of course, a close second) and runs one-last mission with Tiger, who is the new leader of the new and less-evil Spyral.

Finally, there's some more Court/Parliament of Owls stuff, which looks like it will dominate at least the first story arc of the upcoming Nightwing.

As I said, I wasn't a big fan of the entire Grayson milieu, despite what King and Seeley were occasionally able to pull off with it, but this particular issue does a pretty good job of filing all that stuff away without blowing it up, so that characters and concepts can be returned to if needed in the future. That's wise. I particularly liked Dick's interactions with Midnighter who, remember, was created as a sort of Batman parody, and is always defined in relation to Dick's first and greatest partner.

Like, um, every comic book DC has published in the post-Flaspoint DCU, this would be a hell of a lot better if there weren' a reboot accompanying the introduction of The New 52. For example, prior to that reboot, we knew that there was a legendary Kryptonian hero named Nightwing, we knew that Dick had a long-time relationship with Superman, since he was Batman's junior partner throughout their entire "World's Finest" relationship and Chuck Dixon and Scott Beatty even wrote a nice scene in their 2005 "Year One" Nightwing story arc in which Superman suggests the name to Dick.

In the New 52, I can't recall if Superman and Dick Grayson ever even met until after Grayson became Agent 37.

Also, the climax involves Dick looking at his original, retconned Robin costume in its glass case in the Batcave and, I don't know, maybe it's me, but I just can't get used to seeing that costume and thinking "Dick Grayson's Robin" costume, as it looks more like a Tim Drake costume from some videogame adaptation.

When he does finally suit up as Nightwing, it's worth noting that he's wearing a new costume, this one with the blue and black color scheme he wore for most of his career as Nightwing, only with an abstract "bird head" shape to the blue V element, like that of his costume from Batman: The Animated Series. I think the costume from the Dixon/Scott McDaniel run of Nightwing is his best costume, and this is close enough, certainly better than the red and black costume of the first New 52 Nightwing series.

Please note that Nightwing will be drawn by Javier Fernandez, so if you love Paquette's art here, don't expect to see it on a monthly basis.

New Super-Man #1 by Gene Luen Yang, Viktor Bogdanovic, Richard Friend and Hi-Fi

DC has moved Gene Luen Yang from Superman to a brand-new book, featuring a brand-new character of his own creation, and rather than a demotion, it seems like this new book will have the potential to make far better use of Yang's writing talents (His time on Superman was bogged down with telling one-third or so of the story about Superman losing his powers and secret identity, which was never really resolved satisfactorily).

This new Superman, er, Super-Man is Kenan Kong, and he is a Chinese teenager. Not a Chinese-American teenager, mind you, but a Chinese teenager. Living in China. This immediately promises an unusual direction for a superhero, especially a Superman, narrative, as a character known for fighting for "Truth, Justice and The American Way" doesn't transplant directly into a non-American country, let alone one that is still Communist and currently America's next most powerful economic and military rival.

Kenan's father lists a different set of ideals when ranting against the corrupt government in one panel: Truth, justice and democracy.

The other interesting choice is to take a more Spider-Man origin route, and make Kenan an arrogant jerk who, one assumes, will learn in future issues that with great power comes great responsibility...or that he will at least stop being such a jerk as Superman's powers more-or-less transform him into a more Superman-like figure (Remember at the climax of All-Star Superman, when Lex Luthor gained Superman-like powers and found himself more-or-less infected with empathy and goodness, as his new super-senses unlocked a new understanding of humanity?).

When we first meet Kenan, long before he's super-powered, he's not only an arrogant jerk--which one could say of the 1994 Superboy, whose personality Kenan's reflects in several aspects--he's also a bully, stealing the lunch from a smaller, chubby classmate who can't fight back.

In a moment of stress, he acts heroically, and is basking in newfound fame until his father deflates him, and we learn about a tragic event in his life, one that is an intersection connecting his father's political views, his lashing out against that particular target and even Superman. By book's end, Kenan has volunteered for an experiment conducted by a mysterious Dr. Omen to grant him super-powers.

Naturally it works, or else there would likely be no second issue, and Kenan becomes the Super-Man of China. And, in a last-panel reveal, when he seems out of control, he's faced with The Bat-Man and Wonder-Woman of China.

Yang's story, from conception to dialogue, is all on point. Superman's been around in every medium imaginable for just about ever, so pretty much any time someone comes up with a new take that can explore little-seen aspects of the character deserves at least a slow clap, and while putting Superman in different countries and cultures has been done in short, imaginary stories before (most commercially successfully by writer Mark Millar with 2003's Red Son), but Yang's story has the advantage of being "real," and, by not using the Superman character himself in a Superman story he has the opportunity to do things he wouldn't otherwise be able to do.

I admit to being pretty disappointed by penciller Viktor Bogdanovic and inker Richard Friend's art in the designs. I really like the design of the new Super-Man costume (which I've mentioned before), and i particularly liked the way that it substituted one of the other primary colors in the original Superman's costume as the primary primary color--although, because I am dumb, it didn't occur to me until I read this issue and saw the little stars like those on the Chinese flag on his shoulder that it likely had as much (or more) to do with red being China's color than it did with making a striking opposite to Superman's own blue-dominated costume.

The Bat-Man and Wonder-Woman are similarly cool designs. The Batman is big and blockly, like the Dark Knight Returns Batman, colored with the blue, gray and yellow that American Batman abandoned so long ago. Wonder Woman on the other hand, is in green, and doesn't look much of anything like any other Wonder Woman, save for the fact that she also has a luminous lariat (pink-ish rather than gold). All three costumes have the stars on the shoulders, and matching borders around their chest sigils.

But Bogdanovic's art has a generic quality to it, so much so that it is not immediately his and, were a reader presented with it in a comic with no credits, it would be impossible to assign it to him rather than any of another dozen or so artists that have worked regularly with DC in the past five years or so. This book, despite the high-profile author, despite the unusual and unusually compelling premise, just looks, stylistically, like any other DC comic.

As I said the other day, that may be a deliberate choice, to make the entire narrative more subversive by making it look more like every other DC comic, but I think it is instead just a poor pairing of art team and writer. Once this is collected into a graphic novel, it will sit very uneasily alongside all the other books Yang has written that fill library shelves, both those he illustrated himself, those he collaborated with other artists on and even the licensed, franchise comics he's done, like Avatar: The Last Airbender.

It's a good comic book, but it really should be a better one.

These are some graphic novels I read recently:

All-New Captain America Vol. 1: Hydra Ascendant (Marvel Entertainment)

Not to be confused with All-New Captain America: Fear Him, which collects a four-issue miniseries by that name, this collects all six issues of the "ongoing" All-New Captain America series, which was abruptly canceled (like the rest of Marvel's line) last spring as part of the publisher's Secret Wars. So it ended up just being a mini-series, really. This was somewhat unfortunate, as it ended with a really rather dramatic revelation, which it seemed would be the focus of writer Rick Remender's second story arc on the book. Except there was no second story arc, as there were no more issues of All-New Captain America. The character did reappear in his own book after the conclusion of Secret Wars, but that book was entitled Captain America: Sam Wilson, and wasn't written by Rick Remender, but instead by Nick Spencer.

Marvel's always-frustrating publishing gymnastics aside, how is this book? It's pretty good. Stuart Immonen handles the artwork, so of course it's pretty good. Immonen is an interesting artist these days, because he has always been pretty good, but his work today is so much cleaner, crisper and kinetic than it was at the start of his now fairly lengthy career. I'd say he's currently at the top of his game, but then, I would have said that five years ago too, and his art only gets stronger and stronger.

As for the story, it seems to pick up where Remender left off in a previous Captain America title, the 25-issue 2013-2014 Captain America which introduced Steve Rogers' son, the new Nomad and apparently ended with Rogers becoming a very old man (with great abs, at least as Old Man Rogers was drawn in some of the Avengers books of the era) and passing his shield and codename on to his long-time ally Sam Wilson, The Falcon.

I say "seems" because this is very much in media res, and those all seem to be things it's assumed a reader will know (and I did know most of it, simply from what I had absorbed from other Marvel books; the new Nomad was a complete surprise to me, though).

I like Wilson as Captain America. His hybridized costume is pretty great, and probably the best of the many costumes he's worn over the years (I think the wings being completely withdrawn when he's not flying helps a lot). With some artists, the combination of the wings and the shield can look pretty awkward, but Immonen makes them work perfectly together, particularly in the action sequence of the opening issue.

The plot seems at least semi-inspired by Captain America: The Winter Soldier, as it involves a very wide-reaching Hydra plot involving sleeper agents, one on each superhero team, according to one agent. The high command is made up of all of Captain America's rogues gallery, or at least the current incarnations of them, including Batroc The Leaper, Baron Zemo, Red Skull, Crossbones, Taskmaster and Baron Blood, who is ideally suited to fighting the new, winged Cap.

The bad guys' plan is to release bombs at certain cities all over the world that will sterilize everyone who isn't Hydra, reducing the world's population to a more sustainable size (Ra's al Ghul style), and it's up to the All-New Cap, the All-New Nomad, Redwing and some ad hoc allies--particularly Misty Knight, Agent of SHIELD--to shut down the bombs and save the world. Spoiler alert: They do.

The super-villain team-up makes this a nice introduction to the world of Captain America, and I'm not sure to what extent Remender and Immonen are responsible for some of their current looks and portrayals, but while some look just like they did the last time I saw them, others have cool, new looks (like Batroc) and personalities (Batroc, again, who is presented as anti-American in an elitist, dismissive way, rather than as a comic book Nazi kind of way).

There's a panel in which Knight flips mercenary Taskmaster by simply promising to pay him more than Hydra is that seemed like more of a swipe than a borrow of a similar scene in the Grant Morrison-written "Rock of Ages" JLA story (where Batman pays mercenary Mirror Master than Lex Luthor promised to, fitting in with Morrison's Batman-lead League vs. Luthor-lead Injustice Gang as corporate warfare element of that epic clash). It's possible someone did it before Morrison too, of course, but if so I didn't read that story.

The best part of the entire book, however, may be when vampire villain Baron Blood "kills" Redwing, and, a few pages later, Redwing is alive again, and Cap says something to the effect of "But what's with those red eyes? Well, I guess we'll deal with that later!" Yes, that's kind of weird that Redwing was bitten by a vampire, died and then was up and moving around, but with glowing red eyes--what could that mean?

Hopefully Spencer picks up on the Vampire Redwing plotline in his Captain America: Sam Wilson book. While the cliffhanger at the end of the volume, and the idea that each Marvel super-team has a Hydra infiltrator on it, are fairly compelling plots, what I really want to know more about is how Sam will cope with having his animal sidekick transformed into a vampire...

ApocalyptiGirl: An Aria for the End Times (Dark Horse Books)

Andrew MacLean's original graphic novel about Aria and her sharp-faced white cat Jelly Beans as they navigate a mysterious, post-apocalyptic world on a somewhat mysterious mission. That mystery will eventually come into focus and be clarified, but a large part of what makes MacLean's story so satisfying is the gradual, casual pace at which it unfolds. His remarkably upbeat protagonist seems to just go about her business cheerfully, occasionally narrating and occasionally getting involved with a spectacular action scene, and her setting is one that is at once fresh and fantastic, while still feeling lived-in and well-worn.

On foot or on motorcycle, she travels from her  home in an abandoned subway train to the plant-encrusted mech leaning against an ancient gas station, searching for a signal, searching for apples and sometimes having to pull a sword on members of the two warring tribes in the area, both of whom speak only in intelligible alien languages, when they speak at all.

The book reminded me a bit of the work of Matt Howarth, a bit of the work of Brandon Graham, and a bit of the work of James Stokoe–three of my all-around favorite cartoonists, all of whom have produced highly imaginative and oragnic-feeling sci-fi and fantasy work–but his art doesn't really look like that of any of those three.

Many of the elements of this comic will seem extremely familiar, but it never feels derivative of anything in particular. Quite the opposite, in fact. I'd highly recommend it.

G.I. Joe Vs. The Transformers Vol. 3 (IDW Productions) The current license-holder of both G.I. Joe and the Transformers, IDW, has repackaged all of the previous crossovers into a series of three trade paperbacks, starting with the original 1986 Marvel crossover and concluding with Devil's Due Publishing's 2007 The Black Horizon story, one of the two in this volume.

These two comics arcs are, to put it bluntly and gracelessly, garbage. If one were to make a diagram of the quality of all of the crossovers contained in these three volumes, it would look like a hill; the Marvel ones weren't very good, the first Devil's Due of the early 00s which featured Transformers disguised as various Cobra vehicles the best, and these two just sort of sputtered out with unambitious stories and awful artwork.

Both are by writer Tim Seeley, and the script end of things is markedly better than the art end, which gets increasingly amateurish to the point that it's kind of surprising that some of these pages even saw print as is.

The first story, originally published by Devil's Due in 2006 as G.I. Joe vs. The Transformers Vol. III: The Art of War, introduces Serpentor into the peculiar mixed continuity of the series of miniseries, in which a handful of Joes have large robot-fighting mech suits of armor derived from Cybertronian technology.

This Serpentor is created by scientists in the U.S. government at the Area 52 facility, a few floors beneath the G.I. Joe/Autobot collaborations. He's a powerful android programmed with the tactics and leadership abilities of history's greatest strategists...including Megatron, whose giant severed head is also in the facility. They wanted to use him as U.S. super-soldier, but you could guess how well that worked for them.

After Cobra attacks, the arisen Serpentor heads to Cybertron where General Hawk and a handful of Joes (Snake-Eyes, Scarlet, Road Block) go to lend a tiny, tiny fleshy hand. Once there Serpentor, Son of Megatron rallies the various warring Decepticon factions and leads them against The Autobots, along the way discovering that he lacks a soul/spark like all the human and Transformer characters, and seeks to remedy it by acquiring The Matrix of Leadership from Optimus Prime.

Interestingly, it ends up in the hands of Hawk, who becomes one with it...sorta (It would have been funny to seem him try to shove the giant Matrix into his tiny little body, but that never happens).

Seeley and the too-many artists–pencillers Joe Ng, James Raiz and Alex Milne, inkers Rob Ross, Alan Tam and "M3th"–do a pretty poor job in terms of getting characters in (Cobra Commander, The Baronnes, Zarana and Zartan are the only Cobra chracters with speaking lines; in addition to those mentioned above, the only Joes with lines are Mainframe, Firewall, Lady Jaye and Flint). There are relatively few Autobots and Decepticons, too. It's a very small crossover, considering the massive casts Seeley had to pull from (the casts are similar to the small-sized ones live-action movies, which never seem capable of juggling even a half-dozen characters from each faction).

The secondary characters are mostly un-introduced. Like, I know who the Predacons are because I played with them as a little kid, but there were a few characters that never made it into the G1 cartoons that I didn't recognize at all. Presumably, who they are isn't all that important, but given the most recent franshice smash-up that IDW has been publishing–Tom Scioli and John Barber's superior Transformers Vs. G.I. Joe, both the small casts and complete lack of introductions seem even worse. Scioli has pages, hell, even panels with more characters than all of those that appear in all six of these issues, and the "filecard" intros, complete with two-to-six word intros, at least suggest a characterization. Here, many of the characters might as well be named Deception #2, G.I. Joe #7, and so on.

The settings are similarly ill-defined, with Cybertron not looking any different or more alien than what little we see of Earth (the insides of a couple of high-tech headquarters).

With Black Horizon, originally published as two over-sized issues, Seeley has a more interesting semi-high concept, pairing the villains of both 1986's The Transformers: The Movie (still the best Transformers film) and 1987's G.I. Joe: The Movie (ditto), Unicron and Cobra-La, in an alliance of sort. The metal-adverse Cobra-La, whose technology is all organic and bug-like, once held the Galactus-like planet-sized Transformer Unicron at bay, promising to summon him in a few millennia to cleanse the Earth of humanity.

That time has come in Black Horizon. The Matrix-eyed Hawk no leads a clandestine alliance of Autobots and former Joes (Firewall, Cosmos, Prowl and a few more Autobots I didn't recognize) in trying to rid the world of Cybertronian technology, like that which his former government used to build Serpentor. They stumble upon Cobra-La's plan, and with the help of Flint and Optimus try to advert the apocalypse.

In one of the neater twists in Seeley's story, he includes the original G.I. Joe characters, the Barbie-sized ones, with Joe Colton, the character G.I. Joe is named for, having been taken prisoner by Cobra-La decades ago. He too is integral in saving the day. (I'm fairly certain they even snuck some Battle Beasts in there, but I can't be sure, since Andrew Wildman's artwork was so poor; it was hard to be sure of much of anything, really.)

Seeley also adds some Yeti (?) into the Cobra-La society, which, um, kind of clashes with their overall arthropod aesthetic, and gives them a Pretender Transformer or six to play with. These are among the weirder Transformers, ones that even as a little kid I thought were super-dumb. The toys were regular Transformers encased in plastic, two-piece shells of huge, humanoid monsters. That didn't seem to fit the whole "robots in disguise" formulation of the toy line. Like, if you were a giant robot from space, disguising yourself as a giant undead samurai isn't exactly as good a camouflage as, say, being able to turn into a helicopter or truck. In fact, I'm fairly certain a giant undead samurai is more conspicuous and alarming than a simple giant robot.

Like the previous story, this one is very small in its cast–which is especially unfortunate that one would think every single Joe would be rallied to fight off a astronomically large robot intent on eating the planet Earth–and is even worse in its drawing. The settings should be even more fantastic, but there are no real establishing shots, and we see little of the fascinatingly weird culture of Cobra-La, which here consists of little more than three name characters (Golobulus, Pythona and Nemesis Enforcer), some poorly-drawn, off-model Cobra-La soldiers and random humanoids.

Last week, I thought Scioli and Barber's Transformers vs. G.I. Joe comic was one of the best genre comics I had ever read, and certainly the based based-on-a-licensed property comic I'ever ever read. After reading how poorly produced previous crossovers between those two particular properties, I like it even more.

Star Wars Adventures: Chewbacca and the Slavers of the Shadowlands (Dark Horse Books)

While contemplating Marvel's recent Chewbacca miniseries, I became curious about the inherent difficulties in a solo story starring a character who communicates only in funny howls and growls, and how other comics writers might have addressed the Wookie language barrier in previous Chewbacca comics.

I didn't find many in existence, perhaps because of that very issue, but this Chris Cerasi-written, Jennifer L. Meyer-drawn original graphic novel was one. Cerasi's approach? To simply translate Wookie-ese into English/"Basic", so that Chewie and the other Wookies in this story simply talk to one another in the same manner that, say, Luke Skywalker and Han Solo do in other comics.

While it's kind of disconcerting to hear Chewie say, for example, "What is it, Ralrra? I'm kind of busy here," instead of a more typical "HHHRRRHHH," what really makes the dialogue in this comic weird is that the story is a story-within-the-story, told by Chewbacca himself.

So in the framing sequence, Han, Leia and Chewie have just jumped to light speed and Chewie is scolding Han for being careless ("GRAAAARRRRHH!"), and when Leia, who can't understand a fucking thing the Wookie says, asks Han why he's so upset, Han explains that his hirsute friend once had a run-in with some slavers that cost him.

Leia puts a hand on Chewie's shoulder and says, "Tell me, Chewbacca. Please?"

This is two panels after Leia asked Han what Chewie was saying. The Wookie stares off into space, and an off-panel dialogue bubble belonging to Han starts the story. And then we cut to Wookie world, "185 years before The Battle of Yavin" (Wookie's live long, BTW).

I suppose that we're meant to ignore Leia's direct plea to Chewbacca to tell her, and assume Han tells the story. But I like to imagine Chewbacca sitting there and HHHHRRRR-ing to Leia for a half hour, while she does her best to look engaged and concerned, despite having know idea what he's yowling.

In that story, Chewbacca was a reckless, rebellious teen Wookie, and seems to be prickly about the fact that an older friend of his named Tarful just passed some warrior rite of passage. To prove himself, he goes off into "The Shadowlands," with Tarful, a female friend named Ralrra and two very young, Ewok-sized Wookies in tow.

There they encounter the titular slavers, a human woman, a big fuzzy alien I recognize from the cantina scene in A New Hope but can't name and a white humanoid weasel/rat. They fight, Chewie and Tarful eventually win through a combination of home turf advantage and timely intervention by the grown-up Wookies but one of the little ones dies.

It's a pretty simple story, with some pretty heavy subject matter, given its apparently all-ages address (You can tell by the word "Adventures" in the title; why does "Adventures" mean "targeted towards kids"...? I'll never know, but it holds true throughout comics from at least the last 25 years).

Meyer's art is pretty unusual for a Star Wars comic. Only five pages of it is set in "the present," and she does a fine job of filtering the characters through her own style, which has a slightly washed-out look that appears to be somewhere between air-brushed and watercolors. She doesn't mess around with trying to draw likenesses either; she's drawing Princess Leia and Han Solo, after all, not Carrie Fischer and Harrison Ford.

On Kashyyyk, things look less Star Wars still. The forest world is full of hazily, dreamily rendered foliage and mist, and the Wookies have big, expressive eyes and readable facial expressions that give them a cute, almost manga look, and seems far, far removed from the silver screen Chewbacca (all of the current Marvel Star Wars comics, no matter the artist, seems to feature art that strives to replicate the look of the films as much as possible, sometimes to their detriment).

I've definitely never read a Star Wars comic that looks like this one, which, in and of itself, kind of recommends it.

Star Wars: Vader Down (Marvel )

The first real crossover of the new, Marvel era of Star Wars-licensed comics, this collection includes a special one-shot by regular Star Wars writer Jason Aaron and artist Mike Deodato and a handful of issues of both Aaron's Star Wars ongoing (also drawn by Deodato) and a couple of issues of writer Kieron Gillen and artist Salvador Larocca's Darth Vader. The story is a lot of fun, although if one wanted to read it cynically, there's a whole lot of silly, "And then this guy shows up, and then this guy shows up, and then..." with some outright comical, cartoon-esque sequences. If one was already on board, however, then that stuff is a blast.

The basic story is pretty simple. Vader recently learned that the pilot who blew up the Death Star is named Luke Skywalker, and he is therefore scouring the galaxy to find his son. He's doing so on the sly, with the help of Doctor Aphra and her evil droid allies, Triple-Zero (a sadistic, evil opposite of C-3PO) and BT-1 (a ridiculously heavily-armed, square-headed version of R2-D2).

Vader finds Skywalker doing drills with a couple dozen rebel fighter pilots, and engages them in one of the many scenes demonstrating Vader's superhuman, superheroic levels of Force powers, but he's ultimately brought down by Luke straight-up ramming Vader's tie fighter (the first of several attempts by the Skywalker twins to take Vader out in suicide missions).

With Vader down and all alone on a mostly abandoned planet (along with a similarly downed Luke), Leia launches an all-out assault to take out Vader once and for all. Given that these comics all take place before the next two Star Wars movies, and we know exactly when and how Vader dies, there's not really much suspense as to how this all turns out, of course.

That lack of suspense doesn't make it any less interesting. The two main aspects of that interest are watching Vader tear apart whole Rebel legions (I've noted before that Comic Book Vader, in both the Dark Horse comics and now the Marvel comics, is depicted several hundred times stronger in the Force than he ever is in the original trilogy of films; if this Vader showed up on Hoth at the beginning of Empire, the series should have ended right then and there with the Empire triumphant), and Aaron and Gillen pairing the film's heroes with their comic book opposites here.

Han Solo vs. Dr. Aphra! C-3PO vs. Triple-Zero! R2-D2 vs. BT-1! Chewbacca vs. Black Krrsantan! And Leia's desire to avenge Alderann vs. her desire to not have her new friends all killed horribly!

Those last two character vs. character battles are probably the best bits, as the two little trashcan droids cuss each other out* before pulling their weapons, and R2 is severely out-gunned. As for Chewie vs. um, Blacky, our hero is on the ropes, still suffering the effects of a neurotoxin injected by Triple-Zero (who notes that the rebels have all seemed to develop a particular enmity against protocol droids for some reason). R2 administers an antidote, and things turn around instantly. It's practically a Popeye fight, with the syringe a sort of chemical space spinach.

The resolution is basically of the everyone returns to their respective corners sort that defined the original run of Marvel Star Wars comics (and all Star Wars comics starring the characters from the movies that are set between films), but there are developments in the Darth Vader book's plotline, as Vader faces against one of his major rivals (who looks like Admiral Ackbar's head on General Greivous' body).

I'm no fan of either Larocca or Deodato, the latter of whom has increasingly relied on photo reference and appropriation in his comics-making, and his images often feature an uncomfortably obvious use of dropped-in, repeated images when illustrating large numbers (dulling the impact of that first splash page, for example), and swipes of character poses and expressions straight from the films that are more than a little distracting (I found myself wondering which frame of which film a particular Han Solo face is from, for example, rather than concentrating on that particular scene of the comic).

Their styles are similar enough that there's no severe aesthetic whiplash in this collection when they hand the baton off to one another, although Deodato's Vader often looks more noticeably like a Marvel superhero than Larrocca's, and Deodato's Aphra's anatomy shifts unpredictably, depending on his photo reference, I guess.

Suicide Squad Vol. 3: Rogues (DC Comics)

With this latest 280-page collection of the John Ostrander-helmed Suicide Squad run, I realized one of the reasons that DC has had such a hard time with their recent revival attempts. A new Suicide Squad book was one of the 52 new books launched as part of The New 52. It was one of a handful of books that the market seemingly kept rejecting, but DC kept insisting on publishing anyway**, simply changing creative teams at a particularly high frequency and, at one point, cancelling it and relaunching it almost immediately (DC did the same with Teen Titans and Deathstroke).

Now, there are a couple of reasons why the book has had such a hard time taking off, including rejection of fans by some of the New 52 redesigns--like skinny, sexy Amanda Waller, or mustache-less Deadshot--and the fact that it has thus far featured either bad writing, bad art or both (2011's Suicide Squad #1 was among the worst of the 52 #1s, consisting of almost 20-pages of the protagonists being tortured and, um, that's it).

But while reading Rogues it hit me that a conceptual problem was the fact that the New 52 version of the DC Universe wasn't old enough to support the Squad. While the original one launched shortly after Crisis On Infinite Earth's hard reboot of DC history, COIE didn't hit the re-set button on everything all at once, and it affected some characters more than others; the DCU still had a history, and most of its characters were understood to have been around for a while (about ten years or so).

So when Amanda Waller's Task Force X starts recruiting the likes of Captain Boomerang, Deadshot Bronze Tiger, Nightshade and The Enchantress, these are all characters that were at least semi-familiar to readers as Flash and Batman villains, as supporting characters from older, canceled titles and curios of DC continuity. Black Orchid, Shade, The Changing Man, Vixen, The Penguin, Dr. Light--whether their roles were big or small, they were characters with history in the DC Universe and a presence in the back issue bins. If you wanted to learn more about them, you could read their old comics, because there were old comics featuring these versions of the characters.

That's not been the case with the New 52's Suicide Squads, one of which appears in a book called New Suicide Squad. Yes, the characters all have familiar names, but unfamiliar histories, especially at the outset. The first issue of 2011's Suicide Squad was the very first introduction to the new versions of Deadshot, Harley Quinn, King Shark and company, and while they shared the universe with all the other characters, that universe was brand-new across the board.

One of the most interesting aspects of Ostrander's Squad book, that it featured ever-changing, Dirty Dozen-like congregations of characters that really had no business sharing the same story space, wasn't something that could be replicated in the New 52 DCU. It can now of course; when New Suicide Squad added the likes of Reverse Flash, Black Manta and The Joker's Daughter, these were, at least, characters with story arcs in other books, and a modicum of history, and writers were able to flesh out backstories for the more regular characters like Deadshot and Harley, but even then, their universe was younger and smaller than that of the original, Ostrander-written Squad.

I don't think that element was the chief virtue of the original series, but it was certainly one of them, and one that can't be easily manufactured (So it should be interesting to see the upcoming film, which features a cast of characters who have never appeared in any films before, excepting a Joker; it's going to come down to characterization, concept and craftsmanship, and can't coast on fights with The Doom Patrol or Justice League or trips to settings like Shade's weird-ass homeworld or Apokolips).

This particular volume collects #17-25, and 1988's Suicide Squad Annual #1. Ostrander continues to do the bulk of the writing, sometimes in conjunction with Kim Yale, and Luke McDonnell handles the lion's share of the pencil art.

There's a lot going on in these stories in terms of plot, just like there's always a lot going on in the old Suicide Squad, including the team's cover being blown and being forced to go public, an "Invasion" tie-in, Rick Flag going rogue after committing what turned out to be an exceptionally unnecessary murder and, perhaps of the greatest historical importance, the very first appearances of Oracle–here as just a voice coming out of a computer and offering her/its help to the Squad.

McDonnell and company's artwork is serviceable but unspectacular, and can read strangely today. We're so used to seeing highly-stylized art, often with style taking the driver's seat and shoving story-telling fundamentals into the backseat, that it can bee downright unusual to see such perfectly readable, but also un-showy, artwork. Especially applied to DC characters.

I am increasingly struck by the fact that no matter how dark the subject matter gets in this series, the characters almost never get any kind of costume redesigns–the exception that proves the rule here is Nighshade, who had a transformative experience in the comics collected in volume 2. There's just some kind of special energy that emanates from the friction caused by the garish, colorful supervillain costumes grinding against the deadpan serious stories of international intrigue and violent geo-politics.



*"My, what language," Triple-Zero says of their BLEEP PBEEP WUURUU BIDDA DEEBA smack-talk. "He certainly s a foul-mouthed little astromech. I wonder if he's capable of backing up such talk?"

**Which might have had something to do with a big-budget, Will Smith-starring Suicide Squad movie having been in development, and set for release this summer.