Revisiting 2005's Day of Vengeance

As you've surely noticed, reading the first half of John Ostrander and Tom Mandrake's 1992-1998 The Spectre via November's omnibus collection piqued my interest in the character, and I became especially curious about how DC proceeded to use him after the Ostrander/Mandrake series, given the pretty perfect ending he received at its end.

As DC hasn't collected every one of those appearances, and some of those that the publisher has collected aren't readily available in library-borrowed trade, I've been pretty much just reading what I can find, in whatever order I can find it. 

Now I come to the 2005 miniseries Day of Vengeance, one of four miniseries the publisher launched as lead-ins to 2006's Infinite Crisis, each of which dealt with a different aspect of the DC Universe. This one covered DC's various magical and supernatural characters and prominently featured The Spectre and Eclipso.

While I was curious to revisit it in light of Ostrander and Mandrake's take on those two characters, I was also curious if, like those last arcs from JLA that I recently reread, the book now reads better at the remove of a couple of decades, when one isn't reading it in regular installments as a part of an unfolding story, with the various expectations that can entail. 

While I have the six-issue miniseries in singles, I opted to borrow the 2005 trade from the library. That includes a not-very-good three-issue arc that Judd Winick and Ian Churchill did in the Superman books that doesn't seem entirely necessary, as well as some fun bonus features. 

I've opted to go with random thoughts and bullet points, rather than something more formal, so feel free to skim. 

•I had completely forgotten until I started rereading Day of Vengeance here that it was drawn by Justiniano. If you're not familiar with that name, it belongs to a very talented artist who did a great deal of admirable work for DC Comics between 1999 and 2010...and, in 2011, was arrested for possession of child pornography. He plead guilty and was sentenced the following year. 

How do we assess the work of a comic book creator who has committed such a heinous crime? Well, while it's certainly possible for two things to be true at once—that is, that Justiniano could draw comics very well and that he is a bad person who is responsible for something terrible—in general, I'm inclined to ignore the work of such creators. 

I don't think DC will even give you the option of spending money that might in any way support Justiniano at this point, as I'm fairly certain nothing he drew for them has been collected since his arrest, which seems fair. After all, no publisher would want to be associated with such a person. 

But regardless of buying work Justiniano has drawn, should we even read it? Should we write about it? I don't know that I have a good answer. I think it's a discussion worth having, especially as there are now a good handful of mainstream superhero comic book creators who have done terrible things that have victimized others. 

For today anyway, I'm going to go ahead and write about this collection and try not to focus on Justiniano's contribution to it any more than I have to. 

•The single most impressive part of this collection is the one to which no name is attached, and thus I am unsure who produced it. 

That would be the 16-paragraph prose piece entitled "The Nature of Magic" that starts on the title page, preceding any of the comics content. It is, in essence, the history of magical beings and the practice of magic in the DC Universe setting, from the point of creation to the rise of Gemworld following cosmic events in "what humans called the 15th century."

The opening few paragraphs blend ideas from comics across decades from various writers on quite different books, like Jerry Siegel's "The Voice" from his 1940 "The Spectre" strip, Jack Kirby's "The Source" from his 1970s Fourth World comics, Marv Wolfman's Destiny from 1972's Weird Mystery Tales, and elements from Neil Gaiman's Books of Magic and The Sandman, Grant Morrison's JLA and John Byrne's Genesis, all from the 1990s. 

And on and on it goes, a coherent, consistent cosmology created piecemeal over many years by many hands, but here presented as a whole. It's both a remarkable bit of synthesis by whoever wrote it, and an eloquent example of what is so appealing and so unique about the two main comics "universe" settings, those of DC and Marvel, and how they evolve writer by writer and story by story over many years. 

•The Judd Winick, Ian Churchill and Norm Rapmund three-part story "Lightning Strikes Twice" that is collected here is pretty unnecessary to the events of Day of Vengeance. Sure, it includes a bit about a black diamond shard of The Heart of Darkness finding its way into Jean Loring's cell in Arkham Asylum and reveals that Eclipso would take her as a new host, but then, the first pages of Day of Vengeance tell us that too. 

Still, I guess there's no reason to complain about getting more comics in your collection, is there? (This whole 200+ page collection only cost $12.99, by the way. These days, thirteen bucks would only get you, what, three DC comics...?)

•"Lightning Strikes Twice", which originally ran through an issue apiece of Action Comics, Adventures of Superman and Superman, centers on a fight between and Eclipso-possessed Superman and Captain Marvel...as did 1992's Action Comics Annual #4 (Collect 1992's annual event, Eclipso: The Darkness Within, I say!). 

Here, we open with Bruce Gordon doing action movie stuff in South America, the wizard Shazam having Captain Marvel standing by on the Rock of Eternity and a disembodied Eclipso trying to maneuver closer and closer to Superman in Metropolis, somehow manipulating various civilians to take their own lives very publicly and violently. 

Eventually, Eclipso eclipses a S.T.A.R. Labs doctor, who strips to her underwear and then suits up in a LexCorp battle suit specifically modified for Superman-fighting (It fires red sun energy, and is built with a kryptonite alloy). Plan A seems to be to duke it out with Superman, pissing him off enough that Eclipso can use the diamond shard aboard to eclipse the Man of Steel.

When that fails, it's time for Plan B, secretly eclipsing Lois (she isn't drawn with an eclipsed face or red eyes, nor does she speak in Eclipso's purple-rimmed dialogue balloons), having her snipe at Clark in their apartment until he loses his temper, and then press the diamond to his forehead, finally giving Eclipso possession of Superman again.

Then, in the final chapter, it's finally time for the eclipsed Superman vs. Captain Marvel rematch, as Eclipso wants Marvel as his new host. They knock one another around a bit, Marvel resorting to the same move he used against Superman in Kingdom Come, shouting "Shazam!" and positioning himself so that the magic lighting strikes Superman, over and over.

As Winick runs out of pages, Shazam himself appears to blast Superman with lightning. And then the then host-less Spectre appears and...does something. The art is kind of confusing, but it seems The Spectre does something to pull Eclipso out of Superman. 

The Spectre and Shazam have a brief, portentous chat, during which the Spirit of Vengeance says something that seems like it might be important when reading the curious events of Day of Vengeance, wherein his actions don't actually make a whole lot of sense:

Without a host, my memories fade in and out. Only my instinct survives. 

My purpose. 

And the diamond? Well, the narration isn't really much clearer than the art on this point. After The Spectre tells Shazam that it has "disappeared again...pulled away by hate," Winick writes the following in white boxes that appear on the penultimate page: "The black diamond was taken by something or somebody."

However it got there, it ended up in Jean Loring's padded cell in Arkham Asylum, where Eclipso has apparently taken over her mind. The last page of the story is a splash, showing a smiling Loring in a gray Arkham jumpsuit, her facial features making it clear that she has been eclipsed. 

•Say, do you think Jean Loring being committed to a home for the criminally insane is supposed to be an admission that the nonsensical plot to get back together with her ex-husband—by murdering Sue Dibny, taking out a hit on Jack Drake and threatening Lois Lane—was crazy...?

•I was kind of surprised at just how horny Churchill's art is in this story arc. There are only three female characters in the whole story, if you want to count Jean, who only appears in a single panel. The others are Lois Lane and S.T.A.R. Labs scientist Doctor Jeanine Tracey.

When Lois is introduced, she's shown striding though the office of the Daily Planet, dressed in a tight-fitting shirt showing lots of cleavage, and a skirt with a slit that goes almost to her hip. Later we see her in her apartment, and she's wearing a tight-fitting babydoll t-shirt and a pair of skimpy panties (Clark, meanwhile, is fully dressed).

When we first meet Dr. Tracey, she's sensibly dressed in a pantsuit and coat, but she will spend the remainder of the story in a strapless bra and panties (I guess you have to strip down to your underwear in order to pilot this particular make of LexCorp battlesuit...?)

•When Eclipso possesses someone in this comic—Jeanine Tracey, Lois Lane, Superman, Jean Loing—Churchill employs the visual signifiers introduced back in 1992's Eclipso: The Darkness Within. That is, their face bears a bluish "eclipse" symbol, their eyes turn red, their ears and teeth get pointy. He also adds an additional flourish, giving them weird, somewhat alien-looking ridges on the sides of their faces and their foreheads. It reminded me a little of the way vampires look in Buffy the Vampire Slayer, although they're not really all that similar in appearance. 

Somewhat frustratingly, Churchill doesn't always draw an eclipsed person with all of these signifiers, as in the case of Lois Lane mentioned above. In that case, I think it was to keep the fact that she was eclipsed from the reader as much as from Superman, although it got me wondering...Do you think the various signifiers are just there for the benefit of the readers, or do Eclipso's victims literally transform like that within the world of the comic, so that, say, Superman can tell at a glance whether Lois Lane has been eclipsed or not...? 

I've been wondering about this off and on (the same day I reread Day of Vengeance, I read the trade paperback Eclipso: Music of the Spheres), as the various "rules" as applied to Eclipso seem to change story to story.

Here, for example, he seems to be driving various civilians to kill themselves, although they don't appear as if they are eclipsed (nor do they seem to ever be exposed to a black diamond), and, in the case of Tracey, he seems to be goading her into a particular action before he finally does take over her body. 

While the suicide scenes are quite heavy in narration, they don't ever explain just what Eclipso is doing or how, which is, obviously, the sort of thing that can irritate a reader like me.

•Between the end of "Lightning Strikes Twice" and the beginning of Day of Vengeance, the collection includes a three-page prose feature. Under the heading "The World of Heroes and Sorcerers", there are five paragraphs devoted to explaining the existence of numerous super-people on Earth today and recapping the plot of Identity Crisis, concentrating on Jean Loring, who, as we just saw, was possessed by the hostless Eclipso while imprisoned in Arkham.

"So begins the story," the first section ends, "but first let us introduce you to the dramatis personae..."

The rest of the three pages is devoted to the six main characters, those that would later star in Shadowpact: Blue Devil, Enchantress, Nightmaster, Nightshade, Ragman and Detective Chimp. Each of them get a long-ish paragraph detailing their biography and history, including their current status quo.

This seems pretty valuable, given how relatively minor some of these characters are (For example, this was the first time I had ever read anything featuring Nightmaster—that I actually remembered him in, anyway. He was introduced way back in 1969). 

Actually, not all of the six heroes get all that thoroughly explained here. The entry for Detective Chimp just says "Bobo tells his story better than anyone, and you'll find it four chapters in." Indeed, while writer Bill Willingham will allude to events in the other characters' lives throughout the series, Detective Chimp is the only one who gets an entire passage of the comic devoted to retelling his origin and history.

•One imagines that Willingham, like the writers of the other "Countdown to Infinite Crisis"-branded miniseries, was given a few particular plot points by editorial before he ever sat down to write this story. Not only does it feature DC's magical and supernatural characters, but it also seems to be working through a particular checklist, in order to get certain characters to certain places and accomplish certain events, moving a bigger mega-plot forward so that Geoff Johns could resolve certain things in Infinite Crisis, and some books that followed that event series would have something to work with that seemed like part of a bigger DC Comics story (For one fairly minor example, original Blue Beetle Dan Garrett's mystical scarab artifact is shown being thrown from the Rock of Eternity to El Paso, Texas...where we know it will be found by Jaime Reyes, who will become the third Blue Beetle in the 2006 Blue Beetle series).

As for that checklist, it seems to include 1.) Presenting a host-less Spectre as a serious worldwide threat (again, I guess, following Johns' own 1999 Day of Judgment, which only ended upon The Spectre getting a new, heroic host), 2.) Killing off of the wizard Shazam and destroying the Rock of Eternity, setting up a new, dumb and ultimately very temporary status quo for the Marvel Family and 3.) Setting up an ongoing series about a magic team in the DCU, something DC seems to have been continually flirting with since at least 1995's Underworld Unleashed: Abyss—Hell's Sentinel, if not earlier. 

I'm not sure how successful this was, long-term. Sure, the new Blue Beetle has managed to stick around, starring in four different ongoings of various lengths in the years since, but as for the other changes wrought by the events here?

Well, The Spectre got a new host during Infinite Crisis, recently killed-off Gotham City Police Detective Crispus Allen, but he never got his own ongoing series, just a three-issue Infinite Crisis Aftermath-branded mini, and when DC rebooted their line a few years later, Jim Corrigan was again the Spectre's host. 

The Judd Winick-written 12-issue maxi-series The Trials of Shazam had Captain Marvel wearing a white costume and changing his name to just "Marvel" to replace the wizard, while Captain Marvel Jr. changed into a red costume and started going by the name "Shazam" (Which, now that I type it out, sounds exactly backwards, doesn't it?). Johns and co-plotter/artist Jerry Ordway undid these changes three years later in the pages of JSoA (And, two years after that, the New 52 rebooted and reset the Marvel Family's status quo yet again anyway). 

And while the Shadowpact did indeed get their own series, it only lasted 25 issues (For comparison's sake, the Gail Simone-written Secret Six, which spun out of Day of Vengeance's sister series Villains United, lasted 36 issues, only ending when DC rebooted their whole line in 2011). The magic hero team concept would return in the New 52 though, with different creators and a different line-up, under the title Justice League Dark. That book lasted over 70 issues across two series. Maybe what DC magic hero team needed to thrive was the "Justice League" branding...? Or, perhaps, to feature former Vertigo characters like John Constantine, Swamp Thing and Black Orchid...? 

•This is the plot of Day of Vengeance. Eclipso has taken over Jean Loring, giving her a dramatic make-over that includes a black "eclipse" symbol over her face, and a costume featuring a bustier/corset with lots of cleavage. She then seduces—the comics' word, not mine—the still host-less Spectre, who was shown to be wildly out of control, punishing even the most minor of offenses severely, as in one case in which a boy who stole who stole six dollars from his mother's purse is caught in a wave of coins (It's unclear whether or not the kid survived).

Here's the part that doesn't quite make sense. Eclipso, The Spectre's enemy stretching back millennia, manages to convince him that in order to eradicate all evil from the world once and for all, he need only destroy any and all forms of magic, from magical locales to magic-users (Never mind that the Spectre's raison d' etre isn't to wipe out evil, but to "confront" it and, at least in all the comics I've ever read, punish the murdered dead). 

So, the Spectre then begins waging a war on magic in the DCU, wiping out hundreds of magic-users. These are, of course, mostly unnamed characters. The only IP DC seems to sacrifice here is minor Firestorm villain Black Bison and, at the end of the book, Shazam (Both have since returned to life, of course). 

As for the "big guns", Spectre takes them out without killing them: Doctor Fate is entrapped in his helmet, Madame Xanadu is blinded and The Phantom Stranger is turned into a mouse ("I don't think even you could kill me, Spectre," The Stranger says during their fight. "I doubt the universe would allow it.")

A bunch of magical heroes gather/hide out in Nightmaster Jim Rook's inter-dimensional bar for just such a clientele, The Oblivion Bar (As does Animal Man; Willingham must have a generous definition of magic). Eventually, Nightmaster, his bouncer Blue Devil, Nightshade and Detective Chimp all decide to step up and tackle The Spectre head-on, joining forces with Ragman and The Enchantress, who have just escaped a fight between The Spectre and Blackbriar Thorn (Oh, I guess he dies too, but he's shown already growing back to live before this series ends).

The half-dozen heroes confront The Spectre in Budapest, where he's throwing down with Captain Marvel (Throughout this series, Spectre mostly just zaps energy bolts and throws punches, rather than using his powers in imaginative or visually interesting ways, so the multi-issue Spectre/Marvel fight isn't really much of a read). 

While Detective Chimp and Nightshade go to recruit a character that the former thinks can actually vanquish The Spectre, Enchantress borrows magical energy willingly donated by volunteers around the world, channeling it into Captain Marvel and, ultimately, making him a giant (See the cover at the top of the post). (And yes, this did remind me of Goku creating his spirit bomb during his fight with Frieza on Namek in Dragon Ball Z.)

Temporarily vanquished by Marvel's powered-up punches, The Spectre flees, carrying the wounded Eclipso with him. 

For round two, Detective Chimp's stratagem is employed: Black Alice, a character introduced by Gail Simone, Joe Prado and Ed Benes just previously in Birds of Prey, uses her meta-human ability to temporarily steal magic powers to completely drain The Spectre.

The only problem with this is, of course, without a host, The Spectre is pretty much nothing but magic powers, so when Alice takes those away, he's nothing but a formless ghost, which the Shadowpact is unable to affect in anyway, their attacks going right through him. He again flees, but this time without Eclipso; Nightshade had used her powers to create a portal to an orbit around the sun, through which they had thrown Eclipso.

Finally, The Spectre goes to the Rock of Eternity to duke it out with Shazam. During their battle, the Rock explodes over Gotham City, showering the world with magical debris, and seemingly scrambling the world of magic to such a degree that a full-time magic super-team will be needed to deal with it going forward, as opposed to the ad hoc unions of magical characters that had been semi-regularly popping up in DC Comics over the last decade or two.

The book ends with the Shadowpact vowing to stay together, but, as for the threat of The Spectre and other fall-out of his attack, that won't be addressed until Infinite Crisis proper. I am not rereading that.

•As stated previously, Day of Vengeance opens with Jean becoming Eclipso's host. Here, that is much more involved than was shown in "Lightning Strikes Twice." There's a good two and a half pages of argument between Jean and Eclipso; we're not privy to what he seems to be saying to her through the black diamond in her cell, only her responses to him which, oddly, sound kind of dirty at times ("And what do you expect in return?" she asks at one point, followed later by, "Oh, no, I could never do that! What kind of woman do you think I am?" and "Because I was raised better than that--that's why!").

Anwyay, once Eclipso finally eclipses her, a seven-panel sequence depicting a painful process, she is transformed, and, pointy-ears and eclipsed face aside, doesn't look much like any of the eclipsed from the previous story...which, in this collection, is, like, five pages ago.

Also, her dialogue bubbles don't have a ring of purple around them, seemingly suggesting that she's talking in Jean's own normal, human voice, rather than in Eclipso's distinct voice.

•Willingham's take on Ragman, who narratees much of the first issue, is a distinct one. While we would have last seen him in a 1998 Batman arc—which you and I have just seen quite recently——here he's not only not resistant to taking the lives of evil people but seems to regard doing so as his job. "Once upon a time I used to be a superhero," he says, "Now I'm just the guy who picks up the trash."

In this scene, "the trash" refers to a man who apparently murdered his wife and business partner. Ragman chases him down, throws him around, enwraps him in the rags of his cape, and then ultimately sucks the man's soul out of his body to become another rag in his suit of souls, leaving behind a desiccated husk. 

Here, Ragman seems to be intimately familiar with each and every rag/soul in his suit, able to recall their name, their crime and their willingness to help him, by lending them their strength. His power seems to correspond to the number of souls in his suit, and, when he needs to lift a large tree trunk to save someone trapped beneath it, he narrates, "I take energy from dozens...And when that doesn't work, I increase the enlistment to hundreds."

•As to how Eclipso is able to convince The Spectre to attack magic, well, that gets explained (or as explained as it ever is), in the second issue. We listen in as Eclipso talks directly to The Spectre in purple narration boxes, referring to him as "Darling" and "Handsome."

When The Spectre lays eyes on Eclipso and hears his/her name, he says only that it sounds familiar. Willingham than has Eclipso expound on The Spectre's confused state, referred to by Winick in "Lightning Strikes Twice":

I know you're a bit confused these days, right? Old memories all a jumble?

It shows.

Not your fault, though.

This is the first time in ages you've been without a human host. Someone to anchor you to this reality. 

I'm here to remedy that. 

Eclipso isn't going to be his new host, although that might be a bit more believable, if one spirit of divine retribution can indeed host another ("I have my own part to play, in the grand scheme of things," she answers, when he asks if Eclipso is to be his new host). (Of course, what would make the most sense would simply be to have Eclipso eclipse The Spectre. Then The Spectre's evil actions could be explained as his being controlled by an evil entity, rather than this talk of seduction and belief that magic is the source of evil.)

Rather, she says she has been sent by "the higher powers" to advise him and give him direction.

That conversation, and Eclispo's thoughts, are shared with readers in a scene wherein The Enchantress channels Eclipso, speaking his thoughts aloud to her new allies. Eclipso boasts that her logic "is subtle, but flawless." "Law and order are all about following the rules," Eclipso-through-Enchantress says, "And magic is all about breaking the rules of nature."

Maybe. I think there were better ways to "sell" this conflict which, again, I think was dictated to Willingham rather than being entirely his own invention, and perhaps another would simply be the host-less Spectre deciding that magic was a sin in the eyes of God, an unnatural usurpation of God's dominion over the world and its workings. After all, there are passages in the Bible forbidding witchcraft and other forms of magic and divination, and certainly for centuries now the church has associated magic with the devil and dark powers.

Anyway, Willingham continues to make it weird. The first words we hear Enchantress speak when the scene shifts to her are "I'm doing it...I'm actually seducing The Spectre." And, a few panels later, after mentioning how lonely The Spectre has been without a host and how happy he is that Eclipso has befriended him, she says, "And oh, the new feelings I've woken in him! He wants me in more than just a spiritual sense."

I...don't like to think of The Spectre as a sexual being at all, but I suppose DC has done something similar before. 

At any rate, the recent Spectre omnibus includes a panel wherein Madame Xandadu says something cryptic about how, in the past, "both natures of The Spectre fed me the tantric power by which I maintained the spell," and the art shows her with her hand on the grim face of The Spectre, next to another image of her happily embracing a shirtless Corrigan. (She seemed to be referring to the events of the 1987-1989 Spectre series written by Doug Moench, which I've never read, but heard a bit about.)

And in 1999's Day of Judgment, a caption refers to Madame Xanadu as, in part, "former lover of The Spectre", again likely referring to the Moench series. 

•Hmm, all this talk about magic being the root of all evil aside then, could Eclipso have really seduced The Spectre simply by showing interest in him...and showing so much cleavage? That's something the old Eclipso never had, anyway. 

If Jean wanted to get back together with The Atom, maybe she should have tried putting her boobs in his face, rather than that whole murder-his-old-coworker's-wife stratagem...

•Rex The Wonder Dog makes an unnamed cameo, appearing in a panel of the origin story that Detective Chimp shares with Black Alice's dad ("On our circuit was a show in rural Florida, where a doggie pal of mine led me to the Fountain of Youth," he says in a brown narration box with a magnifying glass in the corner, while the art shows a still-naked Bobo and a white dog drinking from a pool). 

If DC had only released a complete collection of the 1986-1990 Secret Origins series, maybe Bobo wouldn't have had to take up so much of this mini-series telling his story.

His origin was told in 1989's Secret Origins #40, the infamous all-ape issue featuring one of the greatest covers DC has ever published. Andy Helfer and Mark Badger were responsible for that Detective Chimp origin story, although it sounds pretty different than the one presented here (The Fountain of Youth story appears to originate in a story from 1981's DC Comics Presents #35). The issue also included origins of Gorilla Grodd and Congorilla (on the motorcycle). 

I've been meaning to devote a post to how badly I wish DC would collect that Secret Origins series for a while now. Maybe they can do so in a couple of DC Finest volumes in the near future...? Sure, continuity has changed repeatedly since the last issue of the series was published, and thus many of the specifics of those stories might have likewise changed, but there's a real who's who of talent involved in those comics.

•Excuse me, Captain Marvel? You have too been in a bar before. I saw you there. You ordered a milkshake. Remember L.E.G.I.O.N. '91 #31? The "War of the Gods" tie-in where you fell on top of Lobo and, despite your resistance, you eventually fought him until you were teleported away again? That was totally in a bar. I mean, it was a space bar, sure, but it was still a bar...

(If you, dear reader, missed that particular barroom brawl, which was drawn by Barry Kitson and appeared under a cover by the great Dan Brereton, DC collected it in 2015's Shazam! A Celebration of 75 Years, which is a pretty good book to have on your bookshelf.)

•Okay, so as stated above, Eclipso-in-Jean-Loring's-body was teleported to "a perpetual, non-decaying orbit around the sun."

Now, as far as I knew in 2005, sunlight was Eclipso's one great weakness, and exposure to sunlight would drive him out of the whatever body he happened to be in possession of. Had that changed somewhere between 1992 and 2005...? (I don't think it did, as I had read all of his appearances between The Darkness Within and Day of Vengeance, but I suppose it could have in, say, JSA, and I just don't remember). 

Anyway, I'm pretty sure that as soon as the eclipsed Jean Loring appeared in orbit around the sun, Eclipso should have been driven from her body, and she would have then immediately died by virtue of being in the vacuum of space.

•After Day of Vengeance concludes, with a cliffhanger ending of sorts, it's dangling plot threads eventually picked up on in Infinite Crisis, Day of Vengeance: Infinite Crisis Special #1 and Shadowpact (Oh, and the previously mentioned Blue Beetle, I guess), the trade includes a few more features. There's a cover gallery (Churchill drew the "Lightning Strikes Twice" covers, while Walt Simonson drew the Day of Vengeance ones), Justiniano's character designs for the eclipsed Jean Loring and Enchantress, and two pages that offer a character key for all of the cameos in the first Oblivion Bar scene.

Justiniano filled these scenes with plenty of original character designs, but there's also a ton of extant DC characters, like Jennifer Morgan, Arion, Black Orchid, Witchfire, Janissary and The Ghost Patrol...it was a fun scene in the comic, rewarding one scanning the background and seeing which characters could be recognized, and it was equally fun to have the "answers" to the scene in the back like that. 

Review: Batman and Robin: Dark Knight Vs. White Knight

DC launched Batman and Robin in 2009 as part of Grant Morrison's ongoing run on the Batman franchise. It was one of several instances where the writer rather shrewdly tied a new story direction to the launch of a new title, underlining the presumed importance of the new direction (and, perhaps not incidentally, generating higher sales than he would have by continuing on a pre-existing title).

This particular book was launched after the events of Final Crisis and the aftermath of Morrison's "Batman R.I.P." story arc in the Batman title left Bruce Wayne temporarily "dead." Dick Grayson became the new Batman, Damian Wayne became the new Robin and DC was launching a new title devoted to this bold new direction.

It was actually the first of two times Morrison's twisting and turning six-year Batman mega-plot birthed a new Batman title. When Bruce Wayne returned, Morrison left Batman and Robin, which had outlived its usefulness to his story, and DC launched Batman, Inc. for Morrison, a new book devoted to chronicling Wayne's attempts to build a global army of crime-fighting Batmen.

So what to do with Batman and Robin...? Cancel it? A successful title starring Batman? Of course not.

Instead, DC would keep it going, although their plan for doing so looks like it must have been more than a little confused, looking back on what the post-Morrison version of the title looked like: Ten issues by four different creative teams, three three-issue arcs by three different teams (the third of which suffered some pretty bad production problems, based on the number of artists involved with it), plus a one-off, schedule-filling issue by the fourth team.

This collection includes all of the post-Morrison issues of the first volume of Batman and Robin save for the final issue, a done-in-one written by David Hine and 2/3 drawn by Greg Tocchini, with artist Andrei Bressan drawing the final third. (What, exactly, happened during this period of the title's life is likely explained by the then-imminent launch of DC's "New 52"; at one point, Peter Tomasi and Patrick Gleason were announced as the new creative team for the book, but after one arc another creative team came in and, when the second, "New 52" volume of the series was announced, it was with Tomasi and Gleason as its creative team).

All of the apparent chaos behind the scenes obviously wasn't conducive to producing great comics, but there's surprisingly good work in this volume, some of it from creators who haven't produced much of note over the course of the last few years (artist Scott McDaniel and writer Judd Winick, for example) who nevertheless make rather strong showings within these stories.

The first story is very good, the second a little less so and the third even less so. Due to the fill-in nature of all three arcs, and the fact that the de facto Batman showrunner Morrison had already turned his attention away from the Grayson/Wayne Batman and Robin team means there's only so much any writer can do with the characters or characterization. All three writers managed to carry on Morrison's surface-level characterizations, however, and have fun with the inverted light-hearted, quipping Batman and dark, tight-ass Robin relationship, the Dynamic Duo as multi-generational buddy cops with Alfred as referee premise.

All three stories also manage to introduce new villains of varying degrees of stature and creativity, and boast some pretty decent art—at least until the very end of the collection.

Let's look at them one at a time, shall we?

"The Sum of Her Parts" by Paul Cornell, Scott McDaniel, Christopher Jones, Rob Hunter, Art Thibert and Andy Owen

The arc opens in medias res with Batman and Robin busting up a mysterious wedding ceremony of some sort, while Damian bickers with Dick over the fact that they both had an entrance line (That is, traditionally, Robin's job, but ur-Robin Grayson hasn't kicked the habit yet).

From there we flash back a few nights to a grave robbery of one Una Nemo, a brilliant, beautiful billionaire that Bruce Wayne was once semi-courting as part of his weird playboy act; he disappeared on her when Darkseid shot him backwards in time (although she didn't know why he suddenly stopped calling) and then she got shot through the forehead during a yacht robbery gone bad and, thanks to some barely alluded to comic book science about pollution in the water, she survived:

That's McDaniel's drawing of her. Here's Guillem March's, from one of the covers to Batman and Robin #18:

While the comically large hole in her head might beggar belief, this is a Batman comic, and it sort of works; she may look like she was shot with the sort of revolver that Elmer Fudd or Yosemite Sam might menace Bugs Bunny with, but it gives her that striking, gruesome Dick Tracy-villain look that so many of Batman's best enemies has. It also helps her meet the requirements of a good Batman villain: A striking visual that matches her modus operandi and her unbalanced mental state.

Now calling herself Absence, Nemo launches an extremely strange crime spree revolving around what's missing and what's not there. Her plan seems straightforward, and involves whipping up a cult following and a series of death traps for Batman and Robin, her stated plan being to kill enough of Bruce Wayne's new army of Batmen to regain his attention. More is going on.

It's a extremely well-scripted Batman story, working on the two levels the character's devious plotting is working on, while providing all the surface thrills that Morrison's conception of the all-new Batman and Robin team (and comic) had provided in previous issues, while also mining the fertile psychological territory that is inherent in the Batman experience (It's somewhat neat how Cornell manages to explore Bruce Wayne's behavior and state of mind in a story that he barely appears in at all, while also doing the same with Damian, Dick and the new villainess, and making it all relate.

Based on this story arc alone, Cornell might have been an ideal writer to follow Morrison on the title.

Given all the help McDaniel had in crafting the artwork—Jones gets a "with" credit for pencil art, while all those other names above inked these 60 pages—it's hard to tell exactly what's his and what's some one else's contribution, but it all looks like McDaniel's art. The figures have his signature design, they contort into thrusting, frozen poses when leaping or fighting, they are usually drawn leaping or fighting.

There's a lot of black in the art and it is, in general, richer, deeper, fuller than a lot of McDaniel's work in the recent past (Trinity, Arena, etc). There's a lot more detail to it, but it retains the semi-abstracted look of much of McDaniel's work, in which dynamic angles and figures propel the action as well as the story.

"Tree of Blood: Dark Knight Vs. White Knight" by Peter J. Tomasi, Patrick Gleason, Mick Gray, Keith Champagne and Tom Ngueyn

It sure takes a lot of guys to ink DC comics these days, doesn't it? The last three names above were the guys who inked Gleason's pencil art on this story. To everyone's credit, it's not incredibly obvious when a new inker comes in, and even with that many cooks in the kitchen, they produce much better than average 21st century Batman comics art.

I wish I could remember which blogger it was that called out how incredibly fucked-up the first scene in this story actually is (It was Tucker Stone, yes, but maybe someone else too...? Maybe everyone else? Tucker's take is, as usual, pretty funny. So you should probably go listen to it). In the book's first three pages, we see the three Robins—Dick Grayson, Tim Drake and Damien Wayne—hanging out in the kitchen with Alfred, making popcorn and smoothies and chatting. Then they gather in Wayne Manor's home theater with their dad/mentor and Alpha Bat Bruce Wayne to watch a movie.

It's a pretty cool, just-some-guys hanging-out, superheroes-behind-the-scenes sort of sequence, the kind that is more rare in Batman comics than in super-team comics. Sure, it's a little weird that none of the Batgirls were invited, and that Tomasi makes a point of this being the important part of the Batman family by having Wayne literally refer to them as "the whole family." But what's fucked-up is the movie they're watching: The Mark of Zorro, aka the movie young Bruce Wayne just got done watching with his parents before they were gunned down in an alley, an event that so traumatized him that he spent the rest of his life and most of his fortune dressing up as a bat to beat people up...and convince dozens of others to do the same!

After that, it is a pretty straightforward Batman comic, in which the Dick Grayson/Damian Wayne versions of the characters (Bruce and Tim apparently go off to their own comics after the movie), investigate the work of a new serial killer with a bizarre and presumably very expensive, pain-staking method of choosing and killing victims.

He's covered in something that renders him a glowing silhouette, with his eyeballs being the only normal detail one an see, and he has some kind of weird gun that paints things similarly glow-y (this detail reminded me quite a bit of the 2003 miniseries Batman: City of Light). To kill victims, he dresses them up as angels, pumps 'em full of drugs, and talks them into jumping off of skyscrapers.

The victims he chooses are what is perhaps the most interesting thing about the character—aside from the rather striking visual, which gets even more striking in the last scene, which leads me to believe Tomasi intends for him to be a repeat villain. This probably constitutes a spoiler: All of his victims are the relatives of Batman villains who are or have been incarcerated in Arkham Asylum, and his plan is to not only kill all of those killers, but wipe out their families and thus their bloodlines as well.

The downside of this is, of course, that it makes this one more story about all of Batman's old villains, instead of doing or saying much of anything new. There are welcome aspects to that strategy, like getting to see Gleason draw a large swathe of the rogues gallery—there's a pretty great scene where you turn a page and suddenly Man-Bat* appears out of nowhere flying tackling Batman—but it also simply covers the same old ground in a slightly different way. This is probably me as much as it is them, but I've read soooooo many stories about Arkham Asylum and its inmates at this point, I find stories dwelling on them rather tiresome now.

"The Streets Run Red" by Judd Winick, Guillem March, Andrie Bressan, Greg Tocchini and Andy Smith

Finally, there's a Winick-written Jason Todd story, which I think is the first one since Morrison sort of took over the character for an arc and offered his take on the long-dead Robin that Winick had quite clumsily resurrected and made into the new Red Hood.

Winick's version was a guy in a vaguely Spider-Man-shaped red helmet and street clothes, savagely gunning down villains like The Punisher (as to how he survived being blown up by a bomb and buried, it apparently had something to do with Superboy-punching, but let's not dwell on that).

Morrison reinvented Todd's Red Hood, giving him a cool new superhero costume (which I assume was designed by Frank Quitely rather than Batman and Robin #4-#6 artist Philip Tan, but I don't know for sure), a pair of signature crimson pistols and a sidekick of his own, Scarlet. Just as Dick Grasyon graduated to Batman, Todd made his own Red Hood persona more Batman-like. (That arc also revealed some rather weird details, like the fact that Todd was actually a redhead, but Bruce made him dye his hair black to look more like Dick).

So Winick returns to Todd after Morrison, and essentially writes him as he was writing him before, while acknowledging the cosmetic changes.

Aside from a flashback to Todd's days as Robin during the first ten pages of the book, drawn by cover artist March, and a visit from Dick Grayson's Batman to Todd's jail cell, the entire first issue is devoted to Todd in jail. Apparently, after the events of the previous Red Hood arc, he was being housed anonymously at Arkham Asylum, but is now being transferred to a regular prison.

There he regularly kills criminals—he's up to 95 before they think to transfer him back to Arkham.

Couple of things: 1) Yes, the lethal vigilante in jail killing his fellow convicts left and right is a Punisher story that's been written over and over 2) the Bat-guys want Todd in Arkham Asylum due to its greater security for his own safety, but Todd wants to be in a regular prison since he's not crazy—Arkham Asylum has terrible security, with folks escaping and murdering other people in there constantly, and wouldn't Todd rather be incarcerated somewhere he is able to kill folks like The Joker than somewhere he has to simply content himself with killing gangsters and "regular" criminals...?

Anyway, when Todd is being transferred again, he's "rescued" by The Menagerie, a team of mercenaries who are half-animal—the artists draw them as basically human with animal heads on top. They look kinda silly but, hey, new characters! That's something.

They are working at the behest of...Some Lady. Winick doesn't really explain who she is, or why she wants to free Jason Todd. She does know he's Jason Todd, though, so she somehow knows more about him than anyone at Arkham Asylum or the Regular Prison (Blackgate...?).

When Todd, with an assist from Batman and Robin, defeat The Menagerie, she calls him on the phone to tell him that she has Scarlet kidnapped, so The Red Hood (now wearing a compromise costume incorporating bits from his superhero-style costume and his Punisher-Lite costume) must form an uneasy alliance with Batman and Robin to rescue Scarlet by fighting...people. That work for that lady.

And, um, that's pretty much it. The story simply finds Jason Todd, follows him around, and then sets him free to fly off into an indeterminate future (I'm not certain; is this his last appearance before The New52boot, in which he would be reintroduced in the title Red Hood and The Outlaws...?).

The story isn't terribly ambitious, and lacks even a pretense of characterization of the antagonists, who are maguffins without so much as a veneer of non-maguffinosity. Where it really falls down, however, is the art. Which, as I mentioned, is by several artists, none of whose styles mesh in the least.

Any one of them would have probably done a decent enough job, but all together on a single story? It's a mess, and they're not even doled out, like, one per issue.

Here, for example, are three images by the three artists from the same story:

This, apparently, is where things really started to break down behind the scenes, and preparation for the New 52 relauch got underway and began interfering with the pre-New 52 comics-making.

Recently, Grant Morrison has announced that he's winding down all of his DC writing, which currently includes Action Comics and the recently relaunched Batman, Inc.

It will be curious to see what DC decides to do with that created-for-Morrison title when his run wraps up. Will they allow that book to retire with Morrison, or will they keep it going as they kept Batman and Robin going...?

If the latter, perhaps they'll let Cornell take it over. Based on the stories in this volume, he's the best they've got at following Morrison.



*Was Man-Bat an inmate of Arkham at any point in the comics...? This is the first I've heard of it, and I can't really remember an instance of him being shown as an inmate. I thought he wasn't criminally insane so much as sometimes he would turn into a giant bat, which is more of a chemical problem than a mental one..

One more thing about that skeevy sex scene in September's Catwoman #1

A couple of months ago I wrote at some length about the extremely skeevy but attention-getting splash-page ending of DC's Catwoman #1, in which writer Judd Winick and artist Guillem March had Batman and Catwoman totally doing it in a gross, awkward sex scene (Above).

By way of disparaging the lack of subtlety in Winick and March's scene, I compared it to a Batman sex scene in another comic.

Here's what I wrote then:

Even All-Star Batman and Robin, The Boy Wonder, one of the least subtle comics of the 21st century, by Frank Miller and Jim Lee, two creators no one would ever accuse of being too subtle, had a scene of Batman having costumed super-sex with a fellow super-type, and that was infinitely more subtle.

At the time, I hadn't yet read Frank Miller's original graphic novel Holy Terror (it was released in October), but, it turns out, that that book also features a Batman/Catwoman sex scene that is much, much, much more subtly staged than the one in Catwoman #1. (Above: A post-coital conversation from the "We keep our masks on...It's better that way" scene from Miller and Lee's All-Star Batman and Robin, The Boy Wonder).

Holy Terror opens, after the obnoxious, inflammatory, out-of-context two-page quote, with Miller's Batman analogue The Fixer pursuing his Catwoman analogue Natlie Stack. He's trying to arrest her after she stole a diamond bracelet. When he finally catches up with her, they fight.

She kicks him square in the area, then kicks him in the face, and that slashes his face with her claws. He punchers her in face. This goes on for another page. After recovering from that last punch, she jumps lips first onto The Fixer: Then things get weird.

On the next page, the two tumble, still kissing, backwards off a roof, until The Fixer lands head first on another roof with a "KRUNK" and, on the next page the continue to fall, and The Fixer is slammed into a wall ("WHUDD."). He stands up and punches Natlie in the gut, but at this point, she's already talking about the sex scene to come. "It's not like we planned this," she narrates as they roll around, still fighting. "We didn't even know we wanted it. It was just a slow night. That's all."

On the following page, Fixer punches her in the ace again for good measure, and they do what is apparently their version of flirting (She: "I hate your guts. You make me sick." Him: "Sure I do.")

Then: And can you guess what happens in the next panel?

This?No. Don't be silly.

Frank Miller, the guy who just wrote a scary weird, almost ten-page long scene where two people brutalize one another between kisses, in a comic book about how Islam is a religion of terror, pulls away from the two fetish freaks just as they are about to copulate, so the next page is a long shot of some "Empire City" architecture, and we just see the silhouette of Fixer's cape and Stack's hand (he's on top now), and her narration repeats, "Just a slow night. That's all."

The next page is an even longer long shot of buildings in the distance, with clouds made my fingers smudging ink on the white page, and the rhythmic repetition of "That's all. That's all."

And then, finally, this page: Miller conveys the sex through the repeating narration, that phrase spaced out and given a certain amount of time to occupy by being placed in individual narration boxes and in different consecutive panels (Even though he's suggesting the sex with the words instead of the pictures—at least in those two pages, between the last two splash pages I scanned aboe—it's an effect that couldn't be achieved in straight prose, as the writer can't control the passage of time the way a cartoonist can through panels of artwork).

The next page features a bomb packed with nails exploding, the first of many terrorist attacks that rock Empire City and lead to the Not-Batman vs. Terrorists plot that is Holy Terror's real subject matter.

So hang your heads in shame, People Who Made Catwoman #1, because Frank Miller did a more subtle, more artful, more elegant, even—dare I say it?—more classy comic book scene in which Batman and Catwoman fuck. Frank Miller. In Holy Terror.

You have to try reeeeaaaalllllly hard to lose that kind of contest, guys.


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AND SPEAKING OF HOLY TERROR AND ALL-STAR BATMAN AND ROBIN, THE BOY WONDER:

It's rather remarkable how many times the former seems to echo the latter, at least in Miller's staging:
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Okay! Now I'm off to take two showers! One to wash away that skeevy Batman/Catwoman sex scene in Catwoman, and then another to wash away the disgusted feeling I get when reading Holy Terror. If you need to cleanse your eyes and mind, I'd recommend revisiting David Brothers' series of essays on Miller's Batman, one entry of which I borrowed/swiped a few of the scanned ASBaRtBW panels from.

I am going to discuss Catwoman and Batman’s sex lives in great detail, because DC Comics asked me to*

Do you remember a few years back, when DC Comics first released the cover image for Superman/Batman #40 as part of their solicitations ritual, and the Dustin Nguyen-drawn image featured Batman standing behind a woman, his hand on her torso?

But then, when the actual comic book showed up on shelves a few months later, it had been altered, so that Batman was no longer holding the woman?His hand was apparently a little too close to her breasts for DC’s comfort; they must not have wanted one of their flagship characters, a constant cartoon star and their one sure-thing bankable intellectual property potentially stirring any sort of potential controversy.

That was 2007. This happened in Catwoman #1 two days ago (and, if you're at work, you should probably stop looking at my blog and get back to work lazybones, because we're getting into some pretty NSFW, yet still somehow T-for-Teen area):The last page of the issue features a full-page splash of, as Comics Alliance’s Laura Hudson put it in a fairly heart-breaking post about the cumulative effect of the scene on top of Red Hood and The Outlaws #1 and a million billion other little cuts, Batman actually penetrating Catwoman.

My how things have changed in just a few years!

Or maybe they haven’t. For example, if the problem with the Superman/Batman cover was that Batman was almost touching that lady’s breasts, perhaps this is consistent. It’s not like he’s touching Catwoman’s breasts. Or Catwoman at all. His right hand is on the floor, apparently propping him up so Catwoman can hump him (Not sure if artist Guillem March drew his hand holding Catwoman’s other side—there’s a Bat-glove colored shape apparent where the right side of her ribcage would be—or if it is similarly on the floor, obstructed from view, hidden by their bodies). Maybe DC has a rule book somewhere that says Batman can touch women’s erogenous zones, but only with his penis, never with his hands.

That, or maybe there’s some more logical rule about not putting potentially parent-perturbing imagery on the cover, but an acknowledgement that much more can be gotten away with on the insides of the book. (Although I kind of doubt it).

The scene raises questions, some of the funnier ones have already been asked by Abhay Khosla in his “7 Questions About Images on the Internet of the Final Pages of Catwoman #1” post at Savage Critics.

My initial reaction was to open up my document marked “links” and type out “It never occurred to me until I saw an image of Batman and Catwoman doing it while still dressed in their bat and cat costumes, but as people who dress like animals and do it, they are essentially furries, huh?” and post it on Sunday as part of a weekly link-blogging post like this one.

But I keep reading about the scene, and thus can’t stop thinking about it and while, like Khosla, I kind of worry about that fact, at the same time I realize it’s perfectly natural for people who devote a large portion of their lives to reading, thinking and writing about comic books to read, think and write about what those comic books might be saying.

Here are a couple of links, beyond the ones provided above:

—DC Women Kicking Ass groups it with a perceived trend of super-ladies being reduced to male heroes’ allies-with-benefits in “The New 52”

—The Beat hopes that fans and readers don’t let questionable/gross portrayals of characters like Catwoman screwing Batman outweigh or eclipse positive portrayals of characters like Wonder Woman in really good comics like Wonder Woman #1

—Don MacPherson notes that in context the scene makes Batman seem like a real creep in his thorough review of Catwoman #1

—Tom Spurgeon links back to some of those same pieces (the comics blogosphere isn’t just an ouroboros, it’s a Gordian knot tied of ouroboros instead of ropes), and notes the difference between sex scenes as plot points and sex scenes as part of a story, contrasting the Winick/March scene with the Ed Brubaker-written Catwoman run.

And here’s me going where that image all but pushes me:

1.) Is that last panel, of a fully-clothed Catwoman riding a fully clothed Batman who seems to be doing some sort of tricep push-up really the best they can do?

I think Guillem March is a great artist, and I’ve been pretty bummed out by the fact that he’s usually paired with writers I don’t like and or put on projects I’m not that interested in, because I love looking at his art.

So I kind of have to assume Winick wrote a script describing the positioning and so forth, but then, Winick is an artist too. Not as good an artist as March, and, I don’t know, maybe he doesn’t even draw anymore, but I have a hard time believing that was the best these two could come up with for a Batman/Catwoman sex scene.

They couldn’t have done something for subtle, more sophisticated, more evocative? Something with shadows or sillhouettes or tight close-ups of hands gripping sheets or a suggestive close-up of a catsuit zipper coming down or a dramatic pull-away while the narration suggest what’s going to happen next or…something other than that weird image that looks like a Google Image result for Catwoman + Batman + sex (Don’t google that!).

So I guess it was a deliberate choice by…someone, presumably to provoke this kind of response from the Internet and maybe sell some more issues, or at least keep people talking about another aspect for “The New 52” for another day or two or maybe just talking about this book instead of one of the other books (Catwoman and Red Hood are certainly getting more buzz this week than, say, DC Presents #1). Even All-Star Batman and Robin, The Boy Wonder, one of the least subtle comics of the 21st century, by Frank Miller and Jim Lee, two creators no one would ever accuse of being too subtle, had a scene of Batman having costumed super-sex with a fellow super-type, and that was infinitely more subtle (Note the thunder and lightning above; and it's still more subtle than Catwoman!).

In that scene, Batman used his cape as some sort of privacy tent for he and Black Canary while they did it on dirty dock somewhere, and Miller and Lee used shadow and post-coital pulling costumes back on to signify what went down. I remember mentioning them making-out on a dock in my review of the issue, and commenters had to point out that they did more than make out.

2.) Catwoman is rated “T+”, which means it’s “appropriate for readers age 16 and older… may contain moderate violence, mild profanity, graphic imagery and/or suggestive themes.” I suppose that sounds about right in terms of sexual content, although the violence ratings seem off (T+ affords only “moderate” violence and T “mild” violence? Was the end of T-rated Detective Comics #1 mild?).

If the creators are going to go for full-page splashes of Batman and Catwoman doing it, why not just go ahead and rate the thing “M” and publish a comic book that’s actually for adults and completely honest with everyone about its target audience? Why would you want to publish, much less create, a scene like this for sixteen-year-olds instead of for adults exclusively?

If the plan is to make a sexy, sexy Catwoman totally having sex with Batman in as unambiguous terms as that panel and that narration reveals, just go for it, okay? Rate this sucker “M,” let Catwoman and Batman take their costumes all the way off, let’s see their naked butts and Catwoman’s breasts, let’s go full-on softcore kissing and fondling and foreplay, huh?

If comics are for grown-ups, if this particular comic is for grown-ups, if it’s to titillate grown-ups, that is perfectly okay, but why not go ahead and actually make it for grown-ups, all official-like, and go all the way with it?

This is just so…weird and gross. At least to me. Weirder and grosser than a porn comic would be, to be honest (although the only porn comics I’ve actually read were by Colleen Coover and Brandon Graham, and those are some great cartoonists) and certainly infinitely weirder and grosser than any sex scene I’ve seen in a Vertigo comic or a grown-up “art” comic created by and for grown-ups.

3.) I haven’t been reading any of the Bat-books in the new continuity yet, so I have no idea what has changed and what hasn’t, continuity-wise. I assume Catwoman and Batman still know one another’s secret identities, as that’s been pretty clearly established for a while now and Batman Inc is supposedly still in-continuity.

Is that the case? Because if they don’t know one another’s secret identities any more, that scene is pretty damn creepy. And gross.

4.) I'm saying "creepy" and "gross" a lot here. Also creepy and gross? Look at Batman's face. Oh God look at Batman's sex face! Aaaaa! And why is Catwoman still wearing her goggles...? Oh God--! I hate this image!

5.) Also, and I hate myself and Judd Winick and DC for thinking of this at all, but if Catwoman doesn’t know his secret identity any more (as suggested by the mask-wearing), what does Batman do about his…DNA evidence…?

6.) Also also, while being on top seems well within Catwoman's character, I have a hard time imagining a control freak and weirdo fetishist like Batman letting her be on top during sex. It seems like something they'd argue about.

7.) Also also also, I've yet to get around to writing about Batman: The Widening Gyre which was one of the worst, weirdest and grossest DC Comics I've ever read, one that was so bafflingly I-can't-believe-they-published-this that I haven't been able to convince myself to wrap my head around it and write about it for a blog entry, even though I read it months ago. It is such an...odd comic that I suspect it was one of the motivating factors convincing DC they had to reboot their universe, because they couldn't let that story stand (Cry For Justice, Infinite Crisis and Rise of Arsenal are other suspects for straws that broke the DCU camel's back). Batman's sexual prowess is under constant discussion in the book, in which Silver St. Cloud reveals that their first night together she had at least ten orgasms, and there's one terrible, terrible scene where Batman goes to tell Catwoman he's engaged to Silver and they end up totally doing it. I thought all of that—including the weird scene where Batman cheats on Silver with Catwoman in a horribly-staged couple of panels in which Batman pretty much just jumps Catwoman's bones—was the wrongest Batman story I could imagine. That coupling of the characters now seems tasteful compared to this.

8.) Is there a panel involving a condom, or mention of whether or not they should use one? Or of birth control? I would assume that Batman is the sort that would always use a condom (probably with a Bat-symbol on it). I would hope that a Batman comic book involving on-panel sex scenes of this sort geared toward high school students would involve discussion of safe sex. I mean, the JLI and other DC second-stringers were preaching the importance of safe sex back in the early ‘90s. I’d hate to think the publisher is less concerned with safe sex now than it was then—or more scared of pissing off the abstinence-only crowd than they were 20 years ago.

9.) I sincerely hope the trade collection includes Winick’s script for the first issue. I really want to know where that tweaking of Batman’s ear came from, and who made the decisions for staging that last panel and how exactly.

Okay! Now to go take a shower!



*Okay, Dan DiDio and Jim Lee didn’t call me up and ask me to or anything. Obviously. But the provocative scene in question begs for attention

In a genre built out of trivia, there’s no such thing as a trivial matter

I came across two news (“news”?) items on the Internet today that really sort of shocked and surprised me, to the extent that news/“news” items regarding shared universe super-comics can shock and surprise someone.

The first was an innocuous enough-seeming post hyping the bi-weekly limited series Justice League: Generation Lost on DC’s Source blog.

Those of you who read and remember my “Comic Shop Comics” posts will know that I’ve been reading and rather enjoying that series regularly, and having just read the eighth and ninth issues of it, it is now the Judd Winick series I have read the most consecutive issues of since…2005, when I read the issue of his Outsiders in which a victim of childhood sexual assault dispassionately began to beat a rapist to death after the rapist attempted to sell five-year-old Lian Harper into sex slavery (Don’t worry, Lean was saved, and lived…until she died in an earthquake five years later). That was the moment when whatever good will Barry Ween and Pedro and Me had generated began to get outweighed by the weight of Winick’s awful, awful superhero writing, and the dark, broken light bulb appeared over my head (cutting my scalp on its jagged edge), signifying the arrival of a bright idea—Hey, this guy writes awful, ugly comics, and I don’t have to read ‘em!

But I liked weekly(-ish) comics, and I liked the JLI characters so I tried Winick’s Justice League: Generation Lost #1. And it wasn’t bad. So I picked up #2, and have been proceeding with caution since. I’ve expected to start hating it at any moment all along, and thus haven’t added it to my pull-list at my local shop, but have been reading it off-the-rack, just waiting for it to plunge from not-that-bad to Why God, why?!

Is that point around the corner?

I don’t know. I didn’t really read Alex Segura’s post hyping the upcoming issue #11 on The Source very closely, I noticed it had a quote from editor Brian Cunningham and there was a pencils-only splash page of “Ice Unleashed” which looked fie, if not “amazing.”

My Blog@Newsarama colleague Troy Brownfield did read Segura’s post and Cunningham’s quote closely though, and noticed a problem, which he posted about here.

You can go read Troy’s post (don’t worry, it’s much shorter and less rambly than mine!), as it will make more sense in context, but the gist of it is that Cunningham refers to Ice’s initial introduction as the Super Friends series from the 1970s, where Ice was originally introduced as Icemaiden…and he notes that she had an absurd origin. (Above: The Icemaiden from the Super Friends comic book. Those comics, by the way, were non-canonical in terms of official DCU continuity)

Troy points out that the Icemaiden from Super Friends is a completely different character than Tora “Ice” Olafsdotter, from the Justice League comics. Icemaiden joined the Justice League after Tora/Ice’s death, appearing on the line-up immediately preceding the Grant Morrison/Howard Porter/John Dell team (Icemaiden appeared briefly in the “New World Order” arc of JLA, fleeing the Justice League satellite with her teammates as the disguised Hyper Clan destroyed it).

(Tora "Ice" Olafsdotter)

(Sigrid "Icemaiden" Nansen, being menaced by tentacles. Wait, surely I can find a less exploitive image of her than that somewhere on the Internet...)

(Hmm, on her knees and in chains probably isn't much better, huh?)

(So, um, this image of her falling out of her costume is the most heroic and dignified image of her I can find on the Internet. Well, at any rate, please note that she has blue skin. That's one good way to tell her apart from Tora/Ice, who does not have blue skin)

There’s some commentary from commenters at both The Source and Blog@ but, so far anyway, no one from DC has popped up to explain what’s going on.

Did Cunningham simply confuse when Ice made her first appearance? If that’s the case, then it doesn’t seem like a huge deal, just something kind of embarrassing for a dude who edits a book starring the character to bring up on his own. But since he mentions that character’s origin and the fact that Winick would be creating “a credible and tragic origin that doesn’t negate what we already know,” well, then it sounds like the stories are being confused, and that is a big deal.

See, Generation Lost’s entire premise is one of nostalgia and trivia, building on the narrative arc of these decades old characters’ fictional histories. It’s a next chapter of a group novel that’s already been written, and the old stuff is much less flexible. This is, after all, a series about a half-dozen characters popular from a 20+ year old comics run reuniting to deal with a threat that surfaced in a five-year-old (or so) series of event comics, which has been given new urgency by the last year or so’s worth of Green Lantern and Blackest Night comics. Take away exacting fealty to the plot points of past comics, and what are you left with in Generation Lost? Just some clichéd if readable superhero action-adventure scripting, some uneven, generally sub-par art, and some really nice Cliff Chiang covers.

In other words, not a whole lot.

Troy ends his post by asking if fans can keep this stuff straight, why can’t editors? It’s a fair question. I’ve always assumed there was a lot more to editing a DC comic book than simply knowing the characters and their histories extremely well, but man, this seems to suggest there’s less. (Even if you don’t trust Wikipedia or the Internet in such matters, there’s always the DC/DK-published The DC Comics Encyclopedia: The Definitive Guide to the Characters of the DC Universe. Flipping to the I’s, I see Ice and Icemaiden are both included, their entries complete with their first appearances, secret identities and origins).

Ignoring The Source suggestion that this might lead to a new costume (it looks like Ice’s tank top is exploding off in that image, part of which you can see above, and her neat-o page boy is turning into a pointy icicle afro), there are at least two other less-than-thrilling suggestions about the character’s possible future.

The first is the promise that the character will be going “from pensive, shy flower to elemental badass.” Perhaps this time will be different, but Ice was already darkened and bad-assened in the ‘90s, just before she was killed off in 1994, remaining dead and off the board until she was resurrected through a combination of magic and herbs or something in Birds of Prey in 2007, which coincidentally returned her to her JLI-era costume and personality.

In other words, “Dark Ice” didn’t really work out all that well for anyone. (Above: Dark Ice. You can tell she's getting edgier and more bad-ass by the amount of cleavage pictured)

The second is Cunningham’s reference to a possible new origin for Tora/Ice to replace or update her original, “absurd” origin.

What origin is that? Tora is a princess of a long lost race of magical Ice-people who live in a secret mountain homeland in Norway. That is, magical ice princess has magical ice powers. That’s hardly an “absurd” origin story, particularly by the standards of super-comics (Ice’s on-again, off-again boyfriend Guy Gardner’s origin, for example, is that he was chosen as the back-up Green Lantern for Hal Jordan in case Hal Jordan ever couldn’t be Green Lantern. Oh, and then he was a retroactively geneteically-engineered human/alien hybrid with the ability to transform his body parts into weird weapons via magic tattoos. And then he wasn’t anymore, because that was stupid.)

By the way, the last time Judd Winick attempted to fix an origin story that wasn’t the least bit broke? That would be the troubled 2006-2008 limited series Trials of Shazam!, which effectively left the Captain Marvel and the Marvel family so toxic that they’ve been barely touched in the year since it wrapped up, as if DC was letting the radioactivity of Winick’s changes wear off.

So no, I’m not very excited about the future of Justice League: Generation Lost.


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But enough DC Universe trivia, let’s look at some real world trivia: Quick, which Ohio city beginning with the letter C did Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster collaborate on Superman in?

You did say Cleveland, right?

Because J. Michael Straczynski said Columbus in this particular post in the long, fairly healthy comments thread about one retailers disastrous attempts to try and use JMS’ Superman-walking-around storyline to promote Superman and comic in general while, naturally, selling some comics of his own.

If you haven’t read the story JMS was commenting on at all, please do—It’s one of those stories that is no doubt incredibly frustrating, even maddening, if you’re involved with it, but is actually kind of hilarious in a “Ha, ha, comics is soooooo fucked up” kind of way if you’re not.

Straczynski, by the way, really does know what city Siegel and Shuster did their Superman-making-up in, as he came back a little later down the thread to say it was just a stupid typo and to note that Ohio has far too many big cities that begin with the letter C (But, sadly, no Calebopolis…yet).

His mistake was enough to make me temporarily question everything I knew about Siegel, Shuster and Cleveland though, as I briefly entertained the possibility that JMS was right and my memory was wrong. Like, maybe they were born/grew up around Columbus and then moved north to Cleveland later…?

This sort of real-life trivia is perhaps a bit more important to me than it is to others, as I am a lifelong Ohio resident (Well, I went to college in Pennsylvania, but still…), and grew up east of Cleveland before relocating to Columbus for about a decade and then returning east of Cleveland again…I thought I knew my comics geography pretty well, and take a certain amount of pride in it.

I can forgive JMS the mistake though, as I’d be hard-pressed to name three big cities in many other states myself. I am pretty curious about Superman #703, the Superman-walks-around-Cincinnati issue, as from what JMS says Superman actually spends most of the time around Cleveland…?

Because Cincinnati is about two hours south of Columbus, and Columbus is about two to two-and-a-half hours south of Cleveland, so that’s a good four or five hours difference between cities…by car. Walking, it’s…I don’t know, really, really far? Is Superman super-walking?

Once the Columbus/Cleveland confusion was cleared up, I was still a little shocked to hear just how badly DC screwed over this retailer. Not that it’s was there job to help him with his own personal marketing efforts or decision to celebrate their book or anything, but in that they didn’t publish the book on time, thus ruining whatever he had happened to have planned in the first place.

Like, the absolute bare minimum DC had to do was just keep a shipping date, and they couldn’t even do that much. That is sad. And hilarious. Tragicomic? Let’s say tragicomic. DC and poor Kendall Swafford’s entire experience with Superman #703 is nothing short of cosmically tragicomic.

JMS explains the reason for his delay, explaining that he was very ill, which is, of course, pretty terrible for JMS, and is certainly an explanation, but not really an excuse.

I was under the understanding that DC Comics were written a good six months before they arrived in comics shops—a tidbit I learned from a letters page in a comic from the early ‘90s or so—but I guess that’s no longer the case? That six months has shrunk to a matter of weeks now? Jeez. I assumed JMS had his entire Superman-walking-around story finished in script form before the first issue saw publication. Why wouldn’t he? Why would DC want to start publishing a story arc that wasn’t even finished being written yet?

If that sort of schedule is more common than the six month lead time I remember form my youth, then it’s really no wonder so many DC books look rushed these days—they are rushed.

It’s really a shame in the case of JMS’s Superman-walking-around storyline, too. I don’t know if it’s any good or not—I haven’t read a single positive review of it, every panel of it I have seen posted here and there with reviews has made me cringe, and Eddy Barrows is one of my least favorite artists, so I haven’t been in a hurry to jump on it—but it’s certainly marketable.

The publisher should easily be able to get a bunch of local press with each and every issue of the storyline, as local TV news goofballs crack a few jokes about Superman visiting their cities on the 11 o’clock news and daily and altweekly newspapers review the issue or interview JMS or Barrows or the editors or whoever. This storyline is tailor-made for local mainstream media coverage.

Of course, to plan that sort of press, you have to have the issues actually come out when you say they’re coming out.