On 1999's JLA #35

I can't remember being annoyed by September of 1999's JLA #35 being the work of a guest-team, bumping writer Grant Morrison and artists Howard Porter or John Dell and forestalling Morrison's ongoing Justice League story for a month.

Maybe that was because, at that point, we JLA readers had been acclimated to issues from guest creators. 

For example, January's #27 was from guest-creators Mark Millar and Mark Pajarillo (that was the JLA and the reserves vs. Amazon done-in-one, a sort of spotlight on The Atom). That was followed by Morrison, Porter and Dell's four-part "Crisis Times Five" (the JLA/JSA/Captain Marvel story arc). And then we got two more issues from fill-in teams, with Mark Waid, Devin Grayson, Pajarillo and Walden Wong handling JLA # 32 (in which the team investigates the "No Man's Land" situation in Gotham) and the same creative team (minus Grayson) also handling JLA #33 (in which the team investigates a faux Bruce Wayne). The "regular" team was back for #34 (in which Green Lantern gets swept up in a prison riot at Belle Reeve), but it was beginning to look like we were getting at least one fill-in issue between each complete story by Morrison and company. 

It might also have been because that September's Day of Judgment event felt so much like a JLA story that I felt like I was getting more JLA that month, not less. (Batman, Superman, Green Lantern and Zauriel played big-ish roles in the main Day of Judgment series, while Martian Manhunter and Wonder Woman also appeared).

Looking back now though, JLA #35 looks like a rather unwelcome interruption of Morrison and company's Justice League epic. In issue #34, "The Ant and the Avalanche", New Gods tell the League the long-foreshadowed apocalyptic threat is finally arriving, and the cliffhanger ending reveals that Lex Luthor, the villain of 1997-1998's "Rock of Ages" arc, has now aligned himself with Prometheus, the villain who single-handedly took on and took down the newer, bigger Justice League in 1998's JLA #16 and #17. 

What could these two be up to, and who else might be on the "new Injustice Gang" Prometheus mentions...? How might it tie into the prophesied threat? Readers in 1999 had to wait not one but two months, not getting a resolution to that cliffhanger the following month, but instead a story by J.M. DeMatteis and Pajarillo about Hal Jordan, a character who had never appeared in this particular title, and how he was dealing with being the new host of The Spectre. (The side-quest nature of this story is particularly apparent when encountered in a collection of JLA today;I re-read it in a library-borrowed, 2000 collection entitled JLA: World War III, where it is sandwiched between the aforementioned "The Ant and the Avalanche" and the five-part "World War III" arc, the latter of which was both the climax and the finale of Morrison's run). 

According to comics.org, DeMatteis and Pajarillo's JLA #35 was released on September 29, 1999, the very same Wednesday that Day of Judgment #5 and Day of Judgment Secret Files and Origins were released. So, depending on which order one read them in that week, this is either the first or second appearance of Hal Jordan as The Spectre following the events of the main Day of Judgment series (And though the cover of this issue brands it as a Day of Judgment tie-in, it is, according to a footnote, set after the events of the series, so, like the Secret Files and Origins special, this too is a sort of epilogue). 

The story, entitled "The Guilty", opens with a two-page sequence in which "the camera" seems to be zooming in from a longshot of a city street from far above, down to a troubled man in a yellow shirt and blue pants in front of a toy store, all the other people passing by depicted only as silhouettes. Green narration boxes make it clear that the words in them are supposed to be the thoughts of Hal Jordan, and that he is, apparently, the man in the yellow shirt.

I wouldn't have recognized him, honestly. He looks far younger than he did in Day of Judgment, his build is thinner, and colorist Pat Garrahy gives him a very light brown hair, far lighter than he usually has. Honestly, he looks more like Ralph Dibny than Hal Jordan. Given the events of the story, though, this could be either Pajarillo and Garrahy rendering him a bit off-model, or it could be intentional.

Anyway, as the suffering Jordan narrates about how he can't stop being flooded with darkness and evil, he finally cries out in anguish, assuming the form of The Spectre, a white-skinned giant wearing not just the customary green hooded cape and gloves, but also a green mask evocative of Jordan's old Green Lantern uniform (As is hinted at on Porter's cover at the top of the post, the design for the new Hal Jordan-as-The Spectre hybridizes Hal's Green Lantern outfit with The Spectre's get-up).

Suddenly, the JLA's resident angel Zauriel swoops down to look Hal in the eye, his flaming sword already drawn:

Is there a problem?

Your howl of grief across the ethers--drew me here through the sheer force of your thought. 

It slowly dawns on Hal that he knows Zauriel—they met in Purgatory in Day of Judgment, and, prior to that, a time-travelling Jordan from the past met Zauriel in the 1998 "Emerald Knights" arc Green Lantern, but I'll be damned if I can remember if Past Hal kept his memories of this adventure in his future, or if they were power-ringed away before he got sent back, so as not to screw with the timeline (As far as I know, "Emerald Knights" is also the first time Hal Jordan actually met Plastic Man, too, but I may be wrong on that; do correct me if I am). 

Hal's dialogue, presented in green-tinted dialogue bubbles with lines suggesting fire, meant to imply The Spectre's spookier-than-human voice, makes it quite clear he's struggling with being bonded to The Spectre-Force. The new Spectre and Zauriel go back and forth a bit about the latter having forsaken Heaven for life on Earth, with The Spectre seemingly intent on punishing Zauriel for doing so.

Then a bunch of Leaguer's appear, Superman saying "That'll be enough, Hal--" to presage their dramatic appearance. Assembled here are Superman, Martian Manhunter, Batman, Green Lantern and Plastic Man. Together with Zauriel, they would make up the half-dozen Leaguers who are featured in this story.

It's an interesting mix, as Superman, Batman and J'onn have known Hal about as long as anyone and served on Leagues with him before. Zauriel is there for obvious plot purposes, standing as he does between Earth and the divine realm that birthed The Spectre. Green Lantern Kyle Rayner has a complicated history with Hal, having had to repeatedly fight him while also trying to live up to his legacy ("Emerald Knights" is one of the relatively few times Kyle and Hal shared a story where they weren't fighting, actually). And as for Plastic Man, well, his particular past is salient for one scene DeMatteis writes later.

Among the other eight Leaguers, Aquaman, Wonder Woman and then-Flash Wally West might seem conspicuously absent, given Aquaman co-founded the League and served on it for years with Hal, while Wally and Wondy were his colleagues on Justice Leagues during the multi-Leagues "International" era between the end of the Giffen/DeMatteis era and the start of JLA. (Remember, in post-Crisis, pre-Infinite Crisis continuity, Wonder Woman wasn't a founding Leaguer, nor even in Man's World throughout the entirety of the Satellite Era). 

During a brief argument with Superman, the still-giant Spectre returns to a human form, and then tumbles out of the sky, eliciting a fun panel in which J'onn, Kyle and Plas all shout "I'll get him!", but Superman beat them all to the catch, thanks to his super-speed. 

To their shock, they don't recognize the man in Supeman's arms at all. "If Hal Jordan is the new Spectre--" Plas starts, before Batman finishes his sentence, "Then WHO is THIS?"

Taking the unrecognizable Hal back to the Watchtower, the narration makes it clear that not only do none of them recognize him as Hal Jordan, but he appears completely differently in the eyes of each of them (Pajarillo helpfully draws six completely different-looking men the same yellow shirt in a series of panels; one of them, the one Plas sees, is a Black man). 

Zauriel interrupts the questioning, takes a good hard look at the man he sees, and then explains:

Our inability to recognize him-- is part of the ordained plan for The Spectre's mission on Earth. 

Jordan is dead...The world believes him dead...and though he's been given the semblance of a human form, no one-- --not even those who knew him best-- will recognize him now.

Though Zauriel somehow seems to fix that for his fellow Leaguers, he stresses that this is just temporary, and that "For reasons known only to The Presence," Zauriel's name for God, once Hal leaves the Watchtower, the Leaguers will only remember him as The Spectre, not as Hal Jordan-as-The Spectre. 

I didn't like this development when I initially read this comic. Not only did it seem to violate one of the established "rules" of The Spectre that I had previously read about—everyone seemed to recognize the dead Jim Corrigan as Jim Corrigan when he was The Spectre—it seemed counter-productive. What, after all, was the point of making the long-lived DC character Hal Jordan the new Spectre if DC was only going to obscure that identity from everyone in the DCU anyway? Would stories of Hal Jordan possessing The Spectre's god-like powers in the modern DCU be all that interesting if only the writers writing his adventures and the readers reading them knew who he actually was?

It seems like DeMatteis must have changed his mind about it too...if this aspect was his idea, and not an editorial edict. About a year and a half after this issue was published, DC would launch a new volume of The Spectre, with DeMatteis writing it. (I wonder now if DC and DeMatteis knew the latter would be writing the series at this point or not.) But by 2003's JLA/Spectre: Soul War two-part mini-series, the League all knew that Hal was The Spectre again. 

Hal resumes his Spectre form, and there's a bit of debate among the assembled men. Superman tells Hal he's a good man, while Batman argues, "As far as I'm concerned, Jordan stopped being a "good man" when he turned on the guardians. When he killed-- and kept on killing."

Hal again discusses how his new, supernatural senses are overwhelming him:

If only you could see--what I see! What this...thing I share consciousness with makes me see: The demons! The guilt!

Humanity's shame and sorrow! It's festering jealousy--and murderous rage!

After Plastic Man interrupts him—"Let me get this straight: Before you were dead--now you're the all-powerful Spectre--and you're kvetching about it?"—we get to the heart of the comic.

"All men--no matter how pure they may appear--are guilty!" Hal says, spreading his cape like a matador. "Every soul on Earth is a potential target of The Spectre's divine wrath!"

Superman scoffs, saying he doesn't, he can't subscribe to such a philosophy, at which point Hal-as-The Spectre starts using his powers to illustrate his points, giving Pajarillo lots of intense imagery to work with. He shows them the time Superman executed the Phantom Zone criminals, the instance in which he actually took a life—there's no asterisk or footnote, but I believe this happened during John Byrnes run, right?—and how guilty Superman felt about it.

Batman cuts in, and then The Spectre turns on him, noting how many people have suffered due to Batman's arrogance, and that there's a small part of Batman that wants to kill his enemies, one he may eventually act on—should The Spectre attack Batman now, or wait until he's crossed that line? (Batman's refusal to ever kill, even the likes of The Joker, makes him maybe a poor example to subject to The Spectre's scrutiny; I wonder if it might have been better for DeMatteis to use the harsher, more violent Huntress, or perhaps warrior characters like Wonder Woman or Aquaman, although, to be honest, I don't recall if any of those three had actually killed anyone by this point; I feel like Peter David had depicted Aquaman killing at least one alien invader earlier in his run, but I'm no longer positive.)

Hal goes on to accuse Kyle of fearing being corrupted by his power and lashes out at Zauriel when he again mentions The Presence.

It is at this point, Plastic Man joins the conversation, transforming into an easy chair and sweeping Hal off his feet with a "Siddown a minute!"

As a Plastic Man fan, I should note that DeMatteis does a pretty fine job of the character in a sequence of less than a half-dozen panels. While Morrison had an even-handed, nuanced approach to Plastic Man as a true hero despite his jokes, in general, most of the other writers to handle the JLA during Morrison's run just played Plas as a source of usually lame jokes, his shape-shifting abilities employed to contort him into visual punchlines. 

(For one example of Morrison's take on Plastic Man from the very collection I am reading this issue in, in the first chapter of "World War III", Zauriel said that Heaven has decided Earth will surely end during this particular threat, and that the angels are already planning the architecture of a new universe. Plastic Man's head turns into that of a chicken, and notes that if Heaven has given up, maybe he and Zauriel should as well, to which Zauriel responds, "I haven't given up...and neither will you when it comes to it, Plastic Man." He's right! They both play their parts in saving Earth and the universe from the new Injustice Gang and Mageddon.)

Plastic Man explains that he too had been in the position Hal has been in, a bad guy who was seemingly killed and then got super-powers (Although there's an obvious difference in scale, here; Eel O'Brien, as his surname is spelled here, was a rather cartoonish gangster pulling robberies and heists, while Hal was an honest-to-God cosmic supervillain with a considerable body count who, at one point, unraveled all of time in space in order to recreate it in his own image). 

"Believe me, when the fates offered me a second chance--I took it!" Plas says. "But did I mope and moan about it? Nuh-uh! I decided to have fun with it! If I was gonna live my life over, it was gonna be--YOWCH!"

Pajarillo's art is a little confusing here—I'm sure the script couldn't have been all that clear, given what's going on—but Hal interrupts Plastic Man by ripping open the back of his head, where he finds Eel hiding:

You hide behind a mask of arrogance and flippancy--

--but there is another face that lies behind that vapid grin! A man who preyed on the weaknesses of others! An all too common criminal--

--named "Eel" O'Brien!

Again, pretty sure it's spelled "O'Brian," but whatever. The Spectre's beat is evil, sin and vengeance, not spelling.

Here we get a glimpse into Plas' mind, wherein he reveals that he faces "the darkness" of his soul constantly, that he knows every rotten thing he's ever done and been face-to-face with his own guilt, but that he likes his "mask of frivolity." And, when he finally meets his maker, as Hal phrases it? "I'll take my chances that he's just a tetch more forgiving than you are!" Plas says.

Hal seems to really lose his shit at this, at which point J'onn loses his, screaming "Enough!" in big, bold red letters "both verbally and telepathically".

Using his powers, J'onn transports all seven of them to a scary-looking plane of fire and stalagmites and weird architecture. 

"Back in Hell?" Kyle asks; he and Superman having just been there in Day of Judgment. "After a fashion," Zauriel replies. He seems to be the only one who knows where J'onn has taken them—mentally, if not physically—although Batman figures it out a moment before Hal does, and before DeMatteis and Pajarillo reveal it to us.

After a four-page fight through a bewildering hellscape, they meet an extremely ordinary-looking middle-aged man and his wife, sitting in easy chairs and listening to a radio show in a cramped cave. An aggressive Hal confronts the man and is shocked to see that "the scared light" shines within him. 

Who is this guy, and where are they?

The place was The Joker's mind, and that guy was the light of God within The Joker.

Here's J'onn's explanation of what they all just saw:

Do you see, Hal? Even there--in the most corrupted of human souls--

--lies a spark, however small, seeking hope, seeking love-- and yes--

--redemption.

...

Perhaps you've been projecting your own guilt, for your own transgressions--real and imagined--onto everyone else.

You're not seeing us, Hal. You're seeing yourself reflected back at you--through the prism of the Spectre's wrath. 

...

I learned, long ago, not to underestimate the human race... and their capacity to rise above their limitations. 

Too bad about that "ordained plan" that means everyone will be unable to recognize Hal Jordan now that he's The Spectre, or else maybe Martian Manhunter could have continued to counsel him in his new career, and his efforts to wrestle the Spirit of Vengeance into a Spirit of Redemption. 

On the last page, The Spectre grows giant again, and he floats through the ceiling out into space, saying that the men he's leaving are "still the best friends-- --I ever had." Presumably he was speaking just of J'onn, Superman and Batman, as he, like, just met Zauriel and Plastic Man, and his relationship with Kyle seems...well, "friends" doesn't seem like the right word at this point in their personal history, does it?

As for the League though, they've already forgotten him, as Kyle gets the last word among them. "Sure hope we helped him--," he says, "--whoever he was."

The last image in the book is of Hal-as-The Spectre, impossibly gigantic and semi-transparent, seeming to hold the Earth itself in his hands, as he ends his narration with something I don't think we see regularly in super-comics: A prayer.

"Lord.. ...let me be worthy," he thinks. 

After this issue, the League goes on to face Mageddon in "World War III" in the pages of JLA, after which writer Mark Waid would take the reins from Morrison (and Zauriel would fade into very occasional guest-star status). Waid would, in one of his handful of arcs, get into Plas' head in a way similar to what DeMatteis did here, with the hero lamenting his life of crime and facing the temptation to steal again once Plastic Man and Eel O'Brian are split into two separate people. 

While I wasn't particularly annoyed by this book back in 1999, I don't think I appreciated its virtues, either. I don't know that it's necessarily the best Hal Jordan story or anything, but in just 22 pages, it does manage to fit interesting portrayals of Zauriel, Plastic Man and Martian Manhunter. 

Revisiting 1999's Day of Judgment

The 2005 Countdown to Infinite Crisis-branded miniseries Day of Vengeance that we discussed the other day was preceded by the five-issue Day of Judgment event series back in 1999, which also centered on the threat of a rampaging Spectre...and the title of which Day of Vengeance was apparently meant to echo. 

I just re-read it. Unable to find a copy of the 2013 collection of it in the library, I was forced to pull the single issues from one of my long boxes; luckily it was fairly easy to find among my fairly disorganized collection. 

I found it a very pleasant reminder that DC's crossover events don't have to be about cosmic goings-on to rewrite, reboot or rejigger their continuity; that's just a choice the publisher seems to keep making. Over and over and over again.

This one was written by Geoff Johns, fairly early in his career in comics. By the time the first issue of Day of Judgment hit the stands, he was only a few issues into his Stars and S.T.R.I.P.E. (the fourth issue of which was a Day of Judgment crossover) and he hadn't yet replaced James Robinson as David Goyer's JSA co-writer. (I guess DC is a little quicker to hand their iconic heroes over to a new writer if said writer was already working in Hollywood, as Johns was...?).

I am curious about just how much of the plot was conceived by Johns himself and what points editorial may have mandated, as one of the big things to occur in the series is that the dead Hal Jordan, a character Johns has long since demonstrated a love for, is rescued from Purgatory and becomes the new host of The Spectre. 

Although this didn't quite bring Hal back to life, it did put him back in circulation and allow for him to continue the redemption arc that DC had started with 1996's Final Night. Still, it would be Johns himself who would decouple Hal and The Spectre a few years later, in 2004's Green Lantern: Rebirth, so it doesn't seem like Hal-as-The Spectre was a concept that Johns loved or anything.

For this series, Johns was paired with artist Matt Smith, who had previously done a little work for DC, including issues of Sandman Mystery Theater, Starman and the short-lived 1996 reboot of Marv Wolfman's Night Force. The comics he drew just prior to Day of Judgment were Lobster Johnson and Abe Sapien back-ups in Mike Mignola's Hellboy: Box Full of Evil, which might help explain just how Mignola-esque the art in Day of Judgment looks. (I've tried to include a bit more art than I usually do in my reviews, as Smith isn't as popular an artist as many of those I write about here; do note that the colors might be slightly off).

Smith's figures are thick and somewhat squat, and the imagery simple yet bold. Working with inker Steve Mitchell and layout artist Chris Jones, Day of Judgment reads a lot like Mike Mignola drawing a script intended for Howard Porter. I would say it answers the question of what a DC crossover series drawn by Mignola might look like but, of course, we already got one of those in 1988's Cosmic Odyssey.

But artwork evocative of the Mike Mignola of the late '90s is pretty much perfect for comic set partially in Hell and is full of demons and devils, including Jack Kirby's Etrigan, The Demon and the by that point increasingly Hellboy-esque Blue Devil. 

The story, told across five weekly issues that kicked off with an over-sized 29-page #1, is fairly simple. The conflict imperils the Earth—and Hell and, to a certain degree, perhaps even Heaven itself—and facing it involves various configurations of superheroes to form ad hoc teams and perform different missions. 

It also moves the DC Universe story forward a bit—brining back Hal, giving The Spectre a new host, and seemingly priming a magic super-team book that never actually materialized at the time—and it provides a very easy way to tie any and all other DC books into it, and to do so without derailing them all that dramatically.

So, remember Asmodel? The rebel angel and leader of the Bull Host who planned to overthrow Heaven and invaded Earth in an attempt to get to Zauriel in the pages of 1997's JLA #7-8? We open with him in Hell, where he was consigned at the end of 1998's not-very-good miniseries JLA: Paradise Lost, written by a young up-and-comer named Mark Millar. 

After Neron gloats over him for a bit, Asmodel receives a visitor in the form of Etrigan, who has big plans for Asmodel. First, Etrigan frees him from his bonds, then he summons the then host-less Spectre (Jim Corrigan and The Spectre were split from one another in 1998's The Spectre #62), and then he performs a bit of magic he says he learned from Merlin, which bonds Asmodel to The Spectre, making the new host of The Spectre a bad guy!

The new Spectre, distinguished from the old one by being a solid green-ish blue in color rather than a white-skinned dude with bits of a green costume, wastes no time. First, he sucks up all the hellfire in Hell, literally making it a cold day in Hell. Second, he freezes Neron solid in a block of ice. And, third, he invades Earth, an army of demons behind him. 

(These demons, by the way, are mostly generic in appearance, with horns and batwings. We'll later learn Hell is more or less emptied out, with devils, demons and even the dead rising all over the Earth. This, then, is what gives the heroes something to do in their own books that tie-in to the crossover: Fight the legions of Hell or any specific underworld threat that particular book's writer might want to use).

The Spectre, Etrigan and their demon horde make their beachhead in New York City. Meanwhile, Martian Manhunter J'onn J'onnz calls out the JLA and their reserves, members of other super-teams show up to rumble (Damage and Argent from the Titans, the just-formed JSA) and Zatanna spends an issue gathering a group of magical characters that will introduce themselves as "The Sentinels of Magic" on the last page of the first issue.

The Sentinels manage to drain much of The Spectre's energy and temporarily trap it in Madame Xanadu's crystal ball, giving the assembled heroes time to split up and take on a couple of different missions to save the day.

The JLA's resident angel Zauriel leads Sentinel Alan Scott, Wonder Woman, Mister Miracle and Supergirl to Heaven, teleported there by Raven (whose demonic nature forces her to flee immediately). Their job is to bring Jim Corrigan back to Earth in order to reclaim The Spectre, but, after some 50 years of avenging the murdered dead and finally knowing peace, he no longer wants the gig. The angel Michael instead directs the heroes to Purgatory where, as you probably know, they'll find Hal Jordan among a small group of fallen heroes, heroes who, Zauriel explains, are all there "due to their own mistakes, their own shortcomings." (There are a few panels outside the gates of Heaven where Alan meets a handful of dead members of the Justice Society, but no one seems to think to ask if, say, the original Mister Terrific or Hourman might want to come back to Earth and be the new host of The Spectre). 

Meanwhile, Zatanna, Superman, Green Lantern Kyle Rayner, Firestorm, The Atom, Faust and Deadman-in-Enchantress' body go to Hell, where they hope to rekindle the flames, drawing back the army of demons (Interestingly, Kyle and Firestorm just there a few years ago, in the pages of Underworld Unleashed, but no one mentions this). 

And, finally, Batman sends Captain Marvel, Starfire and S.T.R.I.P.E. into space, in order to recover The Spear of Destiny, the only known weapon that can hurt The Spectre (The last Spectre, the one bonded with Corrigan, had deposited the dangerous artifact there, out of the reach of most of humanity, during Ostrander and Mandrake's Spectre run).

Despite unexpected events—which, in Hell, means the resurrection of Blue Devil and the murder of Enchantress—the three missions are more or less successful.

At the climax, The Spectre is wounded, and both Neron and the dead Hal Jordan, having changed his form so that he's wearing his old Green Lantern costume rather than the Parallax get-up he wore in Purgatory, enter into The Spectre's body, where they wrestle with Asmodel over control of the Spectre-Force. 

That, which is described as a parasite and, as drawn by Smith, appears as a green-cloaked skeleton whose ribs stab into Asmodel, listens to the three as they each make their appeal for why they should be the new host. Halfway through his pitch, Jordan breaks down in tears, confessing his crimes. 

"I don't deserve power," he says. "I deserve punishment."

At this, The Spectre seems to perk up. "You believe you deserve punishment?" it says. "THEN FACE YOUR PENANCE!" 

And so Asmodel and Neron are both ejected from The Spectre's towering form, each of them prone and bound, while The Spectre has taken on a new shape to accommodate its new host, an interestingly hybridized costume mixing elements of The Spectre's with that of Hal's Green Lantern costume, including a domino mask under the hood and a blazing ring of green fire on his chest where the GL Corps symbol used to be. 

In the last few pages of the series, everything is set more or less right. Corrigan's soul briefly returns to Earth to bless Jordan's new mission, which Jordan indicates will not be about vengeance, Corrigan saying that The Presence (that is, God) approves of Hal Jordan-as-The Spectre. The Sentinels of Magic, which now seems to include Blue Devil and the new Doctor Fate Hector Hall, again announce their name and mission, and return to their daily lives. Asmodel is not returned to Hell, but taken to Heaven, where he is the sole inmate in The Silver City's first prison. And Neron returns to Hell, where he is punished for this whole fuck-up, demoted from an infernal Prince down to a rhyming demon, which, apparently, is why Etrigan kicked this mad plot off in the fist place: He just wanted to mess with Neron. 

(Having spent so much time with DC's devils and demons of late, I was interested to see that, in this short passage, a human-sized Neron is shackled in front of a huge, skeletal demon on a throne, one with enormous horns and batwings. This character is never named but is presumably meant to be DC's answer to "The Devil" or "Satan", although, to my knowledge, DC never really had a direct analogue to the devil/Satan before, just Lucifer and a sort of court of sub-devils...?).

In addition to its various tie-in issues in ongoing series—of which there were 14 issues, plus a Batman: Judgment Day special—DC also published a Day of Judgment Secret Files and Origins special. The Secret Files and Origins specials were fairly common in the late '90s, and contained a full-length comic book story, the "Secret Files" pages that paired a pin-up like image of a character or team with stats and short paragraphs of prose about the character (essentially an abbreviated, '90s answer to a Who's Who entry), plus some shorter features.

In this case, the features were mostly epilogues. 

The main story was written by Scott Beatty and drawn by Hitman's John McCrea (I remember it being a great pleasure to see him draw so many different super-characters here originally, and it was just as much of a pleasure to revisit it in 2025; we'll take a closer look at this story in a few days). In it, the new Spectre secretly, magically gathers the Sentinels of Magic in a field around the Spear of Destiny, explaining at the end to The Phantom Stranger that he had essentially convened them as a sort of jury to judge him, while handing them a weapon with which they could take him down if they so decided. 

There were also a couple of short, two-page stories: One by Mark Millar and Yanick Paquette in which Madame Xanadu does a tarot reading for Blue Devil, another by Millar and Phil Winslade following Zatanna over the course of a date and one by Geoff Johns and a Jason Orfalas following Faust—the son of Justice League bad guy Felix Faust, the "white sheep" of his family introduced in the 1993-1995 Outsiders series—and what his actions in Hell mean for June Moon. 

This was obviously pretty early in both Johns' and Millar's comics careers, but still, reading the issue in 2025, it's strange to think of these future superstars basically taking any writing job they could get like this.

Some other thoughts...

•As mentioned above, Zatanna puts together another ad hoc super-team of magic-based characters in the series, and they are repeatedly referred to by the name "Sentinels of Magic." 

The first issue ends with a splash depicting her with The Phantom Stranger, Deadman, Ragman, Doctor Occult, Sentinel, Raven, Madame Xanadu and Faust and declaring, "You might call us-- --The Sentinels of Magic!", those last words in a big, colorful, almost logo-like font. 

The scene repeats itself on the first page of the second issue, with captions naming the members of the roll call. 

Near the end of the fifth issue, the team—now missing Raven and The Stranger, but with Blue Devil and the newest Doctor Fate added to their line-up—all pose in one panel, while Zatanna tells the other superheroes, "The Sentinels of Magic will be on center stage whenever you need us." 

And in Secret Files special, the Sentinels star in the main story, wherein they all put their hands together like a sport team before a big game, and Alan declares them "Sentinels of Magic!" ("Oh well...guess it beats 'Justice League Europe'," Blue Devil says in the next panel). That's the image above, drawn by McCrea.

And, finally, the team gets a two-page "secret file" entry following the story.

I now find myself curious if DC was perhaps planning a Sentinels of Magic series following Day of Judgment and, if they were, why they ultimately decided against it. As I said in the post about this crossover's kinda sorta sequel Day of Vengeance the other day, DC seemed to have been flirting with a magical super-team since at least 1995's (excellent) Underworld Unleashed one-shot special Abyss—Hell's Sentinel #1. 

That was the first time I had personally encountered such a grouping, anyway. (That one, like this one, included Sentinel Alan Scott, presenting him as something of a bridge between the world of superheroes and the supernatural.) Looking back, though, Alan Moore and company's 1986 Swamp Thing #50 gathered together many of DC's magical characters for an assault on Hell and a sort of seance, and, in writer Neil Gaiman's 1990 mini-series The Books of Magic, new character Timothy Hunter is introduced to DC's various magical characters by what John Constantine jokingly refers to as "The Trenchcoat Brigade," a quartet of magic characters who got a Vertigo mini-series under that name in 1999.

While the Sentinels of Magic never got a book of their own, Day of Vengeance introduced the Shadowpact (whose number included the Sentinels' Blue Devil and Ragman), and that team would go on to star in a 25-issue ongoing series. And then the magical super-team concept reemerged in 2011 in the Justice League Dark, which lasted 72 issues across two volumes. 

•I kind of love how catty Zauriel is throughout the series regarding the belief systems of other superheroes, especially considering that theirs are just as concretely real as his, as has been repeatedly demonstrated throughout DC history. 

When Wonder Woman volunteers to go with Zauriel's team, for example, she notes, "I've been to Olympus...I've some experience with the divine." 

"Hmph," Zauriel says, "I'd hardly call Olympus divine..." 

When they reach Heaven's gate, Mister Miracle refers to himself as "a New God". You can see Zauriel's reply above. "A new god?" he says, "Unlikely, Mr. Miracle." (He does have a smile on his face while saying this, though.) 

•Whether or not it's a good idea to give Hal Jordan, a guy who had, in addition to murdering a bunch of his Green Lantern Corps colleagues later went on to unmake all of time and space, (temporarily) killing uncountable billions in the process, almost unparalleled, god-like powers seems to be an issue that is rather under-discussed in this series.

Alan Scott is Hal's cheerleader throughout, noting that he is the only person other than Jim Corrigan he knows with the willpower to control The Spectre. (Alan doesn't mention that he had fought Hal repeatedly since his heel turn, including in 1994's Guy Gardner: Warrior arc "Emerald Fallout" arc and Zero Hour, nor that the only reason so many of Alan's old JSoA colleagues were in Heaven to greet him at all is because Hal's henchman Extant killed them during Zero Hour.) 

Batman is a skeptic. Most of the other heroes don't even get to voice an opinion on the matter, let alone discuss it (Johns does have Wonder Woman put her hand on Alan's shoulder in Purgatory and ask him if it's "wise" to try to give Hal control of The Spectre's powers, given that Hal "couldn't even control himself".)

I've got to say, I'm with Batman here. Interestingly, while Batman's take seems the more reasonable of the two in this book, over the years of writing Hal, Johns would continue to present Batman as doubting Hal, but, gradually, it seems like Johns would present Batman as too cynical and judgmental about Hal. 

In the penultimate issue, we get as close to an argument between heroes regarding this course of action that we get in this series (above). 

I have to admit, I found sarcastic Batman pretty funny in that exchange. 

•Reviewing the list of tie-in issues, I see that I had bought and read eight of the 15 that DC published. These were all books I was already reading regularly—Anarky, Aquaman, Hourman, JLA, Martian Manhunter, Stars and S.T.R.I.P.E., Titans and Young Justice—plus Supergirl, which I only bought because the cover so prominently featured Zauriel, a favorite character of mine.

My memories of most of these comics are pretty dim at this point, which probably doesn't speak well of their quality. I do remember the Anarky issue pretty well, as it was an extremely unlikely team-up with The Haunted Tank (and I'm pretty sure it was my first exposure to that weird concept, as I don't think I had yet read Gath Ennis's 1994 "Haunted Glory" arc of The Demon at that point). And the Hourman issue was basically a Snapper Carr solo story, in which he teaches a stray demon about free will. And the Martian Manhunter issue pit the hero against undead versions of past Leaguers who had died in the line of duty. 

•As for the big change that this event story wrought within the DC Universe, making Hal Jordan the new host of The Spectre? Well, that state of affairs lasted almost exactly five years, which seems a respectable amount of time. At the very least, DC seems to have given Hal-as-The Spectre a healthy chance of succeeding, before reverting Hal back to his pre-"Emerald Twilight" status quo as a Green Lantern, relying on a retcon to excuse his fall from grace and heel turn. 

DC launched a new volume of The Spectre starring the Hal Jordan version of the character in 2001, and it ran 27 issues before being cancelled in 2003 (For context, the three previous Spectre ongoings had lasted 10 issues, 31 issues and 62 issues). That series was written by J.M. DeMatteis and drawn first by Ryan Sook and then by Norm Breyfogle (with a handful of fill-in artists coming and doing during both artists' runs). I appreciated what DeMatteis was trying to do with the character and concept, particularly the effort to have Hal trying to remake The Spectre into a Spirit of Redemption instead of a Spirit of Vengeance, but I didn't much care for the series. Of course, I mostly only read the Breyfogle issues, and those only because I was a fan of Norm Breyfogle's. 

This Spectre also shared a DeMatteis-written mini-series with the JLA, 2003's not very good JLA/The Spectre: Soul War (I'll write about that in the near-ish future), and he had some notable appearances during big doings in the DCU, like playing a key role in the resurrection of Oliver Queen in the pages of the 2001 Green Arrow series and cameoing in JLA/Avengers (Hal would get much more time in that mini-series as Green Lantern though, able to appear as part of some time-travelling shenanigans). (Oh, and he also appeared in one scene in 2004's Identity Crisis, telling Green Arrow that he was "working on" being brough back to life...)

I'm sure there were others.

Anyway, Hal's career as The Spectre ended in the aforementioned 2004 Green Lantern: Rebirth mini-series, restoring Hal Jordan to his original form and, seven years later, The Spectre would return to his original form too, character development and ongoing narrative be damned, with the New 52's Spectre once again bonded to Jim Corrigan. 

ZAURIEL

is still new to the mortal plane, and has yet to try every single flavor of ice cream.

But he's working on it.

Weekly Haul: March 7th

(Above: A panel from best book of the week Fantastic Four #543. I usually post the cover of the best book at the top of these Weekly Hauls, but it seemd a shame to put that pedestrian Gradanov cover up, when the interiors were chock-full of such great panels, like this one of the Human Torch sucking the flames off of an exploded hotrod).

52 #42 (DC Comics) The fact that Black Adam was going to lose a member of his new family at some point near the end of the series seemed like a foregone conclusion since 52 began, and that would drive Black Adam to resume his murderous ways. After last week’s big, gory death scene, it seemed like Isis at least was safe. But 52 continues to surprise, even when you’ve seen things coming for almost a year’s time. All Four Horsemen descend upon Adam and Isis, and she succumbs too, leaving Adam alone again, but his turn back towards evil comes for a rather unexpected reason.


The All-New Atom #9 (DC) Newsarama.com recently announced that penciller Mike Norton would be taking over art duties on this title, which is good news—but at least nine issues too late. With three art teams so far, the book has had the artistic consistency and polish of 52, but without the excuse of a weekly schedule. Writer Gail Simone has cut down a bit on the asterisk abuse, but doing something completely retarded twice an issue instead of ten times an issue is still retarded. I like Simone’s concept of Ivy Town and its relationship with its former hero, and I’ve come to like Ryan Choi and the idea of a college professor/hero, but the whole title seems to suffer from being too-rushed on the front end, both in the inability to sign a monthly artist, Simone’s odd idea of “experimenting,” and too little differentiating it from every other superhero book on the stands. Dropped until further notice.


Captain America #25 (Marvel Comics)
I see that one can purchase two copies of this comic, one with each of the two variant covers, for $107.50 on eBay at the moment (Thursday afternoon). There are 21 dumb motherfuckers who have bid on it. That’s just one of several auctions going on right now; the cover of the issue I bought (For $2.99, mind) is being auctioned off for $51 at present, and 15 idiots have bid for it. A little bit of advice, civilians: The book is worth exactly $2.99, and it’s not going to increase in value over the years (trust me; I speak as someone with two copies of the Death of Superman issue, one still in it’s unopened polybag). If you have a copy, get it on eBay stat and cash in while there are still some suckers left; if you don’t have a copy, don’t waste your money. Hell, you can have mine. My address is in the upper right hand corner—send me your address and, let’s say, $5 ($2.01 for shipping and handling) and it’s all yours. Sheesh. I realize the news media needs to report on something to fill it’s column inches/online electronic inches/airwaves, but it’s not like there isn’t a war in Iraq and a high-level Bush official charged with a high crime. And if they want to talk comics, can we at least talk good comics?

Alright so, Captain America #25. As all four of my faithful readers know, I’ve been reading writer Ed Brubaker’s run on the title in trade from the library, so I’m pretty far behind at the moment. But as a comics columnist, I felt it my duty to be as least as on top of the big comics story of the news cycle as that bastion of comics industry news CNN, so I gave my local retailer and Marvel their shares of my $2.99 to see the “death” of Captain America.

Props to Brubaker, who’s run on the book I’ve quite enjoyed, for at least making it look convincing. A sniper’s bullet to the back of the neck, and a gut full of automatic fire finish the good Captain off, or at least make it look that way by the end of the issue (In a storyline that has already involved “Life Model Decoys,” the reality-altering Cosmic Cube, and the long presumed KIA Bucky Barnes back among the living with a robot arm, there are just too many outs to even care—I mean, Cap is only in the modern Marvel Universe at all because the Avengers found him floating in a block of ice after a rocket he was riding blew up during World War II). Anyone who reads comics will tell you, it’s not a matter of whether or not Cap really died or if he’ll really come back from the dead, it’s just a matter of when: Immediately? A few months? Maybe not for a whole year?

One of the admirable things current Marvel E-i-C Joe Quesada instituted when he came on was a “Dead Means Dead” policy, because he was savvy enough to realize the number of deaths and resurrections has cheapened both sorts of stories over the years. The policy has gotten more and more lax over the years however. Since I’ve been reading Marvel Comics more religiously, I’ve seen Colossus come back from the dead, Bucky come back from the dead (after a few decades of being dead), Uncle Ben come back from the dead (well, it’s an alternate reality Uncle Ben, whatever) and, most recently, Captain Marvel come back from the dead, the latter of whom is a character who died of cancer 25 years ago. We’ve even seen Hawkeye killed and brought back to life within the space of a few years, under Quesada’s watch. And when the company’s Distinguished Competition has brought Jason Todd back from the dead in a way that was so retarded (I’ve really gotta stop using that word) that it made Captain Marvel’s return seem brilliant, well, why would anyone care one way or another if Captain America is “dead” or not?

As for the issue itself, it’s fairly well written, giving a decent overview of Cap’s career up until this point as well as his new status quo (i.e. being “killed”). It is an awful jumping on point for new readers though, which makes it’s hype all the sadder; any “civilians” picking it up are more likely to be turned off by comics than on (It’s a perfect example of how hard it is to get into continuity-laden “universe” comics). Steve Epting’s art, heavily shaded and given that glossy, airbrushed looking sheen I hate, is decent, but not my cup of tea aesthetically.




Detective Comics #829 (DC) Don’t say anything dirty about the cover, don’t say anything dirty about the cover, don’t say anything dirty about the cover…


Fantastic Four #543 (Marvel) I snapped up this extra-sized, 45th anniversary issue of FF because Dwayne McDuffie’s the new writer on the title, and I enjoyed his last issue immensely—for the first time since “Civil War” began, Reed “Mr. Fantastic” Richards’ actions made a bit of sense. I didn’t even realize this issue also included back-ups, let alone ones by such remarkable creators, so this book came as quite a welcome surprise this month. In McDuffie and penciller Mike McKone’s lead feature, new reader’s get caught up on the high points of FF history, with particular attention being paid to their origin and their recent “Civil War”-related strife. This is what they call a “good jumping on point.” Ben and Johnny watch Val and Franklin and watch a documentary about their team, while Reed takes Sue up in the Fantasticar to discuss their relationship. McDuffie absolutely nails each and every character’s distinct voice, and continues to make sweet, sweet lemonade out of the sour lemons of Civil War.

Back-Up Feature #1 is written by Stan Lee, who also co-stars, and is drawn by the X-Statix Presents: Deadgirl art team of Nick Dragotta and Mike Allred. The Mole Man threatens New York with annhilation, but Reed won’t let the FF save the day (“Let some other super heroes save the world for a change. It’s DC’s turn!”). Miffed that Marvel isn’t doing anything to celebrate their 45th anniversary, Reed proposes the FF just sit this one out. Luckily, Lee saves the day, after letting his creations make fun of him for a majority of the story. Dragotta and Allred do one hell of a good Lee (I totally want that jacket!), and the army’s special FF phone, with the 4-shaped antennae, is the very definition of awesome. I don’t know what Reed’s so pissy about—it doesn’t get much more special than this story.

But wait, there’s more! Back-Up Feature #2 is written and drawn by Paul Pope, an artist who’s style is so unique that there are times I kinda wish he could just draw every superhero comic from both Big Publishers. Batman, Robin, Superman, Bizarro, Catwoman, Spider-Man—I’ve never seen him tackle one of their properties without being thrilled at the character designs and energy of the line work. Here Pope takes on the FF, and we get to see him draw Johhny, Reed, Ben, Spidey, J. Jonah Jameson, Crystal (with a new dog!) and Wyatt Wingfoot. Here are some badly-scanned examples of Papal awesomeness:



Pope has a wonderful way with Spidey’s webs (and dig that panel where he walks on his fingertips while dodging fireballs!), Thing’s craggy orange skin and, the biggest revelation, Torch’s flamed-on appearance. If you only read one superhero comic this week, this is definitely the one it should be.

Wait, what’s this?



Tch, tch, tch…looks like Pope snuck a cigar into Marvel’s smoke-free environment. I do hope that doesn’t mean we won’t be seeing more of his work on their characters in the future.


The Helmet of Fate: Zauriel #1 (DC) This is the Helmet one-shot I’ve been most looking forward to, as I’m a huge fan of Zauriel, one of Grant Morrison’s most promising (and least capitalized on) additions to the DCU. JLA #6-#7 are very, very high on my list of Most Favorite Comic Books Ever, although no other writer has been able to fuse the crazy science fiction version of Heaven with DCU mythology as well as Morrison. He peppered Zauriel’s dialogue with fantastic Biblical-sounding science jargon and place names, and gave him a very human sense of humor and worldliness; he flirted with Wonder Woman and complained about his throat and sacrificed immortality for a girl. He belived in God and Jesus, but not in a particularly pious way; he knew they existed, in much the same way you know your neighbors exist. Outside of Morrison’sJLA issues, no one’s done anything very interesting with him. Mark Millar wrote a four-part mini that gave Z. his new super-suit and a base, but it was nothing you didn’t already see in The Prophecy. Geoff Johns used he and Asmodel to little effect in Day of Judgement and used him again in JSA and Infinite Crisis, but by then he’s devolved into a token Christian version of Hawkman.

Sadly, writer Steve Gerber doesn’t fare very well with him in this one-shot either. He gets a nice-looking logo (as have all of the Helmet stars), and great art inside and out thanks to Michael Kaluta and Peter Snejbjerg, which at least makes the story worth a read, even if it doesn’t seem strong enough to lead to anything new for the character (Personally, I’ve always felt that he, like Steel and Oracle, should have remained on the League with The Big Eight when Mark Waid took the baton from Grant Morrison, but I’m just a DC reader, not an editor).

Gerber starts quite strong with a scene of Z. visiting a Sunday school and taking some questions from kids, which he has no answers for. It definitely shows how difficult theology in the DCU must be. For example, one kid asks if Heaven is “Just for earth people, or will Superman go there if he dies again?” Unfortunately, Gerber doesn’t have Zauriel answer any of these questions, and his nonchalance about the afterlife in JLA was one of the things I always liked about the character; it would be cooler to see him confidently answering about Kryptonian heaven and hell in the pre-established DCU theological terms about the afterlife being what one wants it to be and making the teacher uncomfortable. Oh well.

Things all go downhill from there, when another angel summons him to do an errand for The Presence which basically amounts to some pretty pedestrian superheroing—God wants Z. to journey to a distant planet where a race of plant people fight a race of fungus people and removing the Helmet of Fate from one of the factions. Oh, and Zauriel totally kills a guy too, which doesn’t seem too terribly superheroic. Being God’s literal representative in the DCU seems somehow wrong to me, as does being a superhero “in order to proclaim God’s existence and his love for humankind in a more visible, tangible way.” See, I thought Zauriel came to earth because a) he liked it down here and b) he wanted to defend it from Maggedon, even after Heaven itself had given up on it.

Ah well, back to limbo with you, Zauriel. Hopefully another writer who really gets you will come along again someday.


Justice League of America #6 (DC) Almost there. Writer Brad Meltzer gets all of the heroes who will eventually form the new League line-up in the same place at the same time this issue, as the heroes face off against their perennial opponents Solomon Grundy and Amazo. What makes these confrontations different from all the others? Well, there’s the amount of blood and level of violence; I was honestly a little surprised to see that “Approved by the Comics Code Authority” stamp on the cover; if that’s all-ages appropriate, what does the CCA do anymore, exactly? Make sure there are no F-words or full-frontal nudity? While I could certainly spend longer picking this book apart, nitpick by nitpick, I’m just going to concentrate on two things this month.

First up, flip to the two-page sequence on pages four and five, in which the League confronts Amazo. This here is pretty much everything that’s wrong with Meltzer’s work on these characters. The whole sequence is, of course, narrated, presumably by Roy Harper, since the narration boxes are orange, like his hair. He tells us everything that’s happening, of course, but while he does so we also get a few other simultaneous threads of verbal information, the dialogue between Kathy, Amazo and the heroes, plus what must be Amazo’s thoughts and/or narration. Roy’s narration is at a conversational pace, a couple sentences per panel, but Amazo’s dialogue is much, much slower, with the word “me” stretched out over two panels (Roy gets two whole sentences in during the time it takes Amazo to pronounce that syllable), and the word “Situation” takes four panels to appear in Amazo’s head (Panel four has “SITU,” panel five “SITUA” and so on).

So, what the hell is going on, exactly? Roy thinks faster than Amazo? He thinks faster than Amazo can talk? Do we even need to know what word Amazo is thinking to himself?

The fight choreography here seems overly forced just to include everyone (Is the Bat-Pen Laser in panel nine really necessary? Couldn’t Hal just make his ring-generated chainsaw a couple inches longer? And later Black Canary and Lightning each take one of Amazo's ears, which should, at the least, take out Jeff too), but I was much more irritated by the narration, particularly Roy’s line, “From there, they get Ruthless. Clark goes for his eyes.”

First off, Roy Harper doesn’t know that Superman is really Clark Kent, and even if we’re to believe that he has somehow figured this out over the years, he doesn’t know him on a first-name basis, and thus wouldn’t be very likely to think of Superman as “Clark,” now would he? Batman does that, but it’s only to needle Superman; even Superman’s friends who know his secret identity and actually are on a first-name basis with him call him “Kal.”

And secondly, “get ruthless?” “Clark goes for the eyes?” Come on, how often does Superman get ruthless, and/or go for the eyes? He’s not the only ruthless superhero here, of course. While Red Tornado fights for his life against Solomon Grundy, he repeatedly goes for a kill shot, shooting a metal shard through Grundy’s heart, and, later, ripping him in half. I know Reddy was in dire straits there, but come on, didn’t he read that story about Diana killing Max Lord? Superman and Batman hate that shit.


Marvel Zombies Vs. Army of Darkness #1 (Dynamite Entertainment/Marvel) I lost interest in Dynamtie’s AoD comics pretty quickly (before the ongoing even launched, in fact), as they seem to keep covering the same ground and recycling the same jokes over and over, and although I keep trying out the (usually rather inspired) crossovers, I end up dropping them all mid-story. Well, this one certainly showed promise; even if it turns out to be unreadable, at least it will give us some more of Arthur Suydam’s neat zombified versions of classic Marvel covers. As for the story, Ash gets punched into the Marvel Zombiverse by the zombified Sentry, just before the events of Marvel Zombies (he arrives days before the plague hits the heroes). Writer John Layman’s Ash is pretty annoying (if Bruce Campbell ain’t playing him, Ash loses a lot of his charismas) and dragging the Necronomicon into things seems sort of pointless (can’t Ash ever fight zombies without the book being involved? I mean, Batman sometimes fights the Penguin or the Riddler; it’s not the Joker in every issue, you know?), but the interactions with the Marvels are all pretty well-written. A bigger obstacle is the art of Fabio Neves, which has that soft, airbrushed, heavily-referenced look of Greg Land’s art. I suppose it’s appropriate, given that Land was the first artist to delineate Marvels’ Zombieverse, but I’d prefer a style that meshed better with Marvel Zombies’s Sean Phillips’ style, or just plain looked more drawn. The cartoony image of Ash trussed up like an inch worm in Spidey’s webbing, for example, should look totally cool, but instead just looks limp, with an airbrushed celebrity likeness Weekly World News-ed into an ugly modern Marvel comic. I’ll stick with it for at least another issue, but already this cross-over is failing to live up to it’s potential. Now pardon me while I go re-read that Dragotta/Allred story in FF and imagine how awesome this book might have been if they illustrated Layman’s script…


Midnighter #5 (WildStorm/DC) That bit where Midnighter learns about human sexuality in the 96th Century? That’s pretty much worth $2.99 right there.


The Mighty Avengers #1 (Marvel) I didn’t mean to purchase this comic, as I was almost positive I wouldn’t like it. Writer Brian Michael Bendis’ last few years on New Avengers has been nothing if not frustrating, and this second Avengers book by the same writer features a collection of heroes I either know nothing about (Ares), know a little about but don’t find very interesting (Wonder Man, Black Widow, Ms. Marvel), know a little about and hate (Sentry), or know fairly well but have grown to hate during the course of “Civil War” (Wasp, Iron Man). But I found it in my pull this Wednesday, and felt obligated to make the purchase. I say all this because the context may be useful to you—I was totally ready to hate the book, and I ended up enjoying it quite a bit.

A few of Bendis’ bad habits remain, including the fact that all of the characters sort of talk alike (Mole Man repeats a line that Reed Richards used in The New Avengers: The Illuminati #1 almost word for word here), and a couple of panels are completely recycled, which gave me unpleasant flashbacks to the conclusion of Secret War, which rivaled The Flintstones in the re-using-the-same-art-over-and-over department.

Those are my only gripes about the book, however. Bendis has clearly learned from his mistakes during the New Avengers launch (which outsold everything, meaning Bendis didn’t have to do anything different unless he cared about writing better comics, which is clearly the case). The entire line-up gets introduced in the very first panel, as they swoop in to fight the Mole Man’s invading hordes of monsters. Bendis flashes back and forth between the team’s fight and Tony Stark, director of SHIELD and Ms. Marvel’s discussions of who should be on their Avengers (honestly, it’s quite similar to Meltzer’s scenes of The Trinity picking the new League, only BMB gets it done in one issue, rather than four).

Of particular note is the drastic swerve from the status quo in this book, something I personally found much more shocking than the “death” of Captain America this week—Bendis’ usage of thought bubbles. Thought bubbles have been MIA at Marvel since around the time Joe Quesada became EIC, and they increasingly seemed to be a thing of the past, back when Chris Claremont was over-writing the X-Men and Golden and Silver Age comics, when the art alone wasn’t sufficient to tell the story. At Marvel, the thought balloon has long been replaced with the first-person narration box, but that only allows for one narrator (unless you’re Jeph Loeb, in which case you’ll used dueling narrators, distinguishing their thoughts by a bat-symbol or S-sheild in their box, or Brad Meltzer, in which case every character narrates everything all the goddam time, their boxes color-coded to distinguish who’s thinking what). How much simpler the thought bubble is, since it’s dotted line connects the thought to the head of the person thinking it. It’s something that can only be done in comics and, reading JLoA and this story in the same week, it seems the bubble may indeed be the more effective way to let us inside the characters’ heads, as long as the writer resists the old-school soliloquies and sticks to one-word thoughts and brief phrases.

So there you have it, I don’t like Bendis’ Avengers writing, I don’t like the line-up and I don’t like the whole Marvels-who-work-for-the-government-just-like-in-The Ultimates status quo of the team, and I still really enjoyed this book. If you don’t suffer from the same prejudices I do, I imagine you’ll love it.



Shazam!: The Monster Society of Evil #2 (DC)
In the second issue of Jeff Smith’s long over-due reimagning of the Marvel Family characters, we’re introduced to several more important players in the mythos, included Mary Marvel, Mr. Tawky Tawny, Dr. Sivana, and the voice of Mister Mind. It’s all great fun, well-written and beautifully designed, drawn and colored. These characters, perhaps even moreso than the Billy/Cap dynamic, differ fairly dramatically from their DCU and old Fawcett iterations. Tawny is an Iffrit, which isn’t too different than what Jerry Ordway did with the character in The Power of Shazam!, but he’s played as a wise and competent spiritual guide type, not comic relief. Mary looks like a little girl rather than a sex bomb, and while that seems the biggest departure, it’s really just Smith correcting an old Beck mistake; Billy and Mary were supposed to be twins, and yet she looked like a teenager while he looked like a little boy. I know girls mature faster than boys, but that wouldn’t have explained their discrepancy of ages. Sivana is a wonderful looking little troll; he seems smaller than ever, but that too is in keeping with Beck’s version, wherein Sivana was Billy’s size. Here he’s the Attorney General and head of the Department of Technology And Heartland Security (the few off-handed riffs on the Bush Administration’s post-9/11 power grabs seem terribly dated in 2006), which doesn’t strike me as appropriate as his traditional mad scientist background (Besides, the original Sivana has the coolest villain origin of all time). While the book is still a ton of fun, at this point it seems clear that it’s not going to be the “Year One” sort of book that would redefine the Marvel characters’ place in the DCU I was hoping it would be. If you’re just looking for great comics, that doesn’t really matter, of course, but if you’re a Captain Marvel fan and regular reader of DC’s “universe” comics, it’s something of a tragedy, considering where Judd Winick’s taken the characters. Confidential to the writers of 52: Check out the last panel on page 12; that’s how you do a nice, tasteful, all-ages appropriate talking-crocodile-devours-helpless-human-victim scene.


Superman/Batman #32 (DC) “The Enemies Among Us Part 5?” Jesus, this story is still going on?


Ultimate Spider-Man #106 (Marvel)
My favorite part of this issue by far had less to do with the story itself (which remains excellent; if anything, this issue is better than the last few) than it did with the book it was appearing in. Wilson Fisk, aka The Kingpin of Crime, is an evil gangster who is viewed as a legitamate businessman. At a legitamate business meeting, one of his flunkies tells him that a company he own acquired a company that owns the likeness of Spider-Man (who, you’ll remember, got his start in pro-wrestling, where he signed away the merchandising rights to his name and image). Fisk ruminates on what this means for a moment, and then says with a sinister smile: “Take any sublicense offer. Take any media offer. Go to town. Flood the market.” The flunky responds, “Run it into the ground?” Kingpin smiles broadly, “Exactly.” This scene occurs two issues after an ad for Shakespeare brand fishing equipment, “The Superhero’s Choice For Fishing,” who are selling a Spider-Man Fishing Kit and Spider-Man Tackle Box. It is followed by ads for Spider-Man dimensional stickers and a Spider-Man 3 Limited Edition Klik Candy Dispenser.