The one passage in Luke Skywalker Can't Read that I did not care for at all

Becky Cloonan makes history in 2012's Batman #12, by being the first woman to draw an issue of Batman. The character was around 73 years at that point. 

I've been reading author Ryan Britt's Luke Skywalker Can't Read and Other Geek Truths (Plume; 2015), a fun, funny collection of essays addressing modern geekdom's greatest touchstones–Star Wars, Star Trek, Lord of The Rings, Doctor Who, etc–from various, sometimes rather quirky angles. Like how he learned the birds and the bees from Barbarella and dinosaurs, how discovering the modern Doctor Who helped him overcome depression and whether or not anyone in the Star Wars universe is functionally literate or not (The title answers that question, actually).

I've been greatly enjoying the book, and I assume it must be a pretty good, for the simple reason that many of his subjects are ones I know very little about (Sherlock Holmes, Harry Potter) or have zero first-hand experience with (Star Trek, Doctor Who), and I've still found the pieces all engaging and interesting.

The penultimate essay involves superheroes, something I do know quite a bit about and have quite a bit of first-hand experience with, however. It's entitled "Nobody Gets Mad About Hamlet Remakes: Rise of the Relevant Superheroes," and it is a discussion of the current boom in comic book superhero films and various complaints about them, from fans and critics.

It's a fine essay, but I was actively irritated by this passage:

The idea that the movie isn't as good as the source material because it contradicts the author's vision is another criticism of comic book movies. We might claim Batman was "created" by Bob Kane, but most people will tell you he was co-created by Bill Finger. So, are we seeing a vision of Batman that is true to Kane's or Finger's original conception of him when we go see the latest Batman movie? Absolutely not. From Alan Moore to Frank Miller to Jeph Loeb to Gail Simone to Marguerite Bennet to artists like Neal Adams, Alex Ross, Jim Lee, Tim Sale, Lee Bermejo, Becky Cloonan, and countless more, the image and words of Batman aren't the purview of any one sacred person. And this is true for every single other superhero, too.

The point he makes there is correct (even if there are examples that can be found to make the last sentence incorrect; I would have suggested he changed it to "for almost every other superhero"), but it's the specificity of the character and the creators that bugged me.

Because if you've seen "the latest Batman movie"–which, at the time of his writing, was The Dark Knight Rises and not Batman V. Superman: Dawn of Justice–and are familiar with Batman comics, than you know that list of creators is complete bullshit.

But before we pick it apart, I should note that this is just a portion of a single paragraph in an essay, and not even the focus of the essay. So maybe I should also quote what follows, so as to at least contextualize the passage.

Britt goes on:

Comics have always had several different narrative voices behind the scenes, which means that by the time the stories get translated into big, watchable movies, all of those narrative voices are condensed down into a single composite story. Because there's probably a lot of good stuff left over, who wouldn't want to make another movie?

Now let's look at that list of Batman creators, shall we?

First, the writers. Frank Miller's Batman output is far from the greatest in terms of volume (The Dark Knight Returns, "Batman: Year One," Spawn/Batman, Batman: The Dark Knight Strikes Again, All-Star Batman and Robin, The Boy Wonder), but he remains probably the single most influential Batman writer (and that just for "Year One" and The Dark Knight Returns). Fair enough. Jeph Loeb has also written a lot of very popular Batman comics (Three Legends of The Dark Knight Halloween specials, Batman: The Long Halloween, Batman: Dark Victory, "Hush").

Alan Moore's a little tricky, as he really only wrote a single Batman comic of any note, although, because he's Alan Moore, it is a perennial-seller and a touchstone for a lot of readers: Batman: The Killing Joke (That it set the stage for the transformation from Batgirl Barbara Gordon into Oracle, and that it was one of the ultimate Joker stories, certainly helped keep it relevant for a long time, too).

The other two on the list, Gail Simone and Marguerite Bennet are both spectacularly poor choices, and I'm baffled as to why they were included at all. I know Simone has written the character Batman in the pages of her long run on Birds of Prey and in at least one Justice League comic, and it's certainly possible he popped up in the pages of her relatively short run on the current volume of Batgirl, but I honestly don't remember her ever writing a Batman story for any of the many Batman titles, or doing a miniseries or original graphic novel. Please correct me if I'm wrong.

Bennett is a relative newcomer to comics, and while she has written Batman–co-writing 2013's Batman Annual #2 with Scott Snyder–he's not someone I would even think of including as an influential Batman writer. she's there instead of Denny O'Neil, Chuck Dixon, Alan Grant, Grant Morrison and Snyder, for example. And remember that Dark Knight Rises was a 2012 film; she didn't write any Batman until well after the release of the last Batman movie.

It's possible–all right, probable–that Britt includes the pair because they are both female writers (Something that seems like a pretty good possibility, seeing as he includes the only woman to ever draw Batman when listing artists, even though she drew just a handful of pages, which were likewise published after the last Batman film).

I think that's too bad. Firstly because it gives a mistaken impression to his readers that the Batman comics aren't as inexplicably dominated by male writers and artists as they actually are. And, secondly, there are better choices, or at least a better choice: Devin K. Grayson, who wrote parts of "No Man's Land" before eventually earning her own Batman title, the 2000-launched Batman: Gotham Knights , which she wrote for 32 issues. She also had substantial runs on Batman-adjacent titles Nightwing and Catwoman.

If the idea were to mention writers who influenced the The Dark Knight Rises, and/or the entire Christopher Nolan cycle of films, then that list looks even more questionable. If that were the point of the list, then you'd keep Miller, of course, as not only did his late-80s Batman comics influence just about everything to follow (and, along with Moore's writing, the entire direction of the superhero comics industry), but director Christopher Nolan and company drew plenty of inspiration from Miller's "Year One." Hell, maybe Loeb is an okay fit, too, as he did so much work within Miller's "Year One" milieu in his Long Halloween and Dark Victory comics.

But what about Chuck Dixon, who co-created Bane and wrote swathes of the "No Man's Land" arc that dominated the second half of Rises? Or Dixon's peers on the "No Man's Land" era of Bat-books, like Greg Rucka and the aforementioned Grayson? What about Denny O'Neil, who created Batman Begins heavy Ra's al Ghul and Rises player Talia? Or Len Wein, creator of Lucius Fox?

As for the artists he mentions, Neal Adams is largely credited with making Batman darker and more reaslitic, in addition to creating the first villain in the Nolan cycle–Ra's al Ghul. Alex Ross is kind of an outlier in that he's only really ever drawn a single Batman comic of any length, his 1999 collaboration with writer Paul Dini, Batman: War On Crime, but through his work on Kingdom Come and his paintings of Batman on covers, posters and merchandise, it's certainly easy to see how many could consdier him an influential Batman artist/

No questioning the inclusion of Sale, either, who drew all of the above-mentioned, Loeb-written comics save "Hush," and whose design for Two-Face in Long Halloween was taken almost directly for usage in 2008's The Dark Knight.

Jim Lee seems an odd choice, despite the continued popularity of "Hush" and the fact that the New 52 era of DC Comics was so beholden to his style.

Bermejo just boggles my mind, as his main Batman credits are Batman/Deathblow, the not-very-good 2008 original graphic novel The Joker and the almost-as-bad Batman-ized version of A Christmas Carol, 2012's Batman: Noel; the former featured a character that resembled The Dark Knight's Joker visually, but Bermejo was inspired by the film, not the other way around.

Cloonan has the dubious distinction of being the only woman to ever draw Batman, a fact that sounds shocking at first, and becomes depressing when one starts trying to find a single example to prove it wrong and comes up blank. Listing her there is like listing Dan DeCarlo or Steve Mannion; yeah, they technically drew a few pages of Batman comics, but so what?

Better inclusions would have been David Mazzucchelli (Miller's collaborator on "Year One"), Jerry Robinson (long-time Batman artist and creator of Dark Knight villain The Joker, as well as Alfred) and pretty much anyone who drew Batman for a reasonable length of time: Dick Sprang, Sheldon Moldoff, Carmine Infantino, Marshall Rogers, Jim Aparo, Norm Breyfogle, Greg Capullo and so on.

Aside from the names on those two lists, however, the rest of Britt's book is just fine.

Wonder Woman: Earth One Volume One

Giant kangaroo mounts referred to as "kangas." The Purple Healing Ray. The robot plane. The Holliday Girls, and their zaftig leader with the "Woo woo!" catch-phrase. The exclamation "Suffering Sappho!" Bondage as symbol of love. Female superiority over men, and the submission of the latter to the former as the ideal societal construct.

These are among the components–some minor details, others pervasive elements–of William Moulton Marston's Wonder Woman that have sent just about every single person to try their hand at telling a Wonder Woman story in any media since creator Marston's death running and screaming from Wonder Woman's actual origin, the original half-decade or so of her adventures and the author's intent. And these are among the elements that writer Grant Morrison, along with artist Yanick Paquette, embraces in his telling of the Wonder Woman story, in the particular, peculiar format of DC Comics' Earth One line of sequentially published, original graphic novels.

The most remarkable aspect of Morrison's version of Wonder Woman is that the writer, unlike everyone else who has come before, doesn't attempt to reinvent this particular wheel, and he doesn't attempt to fix what was never broken. In essence, Morrison simply reshapes Marston and collaborator H.G. Peter's comics into a style and form more familiar and palpable to modern readers, the result being a fairly perfect packaging of Marston and Peter's Wonder Woman into a sort of ultimate re-mix. It's rather similar to what Morrison already did with Batman during a relatively long 2006-2013 run across a series of Batman titles, and with Superman in his 2005-launched All-Star Superman, although here he actually does less work than he did with either of the other two personalities of DC's so-called "trinity" of characters. With the World's Finest, he cherry-picked from their entire histories; here he sticks to Marston and Peter, with only a few minor tweaks and modifications consistent with the update in time period.

The book is structured in an unusually literary and complete fashion, not only for a comic book series, but when compared to the rest of the Earth One line (so far consisting of three volumes featuring Superman, two featuring Batman and one featuring the Teen Titans). After a 13-page sequence detailing the origins of Hippolyta and the Amazons' break with Man's World–in which she lost her girdle to Hercules*, stole it back, killed the hero and prayed to Aphrodite that they may "retire forever from Man's World"–the remainder of the book is set 3,000 years later in present.

Wonder Woman, dressed in a version of her familiar costume, exits a beautifully-designed "invisible" robot plane on Paradise Island and is bound in chains by Amazons and dragged before her mother for trial. The remainder of the book is told through the trial, with chronological flashbacks telling the origin of Wonder Woman, as she and other players in the drama are called forth to bear witness (the lasso of truth compelling them all to be perfectly honest).

That is not a format we see in superhero comic books, and is almost impossible to imagine in a superhero TV show or movie; I think that's notable because so much of the rest of the Earth One line seems to be written with at least one eye on multi-media adaptation. Writer Geoff Johns' Batman graphic novels read like comics adaptations of a few scripts from a Batman TV show that doesn't actually exist, for example. Morrison, who, unlike Johns has had little experience in writing for TV and/or film, just writes this like a graphic novel. And it's relatively late release all but guarantees that it will have little to no impact on future Wonder Woman movies, which have already cast their stars, something I'll return to in a bit.

In broad strokes, the story will be very familiar. Diana is the somewhat rebellious and adventurous only daughter of Queen Hippolyta, apparently a gift from the goddesses because, like all of the women in the all-female utopia of Paradise Island, Hippolyta can't exactly have a child the old-fashioned way.

One day she discovers United States pilot Steve Trevor, who has somehow crash-landed on the island, and she heals and cares for him, keeping him safe from her sisters (As in Renae de Liz's Legend of Wonder Woman, she does so in secret, keeping him in hiding). She wins a tournament, allowing her to take Steve back to his own world. She suffers an immediate and drastic form of culture shock, but makes fast friends with "Elizabeth" Candy and her sorority sisters from Holliday college (I find it amusing that, of all the stuff from Wonder Woman's Golden Age one might be leery to include, Morrison apparently drew the line at a character named Etta Candy; giant kangaroos? That's cool. But a joke name like Etta Candy? No way).

There is the expected tension between the isolationist Hippolyta and the Amazons and the expansive U.S. military, and between the way a society is supposed to work, "Man's" way or Marston's way.

Marston's Wonder Woman, despite what people have been reading into her since at least 1972, when Gloria Steinem stuck her on the cover of Ms., is not a feminist character, nor was hers originally a feminist story. If we consider "feminism" the ideal default it should be, and keep in mind that it is the belief that women and men are equal and should be treated as such**, then remember Marson wasn't really arguing that in his comics. He was, through Wonder Woman, arguing that women were better than men, at least in many of the most important ways (and please note that there was nothing misandric about Marston's point of view; he didn't think men inferior, he just didn't think they were as awesome as women, particularly his idealized Amazon women, were).

These are subtleties that are generally ignored, and they are ignored because they are pretty out-of-date, pretty particular to Marston and pretty much universally rejected in favor of the idea that men and women are equal, and neither should be master over the other. I don't want to get too deep into this particular rabbit hole, but Marston's brand of feminism, if we want to call it that, involved the loving submission of man to the loving dominance of a loving woman, which could conceivably be seen as a chilvalrous, noble act on the part of the man, who is very active in the act of surrender. Not to inject Christianity into things and further muddle it, but surrendering peacefully is actually a hell of a lot harder than fighting, something Morrison's Superman once alluded to in a throw-away JLA story in which he lectured some pro-active superheroes that not killing is infinitely harder than killing. At any rate, there are some confusing interpersonal politics involved here.

That was, essentially, the Amazon way, and perhaps it was a way that worked on Paradise Island, and could work in a Man's World that all came around to Marston's way of thinking. Wonder Woman herself was a lot more traditional in her views of relationships, being the only Amazon to fall in love with a man and then to pursue him for years, even decades in a weird love triangle reflective of the Clark/Superman/Lois one. Here she is also pro-Steve, and pro-engagement with Man's World. She wants to change it for the better, just as she wants to change aspects of her own, "Woman's World." She's a compromise character, a bridge between the two cultures--and the two modes of relationship between male and female.

The last page of the book, in which Wonder Woman begins her engagement in earnest. The words that precede those on the page above are "Hola! 'Man's World'!" That is her "final" costume, by the way, and her robot plane, Steve Trevor and "Beth" Candy in the background.

Wonder Woman is, at least here, a feminist character, a figure of equality, even if the culture Marston created for her (and so many aspects of his own psychological work and his own comic book work were of a feminism-plus line of thinking).

The other thing that Morrison and Paquette do that Marston and Peter did not, and could not, is make all the kinky undertones of the Golden Age Wonder Woman explicit. You need not read many of those stories to see exactly what it was that gave Frederic Wertham fits, or to refer to Wonder Woman as a veritable recruiting poster for lesbians. I think the tying up can be excused, and be read innocently–at least context-free and in the original texts themselves, until one learns more about Marston himself, anyway–but there's some really weird stuff in there. Like Amazon Christmas, "Diana's Day," a festival in which some of the girls dress up like deer, others dress up as hunters, and they "hunt" for the girls, tie them up, and then skin and eat them.

If you see something vaguely kinky in the above scene, you're not the first adult to do so.

Here that game occurs, at least in the corner of a splash page, but so too does all kind of libidinous behavior, with Amazons dancing topless (their backs turned to the reader, of course) and doing body shots off one another. If Marston and Peter implied kinky, pagan bacchanals and lesbian relationships, Morrison refers to them as such, and Paquette draws them.

Diana's Day = Amazon spring break.

Wonder Woman explicitly refers to Mala, a minor character in the original Wonder Woman stories, as "my lover," a step beyond all the slightly more equivocal reference between the women as "my love" and so on. Etta Beth Candy even uses the L-word when discussing Paradise Island (not the other L-word):

I'm...not sure if this is an improvement or not. There's certainly something to be said for the subtlety of the early 1940s Wonder Woman comics, which may have been borne out of conservatism and bias against homosexuals in general, but may also had a lot to do with the fact that they were comics for little kids. This isn't intended for little kids, and yet it's not a mature readers book, either (The book, unlike DC's serially-published comics, doesn't have any form of rating, but it the Earth One is generally considered to be meant for the YA and book-store reading audience; certainly the adult themes but lack of swearing, nudity and violence would seem to bear that out). Morrison's script is hardly crass or anything (Hercules calls Hippolyta a "bitch," but then, Hercules is a real dick), but I think there's something to be said for having to be slightly sly with such matters.

That, though, seems to be the biggest discernable difference from the original source material, the fact that Morrison can just come out and say words like "lover" and "lesbian" instead of implying them. Well, that and the art, which I've neglected to mention at this point, but is perhaps what makes this such a radical book since, as I've mentioned, Morrison's most radical act is in updating the original Wonder Woman comics rather than reimagining them.

Paquette, like Morrison, apparently paid very close attention to the work of Wonder Woman's creators, and it is evident in his work. One of the many things modern creators always seem to get wrong about Wonder Woman and her milieu is that they insist on grounding it in some sort of mythical, or at least ancient, style, as if the Amazons haven't changed or progressed in any way since they first came to their island, as if their society, culture and science remained perfectly stagnant. But what culture would? Certainly not one as progressive, forward-thinking and presumably more advanced than our own.

Paquette's version of an Amazonian firearm.

The original Paradise Island was as much Buck Rogers as it was sword-and-sandals, and that's evident here. Not only does Paquette draw Wonder Woman's doctor friend in an outfit similar to that of the one she wore in the original Wonder Woman comic, but these Amazons have firearms to play bullets-and-bracelets with a gun that looks so strange that it is apparently one they developed parallel to the firearms developed in Man's World), they have flying hover-bikes shaped vaguely like the shells their chief goddess was said to be born from, and then there's Hippolyta's TV-like magic mirror and the aforementioned robot plane/invisible jet, which is similarly redesigned to look like the sort of airship that might have been developed by a culture completely unfamiliar with Wilbur and Orville Wright.

I really can't overstate what an incredible job Paquete does in taking the craziest ideas present in some of the original comics–rideable kangaroo steeds, for example–and integrating them with a kind of sci-fi fantasy Ancient Greek + 3,000-years aesthetic. I have seen a lot of different versions of Paradise Island over the decades, and this is probably the best-looking one, with almost every single Amazon having her own look, costume and style. His Hippolyta, who here has black hair like her daughter, is probably the all-around coolest-looking Hippolyta I've ever seen, and I like the way that he and Morrison sneak in familiar characters in relatively minor, almost background roles, like Troia (wearing a new version of her old Wonder Girl costume) and Artemis.

Note Troia in the lower right-hand corner; she's in the background of the cover too, and part of a war party sent to Man's World to retrieve Diana.

Of the major divergences from the original story, there are two, the significance of which may strike different readers at different levels of importance.

The first is that Steve Trevor is no longer the blond-haired white guy of the 1940s, but is a black man–Idris Elba, from the looks of Paquette's drawings of him.

Idris Elba, right? Is it just me?

During my first reading, I thought nothing of it. Morrison, Paquette and company decided to "blind cast" a character, who doesn't have anything essential to his character that mandates he be a white guy...certainly not if the story is taking place in 2016 instead of 1941. It seemed like an easy and well-intentioned way to put a person of color into a story that is otherwise just a bunch of white folks; the only other black character with a speaking part is the Robert Kanigher and Don Heck-created Nubia, who is portrayed well in this but is, well, she's still named "Nubia."***

There is, in fact, one thing about a black–or, specifically, an African-American–Steve Trevor that does impact the overall Wonder Woman mega-story, although it took a second reading for the idea to really sink in.

During the trial, Steve is one of the witnesses called forth to testify, and he tells Hippolyta and the assembled Amazons that his "ancestors were enslaved and persecuted by men with too much power."

It's a simple line of dialogue in a panel or two, but it's suggestive in ways that complicate the themes beyond what I'm equipped to address here, and, I imagine, what Morrison intended. First, and less problematically, it occurred to me that with Steve now a black American man rather than a white American man, he shares something in common with women, as he himself points out. He is part of a group that was also hideously mistreated by white men. So Steve Trevor is no longer a representative and a member of those that have and would oppress the Amazons/women in the past, but now he is someone who has likewise been oppressed. Does that matter? Were Steve and Diana paired as representatives of the two world views, and their partnership and kinda sorta romance meant to serve as symbolic bridge between Man's World and Amazonia? Was Golden Age Steve Trevor the embodiment of Man's World, and Diana's ability to win him over emblematic of he eventual success of her mission?

But wait, it gets thornier. Remember that Earth One Steve explicitly mentions the fact that his ancestors were enslaved. How, exactly, does American slavery fit into this idea of bondage and submission? If the book, and Marston's philosophy in general, are pro-bondage and pro-submission, what becomes when we factor in such a repugnant, real-life example of the disastrous negatives of such relationship? (I won't go so far as to say that Marston or Peter were racist, but you need not read many pages of their Wonder Woman comics to see that their comics were racist, regardless of the intent of the creators. Non-white characters are all confined to wince-inducing racial stereotype in the Wonder Woman comics, not simply the Japanese that the characters were at war with, but everyone who wasn't a white American or Amazonian.)

Is Morrison attempting to compare and contrast "bad" enslavement (that which is forced upon the slave out of hatred or a complete lack of empathy) with "good" enslavement (that which is offered and accepted out of love)...? Is it the difference between man-to-man slave/master relationships and man-to-woman and woman-to-woman slave/master relationships? Is the difference simply between the slavery of Man's World and the slavery of the Amazons?

I don't know, and, like I said, I don't think Morrison even intended to go there–if so, I think a little more space would have been spared–but he took us there, even if only in a passing bit of dialogue.

The second big change, which is more significant to the Wonder Woman story, even if it raises fewer questions about its application to our world, is the exact origins of Wonder Woman–that is, how exactly she came to be. The traditional story, that of Marston, is that she was a sort of doll made of clay by Hippolyta, who was distraught that she could not have a daughter of her own, and that the goddesses brought that clay doll to life and imbued it with their blessings. The child then grew up to be Diana.

In rebooting the character's origins for The New 52, writer Brian Azzarello nixed that, and made Wonder Woman the product of a union between a man and woman. Sort of. In his origin, Hippolyta had her baby the old-fashioned way, and the seed was provided by the god Zeus, a well-known knocker-upper of women in myth. That made Diana a demi-god and part of the Olympic family, who dominated Azzarello's run on the title. It also greatly annoyed a lot of Wonder Woman fans for perhaps obvious reasons, but in the sins Azzarello committed against the honor of the Amazons, that was actually pretty minor compared to his explanation of where Amazons babies come from.

At the climax of the trial, Diana gets to question her mother, and asks her of what substance she is made. Hippolyta confesses the story about being a clay figurine brought to life by the goddesses was a lie, a fairy tale told to help keep Diana innocent. In fact, she was the child of Hippolyta and Hercules. She wasn't conceived either in rape or consensual passion though. Morrison has Hippolyta explain:

I took the egg from my womb. And the seed form the loins of the man-god Hercules. Blended in my alembics, seasoned with my fury.

You were my revenge on Hercules, Diana. That his line would yield no sons, only daughters bred to conquer and subdue Man's World. Of my anger you were born.

Your native Amazon vigor combined with the blood of Hercules makes you unbeatable. Yet also proud, rebellious, restless. His blood calls you to Man's World, and to battle.

What are we to make of this? You got me. In a sense, this feels less true-to-myth than her being fathered by noted philadering father of the gods Zeus, even if Hippolyta and Hercules were certainly better positioned within the history of Wonder Woman comics to have made a baby together. The "how" is a little confusing–I would have appreciated Hippolyta saying something about "and through Amazonian science and forbidden magic, I blended them in my alembics."

In essence, it sounds as if Diana was a test-tube baby of sorts (just like Morrison's Robin, Damian Wayne, whose mother Talia al Ghul stole seed from the unwitting Batman to create him****), although how exactly that would work with a Bronze Age man's seed and the sci-fi science of later Amazonia, I don't know.

It does make Wonder Woman fully human, rather than "less than human," as she refers to what she thought of herself due to her clay origins, although I'm not sure that's really that important (Superman's not human, and that's never really been a problem for the character). It also strips her of her unique status among the Amazons; no longer is she the only one born not of the union of man and woman, but she's as human as the rest of them. Ironically, Hippolyta speaks to that particular mingling of blood as what makes Wonder Woman unique, which seems to suggest that this Hercules really was a demi-god, and not just a man, as Hippolyta seems to imply throughout.

It works, but only so long as you don't pick at it, and is a rare example of Morrison trying to "fix" something that wasn't broken. That is the trap that all Wonder Woman creators seem to fall into. It may grasp at Morrison, but for the most part he and Paquette sail on it.

Together they've created the very best standalone graphic novel to feature Wonder Woman, and the one of the best Wonder Woman comics since Marston and Peter's first Wonder Woman comics.



*That's right, "Hercules," not Herakles; like Marston, Morrison doesn't seem to feel a need to prove how smart he is by distinguishing the Roman and Greek spellings. Just last week I was re-reading George Perez and company's "War of The Gods" storyline from 1991-1992, and it actually hinged on a conflict between the Greek and Roman versions of the same pantheon. Marston, meanwhile, had Wonder Woman created by Greek goddesses and battle the Roman war god Mars few issues later.

**Which means, in truth, no one should have be labeled or declare themselves "feminist;" it's everyone else who should be labeled "sexist," as you're either one or the other. It still boggles my mind that there are people, men and women, who resist or refuse to be called "feminist." Personally, I've long assumed–or maybe it's more like hoped–that this was because the people who claim not to be feminist are doing so out of pure ignorance and don't really know or understand what that word means.

***Of course, the decision of "casting" Steve as a black man rather than a white man here doesn't seem like the sort of thing that will have much impact in the pop culture in general, at least, not in the same way that Mark Millar and Bryan Hitch making the Ultimate Nick Fury black lead to Sam Jackson playing the character in all the Marvel movies...and the creation of a new black character with the name appearing in the "real" Marvel comics. In fact, this isn't even like having the New 52 Wally West be black, which I hear lead to his being black on The Flash TV show. Wonder Woman's movie is already in production, and its Steve Trevor is going to be played by white guy Chris Pine. Would that have been different had DC published this book just a few years earlier? I don't know, but possibly.

****Also like Robin Damian Wayne, Morrison's Earth One Wonder Woman wears regular old off-the-rack boots with laces.

Comic Shop Comics: April 13

Batman/Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles #5 (DC Comics) Waaaaaaaaaaait. Commissioner James Gordon appears in this issue, and he has white hair and a white mustache and is smoking a pipe. That would indicate that this series is not–I repeat not–in current, New 52 Batman continuity, despite the relative pains taken by writer James Tynion IV to keep the six-issue miniseries consistent with IDW's TMNT Vol. 5 continuity and all the rigamarole that was required to build the entire plot around the Turtles traveling from their own universe to that of Batman's DCU. I've been saying all along that I would have preferred a more standalone crossover, which would have freed up a lot more pages space to devote to things other than explaining how the TMNT and Batman got to be in the same place at the same time.

This is the penultimate issue, and two big things of some interest occur, neither of which are what is depicted on the cover...at least, not exactly (That cover is worth studying though, if only to see who artist Freddie Williams II decided to include–8 to 10 of those inmates aren't actually inmates at the moment, or never were, for example–and whether he decided to draw the New 52 or classic versions of each of them.)

The first is that Robin Damian Wayne returns to the Batcave in time to fight Michaelangelo Michelangelo and Donatello, and the second is a last page splash showing what exactly The Shredder and Ra's al Ghul did with the mutagen they brought into Arkham Asylum with them. Some of the mutations, like that of The Penguin–

–and The Scarecrow are obvious, others much less so. I suppose Ra's and Shredder brought DNA samples of all kinds of animals into the asylum with them?

The next issue should be fairly insane, given how insane this last page is (Here's hoping Batman and Robin get mutated into a bat-man and a robin-boy in order to fight their mutated foes on the same level!), and it is one more example of how Williams has been fairly killing it on this series. At least in broad strokes...the action remains a little muddier than it should be in a comic book about a bunch of martial artists fighting.

Black Canary #10 (DC) Grumpy Black Canary has been appearing in the last few issues of Batgirl, and so for this issue Barbara Gordon returns the favor and tries to help Canary crack the mystery of what exactly is up with her late mother, her mysterious aunt and the ninja death cult.

Regular artist Annie Wu is still MIA (although she draws the cover of this issue, and, oddly enough, a 6-page Black Canary/Gotham Academy crossover in this week's issue of Gotham Academy, detailing "that time...Pom had an emotion.") Not to worry though, as always-welcome Moritat draws the first six pages, and Sandy Jarrell draws the other 14; Jarrel's style is pretty far from that of Moritat, but they are within the same stylistic ballpark, and it helps that there's a scene change separating the two artists.

They're both excellent artists, by the way, and Jarrel's brief fight scene between Canary and Greyeyes on page 17 is better and more clear than any that Williams has drawn for Batman/TMNT to date.

DC Comics: Bombshells #11 (DC) Writer Marguerite Bennett assembles all of the Bombshells–or, at least, all of the main ones working under Commander Amanda Waller–together for "The Battle of Britain Part 1 of 2," a full-length beat-'em-up action comic. So that's Waller, Aquamwoman, Supergirl, Stargirl, Wonder Woman, Batwoman, Dr. Light and Big Barda, all together for the first time, beating up undead demon Nazi things and sea monsters.

Mirka Andolfo and Laura Braga are the artists, although I'm not sure who drew which section. So I am unable to properly credit whoever drew the above page, probably my favorite in any comic that I read today.

It is, like most issues of the series, pretty good. There are two things of special interest worth mentioning, though, aside from how awesome "I FUCKING LOVE HOMONYMS!" is as a battle-cry (We're all agreed that Batwoman's "@#$^%*&' should be pronounced "fucking," right?).

First, I'm not entirely convinced that being caught in an explosion and then seeing civilians menaced by a giant octopus on the streets of London would really cure one of shell-shock, as it apparently does Steve Trevor here. I'm even less sure that it would suddenly make him so confident that he would decide to fist-fight sea monsters instead of, say, pick up a gun again.

Second, I guess Big Barda is dating Doctor Light in the Bombshells-iverse? This series has had a lot of girl-on-girl action thus far, but I was actually surprised to see Light plant one on Barda. Wonder Woman and Steve also share a passionate kiss (I'm sure it's not Bennett's intention, but it sure reads like now that Steve is over his temporary PTSD, Wonder Woman is sexually attracted to him), but it is immediately followed by Mera telling Steve that she was Diana's first kiss.

The Barda thing only surprised me because unlike Batwoman or Maggie Sawyer, who are gay in the "real" DC Universe, or even Wonder Woman or Mera, who are sufficiently different here that they could be, Barda is totally married to a man in the DCU, and she has his surname in this comic. On the page immediately preceding this one, Doctor Light refers to Barda as "Barda Free," implying that Bombshell Barda is married to Scott Free, AKA Mister Miracle (Or maybe he died off-panel in this? Was that mentioned already and I forgot?).

Anyway, that was a surprise!

Slightly more surprising was the fact that Barda fought with her Megarod/sex toy (as seen on the cover of this issue) as she usually does, but her the hand portion of her elbow-length gloves glowed here when she had punching to do, and she had glowing yellow wheels appear on the bottom of the soles of her boots, turning them into roller-skates? Are roller-skates the WWII-era analogue to the flying discs that Mister Miracle used...?

This was a particularly fun, if particularly weird, issue of this unpredictable series. Oh, and keep your eyes peeled for a kinda sorta Easter Egg appearances of Britain's future Batman and Robin, The Knight and Squire!

Gotham Academy #17 (DC) The apparently never-ending "Yearbook" storyline continues to not end! Writer Brenden Fletcher's story playing out in the "interstitials," which are drawn by Adam Archer and Sandra Hope, are taking on the shape of a story, as Robin Damian Wayne has apparently stolen Maps and Olive's fake "yearbook" for some reason, and they are in hot pursuit. Say, has Damian been stealing books from Gotham Academy on the reg? Looks like!

The shorts that make up the bulk of this issue, as they have each issue of "Yearbook," are from a predictably unpredictable line-up. The Black Canary team of Fletcher and Annie Wu present a kinda/sorta Black Canary/Gotham Academy crossover focusing on Heathcliff (from the former) and Pomeline (from the latter), Michael Dialynas writes and draws a story featuring a particularly terrifying version of Klarion The Witch Boy's generally creepy-looking Teekl (and Klarion too; this one actually seems like it could have been an issue or couple of Gotham Academy, if expanded, given how well that character fits into this milieu), and, finally, David Petersen draws a three-page urban legend about what became of a group of four students in the 1980s when they tried playing Dungeons & Dragons Serpents & Spells in what looks like it might have been Jonathan Crane's old lab.

Next issue? More "Yearbook"...!

The Legend of Wonder Woman #4 (DC) It was a little weird reading this particular issue of the so far still excellent Renae De Liz Wonder Woman origin re-telling less than 24 hours after reading Grant Morrison and Yanick Paquette's Wonder Woman: Earth One Volume One (review forthcoming), which was also a Wonder Woman origin re-telling. De Liz obviously has more room to work, given that she's producing a serially-published miniseries consisting of nine over-sized issues, but there is a great deal of over lap between Morrison/Paquette's story and this particular chapter of Legend. In this issue, Princess Diana finds herself in Man's World, and befriends Etta Candy. (As an aside, it was also a little depressing to note that both of these Wonder Woman origins would make excellent, standalone Wonder Woman graphic novels, presenting the long sought-after Wonder Woman equivalent of a "Batman: Year One," were they not both so clearly set outside of the continuity of the "real" DC Universe–De Liz's story is set in the 1940s, and Morrison and Paquette made a few choices that put their story in conflict with any and all post-Crisis versions of the Wonder Woman story).

Here, Diana is quite lucky to end up in a bed under the care of a kindly old Massachusetts fisherman's wife, where she sees her second man, and her first male/female relationship. From there the still-stunned Diana wanders away, coming upon a party at Holliday College, where Etta Candy recognizes her as a fish-out-of-water and "rescues" her, putting her up in her dorm room while she continues to come to grips with what happened to her.

Etta is an extremely difficult character to deal with on this side of the Silver Age, as she was such a jokey, sidekick character defined, in large part, by a single characteristic that polite mass entertainment doesn't really point out like it used to. In other words, she's fat, and obsessed with the eating of candy. Sure, she's not so troublesome a character as The Spirit's old sidekick Ebony, but she doesn't translate as seamlessly as, say, Robin (Like Green Lantern's Doiby Dickles and Plastic Man's Woozy Winks, she was also drawn in a cartoonish style that clashed with the design of her hero, making her a visually difficult character to translate.)

Actually, that's unfair. While creator William Moulton Marston used her weight and love of candy as a running gag, it was hardly her only characteristic. She was not the least bit ashamed of her physical appearance, or even terribly interested in the opposite sex and what men might think of her figure–often to the confusion of her fellow Holliday Girls and even Diana herself–and was loud and brassy (a characteristic that perhaps is due to the fact that she was not only American in contrast to Diana's Amazonian, but she was Texan). She was also a born leader, more general than mascot to the Holliday Girls, and quite a brawler.

She's actually a pretty fascinating character, and it's interesting to see the way that various DC creators have tried to deal with her in the modern age. De Liz's approach is closer to that of, say, Ben Caldwell's in Wednesday Comics (and Morrison and Paquette's in Earth One) than George Perez's in the post-Crisis reboot or Geoff Johns, Gene Ha and company's in the post-Flashpoint reboot.

De Liz's Candy is still big, but taller too; she's neither obese nor doll-like in stature. She's still not ashamed of her body in the least, and seems to be quite a hit with the boys, and she seems at least somewhat interested in them (she jokes about marrying Clark Gable, for example, rather than saying she wants to marry a box of candy or something). She's popular at school, with her girls as well as the boys, and even has a mean girl archenemy: Interestingly, Etta seems like a character from her own comic book that Diana just bumped into here. One gets the impression from De Liz's issue that Etta could have been starring in her own teenage, Archie or Patsy Walker-esque gag comic for years before joining the cast of Legend of Wonder Woman.

So De Liz gets a hearty high-five for her Etta (Oh how I hope Greg Rucka and company have been reading Marston, and Wednesday Comics and saw this issue of Legend before they went to work trying to reconcile all of Wonder Woman's various origins, which is apparently going to be the focus of the post-Rebirth Wonder Woman comic, and they can do right by Etta in the "real" DC Universe).

I'm less sure of how De Liz handles the introduction of a major Wonder Woman villain, the first in the series so far (The conflict of the previous issues has been between good Amazons and bad Amazons). That's the Duke of Deception, who is named near the end of the issue, and first seen as a morose Scottish (I think?) young man in a dream of Diana's. He embraces some kind of dark force/entity, and becomes some form of sorcerer, raising the undead to fight against the Allies in the European theater (Not unlike what's going on in Bombshells, actually; and yeah, with Bombshells, this makes three comics featuring a version of the Wonder Woman origin story I've read in the last 24 hours, none of which are related to DC's "real" Wonder Woman in their "real" universe).

SpongeBob Comics #55 (United Plankton Pictures) Dig that quite intentional reference to the old Dell Popeye comics on the cover of this month's issue of SpongeBob, the bulk of which is dedicated to a real rarity for the series: The first 26-pages comprise the first chapter of a multi-part, multi-issue storyline. That storyline, written by Derek Drymon and drawn mostly by Jacob Chabot, is "The Ballad of Barnacle Bill," a Popeye analogue that I wasn't sure was original to this comic or a recurring character from the cartoon. A good 45-seconds worth of Internet research revealed that the name "Barnacle Bill" has history, and history with Popeye even, but doesn't seem to be a character from the cartoon that spawned the character who stars in this comic (although I guess there is a band by that name on at least one episode of SpongeBob...?)

The essential conflict here is that the Popeye analogue is convinced that the Aqualad analogue is really the grown-up version of a Swee'pea analogue, stolen from him by the Aquaman analogue. And that's all kinds of right up my alley. Drymon and company are anything but coy when it comes to their Popeye pastiche, going so far as to name his boat the S.S. Segar, and packing in many other gags of varying degrees of subtlety, some out of homage, some out of parody, most out of a combination of the two. Stephen DeStefano, who is tied with Ronnie del Carmen for Caleb's Favorite Cartoonist Who Doesn't Draw Comics Often Enough, draws Barnacle Bill's biography, which the sailor has tattooed onto his torso.

Now, a 26-page, ad-free comic might seem like more than enough for your hard-earned $3.99, but wait, there's still four more features spread out over six more pages! There's James Kochalka's regular contribution! (Why the shark is dressed like that is a mystery that is maybe the funniest part of this issue; no, I will not tell you what I'm talking about, as I really think you should buy and read this issue for yourself.) There's Vanessa Davis illustrating a Karen Sneider-scripted informational comic strip about mermaids! There's Corey Barba kinda sorta riffing on Wimpy! And Sam Henderson scripted a one-page gag that Gregg Schiegiel illustrated in SpongeBob (the TV show) style! (Man, Sam Henderson gags drawn by someone other than Sam Henderson look so weird.)

We're on issue #55 of this series, and I still find myself slightly astounded by it. Like, if you told me that there was a comic book-format comic featuring the work of Stephen DeStephano, Vanessa Davis, James Kochalka and Sam Henderson, I would be dubious, as that's an awfully all-star line-up for a comic book-comic in the year 2016. And if you told me it was a comic book based on a Nickelodeon cartoon? I would scoff, and scoff hard. If I wasn't already familiar with SpongeBob Comics, of course. SpongeBob Comics–the extremely unlikely home of your favorite cartoonists!

Review: Star Wars: Chewbacca

Everyone loves Chewbacca, but you wouldn't know it from how rarely the big fuzzball gets to take a star turn in comic book series. Dark Horse held the license to produce comics based on Star Wars for about 20 years, and a quick glance at comics.org reveals only two books with "Chewbacca" in the title, a four-issue 2000 series entitled Star Wars: Chewbacca and a 2011 original graphic novel Star Wars Adventures: Chewbacca and the Slavers of the Shadowlands.

The reason Chewie doesn't make such a great comic book star is the same as one of the reasons we love him as a film star so much: He can't talk English (or "Basic" or whatever), but communicates solely via high-pitched howls that only Han Solo and C-3PO seem to understand all that well.

This, naturally, makes him a difficult character to start in a comic book, as the writer would either have to translate his wookie calls via sub-title (which would suck all the mystery and charm out of the character), or he would have to remain a more or less mute character, with any comic book adventure that pivots around him necessarily being something of a silent affair, with a very gifted artist needed to try and convey Chewbacca's thoughts and feelings through action and subtle shifts in body language.

The latter could be done, of course, but it's not done here, in Marvel's first miniseries to feature Chewbacca as the title character. Rather, writer Gerry Duggan just swipes out Han Solo and Chewbacca's more familiar human allies for a new one, who can function as our point of view character and do most of the talking for Chewie.

That new character is Zarro, a little girl who finds herself enslaved, along with her father and many of their neighbors, by a local gangster who puts those who can't repay his loans to work in his mine. She briefly escapes, and happens upon Chewbacca, who has recently crash-landed his ship in a field near town. Chewbacca's inherent heroic nature leads him to protect her a few times, and while he is quite insistent on his need to leave the planet and get back to his important business–which he communicates by pointing at himself, and then at the sky and shouting "HRRAR!", she eventually prevails upon him to help when she tells him that she and her community are being enslaved (a sore spot for Chewbacca and wookies in general, as the wordless flashbacks reveal).

And so Chewbacca and Zarro endeavor to free the slaves, defeat the gangster and even get to strike a blow against the Empire, as it turns out that the gangster is trying to set up a deal to supply the Empire with the raw materials he was mining.

Duggan's script presents a nicely small-scaled, even relatively intimate conflict–one that even recalls the sort of Western that so inspired young George Lucas–with Chewie in the role of the taciturn stranger who rides into town and ends up finding a problem that only he can solve, mostly through righteous violence.

Chatterbox Zarro, who can't understand Chewbacca any better than we can, is a great partner and foil for him, goading him into helping her while occasionally making fun of his piloting skills. Duggan gives us an uncharacteristically funny Star Wars story, and manages to do so without really violating the spirit or tone of the source material; instead, it's quite organic, and much of the comedy originates from the simple character and culture clashes that are involved in having a wookie wandering around in a place unfamiliar to him and his kind.

Duggan also riffs repeatedly on that one moment in Star Wars where the droids play holo-chess with Chewie, mentioning more than once that there are various sayings about wookies, and addresses an enduring mystery about the conclusion of the original Star Wars film: Why did Han and Luke get medals, but Chewbacca didn't?

No, he totally got a medal! He just didn't want to wear some stupid medal. That means Chewbacca is, unquestionably, the coolest member of the cast of the original Star Wars.

Phil Noto's artwork is pretty incredible, as he's developed and perfected a style that makes him perfectly suited for drawing "real" characters like Chewbacca in perfectly realistic fashion, while seamlessly blending them into a world and cast without any sort of visual cast. There are plenty of artists who could draw great Chewbacca comics, but I'm hard-pressed to think of an artist who could draw a Chewbacca that so closely resembles the film's Chewbacca and fit him so naturally into a comic like this.

...

It occurs to me after pounding out those few paragraphs that, perhaps a better review would have been to just show you these panels, as it encapsulates pretty much everything great about Star Wars: Chewbacca:

Yes. Did you like those panels? Then you'll like this graphic novel. Go read it already.

Review: Godzilla In Hell

This is perhaps one of IDW's most surprising comics based on an intellectual property license, and they've certainly published some doozies. The format may be that of a standard comic book mini-series–it was published serially as five numbered issues–but it doesn't tell a single story so much as serve as a sort of challenge to its creators (which number among them two that are likely to be among many Godzilla fans favorites). It's that almost avant garde aspect that makes the collection such a startling read, as the creators are met with simple guidelines–the three words of the title and nothing else, apparently–and then get 20 pages to do whatever they want, several mixing literary allusion and theology into a story featuring a character still best-known for particularly cheesy and cheap mass entertainment aimed at children.

I was repeatedly struck by how deep and how daring some of these stories turned out to be, but never as struck as I was by the simple fact that IDW commissioned such a series in the first place.

Each issue has its own creative team and tells its own discrete story, with nothing in common save the obvious. Collected into a single volume, Godzilla In Hell becomes an anthology.

The first issue is by James Stokoe, creator of the excellent Godzilla: The Half-Century War (maybe the best of IDW's many Godzilla comics to date). One of his claims to fame on that series was how he decided to illustrate Godzilla's famous cry, and there are several instances of his clever uses of incorporating lettering into his art in his story, including integrating the title into the walls of the deep pit that Godzilla falls down to reach Hell (Godzilla himself is drawn tiny, making the fall itself seem astronomical, given what we know of Godzilla's size) and Dante's "Abandon All Hope Ye Who Enter Here" carved into a gigantic obelisk waiting to greet Godzilla. He responds, as he so often does, by blasting it to rubble using his atomic breath.

Stokoe faces the silent (save for a few growls) monster with a series of bizarre challenges as he stomps through a seemingly endless, rocky wasteland, including a vast sea of floating humanoid shapes that swarm the king of monsters and, ultimately, his own double, which Stokoe brilliantly designs into a horrifying monster wearing Godzilla's shape like a disguise.

Several of these elements are more or less classic visions of hell, but none so terrifying as the ending, which really drives home the most horrifying aspect of eternal damnation. Without giving away the ending, Stokoe not only puts Godzilla in a hell that feels both universal and personal to the protagonist, but uses it to demonstrate Godzilla's inhuman, force-of-nature will. While "hope" doesn't really seem like an emotion one might attribute to the monster, despair certainly isn't one either, and it's the absence of despair more than the possession of hope that keeps him relatively unruffled as he goes about falling and fighting forever.

That's followed by a story written and painted by legendary Godzilla artist Bob Eggleton. It's a much more straightforward story, told in a much more straightforward manner. While there's no dialogue, save for the occasional "REEE-UUNNNNNKKKK" or "SKREEONK," this story is anything but silent, as Eggleton narrates it, making for an extremley sharp contrast to Stokoe's preceding story.

In poetic, if purple, prose, the artist tells us that Godzilla has awoken in hell, "The abysmal plain of the underworld presenting all which has failed or gone wrong." But, he seems to assure us, Godzilla doesn't really deserve hell, either because he's a good rather than bad monster, or, perhaps, simply because he is a monster, and thus more animal than sentient, soul-bearing, morality-comprehending creature. "This is not his final destination," Eggleton's narration states, "but a journey, a test..."

Godzilla in Purgatory, then.

His Godzilla travels from one arena to the next, in each new setting–a flaming world of nuclear wars, a frozen cavern, the sea–he faces a demon version of an old opponent or ally. After three fights comes the boss battle, with "The reason the leviathan was brought into this horrific netherworld...King Ghidorah, the great three-headed dragon, the golden devil." You know Dante's devil had three faces, right?

A whirlpool sucks him below the waves before he can do battle with his archenemy, and the narration tells us that he is being taken to "fresh levels of torment...or a way out..."

After these first two stories, it becomes apparent that, despite the changes in story-telling styles, one could read at least these first few stories as connected, given how each ends with Godzilla falling from the level of hell the story is set on, so that perhaps this is the same Godzilla (varying artistic styles and visual signifiers notwithstanding) on the same journey through different parts of hell (Spoiler alert: That holds true of the rest of the stories too, if you want to view them from that angle).

Eggleton's story is something of a disappointment after Stokoe's, and the narration sucks some of the mystery out of the concept, but who's going to complain about Eggleton painting two-pages of sequential art featuring Godzilla battling Rodan, Anguirus and Varan through portentous settings?

The third story is the first by an entire creative team, rather than a single creator. Ulises Farinas and Erick Frietas write this issue, while Buster Moody draws it. Godzilla is facing off against his opposite number Space Godzilla in the ruins of Rio de Janeiro, with the Christ The Redeemer statue watching from a hell above. As Space Godzilla powers up, it crumbles to dust and rubble as well, and after a page or so of fighting, the Godzillas lock breath weapons, increasing their power more and more until the entire world is destroyed.

So that's what it takes to send Godzilla to the afterlife, apparently.

He awakes beholding a gigantic, Purgatory-like mountain, the words "Submit, Serve Peace" echoing from it on repeat. A host of tiny angels with butterfly wings (or should that be moth wings, given the fact that this is a Toho licensed comic?) stream toward Godzilla, and he smashes one between his massive claws like it was a bug.

In response, the disembodied voice cries "You shall learn to submit to peace!" and Godzilla is plunged far, far below ground again, this time awaking in an endless cavern of ice, little red devils (well, little to Godzilla; they're our size) hiding behind stalagmites and, curiously, the rubble of Christ The Redeemer laying in the shape of a cross next to Godzilla.

He is immediately faced with Space Godzilla, and an evil, Satanic presence. The devils fly down Godzilla's throat. Then the host of heaven flies down his throat after the devils, the rubble resurrects itself in the shape of a cross, and here is the conflict in a single panel:

Heaven cries, "Serve God! Submit to God!" while Hell criews, "Enter the throat! Become one with Hell!"

Both Heaven and Hell want Godzilla, but what does Godzilla want?

Well, he uses his divine power-up to put down Space Godzilla, and when Heaven essentially says Godzilla owes his allegiance to the "my army of peace," Godzilla demonstrates that he wants what he always wants: To be left the fuck alone.

He breathes atomic fire in the direction of Heaven, snatches up a handful of both angels and devils and–in the book's most surprising moment, both sides betray God and Satan and fall to worshipping Godzilla, who couldn't care less, as he kills a handful of each and stomps off, the cross rubble once more.

This is probably the best of the five stories herein, and one of the best, most direct Godzilla comics I've ever read or seen, as it pretty directly and elegantly defines the character as an elemental force of destruction beyond morality and, here, beyond even God. Blasphemous? Maybe in certain circles, but then, that's Godzilla for you. He's a monster, not a man, and all he does is fight and fight until his conflicts have been killed or otherwise destroyed, and then he moves on until it's time to fight again.

The next issue, another by a creative team, is written by Brandon Seifert and drawn By Ibrahim Moustafa. Another mostly silent story, with only monster calls and roars for sound. This is the most meta of the stories, and the one that requires (and rewards) repeated readings the most. On the opening splash, Godzilla stands triumphant over the crumpled bodies of two of his greatest foes, King Ghidorah and Destroyah.

Almost immediately they rise to do battle again, and the three monsters battle throughout a seemingly abandoned Tokyo, one of them occasionally suffering what would appear to be a death blow, only to rise again later–as when Ghidorah flies Godzilla high up into the sky only to drop him so that he's impaled by Tokyo tower. (!!!)

During all the fighting, Godzilla eventually notices a huge and seemingly impenetrable wall, and tries to break it. Eventually he does, and finds himself beyond his own narrative confines. The character is outside of the film, outside of the panels of the comic book, in complete nothingness.

It's a maybe obvious, but well-done, version of existential dread for a fictional character of any kind, told and sold eloquently by Moustafa's artwork.

Dave Wachter closes out the book with another mostly wordless story. In this one, Godzilla determinedly trudges through several inhospitable settings, irritated but unfazed, not showing the least bit of fear or concern until he's swarmed by millions of strange red, cycloptic, bat-winged creatures. He attempts to escape them, and keep moving forward, by scaling a titanic mountain, atop which a creature that is all tentacles rest, red towers on either side of it reaching up and disappearing into the black clouds that fill the endless sky.

Godzilla's breath weapon won't work, as if he were in a dream, and he can't scale the mountain. So in a weirdly emotive panel, he spreads his arms and closes his eyes, and the creatures completely devour him, skeletonizing him in moments. But! Each creature's mouthful of Godzilla has turned it into a piece of Godzilla, and they then swarm the bones, acting as Godzilla's flesh and muscles.

He/they can now not only fire the atomic breath, but they can do so from endless mouths, every cell of this reborn Godzilla, blasting aways the guardian creatures, the clouds above and even carving a smooth pathway to the top of the mountain, upon which we see the red pillars were actually just part of an obscured torri gate. Godzilla passes through, a quote from Buddha hovering in the panels of the last two pages and, on the final page, he emerges, alive and whole once again, bursting from the sea.

The quote?

It is better to conquer yourself...

...than to win a thousand battles.

Then the victory is yours.

It cannot be taken from you...

...not by angels or demons...

heaven or hell.

–Buddha

How appropriate is it that at the end of a series in which Japanese Godzilla contends with a series of interpretations of the traditional, Western conception of Hell, he ultimately finds salvation in a the example and words of Buddha and a Shintoist symbol...?

It's a great, even beautiful ending to a great, even beautiful series. I can't recommend it highly enough.


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

I must confess that I was a little disappointed that the infernal figure standing between Godzilla and Ghidorah on Jeff Zornow's EC Comics-esque variant cover for Godzilla In Hell #1 never showed up within.

While these issues took on a cool, often philosophical bent, it also would have been great fun to see Godzilla fighting traditional denizens of hell like Cerebus and The Furies, or Beelzebub, Baphomet and Asmodeus, or denizens of Dante's Inferno, like Geryon and others.

Meanwhile, at Comics Alliance...

This year is First Second's tenth anniversary, and to note the occasion I interviewed a handful of First Second's finest about their time with the publisher for Comics Alliance.

If for some strange reason you read my blog but don't read Comics Alliance, and thus missed them, here are links to the interviews: Cartoonist Sara Varon (author of one of my all-time favorite comics Robot Dreams, a portion of the cover of which is above), Olympians cartoonist George O'Connor, one-third of the Adventures In Cartooning series' creative team James Sturm and, finally, First Second Senior Editor Calista Brill.

I'm going to try and be all timely with a post today about that thing everyone was talking about.

That's how I woke up this morning. I have since watched the trailer a time or four. Would you like to watch it again, together? Okay, let's!

0:14-0:17 Hey, it's that stupid droid that is literally just a kid or a little person shoved in a square garbage can! Why would they fill the background of the film one of the goofiest imagineable droids in the Star Wars-iverse? I guess that's some commitment to Star Wars history fidelity. I bet there is a very long, very boring Wookiepedia article about those droids. No, I was wrong. There is an article about those droids on Wookiepedia, and it is boring, but it is also very, very short.

0:23 Hey, Felicity Jones (that's who that is, right?) looks an awful lot like a brown-haired Kristen Bell. Like the Kristen Bell who was in Fanboys. Hmm, Carrie Fiscer's Princess Leia, Natalie Portman's Padme Amidala, Daisy Ridley's Rey and now Jones' Whoever; that's a lot of brunette protagonists. Are their no blondes or gingers in space?

0:24 Mon Mothma!

0:27 Is that dashing Poe Dameron...?

0:46 Aw man, the Death Star again? Is every goddam Star Wars movie gotta be about the Death Star, or the secret plans for the Death Star, or the new and improved trap Death Star, or the newer and even more improved super-giant Death Star that can death star multiple targets at once, or the plans for the Death Star, or feature a cameo for the Death Star? The Empire and/or The First Order really needs to think of a new weapon. Surely there must be other ways to kill entire planets all at once aside from a giant round space station that shoots a big laser beam.

0:55 Seriously, if you had told me that was Kristen Bell, I would believe you.

1:02 Hey, who is the older-looking gentleman in the light gray uniform with the cape? Is that supposed to be young Grand Moff Tarkin...? Oh man, I hope so! That would mean I would get to say "Mon Mothma" and "Grand Moff Tarkin" over and over again through the end of the year! Those are two of my favorite things from Star Wars to say out loud!

1:06 Forest Whittaker? What are you doing in Star Wars? I did not expect to see you here!

1:09 A stormtrooper with black armor...?

1:12-1:13 And gray ones? Or green ones? I hope there's a whole rainbow of stormtroopers in the Saga by the time they quit making Star Wars movies, which I suppose will be never.

1:14 Donnie Yen!

1:15 Hey, Donnie Yen doing kung fu. You know, if I cast Donnie Yen in a movie, I would want him to be doing kung fun, I suppose. I don't know about Space Donnie Yen, though. Is it going to be weird if the only guy doing kung fu in space is the Asian guy, although I guess he's not really Asian in this, since there's no Asia...?

Hmm..

Anyway, Donnie Yen! Donnie Yenning!

1:18 Someone in a robe, kneeling in front of a big smokey tube, while Emperor Palpatine's red guards flank the tube. Who's that supposed to be, I wonder? There's no helmet, so obviously not Vader. An Inquisitor? A new Sith-like character...?

1:22-1:25 Imperial Walkers! That was all I wanted from future Star Wars movies, when they first announced that there would be new Star Wars movies! Hooray! I don't care what anyone else says, that automatically makes this the second best Star Wars movie (after Empire, which had an extended Imperial Walker set-pice, of course).

1:28-1:29 OMG, the rebellious rebel lady is wearing a black costume that looks like one worn by TIE-fighter pilots! Has she turned to the Dark Side, or at least switched sides, as Whitaker's lines imply? Wait, is that Whitaker doing the voice over? I have no idea.

1:36 Rogue One: A Star Wars Story...? That's a dumb name. I assumed these "anthology" or between-Roman numeral-ed movies were going to be called Star Wars: Rogue One or Star Wars: Asajj Ventress or whatever.

Comic Shop Comics: April 6

Archie #7 (Archie Comics) In this issue of the ongoing saga of Archie Andrews–and man, how weird is it that Archie Andrews is involved in an ongoing saga?–our hero decides he must dislodge rival Reggie Mantle from the Mantles, and so he turns to Jughead and Pop for help. He succeeds, but mostly by proving so pathetic that Pop decides to save the day. Veronica Fish is still drawing, Mark Waid is still writing and it is still really good. Seriously, I swear it. If you haven't been following the revamped Archie, the first six issues are now available in a great trade collection that includes such extras as all one million variant covers for the first issues, and the entirety of Chip Zdarsky and Erica Henderson's Jughead #1.

Batgirl #50 (DC Comics) I can't remember the last time I was so disappointed by a particular issue of a comic book as I was upon reading Batgirl #50, although my disappointment with the book has absolutely nothing to do with the quality–or at least, not directly.

If you've been reading Batgirl for the last few months (or even if you were just reading my hurried little Wednesday night reviews of it), then you probably know that these last few months writers Cameron Stewart and Brenden Fletcher have been having Babs' roommate (and computer expert) Frankie becoming increasingly involved in crimefighting with her, with Frankie repeatedly referring to having come up with a codename for herself, one that begins with the letter O. Also, grumpy Black Canary has returned to Gotham City (and the pages of Batgirl). And Babs has even recruited local teenage crimefighters Spoiler and Bluebird to help her out against her current foe, The Fugue.

Hmm...an all female team of street-level crimefighters that includes Barbara Gordon and Black Canary, a behind-the-scenes computer expert with a codename beginning with the letter O...that sounds pretty familiar. Could DC be building towards launching a new Birds of Prey series, this one differentiated from the previous volume by being awesome, rather than terrible? That's what I've been hoping for since DC released the cover of this issue back in January. And, in February, when they announced the new title Batgirl and The Birds of Prey, I was all but certain that DC would be spinning that book out of this book.

Well, as we learned recently, they're not. Batgirl and The Birds of Prey will be written by some TV writers, and will feature Batgirl, a (slightly) redesigned Black Canary and a dramatically redesigned Huntress (no word on which Huntress from which universe yet, though). What about the rest of these girls? Well, we know Spoiler will be in the pages of Detective Comics, and Bluebird is MIA; according to last week's issue of Batman & Robin Eternal, she's going into semi-retirement to go to college.

And just like that, my months of hoping for a Stewart/Fletcher/Tarr Birds of Prey (although I would have accepted Annie Wu or David LaFuente or Bengal or soemone if Tarr was going to be sticking with Batgirl) were dashed.

This issue, and the "Rebirth" announcements, dashed them even further. This is actually the last issue of the Stewart/Fletcher/Tarr team's Batgirl, and oversized ending to their 15-issue run. The next two issue will be written by Fletcher and drawn by Eleanora Carlini, presumably treading water until June's Batgirl: Rebirth #1 launches a brand-new Batgirl book in a possibly (probably?) rejiggered DCU by a new creative team.

And that's damn disappointing, given how good this book has consistently been. I wish the new creative team luck and all, but a good 95% of the pleasure I've derived out of every issue of this series has come from Tarr's artwork...how goddam sexy she draws everyone, how well she costumes everyone, all the awesome expressions she puts on Babs' face...

As I mentioned elsewhere today, Batgirl was pretty much a perfect example of how to relaunch a character: You get top, fresh talent with a distinct style and vision, and you let them do something different with the character than what the last creative team were doing. It need not be a cosmic continuity-shaking event; it can be as simple as a change of clothes, a focus on a neighborhood and a supporting cast, and some new characters. The Stewart/Fletcher/Tarr Batgirl wasn't a reboot, but it was refreshing, and it's the sort of thing that one would hope DC would learn to replicate, rather than simply rebooting their continuity every few years and shifting the same 50 or so writers and artists between books.

So this issue was terribly disappointing to read, as it dashed my hopes for the future of Batgirl, for the Birds of Prey and for just how final the conclusion is. In that respect, it's a nice wrap-up of the creative team's entire run (which should end up being just three very solid trade collections worth of comics), with a pretty perfect ending for Batgirl and her supporting cast. The thing is, the ending is so final that it seems pretty damn clear that some kind of continuity rejiggering will be a part of "Rebirth," since Barbara's status quo at the end of this book would seem to be in conflict with the premise for the next volume of Batgirl (For further evidence of a reboot aspect to "Rebirth," check out this Wednesday's Harley Quinn and Suicide Squad April Fool's Day Special, which features the old, pre-Flashpoint Amanda Waller).

As for this issue, it's damn good. Batgirl's new foe The Fugue has gathered just about every villain she's encountered over the last 15 issues–Dagger Type! The Jawbreakers! The Velvet Tiger! Corporal Punishment, AKA Vicki! Plus Killer Moth, whose New 52 redesign is the worst!* They are each tasked with helping him set up a different section of the Negahedron thingee, with which he plans to kill everyone in Burnside. It's up to Batgirl and the ladies on the cover to split up and take them all down.

Spoiler alert: They do. Six weeks after she's saved the day, she and Frankie have got Gordon Clean Energy up and running in Burnside, with here friends all gainfully employed there, and a sort of Batgirl-cave built in the basement.

The issue is 38 (story) pages long, and Tarr gets plenty of help in filling them. Roger Robinson, John Timms, Eleanora Carlini and James Harvey all draw portions of the book, and Stewart handles some breakdowns again. The artists are all chosen wisely and deployed strategically; it's often difficult to tell who's drawing what, exactly; it's an extremely, even surprisingly, consistent-looking comic given how many artists are involved. The high page-count comes with a price-bump–this issue is $4.99–so it is perhaps a little irritating that so much real estate is spent on video game-like splashes announcing which hero is fighting which villain. There's also two pin-ups, one by Stewart and another by Joe Quinones.

Like I said, it's a pretty perfect conclusion. I was a little surprised to see that Luke Fox only got a single panel in his civilian identity (I guess he's taking that retirement from Batwing pretty seriously, despite suiting up recently in the pages of this very title), and that Babs' dad didn't show-up in some capacity (although a hacked and hijacked version of his robot suit does), if only because this issue is pretty focused on rounding up all of Babs' allies and enemies for one bit, multi-front showdown.

You know what's most disappointing about this issue? Not only is it the end of the Stewart/Fletcher/Tarr team on Batgirl, but it's the (apparently) end of the team at DC. They're not moving on to Batgirl and The Birds of Prey, they're not going to attempt to reinvent Supergirl the way they did Batgirl, they're not doing a new series starring the 1990s Superboy (something I've been daydreaming about ever since Tarr did that sweet Convergence tie-in cover. Instead, they're doing a creator-owned thing for Image, which, admittedly, looks pretty cool, and will definitely be something I check out.

I know it's got to be more satisfying to do your own thing, and to devote that energy to something you own, but man, DC is a poorer publisher without this team and, especially, without Tarr, who quickly became one of their most distinct and all-around best artists over the course of the last year and a half or so.

Kill la Kill Vol. 2 (Udon Entertainment) I enjoyed the first volume enough to pick up the second. It retains the same pleasures as the first, even if the surprise of a narrative about sentient Japanese school uniforms that imbue their wearers with powers has worn off.

Providence #8 (Avatar Press) Alan Moore and Jacen Burrows do this neat thing this issue which is one of those things that can only be done in comics, and doing things that can only be done in comics is one of the great indicators of a great comic. While two characters, our protagonist and point-of-view character Robert Black and his latest interviewee have a conversation, and while that character is telling Black a story, the panels illustrate that story, even though the dialogue is that of Black and the teller, their dialogue coming in bubbles spoken by characters in that story (Well, it could be done in film, I suppose, but not as easily or effectively).

They use a similar trick a little later on, when Lord Dunsany gives a reading.

Oh yeah, Lord Dunsany is in this issue. So too is H.P. Lovecraft. Thus far, Moore has had Black traveling around meeting what are apparently meant to be the real-world analogues to the character fictionalized in Lovecraft's stories, but here Black and Lovecraft actually meet, shake hands and plan to spend some time together in Rhode Island in the future. It certainly feels like a turning point in the series; if nothing else, it is depicted with a great deal of portent.

Burrows also draws the hell out of a dream sequence, smartly constructed by Moore. I do wish the book discarded all the prose back matter, if only so Avatar wouldn't feel the need to charge $5 a pop for the book. I feel like it's not getting the attention it deserves, and while I imagine there are plenty of reasons for that, one of them is probably the fact that it's not a cheap read. Perhaps it will find a wider audience in its eventual collected format.

Swamp Thing #4 (DC) This is a Kelley Jones-drawn comic, so, really, there's little to do in terms of review, aside from scan panels and shout, "Look! Look how awesome this is! Jones is the best, isn't he?"

So last issue saw a very big, very unexpected twist–and not just because the last time we saw Matthew Cable he was a talking raven hanging out with The Sandman. He helped restore Alec Holland's humanity, but, in the process, he became the new Swamp Thing. Because "the universe demands there must always be a balance, always be a Swamp Thing." That's just physics. I think Isaac Newton coined that.

The de-Swamp Thing-ifciation of Holland occurred in Zatanna Zatara's family castle (?), and she tells the now naked Alec that "I think I still have some of my dad's old clothing that should fit you." I can't tell you how disappointed I was that the next time we see Alec, he's just wearing a black shirt and black pants, and not a tuxedo and top hat. I just assumed Zatara's wardrobe was nothing but tuxedos.

Once in the swamp, Alec starts training Matt in how to Swamp Thing, and there's this pretty hilarious scene where Matthew literally tears a poacher into five pieces in a spectacularly overwrought panel, and Alec simply scolds him as if he accidentally hit a baseball through his window or something.

Check it out:

Alec's response? "What the hell did you just do? There were so many less lethal ways of dealing with him." Yes. And even if you were going to kill him, couldn't you just strangle him or break his neck? Or tear him in half? Why rip him into so many pieces? Why rip the top half of his head off? Who rips a head in half, rather than just ripping it off?

"Look, it's getting late," Alec says, as if changing the subject.

As if that scene weren't indication enough, Matt goes bad, and abuses his new Swamp Thing powers. Will Alec be able to stop him? Probably. But then, the suspense of the conflict isn't what one reads a Kelley Jones Swamp Thing comic for, is it?



*The first time I saw Killer Moth in the New 52 was in Legends of Tomorrow #1, and this week he's in both Batgirl and the aforementioned Harley Quinn and Suicide Squad special. His costume is just...a gas mask? And he has some tanks on his back? Plus a cocoon gun? And, um, that's it? He doesn't look anything at all like a moth of any kind, killer or otherwise! He seems particularly out of place here, and could probably have been easily replaced with those videogame guys or Livewire, but I guess he could be considered one of Batgirl's archenemies, whether he appeared in this run of comics or not. And he didn't.