A Month of Wedesdays: July 2025

BOUGHT:

DC Finest: Justice Society of America: The Plunder of the Psycho-Pirate (DC Comics) This second DC Finest collection of the Golden Age All-Star Comics suggests that the Justice Society is finally going to get to fight an actual supervillain, after spending the first dozen or so issues of their adventures beating up gangsters and the occasional Axis agent or soldier. I mean, it's got the name of a supervillain right there in the title, doesn't it?

Well, sorta.

The Psycho-Pirate in question isn't the one you're probably thinking of, the one in the red tights and cape, with the Medusa Mask that controls people's emotions. That guy wouldn't come along until the Silver Age. This Psycho-Pirate is, well, I don't want to spoil it, but let's just say he's a different guy, one with no costume and no super-powers. He just plans crimes organized around human emotions and he can't stand up to anyone in the Society in a fight (Indeed, he doesn't even put up a fight when discovered, but, after experiencing a range of emotions himself, collapses into the Thunderbolt's arms).

In addition to Psycho-Pirate and a couple of  other "name" villains like The Bee King, a scientist who feeds specially-developed insect hormones to people to give them the powers of various bugs, and The Monster, a criminal mastermind who looks a bit like Mr. Hyde from the 1931 and 1941 films and may also have a degree of super-strength, there's Brain Wave. 

A bespectacled genius with a huge bald head wearing a green, dress-like smock, he does seem to have a super-power, the ability to project realistic images across great distances to trick his victims and try to drive them mad. He seems to be as close as we'll get to a supervillain in these 12 issues, which provide another 600 pages of crude Golden Age superheroics by writer Gardner Fox and a stable of different artists (including Jack Kirby drawing the now purple-and-gold clad Sandman, as well as Sheldon Moldoff, Joe Kubert and plenty of guys whose names I don't really know). 

Brain Wave even came back for a return engagement, having survived what seemed like a plunge to his death at the end of his first story, although, in his second story, he didn't use his powers at all, but instead shrunk the various members of the JSA down to doll-size, and they had to fight to foil his plans at that significant disadvantage before being restored to full height.

The format of these issues is just the same as those in the previous collection, last December's For America and Democracy. The issue would open around the JSA's meeting table, where they would usually receive six-to-eight different related missions. They would then split up, each character starring in their own individual adventure, and then reconvene in the final pages, often dog-piling the villain of the piece. Conveniently, the various master criminals would seem to plan, say, eight different crimes to be executed simultaneously, and thus the members need never actually team-up with one another...at least not until the final pages, anyway, where they swarm the villains.

(I like this sequence above, in which the JSA seem to be falling all over one another to get to Brain Wave.)

At this point, the JSA consists of Hawkman, The Spectre, The Atom, Doctor Mid-Nite, Doctor Fate, Starman, Johnny Thunder and The Sandman (sometimes accompanied in action by Sandy, who doesn't seem invited to the meetings). 

Wonder Woman, though she had her own title and thus should, like Batman, Superman, The Flash and Green Lantern have "graduated" to "honorary" status, has volunteered to stay on as the team's secretary. Thus, she usually appears on the covers and the opening splash pages, and is often seen at the beginning and end of the stories, but rarely has an actual adventure like the boys do (Issue #13's "Shanghaied Into Space", in which the Nazis gas the team meeting, load them into eight individual rockets, and shoot them to different planets in the solar system was a rare exception. In that issue, Doctor Fate, who was too busy to attend the meeting, didn't appear, and so Wondy's creators William Moulton Marston and H.G. Peter handled a six-pager in which she is temporarily banished to Venus). 

In the last issue collected herein, Wildcat and Mister Terrific appear, with no more explanation than that Hawkman had called them in. Doctor Fate, Spectre and Sandman are all MIA in that issue, and The Flash and The G.L. show up for the meeting, but don't travel through the timestream with the others. 

This strict adherence to the format obviously makes reading huge swathes of the comic at a time like this repetitive, and, especially when the premise isn't terribly engaging, even tedious (I generally read an issue per sitting, as it could be hard to read much more than that at a time). The music-themed crimes of issue #19, for example, didn't do much for me, nor did the three (three!) different stories in which the members of the JSA traveled backwards through time on extremely weird missions (Two of these through the power of "The Conscience of Man", an all-white fairy with a wand who visits their meetings). 

It certainly doesn't help that Fox essentially writes all of the characters the exact same, with the same personalities and the same style dialogue, the only thing really differentiating one from the other being their costumes and the nicknames Fox uses for them in the occasional narration boxes. 

Heck, they only rarely use their various crime-fighting gimmicks or fantastical super-powers, with even the nigh-omnipotent Spectre, Fate and Thunderbolt generally just using their fists on their opponents. In fact, Doctor Fate, for example, doesn't seem to use any magic at all throughout these dozen issues, with, perhaps, the exception of flying in one issue (And this he does by seemingly running through the air, rather than adopting a more Superman-like flying pose).

Golden Age super-comics dabbling in war-time propaganda is nothing new of course, but I was still somewhat surprised to see how far Fox and company went in these issues, and I wondered what those loud online voices who say that superhero comic books shouldn't be "political" would make of All-Star Comics between 1942 and 1945.

It's not just that the JSA fought the Nazis and the Axis powers, with Hitler being the only villain to appear in this book more than Brain Wave (And he's usually depicted as a sort of evil clown figure; Kirby seems to have drawn him more than any of the other artists). 

Sure, the JSA are the victims of a Nazi plot in the first issue, the one that attempts to exile them all into space. And in the very next issue, our heroes sneak into war-torn Europe to deliver miraculous instant food pills to various allies in conquered countries, fighting the Nazis as they do so. 

In another issue, the team tackles the problem of Nazi propagandists infiltrating the U.S. to spread division based on class, race, nationality and religion, an issue that ends with what amounts to a three-page, 20-panel lecture about Americans needing to all band together as a united people to defeat the Axis in the war. 

There are a couple of one-page strips in which Wonder Woman and Doiby Dickles explain the importance of saving paper to the war effort, another strip in which Wondy praises President Roosevelt's work with the March of Dimes and, in issue #21, which isn't otherwise a war-related story, the bottom of each page includes a little rhyme encouraging kids to help the war effort through efforts to invest or save material, like "Every Time You Buy a Stamp, You Feed the Flame in Freedom's Lamp!" or "If You Still Have Metal Scrap, Turn It In To Beat The Jap."

And then there's spring of 1945's issue #24, on the cover of which our heroes have assembled in a theater balcony to watch a film about war-like Germany, the text reading "All-Star Comics Presents This Is Our Enemy!"

The story is a doozy, and made me, an adult reader coming to it 80 years after it was created, awfully uncomfortable because of its stridency (I'm assuming it hit differently with children in the 1940s, though).

It opens with a splash page with prose reading:

This is the story of a nation—a degenerate nation whose people throughout the centuries have always been willing to follow their military leaders into endless, bloody, but futile wars!

What was the reason for their constant belligerency? It was due entirely to a mad notion that they were a master race and destined to rule the world!

See, the story says, it's not just the Nazi regime running the show now that is bad, but Germany and its people are just terrible and, what more, they always have been terrible! 

The JSA is presented with a young man who has been drafted, but who isn't convinced that America should really be fighting Germany at all. He's not a coward or afraid to fight, "It's just that I...I resent being fooled!", he says.

He makes various arguments, including that "Germany is in Europe...which makes it Europe's problem— Not ours!"

The JSA members make various counter arguments, but none seem to work until The Conscience of Man, whom Hawkman just calls "Conscience" for short, reappears. She offers to send the young man, Dick Amber, back through German history, where he would essentially incarnate as a person native to the country at that time, and he could see for himself Germany's inherent war-like character and conquering ambition. In each stop, he's watched over by a different member of the JSA. They generally just appear at the climax of the sequence to punch out some German bad guys.

And so Dick starts out as a Teutonic knight in 1250 A.D. as he and his fellow knight make war on the Poles, and then he's whisked to 1725, where he spends a lifetime as a friend of Frederick Wilhelm, who will grow up to be king and wage wars of conquest, and on and on for four more stops, until 1923, when Hitler is starting to amass followers. ("Hitler? Phooey!" Johnny Thunder says, his head emerging from a cloud to scold an early follower of the future fuhrer. "You aren't paying any attention to that crack-brain, are you?" he says, before remembering he's not supposed to get involved and retreating back into his cloud).

 

Dick eventually returns to the present, a changed man, and makes with a speech:

I have learned the truth! That...for many centuries...Germanic rulers and military leaders have led a willing German people into war after war!

And, believe me, all this senseless useless, bloodletting was only for the personal satisfaction of these same military men and rulers...to build up their own ego! 

...

Unless we uproot the idea of a German "master race" above all religions, races and nationalities, Germany will always be a menace to peace!

Well, a comic book could hardly get more political than that, right?

Oh, it can...?

Yes indeed, for the story's last page ends with a four-point "Formula For A Lasting Peace" written out on a scroll of paper that Wonder Woman gestures to, calling for a complete re-education of the German people, guaranteed by the allied nations, who must "get together in a 'World Organization For Permanent Peace'."

The plan is signed by the individual members of the Justice Society of America, as you can see above.

Now that's politics in comics. Some fans today whine if Superman says "a better tomorrow" instead of "the American way", while, 80 years ago, Gardner Fox had Wonder Woman and the also-rans of the JSA making specific foreign policy prescriptions!

Looking at comics.org, it would seem that All-Star Comics would run for 33 more issues, so I imagine three more DC Finest volumes could collect the rest of the series, although so far DC has announced any more Justice Society of America comics (UPDATE: I was told via Bluesky that the page-count per issue shrunk as time went on, so maybe it won't take quite so many volumes to collect the rest of the series after all). I would buy them if they did; as tedious as reading them may be sometimes, I'm still fascinated by these comics, and it looks like future issues will contain more supervillains, with Solomon Grundy, The Wizard and Per Degaton on the coves of All-Star #33-35, and #37 boasts this striking cover of an alliance of various name villains.

I wonder if DC would do better collecting the 17 issues of the 1976 revival, though...or might that book be a little too Earth-2-y at this point...? (Scanning the covers, I see a lot of Power Girl, Huntress and gray-at-the-temples Superman). 

Godzilla's Monsterpiece Theatre (IDW Productions) Two guys whose comics I like to keep an eye on are Tom Scioli, who I came to regard as a literal genius after reading 2014-2016's The Transformers vs. G.I. Joe (and haven't seen any work of his since to make me reevaluate that assessment), and Godzilla, whose licensed comics aren't always great, but usually have great potential, potential that is quite often realized.

So Scioli making a Godzilla comic? Yes, that sounds like it was commissioned specifically to appeal to me. The result, Godzilla's Monsterpiece Theatre, is a particularly weird comic, as the Fantastic Four #1 homage cover above suggests. 

Somewhere along the line, Godzilla license holder IDW Productions seems to have had an important epiphany, one that unlocked all kinds of unusual takes on the King of the Monsters. That is, to tell a Godzilla narrative, all you really need are two things, and these things only need to intersect occasionally, rather than "seem like something Toho would make a movie out of" or even "make sense". 

First, you need Godzilla, the huge, unstoppable monster, engaged in the doing of Godzilla things, like wrecking cities or fighting other giant monsters. 

Secondly, you need human beings, doing human being things...and these humans, and the things they can do, can be any human beings, engaged in pretty much any human activities.

So you can make Godzilla comics where the humans are pirates, or little girls at summer camp, or Australian skateboarders, or superheroes, or the Mighty Morphin Power Rangers. Whatever; there are no real rules here.

Can the human characters even be those from F. Scott Fitzgerald's classic 1925 novel The Great Gatsby?  

I don't see why not. 

Neither, apparently, did IDW nor Scioli, which is how we got Godzilla's Monsterpiece Theatre. 

The obscenely wealthy, intriguingly mysterious millionaire Jay Gatsby, who Scioli draws as a handsome blonde Adonis in pink suits, hosts lavish parties at his mansion in West Egg, Long Island, all in a vain attempt to draw the attention of the love of his life, Daisy Buchanan, who has married another man and now lives directly across the bay from him.

So much, so familiar, right? And then on page six we see Godzilla's huge feet stomping toward Gatsby's estate, now bathed in blue flames. The leviathan leers through the windows. Gatsby and new friend (and novel narrator) Nick Carraway hop into a speedboat and cross the bay to save Daisy, Godzilla hot on their heels. They load her and her asshole husband Tom Buchanan aboard and take off, but Godzilla smashes the boat, and Daisy is lost at sea.

And so, in addition to hiring detectives to search for Daisy, Gatsby pours his money into the creation of G-Force—the "G" stands for "Gatsby", of course; what else might it stand for...? This private military is devoted to the eradication of Godzilla, who quickly reappears in New York City, where they have their first battle with the monster, seemingly driving it away after a thrilling rampage (The bit with the teeth and the train? Sublime).

Throughout the first issue/chapter, Scioli juxtaposes sentences and paragraphs of Fitzgerald's novel, here also presented as Nick's writing, making this inspired comic something of a collaboration between the late Fitzgerald and Scioli...whether the former likes it or not, I suppose (There are some obvious changes here and there, though, like Fitzgerald's "line of yellow windows" becoming a "line of yellow teeth," for example, above a splash in which he see an oddly grimacing Godzilla towering over Manhattan.) 

Now, I have to imagine that as cool, as crazy, as funny, as post-modern or punk rock or whatever you like to call it a "Godzilla Vs. The Great Gatsby" comic might be, I have to assume that someone at IDW—perhaps even Scioli himself—realized that it might be a little too niche, even for the world of mainstream comic books, which essentially nothing but niches these days. 

And so there are other characters. The cover of the trade names Gatsby, Sherlock Holmes, the "Time Machinist" (that is, the character from H.G. Wells' 1895 novel The Time Machine) and, of course, a character identified as "?", who is quite clearly Dracula (And the original version, from Bram Stoker's 1897 novel, the events of which he had apparently survived, rather than the more famous filmic version). 

So is this Scioli doing a Godzilla vs. The Lague of Extraordinary Gentlemen riff...? 

It sure seems like it from that cover, but no, not really. Gatsby remains the main human protagonist, and Daisy, almost immediately found washed up on a beach, and Tom ("Do you think I'd let my wife go on this fool misadventure without me?!") are key members of the supporting cast joining Gatsby as he travels the world, hunting Godzilla with various fantastical weapons with literary origins of their own. (As for Nick, he seems to have suffered a nervous breakdown after his encounter with Godzilla in the city, but not to worry: Gatsby has found Nick's "manuscript" and has decided "as a tribute to my good friend to complete his work, to tell the story of this moment in time, this turning point in history.")

Gatsby approaches various allies to add to G-Force, some of them real people, some of them fictional characters from popular literature, one a hilariously fictionalized real person (he's named on the cover of the second issue, if you don't want to enjoy the surprise of his introduction) and a few characters extrapolated from works of literature, being the descendants of familiar characters. One character, the mysterious Time Machinist, approaches Gatsby, retuning to this point in time haunted by the knowledge of what Godzilla will do in the future.

In addition to a string of unlikely cameos, Scioli mixes and matches the characters in fun ways, many of which make perfect sense, and so we get to see the elderly Sherlock Holmes fight Dracula, for example, and, later, Dracula professes an unhealthy interest in Daisy, complicating the Jay/Tom rivalry for her affections with a third party, this one an even bigger villain than Tom, but also supernaturally irresistible.

Meanwhile Scioli's Godzilla, which he draws to resemble a particularly sharp-eyed, -clawed and -toothed version of one of the Showa suits as if it had somehow come alive (A neat trick also pulled off by Jake Smith in Godzilla: War for Humanity, although Smith's art has more detail and depth than Scioli's), travels the world, destroying its most interesting monuments.

Godzilla visits London, Paris, Egypt and finally Dracula's Transylvania, destroying various landmarks in visually striking, occasionally anime-inspired ways (this Godzilla has a tendency to destroy things by cutting them perfectly in half, as if he had used a giant sword), and picking up unlikely enemies along the way. (In one scene, a mummy rises from the wreckage of a pyramid, to the horror of the men gathered around it, one of whom says, "The curse of the pharaoh Utma Utep says that whomever disturbs his tomb will be pursued to death and beyond," while the mummy proceeds, arms outstretched horizontally, to walk right past them. "We didn't disturb the tomb," one says, watching the mummy walk off-panel. "Godzilla did." Naturally, the mummy will play a role later.)

It all comes to a head at Dracula's castle, where he has taken Daisy in order to make her his bride, and also attempt to gain control of Godzilla with his mesmerism powers. Neither plan comes off, although there are a lot of big, splashy, instantly iconic scenes, including maybe the last thing I ever expected to see in a comic book, even after I started reading this very comic book. (The splash page wherein the Time Machinist says, "He has truly become...The Great Gatsby," those last three words in a big special font as if taken right from a book cover? One of the coolest things I've seen in a comic book in I don't know how long.)

Now I know I have mainly been talking about the story, rather than the art, which is a failing that comes from my being a writer rather than an artist. If you've read Scioli's work before—and I do hope you have, given how great it is—then you should know what to expect. It's definitely still Jack Kirby-influenced, although he's not working in the same deliberate Kirby pastiche of some of his earliest comic work, and his art is still tending towards simplification, the pages consisting of a few big, bold, flat, colorful images, those colors carefully chosen, and tending to be solid and primary, with no real gradation.

Scioli's image-making power is on full display here, as he approaches Godzilla's acts of destruction as works of cartoon art, symbol acting upon symbol to look cool and have as much impact as possible, rather than necessarily detailing what, say, Godzilla bathed in flames, or Godzilla being shot through with electricity while gripping the Eiffel Tower, or what Godzilla smashing The Great Sphinx of Giza might look like "in real life."

Scioli also just does some really fun stuff, my favorite example being a splash page in which Jay and Tom, each holding a hammer and stake, enter a cross-section of Dracula's castle, and Scioli draws dozens of tiny Jay Gatsbys as they explore the many rooms and face the many dangers of the castle, the multiple figures showing dynamic action the way that some artists used to draw, say, Spider-Man in action, but here taken to the most extreme degree.

Here's a bad photo:

The book is full of weird, fun, inventive, Tom Scioli-ish stuff like that.

Because Godzilla is Godzilla and Gatsby is the hero—and this is neither 1954's Gojira nor Fitzgerald's novel—neither can be killed nor can they even really be defeated. So, after the climax, which does finally kill off Dracula, the two spent adversaries essentially just part ways, the time and space allotted for their battle at an end. (If this were a Toho movie from the later Showa era, they might have fallen into the sea together, or a convenient volcano might have erupted to signal the end of hostilities.)

Godzilla heads east, literally walking into the rising sun, while Gatsby, Daisy and Tom head home, Daisy again choosing to stay with Tom over Jay. He doesn't get the girl, but he doesn't get killed, either, so he gets a far happier ending than Fitzgerald gave him (Hey, that's a spoiler that is literally 100 years old. Pretty sure that's the oldest spoiler I've ever written...!)

Anyway, this comic book is pretty much the best thing ever, and I would highly encourage you to read it, if you haven't already.

Of course, I am curious how it would read if one has never read The Great Gatsby (or at least seen one of the many movies), just as I'm not entirely sure how it would read had someone never seen any Godzilla movies, although I think the imagery of those films is more ingrained in our pop culture than any of that from Fitzgerald's novel.

I suppose, to be on the safe side, if you haven't read The Great Gatsby, read that, and then pick up Godzilla's Monsterpiece Theatre....

BORROWED:

Birds of Prey Vol. 3: Bird Undercover (DC Comics) The latest Birds of Prey trade paperback collects issues #14-19 of the series, comprising two story arcs, each with two different artists. Sam Basri draws the four-part title arc, while Juan Cabal draws the two-part "Divide and Conquer" that follows it. 

Both seem to be much smaller scale and to deal with smaller stakes than the stories of the first two volumes, and, perhaps because of this, felt a little bit more like Birds of Prey stories. That is, they seem to be a bit more grounded and realistic than the more fantastical arcs dealing with Amazons, Greek gods and interdimensional travel; more espionage than superhero. (It's all a matter of degree, of course, as Bids is still a DC Universe superhero title...these particular stories just felt a bit more Batman than JLA to me, if that makes sense.)

In "Bird Undercover", we see Cassandra Cain in a quite cool outfit interviewing/fighting for a job as some kind of security consultant for a shady corporation. Said corporation has apparently taken various Amazons captive, and is doing something horrible to them; Cass' job is to make sure they are there, and then call in the rest of the team to bust them out.

Here, that team includes not only series regular Oracle, Black Canary and Big Barda, but also guest-stars Grace Choi and Obsidian, both of whom Basri draws as extremely big and buff (And neither of whom I've seen anywhere in quite a while). 

There is, of course, a complication, and the team loses contact with Cass, fretting over whether or not to intervene, balancing their concern for her well-being with endangering the mission (and thus the Amazons and other victims).

Like I said, it's much smaller scale than the previous stories, but it's also much more emotionally satisfying, I think, as Thompson presents us with a great Cassandra Cain action story, while also showing us how the team feel about one another and how they deal with the stresses of their job...I can't remember the last superhero comic I've read in which the characters worried so much. 

While I still think it's a bummer that the book's initial artist, Leonardo Romero, didn't stick around (he does continue to contribute covers, including that for the collection above), Basri's art is so great, I didn't really miss Romero here. Thompson has a welcome habit of writing very distinct characters—even the handful of bad guys here are quite distinct in personality—and Basri follows suit in his designs and rendering for the characters.

I thought the bad guys' super-drug that turns those injected with it into Hulked-out monsters bulging muscles streaked with pulsing veins, was a little much, with Basri drawing its effects kinda like it was the steroid/helium blend that later artists tended to depict Bane's venom injections with. Surely by this point, we know that a Cassandra Cain that wants to hurt you is terrifying, whether or not she has huge biceps. 

Anyway, if Basri were to become the title's regular artist going forward, I wouldn't mind at all.

In "Divide and Conquer," Oracle learns that the ninjas who are traditionally after Sin are still after Sin, and so, with Black Canary and Sin, she sets a trap, in which the bait beats the holy hell out of all the ninjas, hopefully convincing them to leave Sin alone from now on (The goddess she shares her body with, Megaera, providing quite a bit of unexpected help in the matter).

Meanwhile, to give Batgirl and Barda something to do, they go to that weird magic place from the first volume to help out Constantine; it's mainly busy work, it seems, but it's a visually interesting place and, in costume, they're both visually interesting characters. (I must confess that it's a little weird that Constantine has become something of a Birds of Prey regular; that's certainly not something I would have expected to ever be the case, say, 20 years ago...)

Oh, and I noticed that in this volume Sin no longer has the green streak in her hair. I wonder if someone at DC heard me when I pointed out that Asian women-with-colored-streaks-in-their-hair is a prevalent media stereotype that annoys real Asian women or, more likely, they heard an actual Asian woman raise the same concern somewhere...?

Anyway, this was a very enjoyable book, and probably my favorite of the three so far. 

Now That We Draw Vol. 2 (Seven Seas Entertainment) The cover of writer Kyu Takahata and artist Yuwji Kaba's second volume of Now That We Draw is much less embarrassing than the first (Covered in this column). I felt I could read this one in public without feeling like a pervert. I think the imagery focused on female lead Miyamoto Niina has been toned down a bit too, but maybe just a bit...? 

The book opens with her, dressed only in her underwear and a robe, stumbling into male lead Uehara Yuuki, falling on top of him. Rather than being embarrassed, though, she's excited: "It really happened," she says, excitedly, "The suggestive collision happened in real life!" Of course, the premise of the series is that the two young aspiring manga artists are complete neophytes at romance, and are thus teaming up to pretend to date, in order to get more experience with relationships, and thus, hopefully, material for their manga.

There's also a scene where, when Uehara says he need to get better at drawing the human figure, Miyamoto invites him to the beach, where she poses for him in her bikini. Too embarrassed to look directly at her body though (something artist Yuwji certainly isn't afraid to draw), he looks past it, and thus his art isn't really any better ("I'm pretty sure my boobs are bigger than that," she says, examining his sketchbook).

That's also where, when some guys start hitting on her, he feels a weird tightness in his chest and is unsure of what this new feeling is (It's jealousy, and he'll experience it a second time, with more disastrous results, later in the book). 

This volume also reveals the rather touching origins of each character's desire of growing up to be an artist, and progress in their budding careers, as each gets a job as a manga assistant, for an artist of the opposite sex who is certain to complicate the romantic arc between the two, as unlikely as that seems at this point  As I said before, Uehara seems to need to have a growth spurt before the two even begin to look like a potential couple). 

The manga-ka Miyamoto will be working on is a legendary one, a very popular female artist with an entire staff...who actually turns out to be a handsome young man, one who is, according to Miyamoto, "super hot!!" and "exactly my type!"

Meanwhile, Uehara is assigned to work with a mysterious artist who is reportedly very difficult to work with, who turns out to be a very cute (and, when he meets her, very underdressed) young girl about his age, despite how much more skilled (and successful) she is. 

I remain intrigued by the premise and seeing how on Earth the creators are ultimately going to get these two characters together, as, despite the similarities, they are so very physically different from one another.

Oh, one thing that I'm not sure any of you will be able to answer or not. On two occasions during this volume, adult characters refer to Miyamoto as a gyaru. This despite the fact that she doesn't have the dyed blonde hair, tanned-skin or over-the-top make-up of gals I've seen in other manga, like Manbagi Rumiko from Komi Can't Communicate or Miku Okazaki from Gal Gohan. Are there different styles of gyaru and, if so, what about Miyamoto denotes her as one? Is it just a fashion thing...? 

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Vol. 1: Return to New York (IDW Productions) When IDW announced that they were relaunching their long-running Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles comic with a new #1 and a new creative team, I had every intention of buying the eventual trade collection. 

I mean, I like the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. I like everything of writer Jason Aaron's that I've read. before. The high-profile, rotating artists on the first handful of issues—Rafael Albuqueque, Chris Burnham, Cliff Chiang, Joelle Jones, Darick Robertson—sounded intriguing. And after some dozen years and who knows how many hundreds of pages, a new direction and potential starting point for what has long since become the longest-ever TMNT narrative seemed like a pretty good idea.

But then I noticed the trade was already being ordered by my local library before I bought a copy and, given that I already have way too many books on my groaning shelves, I decided to save myself $20 and just borrow it rather than buy it. That's why it's down here in this section of the column, rather than up top, with the other books I was so excited about that I had decided I had to own them (It's occurred to me that this format has probably outlived its usefulness; like, do any of you care whether I buy a particular book or borrow it from the library? At one point, I figured it denoted a level of interest/excitement regarding the books, but, like I said, I now have so many books that I'm buying fewer and fewer...)

In the end, I'm glad I didn't buy this. At $19.99 for six issues (plus a 10-page short and a variant cover gallery), it's a pretty great value, but, overall, I wasn't too terribly impressed with the book and can't imagine it being one I wish to read over and over again. 

It certainly starts strong, though.

The first four issues of the book each featured a different one of the four original Turtles (the newer, fifth turtle, Jennika, is surely appearing in one of the other IDW book set in their TMNT universe, but I don't know which one), all of whom have been separated and scattered, leading extremely different lives after something mysterious and as-of-yet-unrevealed happened to them. And each of these issues is dawn by a different artist.

After a 10-page short featuring Donatello drawn by Burnham (taken from the pages of the line resetting TMNT Alpha one-shot), we get a story of Raphael in prison, where he is apparently serving as some kind of undercover enforcer for the warden, drawn by Jones; the story of Michelangelo in Japan, where he is a feted celebrity and the star of his own goofy live-action TV show, by Albuquerque; the story of Leonardo on the banks of the Ganges River, where he seeks enlightenment, and develops a weird relationship with the local population of regular turtles, by Chiang; and, finally, the full story of Donatello, half-starved and half-mad, being kept in a cage at a weird safari park, where customers pay to fight and kill mutants, by Burnham.

That accounts for much of the book, and it's pretty intriguing. Each issue is very different from the next, in terms of premise, tone and, obviously, the visuals, and all have a suspenseful element of mystery about them, as the reader is left wondering why the protagonists aren't together at the moment, and how each of them ended up where they are.

While there are few clues offered in the stories themselves, they all sort of end the same way, with the Foot Clan attacking the Turtles where they are, and thus driving them to seek one another out, so that by the end of the fourth issue, they are all in the same place at the same time again, even if not exactly all on the same page (Raph and Mike are at one another's throats about whatever had happened prior to the story, and Donnie is still half-mad...I'm not entirely sure if this is the result of his messing with time, space and magic at the end of the previous volume of the title, or of his treatment as a captive or a combination of both things).

Along the way, it's teased out that Karai's Foot Clan seems to be operating alongside a new villain, the new New York City District Attorney with the unlikely name of Heironymus Hale. Issue #5, drawn by Robertson, focuses on Hale, who he is and how he came to be, and it is pretty much free from the Turtles, who only appear in a quartet of panels showing each being attacked by the Foot.

The issue opens with Hale on the steps of the state Supreme Cout building, telling the press he won't be taking any questions at this time ("Or ever"), and then ordering what appears to be his personal security force, "The Foot Patrol", to violently dispense with the "mob" that is there to protest against them. 

Dressed in red and black, with their faces covered with masks and wrap-around sunglasses, they look like a combination of regular Foot ninja and our over-militarized police forces. (The issue came out in December of last year, so if Aaron's Foot Patrol reminds you of ICE, that's just one more example of the current American government acting like comic book supervillains, rather than the comics addressing their actions; more likely, Hale's new force is meant to reflect the old, run-of-the-mill form of overbearing, abusive, militarized policing, of the sort we saw so many examples of during the nationwide Black Lives Matter protests.)

So the new villain is apparently an evil, species-ist (read: racist), wannabe fascist who has all of the power and prestige that comes with being in control of a government institution. With the title being launched between the end of the first Trump administration and the beginning of the next, that probably seems pretty timely, but, given that it's taking place in what is essentially another mainstream superhero comic book series, it also seems a little tired.

I mean, DC had Lex Luthor elected president of the United States in 2001. Marvel had Norman Osborn put in charge of H.A.M.M.E.R., and thus was the government's Boss of All Superheroes, throughout its 2009 "Dark Reign" era. More recently, Marvel had made The Kingpin Wilson Fisk the mayor of New York City. And, closer to home of course, long-time villain Baxter Stockman was the mayor of NYC in the pages of the previous volume of TMNT and its related comics.

So, between real bad guys being in charge of the federal government in real life and a string of bad guys in charge in the comics over the last 25 years or so, Aaron positing an evil DA? It doesn't seem particularly new, and thus isn't terribly interesting, let alone compelling.

It's certainly not as interesting as the handful of unanswered questions that the first four issues raised, including, I suppose, why the Foot has become enemies of our heroes once again, but Aaron doesn't really address those in the sixth and final issue in this collection, which was drawn by the series' regular artist-to-be, Juan Ferreyra.

That issue involves the Turtles bickering with one another as they return to the city (see the sub-title), where they find that it has completely turned against them, and they are branded criminals and chased around and fought. Not only is the Foot Patrol after them, but so too are regular police officers and even firemen. It ends with our heroes seemingly cornered in Times Square.

Aaron's off to a fairly strong start then, seeding the narrative with enough question marks to guarantee a degree of suspense, more so about what happened into the past to get us to this point than what might happen in the future (This being a Turtles comic, we can safely assume the Turtles will survive their current predicament and go one to have many more years or decades of adventures, of course). 

On the other hand, the Turtles fighting the Foot Clan yet again isn't exactly a terribly exciting premise, nor, as I've said, is the prospect of another bad guy-in-charge storyline. I suppose we'll see.

I appreciated the opportunity this book gave us to see so many different artists draw these so familiar characters. Burnham's Turtles were my favorites. He seemed to draw the beak/mouth area on them just right, so that the characters looked like "themselves", as I remembered them from the old Mirage comics. 

I also liked that he tended to draw them a little smaller and thinner...particularly Donatello, whom I think is meant to be significantly thinner than his brothers, perhaps because he was being starved, and perhaps because the gradual tendency to depict the characters as more physically distinct from one another across various media (and Donnie usually being taller and or thinner than the others). Regardless, he's still notably thinner in the sixth issue, when Ferreyra draws them all.

Burnham's art also has a lot of dark, thick ink on the page, and thus has a grittier look that calls to mind Kevin Eastman and Peter Laird's Turtles art (Eastman continues to contribute covers; you can see some of them in the back of the book).

I also liked Roberston's issue, although, as I said, we only get a glimpse of what his Turtles might have looked like, the rest of the book being devoted to Hale, the Foot, Casey Jones and, in a few panels, April, Bebop and Rocksteady (Robertson also drew some covers featuring his version of the Turtles, which you can see in the back).

Chiang's art was also quite notable, perhaps because of how dramatically it differed from that of all the other artists. He colored his own issue, and his art is notably cleaner, flatter and with brighter, more solid colors than those in any other issue here. I certainly wouldn't mind seeing Chiang do a miniseries or something with these characters in the future. 

As always, there were a gazillion variant covers, enough that there's a 15-page gallery in the back, most of those pages featuring four covers a piece. There are some surprising names among the artists who drew them, including Lee Weeks, Peach Momoko, Sean Murphy and Lee Bermejo (whose scaly Turtle skin recalls the weirdly realistic Turtles of the late Michael Zulli). I liked the four portrait-style ones from a J. Gonzo, whose big-eyed Turtles reminded me a bit of the way Eric Talbot draws them...and, look at that, there's even a Talbot cover, featuring a wounded and mean-looking Raphel.

Oh, one unexpected aspect of the book? Once the Turtles get back together and shed the clothes they were wearing—Raphael's prison jump suit, Donatello's hooded cloak, etc.—they appear as they traditionally have, in just their masks, belts, pads and straps. But after reading Sophie Campbell's fairly lengthy run, where the Turtles were almost always dressed in at least pants or shorts or capes, they all look so nude now...!

I think it's actually going to take me a while to get used to seeing the Turtles depicted this way again, after having spent the last few years seeing them fully dressed...

Titans Vol. 3: Hard Feelings (DC) This book collects the first six issues of writer John Layman's run on the title, which he takes over after a very brief 15-issue run by Tom Taylor (Although, if you count the Titans; Beast World tie-in miniseries, that's actually 21 issues; for context, Marv Wolfman's short-lived post-Zero Hour Arsenal-led line-up lasted 17 issues of The New Titans and an annual before the title was cancelled, and Devin Grayson wrote 20 issues of the 1999 Titans before passing the baton to a successor). 

Layman doesn't seem to stray too far from Taylor's conception of the team, which is of the Teen Titans founders and the New Teen Titans additions of Cyborg, Starfire, Raven and Changeling/Beast Boy reuniting as experienced adult heroes. 

Still, there are some changes, many of them made right out of the gate in Layman's very first issue. Flash Wally West gives the Titans a tour of the new Justice League satellite headquarters, as the heroes are now all officially members of the League, which, thanks to whatever Mark Waid is doing in the pages of Justice League Unlimited, is now no longer such an exclusive club, but something more akin to the old All-Star Squadron, wherein seemingly every active superhero is now considered a member in good standing (I guess I'll be catching up shortly, as the first JLU trade will be released the first week of August).  (There is some early, brief discussion about how exactly this will work, with the Titans remaining a team within the bigger team, and, later, we'll see some gaps between the way in which the Titans and the League seem to want to operate, but Layman doesn't get stuck on the mechanics of the new status quo.)

The Flash, wearing an astonishingly terrible new costume with a lot of black in it, says he's stepping away from the team, so he can focus on being The Flash and on the Justice League (Starfire asks the obvious question in an aside, about how this makes sense given the fact that the Titans are also the Justice League).

Tempest, we're told in dialogue, will also be stepping away to focus on the goings-on in Atlantis.

Arsenal, who has been notably MIA thus far, will be joining the team.

And, finally, Donna Troy will be assuming the role of team leader, something that her and the other characters talk about more-or-less constantly for these half-dozen issues.

Oh, and the team is moving to a new HQ, too, abandoning the still-new Bludhaven Titans Tower that they moved into at the beginning of the series to move into a new underground base in New York City. 

What hasn't changed, unfortunately, is series' focus on rehashing conflicts with old Titans foes. During Taylor's run, that meant that, aside from the ongoing issues with Amanda Waller, the team dealt with a new iteration of Brother Blood and then Trigon. Here, Layman uses two members of the Fearsome Five and The Clock King (who lead a villain team against Sean McKeever's Teen Titans) among a series of villains (which also includes a manipulated Killer Frost and The Psycho-Pirate), the villain behind all of the others being Deathstroke, The Terminator.

Here his intent seems to be founding a new version of The Crime Syndicate for some reason but, regardless, it means that the Titans are once again fighting another member of their traditional rogues gallery instead of doing...well, literally anything else. 

While Layman's issues move swiftly through the changes and they are presented as a series of one-off encounters with various villains that is clearly all part of bigger, behind-the-scenes plot by Deathstroke, it's not as tight as one might hope. For example, both Clock King, exhibiting new powers apparently gained during the climax of Absolute Power, and Psycho-Pirate are employed by Deathstroke to drive various players crazy, and it seems odd to have two entirely separate villains doing the exact same work. 

While Taylor didn't have a consistent artistic partner during his run (the title launched with the great Nicola Scott handling pencils, but she only lasted about an arc), Layman's run is mostly drawn and colored by Pete Woods (Serg Acuna providing fill-in art on one issue). 

Woods has a very animated style here, the characters all look a bit more exaggerated and brighter than what I expected based on his previous art. Coupled with Wes Abbott's lettering, which foregoes black borders around the dialogue balloons, there's a real animated cel-like look to the panels. 

Woods doesn't get too much out of the ordinary to draw, however; it's mostly just the expected heroes and the expected villains, in standard superhero settings (the streets of New York City, various labs and bases, etc). I did rather like his revamp of The Clock King's costume, which is a more highly stylized take on what he wore on Batman: The Animated Series. 

I was a little disappointed with his Boom Tubes, which he basically just draws as normal portals through space and not, you know, Boom Tubes, but then, I feel that's pretty common for current DC artists these days, as they've become so common, not just employed by Cyborg on behalf of the Titans but, as far as I can tell, by the new version of the League as well. 

Anyway, Titans is, as it was under Taylor, perfectly competently made, just fine super-comics, unfortunately lacking in any new ideas, which makes it a not terribly exciting book to read. 

REVIEWED: 

Good Boy (First Second) I talked a bit about Andy Hirsch's book, which tells the tale of an anxious young boy and his dog's budding relationship, on Bluesky a bit already. Hirsch does a phenomenal job of discussing and depicting childhood anxiety, I thought, and handles it visually through the power of comics quite remarkably. More here. 

Iron Man: Something Strange (Abams Fanfare) Dean Hale and Douglas Holgate continue the "Mighty Marvel Team-Up" series from Mike Maihack's trilogy of Spider-Man books. Here awesome facial hair bros Iron Man and Doctor Strange team up to deal with an extra-dimensional menace, which a suspicious-of-magic Tony Stark turns into a contest between the pair and their respective disciplines. The stakes? Their moustaches! Guest-starring Spider-Man, Ms. Marvel and the movie Avengers. More here. 

Superman's Good Guy Gang (DC Comics) I read and reviewed this before seeing the new Superman movie (the comic book came out first), and I had wondered how much cartoonist Rob Justus might have known about the movie while he was making it, as it looked and read a lot like a short comic inspired by the first trailers for the movie (In addition to starring Superman, it includes Green Lantern Guy Gardner, a Hawkgirl, Lex Luthor and a has a Mister Terrific cameo). Well, I guess Justus must have known at least a little bit more than just what he saw in the trailers, as he knew to include the word "gang" in the title. 

So, question: Is "Good Guy Gang" a better team name than "Justice Gang"...? I think so, but I guess they should vote. 

I really like Justus' version of Guy; this one is supposed to be a little kid, but he sure gets the hair and attitude of the character down, despite how far removed his art style is from that of, say Kevin Maguire or Joe Staton. Anyway, I reviewed it here. 

Walt Disney's Mickey Mouse and the Amazing Lost Ocean (Fantagraphics) Denis-Piere Filippi and Silvio Camboni's beautiful, over-sized album tells an epic, steampunk-style adventure in which Goofy is a brilliant inventor (despite still talking like, well, Goofy) and Peg Leg Pete is now "Steampunk Pete." The lost ocean of the title? It actually is amazing, and almost certainly not what you expect, despite the cover kinda sorta spoiling its nature a bit. Like so many of these modern Disney comics, it's a great read, and one that pretty much anyone can pick up and enjoy, regardless of how many comics (Disney or otherwise) they may have read before. More here. 

The End of JLA Pt. 2: "The Tenth Circle"

Certainly someone at DC Comics in 2004 thought that reteaming writer/artist John Byrne with Chris Claremont was a pretty big deal. 

Both were among the superstars of mainstream superhero comics in the1980s, thanks, in large part, to their popular work at competitor Marvel Comics throughout the decade. 

Claremont had a 17-year stint on Marvel's X-Men characters, spanning 1975 to 1992, during which time he created many of the franchise's characters, popularized others and delivered most of what are now considered the team's classic and most influential stories.

Byrne, meanwhile, had lengthy and well-regarded runs on Uncanny X-Men, Fantastic Four, The Sensational She-Hulk and X-Men spin-off Alpha Flight. Teamed with Claremont for a time on the X-Men, he drew some of those classic and influential stories, like "The Dark Phoenix Saga" and "Days of Future Past."

Byrne also did plenty of pivotal work by DC, of course, most notably recreating the Superman franchise for the modern, post-Crisis market. He also drew the crossover series Legends, served as writer/artist for a rather lengthy run on Wonder Woman and spent a few years on New Gods/Jack Kirby's Fourth World, as well as drawing and writing another event crossover miniseries, Genesis. He also had some big Elseworlds projects and a pair of inventive DC/Marvel crossovers on his resume.

Claremont's DC output up to that point, meanwhile, wasn't exactly remarkable. He created and wrote the 1995-1998 series Sovreign Seven, penned a 1997 Superman and Wonder Woman Elseworlds miniseries and contributed a 10-page Fire story to an issue of anthology title Showcase '96. Oh, and Claremont also penned a six-issue JLA miniseries in 2003, JLA: Scary Monsters, although I confess that, at this point, all I remember of it are Arthur Adams' covers. 

Still, it's easy to imagine someone at DC thinking Byrne and Claremont reuniting for a Justice League story would be a big deal, and that the creative team, rounded out by inker Jerry Ordway, would be as significant a draw as some of the past big-name creators on the title, like Grant Morrison, Mark Waid, Bryan Hitch and Howard Porter. (And hey, maybe it was a draw...for any older readers who remembered the X-Men of the early '80s, anyway. In my late 20s at the time, I had barely read anything from either man, and I had considered their appearance in the pages of JLA at that particular juncture to be a particularly weird move).

Their story was "The Tenth Circle", which ran from JLA #94-99. Byrne and Claremont shared writing credits on the six-part story, while Byrne penciled it and Ordway inked it. 

It wasn't merely a matter of one of the most popular X-Men creative teams reuniting on a Justice League story, though, it was also a sort of stealth pilot for a new Doom Patrol series by Byrne (Although it's admittedly far less stealth at this point, over 20 years later; the final cover from the arc, depicting the JLA and the Doom Patrol together, was the one DC used for its first collection in 2005's JLA Vol. 15) .

Launching a new Doom Patrol out of the pages of JLA probably made some sense at the time too, as DC had in the recent-ish past used the JLA to help launch other super-team books. The 1998 JLA/Titans miniseries lead directly to a new Titans, that same year's miniseries JLA: World Without Grown-Ups immediately preceded the launch of Young Justice and 1999 JLA arc "Crisis Times Five" reunited a new version of the Justice Society, presaging the launch of JSA the month after it concluded (albeit with some significant line-up changes). 

Of course, the difference between all of those launches and this Doom Patrol launch was that Byrne and Claremont were here introducing the Doom Patrol of The Chief Niles Caulder, Robotman Cliff Steele, Negative Man Larry Trainor and Elasti-Girl Rita Farr as if they were brand-new characters being introduced here for the first time.

This, then, was to be a reboot of the then 40-year-old team, one completely unconnected to the sorts of space/time/continuity crises that DC usually organized such reboots around, not unlike the one DC did with Supergirl in the pages of Superman/Batman that year (Unlike Supergirl, though, the Doom Patrol's recent history wasn't anywhere near as weird and convoluted, nor had it drifted so far from their original conception as the post-Crisis Supergirl had; the Doom Patrol's last title was canceled just a year previously).

(And yes, admittedly it is kind of clever to put some of the X-Men's most famous creators on a story featuring the Doom Patrol, who, like Marvel's merry mutants, also debuted in 1963 and featured a wheelchair bound older man leading a team of super-powered outsiders branded as freaks by mainstream society. Interestingly, there's even a panel where Caulder uses what looks like some sort of Cerebro unit.)

So there was a lot going on in this particular story, and I don't think it all quite seemed to come together in a way that was particularly satisfying. 

In addition to telling a superhero story big enough to give each member of a sizable Justice League something to do (In addition to the "Big Seven" minus Aquaman, the team in this story also consists of The Atom, Faith and Manitou Raven), the creators also have to introduce the quartet of misfit heroes from the Doom Patrol, and they also set about introducing some new characters who would ultimately join them in the new Doom Patrol title.

The title of the story refers to the name of a group of extra-dimensional vampires, monsters that were banished from this plane of existence by Wonder Woman's mom and the other Amazons centuries ago. They currently have a representative on Earth, a vampire with an extraordinarily bad haircut and the extremely unlikely name of Crucifer. 

He lives in a castle brought over from Europe brick by brick, and commands a small band of loyal vampires, and a group of more loyal still acolytes in cloaks and hoods; these latter he is able to subjugate via mind-control, which seems to be most effective when he bites someone...but doesn't turn them all the way into vampires.

After a few chance encounters with Crucifer and his followers, the League realizes that there is a rash of child kidnappings across the county, the victims all seeming to possess the metagene and relatively minor super-powers (if this were the Marvel universe, we could call such people "mutants"), and so the heroes begin to investigate. 

Also investigating are a mysterious group based in an old Spanish fortress in the Florida Keys, a group we will gradually learn are meant to be a new, rebooted version of the original Doom Patrol (They all get something of a makeover, the most dramatic being Trainor; rather than the traditional bandages wrapping his face up like that of a mummy, he here has what looks like some kind of leather fetish mask on, and when he releases "The Negative Man," rather than the familiar streaking silhouette with an electric yellow aura, the powerful energy form now appears as a black flying skeleton in a bluish aura).

A great deal of attention is paid to a couple of kids working for Crucifer, a girl named Nudge who possesses some form of low-level mind-control and has a close relationship with a four-armed gorilla named Grunt (which is, later in the story, referred to by Caulder as a "mega-primate"), and Vortex, a boy with the power to emit some kind of powerful energy blast from his mouth, powerful enough to break through one of Green Lantern's constructs and knock him on his ass.

Meanwhile, Manitou Raven, who we see at the opening of the story, his magical telling stones and a swarm of bats presaging some upcoming disaster, has gone missing. When The Atom searches the stones for clues to his whereabouts, he ends up shrinking down to investigate them in person and then falling through some sort of dimensional portal and into a bizarre, alien microscopic world, the inhabitants of which regard visitors from our world as a god. The Atom will spend most of the arc there, and how that connects to the rest of the story isn't even suggested until the very end, making his part of the adventure feel oddly grafted-on.

Frustrating the League's efforts is the fact that, after Nudge brings a mind-controlled Superman back to the castle, Crucifer bites him on the neck, and the vampire is thus able to mentally dominate the Man of Steel (This is in rather sharp contrast with 2002's Superman #180 by Jeph Loeb and Ian Churchill, where in Dracula tries to bite Superman's neck and recoils as he burns; Superman being a "living solar battery" meaning that his blood was suffused with "the power of daylight"). 

Under Crucifer's command, Superman acts as something of a double agent, at one point kidnapping Faith (who will spend most of the arc kidnapped actually, tied to a chair in Crucifer's castle) and fighting Wonder Woman a couple of times. Crucifer even seems to kill Wonder Woman at one point, impaling her on a sword, but, thanks to the Amazons' purple ray, she gets better.

It will prove no surprise that the League eventually wins the day, our heroes storming the still-forming Doom Patrol's HQ and then teaming up with them to take on Crucifer's forces, dispatching the dumb-looking but seemingly unkillable vampire in a neat way, a sort of superhero comics twist on an element from folklore, wherein other immortals achieve their invulnerable status by hiding their hearts outside of their bodies. 

I thought Byrne and Claremont did a decent job with all of the Justice League characters, at least the ones they spent the most time juggling, and while we don't get nearly as much of the Doom Patrol, they mostly all felt like themselves (Caulder seemed a little cooler and, well, douchier than his Silver Age self, but then, he had been trending that way since Grant Morrison's Doom Patrol, hadn't he?).

Byrne had drawn most of these characters before—and, in the cases of Superman and Wonder Woman, he had drawn them a lot—although I still thought it fun to see what, say, his turn-of-the-century Batman, or Atom, or John Stewart might look like. 

And, after reading the arc to completion, I even kind of developed a love/hate feeling toward Crucifer, who is in many ways your stereotypical old horror movie vampire, but so much so (and with such a ridiculous hairstyle), that he comes around to almost being kind of...neat?

The story ends with a great two-panel sequence, wherein Batman makes a deadpan joke and turns away, and we get a silent panel showing the League's shocked reaction, the Dark Knight betraying just the slightest hint of a smile. That was pretty great.

As the last issue is winding down, Faith assures Nudge how well she fought against Crucifer and says, "I'd like to help teach you," while Vortex expresses and interest in joining Nudge and Grunt with the Doom Patrol.

"I'm intrigued by all three of you," Caulder says, adding, "Faith, as well...if you're interested!" 

They all join the departing Farr, Trainor and Steele on a teleportation platform, Robotman telling the League, "You guys ever need backup, we're there! Just call on the-- --DOOM PATROL!"

It's kind of curious that Faith leaves with Doom Patrol, as she was created by Joe Kelly specifically for his JLA run, and while she lasted some 30 issues or so in the title, she was never too terribly distinct a character, neither in her ambiguous powers, nor her personality, nor her history. 

I really can't imagine what Byrne might have saw in her, aside from the fact that with Kelley's run on JLA ending and Kelly not using her on the upcoming Justice League Elite, she was available, and perhaps Byrne wanted to use her as a sort of bridge character to the Doom Patrol...? (At any rate, she would only appear twice more time in the pages of JLA; she's among the Leaguers in Kelly, Doug Mahnke and company's JLA #100, wherein Kelly has her say in an aside, "Think stickin' with the Doom Patrol for now is best..." and later, during Kurt Busiek and Ron Garney's "Syndicate Rules" arc, she's among the heroes recruited to help the League deal with twin threats from the anti-matter universe.)

She actually didn't stay with Byrne's Doom Patrol much longer, though, leaving the book and the team with issue #5. 

As for Byrne's Doom Patrol, which he wrote and penciled while Doug Hazelwood inked the majority of the series, it only lasted 18 issues, the final one shipping in January of 2006. All in all, then, it didn't even last as long as the 22 issues of the 2001-2003 John Arcudi/Tan Eng Huat series hat it followed (and, of course, rebooted), and only about as half as long as Sovereign Seven. 

If you missed it the first time around and are curious about it after reading this post, "The Tenth Circle" was collected multiple times, including in the aforementioned JLA Vol. 15 from 2005, 2016's JLA Vol. 8 and 2020's Doom Patrol by John Byrne: The Complete Series. While the Doom Patrol business now sticks out oddly, the rest of the book is fairly evergreen, and fans of Byrne's art especially should find plenty to enjoy in it.

Next: Joe Kelly, Doug Mahnke and Tom Nguyen's "Elitism" from 2004's JLA #100.

On the first 450 pages of Marvel's second Ghost Rider (via 2023's Ghost Rider: Danny Ketch Epic Collection: Vengeance Reborn)

As I noted after reading 2005's Essential Ghost Rider Vol. 1, many of the things I associated with Marvel's Ghost Rider character were absent from his earliest adventures, and I assumed they must have either been introduced later in the title, which ran for a total of 81 issues between 1973 and 1983, or have been innovations that accompanied the introduction of the second of Marvel's flaming-skulled, motorcycle riding Ghost Rider, the Danny Ketch version from the 1990s.

Beyond curiosity about when the character started swinging chains or driving foes mad with his "Penance Stare," after spending so much time with the Satan-powered Johnny Blaze of the 1970s, I was also curious to see how the character might have been updated for a new readership a generation or so later. 

Luckily, my library had a copy of 2023's Ghost Rider: Danny Ketch Epic Collection: Vengeance Reborn, which collects the first 12 issues of the1990 Ghost Rider series, a series that would ultimately run 93 issues and not be cancelled until 1998. It also collects an eight-issue run of the character and Wolverine from Marvel Comics Presents and his guest-appearances in an issue apiece of Marc Spector: Moon Knight and Doctor Strange. (As well as some backmatter of some interest, like some pin-ups and covers, a Fred Hembeck comic strip and a 1991 prose piece from writer Howard Mackie about his reinvention of the character.)

My curiosity was sated. 

It was indeed this series that introduced such aspects of the character like the chain, the flaming-wheeled motorcycle and the Penance Stare (While the two live-action films featured the Johnny Blaze secret identity, it's now abundantly clear that the Ghost Rider in them was actually the later, Ketch version). 

And, somewhat surprising to me, the character was very, very different from the original, the connections between the two Ghost Riders apparently not being made until later than Mackie's initial resurrection of the character (somewhat frustratingly, this Ghost Rider's origins don't start to be spoken of at all until the last few issues collected, about the same time that a mysterious, red-haired motorcyclist who would turn out to be Blaze starts making brief appearances; in fact, the last issue of Ghost Rider collected herein ends with a next issue box reading, "Next Month...Johnny Blaze arrive[s] in Manhattan!")

Here are some random thoughts on these comics, in the same bullet-pointed random thought format as my previous posts on Essential Ghost Rider Vol. 1 and Champions Classic Vol. 1...

•First, I was struck by how extremely different the two Ghost Riders are, despite visual details in common, like the flaming skulls for heads, the leather jackets, the motorcycles. 

Their powers, for example, are quite different. Both are tougher and stronger than mere mortals, of course, but the second Ghost Rider seems more-or-less invulnerable, able to survive most punishment, even reconstituting himself when he's blown up, as well as super-strong, bending a gun with one hand. 

And while Johnny's "super-powers" were limited to projecting "hellfire" from his hands (and occasionally summoning a motorcycle made of pure hellfire), Danny fights instead with a magical chain, which he usually uses to entangle opponents, but which can also stiffen into a spear or separate its links into projectiles. He also possesses his "Penance Stare," which Mackie describes thusly upon its first use, upon a low-level hood:

Eldon Lambert peers into eyes which reflect every transgression from his past--

--he experiences all the pain that he has inflicted on others.

His mind burns with the mental anguish of his victims.

Eldon wishes that the Ghost Rider had dropped him and allowed him to escape this misery.

Oddly, everyone seems to know about this ability and call it "The Penance Stare"; maybe Eldon Lambert spread the word around? 

This Ghost Rider's goal seems to be to deliver this stare to his foes, as though he calls himself "The Spirit of Vengeance" and to more-or-less talk about vengeance constantly. And perhaps this is something of a contradiction, but he also completely eschews killing, even stopping others, like The Punisher, from taking human lives.

Of course, Ghost Rider seems to avoid killing people similar to the way Batman does: It's mainly a matter of luck that those he fights don't ever end up dying in the process of him brutalizing them. For example, in one panel he punches a guy in the face with spiked knuckles. Throughout these early issues, he will also run people over with his motorcycle.

Oh, and apparently this Ghost Rider can also explode at his enemies...? 

At least, he does so in one panel of the not-very-good Marvel Comics Presents story. 

•Their rides are also pretty different. Johnny went from riding regular motorcycles, to being able to summon motorcycles, to his signature "skull cycle"...and/or red skull cycles conjured from hellfire. 

Danny's motorcycle looks like a regular motorcycle, but when he transforms into Ghost Rider, it transforms as well, into a futuristic-looking, high-tech bike with wheels seemingly made of the same flame as that emanating from G.R.'s ever burning skull. It also gets a vaguely skull-like metal shield where a windshield might be; this can be lowered into battering-ram. 

Additionally, this motorcycle seems to have a variety of super-powers of its own. It can be controlled mentally, it too can be reconstituted when destroyed, and it can drive up the sides of buildings, on the surface of water and when this Ghost Rider jumps off of something, he seems to almost be able to fly. 

•Their origins also differ. Johnny's transformations into Ghost Rider were presented as a curse that befell him as part of his doing a deal with Satan (eventually retconned in 1983's Ghost Rider #77 to the devil Mephisto having bonded the demon Zarathos to Johnny, kinda like Etrigan was bonded to Jason Blood in Jack Kirby's The Demon, I guess); other than his head changing and his gaining access to his hellfire powers, he remained himself and in control of his own body and actions (At least in the earlier issues; in later ones, Ghost Rider seems like he was more and more of a distinct entity, at least in the few comics I read in this collection).

Danny, meanwhile, became Ghost Rider after finding a magic motorcycle in a junkyard. When its gas cap starts to glow, usually in response to an innocent person being in danger or someone needing avenged, Danny touches it and becomes the Ghost Rider, a completely different entity, the Danny/Ghost Rider relationship being akin to that of the Billy Batson/Captain Marvel one (Danny retains memories of what Ghost Rider does, but they're otherwise completely different individuals in these stories, only able to communicate in dreams...and/or in the dream realm of Doctor Strange villain Nightmare). 

Finally, Johnny and Danny seem completely unrelated at this early point in the narrative; it's not as if Johnny curse or powers or the demon Zarathos were somehow transferred from Johnny to Danny. 

No one seems to acknowledge that there even was another Ghost Rider prior to this one throughout the book. Not until issue #11, anyway, when Nightmare visits Ghost Rider (The cover features the very 1991 "Hex, Lies & Inner Escape!" echoing the title of the movie Sex, Lies and Videotape), when the villain refers to Ghost Rider as "Zarathos", and an asterisk refers readers back to a 1983 issue from the end of the first Ghost Rider run. 

Then in a two-part story stretching from #12 to an issue of Doctor Strange, the Sorcerer Supreme seems familiar with the earlier Ghost Rider, and also assumes that this one is a demon of some sort, but that proves not to be the case.

As for his part, Ghost Rider doesn't seem to know anything about his own nature, aside from the fact that he's the spirit of vengeance and he must avenge the innocent via chain lashings and Penance Stare. 

Like I said, a relationship between the Ghost Riders will eventually be revealed (I've read and re-read Wikipedia pages and Internet summaries; they all seem as long, dumb and complex as most superhero histories do when decades of stories are so summarized into paragraphs of prose), but not in these issues. 

I see the cover of issue #14 features the title "Johnny Blaze Vs. Ghost Rider," and shows a '90s version of Johnny in a trench coat and sunglasses pointing a gun at G.R., but the next batch of issues doesn't seem to have been put into an Epic Collection, yet (The only other Danny Ketch Epic Collection, Siege of Darkness, seems to include a few issues from much later in the run, and a lot of other Marvel titles featuring the character).

•In addition to writing these first 12 issues of the series, Howard Mackie also writes the Marvel Comics Presents serial. As for the art, Javier Saltares pencils 11 of the first 12 issues, each of which was inked by Mark Texeira. The only issue Saltares doesn't draw, #7, is penciled and inked by Texeria. Texeria also pencils the Marvel Comics Presents story. 

All in all, then, the character had a very stable creative team at his outset, far more so than Johnny Blaze had in the 1970s, and these early adventures have a fairly consistent look and aesthetic. The Saltares and Texeria art team provide a quite realistic look to the book, one that only accentuates the overall strangeness of the inhuman lead character, whose empty eye sockets and expressionless mouth full of teeth are always inscrutable. 

•I'm not sure why we call the character Danny Ketch "Danny Ketch," but that is how Marvel always refers to him in the titles of various comics starring him, including this collection. The character always refers to himself as Dan Ketch, as do his friend and girlfriend. His mother calls him Daniel. The only characters who regularly call him Danny in this volume are villains attempting to mock him.

•The comic is markedly more violent than the first chunk of the original Ghost Rider comic, although never gory, as much of the actual killing seems to happen off-panel. Still, there's a lot of blood splatter and chalk outlines, and talk of people being killed, even children and babies. 

•In the first story arc, which spans the first three issues, teenager Dan Ketch (said to be 18 at one point, and 19 later in these issues) is in a cemetery with his older sister Barb...and a local gang of younger kids, who call themselves "The Cypress Pool Jokers." They all more or less end up stumbling into a meet between various criminals, and one of the Jokers makes off with a mysterious briefcase full of more mysterious yet cannisters that was meant to be exchanged; meanwhile, Barb is badly wounded by an arrow (some of the criminals are ninjas, you see) and Dan finds the magic motorcycle, transforming into Ghost Rider for the first time.

The main villain of the piece is Deathwatch, a businessman/supervillain in the mode of the Kingpin or perhaps the John Byrne version of Lex Luthor. When not in his business suit in a skyscraper office, he wears a dumb mask. He seems to have the power to psychically see what those he touches sees, putting his fingers into their heads in the manner that Cassandra Nova does in Deadpool & Wolverine, and he enjoys doing so in order to vicariously watch their kills (Hence the name).

In addition to an army of ninjas, he also employs a villain named Blackout, who seems to be a vampire (although at one point his fangs are referred to as "mechanical") with a rather cinematic superpower: He's accompanied by some sort of blackout field that snuffs out any lights in his proximity, both electrical or, in one case, an actual flame from a match (Ghost Rider's head and tires seem immune, though). Thus, when he closes in on his victims, his presence is often presaged by the lights going out.

The plot of the first story arc involves a lot of running around as various factions seek to gain control of those cannisters, which apparently hold a plague capable of wiping out all life in the city. G.R. eventually kills it and melts the cannisters with hellfire, but Deathwatch and Blackout escape to threaten the hero and city in the future.

•The book is pretty heavily tied into the Marvel Universe from the get-go. Not only does Fisk himself appear in the first arc, seeking to get his hands on the cannisters so that they can't be used to wipe out the city, but the fourth issue features Ghost Rider versus his first Marvel supervillain, Mr. Hyde (although he will spend most of the issue in his powerless, but ridiculously dressed, Dr. Calvin Zabo form). He manhandles a waitress at a biker bar, and when she punches him, he strangles her and then spends the rest of the issue evading the bar's bouncer and other patrons. G.R. is able to Penance Stare Hyde back into Zabo.

And then, by the fifth and sixth issues, it's time for a Punisher team-up, what with this being 1990 and all. (Note the above cover for Ghost Rider #5, drawn by some kid named Jim Lee.)

In this story, New York City is suffering a rash of active shootings by carloads of teens with military hardware, and both Frank Castle and Dan Ketch/Ghost Rider are on the case. When the two meet up on the roof of the warehouse where the weapons are being distributed, the pair each assume the other is responsible (Although I'm a little surprised at Frank, seeing a guy with a flaming skull for a head drive his flaming motorcycle up the side of a wall and thinking to himself, "This guy sure looks like your typical arms dealer!")

The misunderstanding is, of course, part of the storied Marvel team-up ritual, and so the two briefly fight, Mackie making it clear that the unkillable, super-strong Ghost Rider could crush Frank as soon as he got his hands on him, although Frank talks, er, thinks, a big game.

"Four direct hits and he's still coming," Castle says, after pumping bullets into G.R. "Gun's gone. I've been in tougher spots." 

Later, when Ghost Rider throws him across the roof, Punisher thinks, "He's not human...I've been up against not human before."

Eventually Ghost Rider runs him over on his magic motorcycle, and the pair fall through a skylight and land at the feet of the story's supervillain: Flag-Smasher!

Okay, so I've maybe only seen him show up in a Marvel comic once or twice, but I love this guy. I love his dumb costume (particularly the wrestling championship-like belt with the globe on it), I love his dumb name, and I love his mission of...smashing flags...? No, of destroying all governments everywhere! The dude doesn't just want to topple the United States government, which is a big enough doing for a single guy with no discernable powers or charisma, but he wants to destroy all government!

His dumb plan here is to pass out machine guns to kids, inspire them to become active shooters and then sic them on Wall Street as a distraction, while he and his goons (who dress in goggles, face masks and berets and look like they could be Cobra action figures) attack the banking system or something.

Our dark heroes obviously foil Flag-Smasher's plan once they team up in the second part of the story and, at the end, Punisher points a gun at Flag-Smasher while the villain is still reeling from the effects of the Penance Stare.

"This is the only thing that's going to put an end to his violence," Punisher says, but Ghost Rider breaks his gun in his super-strong fist with a "KRAK" and then has words with The Punisher: "My cause is vengeance--not death. What cause do you serve?"

Then the police show up, and so Frank climbs onto the back of G.R.'s motorcycle and they speed off, across the surface of the water in New York Harbor.

This particular issue, incidentally, reveals that Dan has a job: He's apparently a bike messenger.

•Ghost Rider #7 is the one in which Texeria fills in for Saltares, apparently inking his own work (He's simply credited as "artist"). This one features The Scarecrow, a character I've long been curious about, based on how much I like DC's Scarecrow character, although I think the only time I've ever actually seen him in a comic book might have been in the few panels in which the two publishers' Scarecrows team-up to kidnap Lois Lane in DC Versus Marvel. 

His design, seen above, isn't necessarily a great one for a character with that name, and his modus operandi isn't nearly as interesting as that of his DC Comics counterpart. 

This Scarecrow, Ebeneezer Laughton is a contortionist, which doesn't really come up in this issue except for a scene in which he apparently disappears into a sewer grate. He's also a homicidal maniac who disembowels his victims. Oh, and crows seem to visit him at the asylum he's in, leaving trinkets for him on the sill of the window of his padded room, trinkets like a mask and a razor blade.

He runs around murdering people and ranting to Captain America to come and stop him but has to settle for Ghost Rider. When our hero has him by the collar, Scarecrow kicks away from him, impaling himself on his own pitchfork, which just so happens to have fallen upright against a crate during their fight.

In this issue, Dan's sister Barb, who has been in a coma throughout the series, is murdered by Blackout, who remains at large.

•In Ghost Rider #8, we see the Rider naked when he and Dan talk to one another in a dream. It's not just his head that is a flaming skull; his whole body is apparently that of a burning skeleton.

•A team of sexy lady mercenaries called H.E.A.R.T. Corps (Humans Engaging All Racial Terrorism) are hired by a community group to capture Ghost Rider. 

While one of them wears a top with a neckline that plunges to her belly, their costuming is otherwise pretty tame, particularly for the decade. 

Actually, this volume of Ghost Rider lacks the prominent cheesecake of the 1970s book, in which Rocky Simpson, Linda Littletree and Karen Page were often rather scantily clad, Rocky being dressed in revealing sacrificial garb in two consecutive stories.

The few female characters in these issues, like Dan's girlfriend Stacy, are always dressed in jeans, long-sleeved shirts and jackets 

The most provocative image in this handful of issues is probably a panel in #5, where in Texeria seems to have gotten away with putting little ink crescents on Stacy's breasts to suggest her nipples through her top. 

•Dan is, by the way, a terrible boyfriend. 

Stacy is nothing but supportive about his sister being attacked, being in a coma and ultimately being murdered, understandingly giving Dan plenty of space when he asks for it, but still trying to date him and spend time with him.

Dan, meanwhile, constantly lies to her and even ditches her in the middle of dates to go do Ghost Rider stuff.

She's attempting to join the city police force, like her father, who is actively trying to catch Ghost Rider, and one assumes that she and Dan's alter ego will eventually come into conflict. 

Even compared to other guys whose desire to keep their secret identities make them seem like real jerks, like Peter Parker, Dan comes off as a particularly bad boyfriend, though.

•Ghost Rider #9 guest-stars what the Internet tells me is the original iteration of X-Factor, who are apparently based in a spaceship in Manhattan (?), and are raising a baby (?!). 

Curious about what they were doing with a kid, I asked Bluesky if that was supposed to be Cable, as my limited knowledge of X-Men lore (i.e. what I saw on the original cartoon) seemed to suggest that Scott and Jean's kids all came from nightmarish alternate futures, and I was told this was indeed baby Cable, in a one-sentence summary that seemed to perfectly encapsulate the sort of lives lived by X-Men characters from the 1990s. 

H.E.A.R.T., X-Factor and Ghost Rider all get involved with a plot involving missing human children and some Morlocks hiding out under the cemetery; despite what is suggested by the cover of the issues (above), G.R. doesn't come into conflict with the X-people (And Archangel Warren Worthington isn't actually even in the issue, although he, like Iceman Bobby Drake, should recognize the character, given that they were both on west coast super-team The Champions with the earlier, Johnny Blaze version).

•Next comes the Marvel Comics Presents story. Despite being written by Mackie and drawn by Texeria, it's no damn good, reading quite clunkily, probably because it comes in eight-page installments, naturally leading to rather frequent narrative stops and starts.

Wolverine in in Madripoor, where his narration tells us he goes by "Patch" (although he's not wearing an eyepatch here...?). He's attacked by some red-clad ninjas. 

Meanwhile, in NYC, Dan's friend's sensei is also attacked by similar ninjas. 

It is all part of an elaborate plot by one of Deathwatch's lieutenants to get Wolverine, Ghost Rider and a third character, a presumably new one named Brass, to kill one another. 

There's a lot of fighting, and ninjas and gunsels end up in literal piles. 

The Wolverine vs. Ghost Rider fight is kind of fun, as, at one point, Wolverine says, "--Eat this!" and stabs Ghost Rider in the face with his claws, which creates a gigantic explosion ("WHOOM") that sends them both flying in opposite directions and temporarily knocks them both out.

This is also the story in which Ghost Rider seems to demonstrate his just plain blowing up power, referenced above.

My favorite panel, however, is probably this one, which is actually the last panel in one of the installments, and thus meant to be a cliffhanger. Ghost Rider is told Dan's injured friend has been kidnapped, and Ghost Rider just silently makes this face, like some kind of Pez dispenser:

While Texeria's art was quite good in the issue of Ghost Rider he drew, it's fairly weak here, the pages positively packed with panels, many of them long, thin horizontal rectangles and most lacking anything at all like a background. They feel rather unfinished, a bit like layouts that somehow got inked and colored before the rest of the pencils were done. 

I'm not sure if this is the fault of Texeria or his inker here, a Harry Candelario, or perhaps just a matter of drawing a whole lot of pages in relatively little time (I guess the book was a bi-weekly one?). 

The covers for these issues of Marvel Comics Presents come from plenty of familiar names, including Jim Valentino, Paul Gulacy, John Byrne and one Rob Liefeld. (And look, I don't know if anyone has ever mentioned it before or not, but this Liefeld fellow? I personally don't think his art is all that good. This is for Marvel in 1991, too; isn't that when and where he first blew up?)

•The MCP story is followed by an issue of Marc Spector: Moon Knight, which is also written by Mackie, and features art from Mark Bagley and Tom Palmer, credited as "Breakdown artist" and "Finisher", respectively. 

The art is really quite great, and I really enjoyed the opportunity to see Bagley's art at this particular point, about a decade or so before I started regularly seeing it in the pages of Ultimate Spider-Man. It's fairly different, which may be because he was still refining his style and it may be because of Palmer's work here, but one can still see some of the later Bagley in it. 

In this issue, Ghost Rider joins Moon Knight in breaking up a terrorist attacks at first the Statue of Liberty and then Grand Central Terminal. 

Moon Knight fights the terrorists with what look like moon-a-rangs and a pair of nunchucks. So this is a comic book featuring both a flaming skeleton who rides a motorcycle and a guy with nunchucks. I guess it's easy to see why Marvel comics were popular with boys in the early 1990s.

•The remainder of the collection consists of three more issues of Ghost Rider and one of Doctor Strange. Mackie writes those Ghost Rider issues, one of which is penciled by fill-in artist Larry Stroman but still inked by Texeria, while the Doctor Strange issue is by writers Roy and Dann Thomas and the art team of Chris Marrinan and Mark McKenna. 

In the story of these comics, NYC is visited by a new serial killer going by the name "Zodiak," the "k" differentiating him from the real-life Zodiac killer and Marvel's Zodiac villain group from the 1970s, one of whom, Aquarius, ended up being empowered by one of Satan's minions to become "the one-man Zodiac" and then tangle with Johnny Blaze in the original Ghost Rider comics. 

I can't be sure, but I think this one might be slightly less dumb than the previous Marvel Zodiac/s. Like I said, he's a serial killer, but one who has a bunch of high-tech equipment, up to and including robot duplicates good enough to fool Ghost Rider. In actuality, Zodiak works as an assassin for a group of otherworldly demons...? He also uses Zodiac-themed weaponry, like a Scorpio sting and a pair of Taurus horns and a Leo lion claw and so on.

It is in this stretch of issues that Dan and Ghost Rider are visited by Nightmare, who temporarily separates them while they are in his realm and addresses G.R. as Zarathos (though he seems to be mistaken), and Doctor Strange likewise comes to the conclusion that Ghost Rider isn't Zarathos, nor a demon of any sort.

In addition to Zodiak, the pair also fight his demonic employers, who feed off of the human blood their agent spills for them.

•And that's it, I guess, unless Marvel decides the next issues in a future Epic Collection, or one of my local library systems invest in those big, $150 Ghost Rider: Danny Ketch omnibuses (Because while I liked these comics well enough, and am curious about how Mackie ultimately reconciles the two Ghost Rider mythologies and if it's actually as dumb as the Internet suggests, I'm not, like, $300 interested...)

But don't worry Ghost Rider fans, I've still got at least one more Ghost Rider-related post coming up in the near future...!