When Batman Met Spawn Pt. 1: On 1994's Batman/Spawn: War Devil #1

DC Comics and Image Comics collaborated on a Batman/Spawn crossover in 2022, a book that seemed likely to have been occasioned by the fact that artist Greg Capullo, once primarily known as the artist of Spawn, had since had a long run as the primary artist on Batman. In other words, the popular artist had become pretty much the ideal candidate to draw a Batman/Spawn crossover. 

Spawn creator Todd McFarlane rounded out the creative team for that one-shot special, writing the script and inking Capullo's pencil art (Despite the fact that, as quickly becomes evident when reading the resultant book, McFarlane is not the greatest of writers).

I went ahead and bought it, because hey, how often does Batman meet Spawn? (Three times. The answer is three times.) 

While I didn't really care for it, it did make remind me of the first two times the characters met, in a pair of one-shots from 1994, and I thought about revisiting those comics to see how they compared...and, of course, to see how they had aged over the course of some three decades.

DC and Image made it easy to do so, collecting those comics into the hardcover Batman/Spawn: The Classic Collection...although I missed it upon its initial release, and just remembered it recently (Perhaps put in the mind of 1990s crossovers by recently writing about the two Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles/Flaming Carrot team-ups here and here, or perhaps being reminded of the each-publisher-does-its-own-version style of crossover by hearing folks on social media discuss Marvel's recent Deadpool/Batman, with a DC-produced Batman/Deadpool to follow).

Regardless, I finally got around to revisiting these 31-year-old comics via their 2022 collection. That collection looks surprisingly slim at just 112-pages—Of course, the two one-shots in collects weren't very long, so that does make sense—but it's a nicely designed package.

It looks like it features new cover art by Capullo and McFarlane, featuring the two characters confronting one another, bathed in the sickly green of Spawn's hell-spawned magical powers. And I see they used one of the Batman logos of the 1990s for the cover, the same style logo that was atop the cover of the DC crossover, entitled Batman/Spawn: War Devil (the wraparound cover of which is atop this post).

There's not much in the way of additional features, either, just a pin-up "gallery" of two images. One is a double-page splash featuring a tight close-up of the two heroes flying through the sky, drawn by Greg Capullo (and dated with a "'93"). It's certainly interesting to see how much Capullo's art has changed over the years, particularly his Batman. 

The other pin-up is a "jam" piece by the Spawn/Batman creators, Frank Miller and McFarlane, depicting the two heroes kinda sorta standing in air, a big full moon and a city skyline in the background, and bats flocking everywhere. McFarlane obviously drew Spawn and Miller Batman, and as for the rest, I'd guess those were Miller's buildings and McFarlane's bats (His bats are prominently featured on the cover of Spawn #1 and #3, for compaison's sake). 

I'm going to tackle each of the two crossovers in two separate posts. This one will be devoted to the DC-produced Batman/Spawn: War Devil #1. 

I always found the creative team for this book, which I had of course bought and read upon its initial release, to be a curious one. It has not one writer, not two writers, but three writers. These are Doug Moench, Chuck Dixon and Alan Grant, who were at the time writing the three ongoing Batman titles, Batman, Detective Comics and Shadow of the Bat. 

Why did DC, or perhaps the book's editor Denny O'Neil, decide to enlist the entire Batman line's writing staff for a relatively short and extremely straightforward 48-page story? I didn't know then and I still don't know for sure, as certainly any one of these gentlemen could have handled the assignment and done an admirable job of it. If I had to guess, I would guess that O'Neil, and probably the writers themselves, wanted them all to share in what I imagine must have been fairly decent royalties accompanying what I have to assume was a potentially very good selling book. 

I have no idea how popular Spawn was in 1994, of course. The character's book launched in 1992, and in May of 1994, the month War Devil was released, the most recent issue of Spawn was February's #18, which I see was written by Grant Morrison (!) and drawn by Capullo and Art Thibert. (Me, I had dropped the book after the first five issues, then returned for 1993's #8-11, those written by Alan Moore, Neil Gaiman, Dave Sim and Frank Miller. Other than the three Batman crossovers, I don't think I ever read another issue of Spawn*.) The character's not-very-good live-action film was still three years away, as was the HBO animated series, so I assume the character's popularity had then yet to climax.

As for the art on War Devil, it was provided not by one of the then-regular artists of the Bat-titles (or all of them, as with the writers), but by Klaus Janson, who also colored his work (with Steve Buccellato).  Janson wouldn't have been my first choice for the project at the time. I thought (and still think) Norm Breyfogle would have been perfect. In addition to being my favorite Batman artist, I always thought there was some aesthetic similarity between he and McFarlane when it came to drawing their caped heroes, particularly in terms of their dynamism (In fact, one of the things that attracted me to McFarlane's Spawn originally was that it looked somewhat Breyfogle-esque to my teenage eye). 

Those two artists could tend towards the cartoony in their expressions sometimes, they sometimes drew similar bats (compare the one to Harold's right on this cover to those on those Spawn covers I linked to earlier, for example), and there's this one trick they would both occasionally employ, which I don't have any examples to point to in front of me, nor the words to describe it; basically, when something exciting, shocking or extremely dramatic might happen, the panel itself would sort of "scream", with jagged white lines biting into the image (Next time I see examples, I'll try to post some). 

But by 1994, it had been almost a year since Breyfogle's last issue of Shadow of the Bat, and he was about a year into his series Prime for Malibu, a series I never read and, unfortunately, may never read, given who Breyfogle's collaborator was on that series and what became of him...somehow, I don't see any publisher collecting any of his work ever again. 

My other choice to draw a Batman/Spawn crossover would have been my other favorite Batman artist, then Batman cover artist Kelley Jones, whose preference for drawing gigantic capes, billowing and flapping as if they were alive, makes him a perfect artist for Spawn, a character I don't think he's ever officially drawn (Not even, I was surprised and disappointed to find, on one of the coves for the 2022 crossover, accompanied as it was by variant covers from so many Batman artists). 

Instead, they went with Janson, who even then was a veteran artist with a long list of solid, quality comics on his resume (At the time, I knew him best as the guy who inked Miller on The Dark Knight Returns, though).

Whoever DC went with, though, I think it would have been interesting, given that the Spawn character was so associated with the art of his creator. I'm not sure how many other artists might have actually drawn Spawn by spring of 1994 (Capullo had done a few issues of Spawn by then, but perhaps the character appeared in pin-ups by other artists, or had guest-appearances in other Image books...? Not sure if Hilary Barta's Stupid cover counts or not...). But I can't imagine it was very many, and thus seeing any other artist drawing Todd McFarlane's Spawn character would have probably been something of a novelty.

I think Janson does a decent job with Spawn. He honors the massive cape and streaming chains of McFarlane's version, although they do tend to look a little off at times. Though Batman's cape is similarly sometimes unrealistically big and billowing, Janson's style is realistic enough to make the exaggerated, expressive flourishes feel less than natural. 

I also think seeing Janson's take on Spawn somewhat underlines some of the weaknesses in the design. As striking as the character might look, it's pretty clear he wasn't designed to be a character that could be drawn over and over again by anyone, the many fussy details—the skulls, the randomly-placed spikes, the white stripes—making him a figure an artist has to linger one, and a reader's eye might get stuck on. 

What surprised me most about re-reading the book today, however, was the discordant clash of the various lettering styles. The book was lettered by Todd Klein, who, in addition to being one of the handful of names of letterers most comics readers will actually know is, I think it's safe to say, one of the best in the business. As a reader, he is who I would want to be lettering the comic I'm reading. And, were I producing a comic book, he's the letterer I would want handling it.

Klein honors the exact style of Spawn's signature dialogue balloons and narration boxes. The former have a very specific font with bigger than usual sized letters, the border of the balloon thick and black, and surrounded by a second, thicker, gray-colored border. The tails are also quite distinct, dramatically hooking like little sickles in Spawn's direction. 

As for the latter, these are the customary yellow, but feature the same too-big type size, jagged irregular borders and an underlying layer of green that make them look somewhat 3D. (Tom Orzechowski lettered the first issue of Spawn, and I assume is responsible for the distinct style of Spawn's visual "voice"). 

The intent, I think it's safe to say, is to suggest that Spawn's voice doesn't really sound like anyone else's and, given what else we know about the character, it's probably meant to sound a little deeper, a little louder and perhaps spookier than the voices of normal people.

But now, after decades of communicating via email, text and social media, long, long after we all agreed that writing in all-caps suggested shouting or yelling, reading panels of Spawn in conversation with Batman, wherein the Image Comics hero's dialogue is so much bigger and bolder than Batman's, it now looks like Spawn is always talking in an inappropriately loud voice, like perhaps he's hard of hearing or something. 

The most fun aspect of the book for me in 2025, though, was reading a script written by Moench, Grant and Dixon, three writers who, by this point, I have read untold hundreds of pages of comics by and have long since become familiar with their individual styles and personal tics. 

I didn't notice at all in 1994, but now it seems apparent that, if they all collaborated on the plot, they apparently took turns scripting the pages, as some read as obviously the work of Dixon, for example, while others sound just like Grant or Moench. (The first clue that they are taking turns is in the lettering, too; one page will feature the regular bolding and italicization of certain words in the sentence, as some comics writers practice, while the facing page will hardly have any bolded, italicized words at all.)

I'm not saying I could necessarily tell who was writing each page in all 48 cases—a Grant script and a Moench script are closer to one another than either is to a Dixon one, for example—but it's often quite clear when the baton is passed, and it's a lot of fun trying to parse who's writing which page. 

There are, of course, some obvious tells. For example, when the two heroes fight a literal demon from hell at the climax, there's a panel in which Batman throws three objects in the direction of the monster, and, in his thought cloud, he thinks, "Percussion caps!". Grant would often have Batman announce, either to himself or his opponent or the reader, what weapon he might be pulling from his utility belt to use. 

Earlier, when the Dark Knight is fighting a couple of security guards over the course of a mostly word-less page, the sound effects are all pure Moench: KUNCH, TUNCH, THROK, HWOK, SWUKK.

And so on.

Perhaps unsurprisingly given the writers, War Devil is a pretty good Batman story, and a fairly weak Spawn one (I do wonder how it might have read if the Batman writing staff added a fourth writer, in the form of McFarlane). Re-reading it today, I didn't really get any sense of who Spawn actually was. What's his status quo? What's his background? What exactly are his powers, and how do they work? There are few clues here. From this particular comic, all that is evident is that he is a semi-amnesiac former hitman who now has undefined magic powers he uses when encountering supernatural opponents sent to attack him. 

That, and that he is somewhat new to being a superhero. "You're new at this, aren't you?" Batman asks, after beating "the living crap" out of Spawn. And, in the last panels of the comic, Spawn watches as Batman swings away, thinks about the kind of man Batman is and, in the story's very last words, thinks "The kind of man I'll be."

It would take very little retooling to adjust this script so that, instead of Spawn, it featured pretty much any supernatural hero helping Batman on a case involving the forces of the underworld: Doctor Fate, The Spectre, John Constantine, whoever.

The comicopens in the Roanoke colony in 1587 North Carolina, with the birth of Virginia Dare, the first British child born in America, and the mysterious disappearance of the 100 people who lived there, the only clue as to what might have happened being "a single word carved or burned into the trunk of a tree, far higher than a man could reach: 'Croatoan'."

In this telling of the real-life historical mystery, though, there's also a second clue, "although no one could see it." Janson draws the settlement from above, and it's clear the trees of the surrounding forest have been cut down in a very specific pattern, forming a five-pointed star around its walls and buildings.

In modern Gotham City, beneath a sky full of blimps, Batman is looking for a Virgil Dare, who has something to do with a shipment of explosives and Gotham real estate ("Bombs and buildings," Batman thinks to himself, "A bad combination... ...if ever the twain are permitted to meet"). The search for Dare leads him to eccentric architect Simon Vesper, a man who has been missing for years, a man who, in fact, Batman had seen shot to death before his eyes, although the body immediately disappeared. Vesper resurfaces suddenly, just as Gotham Tower, a long-time project of Vesper's, is about to be completed and opened for the public.

Meanwhile, Spawn, who we meet sitting among the boxes at the back of an alley, has a newspaper blown into his lap, and its front page has a story and image about Gotham Tower, which prompts his memory of being hired to kill Vesper, back when he was still Colonel Al Simmons. He strides off towards Gotham.

Batman visits the tower, where he finds a blood-splattered elevator ("It looks like a slaughterhouse"), and the body of Virgil Dare, his throat cut, laying in the middle of a five-pointed star drawn in blood, the word "Croatoan" written in blood on the floor.

As Batman is leaving the tower through a window and swinging away, Spawn spots him, drops on him from several stories above, delivering a flying kick to the Dark Knight's abdomen on a two-page splash.

"So, he sent another of you losers?" Spawn says, while Batman responds with a pained, "UNNH!" 

When they reach the ground, Spawn talking the whole way down, his fist glows green and he points it at Batman, who has broken his fall by grabbing a flagpole and landed atop a nearby parked car. 

In maybe the book's only funny moment, Spawn is surprised to find that nothing has happened to Batman.

Apparently, Spawn saw Batman's costume and assumed he was some kind of demon from Hell (In this story, Spawn has apparently never heard of Batman, despite the fact that they share the same world, rather than, like, coming from different dimensions or realities or whatever). He had tried to magic him back to Hell, but it doesn't work, because Batman is not actually a demon from Hell. 

Batman then flying kicks Spawn, punches him in the face three times, and ultimately kicks him through a nearby store window. The fight part of the fight-and-then-team-up ritual is short, and decidedly one-sided. Though Spawn readers will know that the character has genuine super-powers that would make him more than a match for Bats, here Spawn finds no reason to prove himself, simply pointing at Batman from the ground, and saying, "You don't know how close you came." 

It's not super-clear, but I think that Spawn's powers somehow shut themselves off when he was confronting a regular human being and then turned themselves back of when the fight was over. Is that how they work? It's not how they work in this book's sister publication, Spawn/Batman #1, which we'll discuss in the next post. 

Wait, I guess this part is actually kind of funny too:

Once on the two heroes get on the same page, they head back to Gotham Tower. There, the undead Vesper has gathered Gotham City elite for his diabolical plan. He's blacked out all of the city save for Gotham Tower, had fires set all over in order to create a burning pentagram around the tower, and magically emptied the graveyard, its revived corpses shuffling towards the tower in order to feed on the rich and powerful who Vesper had gathered there.

The plan is, apparently, to open a gateway to hell, offer the souls of all his victims to the/a devil (Vesper rants about "him who is more evil than you can even begin to imagine!", "my dark master," and "the armies of Satan!"), in the hopes of garnering his own corner of Hell to rule.

Vesper tosses Batman around while Spawn is busy investigating the gateway to Hell in the basement, the apparently undead businessman soon transforming into a big, red brute that grows out of Vesper's suit, Hulk-style. When Spawn then arrives to confront him, "Vesper" says, "You're confusing the clothes with the man, Spawn...Vesper is a shell I'm wearing."

He then transforms again, growing bigger still, and taking on a green, vaguely reptilian humanoid form, with a big head and bent limbs and posture that kinda sorta suggests that of McFarlane's Violator from the Spawn comics. The creature then introduces itself, talking in a special, unique font and dialogue bubbles suggesting someone big, ancient and powerful: "BEHOLD THE ARCHFIEND IN EXILE! HE WHO WAITED BUT WAITS NO LONGER-- THE DEMON CROATOAN!"

The fight is mostly Spawn's, Batman's sole contribution being the aforementioned "Percussion caps!", which explode THOOM! THOOM! THOOM! behind Croatoan, distracting it long enough for Spawn to gesture with his hands, shooting sickly green fire that first shrinks and then seems to kill the demon, while he narrates cheesily, remembering the vision of his ex-wife Wanda that he had seen through the portal of Hell earlier: "I pour it out, the hate-- the lust for revenge. Then I remember her face-- --and it's love that finally tears him apart."

Did whoever write this particular page—my guess is Grant, but maybe Moench—want the reader to think of Joy Division at this point? I don't know, but "Love Will Tear Us Apart" was certainly stuck in my head for the rest of the night after reading it.

The day saved, Spawn's powers sending the army of undead to crawl back into their graves, the two heroes stand atop a nearby rooftop to debrief. Batman asks Spawn what happened, and McFarlane's hero responds, "Something evil...If you need a name, call it...'Terrorism of the soul.'"

He then proceeds to ask Batman a rather philosophical question: "You know the darkness, Batman...What is it that makes one man good, the next man evil?"

Batman responds with an unattributed quote that I can't find by plugging into Google, although all the results that did come up were of things written by Nietzsche:

That's beyond me. 

But somebody once said--"Good and evil are not determined by the intercourse of people with one another, but entirely by a man's relationship with himself."

Then the Dark Knight politely excuses himself—Literally saying, "Now if you'll excuse me"—and Spawn has his moment of reverie regarding Batman as a role model.

When the two would next meet, in Spawn/Batman #1 by Frank Miller and Todd McFarlane, they wouldn't be nearly as polite, nor would Spawn find much to admire in Batman, nor would there be any mediation on the nature of good and evil.

There would be a lot of tough guy narration and posturing and a lot of violence, though...

*What about you guys? Have any of you read the Morrison-written Spawn? Should I seek out those issues? As I assume most of you know, I am a fan of Morrison's comics-writing.

Review: Uncle Scrooge and the Infinity Dime: Gallery Edition

After his The Other Side and Scalped became successes for DC's Vertigo imprint in the 2000s, writer Jason Aaron began a career at Marvel, one full of generally well-regarded runs on various high profile characters. He wrote Ghost Rider, Thor, The Punisher, Wolverine, The X-Men, Wolverine and The X-Men, Doctor Strange, The Hulk, The Avengers, and even Star Wars and Conan.

In 2023, he announced that he was no longer under exclusive contract with Marvel and he was shortly tackling some...well, some unusual characters for a guy who had spent about 20 years writing so much of the Marvel Universe. He wrote Superman (in an Action Comics arc, followed by the Absolute Superman ongoing), the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (relaunching IDW's ongoing series based on the license) and Uncle Scrooge (for a special Marvel one-shot). 

I wondered if, perhaps free of his exclusive contract, he was setting about working on his bucket list of comic book characters in earnest.

One has to imagine that, if Scrooge McDuck isn't on a lot of comics creators' bucket lists, it's only because writing him might seem so unrealistic. Luckily for Aaron, though, he had a long and fruitful relationship with Marvel, a corporate entity that is now owned by Disney (Although, aside from licensing most of their Star Wars comics to Marvel, Disney has mostly steered clear of having Marvel publish much of anything starring their signature cartoon characters, Fantagraphics seemingly remaining their favored publisher for duck and mouse comics). 

Certainly, Scrooge is one of the all-time greatest comics characters, and, of course, Aaron is a fan—although according to his brief introduction to the hardcover "Gallery Edition" of his comic Uncle Scrooge and the Infinity Dime, he's a rather recent one. 

Under the title "Why I Love This Duck", which begins with the sentence "Uncle Scrooge is one of the greatest adventure characters in comic-book history," he tells of sitting down with his son at bedtime one night to read Don Rosa's "Son of the Sun". After that, he was hooked, and said he spent the rest of his son's childhood reading the Don Rosa library with him, singling out "Guardians of the Lost Library" as his favorite story. 

While he dedicates The Infinity Dime to several people—including his son, Rosa and Scrooge creator Carl Barks—he also says he wrote it for "you," by which he seems to mean readers who aren't already fans of Uncle Scrooge, hoping his comic would serve as a sort of gateway into some of those many great comics, comics you can know fill several bookshelves full of handsome collections of, thanks to Fantagraphics.

After reading that, I was a bit curious as to how well the project might have succeeded. Did Uncle Scrooge and the Infinity Dime find its way in front of the average Marvel Comics fan, or, perhaps Jason Aaron fan, and did such readers not have any prior experience with Uncle Scrooge? (Given the presence of Disney comics in comic shops over the last few decades, and the existence of two different versions of the cartoon Duck Tales, one from 1987s and one from 2017, I have to imagine most comics readers already had a pretty good idea of who Scrooge was and what he was all about. I know I personally met him in repeated viewings of Mickey's Christmas Carol, hung out with him after school during the initial Duck Tales series, spent hours playing the video game based on the cartoon and then followed him into the comics as soon as Fanta started their Carl Barks Library.)

Anyway, Aaron's effort is a rather odd comic, something of an uneasy Marvel/Disney hybrid. Its writer is, of course, a Marvel guy, and the basic idea seems to be to put Scrooge, his cast and basic milieu into a somewhat typical Marvel comic book, although they apparently didn't want to book to look or feel like a Marvel comic, as rather than commissioning a Marvel artist or artists to draw it, they turned to a half-dozen Italian Disney artists, splitting the chapters between them: Paolo Mottura, Fancesco D'Ippolito and Lucio De Giuseppe,  Alessandro Pastrovicchio and Vitale Mangiatordi and Giada Perissinotto, with colors by Arianna Consonni.

The only clue of what members of Marvel's "bullpen" might have done with the character if given a chance came on the covers. Recent Fantastic Four cover artist Alex Ross is responsible for the one above, but there were of course plenty of variants, including ones from J. Scott Campbell, Gabriele Dell'Otto, Steve McNiven, Frank Miller, Peach Momoko, John Romita Jr, Walter Simonson and Skottie Young (This particular hardcover collection includes them all in the back, as well as interviews with many of the artists; we'll get to them later on in the post, as I'm sure you're fascinated to find out what Frank Miller's version of a Disney duck might look like and, if you can't wait, you can always visit Comics.org).

Now, The Infinity Dime was apparently a 30-page, $7.99 one-shot, published in August of 2024. Being currently comic shop-less, I naturally skipped it, deciding to wait until it was republished in trade (I had assumed it was a far longer, multi-issue story, to be honest; I guess when one stops reading Marvel's solicitations month in and month out, one no longer knows exactly what they're getting when picking up the publisher's works).

I never did buy a trade, nor did I ever find one in my library and, recently remembering the comic existed, I checked the library catalog for it, and was somewhat surprised to see that that while an over-sized 9.57-inch by 13.25 inch, 112-page hardcover collection was indeed published back in March, neither my library nor the consortium we share materials with had ordered a physical copy for some reason (Reminder: That consortium consists of 40 different library systems throughout northeast Ohio, including the Cleveland Public Library system). 

And so I read it as an "eComic", borrowed via the Hoopla app.

This meant that I couldn't tell how big the published version's pages actually were, nor could I guess how long it actually was until I had finished reading it. Based on the original comic's cover boasting that it was "The Story of the Century!", and by Aaron's professed interest in the works of Rosa and Barks and company, and by the fact that it was broken into three chapters and an epilogue and the fact that it had so many different artists involved, I was expecting the story to be, well, something of an epic, you know?

It's not. Like I said above, there are just 30 original story pages devoted to The Infinity Dime, making it the length of about one-and-a-half regular Marvel comics. That was, obviously, rather disappointing.

And as for Aaron's story, while it is big in terms of scale and stakes, if not page count, and it does seem to endeavor to offer something of a mission statement on the title character and what makes him so special, it can't help but feel a little small...more of a trifle than an epic, really.

The plot is really quite superheroic, and while many Disney comics have been published that deal with the genre—including those in which Donald Duck and Goofy have their own superhero personas—this one feels much more like a modern DC or Marvel book, rather than an application of the Disney characters to the classic superhero tropes.

The book begins with Donald and Huey, Dewey and Louie diving through a terrible snowstorm, on their way to Bear Mountain, where they would meet their distant Uncle Scrooge for the first time and spend Christmas with him (This is, of course, the same premise of Bark's 1947 story "Christmas on Bear Mountain," the first appearance of Scrooge). Here, things go differently, though: Scrooge's nephews never make it to see him, Donald never proves his mettle to Scrooge and the old miser never becomes part of their lives. This, a caption in the last panel of the first page tells us, is a world "among the myriad of alternate universes arrayed across infinity."

That's right, it's a multiverse story! Sick of the Marvel Cinematic Universe telling multiverse stories? Well, now they've even infected Disney duck comics!

This particular world's Scrooge seems to have still had many of his adventures, enough to fill a massive money bin, but he's grown more bitter and lonely than ever. One day, while stomping through his bin, he happens by a magic mirror embedded in a pile of coins, which he had taken from "that two-bit conjurer, Magica De Spell". No sooner does he finish his exposition, telling readers that it was called "The Mirror of Worlds", then it begins to glow pink, emit a stream of five-pointed cartoon stars and pull on his number one dime, which he wears like a necklace. (For some reason, it's a really big dime, looking more like a fifty-cent piece).

Then he has a revelation: "Why settle for being the richest duck in the world, when I could be... ...the richest duck on ALL the worlds!!!"

Meanwhile, in the "real" world, Scrooge and his nephews are flying back into Duckburg, where they see the Beagle Boys attempting a strange money bin heist, wherein the entire bin is being lifted up off the ground and into some sort of pink energy portal in the sky.

Scrooge goes on the attack, but he soon finds himself face to face with Doctor Doom-like "the Scrooge-Above-All", the evil Scrooge we had just met, now outfitted with a villainous-looking costume (dig the coins on his knuckles). Between the pages, he has apparently busied himself by visiting alternate reality after alternate reality, besting each world's Scrooge and then making off with that fallen Scrooge's number one dime and money bin. He gets those of our Scrooge too.

Scrooge and the nephews go to Gyro Gearloose for help, and the nephews explain the multiverse, using the entry on "multiverse" from their Junior Woodchuck Guidebook. Gyro pulls out this world's Mirror of Worlds, which he has been studying (He does not, therefore, end up inventing anything here to help Scrooge). 

After it's explained that to travel through the multiverse, one needs a "universal constant", "something that exists in all universes at once," Scrooge at first thinks that his number one dime might be it, but Gyro tell his that no, it is Scrooge himself that is the universal constant (And I guess he does exist in our universe, the only one we can be sure is definitely real, in the form of a comic book and cartoon character, but then, we also know that he doesn't exist in other universes we read about regularly, like that of the Marvel Universe or DC Universe...)

To make a not-very-long story short (a "weeks later" caption seems to skip over what a reader might expect to come next), our Scrooge visits the Scrooge-Above-All's Duckburg and infiltrates his gigantic money bin, which is a money bin big enough to encompass all the other worlds' money bins. It's "The All-Bin."

Confronted by Beagle Boys, our Scrooge commands his shadowy allies, revealed on one of the book's several splash pages, a story technique that is definitely more modern Marvel than classic Disney, "Fight like Scrooges!!!"

Scrooge's multiversal army of himself then falls before the magical might of the Scrooge-Above-All, who tells them that this has all happened before, and refers to himself at one point as "Scrooge...Uncle to NO ONE!"

Then the Scrooges unleash their secret weapon, dogpile, er, duckpile the evil Scrooge, and, in a matter of panels of them yelling at him while wrestling, convince him that all of the money in all of the worlds is still just so much metal, and that the sense of adventure, the connections made along the way, and family is the real treasure.

And, a few pages later, there's a two-page epilogue, during which we see that the evil Scrooge too has been redeemed in the same way that the "real" Scrooge was...his redemption just took a lot longer, and a violent intervention by his own multiversal doppelgangers, rather than just, you know, spending a Christmas with his nephew and grand-nephews.

As you can see then, it's quite "Marvelous" a story...Aaron even drops a "'Nuff said" into the proceedings. 

I confess to being somewhat disappointed, but that's mainly because I was expecting something longer and grander (and the way I read it kept me from realizing how short it actually was until I reached "THE END" on the last page; obviously if you get a physical copy of the book for yourself, this won't be a factor for you), but it certainly does its job of putting Scrooge and company into what feels a lot like a modern Marvel story, while extolling the character's virtues: Not only is he smart and tough and super-rich, but his extreme wealth is presented as a symbol of what is really valuable in life. 

And then it's on to the backmatter, of which there is a lot.

In fact, there is some 80 pages of it. All these extras include a short interview with Jason Aaron, another with the artists, one with the artist who designed the "dark" Scrooge including some preliminary sketches, some pages of unfinished art, and each of the variant covers, including interviews with many of the artists who contributed them.  Finally, there's Bark's original 19-page "Christmas on Bear Mountain," reprinted in all its glory.

The Marvel artists who contributed these tended to fall into one of two camps. 

Some simply drew in the Disney style and did so to such a degree that you might not recognize their art as theirs at all. This includes Alex Ross (I mean sure, his is painted, and in a more photorealistic style that suggests a degree of three-dimensionality, but other than that, his Scrooge just looks like the regular Scrooge, right?), as well as J. Scott Campbell, Ron Lim, Steve McNiven, Gabriele Dell'Otto and, I think, even such distinct stylists as John Romita JR and Walt Simonson.

I mean, at a glance, could you tell these covers were the work of JRJR and Simonson?

And then there are artists who drew Scrooge in their own signature styles, design be damned. These include Peach Momoko, Skottie Young and Frank Miller.

Check out Miller's Scrooge:

I think it's quite safe to say that it doesn't look like a piece one might expect to find on a Disney-branded comic (I'm most intrigued by how he handled Scrooge's feathers between the hem of his coat and the top of his legs; it looks like he's wearing a white hula skirt...and man, that beak...! I remember from middle-school trying to draw Scrooge's beak, and damn, it is not easy...!)

I think the artists who fares the best at drawing Scrooge, the one who balances adherence to the design without sacrificing their own personal style at all is Young. Check this out:

It's obviously a Scrooge, and a workable one, but not the Scrooge, right? I imagine it is merely a result of Young's own cartoon-inspired style being closer to that of Disney comics than the style of many of his peers, but it's easy to imagine Young having drawn all of The Infinity Dime, for example, while Miller doing so would seem unthinkable.

Now, while the book doesn't say so, I can say so here. If this really was your first introduction to Uncle Scrooge comics, click this link and start shopping. 

While I've yet to read a book from any of Fanta's Disney series that I didn't enjoy, I'd recommend starting with pretty much any volume of The Carl Barks Library, be they Donald Duck or Uncle Scrooge books. I only have a pair of volumes from the Don Rosa Library myself so far, as I wanted to get all the Barks ones before moving on, but, obviously, those are damn good comics too (And, after reading this, I want to seek "Guardians of the Lost Library" ASAP).

When it comes to Fantagraphics' collections of classic Disney comics, it's really rather hard to think of a better deal in terms of quality of comics to money spent ratio in comics right now....

A Month of Wednesdays: September 2025

 BORROWED: 

The Avengers in The Veracity Trap! (Abrams ComicArts) I'm afraid this book just doesn't really work the way in which it was intended.

And that's something of a disappointment, because pairing book designer, author and comic book fan Chip Kidd with the phenomenally talented artist Michael Cho on a work celebrating the original Marvel Comics collaborations of Jack Kirby and Stan Lee sounds pretty much like a dream book, doesn't it?

Unfortunately, the problem is a deep one, seemingly coming at the point of conception, and with the involvement of the publisher Abrams (Instead of the company that, you know, actually owns and functions as caretaker for these characters, Marvel).

It certainly seems to start on solid ground. In its first 25 pagens, Kidd and Cho present an epic battle involving a team of some of the very earliest Avengers: Iron Man, Thor, The Wasp, The Hulk, Giant-Man Hank Pym and Captain America (I consulted comics.org to see if this line-up ever actually existed, as I thought Hulk officially left the team before Cap actually joined, but never mind all that; continuity is not important for this book).

The heroes are all "somewhere in Asgard", where the Avengers' first-ever villain Loki is commanding an army of monsters, none of whom are named in the book, but most of whom will be immediately recognizable to many a Marvel fan: Fin Fang Foom, Orrgo, Goom, Googam and so on. 

If you've seen Cho's work on various Marvel covers in recent years you will know exactly what to expect. He's working with Kirby's designs, and somewhat in his style here, but with a more elegant, smoother rendering that is all his own. The art looks both classic (even classical) and fresh and new at the same time. 

And these pages certainly show that work off, with plenty of splashes (some character-specific ones labeled "A Marvel Masterwork Pin-Up" and including the character's logo and nickname, like "the Golden Avenger, IRON MAN") and double-page splashes. None of these pages feature more than four panels.

While most of the Avengers show off their powers defeating the monsters in this sequence, Iron Man asks, "Where did Loki run off to?", and The Wasp chimes in, "More important, where's Thor?"

The latter is in pursuit of the former and finds him in an extremely Kirby-esque "ancient temple", which also houses a large, humming ball of energy, emanating shafts of light and what we now call Kirby dots, although these are green rather than the traditional black.

Loki calls it his "veracity vortex" and warns his brother of its power. Thor hurls Mjolnir at it, and the vortex seems to absorb it. And so Thor reaches into it to retrieve his enchanted hammer and, in a pair of splash pages, Thor too is taken into it with a WHHOOOOM! that saps all the color away from him, breaking him down into black and white lines, then just faint blue pencils and, ultimately, the white nothingness of a blank page and, on the next page, WHHOOOOM!, spits him back out with his hammer, the whiteness now gradually turning back into a fully inked and colored page. 

Thor falls to his knees, covering his face, and his allies gather around him. 

"By the Gods!" he exclaims, " We are...not real?"

What happened to The Mighty Thor, Prince of Asgard between those two WHHOOOOM!s, as the readers merely turned the pages? Apparently, he discovered that he and his fellow Avengers were actually comic book characters, as he rants and raves to them wearing a shell-shocked look on his face. Hulk exchanges glances with Iron Man, holding his index finger to his ear and spinning it in a circular motion, the universal gesture for "He's crazy!"

Thor's ranting, in which he explains the comic book creation process to the Avengers in language that is clearly written by a comic creator is genuinely quite funny at first. He starts: 

Nay, heed me, comrades. We exist in a sort of codex called a...comic book! It is considered by many to be literature of the lowest order!

After explaining how someone "outside our realm" illustrates them using a pencil and paper, he goes on:

Then another hand takes those pages and completes the illustrations in ink! But they are no mere tracers!

And yet another party applies pigment to those illustrations, using something called a four-color process! They aren't paid nearly enough, but what choice do they have? They're still waiting for ad agency callbacks to work on actual accounts! I don't even know what that means, yet it was revealed to me as such!

But Kidd keeps this going a bit too long, which is where we get to the crux of the problem:

We possess no free will! The stories of our lives are imprinted on wretched scrolls called newsprint, betraying visible chunks of wood pulp upon its curious surface!

The pages are gathered within a glossy covering and bound together with pathetic metal rivets called staples. And we are almost never in register! I don't know what that means, either.

The pamphlets of our adventures appear upon the dawn of each month, and they almost always end in cliffhangers so readers keep buying our stories. 

You can probably see the problem here. 

Never mind the fact that Cho himself is, in addition to co-plotting the story, penciling, inking and coloring it himself, rather than passing it on to various "hands." Never mind too the bit about comics being referred to as "literature of the lowest order" in 2025, so long after museums to the medium having been opened, college courses taught on it, graphic novels regularly becoming best-selling books, the fact that Marvel comics dominates modern pop culture and so on.

Everything Thor is saying in this case is obviously not true. This adventure isn't printed on newsprint, there are no chunks of pulp visible and the characters are clearly in register. The book isn't stapled together, but is bound, and in hardcover no less. 

Hell, not only is this book not a monthly pamphlet with a cliffhanger ending, this book isn't even published by Marvel Comics, but by an imprint of Abrams, a long-lived and venerable publisher of, like, real books, not comics. 

Thor's speech might have been cleverly metatextual had Kidd written it in a Marvel comic from the 1960s, from which these characters and the designs they are here rendered in all hail from. But in a modern, bound, high-quality hardcover original graphic novel from a respected publisher? 

In order to truly be metatextual, doesn't the work really need to be in the same basic form as the text in which it is commenting upon? I mean, sure, this Veracity Trap is comics, or sequential art if you like, and thus the same medium, but by concentrating on the specifics of the physical format as Kidd does in Thor's speech, the book betrays itself as being so clearly not that. 

At the end of the scene, Captain America looks off-panel and tells Hank and Janet that there's "only one way to find out" the truth of Thor's words. And then a turn of the page finds a trio of panels in which the "camera" zooms out from a tight black-and-white close-up of Cap's inked face, as we had seen it in that last panel, gradually revealing the previous page of uncolored, unlettered comics art in someone's hand.

The fourth panel, taking up the bottom half of the page, shows an artist sitting in a chair at a drafting table considering the page, while a man in glasses and a striped jacket leans over him. 

"Hmmmmm..." the artist says aloud, "I don't know if this is working, Chip."

The artist is, of course, Cho, and the man standing over him is Kidd, and, I have to say, upon first reading this book, I agreed wholeheartedly with Cho: I didn't think it was working, either. 

Kidd doesn't agree, at which point Cho replies, "I'm still not sure about this whole meta take." He continues, "It's been done before." 

Indeed it has and, I daresay, it has been done better. 

The two comics creators, whom Cho gives an increased degree of shading, are then confronted by all of the Avengers (who are all also more shaded when in the "real" world). The team has all leapt through the veracity vortex which, of course, leads to the real world, and, specifically, to the creators of this story, Cho and Kidd. 

"If the two of you created the vortex, then mayhap the two of you can destroy it!" Thor says, pointing a finger at them. "You are coming with us!"

And so they abduct the writer and artist, taking them back through the vortex to Asgard, where Kidd and Cho are little kids, for some reason. And then a giant Two-Headed Thing, much bigger than any of the earlier monsters (most of whom seem somewhat scaled down, probably in order to make them more compatible as opponents for the human-sized Avengers), stomps towards creators and characters alike. The Marvel heroes are on their backs, seemingly wrestling with existential dread and having their vigor sapped by the trips through the vortex.

Kidd and Cho decide to return to Earth, where they have the power to shape the story, and there are then some shenanigans with Loki, who boasts of the power of stories and himself as "the God of Stories!", which seems to be somewhat similar to what Al Ewing was doing with the character when he was writing him for Marvel a few years back (At least, according to what I read of Ewing's work with Loki in Douglas Wolk's All The Marvels; I didn't personally read any of those comics). 

Frantically working in what appears to be the "Marvel method," with Kidd telling the story to Cho as he puts it directly on the paper (and thus affects what's going on with the heroes), Kidd-through-Cap comes up with a plan to build a machine that does the opposite of the vortex, which Iron Man describes as "a machine that weaponizes...the imagination!"

Captain America, who is also an artist (as he reminds the creators), sits down at the drawing board and designs what Kidd dubs "The Imaginirritator", another extremely Kirby-ish looking design, a sort of giant super-tank bristling with weaponry, including an "X-trov cannon" which, as you might guess from its name, is especially designed to shut down the vortex. 

As kids in Asgard again, the creators make a pair of speeches. Kidd reassures the Avengers that it's not just them, but that everyone is actually someone else's idea and that no one asks to be born or created, and that it is thus the choice of the individual what they do with the life they are given that really matters. And then Cho takes the opportunity to meet the Marvel heroes face to face to thank them, telling them, "Those comics weren't disposable pulp...they were our dreams."

In the end, the Avengers triumph, Loki and the monsters are defeated and receive just punishments, and Kidd and Cho finish their book on the penultimate page, the very last page being devoted to another splash, this one showing the team posing, apparently about to plunge into the fight scene that covers the book's endpapers. 

It's beautifully drawn, and the high production value and the 8.9-inch by 11.35-inch, bigger-than-your-average-comics presentation flatters Cho's work nicely. I'm sure it was a blast for them both to make, presumably collecting a decent paycheck to create a love letter to comics characters they are obviously quite passionate about. It also made me think, as I dwelt on what they were attempting to do here, what they were saying, how they were saying it and how it might have been more effectively said.

I'm never going to complain about a gorgeous-looking superhero book that makes me think.

But that doesn't mean it really works, and thus as ambitious a project as it may be, I don't think it's quite the work its creators might have imagined it to be. 

Gracie's Ghost (Image Comics) I originally checked this out thinking it might be a good candidate for review on Good Comics for Kids, but, after reading it, I wondered if it might be just a little too...bleak for some young readers. I mean, sure, the point of Dawn Brown's graphic novel is that her young protagonist Gracie is able to not only survive her many travails, but keep living her life despite them, but those travails? There are a lot of them, and some of them are rough.

Many will be familiar to most kids, including her hopefully well-meaning mom's inability to understand her, watching her spoiled little brother get whatever he wants, mean teachers and unsympathetic Catholic school administrators, relentless bullies and, rather often, just plain old bad luck. Throughout most of the book, it seems like the universe itself is against Gracie. (I think the stuff with her mom tends to hit the hardest, as she is generally opposed to enforcing rigid gender stereotypes on Gracie, and sometimes seems to take away the few things that give her daughter actual comfort and pleasure, like throwing away her box fort, for example.)

There's one person in Gracie's corner, though, and that's the second half of the title. She is often accompanied by a ghost who, Calvin and Hobbes-style, only she can see and hear, and who, true to being a ghost, can't really interact with the world in any real way, so that the line between "imaginary friend" and "ghost" is particularly thin. (There is one rather dramatic exception to this rule, of course, at the end of the book, when a bully finally gets her comeuppance thanks to the unseen actions of the ghost.)

Cartoonist Dawn Brown's book is black and white, and divided into short, discrete stories, kind of like a collection of a comic strip, although those strips might be a couple of pages long rather than a couple of panels long. There is an overarching story involving the ghost, who tries to explain who she was in life at one point and how she died, but the story doesn't really go anywhere. There are also occasional pages where we see the ghost checking in with an authority figure and learn that the ghost has to help someone and, well, "behave" in order to leave Earth and ascend to the next place.

Perhaps somewhat oddly given the title though, the ghost doesn't play too big of a role in the proceedings, is absent from plenty of the stories and, in fact, it's actually not hard to imagine this graphic novel with the ghost removed from it entirely (well, the climax wouldn't quite work without her, I guess...)

Brown's art, presented in black-and-white throughout, has the look and feel of newspaper comics page cartooning, which seems quite appropriate given its apparent inspirations and format. I'm still not sure if it's necessarily a good comic for kids or not (I suppose it will depend on the kid), but adults should find some things to like in it.

Komi Can't Communicate Vol. 35 (Viz Media) Okay, I know I've been speculating about when this series might actually end for quite a while now, pretty much ever since its stars Komi and Tadano, whose will-they, won't-they mutual crush drove so much of the book, became a couple. Now it seems like it's really drawing to a close for sure though, as manga-ka Tomohito Oda includes a caption reading "As Komi Can't Communicate enters its final stretch." Also, we are told Komi only has to make three more friends in order to meet her series-long goal of making 100 friends, so I assume the series will end when she hits 100 and graduates from high school.

Anyway, in addition to the usual focus on Komi and Tadano, this volume includes a passage wherein Manbagi has to impress her new boyfriend Wakai's father (who is alarmed to find out that she's a gyaru) and another involving Komi and Tadano's younger siblings. 

REVIWED: 

Deepwater Creek (G.P. Putnam's Sons) Michael Regina's horror graphic novel is about a group of kids who encounter a bizarre monster and related phenomenon on the river they regularly fish. It's also about depression and grief...but that's the subtext. The text? Monsters. More here. 

Masks (Andrews McMeel Publishing) This is probably the perfect time to read Margaret Rae, Brian Nathanson and Beck Kubrick's graphic novel about young monsters living in the fringes of human society, as the majority of the book is set on Halloween. There's a pretty obvious metaphor here, in which "monster" is a stand-in for anyone who might be different in some way (or feel like they are), particularly LQBTQ+ people, but the book is never the least bit pedantic and works quite well as a fun adventure with some comedic moments throughout. More here. 

On every Plastic Man team-up ever

Jack Cole's Plastic Man was one of the most successful superheroes created in the Golden Age of comic books, at least going by perhaps the simplest and most obvious of metrics: That is, he's one of the dozen or so characters created back then who is still around in one form or another in today's comics.

Plastic Man debuted in publisher Quality Comics' 1941 Police Comics #1. By the series' fifth issue, he had captured the cover and would remain on it through the 1950's #102. Meanwhile, Quality spun Plas off into his own Plastic Man book, which lasted 64 issues between 1943 and 1956.

Unlike a couple of Golden Agers—pretty much just Superman, Batman and Wonder Woman—Plastic Man didn't stay in constant circulation since his creation, but rather, like Captain America, he disappeared for a bit between the sunset of the Golden Age's original superhero boom and the revivals of the 1960s.

Quality's fortunes sagged in the 1950s, as did those of many comics publishers, and in 1956 they ceased publication of their line, all of their various characters and trademarks going to DC Comics, which kept a couple of Quality's comics going for a while but, notably, not Plastic Man (Who, at that point, apparently wasn't as popular as Blackhawk...or the books G.I. Combat and Heart Throbs). 

But once Plastic Man was officially part of DC's toybox, it was only a matter of time before they took him out to play with, which they finally did in a couple of different comics in 1966. The being-absorbed-by-DC Comics and then eventually becoming part of their DC Universe shared setting was a survival strategy Plastic Man shared with plenty of other Golden Agers, perhaps most prominently one-time Superman rival Captain Marvel and his family.

At DC, Plas got another chance at a starring role every once in a while. There was a 10-issue Plastic Man series that launched in 1966 and lasted until 1968, followed by another in 1975 that resumed its numbering, ceasing publication with 1977's #20. The final Plastic Man ongoing was the 2004-2006, 20-issue series by Kyle Baker. 

There were also a handful of Plastic Man miniseries, in 1988, in 2018 and, more recently, 2015's Convergence: Plastic Man and The Freedom Fighters and 2024's Plastic Man No More! (reviewed in this column). 

Similarly, the character earned a couple of one-shot specials at the turn of the century, Plastic Man Special #1 and 2004's all-reprint Plastic Man 80-Page Giant #1. Oh, and though his name wasn't in the title, the character also starred in a run of stories in Adventure Comics in 1980, usually sharing the cover with the Prince Gavyn version of Starman or, in a few cases, Starman and Aquaman. 

That's a pretty decent bibliography for a character who debuted in 1941 really, but, quite obviously, there are a lot of holes in it. Like most of the superheroes who now make their home in one of the two "universe" settings that belong to DC Comics and Marvel Comics, though, Plastic Man has often been around, even when he wasn't starring in a book.

Now, there are a few ways to keep superheroes around when they aren't anchoring their own book. 

They could join a superhero team, which is what Plastic Man did around the turn of the century, when he joined the Justice League and ended up appearing in most of the issues of the 1997-2006 JLA series and it's many, many tie-ins and spin-offs. And, in this century, he was one fourth of superhero team that starred in the short-lived 2018-2020 series The Terrifics. (Oh, and like all of the Golden Agers DC would eventually come to own, he was a member of the title team in the 1940s-set All-Star Squadron book of 1981-1987, which started out being set on Earth-2, and...I'm actually not sure what happened to it after Crisis, as DC only ever collected the first 18 issues of the series.)

There were also the big, line-wide crossover events, which only really became a thing after DC's 1985-1986 Crisis on Infinite Earths, and then seemed to wax and wane in popularity in the decades since. Plas' role in such DC events seemed to be limited to a cameo or so though, unless these happened to fall during his time on the Justice League, wherein he might have more substantial panel time.

And then, finally, there is the superhero team-up, in which a more popular character with a book of their own might meet another, sometimes book-less character, and share an adventure. This was a way to keep book-less characters alive, of course, perhaps even interesting readers of the more popular character in them. 

And, if nothing else, it helped add a sense of texture and connectivity to the superhero universe in which it was set. For a time, DC had two books pretty much dedicated to that formula, with every issue of The Brave and The Bold pairing Batman with another hero, and every issue of DC Comics Presents doing the same with Superman. 

That final method is the one I want to focus on in this post, as it seems like DC somewhat consciously made an effort to "sell" Plastic Man to readers with his guest-appearances in books like The Brave and The Bold, for example. That, or maybe Brave and The Bold writer Bob Haney just really liked Plastic Man...? 

Anyway, below we will take a look at almost every Plastic Man team-up, those from 1966 to 2022 (I'm know I'm missing the Wonder Woman team-up from the pages of Batman: The Brave and the Bold #19-20; they haven't been collected yet; I'll probably update this post with an entry on that story when it is.)

As for what constitutes a team-up versus a guest-appearance, well, for the purposes of this post I'm defining a team-up as any story in which Plastic Man appears in a title not his own and, well, teams up with another hero...or, in a few cases, two or three other heroes...or, in one case, a heroic dog and that dog's gang. (And so I chose to ignore comics like 1980's Super Friends and 2008's Green Arrow/Black Canary #10-12, each of which featured Plas among a whole group of other heroes.) If, while reading this, you think of any I might have missed, do feel free to tell me, and I'll try to track it down, read it and include it in an update of this post.

Now let's read some comics...

House of Mystery #160 (1966) Plastic Man's very first appearance in a DC comic book was in a very unusual feature in an unusual book, and it was accomplished by the most unusual of means: He was one of the superheroes that teenager Robby Reed transformed into using his mysterious H-Dial, heroes that, with the exception of Plastic Man himself here, were always original characters.

The "Dial H for Hero" feature was written by Dave Wood and drawn by Jim Mooney and debuted in 1966's House of Mystery #156. Though quite inspired, the premise was also pretty straightforward. Colorado teenager Robby Reed falls into a cavern, where he discovers a strange artifact. It's a dial akin to that of a rotary phone—which I suppose fewer and fewer readers will have any firsthand experience with as the years tick by—with alien-looking symbols along its outer rim. When Robby dials the letters H-E-R-O on it, he temporarily becomes a brand-new superhero. When dialing the word backwards, O-R-E-H, he becomes himself again.

In this fifth installment of the series, which promises "an old new hero, a new new hero and a new old hero!", Robby goes to stay the weekend with his cousin Ned and engage in such wholesome, mid-60s teenage activities as searching for interesting rocks and going to the fair. As per usual, Robby finds himself facing various dangers and needing to dial himself into various heroes.

Here that means Giantboy, a, um, giant boy who had previously come when dialed in the feature's first installment; the brand-new King Kandy, a peppermint-striped hero who fights crime with various candy gimmicks; and, of course, Plastic Man himself. 

As the different heroes, Robby encounters various stages of a villain named The Wizard of Light's attempts at a crimewave, which, in typical Silver Age fashion, means wasting such amazing inventions as a ray gun that cancels out gravity on a simple bank heist.

As Plastic Man, "that famous crime-fighting hero of years ago!", Robby acts and sounds like himself as per usual, but he takes on the appearance of Cole's Golden Age great, and has access to his powers. In the few pages in which he is Plastic Man, Robby turns himself into a giant bouncing ball, grabs onto two trees to fire himself like a slingshot into the Wizard's headquarters, stretches his arms to swat some crooks and ultimately wraps up the villain in one long, coiling arm.

It's definitely the most unusual of superhero crossovers, and it's like is never repeated in the remainder of the original "Dial H" feature's run. I haven't read all of the later revivals (just Sam Humphries and Joe Quinones' excellent 2019 limited series, and the dial's appearances in Superboy and The Ravers and the Silver Age event), but apparently the dialer who stars China Mieville and Mateus Santolouco 2012 series once dialed himself into The Flash.

(Collected in 2004's Plastic Man 80-Page Giant #1 and 2010's Showcase Presents: Dial H for Hero.)

The Brave and The Bold #76 (1968) If we conclude that the Plastic Man that appeared in that installment of Dial H For Hero was not the "real" Plastic Man, then I wonder if that makes this comic the very first acknowledgement that Plastic Man lived in the main DC Universe proper, and that his adventures—or at least his 1960s adventures—were indeed set on what would then have been referred to as Earth-One in the DC cosmology, rather than Earth-Quality, where the Golden Age Quality Comics heroes' Golden Age adventures were said to be set, or Earth-X, established in 1973 as an alternate world inhabited by Quality heroes, or perhaps Earth-2, where All-Star Squadron would later reveal there to be a Plastic Man as well.

Although there's also Earth-Twelve, home to The Inferior Five that was retroactively named as the home world of various "funny" heroes and comedy stars with their own comic book series, like Jerry Lewis and Bob Hope, listed in the pages of the Crisis On Infinite Earths: The Compendium, which stated that most (but not all!) of Plas' 1960s comics were set there.

And then of course there is also the possibility that this issue of The Brave and The Bold isn't actually set on Earth-One at all, however, but the theoretical "Earth-B", where DC editor Bob Rozakis apparently suggested comics stories that seem off in some way may be set, particularly those like the ones Bob Haney wrote for The Brave and The Bold. 

Gee, I can't imagine why DC ever thought to do away with their pre-Crisis multiverse...!

Those unfamiliar with the title will, upon reading this issue, immediately realize that the Batman in it doesn't really act or talk much like the Batmen they are likely most used to. Written by Haney, the Batman of this team-up title was friendly, jocular, quick with a joke and prone to lapsing into slang, sounding an awful lot like Haney's own narration, which had a Stan Lee-esque, trying-to-sound-hip nature that certainly designates it as distinct. (Hard to imagine another writer's Batman urging his vehicle into action with "Go, little Batmobile!" or declaring "Well, I'll be a super-hero's uncle-in-law," for example.)

In this tale, Batman faces off against a green-and-orange clad villain named The Molder, seen on the Neal Adams cover above. The Molder talks to himself incessantly, ranting repeatedly about "The Plastic Age," and he uses a variety of plastic gimmicks to commit unlikely (and, let's face it, unrealistic, crimes), like molding "memory plastic" in the shape of a car used in a bank robbery that soon "remembers" it's original form of a completely different-looking vehicle, or the invention of plastic robots he calls Plastoids or trapping Batman in melted plastic.

It's when Batman is trapped in plastic on a subway track that Plastic Man appears, using his stretching arm to catch the train and bring it to a stop before it can crash into Bats. The two shake hands, and seem to know of one another; Plas said he's in town on the trail of The Molder, perhaps concerned that the villain is giving plastic a bad name.

Before the adventure is over, The Molder will saturate Plastic Man with "a catalytic plastic," affecting his molecules "so that they will reproduce themselves endlessly," thus smothering Gotham City and drowning Batman in the ever-expanding Plastic Man's own body (That's what's going on with Plastic Man on the cover, by the way).

Needless to say, Plastic Man figures a way out of the mess, Batman punches out The Molder and Plas imprisons teh villain between the fingers of a giant hand.

The story ends with another handshake, that seen in the image atop this very post, and Haney extolling the virtues of the Plastic Man ongoing: "The regular adventures of Plastic Man in his own mag will heat up your funny bone, mold your mirth, and generally split your sideburns!"

Haney's collaborators on this issue are penciller Mike Sekowsky and inker Jack Abel. Their Plas isn't exactly inspired, and looks fairly generic when compared to the one I've so recently been reading about in DC Finest: Plastic Man. Their design is notable for giving Plastic Man a full-body red suit, one that covers his legs and feet. 

In addition to stretching, bouncing, changing shape and, in one sequence, making like a human slingshot, Plas repeatedly demonstrates the ability to survive being broken into separate pieces ("You're all over the place, Plas!" Batman smiles, while hauling his torso and a couple of limbs to Plastic Man's head and shoulders). 

This is the first of a couple of appearances by Plastic Man in the pages of The Brave and The Bold, and I wonder if that was a factor in the producers of the Batman: The Brave and The Bold cartoon featuring him so prominently among Batman's allies in the team-up show. 

(Collected in 2007's Showcase Presents: The Brave and The Bold Batman Team-Ups Vol. 1 and 2017's Batman: The Brave and The Bold—The Bronze Age Omnibus Vol. 1) 

The Brave and The Bold #95 (1971) Well, I suppose the very inclusion of this issue in this post rather spoils the mystery of the cover, which went to such great lengths to disguise the identity of Batman's guest-star, huh? 

This is a weird one—"The Brave and the Bold's most bizarre team-up!", according to that cover—even by the title's standards. While their first meeting was a pretty standard pairing of two superheroes, here writer Bob Haney takes an entirely different tack, with the 22-page adventure reading like a Batman solo story until the last three pages or so.

Batman is "hired" by Ruby Ryder, "the world's richest woman and top female tycoon", to find her lost fiance Kyle Morgan, "the most beautiful, wonderful hunk of man since Adonis," who disappeared in a South American jungle. 

After some adventure, Batman succeeds, but when he brings Morgan to Ryder, she shoots him to death and disappears, pinning the crime on Batman! 

Now a fugitive from the law, Batman travels the world hunting her, a mysterious guardian angel continually saving him from assassins (A panel in which a pair of inhumanely long arms stretch out of the water to grab a man with a knife stalking Batman would seem to offer a pretty good clue of who that guardian angel is, but not what exactly is going on).

As Ryder is eventually being led to the electric chair to be executed for Morgan's murder, the executioner is revealed to be none other than Plastic Man, who explains the whole crazy story. "Yes, I am Plastic Man," he confesses, sadly removing his goggles. "That clown I'd hoped the world had forgotten...and I'm also...Kyle Morgan!"

Tired of being "that plastic clown," Plas says he "longed to be free...lead a normal life...know a woman's love..." Realizing his powers meant he could be anyone he wanted, he molded his face into the handsome visage of Kyle Morgan, "a man no woman could resist--!" He and Ryder fell in love, but when he realized she was cruel, selfish and power-mad, he fled and faked his own death. 

But Batman found him and brought him back to Ryder, who shot him. He merely played dead, a gunshot unable to actually kill him, and then followed Batman on the hunt for Ryder, protecting the Dark Knight in secret. He took the place of the executioner to see Ryder "humbled for once," but he says he never would have pulled the switch. 

As our heroes walk sadly into the background, Batman asks, "Well, what does the future hold for... Plastic Man?"

And Plastic Man, still resembling Morgan, responds, "I don't know, Batman! In this wide, wild world of today, is there room for me, or am I really what I feared--and out-of-date freak?" (This issue was published between 1968's #10 and 1975's #11 of DC's Plastic Man series, during a very long gap between issues, so apparently Plas would resume his old characterization as a superhero and/or "clown" within a few years).

It's an oddly emotional, if melodramatic, story for Plastic Man, especially for the time, and I wonder if this is the very first instance of the character grating against his reputation as a "funny" hero, which must have been well-established by this point in order for the story to work at all. 

For this outing, Haney was joined by the artist Nick Cardy, who handles the action quite well, and is obviously pretty good at drawing attractive women (There's one particular neat panel where "Morgan" is fighting Batman in the cabin of an airplane and, when the plane briefly goes upside down, the dialogue balloon is similarly upside down, as if the editors had simply turned the whole panel on its head).

Haney's various characters don't speak in very enlightened terms about the Ruby Ryder character throughout ("Witch", "dame" and "boss lady" get used a lot), and the appearance and depiction of South American "head-hunters" and "Indians" is unfortunate.

Overall, it's an interesting comic, in large part because of how weird it is. Not, weird like so many of Haney's comics, because of their general sense of zaniness, but because of its emotional content and down, gloomy tone. 

In this adventure, Plas' costume is only seen in a few panels, but in addition to red pantlegs, his suit also differs from its original design by featuring a pair of black briefs over his suit, in the style of Superman and Batman. 

The cover is, once again, by Neal Adams, here inked by Dick Giordano. 

(Collected in 2007's Showcase Presents: The Brave and the Bold Batman Team-Ups Vol. 2 and 2017's Batman: The Brave and The Bold—The Bronze Age Omnibus Vol. 1)

The Brave and the Bold #123 (1975) This relatively rare triple team-up from the Batman team-up title is a direct sequel to the Plastic Man story from #95. 

In its first part, Bob Haney, now joined by The Brave and The Bold's then-current regular artist Jim Aparo, presents an unusual state of affairs, with Batman charged with bringing in Bruce Wayne on fraud and murder charges...which he does, catching up with the millionaire in Istanbul, where he's trying to buy a sacred idol to return to its home village in Africa. 

But how can Batman arrest Bruce Wayne? What's going on?

Well, apparently Batman ran into Plastic Man on the streets, the one-time superhero having fallen on really hard times after their previous adventure; he's now an unshaven bum panhandling on the streets of Gotham (He briefly refers to an old job in a carnival).  

Knowing he's about to leave town as Bruce Wayne, Batman enlisted Plastic Man to stand in for him while he's gone, "Somebody's got to keep the crime lid from boiling over!" 

Aware that Plas is standing in for Batman, Ruby Ryder brainwashes Plastic Man-as-Batman with a "polymeric catalyst" to believe he's the real Batman (and, of course, to do her bidding), while also framing Wayne so she can acquire the idol for herself.

Metamorpho comes to the real Batman's aid, breaking him out of jail, and together the pair try to track down Plas, thwart Ruby Ryder and get the idol back to where it belongs.

Another particularly downbeat Plastic Man story, this one does allow Aparo to draw a brief (too brief, really) duel between the two shape-changing heroes (Plastic Man: "See, punk, you're tangling with the original freak of a thousand shapes!" Metamorpho: "Yeah? Well, I'm the improved model, chum...the fantabulous freak of a thousand and one changes..."). The pair of heroes with overlapping powers would, decades later, appear together in the aforementioned The Terrifics, and share a tense scene in 2024 miniseries Plastic Man No More!.

For the first time in the pages of this series, Plastic Man is wearing his original costume. In the story's penultimate panel, he asks aloud what will become of him: "But now what happens to me...going back to be a panhandling bum again?"

Batman replies, "Never! The way you handled those bank-robbers as my stand-in was spectacular! You're a superhero for all seasons!" 

(Collected in 2008's Showcase Presents: The Brave and The Bold Batman Team-Ups Vol. 3, 2012's Legends of the Dark Knight: Jim Aparo Vol. 2 and 2018's Batman: The Brave and The Bold—The Bronze Age Omnibus Vol. 2)

The Brave and the Bold #148 (1979) Haney's streak of sad sack Plastic Man stories continues with this Christmas-set issue, wherein Plas is playing a bell-ringing Santa...although he does so without padding or changing into a fatter shape, and without taking his goggles off. 

Batman recognizes Plastic Man when he uses a super-stretchy arm to save a little kid from being run over, and the pair shake hands. 

"Since then, it's been all downhill," Plastic Man tells Batman, referring to their previous adventure together in the pages of this book. "Cheap carnivals I quit because I hated being a freak! But I guess I'm doomed to play only phony roles...like this!"

"Wish I could help you, Plas--but you have to decide who you want to be first!", Batman says, tossing a coin in Plas' bucket. As Batman walks away, he thinks to himself that Plastic Man seems really depressed and notes how hard it is to be alone for the holidays. After three sad Plas stories in a row, I'm starting to wonder where Woozy Winks was in the 1970s. 

The heroes will cross paths again quite soon, however. Gotham has been plagued by vicious gangs smuggling untaxed cigarettes into the city, killing one another's drivers and hijacking their cargo. Commissioner Gordon refers to it as a "Buttlegger war", and both he and Batman do it so often throughout the story that one wonders if Haney just thought the term was funny. 

The "buttleggers" commit an even more audacious crime when they steal the massive Christman display from "Lacey's Department Store" and load it onto a convoy of trucks...complete with Plastic Man-as-Santa, who they knock out with a blackjack. As the cover says, "The Mob Stole Xmas."

Following a clue left by Plas, Batman trails the trucks to Florida, where the gangsters are throwing a Christmas party as part of a peace summit...that turns out to be a trap for their rivals. Naturally, our heroes break it up, capture the crooks and get the Christmas display back to Gotham in time for the holiday, Plastic Man's long, stretchy right arm spelling out "Merry Xmas" in cursive in the last panel. 

The art in this particular outting, Plas' last appearance in the title, is credited to artists "Joe Staton & Jim Aparo." It's not apparent who did what, but I imagine Staton handled either lay-outs or pencils, and Aparo either finished them or handled the inks. The art looks awfully Aparo-like throughout, and he does a pretty great Plastic Man, giving the hero a very distinct face and clearly conveying some complex emotions. 

(Collected in 2013's Legends of The Dark Knight: Jim Aparo Vol. 2 and Batman: The Brave and the Bold—The Bronze Age Omnibus Vol. 2.)

DC Comics Presents #39 (1981) Plastic Man's revived ongoing series ended in 1977, but he would return to comic racks in fairly short order in the pages of Adventures Comics, with 1980's #467. As I mentioned earlier, Plastic Man would share the title with the Prince Gavyn version of Starman, with Len Wein, Joe Staton and Bob Smith handling the Plastic Man feature and Paul Levitz, Steve Ditko and Romeo Tanghal the new Starman. This state of affairs would last for 11 issues—although Martin Pasko would take over writing duties on the Plastic Man feature from Wein, and Aquaman would join the title as a third feature—until 1980's #478, at which point a new iteration of the "Dial H for Hero" feature would take over the title.

So when Pasko, Staton and Smith created a Superman/Plastic Man team-up for DC Comics Presents, the team was on pretty solid footing, and essentially just had Superman (and his villain Toyman and his pal Jimmy Olsen) visit a quite belated chapter of their Adventure feature. 

No name is given for the city in which most of the story is set, but it is Plastic Man and Woozy Winks' hometown, and it's a very distinct-looking city. 

"I don't want to spend one more minute in this town than I have to," Superman thinks to himself as he descends towards the Acme Tilton hotel, where there's a toy convention Clark Kent has been assigned to cover. "I've begun to notice something-- This is a very weird city..."

I want to say the name of the city is Acme City, based on how many businesses are named Acme something-or-other, both in Pasko's dialogue and in Staton's backgrounds. As for how weird it is, well, it seems a lot like any big city, although Staton fills his street scenes and backgrounds with rather cartoonish-looking characters. The most cartoonish of them all is his Woozy Winks, whose big nose, pear-shaped head and overbite make him look like he belongs to an entirely different comic than one starring Superman and Plastic Man, both of whom are drawn completely "straight," as is Olsen (Toyman, on the other hand, has a much bigger and more pronounced nose than I've ever seen him with before).

The plot is about as ridiculous as one might expect, given the story's title: "The Thing That Goes Woof in the Night."

Apparently, a prototype toy dog that the going-straight Toyman is there to demonstrate makes a noise that just so happens to be the exact sonic frequency as "the computer-generated electronic tonality used to lift the tumbler" on a nearby vault door. 

That's according to local criminal Dollface, a woman who looks like a doll, and together with Fliptop, whose mop of curly red hair has a hinge which he can open to gain access to a variety of miniature weapons and gadgets, she attempts to steal the toy from Toyman. 

The bad guys ultimately end up teaming-up to commit the robbery, just as Plastic Man and Superman team-up to thwart it (And Jimmy and Woozy team-up, the latter ultimately showing off his signal watch-inspired invention meant to summon Plastic Man whenever he's in trouble).

There's really not much to it, although it's interesting to see the contrast between what that era's Plastic Man feature must have been like and the Superman comics of the time, both in their sense of humor and the style in which they are rendered. 

(Collected in 2013's Showcase Presents: DC Comics Presents: The Superman Team-Ups Vol. 2 and 2021's Superman's Greatest Team-Ups.)

DC Comics Presents #93 (1986) The idea here is perhaps an obvious one—to get all of DC's stretchy heroes into the same story. And that means not just Plastic Man and The Elongated Man, but also Elastic Lad, the occasional superhero identity of Jimmy Olsen, which he uses when he takes a special serum that gives him temporary stretchy powers. 

Though this issue is written by Paul Kupperberg, the idea for it seems to have come from someone else, as the title page contains a little box reading "Team-up suggested by Laney Loftin."

Kupperberg, working with penciller Alex Saviuk and inker Kurt Schaffenberger, opens with a scene that will appear rather cryptic if one isn't already familiar with Plastic Man's origins. A man with the rather unlikely name of Skizzle Shanks has just bought an old chemical factory, the narration tells us, and then we watch as he shoots himself right in front of a big, bubbling vat labeled "acid." In the last panel, he is lying face down in the green goop, which has spilled all over him after he stumbled backwards and upset it. 

A turn of the page than brings us to a splash of the Daily Planet newsroom, where masked gunmen are trying to shake Jimmy down for the "secret potion" that makes him stretchy. Jimmy, who here wears a red checked jacket instead of his more customary green, has of course signaled Superman on his watch, but before the Man of Steel can arrive, another Justice Leaguer makes the scene: Elongated Man Ralph Dibny wraps the gunmen up in the fingers of one hand. 

Apparently, he and wife Sue are in the building for an interview. Lois immediately whisks Sue off for coffee, leaving the boys to talk superhero shop.

Soon after Superman arrives, he and Ralph, at this point in time wearing the half-white, half-purple version of his costume, follow a shriek to a jewel robbery. Jimmy, having downed his serum to keep it safe, follows along to get the story.

At a nearby jewelry store, where a seemingly impossible robbery has just been committed, they run into Plastic Man, who is just there because...well, he's just there, I guess. 

It may have taken nine pages, but Kupperberg finally got all of the heroes together, and rushing off in the same direction: After a criminal with stretchy powers similar to those of most of the assembled heroes, wearing an all-green bodysuit with pupil-less white eyes. 

This is, as we will eventually learn, Malleable Man (Mr. Shanks was, it would seem, successful in his efforts to re-create the accident that gave Plastic Man his powers).

The heroes will try and fail to stop the new villain a few times.  During their second encounter, Malleable Man will have an accomplice, wearing the same costume and displaying the same powers as him, which the characters will comment on ("There's two of you now?" Ralph will exclaim upon seeing them, as they evade his outstretched arms. "You guys got a franchise on rubber men or...Hey!"), but the second Malleable Man will disappear after the scene and never be mentioned again. 

As the page count dwindles, the villain's ultimate plan will be revealed. It turns out Skizzle Shanks was on the chemical plant job with Eel O'Brian on the fateful night of Plastic Man's origin, and he managed to put two and two together regarding the new superhero's secret identity. After he got out of prison, he successfully gave himself the same powers as Plas and, thanks to some "mind-control glop", he's hypnotized Plas, Elongated Man and Jimmy into joining him as "The Elastic Four." 

Riding Plas-in-the-shape-of-a-hot-air-balloon, the quartet make their way to the Fortress of Solitude and then stretch through the keyhole. Before they can loot the place of its fantastic treasures, however, Superman arrives, and the other reveal that they were never really under Shanks' control.

As some of the plot holes may have already alerted you, it's not too terribly a great comic; I actually went back through it a couple times, trying to figure out where the second Malleable Man came from, where he went, and why no one mentions him at the conclusion. 

It's also somewhat disappointing as the first meeting of Plastic Man and Elongated Man. The creators do manage to compare and contrast their powers—both stretch, but Plas takes various shapes as well—but, well, a more thorough explorations of their differences would have been preferable (Woozy Winks doesn't make an appearance, for example; surely it would have been fun to see he and Sue together). With Jimmy, Superman and a villain to attend to as well, however, there's just not much room to devote to much about any of the characters. 

The pair do get along perfectly well here, though, and are just as collegial with one another as they are with Superman (This is opposed to the scene they share in Alex Ross, Jim Krueger and Doug Braithwaite's 2006 Justice #8, wherein Elongated Man starts an argument with Plastic Man and Plas tells him off).

While the script leaves much to be desired, Saviuk and Schaffenberger's art is superior, just realistic enough to really accentuate how strange the various characters' powers are, and if there is no truly memorable scene involving the various stretchy guys—certainly no image within the book has as much impact as Jim Starlin's cover for it—there are several great Superman moments. I was particularly fond of a panel where Malleable Man and his accomplice attempt to escape out a window, and find Superman standing there in mid-air, Saviuk drawing the scene at a low angle so we can see the soles of Superman's feet. 

(This issue has never been collected.)

Action Comics #661 (1991) Unless I missed something, this is the first Plastic Man appearance since his 1988 miniseries, which was a new, contemporary origin for the character, following the events of Crisis on Infinite Earths (A series which was thus the Plastic Man equivalent of "Batman: Year One", or what John Byrne and George Perez were up to with Superman and Wonder Woman a few years earlier). 

The character's status quo certainly seems to honor that of Phil Foglio and company's mini. Here Plastic Man and Woozy Winks run a private detective agency in New York City, and there are several indications that Plastic Man...well, that he has his own way of seeing things. 

In relating the story of what brought them to Metropolis, the art style dramatically shifts to something far more cartoony (and not unlike the work of Hilary Barta in that Plastic Man mini). Plas looks the same, but Woozy is radically different in appearance, and a man who stumbles into their office shot full of holes has big, Swiss cheese-style holes in his body, as if he were a Looney Tunes character.

Later, after Plastic Man has been blown-up by the issue's exploding villain, Superman asks if he's okay, and Plas responds, "I suppose...I mean, everything looks normal to me." This despite the fact that Superman, as seen through Plas' eyes, is drawn in a different style, with an enormous chin and jawline.

The issue is the work of writer Roger Stern and artists Bob McLeod and Brett Breeding. Entitled "Stretching a Point," it finds Jimmy Olsen running into Plastic Man and Woozy at the airport, specifically at the baggage claim, as they seem to have traveled to Metropolis as baggage. (Woozy climbs out of a suitcase, while Plastic Man was a suitcase.)

They explain to Jimmy that they've come to town following some cryptic clues left by a badly injured colleague, a string of numbers and a set of initials. Woozy and Plas introduce themselves to Jimmy; none of them seem to remember their previous meetings in the pages of DC Comics Presents, so I guess we can assume that Crisis knocked those stories out of continuity. (Later, Superman will mention having met Plastic Man once before: "Very adaptable sort, but he didn't seem all that stable." This is likely a reference to Superman's appearance in the final issue of the 1988 Plastic Man mini.)

With some help for Bibbo, who in this issue has just bought the Ace O' Clubs in Suicide Slum, our heroes eventually meet up at the city docks, and duke it out with a new supervillain named Time Bomb, a big brute whose power is that he can blow up any part of his body, only to have it instantly reform (So, like a flesh-and-blood version of Shrapnel, I guess...?).

Although the book advances several ongoing Superman plotlines, it reads more than satisfyingly enough as a done-in-one story. 

It's always interesting to see how artists draw Woozy, given how unnatural his design tends to look outside of a Jack Cole comic (or someone working in an exaggerated style, like, say, Barta or Kyle Baker). McLeod and Breeding draw him very realistic (and with a trench coat over his polka dots, perhaps because he's a private investigator at this point), which only accentuates the gulf in the way Plastic Man seems to see him in this narrative, when the art shifts to show a Plas'-eye-view of things.

Plas himself is also drawn "straight," and the artists do a fine job at depicting his powers (here mostly limited to stretching, outside of that bit as a suitcase). They also, obviously, do a fine Superman. It might have been nice to see the two superheroes spend more time with one another—Plas and Woozy spend most of the issue in Jimmy's company—but then, they would cross paths again in the not too far future. 

(This issue has never been collected).

Superman #110 (1996) This issue has an entirely different creative team than the one that produced the last one in which Plastic Man appeared in a Superman comic, although it has the exact same plot beats. Plastic Man and Woozy Winks arrive in Metropolis, run into Jimmy Olsen, there's a brief reference to Jimmy's post-Crisis version of being "Elastic Lad", the out-of-towners explain that they have come on a case (their story told in a cartoony style to evoke the Plas-sees-things-differently aspect of the 1988 miniseries) and their adventure intersects with Superman at the climax, where there's some brief superhero action.

The story, "The Treasure Hunt Caper", is plotted by Dan Jurgens, scripted by Jerry Ordway and drawn by Ron Frenz and Joe Rubinstein. 

Jimmy, then working as a TV reporter for WGBS notices Woozy, again wearing a trench coat over his regular attire, walking down the street holding a red sign in the shape of Superman's S-shield. The sign is actually Plastic Man, and as the pair will soon explain to Jimmy, they are looking for Superman. 

Back in their New York City detective agency office, they were approached by a beautiful woman who was literally dripping money. Plastic Man transforms into a chair and offers a seat, his face forming the seat of the chair. (Is this the first instance of a DC shape-changer not-so-subtly asking a character to sit on their face? Notably, in the previous scene, Plas has turned into a chair for Woozy to sit on, and it is his lap that forms the seat of the chair, rather than his face). 

She decides to stand. She introduces herself as Treasure Hunt, and says that her brother, Tiger, is in Metropolis, planning to test an experimental new weapon called "a sonic atomizer" against Superman. She wants Plas and Woozy to deliver a "sonic atomizer nullifier" to Superman to save him. 

This entire sequence is drawn in a style similar to that which Hilary Barta had deployed in the miniseries. Plas basically looks the same, but Woozy hews to Barta's cartoony design for him, in sharp contrast to how Frenz and Rubinstein draw him in Metropolis, and the other characters and elements of the action are also highly cartoony. There's also an earlier panel where we briefly see Jimmy through Plas' eyes, and he appears a caricature of himself. 

Meanwhile, Tiger Hunt has summoned reporter Clark Kent to a parking garage, where he tells a similar story: His sister Treasure plans to test an experimental new weapon against Superman. He wants Kent to get a sonic atomizer nullifier to Superman to save him.

Obviously, something's not quite right about the Hunts' stories. No sooner do Superman, Plastic Man and their respective sidekicks get together and start comparing notes than they are attacked by high-tech but retro-looking robots.

These are no match for Superman, of course. Plastic Man simply holds one off until Superman can punch it to bits, but his shape-changing powers come into play when our heroes deliver a bit of comeuppance to one of the Hunts.

While the team-up fills most of the pages, there is one devoted to Lois Lane hanging out with Clark's old college roommate Lori, in which Lois is pretty catty. 

(This issue has never been collected.)

The Power of Shazam! #21 (1996) Just eight months after "The Treasure Hunt Caper", Jerry Ordway would script another meeting between Plastic Man and a caped strongman, in the pages of his The Power of Shazam!, the Marvel Family title he wrote (and sometimes drew) between 1995 and 1999. Somewhat remarkably, it appears to have been the first time Plastic Man and Captain Marvel had ever met ("Have we met?" Plastic Man says as he coils around Captain Marvel. "Don't tell me--during one of those many crisis thingees?").

Ordway must be a fan.

It's an especially interesting pairing, as the two characters were among the most popular of the 1940s, neither came from Timely or National Comics and each was from, instead, a different publishing house (Captain Marvel from Fawcett, and Plas from Quality, of course).

In this done-in-one issue, both heroes are after the gangster Muscles McGinnis, trying to save his life after the mysterious Lady M puts a million-dollar bounty on his head. Cap wants to protect him, of course, as does Plas, as he was apparently friends with Muscles back when he was still gangster Eel O'Brian. 

This initially leads to conflict between our two heroes, as when Plastic Man sees Captain Marvel coming for Muscles, he sheds his disguise and goes on the offense, wrapping Marvel up in his own body, and then suddenly unwinding it, sending Fawcett City's hero spinning like a top and bouncing all over a fancy restaurant before being flung out the revolving door.

They eventually get on the same page, around the time Woozy Winks and a high-priced assassin catch up with them. Working together, they protect Muscles and go after Lady M, but while they manage to bust her henchmen, she manages to slip away...as does Muscles, who falls into the ocean and never resurfaces. 

Ordway and artists Peter Krause and Mike Manley continue to honor the Foglio/Barta conceit that Plastic Man sees the world through a sort of cartoon vision, just like the last two Superman team-ups did. Here the few panels devoted to showing readers what Plas sees having red borders around them to distinguish them (The change in styles is particularly notable in this issue, as one page juxtaposes two panels in which Woozy appears, rendered completely realistically in one and then in Barta's cartoony design in the next).

This would appear to be the last time that aspect of the character would be part of a comic featuring him, as the next time Plastic Man would appear would be in 1997's JLA #5, trying out for the team, which he would join a few stories later. 

Ordway gives Plas lots to do here, physically. In addition to getting the better of Captain Marvel in their brief fight, he wraps up several opponents, hides Muscles by taking the form of a bright red dumpster and adopts a pair of disguises. There are a couple of panels in which he threatens the assassin, quoting Wolverine and shaping his right hand into a big, pointy-fingered claw, which I didn't find too terribly effective (Barta, in contrast, did a great job of a "scary" Plas in his Plastic Man #1, in which the hero gleefully attacks his own old gang, his head contorting so that he had horn-like points and a big, wicked-looking grin full of pointy teeth). 

Krause and Manley's art is pretty far divorced from what people now tend to think of when they think of comic art from the '90s; it's stately, sturdy and classic in feel, and thus quite perfectly suited to a story starring not one, but two characters from the Golden Age who have hardly changed a bit, and are, indeed, still wearing the exact same costumes they were back then.

The story, entitled "The Big Rubout!", reads pretty much perfectly as a standalone one (there's only a single page of the book not devoted to team-up's plot). There's also next to nothing in the book that marks it as having its own particular version of Captain Marvel (maybe just the Fawcett City setting?), or to any wider DC continuity, making it an evergreen story that reads just in well in 2025 as it did in 1996.  

(This story has never been collected.)

Green Lantern 80-Page Giant #2 (1999) As the text on artist George Freeman's cover says, this second Green Lantern 80-Page Giant anthology was devoted to "Team-Ups From A to Z," which here means Aquaman to Zatanna. Among the other five heroes featured is, of course, Plastic Man.

The short 10-page story featuring him is entitled "Anything You Can Do," which echoes the scene where Changeling and Plastic Man faced-off in 1998's JLA/Titans, and Plas sang "Anything You Can Do (I Can Do Better)" to himself while matching Garfield Logan beast for beast. It's written by a Hank Kanalz (though he's credited as "K.H. Kanalz" in the credit box), penciled by Kevin J. West and inked by Norm Rapmund. 

Set on the JLA Watchtower, it opens with Green Lantern Kyle Rayner narrating: "I'm on watch tonight. And for some reason, so is he." The two heroes seem to be occupying each other by playing with their powers. Plas takes the shape of the Titanic, Green Lantern conjures an iceberg construct for him to crash into. Plas turns into a giant set of novelty vampire teeth, GL conjures a big green dog bone to jam into them.

Suddenly, an alarm goes off, warning them that there's an intruder on their lunar base. They split up and go looking for it, encountering a series of big, scary aliens as they do so. When Plastic Man thinks he has one captured by enveloping it in his body, it suddenly disappears.

This leads up to the gag ending, the last panel revealing a smiling Martian Manhunter, thinking to himself: "That should keep them quite for the rest of the day. And it certainly confirms one thing... ...Anything they can do, I can definitely do better!"

The tell was apparently that all of the alien monsters were green-colored, although J'onn, unlike Plastic Man, doesn't really have any color limitations on his transformations. 

(This story has never been collected.)

Green Lantern #115-116 (1999) This is probably one of the odder Plastic Man team-ups DC has published...I would say the oddest, but, well, there's an odder one yet to come. Like that one though, I find myself quite curious about how exactly this story came to be.

It's a two-parter written by Dan Jurgens, who drew the covers with Terry Austin (The first one did not feature Plastic Man, so I used the second one, which did, above). Mike S. Miller pencilled the first issue and was inked by Saleem Crawford and Keith Champagne. Tom Lyle penciled the second part and was inked by Andrew Pepoy. The story arc was a fill-in, coming fairly late in writer Ron Marz's lengthy, almost 80-issue run on Green Lantern.

The star is, of course, Green Lantern Kyle Rayner, and we catch up with him as he's battling a battalion of soldiers in high-tech armor flying through the skies of New York City. Quite unhelpfully, their armor is colored green, and their dialogue balloons are also green, the same color as the various ring constructs GL uses to fight them, and the color of Kyle's narration boxes.

Why are they fighting? Apparently, Kyle woke up that morning only to find a big red crate had appeared in his apartment, a shipping label attached reading, "Blue and Gold Express...When it absolutely, positively has to be there in ten seconds." Then waves of armored enemies promptly crash through his wall to retrieve it, and thus the fight begins. 

It's not until page 16 that the guest-stars arrive. Blue Beetle's Bug rises from the water, being piloted by Booster Gold. "And sitting in for my sidekick," Booster says after announcing himself, "Plastic Man!" 

What on Earth is Plastic Man doing with Booster Gold? I have no idea, especially since this is rather clearly a Booster Gold and Blue Beetle story, the "Blue and Gold Express" being a Justice League teleporter-powered shipping company the pair came up with, one of their classic get rich quick schemes that leads to trouble.

"Great," Green Lantern says when they appear. "I need Superman or Wonder Woman, maybe even Damage, and I end up with Abbot and Costello." That sounds like something someone might say about Booster and Beetle too, not Booster and Plas, whom, to my knowledge, have neither even met one another before (They were in the same place at the same time in JLA #27, the issue where Oracle calls in a bunch of Justice League reservists to help the team tackle Amazo, but they didn't speak to one another at all. I may be forgetting some big crossover story where they interacted previously, though).

After a few panels of exchanges, Green Lantern turns to Plastic Man and says:

You must not have read page 167 of the JLA handbook?

I quote: "Any member identified as spending time with Booster Gold--

--And/or Blue Beetle is subject to immediate expulsion."

He's presumably kidding around, of which there is a lot in these two issues.

Even with the reinforcements, Green Lantern finds the odds too great, and then Booster Gold whispers a plan to him. GL creates a blinding light that temporarily paralyzes all of the soldiers, and then our heroes fly away, leaving the big, red crate behind. 

This being what they were after in the first place, the armored guys gladly take it and return to their base, where they present it to their leader, a balding man with a fancy cape, a walking stick and rings on all of his fingers. 

As you have probably guessed already, there's a reason why the crate was red, instead of a more standard crate color: During the blinding flash, Plas disguised himself as the crate, and rather than the genuine article, the bad guys brought the disguised Plastic Man back to their base.

Meanwhile, Booster and Green Lantern open it up to see what it was—due to privacy concerns, Booster had no idea what his company was being used to ship—and they dramatically react to what's inside, something we're not shown by the end of this first issue. 

"Oh, my...!" Booster says.

"Of all the things that could've been inside...I never expected that!"

Not a bad cliffhanger to get a reader to pick up the next issue, huh? 

That next issue starts with an entire page devoted to recapping the previous issue, in which Green Lantern's narration tells us the story thus far. Oddly, he says this of Booster Gold's plus one: "Brought a sidekick, Plastic Man, with him...Don't know much about him either, even though we work the JLA beat together."

Really? They've been on the team together for about a year and half and 17 issues of JLA together and, when you factor in all the many ancillary JLA comics of the time, that's hundreds of pages of adventures. Why, it was just a few months previous that we say Green Lantern and Plastic Man hanging out and playing with their powers together in Green Lantern 80-Page Giant #2! Although, given the lead time necessary, Jurgens almost certainly didn't read that story before writing this one. 

Anyway, despite the freaking out about the contents of the crate last issue, here Jurgens rewinds time a bit and has the freaking out about it for another few pages, although it's clear they have no idea what it is. It's just a mysterious glowing ball. 

Meanwhile, the villain, whose name is The Supplier, is busy torturing Plastic Man at his secret base...which just so happens to be right across the street from Kyle Rayner's apartment, which is how the crate was accidentally teleported to Kyle in the first place.

The Supplier has Plastic Man stretched out on some kind of off-panel rack, which surely wouldn't hurt him at all, over a bed of spikes. This really shouldn't be able to hurt him either, but, for whatever reason, the spikes are able to puncture him, and he's not stretching of shifting around them. Then the spikes start to burn which, admittedly, should hurt Plastic Man...I think (His Golden Age comics seemed to vary on whether or not heat hurts him). 

Plas continues to make jokes throughout the torture, and then Green Lantern and Booster Gold arrive. The Supplier gives a name to the glowing ball—The Ogalict—and tells us a little about himself. Apparently, he distributes "the most unusual items to be found anywhere," and he bought The Ogalict from a Psion to sell to a Khund warrior.

After some negotiation, Kyle agrees to give The Ogalict to The Supplier in exchange for the lives of his soldiers, all of whom were apparently innocent victims kidnapped off the street, brainwashed and implanted little bombs within them.

The Supplier then vanishes, saying something along the lines of how our heroes haven't seen the last of him yet. As it turns out, our heroes didn't really hand over the maguffin; Kyle explains that the orb he handed over was actually just a ring-generated fake, and he had hidden the real orb under a bucket on a rooftop...although when he goes to retrieve that, it's missing.

Whatever. Rather than dealing with that, he turns his attention to Booster, threatening to tell Batman that he and Beetle have used Justice League teleporter tech for one of their schemes. A bemused Plastic Man sits silently by, his bare legs crossed as Booster pleads with Kyle.

And that's that. What was The Ogalict? Where did it go? Will we ever see The Supplier again? And what on Earth was Plastic Man doing in this story in the first place? The issues provide no satisfactory answers and, to my knowledge, none of this ever came up again anywhere else in the next 26 years, but then, I haven't read every DC comic in that time, so perhaps it did. 

I like both Miller and Lyle okay as pencil artists, having a bit more affection for the work of the latter, given that he drew some of the first comics I read, including the Robin miniseries starring Tim Drake (and then a Detective Comics arc that was something of a sequel to the first of those).

Other than making funny faces and disguising himself as the crate, Plastic Man doesn't have much to do in Miller's half of the story. He does considerably more in Lyle's half, including lots of dramatic stretching, binding The Supplier in his arms and growing quite large in one panel, although I didn't really care for how Lyle drew his face, as he gave him prominent, monkey-like ears and a notably pointy nose and elongated chin...although, granted, the chin might have been a result of him stretching his face to scream and otherwise react to torture. 

Among Plastic Man team-ups, this one isn't too terribly a good one, but it is weird and, rereading it for the first time all these years later, I'm still perplexed as to the hows and whys of Jurgens' story. It seems like the very same story could have been told with Blue Beetle instead of Plastic Man...with the exception of the bit where Plast pretends to be a crate, something that is definitely outside of Beetle's skillset. 

(This story has never been collected.)

JLA 80-Page Giant #2 (1999) The second annual JLA 80-Page Giant didn't have the same organizing theme of team-ups that the Green Lantern one from a few months previous did. Of its seven short stories, three are two-hero team-ups, one is a three-hero team-up, another a four-hero team-up and the others feature whole Leagues. One of those two-hero team-ups features Plastic Man, and so it is relevant to us here. In it, he is teamed with the one member of this particular iteration of the Justice League that he has the least in common with: The New God Orion. 

Despite the fact that they apparently both like red, the relationship between the two was never particularly warm. Indeed, when the then-new, expanded JLA roster debuted at the end of 1998's JLA #17, the first group shot of them all features Plastic Man making fun of Orion's dour nature, stretching his neck so that it's behind Orion's back and changing the shape of his head so that it is a parody of Orion's, complete with the odd shape of his helmet and a deep frown.

The cover refers to them as "The Combo of Chaos!", although that actually refers to the content of their particular 10-page adventure rather than just the simple unlikelihood of their pairing.

Entitled "Outside the Box," the short is the work of writer Fabian Nicieza and artists Anthony Williams and Stephen Baskerville. On the opening page, the League is assembled in their Watchtower base, and Superman is in the middle of a brief about "chaos-energy" being unleashed planet-wide. 

As the Man of Steel is assigning pairs of heroes to different locations, Orion volunteers, "Barda and I shall--", but Superman interrupts him, saying that Barda is staying on monitor duty. Then Orion suggests that Green Lantern and he will team-up, but Superman again interrupts him, assigning Green Lantern and The Atom to Russia.

At this point, Plastic Man raises his hand and says, "Pickme-Pickmeooh-oohmeme", while Orion glares and says under his breath, "No..."

But yes, Superman assigns he and Plastic Man to go to Los Angeles, where the chaos energy is threatening the San Andreas fault. They leap into action, saving civilians and trying to stem various disasters, getting along like oil and water.

Orion says that Mother Box informs him that the nature of the chaos-energy is "to perform the opposite action-- --to the statistical norms of the laws of physics."

"Up goes down, down goes up and boyohboy must that really bug a 'by the book' guy like you!" Plastic Man responds. "Let it rip 'cause this stuff is like laughing gas to me!"

After some successes by Plas, some advice relayed from Barda regarding how the other teams are doing and the "telemetry analysis" from Mother Box, Orion realizes that Plastic Man has the right idea, and that by seemingly aiding the chaos, they can fix the various problems. Like helping knock down a teetering building, for example, causes it to right itself (Look, I don't get it either. It's a very short story).

Ultimately then, the pair is able to save the day, when Orion uses a blast of the Astro-Force to trigger a massive earthquake, and thus setting the quaking fault back to normal. As they walk off toward the horizon together, Orion tells Plas thank you and, for once in the story, Plas makes no smart remark in return.

After the humor of the pair initially being teamed against Orion's will, there's not much more of note to the story which, typical of many of the supplemental JLA stories of the time (i.e. those not written by Grant Morrison himself), a "straight" superhero regards Plastic Man as something between ineffective comic relief and an outright irritant. Although given how annoying Plastic Man tends to be written in many of these stories, perhaps that's not all that surprising of a reaction to him.

The art team gives Plas the shiny, plastic-y sheen that artists Howard Porter, John Dell and others usually gave him in the pages of JLA proper, and while none of his transformations in this short story are necessarily inspired or memorable, some of his stretching is compelling, particularly in one two-panel sequence where, in the first panel, we see Orion rocketing away with a big BOOM! sound effect following in his wake, and then Plastic Man taking off after him in the next panel, his left leg elongating to incredible portions to carry him after Orion, while the sound effect starts to crumble, a bit like slowly shattering glass. 

Plastic Man also appears in this issue's "Average People" story by D. Curtis Johnson and Chris Wozniak. Featuring some of the JLA then-newer recruits—Plastic Man, Steel, Huntress and Zauriel—it tells the story of the League pursuing insurance actuary and seemingly totally normal guy Andy Plugh. In reality, he is one of several partial prototype Amazos built by Professor Ivo, androids so lifelike that even they don't know they aren't real people. 

Plas only appears in a few panels, attempting to wrap up the Andy-bot and then getting pinned to the floor by a handful of Huntress' crossbow bolts that the android snatches from the air at super-speed. Huntress calls him "P.M." at one point, which isn't a nickname I've heard before, and certainly isn't as popular as "Plas" or even "Plastic," as he is sometimes referred to in that recent-ish DC Finest: Plastic Man collection of Golden Age adventures. 

("Outside the Box" has never been collected...no has "Average People")

Impulse #57 (2000) I debated whether or not to include this particular team-up, given who its pencil artist is, but I decided go ahead and do so for the sake of completeness, assuming you guys all realize that writing about a particular creator's past work isn't any sort of endorsement of that creator's views or behavior (That said, let's not buy any new work from this guy, nor follow him on X or watch his YouTube channel or whatever he uses to communicate his noxious opinions to his likeminded followers.)

Plastic Man's inclusion in the Justice League obviously lead to lots of appearances throughout the DC Universe during the years he was on the team, almost always appearing alongside at least some of his teammates. This appearance is a bit unusual as, though he appears in his capacity as a Justice Leaguer, he's the only Leaguer who appears and, somewhat curiously given the title it appears in, this issue is more of a Plastic Man story than an Impulse one. 

It opens with Plastic Man and is mostly told from his point-of-view, as we see Impulse through his eyes (There are about three pages devoted to Impulse's supporting characters, Max Mercury, out of costume, and Helen Claiborne). 

Writer Todd Dezago and pencil artist Ethan Van Sciver, who had taken over the book eight issues previous, give us another in a series of Impulse Christmas issues. In this one, it's Christmas Eve, and Plastic Man sneaks Woozy Winks onto the JLA Watchtower, where the pair plan to watch their favorite Christmas movie in "the monitor womb."

They are interrupted by an incoming call from Impulse from Young Justice headquarters; he has some dangerous glop called "technoplasm", which, he says, Robin and Steel want him to store in a cryo-lab at the Watchtower. 

Plas reluctantly allows Impulse to teleport up, explaining to Woozy and readers that he's not fond of the annoying little speedster (and perhaps, an asterisk and editorial note suggests, it might have something to do with Impulse tying him in knots in 1998's JLA/Titans).

Meanwhile Mr. Mxyzptlk—dressed not in his traditional orange and purple, but instead in seasonal red and green—has a not-very-good plan to humiliate Superman. He has programmed a "SANTAndroid super-bot" to fight Superman; the Man of Steel will obviously win, but Mxy figures the public will turn against him if they see him beating up Santa Claus (How this will work is exactly not apparent to me, given how extremely fake the Santa looks; like, it's clearly a robot).

The imp's plan goes awry, though. Superman is busy in space, and so it's Plastic Man who comes to Metropolis to deal with the robot....with Impulse close behind. Plastic Man surprises Mxy, who is tinkering with the robot's insides for some reason, and the imp bumps his head on the robot's interior, knocks himself out, and then gets trapped inside it.

That's when Impulse shows up, decides the robot is the real Santa (apparently the robot was convincing enough to fool him, anyway), and then races around the country, dragging the robot at super-speed and helping him deliver presents.

In the end, it's Woozy who sends Mxyzptlk back to the 5th dimension, tricking him into inserting himself into the black-and-white Christmas movie they were watching, and then rewinding it so that the dialogue is played back backwards, so that Mxyzptlk is forced to say "Kltpzyxm". (Um, it's been a while since I've used a VCR, but whenever I rewound a tape, it was more or less silent, it didn't play the dialogue backwards; maybe the JLA monitor womb's VCR works differently...?)

Obviously, there are some problems and leaps in logic here, but Dezago does a fine job of depicting Impulse as innocently annoying, and it's sort of fun to see Plastic Man in the position of the frustrated and annoyed character, as he's usually the one irritating other characters. 

Van Sciver, inked here by Prentis Rollins, was an unusual choice for Impulse, as the series' original artist Humberto Ramos established a very manga-influenced style, giving the lead a big head, floppy hair and big hands and feet, making Impulse look both cartoony and awkward (And the character, of course, tended to "think" in pictograms, which would appear as more cartoony images of objects in thought clouds above his head).

Van Sciver, who followed the similarly inclined Craig Rousseau as the book's third regular pencil artist, has generally worked in a very different mode. If you're familiar with the once-popular artist's later work on, say, the Green Lantern franchise, you know he specializes in a far more realistic, detail-heavy style.

Still, Van Sciver acquitted himself nicely. His Impulse art certainly had a lot more lines in it than that of his predecessors, but he nailed the regular cast's character designs, his Impulse looked, moved and felt like the "real" Impulse and if the more detailed look was a bit of a departure, he didn't really alter the book's basic aesthetic drastically.

Dezago didn't give him too much to do with Plastic Man in terms of transformations—the best image is probably that of a flattened Plas, run over by Impulse when wasn't watching where he was racing, peeling his head off the ground, his face bearing the deep tread marks of Impulse's giant shoes. Still, his is an interesting version of the character, with lots of crosshatching that is normally absent.

Van Sciver also, credit where credit is due, draws one of the best, or at least most accurate, versions of Woozy Winks I've seen while reading and/or re-reading all these comics for this post. His Woozy looks the closest to Jack Cole's of any I've seen, and he manages to get the jowls just right (artists usually just give Woozy a rounder, fat face). 

(This issue has never been collected...and, given the toxicity of its pencil artist, isn't likely to ever be.)

JLA #65 (2002) When JLA writer Grant Morrison passed the writer's baton to Mark Waid in 2001, the latter kept Plastic Man as part of the cast, despite purging the rest of Morrison's additions to the Big Seven/Magnificent Seven line-up (Because, if I'm remembering interviews from the time correctly, Waid wasn't entirely sure which characters were going to survive Morrison's final story arc, "World War III"). And then, when Waid passed it to Joe Kelly in 2002, he too kept Plas on.

After Kelly's first four issues with the new art team of Dough Mahnke and Tom Nguyen, the creators took a done-in-one break or breather issue between the story arcs "Golden Perfect" and "The Obsidian Age". This was JLA #65, "Bouncing Baby Boy," which, as Mahnke and company's cover above intimates, was a Batman/Plastic Man team-up.

I wasn't blogging back then, but, if I were, I imagine this issue would have inspired a very long, rather angry post, given the dramatic changes it made to the Plastic Man character who, at that point, had been regularly appearing in JLA comics (and throughout the DC Universe line) for about five years.

I can understand Kelly's desire to make the character seem a bit deeper and more complex (he was, at the time, the only one of the seven Leaguers to not have his own book...or more than one book, in the cases of Batman and Superman). I can also understand Kelly wanting to make Plastic Man into a somewhat flawed character (although none of the other Leaguers at the time had such a flaw or moral deficiency). This just didn't seem to me, then or now, the way to do it (Exploring the character's criminal past, and perhaps his ongoing temptations to occasionally do bad, as Waid did at one point during his brief run on the title, seemed a more obvious strategy for instilling Plastic Man with a bit more nuance).

Instead, Kelly reveals in this story, that Plastic Man had fathered a son out of wedlock. And then apparently more or less ignored his son for many years, even going so far as to doubt that the child might have been his, something he's no longer able to keep up once the kid starts exhibiting shape-changing powers. 

So Plastic Man, Kelly tells us, is a deadbeat dad. Hardly superheroic behavior...and quite contrary to the version of the character Waid wrote in the 1999 one-shot The Kingdom: Offspring, an out-of-continuity story set in a possible future starring Plastic Man's son, who has a close and happy relationship with his father. 

After reading this issue when it was originally released, I was fairly certain it was one that future writers would end up ignoring, given what a negative light in which it painted one of DC's longest-lived and, at that moment, more prominent characters. I ended up being pretty wrong about that, obviously.

In his first issue on the series, Kelly devoted a page to Plastic Man's secret identity, fast-talking on a cellphone in an office with "O'Brian Security" on the door. He takes a call from someone he apparently hates, but then says he will send money to. A few issues later, when "the truth is breaking down" worldwide, Plas is alarmed to find that he can no longer lie. Among the things he reports he couldn't help but confess? "My ex called looking for her check and I told her I blew the money on the ponies".

So there was a bit of foreshadowing of this issue, in which Plastic Man seeks out Batman in Gotham City and asks the Dark Knight for a favor, as he doesn't think Batman cares at all about his teammates' personal lives, and he knows he can keep his mouth shut. And as for the task at hand? Well, it involves scaring a kid straight, and that's what Batman's all about, right?

The kid, Plas tells Batman, belongs to his ex Angel McDunnagh, who "ain't exactly what you'd call 'Waltz Her Through the Watchtower Material'"; while saying this, he creates a tiny shape of a scantily clad woman dancing on a pole in the palm of his hand.

It probably doesn't take The World's Greatest Detective to figure out that the kid is actually Plastic Man's. A silent panel where Plas and Angel look meaningfully at one another after Batman asks where the boy's father is will probably clue most readers in. 

When we first meet the 10-year-old boy, in the shape of a triceratops wearing a backwards hat, with four gangsters riding on his back, it's clear enough for Batman to say out loud (The boy's first appearance in the story is one of the funnier moments, as Batman asks which one he is, and Plas simply says, "Um, heh....I think he's the one in the hat," a turn of the page revealing to the reader that one of the gang is, you know, a dinosaur).

The gang gets away, in part because Plastic Man refuses to reveal himself to his son, and then the two heroes have a heart-to-heart conversation in which Batman tells Plastic Man that he's disappointed in him and that, "Of all of us, even Clark, I always thought you would make the best father," explaining "I thought you'd be the kind of father would show his children that he loved them, instead of just telling them" and "I thought you would make them laugh all the time."

In the end, Plastic Man is unable to face the boy, whose name is Luke, even when prompted by Batman. The Dark Knight infiltrates the gang's hideout, and does something off-panel that has paralyzed all of the older boys with fear. He threatens the boy to never again as much as look at the other kids in the gang (I don't think it's supposed to be funny when Batman says "gangsta" and "Peeps" in scare quotes, but it sure is), before letting him go. Plastic Man spends the whole time disguised as one of the little yellow panels on Batman's utility belt, shedding a tear from his goggled eye after Luke asks Batman if he knows Plastic Man and if Plastic Man knows about him.

As much as I didn't agree with the content at the time, reading it again over 20 years later, I have to confess it's effective, and that Kelly does a fine job playing the two superhero characters off of one another. Unlike their various Brave and the Bold Team-Ups, here they are much more in character, or at least now what we would think of as in character, with Batman quiet, business-like, judgmental and menacing, while Plas never shuts up or stops joking, even when he's angry or sad (One of Batman's first clues that there's something personal between Plas and the boy is when Plastic Man is quiet for too long; "You've been silent for over seven and a half minutes," Batman says over his shoulder, while scanning the area through binoculars. "Either you've had a stroke, or there's something on your mind.")

The story really wouldn't work at all without Mahnke, who here demonstrates his facility with character acting throughout, both in the expressions of the characters and in their body language, the latter of which tends to communicate what Plastic Man is thinking even better than his various transformations which, by this point in the character's history, were fairly constant and usually used as visual punchlines (The two stars probably aren't the easiest to give expressions either, given Batman's white-eyed cowl and Plas' opaque goggles). 

It would take a few months' time (within the comic), but Plastic Man would eventually do the right thing by Luke, some ten years too late. During "The Obsidian Age" arc, probably the biggest and most ambitious of Kelly's run, the League travels back in time and, at one point, Plastic Manis turned to stone and then smashed to pieces by their opponents. But he doesn't die. Instead, he spends the next 3,000 years lying scattered about the ocean floor, a disembodied consciousness with nothing to do but think.

Back in the present, the Leaguers gather and reunite the various pieces of Plastic Man. (This is issue #76, featuring another striking Mahnke cover, in which Batman pours Plastic Man out of a beaker onto a table in front of the other Leaguers.) After talking about his ordeal, Plas appears in a suit, confessing to the rest of the League that he has a son and he regrets having spent so long running away from him: "I want to get to know my son," he says. "I don't want to be Plastic Man anymore."

And so he takes a leave of absence to reunite with Luke (mostly off-page), not coming back to the team until he's called to do so about a dozen issues later, at the very end of Kelly and company's run.

Luke, meanwhile, would eventually be conflated with The Kingdom: Offspring's Ernie, rapidly aged without any in-story explanation, and become the shape-changing Teen Titan Offspring (a Geoff Johns massaging of continuity). Luke (and Angel) would both play major roles in the 2024 Black Label miniseries Plastic Man No More!, which is basically a graphic novel-length extrapolation of JLA #65. 

(Collected in 2015's JLA Vol. 6 and 2021's Legends of the DC Universe: Doug Mahnke.)

Green Lantern/Plastic Man: Weapons of Mass Deception #1 (2011) This 44-page one-shot is a curious one, pairing Plastic Man with Green Lantern Hal Jordan. As far as I can tell, the two characters have never even met in continuity...at least, not while Hal was alive (Plastic Man encountered him when he was briefly The Spectre in 1999's JLA #35 and 2003's miniseries JLA/Spectre: Soul War and JLA/Avengers). They've certainly been in the same place at the same time before at least once though, both attending the ceremony Aquaman hosted after the League was dissolved in 2005's JLA #120, and perhaps they met off panel during some crisis or crossover of some sort. 

Regardless, the pair were never on the Justice League at the same time before, and neither of them were on the team at the time this book was published (Which was during James Robinson's run on the 2006-2011 Justice League of America title).

And yet Weapons of Mass Deception, which is written by Marv Wolfman and drawn by Brent Anderson, opens in the League's headquarters, where Plas and Hal are both present, and, from Hal's opening narration, it sure sounds like they are both meant to be active members:

My name is Hal Jordan. I'm a member of the Green Lantern Corps. It takes a lot to make me angry: Cruelty, violence... 

...Or thirty seconds with Plastic Man.

He's thoughtless and frivolous. And in the most serious situations, all he cares about is fun. If the J.L.A. doesn't keep an eye on him, he might very well be the death of us all. 

Later, when Plastic Man balks at the pair of them taking on thousands of enemies alone, Hal scolds him, "You're the one who wanted to be in the Justice League...This is what we do."

It sure sounds like they are meant to be active Leaguers during the time at which the story is meant to be set then, right?

As to why this book exists at all, my best guess was that it was originally meant to be a two-issue arc of the 2007-2010 The Brave and the Bold, as Wolfman wrote a two-issue fill-in arc for that title during the 10-issue span between the end of writer Mark Waid's run and the start of J. Michael Straczynski's. Weapons is, after all, the exact length of two regular issues of a comic book, and halfway through there's a dramatic cliffhanger, immediately followed by a scene-setting splash page. 

So it seems that DC may have commissioned it for a Brave and the Bold fill-in and, not wanting to let it go to waste, they ended up publishing it as a standalone one-shot. 

It's not very good, even setting aside the pairing of the characters and the supposition of them as Justice League teammates, which is, of course, completely unmoored from DC continuity. 

Hal's badmouthing of Plastic Man occurs on the opening splash page, during which Plas is begging a very impatient Green Lantern for his help. He explains that he was on what seemed like a routine case, attempting to stop a nuclear heist on behalf of the FBI (here, Plas is apparently a former FBI agent), but when he closes in on the criminals, they pull out "zap-blaster space guns". Though he's injured by the weapons, Plas overhears the bad guys, and it appears that there's some kind of alien presence organizing Earth criminals for something big.

It turns out that the alien weapons seem to be of the same sort that Hal was on his way into space to go investigate. "Unbelievable," he says. "You case actually intersects with mine."

And so the unlikely pair go undercover at an underworld bar in L.A. where the aliens, who look like humanoid cartoon ducks barely disguised in trench coats and wide-brimmed hats, are looking to recruit. And then they go into space (Plas in a spacesuit, being dragged along in a green bubble by GL), where they fight more ducks on one ship, and then face their entire armada. 

After some flying around and fighting, they return to Earth for some more undercover work, and, ultimately, they split up to do what they do best. Plastic Man is able to rally the Earth criminals to betray the space ducks on the ground, while Hal flies into orbit and takes on the ships they have parked there. 

During the course of the adventure, Hal earns a new respect for Plastic Man, which I guess I'll quote at length, given that I quoted Hal's earlier trash-talking of him:

Ninety percent of the time Plastic Man acts like a moron. Then wham! He turns on a dime and does his job like a pro.

He told us once that he's an undercover F.B.I. agent who poses as a third-rate thief to get information on the mob.

Must be one hell of a life.

Maybe that's it. The reason. The thing that drives me insane whenever I'm near him.

As Eel O'Brian, he can't let his guard down for even a second.

One mistake and he's dead. 

Maybe that's his secret.

Being Plastic Man's his release. 

Without the insanity of Plas, there can be no Eel O'Brian focused on doing real police work.

Maybe...?

While Hal's assessment of Plastic Man seems quite harsh, both in the first half of the comic where he's down on him and even near the climax where he seems to come around to him, I have to admit that, as written here, Plastic Man is pretty annoying. 

As has so often been the case after he joined the JLA in the late '90s, the character is presented as zany comic relief, always making generally unfunny jokes, and using his shape-changing powers as visual punchlines to them. And, as is also often the case, he's played off a straight man type character, who finds his schtick tiresome. 

For some reason I can't fathom, Wolfman chose Hal as the straight man in this particular comic.

Anderson, like Wolfman, is a solid craftsman, and he does a decent enough job on the art here, although it's mostly unremarkable (Given the realism of his style though, the duck-like aliens stick out as particularly weird-looking). 

His Plastic Man has a lot of character in his face, and he is often bending or stretching weirdly (the image Anderson draws of him on the opening splash is particularly odd looking). 

Still, the creators don't do anything all that clever or interesting with his powers throughout other than, perhaps, the way Anderson draws his torso as occasionally almost two-dimensionally thin when he stretches. 

All in all, it's a very weird comic, but more so in why-was-this-even-made or a what-were-they-thinking kind of a way, than in a fun way.  

(Weapons of Mass Deception has never been collected).

Scooby-Doo Team-Up #27 (2017) Are DC's Scooby-Doo comics set in the DC Universe...? I...don't think so. Sure, they feature tons of DC characters, or, at least, this particular 2014-2015 series did, and it was followed by another series The Batman & Scooby-Doo Mysteries that, as the title says, had Batman in every issue. That said, they didn't tend to stick to whatever was going on in the DCU comics at the time, they would instead feature the default, classic or original versions of the visiting DC heroes in Team-Up or, in Mysteries, different versions of the characters might show up in different comics, depending on the story.

That said, they are very good comics, and Team-Up proved to be a great introduction to some of DC's better characters; not just the popular heroes you might expect, but many of whom didn't have their own series and were thus less visible (Issues featured, for example, The Doom Patrol, The Marvel Family, Metamorpho, Black Lightning and Mister Miracle and Big Barda; sometimes it seemed like writer Sholly Fisch was writing this series particularly for me personally). 

I particularly enjoyed Fisch's "thematic" issues. Their cover might feature, say, Martian Manhunter, but the story inside would actually feature every single alien character they could fit in. (Other such issues featured all of DC's ghost characters, or all of the gorilla characters or all the teams-of-regular-guys-in-matching-uniforms like The Challengers of the Unknown and the Sea Devils and so on). 

If you've never read any of the series, it's well worth checking out to read quality all-ages comics featuring your favorite DC hero, no matter how unlikely a Scooby-Doo team-up might seem for them (I mean, there's a Swamp Thing issue, too). And if you're a Scooby-Doo fan? Well, don't miss issue #50, which features every version of every Scooby-Doo character ever. 

The praises for Scooby-Doo Team-Up sufficiently sung, I have to confess that I wasn't really a fan of this particular issue, which I didn't think was one of Fisch's better one. It's drawn by his frequent collaborator Dario Brizuela, whose versions of Scooby and the gang are perfect adaptations of how they appeared in the original cartoons, while his superhero characters were generally drawn in his own personal style (Rather than trying to, say, Scooby-Doo-ize them).

For this issue, Fisch reverts back to a classic, Jack Cole version of Plas. He's working for the FBI (as opposed to the NBI, or as a private detective), and he's doing so under a Chief Branner. Woozy wants to help, but his help is not wanted. After Plas lowers him out the FBI headquarters window to the street, Woozy wanders off and meets a fortune teller, who tells him he's doomed.

Woozy is inconsolable at the idea that he's now cursed, and so Plas turns to Mystery Inc. to prove to Woozy that there's no such thing as fortune-telling, psychic powers and curses. Plas would prefer to concentrate on tracking down the Granite Lady (a 1940s villain created by Cole, whom Gail Simone and company seemed to be in the process of trying to recreate in their 2018 series) and her gang of colorfully-named thugs (Including one named "Hijack" Cole).

Conveniently, the two cases intersect. 

(Collected in 2018's Scooby-Doo Team-Up Vol. 5...along with issues featuring the "Hard Travelling Heroes", Hong Kong Phooey, Jonah Hex, Top Cat and the Challengers of the Unknown). 

Flash Facts (2021) Like the issue of Scooby Doo Team-Up discussed previously, the 12-page story in this original trade paperback targeted at kids probably isn't officially canonical. On the other hand, there's nothing in the story that contradicts continuity, either.

The premise of Flash Facts is to use Barry Allen's old oft-repeated term to explain various scientific facts to readers as a sort of over-arching format, with each story in the anthology tackling a different subject and different DC superhero characters used to explain that to young readers in the course of a short adventure. These characters include Supergirl, Green Lantern Jessica Cruz, Poison Ivy and Swamp Thing and the oft-teamed Batman and Plastic Man, which is why I'm talking about the book in this particular post.

Their story, "If You Can't Take the Heat" by writers Varian Johnson and Darian Johnson and artist Vic Regis, is about 3D printing.

Our heroes return to the Batcave after a disastrous encounter with Firefly. Batman is badly singed, one ear on his cowl broken off, the other still smoldering. Batman says he will need a new suit, one more resistant to high temperatures. 

He and Alfred then explain what a 3D printer is and how it works to Plastic Man. After the brief lesson, they turn to Batman's own larger printer, which they will feed the temperature-resistant filament into in order to create the necessary batsuit.

Soon they are back on the street, with Batman in his new armor and Plastic Man as a red bat-symbol on the Dark Knight's chest, and this time they handily defeat Firefly. After Plas asks if there's anything else he can do to help, the story ends with Batman sipping from a cup of coffee, while Plastic Man is in the form of a Keurig-like coffee maker.

Batman and Alfred are both smiling and joking, but I don't know if I'd be quite so eager to drink coffee that's been brewed inside Plastic Man's body, personally.

Regis' versions of all the characters are big-headed, somewhat squat and bearing big, bold expressions that sometimes seem to slide off their faces, giving them the look of chibis or, perhaps, animated Funko Pops. There are only a couple of panels where we see Plastic Man's lower half, and Regis, who apparently colors his own work here, seems unsure of how long to make his pantlegs. In one panel, they seem to be knee-length shorts, while in others they terminate near the characters' ankles.

Of course, one fun aspect of Plastic Man is that an artist can always excuse any inconsistencies by saying the shape-changing character himself was in flux.

This team-up is fine, but hardly extraordinary. I originally reviewed the book here; flipping through it again as I write this, I think it's strongest points of recommendation are probably the chances to see various lesser-seen characters like Swamp Thing, Mary Marvel and Atom Ryan Choi and a rather wide variety of art styles. The cover is by EDILW favorite Derek Charm, who, unfortunately, doesn't also contribute a story within. 

Batman: Urban Legends #15 (2022) This relatively short-lived Batman anthology book, which ran for 23 issues between 2021 and 2023, gave DC a place to feature Batman's increasingly large and unwieldly family of Robins, Batgirls, sidekicks and partners outside of the Batman books proper. It would eventually come to also include Batman's other allies, like, of course, Plastic Man. 

Plas appeared in a 10-page team-up entitled "Bending The Rules" by the creative team of writer Joey Esposito and artist Jason Howard, and he was featured on issue #15's variant cover, by artist Riley Rossmo (above). 

In this story, set "Years Ago," Batman is on the hunt for a Gotham criminal named Brad Sampey who had made a deal with the District Attorney to flip on his boss The Penguin, but then, after The Penguin found out, Sampey decided to run instead. 

Batman, who Howard draws as a big, black, angry-looking shape as he delivers his typical hard-boiled narration, is just about to grab the fleeing Sampey, when, suddenly, BWAANNGG, Plastic Man stretches between the Dark Knight and his prey.

What gives?

Plas explains that he was friends with Sampey back when he himself was a criminal, and that he believes that Sampey will ultimately do the right thing and is just running at the moment because he's scared...of The Penguin, sure, but also of Batman. Plas wants him to turn himself in, but on his own, rather than punched-out and tied-up by Batman.

To help convince Batman, Plas shares a story about a time when he was still just a criminal named Eel O'Brian and he and Sampey were sight-seeing in Gotham. Their bus was attacked by The Joker, as buses in Gotham City tend to be. The villain tossed Sampey from the moving bus, but Batman swings onto the scene, catches Sampey and kicks The Joker in the face.

"The Batman risked his life to save some schmuck who never did nothin' for nobody but himself," Plas says, noting that he right then and there decided the next job would be his last. "I woulda bailed on that one that one too, if I thought I could get out of it without running for my life like Sampey."

That next job was, of course, the one at the chemical plant that gave him his powers, but it was actually the example set by Batman that had inspired him to change for the good. 

Plast finishes his story with "So if you wanna take Sampey in because of who he used to be, who he used to work for...if you think people aren't truly capable of change... ...then what does that make me?"

And then The KGBeast, who The Penguin has hired to kill Sampey before he can testify, arrives. There's a brief fight and Sampey does indeed decide to do the right thing.

Howard's art is great, especially two panels in which Batman fights KGBeast; in the first, he kicks the villain in the face, Howard drawing Batman's leg exploding toward the reader diagonally and then off the page, in the second, the Beast fires his gun at Batman, who Howard again draws as more silhouette and shape than man.

Plas doesn't get to do too much, powers-wise, only taking on the shape of a surfboard with a sail on it for Batman to chase Sampey's boat on and then doing some stretching.

There's probably more supervillains than one needs in such a short story, but then, I guess it's fun to see Howard drawing The Joker, Penguin and KGBeast rather than just some generic mobster types.

Espositio making Batman the inspiration for Eel going straight all those years ago seems a little forced, of course, and it's easy to roll one's eyes at DC once again making everything about Batman. But, on the other hand, this is a Batman comic, so maybe doing so is more forgivable here. 

(Collected in 2023's Batman: Urban Legends Vol.4.)