Comic Shop Comics: April 13

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Anyway, that was a surprise!

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

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

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

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

Next issue? More "Yearbook"...!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Review: Star Wars: Chewbacca

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

...

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

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

Review: Godzilla In Hell

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Godzilla in Purgatory, then.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The quote?

It is better to conquer yourself...

...than to win a thousand battles.

Then the victory is yours.

It cannot be taken from you...

...not by angels or demons...

heaven or hell.

–Buddha

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

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


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

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

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

Meanwhile, at Comics Alliance...

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

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

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

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

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

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

0:24 Mon Mothma!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

1:14 Donnie Yen!

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

Hmm..

Anyway, Donnie Yen! Donnie Yenning!

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

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

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

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

Comic Shop Comics: April 6

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Check it out:

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

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

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



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

Review: Superman and Justice League of America Vol. 1

I used to have a great deal of sympathy for Dan Jurgens, who took over DC's Justice League franchise–or at least half of it–after Keith Giffen and J. M. DeMatteis' five-year run as its writers. Not only was their run perhaps the most distinct in the history of Justice League comics, but it proved extremely popular for quite a long time, and they expanded the brand into a multi-book franchise, as Justice League International became Justice League America and Justice League Europe (both of which they wrote), and then there were the annuals and even a quarterly. Not only were they going to be a hard act to follow, but Jurgens had the even more unenviable task of following them after their massive 15-part finale "Breakdowns," which revisited and wrapped up just about every aspect of their run. It was pretty much a textbook example of a run.

In 2016, I feel all the more sympathetic for Jurgens, as his run was soon followed by that of Grant Morrison, who completely redefined the Justice League (and DC super-team comics), for years to come. While Jurgens wasn't the only whose run happened to fall between two of the best (and best-loved) runs on a Justice League comic–Dan Vado, Gerard Jones, Christopher Priest Mark Waidand a few others would follow Jurgens on Justice League America, Justice League International, Justice League Task Force and (sigh) Extreme Justice in the years after the Giffen/DeMatteis run but before the Morrison one, he was the first and definitely most prominent. And he is the first of those writers from the tumultuous years between to have his run finally collected into trade paperback, with Superman and Justice League America Vol. 1.*

So, how does it hold up? Well, clearly DC wasn't taking any chances, then or now. They allowed Jurgens to add Superman to the team, and they're titling this series of collections Superman and Justice League America. That might be in order to differentiate it from the other collections of that decade's Justice League comics, collected under the titles Justice League International (the Giffen/DeMatteis run) and JLA (the Morrison run), but more likely is simply meant to advertise Superman's presence and move books (I do like that new hybrid logo).

The collection begins with 1992's Justice League Spectacular #1, a 48-page special by Jurgens, "Gerry" Jones, Ron Randall, Rick Burchett and Randy Elliot that shows the origin of the two new Justice League squads. A bunch of diplomats are visit Disney World analogue Funny Stuff Park, and The Elongated Man and Sue Dibny are along for security. When they are all taken hostage by the new Royal Flush Gang, the remnants of the disbanded JLI–Blue Beetle, Booster Gold, Fire, Ice, Green Lantern Guy Gardner, Power Girl and Metamorpho–try to affect a rescue, but are all felled by the surprisingly effective arsenal of the Gang.

Superman is about to fly down to Florida, only to find Batman lurking atop the Daily Planet building (the first of several oddly daylight appearances by Batman in this volume). Superman says that "With the Justice League disbanded I'm next in line to take on The Royal Flush Gang," which I found amusing, the idea that the superheroes have their own little mental charts about which characters fights which villains, and even a descending order of who should fight said villains if the first choice is unavailable.

Batman is there to try and sell Superman on the idea of not only joining the League, but leading it, and Superman refuses, telling Batman he works better alone, another pretty amusing scene, as we get to see the Dark Knight arguing the virtue of teamwork to Superman (ironically, the "loner" Batman has always worked with partners, and, at this point in post-Crisis, pre-Flashpoint DC history, was much more involved with the Justice League than Superman ever was), and we get to hear some of Superman's super-arrogant thoughts ("I understand Batman's point, but a group would slow me down! How would some of those nonpowered heroes keep up with me?").

Superman doesn't fare much better than the old ex-Leaguers did, and so Ice uses an unconscious Guy's GL ring to try and call for help. Hal Jordan receives her signal, and picks up a rather a random assortment of heroes–The Flash Wally West, Aquaman, Doctor Light and Crimson Fox–before joining the battle.

By page 48, the day is saved, and the characters all agree that there should be a new Justice League, two in fact. Who ends up on which team is determined by a splash page; Superman ends up leading the team that keeps the core of the JLA. Two new characters would join in short order, the Jurgens-created Maxima (from his work on the Superman comics) and the brand-new Bloodwynd, a mysterious sorcerer with one of the most '90s of superhero names and horribly over-accessorized costume (the colors are bold and striking, and the costume might not be so bad were it not for the goofy spandex non-mask that covers much of his head except his face, but then he's got all this jewelry, including a golden, gem-encrusted band around his thigh, for some reason).

Jurgens, perhaps under the influence of Jones in the first chapter, is seems to be hewing rather closely to what came before, not only in terms of the Justice League America cast–which includes Max Lord and Oberon, so that Superman is the only new official addition until a few issues in–but also in the book's tone. Jurgens and Jones aren't as good at the sitcom pitter-patter between characters, but some effort is made to make the characters and their interactions funny (most effectively, perhaps, when Blue Beetle and Booster Gold get in a fight, and Beetle offers a list of long, elaborate mean names, each of which Booster responds to simply with "Jerk!").

Structurally, these first few issues are full of call-backs to the early issues of the Giffen/DeMatteis team, with Lord trying to manufacture an international incident to force the Justice League back together, the involvement of the Royal Flush Gang (who Booster Gold fought upon joining the League for the first time) and a direct homage to the opening of the Giffen/DeMatteis run on the first page of Jurgens' first issue of Justice League America (Guy sitting at a meeting table, with his foot on the table, thinking about how he's going to lead the new team).

Aside from his new additions, Jurgens doesn't mess with any of the characters who were in the book before he arrived too drastically. Fire tries out a few new costumes and Guy's three-issue miniseries that gives him his first post-GL costume and Sinestro's ring occurs off-panel during these issues, but for the most part the characters only get one additional concern or characteristic a piece–Ice is infatuated with Superman, Blue Beetle is suspicious of Bloodwynd, etc. It's not until Vado and other writers take over the various League books that these poor bastards start really feeling the effects of the the prevalent trends of 1990s super-comics, with Booster getting dark and a dumb new costume, Ice going bad and dying and so on. At least in these earliest issues of Jurgens' time on the book–#61-68, so a volume two might be able to finish off his run with #69-#78–the book is pretty carefully calibrated to give a slightly more Jurgens-ized version of what came before.

The writer/artist–Rick Burchett and a few others handle the "finishes" of Jurgens art–also has a great interest in wider Justice League history, finding ways to fit elements of it in wherever he can, and establishing this post-Crisis League as the inheritors, worthy or not, of the original League.

So the very first villain they face is a new version of Gardner Fox and Mike Sekowsky's Weapons Master (who fought the nascent League in a pre-Justice League of America issue of The Brave and the Bold in 1960), and the cover of his first issue of JLA is an homage to 1960's Justice League of America.

Their next major opponent is Starslayer, who directly references his past encounter with the original League, and The Atom Ray Palmer shows up for a few issues, considering joining the Justice League, but ultimately being chased away by Guy (You might try Justice League Europe, Ray; your former colleagues Hal, Arthur and Ralph are all on that Team).

This is Jurgens at perhaps the height of his popularity–the next few issues of the series will feature the League fighting Doomsday and mourning the loss of Superman–and his art is a rather strong selling point. Jurgens' figure work is strong, and he does a particularly fine job on Batman, in whose two appearances, as well as Beetle, who is usually posed in Spider-Man-esque, bug-like postures, and Guy, who he gives a sharp, mean face that conveys the fairly one-dimensional take on the character given here. The women are mostly interchangeable save for their hair and clothes (and Maxima is a head taller than everyone else).

I'm glad DC finally collected these comics, and I sincerely hope they finish off Jurgens' run in a volume 2 and/or 3 (Not sure if they will collect the 1992 annual, part of that summer's "Eclipso: The Darkness Within" crossover, as all Jurgens provided was the cover), although as the series progresses, Superman and Justice League America will seem a less and less apt title.

As I said, the next two issues feature the League fighting (and failing to stop) Doomsday while the eventual killer of Superman rampages towards Metropolis and then this badly hurt League mourning Superman. Then there's an issue introducing a new team to take over while these guys recover–Wonder Woman! Black Condor II! The Ray II! Agent Liberty!. And then Superman is out for the rest of the run, which features the "Destiny's Hand" arc (the League vs. an evil version of the Satellite Era League) and the two-part origin/explanation of Bloodwynd, which you've likely already heard spoiled, whether you read it or not. So Superman and Justice League America Vol. 2 is going to be very light on the Superman, and heavy on the Justice League America.



*But hopefully not the last! Jurgen's JLA was maybe the more important of the two, but the Gerard Jones-written Justice League Europe, which was being published simultaneously, was the better of them. I would hope that Christopher Priest and Mark Waid's run on Justice League Task Force gets considered at some point. After about a year or so as a sort of anthology book with a rotating cast and rotating writers, Waid and Priest stabilized the book to feature a regular cast telling a single, often quite good ongoing storyline. The premise, Martian Manhunter training young heroes The Ray, Gypsy and Mystek, plus Triumph and L-Ron-in-Despero's boy (don't ask), somewhat pre-figured that of the Young Justice TV show (at least broadly).

Spider-Woman Vol. 2: New Duds

I feel like I'm always complaining about how overly eager Marvel is to relaunch and re-number their books for the slightest of reasons, so that following a particular creative team's run on a particular character can get downright confusing for the seasoned comics reader, let alone a relative newcomer.

For example, if one wanted to read writer Mark Waid's run on Daredevil, one would read the various volumes not in strict numerical order, but rather in this order: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 1, 2, 3 and 4. Unbeatable Squirrel Girl, Spider-Gwen and Howard The Duck all re-launched with new #1s directly after Secret Wars, despite a few of them only being a few issues into their runs, the collections of their pre-Secret Wars issues bearing 0s on their spines rather than 1s.

There are several different variations of this nonsense, including the changing of the title of a comic during a relaunch, as when writer Al Ewing's story about the Luke Cage-lead team of street-level Avengers that ran through several collections of Mighty Avengers continued into Captain America and The Mighty Avengers Vol. 1, or when Jason Aaron and Russell Dauterman's story about the mysterious new female Thor jumped from the pages of Thor to the re-launched and re-numbered Mighty Thor.

One of the most amazing variations is the strange case of Spider-Woman, as it was a title with plenty of reasons to be instantly re-launched and re-numbered, but Marvel didn't, publishing the first issue by an all-new creative team featuring an all-new direction and an all-new costume for the title character as Spider-Woman #5, and then collecting it in a trade-paperback labeled Spider-Woman Vol. 2. To make that decision seem all the more incomprehensible, Marvel then canceled the book after issue #10 because of Secret Wars, and then relaunched it again with a new #1 by the same creative team of issues #5-#9, so that, once collected, 2016's Spider-Woman #1 will appear in Spider-Woman Vol. 1, which will follow Spider-Woman Vol. 2, and have next to nothing to do with the other Spider-Woman Vol. 1. So if you want to read the Hopeless/Rodriguez run on Spider-Woman in trade, you would read Spider-Woman Vol. 2, and then Spider-Woman Vol. 1 (well, the one Vol. 1, not the other Vol. 1), and then another Spider-Woman Vol. 2. I guess.

Does that even make any sense at all...? Not the decisions on Marvel's part (I know those don't), but my explanation of them...?

Let's review. In late 2014, Marvel decided to give Spider-Woman Jessica Drew her own ongoing monthly title, launching it as part of the then-ongoing Spider-Man franchise event story, "Spider-Verse." Dennis Hopeless was the writer, and Greg Land was the pencil artist, so, regardless of how well it was written, it was going to be a piece of eye-hurting, soul-saddening garbage.

Perhaps you've already seen this image?

One of the six covers for that first issue was by the legendary Milo Manara, and his posing of the character crawling over a rooftop set off something of a firestorm. Spider-Woman was, of course, wearing the same costume she had been wearing since her 1977 debut, but Manara's rendering of it really called attention to the fact that the costume was basically just red body-paint. Which is how it's been consistently drawn since at least the early '00s resurgence of the character in New Avengers, but this seemed to be a perfect storm of factors leading to an outcry: The artist, the fact that it was Spider-Woman's own book, that it was the first issue, the fact that Marvel had so few female-lead books at the time, that social media allowed for conversations like this to start and snowball instantaneously, the death-by-a-thousand-cuts aspect of representation of women in superhero comics.

If the Manara image is the Ted Cruz of Spider-Woman covers, this one is the Donald Trump.

(Personally, I didn't have any strong feeling about the cover. It was hardly the grossest cover Marvel has ever published, and it was one of a half-dozen covers they attached to that particular issue, at least four of which were dumb: A typically terrible Land cover, one featuring Rocket Raccoon and Groot for no reason other than movies and a blank cover. What annoyed me most about the Manara cover was that the artist apparently recycled an old image with an explicitly adult origin for the foundation of it...and the fact that more people seemed more upset about this particular Spider-Woman image than, say, any one that David Finch drew for New Avengers or that weird-ass hentai tentacle rape cover Marvel published).

At least Hopeless got a joke out of the hullabaloo. 

The Hopeless/Land "Spider-Verse" tie-in continued into the next three issues.

And then came Spider-Woman #5, in which Hopeless was joined by pencil artist Javier Rodriguez and inker Alvaro Lopez. In it, Jessica Drew was given her first costume redesign in 38 years, this one a very smart, very cool-looking "realistic" design that kept the essential elements (color scheme, spider sigil, web wings) but also looked to be made of a fabric other than paint and/or spandex. It was designed by Kris Anka, who seemed to take at least a little inspiration from Batgirl Barbara Gordon's recent redesign over at the Distinguished Competition.

Kris Anka's "design variant" cover.

And it read exactly like the first issue of a brand-new series, with absolutely no reference at all to the preceding four-issue "Spider-Verse" arc.

Jessica has finally quit the Avengers–New, adjective-less and Secret–and is hoping to reinvent herself as an unaffiliated crimefighter who helps regular people. She does this basically by tooling around New York City on her motorcycle in her new jacket and sunglasses which, when she sees trouble, she can change with a few quick movements into her work clothes.

Her problem, it turns out, is that she is spectacularly bad at this sort of crime-fighting, perhaps as a result of being rusty, having spent so many years dealing with Avengers-level problems like Ultrons and Super-Adaptoids and big cosmic threats like Skrull infiltrations and whatever was going on in Infinity exactly. After her latest screw-up, she ends up in jail (Hey, that's where Chip Zdarsky and Joe Quinones' Howard The Duck started his new series!) and was bailed out by white, Marvel Comics Universe, Daily Bugle reporter Ben Urich (not black, Marvel Cinematic Universe, Daily Bulletin reporter Ben Urich, God rest his soul).

Urich wants her super-help cracking a strange story he's been investigating: The wives and girlfriends of various, very low-level Spider-Man villains have all gone missing lately, and Urich thinks they're connected. Spider-Woman naturally dismisses him, womansplaining to him that if the significant other of a supervillain suddenly goes missing, chances are she's running from The Kangaroo or Bigwheel or whoever, and doesn't want to be found.

She changes her mind after a chance encounter with The Porcupine, who was in the middle of pulling a bank job. It's then she learns that the villains' significant others (and, in some cases, their kids) have all been kidnapped, and the kidnapper is forcing them to pull jobs over and over in order to pay ransom.

Soon, Spider-Woman, Ben Urich and The Porcupine are on the case!

After some clever investigation, they get to the bottom of it, and it is a rather weird, rather clever, even inspired set-up, one I'm sure I've never seen in a superhero comic before (which is really what the writers of superhero comics should strive for; presenting readers with things they've not seen before). It turns out both Urich and Spider-Woman had hunches that were partly correct, and while there is a fight at the end, it's refreshing that violence didn't provide the answer to the the conflict. Rather, compromise, understanding and a bit of trust did. What a fun story.

The final two issues of the series have Spider-Woman and her two new sideckicks taking their show on the road, righting (weird) wrongs in a montage during a cross-country road trip, until Porcupine takes them too a "historic Dodge City," where they get involved with some particularly dangerous weirdness, including mind-controlled citizenry and, um, Hulk cows.

Secret Wars intrudes in the denouement, which at least provides this Spider-Woman series an odd kind of bookend. It launched out of one event, which ate the first four issues of the series, and it ended with the character reluctantly joining Black Widow to go participate in another event, which mandated the cancellation of Spider-Woman (and, um, everything else Marvel published).

While Hopeless' art is smart and sharp, and he deftly handles creative plotting and sharp dialogue while finding that perfect sweet spot between serious and silly that can make the Marvel comics that want to be so damn fun, as they mine the setting's deep bench of weird characters for deadpan absurdity, it's Rodriguez's art that sells it all.

I can't imagine the whiplash that Land fans must have had--are their Land fans? I mean, aside from whoever keeps hiring him to draw Marvel comics, of course--had when they picked up issue #5. Rodriguez is a comics artist's comics artist. His designs are strong, and he manages to make Spider-Man's many sub-Shocker villains look cool, silly and accurate all at once, he's a superb actor and his page lay-outs are relentlessly clever, without ever letting that cleverness overpower the story that he and Spencer are telling.

Rodriguez and Lopez

Rodriguez and Lopez again

Natacha Bustos draws the final issue in the collection, and she acquits herself quit nicely. Her art is obviously different, but not so obviously that you'd notice during a flip-through, or likely finding it impacting your reading experience in anyway. Bustos either draws a heck of a lot like Rodriguez, or at least carefully calibrated her style to better resemble that of Rodriguez.

It feels a little weird to recommend Vol. 2 of a series, but that's Marvel at the moment. Read Spider-Woman Vol. 2: New Duds.

I imagine the next Spider-Woman Vol. 1, which collects the post-Secret Wars relaunch by the same creative team, will be pretty good too, but I haven't read any of it yet.