Comic Shop Comics: April 5th

Batman #20 (DC Comics) This is the climax of writer Tom King's current "I Am Bane" story arc, and his 20-ish issue run on the title overall, given how much the narrator focuses on recounting the events of the entire series to date, and tying the events of the first issue to those in this issue. I wish I could say that it was as exciting as that fact suggests it should be, however the entire issue consists of Batman and Bane trading bloody punches to the face while King's narration, from the POV of dead Martha Wayne, does all of the heavy-lifting.

I'm tempted to blame this arc's pencil artist David Finch, as I'm no real fan of his work, but I suppose King and the editors who assigned the story to Finch in the first place also deserve some of that blame. You know all those stories you've read or watched that harp on what a great fighter Batman is, how he's one of the world's top martial artists and blah blah blah? You wouldn't know it from this issue of Batman which, again, consists entirely of a 20-page fight scene with flashbacks. Batman just takes and gives punches, like a very weary boxer. It's hard to imagine a more dull fight scene in a comic book, and the sole point of interest in the visuals is probably the one panel where Finch decides to swipe a Frank Miller pose from The Dark Knight Returns.

Given that DKR is probably the most-read Batman comic book of all-time, I have to assume it was meant as a deliberate homage. But then, it's just the panel, not the page, so then I wonder if maybe it was just the result of simply looking for pictures of Batman putting his dukes up to swipe, or if it was a deliberate reference that just demonstrates that Finch doesn't really think about his comics art carefully enough to consider it beyond just-getting-through each panel, one at a time, with no thought of how they fit on a page or an issue. (Am I being too hard on Finch and Batman? I don't think so. Just compared to the other handful of comics I read this evening, it stands-out as piss-poor action. There isn't a page of Corey Lewis' Sun Bakery that isn't full of more action and vitality than any page in this comic book).

As for King's narration, it flirts with a fun idea, that part of the reason Batman has gone to such tremendous lengths over the course of the last few story arcs was that it would provide him with a perfect weapon to perhaps win his war on crime. This won't make much sense if you dwell on it too long--Gotham and Gotham Girl weren't exactly the first young super-people Batman had met--but one need not think of it too long anyway, as Batman himself deflates that idea with a pretty noble, heroic and simply-stated retort to his ghost mom.

This issue, like swathes of King's Batman, is thus more disappointing than it is all-around bad. He did a great deal of long-term planning, and proposed a lot of interesting ideas, but the execution is more often than not left wanting by poor art. I have to imagine King's Batman would have fared far better as a monthly, with a single, solid artist attached, rather than the baton being repeatedly passed to Finch or the occasional one-off artist who blows a key scene or two.

Next issue guest-stars the smiley face pin from the pages of 1986-87 classic Watchmen, so that should be...something.

DC Comics Bombshells #25 (DC) We're between story arcs and this is an anniversary issue, so it seems like as good a time as any to shift focus away from the Bombshells and to a team introduced in the the title's first annual: The World War II-era Bombshells-iverse's Suicide Squad. You'll recall that The Enchantress, Ravager, vampire Batgirl Barbara Gordon and Killer Croc now work as a strike force under the direction of Frankie (from the pages of Batgirl). In the 30-page feature story, in which regular writer Marguerite Bennett is joined by one-name artist Aneke, the Squad infiltrate a special German submarine captained by Edward Nygma in order to save his captive (and Batgirl's former lover), Luc Fuchs (Yeah, the Bombshells-iverse's Luke Fox). I really love the designs of this Suicide Sqaud, so it was great to see them all in action, as well as the neat, more unique presentations of the characters and their powers (This Enchantress, for example, looks an awful lot like the cute, kicky party-girl version of her first appearance, albeit more scantily-clad in accordance to the rules of this book. Her powers are used via her shadow, that, like Peter Pan's, seems to have a life of its own).

I feel compelled to call bullshit on some of Bennett's heavily affected dialogue, which uses modern-day slang in the 1940s (Or did the term "side quest" exist back then, decades before the invention of the first video game, and it just meant something slightly different? What about "PDA"...? And so on)

That story is complimented by a ten-page back-up (this fatter-than-usual issue will cost you $4.99), set in the 1930s and involving Frankie and two other supporting characters from the Cameron Stewart/Brenden Fletcher/Babs Tarr run raiding an Egyptian tomb and accidentally stumbling upon the fact that another Kryptonian has been on Earth for quite a while now: Faora). Here Frankie refers to "arms day," meaning the day in your workout routine focusing on your arms. Maybe Frankie just, like, invented 21st century slang...? That girl is so ahead of her time...!

Deathstroke #16 (DC) Credit where credit is due: Christoper Priest has turned Deadline into an honest-to-God interesting, compelling, even somewhat impressive villain. His "Twilight" story arc, with Larry Hama, Carlo Pagulayan, Jason Paz and others has turned out maybe be the very best Deadline story of all time!

If that's an accomplishment. I mean, it is an accomplishment, I'm just not sure how big an accomplishment. The blinded Deathstroke continues his charade as the super-hero Twilight, as part of a maybe overly-elaborate, Seinfeldian attempt to keep the fact that he's a brutal, amoral killer from the idealistic young girl/super-scientist/super-hero who helped save his life. That young lady, Power Girl II, is brutally killed in a two-page sequence that helps earns the series "T+" rating, and as that sends 'Stroke off to avenge her, it has all the markings of a classic fridging. But, um, spoiler alert: The young woman of color killed off to motivate the older white male hero turns out to be just fine, thanks to her amazing super-powers, and helps save the day without any further need of bloodshed.

It's a nice, if stressful, bait-and-switch Priest and company pulled off, and a lot of that credit is due to how final her death looked: Deadline shoots her with an alien gun that goes all the way through her, burning a hole in her and sending her skidding down an alley. Deathstroke, and any reader, would be forgiven for thinking there's no coming back form a shot like that.

Judge Dredd: Deviations #1 (IDW Productions) You guys know you should always pre-order your comics from your local comic shop, right? Why? Because if you don't, then you might end up missing out on a John McCrea-created (McCreated) comic about Judge Dredd being a werewolf, and have to wait on pins and needles for a few weeks for your shop to re-stock it.

Such was the fate I suffered.

This is apparently part of some What If...?/Elseworlds-like thing IDW did, where they had creators take a "classic" story of some kind and then "deviate" from it. Here, McCrea explains in his foreword that he was asked to do one that deviated from any Judge Dredd story he wanted, and he chose one from 2000 AD by John Wagner, Alan Grant and Steve Dillon where Dredd fought some werewolves, and temporarily became one...before being cured (IDW apparently also released a collection of that story under the title Judge Dredd: Cry of The Werewolf.

McCrea's deviation is that rather than being cured, Dredd stayed a wolf. And so here's a full-color, 24-page story of "Dreddwolf" by McCrea, an artist whose style is perfectly suited to the designs of Dredd and his milieu.

At $5, it's a bit over-priced, but IDW at least tries to compensate with a bunch of other non-comics stuff. The first page is a "What Really Happened..." recap of the story this one deviated from (I haven't seen any of the other Deviations specials, but I imagine the format is similar), a foreword from McCrea and an afterword (the latter in which the artist responds to the unfortunate event that occurred between his beginning work on this comic and its publication; Dillon's too-early death), six pages of process (which I found to be basically a waste of paper; it's the same page of the comic in six different stages of completion, from script to finished page) and then five pin-ups.

The pin-ups all feature either a werewolf, Dredd fighting a werewolf, or Dredd as a werewolf, and they come from a bunch of artist whose work you would be among those that you would most associate with Dredd (and/or would want to see associated with the character): Jock, Brendan McCarthy, Garry Leach, Eric Canete and Duncan Fegredo.

Jughead #14 (Archie Comics) This is, heartbreakingly, Ryan North's last issue on Jughead for the forseeable future, and it looks like his replacement is not going to be Chip Zdarsky, who North replaced on the title. This is pretty bad news, but if artist Derek Charm, who it is my firm belief is the very best of the Archie Comics since the relaunch of the line, then there will be some small consolation. I've liked these past 14 issues enough that I'll certainly pick up the next issue but guys I don't mind telling you, I'm worried.

Nightwing #18 (DC) There's a huge surprise at the end of this issue, as maybe the last villain I expected to see again--albeit a fairly natural one--arrives. Before that very last page? It's Nightwing and Robin vs. Professor Pyg's Dollotron Deathwing and Robin, with the heroes kinda sorta winning the day (or, at least, the majority of the issue), thanks in large part to all children's innate desire to be Robin.

I'm a little torn between whether writer Tim Seeley's reliance on Grant Morrison's Batman run here is commendable or perhaps a sign of creative exhaustion (there's an argument to be made for the latter, I suppose, given the degree to which the previous arc relied so heavily on Chuck Dixon's Nightwing comics), but as someone who enjoyed (most) of Morrison's run on those comics, I'm enjoying the hell out of it.

I suppose it's also possible that Seeley is doing some kinda big meta-tribute to Nightwing's history here too, as he's revisited two of the major stages of Dick Grayson's post-Robin, pre-Agent of Spyral career. We'll see.

Providence #12 (Avatar Press) I'll be honest: I thought this series ended last issue, and the months between the shipping of #11 and #12 only made me more confident in that. Well, it didn't. Rather, this is the final issue of writer Alan Moore's extremely elaborate exploration of the work of H.P. Lovecraft, which is something akin to fan fiction, meta-fiction, criticism, homage and extrapolation. It's essentially a unified theory of Lovecraft, and for this final (?) issue, many members of the cast have been reassembled to witness a dramatic shift in reality. Like the 11 previous issues, artist Jacen Burrows effectively renders the sorts of horrors that aren't meant to be portrayed visually (Shub-Niggurath appears in one panel, and is scary as hell).

I liked this a whole lot, but what is perhaps most striking at this point is the way in which Moore uses Lovecraft's writing as a stand-in for all forms of writing/storytelling/fiction, and the obvious but hardly-ever-made observation about just how crazy it is that Lovecraft's body of work is popular at all, given how weird and, frankly, off-putting his fiction was.

This hasn't been the best or easiest comic to read as it's been serially published, but it's going to make a hell of a collection some day...hopefully one with annotations (I've read and re-read Lovecraft, but it's been so many years since my last re-reading that I felt like there were a ton of allusions, in-jokes and biographical references that whizzed right by me and occasionally right over my head).

Sunbakery #2 (Image Comics) This issue of Corey Lewis' one-man anthology includes five different stories, mostly continued from the previous issue and, in one instance, ending in this issue (at least for now). The most noteworthy of the stories in this issue is Bloodshed, whose story lasts buts one-page...two if you count the cover that Lewis draws for it. That's "Bloodshed," which stars a character named Bloodshed, who seems like the exact sort of character one of the Image founders (or a fan of one of the Image founders) might have come up with in the '90s ("The Dream of The 90's Is Alive ...In BLOODSHED," reads the cover). Turns out Lewis did create the character way back then, although I suppose it's worth noting that for all the era-specific signifiers to the character (headband, shoulderpads, red X chest icon, etc) he still looks and reads like a bad-ass anti-hero who is heavily influenced by manga and/or anime, rather than just, I don't know, The Punisher and Deathstroke The Terminator or whoever).

If, for some strange reason, you could only read one comic book this week, you should make it Sun Bakery, as it is several awesome comics in one.

Superman #20 (DC) So after the head-bending, franchise-specific reboot of post-Flashpoint Superman continuity in "Superman Reborn," we return to Hamilton County and find things...weird, as writers Peter Tomasi and Patrick Gleason pretty much just pick up where they left off, but with some small changes, like Superman's family's surname being "Kent" again. I guess it's just going to take a bunch of new issues of Superman before a reader gets used to this.

This issue guest-stars Batman and Robin, who have once again returned to the farm. I really like both of the World's Finest having family's, or at least sons, now, and pencil artist Gleason gets to draw a lot of fun scenes, like everyone sitting around the kitchen table eating pie or Batman milking a cow (Don't get too excited about that latter point; it's not as amazing as the scene you're seeing in your head right now, he just goes to get a milk sample from a cow).

DC's shenanigans with the Super-family have been ridiculously convoluted over the last five years (imagine how much more simple, interesting and noteworthy it might have been if Superman and Lois just, like, had a kid), but at least Tomasi, Gleason and company's Superman is good enough that the continuity gymnastics can ding it, but not sink it.

Justice League Vs. Suicide Squad, (over exhuastively) reviewed

In what DC has described as the first major crossover of the "Rebirth" era (sorry, "Night of The Monster Men"!), the team that starred in Warner Bros' last big super-team movie is pitted against the team that will star in Warner Bros' next big super-team movie. They are totally going to fight, as you can tell from the "Vs." part of the title. DC Comics wanted to be very clear about the fact that they would be fighting, hence they went with "Vs." instead of their parent company's vague, more legalistic formulation of "V" (See Batman V. Superman: Dawn of Justice; actually, don't, if you can help it).

What might the two teams have to fight about? Plenty, since one is comprised entirely of supervillains, and the other entirely of superheroes. The Justice League's roster has been remarkably steady over the course of the five fictional years between when the first story arc of The New 52 Justice League was set and the second story arc, as well as over the course of the five real years (and a handful of change) that have passed since 2011's Justice League #1 ushered in a new, post-Flashpoint continuity.

Currently, the League consists of founding members Batman, Flash, Wonder Woman, Aquaman and Cyborg. They have been recently re-joined by former Power Ring, current Green Lantern Jessica Cruz, who, at Green Lantern Hal Jordan's behest, now has her Green Lantern Corps partner Simon Baz at her side on the roll call (Baz was briefly on a different, short-lived, government-run Justice League, the one that appeared in Justice League of America). Pushing their numbers up to eight is their newest recruit, Superman. Not the Superman that founded this League with his peers, that Superman, the New 52 Superman, is dead; this is the new Superman (not to be confused with the New Super-Man), who is actually the old Superman, the one who ended up in The New 52-iverse by way of Convergence (Look, it's complicated). I have no idea what happened to Captain Marvel Shazam; the "Darkseid War" line-up dissipated, and while explanations of some of that roster's whereabouts were explained, he has just kind of gone missing, and the rest of the team doesn't seem to have bothered to go looking for him.

As for the Suicide Squad, they just recently--as in around the time their movie hit the big screens and DC relaunched their entire line with new #1 issues--settled on a new line-up reflective of the one in the movie: Harley Quinn, Deadshot, Captain Boomerang, Killer Croc, El Diablo and The Enchantress, lead by Colonel Rick Flag and Katana. Oh, and they added Killer Frost in the back-up to the last issue of Suicide Squad to see publication prior to the start of this crossover. But she won't be there long, judging by the covers of the upcoming Justice League of America book.

The Justice League has been appearing in the pages of Justice League, by writer Bryan Hitch and pencil artists Tony S. Daniel, Jesus Merino, Neil Edwards, Matthew Clark and Tom Derenick. I made it through the first seven issues, but it was a real slog. I wouldn't recommend it, but then, one hardly needs know the ins and outs of the Justice League's ongoing monthly to make sense of them and their presence here; if you read comics or watch TV or movies, you know everyone's deal on the Justice League.

The Suicide Squad has been appearing in the pages of Suicide Squad, by writer Rob Williams, pencil artist Jim Lee and plenty of guest-artists, who contribute the back-up, solo stories. It has been remarkably good since the "Rebirth" re-launch, definitely the best Suicide Squad since the Giffen-written second series, if not the original, John Ostrander-written one (Given the relatively poor quality of the two New 52 series that preceded this one though, I understand that's not saying much, but there you have it).

Given those creative teams, you might expect Hitch and Williams to be writing this, or at least Steve Orlando, who is writing the new JLoA book this is apparently leading in to. You would be wrong, though. Joshua Williams is handling the writing duties (the teams' parent books do offer tie-ins by their regular writers though), and each issue is drawn by a different artist, including a few who have previously contributed to Justice League, like Merino and Daniel.

Now I know what you're probably thinking, because it's what I thought when I first heard about this series: Those aren't very evenly matched teams at all. The Flash could KO the whole Squad in a second, and Superman could take them all out with the sonic waves from a clap (Really, only The Enchantress stands a chance against Superman). These two teams fighting for as few as six panels is probably going to include a few panels of padding; how can Williamson stretch it out for six issues?

Well, I suppose we will have to read it to find out! (Spoiler alert: He accomplishes it the old-fashioned way, by pitting the two conflicting sides against a third participant that will require their working together).

Justice League Vs. Suicide Squad #1 by writer Joshua Williamson, artist Jason Fabok and colorist Alex Sinclair

The first issue goes to artist Jason Fabok, who is no stranger to big, New 52iverse throwdowns, having drawn the "Darkseid War" arc in Geoff Johns' Justice League book. He's got 32 pages to draw here, but Williamson's script makes it easy on him, with four double-page splashes (one of which is turned over entirely to the credits) and three single-page splashes. Fabok's cover doesn't give us a whole lot to go on in terms of what the issue might contain other than drawing the casts of both books all just kinda posing, with the two biggest stars drawn biggest, front and center.

But wait, who is that squinting guy in the background? He's bigger than even Batman and Harley Quinn, even if he's not fully colored. Is that just Flag, or someone else? (I'm just playing; I know who it is).

We open in Death Valley, California, with a quote from John Steinbeck in the first panel (Ooh, literary!). A mysterious man in boots, always shown only in silhouette or mostly off-panel, descends a stair case and walks into a facility that looks remarkably like Belle Reve, Jedi mind-tricking his way past guards and a doctor in a lab coat that releases the prisoners for the man. Well, I say Jedi mind trick, but I guess it's more like outright mind control, as he asks two guards to kill one another and they do.

When a crowd of guards rush in, the off-panel freed prisoners slaughter them all, revealing only hints of their identities--a fist holding a flaming sword here, a blast of emerald energy there--and then they destroy the facility. The man leads the away. These are presumably the villains revealed in that eight-page, accordion pull-out ad that ran in like all of DC's comics the week before this series started. As most of those villains were redesigned in some way or another though, and not explicitly named, I don't know who they all are for sure. One looks as much like Dr. Impossible as he does Doctor Polaris, for example. Anyway, we only see them in extreme long-shot. Drama!

That leads us to the first of the double-page splashes, the one just featuring the title of the series stretched diagonally over a black field, with the creator's credits. For the penny-pinching among you (like, um, me), I should note that counting this spread, there are 32-pages in this $3.99 comics; the other issues all have 30 story pages. So DC didn't charge any extra, or subtract any panels, in order to make room for this giant logo and credits spread.

Turn the page and...it's another double-page splash! This one featuring most of the Suicide Squad--Captain Boomerang, Deadshot, Enchantress, Harley Quinn, Killer Croc, Killer Frost and El Diablo--fighting some goons in matching uniforms and machine guns on a beach. A box in the upper lefthand corner tells us we're in Badhnisia, which Google says is not a real place. It sounds bad, though!

Back at Belle Reve, Amanda Waller exposits to Flag, who is mad that she sent the Squad out without him: A generic bad guy named Apex, head of a generic bad guy cult called The Brotherhood of Evil Mutants Brimstone has a generic maguffin machine, with which he plans to destroy the island of Badplaceia as a sacrifice to his generic bad guy god.

As the Squad kills their way through them, text appears next to each of them by way of identifying them (Example: "Enchantress. Witch. Scary." Another example: "Deadshot. Expert marksman. Has a death wish."*). Their dialogue goes a little further to define them for us--Killer Frost is new to the team, Captain Boomerang is a jerk, etc--and lets us know what their whole deal is. Covert missions that the United States government doesn't want it's fingerprints on, they're kept in line by microscopic bombs Amanda Waller placed in their heads and can detonate with the push of a button and so on.

Meanwhile, the Justice League is having a meeting!

They are all standing around a circular table on their satellite headquarters. Why are they all standing, rather than sitting? No chairs. Perhaps Fabok doesn't like drawing chairs, or people sitting. Or perhaps they are just showing off their endurance by standing. I don't know. I like when they have chairs with their icons on the back, though. That's like my favorite thing about the Justice League headquarters, and this particular HQ is missing it.

They too are introduced by a few lines of text, although it's hard to imagine that many readers don't know who Batman or The Flash are, and that they are "Dark Knight Detective" and "Fastest Man Alive," respectively. The subject of their meeting is, coincidentally enough, the Suicide Squad.

Batman is introducing the concept to the League, which seems kind of strange to me, as I know certain members of the League have crossed paths with iterations of the Squad before. As Batman explains it, the idea is not simply to use completely expendable operatives for suicide missions, but that by using colorful supervillains, Waller gets a built-in cover story: It will just look like a gang of villains up to no good. This doesn't sit well with the Leaguers, as they don't like the idea of people they might have captured being given, in Flash's words, hall passes, and/or being pressed into service for the government, rather than being rehabilitated, which is kind of the point of prison.

What they don't know is that the Squad members have bombs in their heads. What they do know is that while everyone was talking, Cyborg super-Googled "incarcerated convicts" and "sightings of two or more together," and he found...the previous action scene in Badislandville. Fight scene, here we come!

The Squad stops Apex just as he's in the process of destroying the island with an earthquake--via Deadshot sniper-ing him to death from the roof of a nearby building, and pointing out to Waller it would probably be easier just to send Deadshot to assassinate these people solo--but the aftershocks start toppling buildings and threatening the population.

Seeing no way out, Deadshot jumps to his death...but Superman catches him. And the Green Lanterns and Flash save all the buildings and people in another two panels. Then they all regroup behind Batman, where they can all pose for a splash page and the Dark Knight says threateningly, "Task Force X is over, Deadshot. It would be in your best interests... ...to come along willingly."

Hmm, I wonder where they are going to take them, willingly or unwillingly? I mean, if they turn them over to pretty much any legal system, won't the same thing just happen again? Waller did pluck them out of the prisons and/our homes for the criminally insane they were sentenced to for this whole thing in the first place.

There's some tense discussion, during which El Diablo says "Slow your roll, Batman" (a phrase I don't think I've ever heard, in all my years of Batman-reading), and Baz disses Captain Boomerang's boomerang motif. I'm not real clear on why the Squad is so resistant, given that the League offers to help them--they're not supposed to like being forced to serve on suicide missions or have their heads blown off, right?--but they aren't crazy about the idea, and none of them mention the bombs. Waller, meanwhile, orders them to fight the League, with this funny little line: "Do not let the Justice League take you alive. Or you're DEAD.."

They don't try to parse out whatever the hell that means, but instead FIIIIIIGGHHT!

As I mentioned previously, Justice League Vs. Suicide Squad isn't exactly a fair fight. At least, not this Justice League, which is all big guns, and this Suicide Squad, which is almost no big guns. (When the Squad fought the JLI incarnation of the League in 1988, they were much more evenly matched**). With no speedster of their own and no way to counteract a speedster, The Flash should be able to take the entire Squad down solo; instead he's merely shown running at Captain Boomerang, who he has given enough time to throw a boomerang at him (This Boomerang, like the one in the movie, just uses razor-sharp boomerangs, rather than a variety of trick ones).

Superman, who is as fast as The Flash but also has like eight other super-powers too, could similarly take them all down between panels, with only The Enchantress able to fight him, given his vulnerability to magic. In this spread, he's shown flying right at Enchantress, and throwing a punch, while she dodges and throws green lightning around.

Wonder Woman could probably also take most of these guys down in just about as fast, but she merely runs at Harley Quinn, sword drawn, as if she's going to chop her down (that fight should last all of one punch, really).

These two Green Lanterns have been consistently portrayed as new and unused to their powers--Jessica Cruz went an arc or so of Green Lanterns unable to make a construct--so I suppose it makes some sense that they don't just straight up will the Squad into green bubbles or whatever.

Still, the matches proposed here are kind of silly. Flash and Wonder Woman should finish Boomerang in Harley by the time we turn the page. Baz is fighting El Diablo, whose fire powers can't touch him through the ring's force field. Killer Frost is throwing icicles at Cruz, but they can't penetrate her force field. Aquaman is fighting Killer Croc, which might have been a good match pre-Flashpoint, but New 52 Aquaman is as strong and invulnerable as Golden Age Superman; one punch would take Croc out.

The only fights that could plausibly last long are the ones between Superman and Enchantress, and the one between Batman and Deadshot.

Cyborg, meanwhile, doesn't have anyone to fight, as in addition to vastly overpowering the Squad, the League also outnumbers them. He's shown running at Killer Frost with a hand outstretched.

I suppose this will all be over on the next page, as the other six Leaguers turn their attention to helping Superman and Batman with their opponents.

But no! We cut away to a castle in the Swiss Alps, where the guy who rescued the prisoners in the first scene is still speechifying to them. There's a page showing tight close-ups on the five rescued prisoners, revealing a clue as to who they might be, and then a turn of the page takes us to another double-page splash, revealing what the man wants of them: To kill Amanda Waller.

And who is "them"...? Emerald Empress, a Legion of Super-Heroes villain whose green motif makes her a little too visually similar to this version of The Enchantress; Doctor Polaris, a magnetically-powered Green Lantern villain whose New 52 redesign renders him unrecognizable here; Johnny Sorrow, a JSA villain whose "power" is that if you see his true face you go mad and/or die horribly; Rustam, a flaming scimitar-wielding villain of the original, well-written Suicide Squad of the 1980s; and, finally and most unexpectedly, Lobo, who here looks like he did during his 1990s heyday and whose continuity is crazy-confused in the New 52 (I think there were three Lobos prior to him in the current continuity, and at one point "Lobo" was a role instead of the name of a particular character? Remember, he was a supposedly sexy young man for a while, rather than a white-skinned super space biker with a cigar and hook).

Now this is a group of bad guys that could trouble the Justice League. Lobo has taken on Superman mano-a-Supermano plenty of times, and Polaris has fought the entire League before. What is more noteworthy about this particular team, however, is the sources they are drawn from. Emerald Empress is supposedly from a millennium in the future, in a continuity that gets rejiggered during every cosmic realigning, continuity rebooting event (we did see a Legion flight ring during the DC Universe: Rebirth special, remember). I think Polaris, Sorrow and Rustam are all making their post-Flashpoint debuts here, but, in any case, Sorrow's previous origins and stories established him as a character from the Golden Age of superheroes--an age that Flashpoint erased (But, again, DC Universe: Rebirth indicated that the Golden Age might have still happened, and just been mostly forgotten by the people of the New 52-iverse).

Is it possible that the presence of some of these characters is meant to not only suggest the previous, pre-Flashpoint DCU, but indicate that parts of that lost continuity, including its past and far-flung future settings, are coming back? I don't know. But there's one more surprise in store, as the issue's final page is a splash page revealing the identity of the mind-controlling mystery man: Maxwell Lord, bleeding from his nose as he does whenever he pushes his mind-control powers, dressed just as he was after his retcon-enabled heel turn a decade ago (!!!) in Countdown to Infinite Crisis, and, according to some people who aren't me, he may even be standing in front of a crack meant to suggest this particular castle in the Swiss Alps is the very same one in which he killed Blue Beetle Ted Kord in that same comic.

What could that mean...? I don't know!

Well, at least now he know how Williamson is going to fill all these pages. After the League crushes the Squad and removes their bombs (Hey, can Flash just vibrate his hand and snatch the bombs out of their brains safely, or does this current version of Barry Allen not have the power to pass through solid objects by vibrating his molecules?), they can all team up to fight Max Lord's team of mind-controlled supervillains and, I don't know, maybe then fight the Watchmen and reboot the DC Universe again. Exciting!

Justice League Vs. Suicide Squad #2 by writer Joshua Williamson, penciller Tony S. Daniel, inker Sandu Florea and colorist Alex Sinclair

This comic is done playing coy with its villains, with Daniel's cover art showing everyone more or less clearly (even if Max is maybe not immediately identifiable without anything else to go on), and the tag declaring the five villains "The Nightmare Army of Max Lord!"

Splash pages remain the order of the day, as we open with a full-page splash of Waller shouting eight words of dialogue, a splash immediately followed by a double-page splash, depicting Daniel's version of the Squad vs. League splash that Fabok drew at the climax of the previous issue. There are some changes in the arrangement, of course, but among the more significant is that Wonder Woman has lost her shield, sheathed her sword and now attempting to subdue Harley Quinn with her magical lasso, and that now Cyborg is fighting Killer Frost, while The Green Lanterns double-team El Diablo.

For some reason, The Flash, Superman and Aquaman have not yet taken down their opponents; in Flash's case, that fact is almost comical, as he's drawn running circles around a Captain Boomerang but not, like, punching him or handcuffing him or pants-ing him or anything.

Waller reiterates the plot to her Squad (Hey, how come Superman isn't overhearing their conversations with his super-hearing?), adding that Colonel Rick Flag is on his way to Bad Land, but in the meantime the Squad is supposed to fight The League to the death.

From there, Williamson starts getting into individual match-ups, like Killer Frost and Cyborg trying to blast one another, Killer Croc and Aquaman posing in one another's immediate vicinity and Batman and Deadshot trading blows and lines of dialogue. This last bit is pretty poorly choreographed, as when Batman throws a handful of Batrangs at Deadshot and one panel shows them flying past him, but the next shows Deadshot shooting them out of the air; I guess Deadshot dodged them all, turned around and shot the Batarangs down because he thought it would look cool, even though that meant turning his back on Batman?

At Deadshot's command, the Squad scatters in an attempt to make the League chase them. This...is kind of a dumb plan in that the League and Squad had pretty much already paired off, and it's not like they have any real chance of outrunning the League. With the exception of Batman, the whole League can either fly or do something quite close to it and possess something between enhanced speed (Aquaman, Cyborg) and flat-out super-speed. Again, Flash and/or Superman should have all these people unconscious and/or in cuffs by now.

Williamson perhaps wisely cuts to a different scene here, so we don't contemplate things like Captain Boomerang trying to run away from The Flash any further. We return to the Swiss Alps, where Lord is still trying to talk his "nightmare army" to nightmare march to his nightmare orders. Close observers of the ever-malleable DC continuity will want to pay special attention to this conversation.

Johnny Sorrow tells Lord he has been to multiple dimensions, "and this one has been manipulated." Emerald Empress agrees, saying her Eye of Ekron "feels like time is missing," and then mentions her need to find "The Legionnaire." They are referring pretty directly to DC Universe: Rebirth, which revealed that Doctor Manhattan and/or other characters from Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons' Watchmen had altered the DC Universe in the wake of Flashpoint in order to deliberately weaken it, in part by stealing time from it.

Less clear is what it means when Lord tells his nightmare soldiers that "The Justice League and I are old friends." He may be referring to his past continuity, or just to unrevealed elements of his "new" past. At any rate, he gets them all on board with his not-yet-revealed-master plan, even though it's clear it takes the use of his psychic powers to push some of them into agreeing to go along with them.

But this comic is called Justice League Vs. Suicide Squad, not Max Lord Holds A Meeting, so it is time to return to the fighting.

Superman vs. Enchantress! She manipulates Superman into lowering his guard, and then calls him a cretin and blasts him with a green coloring effect, at which point she realizes that "the mighty hero has a weakness...magic."

Cyborg vs. Killer Frost! You know that she doesn't just shoot ice like most ice-powered heroes and villains, but needs to drain heat energy from victims in order to use her power and/or stave off hunger and pain, making her a sort of heat vampire? Well, if not, the comic will make sure you do. Well, she drains some heat from Cyborg's human half, but apparently his machine parts keep him alive through the process.

The Green Lanterns vs. El Diablo! The pyrokinetic bad guy creates a giant fire construct of a three-headed, fire-breathing dragon (at this point, I realize that the movie/New 52 version of El Diablo is basically like Green Lantern Kyle Rayner's villain Inferno), but the Lanterns trap him in a green energy bubble, snuffing out the oxygen needed to fuel the flames. That fight takes all of three panels, making it perhaps the most realistic match-up.

The Flash vs. Captain Boomerang! While Williamson never gets around to explaining what The Flash is doing if he's not capturing Boomerang--What is he, a cat, playing with him?--he does finally have Boomer throw some boomerangs at some innocent beach-goers (not sure why they are still on the beach after all the earthquakes and gun shots and whatnot), making him chase something else for a few panels. Boomerang then immediately caves and starts telling Flash everything.

Aquaman vs. Killer Croc! Croc jumps into the ocean in an attempt to escape Aquaman (?), and there's a curious reference I didn't understand. Croc says he encountered Aquaman at Amnesty Bay before, but Aquaman doesn't have any memory of it, for some reason. ("Amnesty Bay? Have we met before?"). I have no memory of it either! Aquaman summons a giant great white shark to attack Croc (Just punch him, man! You're like 100 times stronger than him! Batman takes this guy out on the regular!) and, in a very unconvincingly drawn panle, Croc rips the shark in half...? He then circles around Aquaman in the cloud of shark blood and tries to bite the Aquatic Ace's elbow, which only breaks his teeth. Then Aquaman finally punches him out.

Batman vs. Deadshot! After throwing punches and insults for a while, Floyd eventually starts shotting Batman right in his armored bat-symbol, but Batman marches through the pain in order to punch Deadshot so hard he breaks his face mask off. Man, where were you in 2011, Bats? His old new costume needed torn apart much more urgently than this less-bad version!

Wonder Woman vs. Harley Quinn! She might be able to fly, she might have super-speed, but Wonder Woman is still unable to catch Harley before she gets on a motorcycle and speeds away. Harley seems to refer to the events of Harley's Little Black Book #1, which is weird only in that the Amanda Conner/Jimmy Palmiotti Harley seems like an entirely different character with an entirely different continuity than the one in Suicide Squad, and, after briefly distracting Wonder Woman, Harley attacks her by driving a motorcycle right into her. One of them walks away unscathed, the other unconscious. Can you guess which is which?

And that's pretty much it! The League has taken the Squad down with no real problems, and Waller's just about to blow their heads up when The Enchantress throws an unconscious Superman into the sand, having apparently exhausted her self taking him down. Waller then commands Killer Frost to absorb Superman's life-force, and she does so; this doesn't kill him either, even though he turns into a mummy for one-panel, but his solar-powered super-life-force powers her up to incredible rates, allowing her to freeze everyone on the beach. In a stunning upset, the Suicide Squad has won!

The Leaguers awake to find themselves each in an especially crafted tube-shaped cell designed to counteract their powers and abilities. Superman, for example, is under red lights, probably red sunlight generating lamps, the Lanterns have weird metal masks encasing their heads, and so on. Not sure what they did to Wonder Woman, as she's basically just tied up in her own rope, which isn't a thing I thought could happen to her. Anyway, they are totally captured and at the mercy of Amanda Waller, who crosses her arms on the last page, another Waller-focused splash, and declares "Welcome to the SUICIDE SQUAD."

So there you have it. Justice League Vs. Suicide Squad has ended with the Squad victorious, and it looks like--Oh, woah, woah, woah, wait. This is only the end of the second issue, huh? There are still four more issues of this to go? Huh.

Justice League Vs. Suicide Squad #3 by writer Joshua Williamson, pencil artist Jesus Merino, inker Andy Owens and colorists Alex Sinclair and Jeremiah Skipper

Jesus Merino and company's cover for this issue is at least somewhat reminiscent of that of 1960's The Brave and The Bold #30, and later homages to it, showing as it does the various Justice Leaguers all captured in tubes kept improbably enough side-by-side. On that long ago cover, they were in special chambers that were siphoning off their superpowers and then redirecting them into the colorfully dressed android, Amazo. Here they are merely captured in some very uncomfortable-looking tubes, while Amanda Waller looks in on them, projecting a shadow that reads "Prisoners Of Amanda Waller!"

After two pages of Flag and Katana visiting The Catacombs prison where Lord freed his bad guys, stepping over all the corpses and retrieving the "black box" they were sent there for, we jump to Belle Reve, where the Justice Leaguers are being kept quite uncomfortable. Batman is trussed up in a straight jacket and muzzle and bound to a big-ass dolly, like the kind Hannibal Lecter (and occasionally The Joker) are moved around on. He of course immediately breaks out, beats up six guys and runs to Waller's office to demand answers from her. Being the World's Greatest Detective, he knows that she can't really have been planning to induct them all into her Suicide Squad (He doesn't mention it, but one good clue? The guards didn't even bother removing his mask, cape or utility belt when securing him).

Meanwhile, the triumphant Suicide Squad goes to visit the caged Leaguers, essentially to tap the glass on their fishbowls and annoy them. While everyone is laughing at Captain Boomerang, Superman calls Killer Frost aside and has a long-ish, two-and-a-half-page chat with her, asking her why she wasn't behaving as ruthlessly as he had expected her to, and she tells him about a time before she became Killer Frost, back when she was just plain old Caitlin Snow (whose surname all but guaranteed she would get cold powers of some kind eventually), she saw him flying one day and he inspired her: "I thought... ...If a man could fly... I could stay in college."

He tries further inspiring her to be a hero instead of a villain (and it must work, because by the time I finally post this and you're reading it, she will all ready be appearing in Justice League of America). Deadshot cuts Superman off, though, with a cynical un-spirational speech.

Half a world away, on a tiny island in the South Pacific shaped suspiciously like a crescent moon, most of Max Lord's team is posing over a pile of dead shamans, while Max and Polaris try a combination of psychic persuasion and torture to get information off the high priest, who looks exactly like all the other shamans, save for a white beard (Which makes them a somewhat Smurf-like societu, I suppose). They talk cryptically about a "him" who can't be let free, who Max thinks he will be able to control with his powers and the priest disagrees. Max eventually gets what he wants, but it happens off-panel, so we readers don't know exactly what it is yet.

Waller then releases the Justice League, and she and Batman bring both teams to look at the security footage recovered by Katana and Flag. It shows Lord's team killing the guards in various horrible ways, and she informs the united super-people that all those terrible villains are on their way to Belle Reve to kill Waller, and she needs them to protect her. Everyone has a good laugh about this...

...even Batman seems bemused. Then Waller drops her next bombshell: Those five villains were "the first Suicide Squad!" (Sorry Rick Flag, Sr., Jess Bright, Karin Grace and Dr. Hugh Evans!)

You know what happens next, right? In traditional superhero team-up formula, the League and Squad have fought, so now it's time to team-up to fight a greater threat.

Justice League Vs. Suicide Squad #4 by writer Joshua Williamson, artist Fernando Pasarin and Matt Ryan and colorists Alex Sinclair and Jeremiah Skipper

A blast from the Eye of Ekron ("BOOM") and some purple magnet power ("KKRRTSSSHH") opens a big wide hole in Belle Reve prison for Max Lord and his team to dramatically march through, where a two-page spread shows both the League and the Squad waiting for them, a small army 18 super-people people strong. There's a little bit of talking, where Superman seems to know everyone better than everyone else, having memories of pre-Flashpoint Lobo and Maxwell Lord, and then the fighting starts.

Lord attacks Enchantress' mind taking her out of the fight, Emerald Empress uses her Eye to blast Baz through like five walls, and then Sorrow...bumps his fists together in front of his mask, summoning an army of creepy looking monsters. This turns out to be a good thing for the comic, as it gives everyone something to do. After all, while some of Max's people are pretty powerful, the League alone should be able to stop them fairly quickly, but from a pure fight choreography point of view, 18 versus five is probably a pretty difficult thing to build a series of comic book scenes around, so the monsters provide a convenient excuse for what so-and-so might be up to while Williamson and Pasarin focus on some smaller melees within the battle.

So we get Rustam and his flaming scimitar sword-fighting with Katana and her cursed katana; Superman and the Green Lanterns fighting the Emerald Empress until foreshadowing for future stories causes her to disappear (there's even an asterisk in a box addressing Superman, letting him know that he will have to deal with her later in the pages of Supergirl); Harley and Wondy vs. Johnny Sorrow (the ladies win, making him and his monsters ultimately disappear); and Cyborg, Aquaman, Killer Croc and El Diablo vs. Doctor Polaris (Cyborg uses science to send Polaris flying out of the comic book).

The two most dramatic encounters are those involving Lobo and Lord. Lobo chases down Waller, with Batman and Deadshot between them. Williamson's take on Lobo's powers is...kinda weird. I remember him having, like, Superman-level invulnerability, but these guys blow huge holes in him with Cable-sized guns and he just grows limbs and chunks of himself back with a super-fast healing factor...kinda like Wolverine, but faster. Batman finally stops him by injecting him with a Suicide Squad-brand brain bomb injected into him through his neck (again, should a syringe even be able to pierce Lobo's invulnerable flesh?) and then, um, doing this:

Pretty hardcore, Batman.

Did the World's Greatest Detective figure out that Lobo could grow his head back, or was he trying to kill an opponent here?

Meanwhile, Lord avoided all of the various fights and headed directly for some mysterious vault in the basement, with the only one trying to stop him being Killer Frost, whose mind he immediately takes over. And here's where things start to go pretty wrong, at least in terms of everything I knew--or thought I knew!--about this particular subject (which, to be fair, has been pretty damn fluid since around the time of Infinite Crisis, when DC adopted a more cavalier attitude about continuity and the "rules" of their universe in a more make-it-up-as-you-go-because-we-can-always-just-reboot-it attitude).

While Lord enters the vault and the rest of the super-people race to stop him, Waller explains that what Lord is really after is a powerful diamond called "the 'Eclipso Diamond'" or "the Heart of Darkness."

Longtime DC readers will know Eclipso as a Silver Age creation by Bob Haney and Lee Elias, who had a feature in House of Secrets. A sort of Jekyll and Hyde, hero-and-villain in one, Eclipso was a bad guy that solar scientist Bruce Gordon would transform into whenever there was an eclipse, a state of affairs brought about after he was stabbed with a black diamond by an evil jungle witch doctor.

In the 1990s, he got a series of dramatic retcons. The 1992 summer annual crossover event reimagined him as one of the most powerful villains in the DCU, able to possess others, and not just his original host Bruce Gordon. That was followed by a surprisingly good if short-lived ongoing series written by Robert Loren Fleming and Keith Giffen and, later, the John Ostrander/Tom Mandrake Spectre series revealed that Eclipso was actually The Spectre's predecessor as a cosmic force of vengeance (He did the Great Deluge, but had stopped exacting divine vengeance by the time of the plagues of Egypt).

I...don't know what's been going on with him in post-Flashpoint. I think he was revealed to have something to do with Gemworld? And the black diamond had appeared at some point in...Catwoman? Team 7? I don't know.

Anyway, what's Max want with the diamond prison of Eclipso?

Here, I'll let Waller explain:

If Max can use his abilities to control the Heart of Darkness. He won't just be able to suggest people to obey him...

...Max will be able to force everyone to become the worst versions of themselves.

And so, on the penultimate page, Lord says "Stop." And the various Leaguers all fall down, making exertion noises. The Squad are unaffected, because, Lord says, he doesn't want to control them when he has the League. That seems like poor planning, as if you can control everyone, why not do so? Wouldn't that be easier than just controlling the most powerful folks and having them beat up weaker folks for you?

And then we get another splash page, this one showing an eclipsed--i.e. possessed by Eclipso--Max Lord, clutching a big, glowing, purple chunk of crystal with his fingertips, surrounded by the entire Justice League (excepting Batman), all of whom are similarly Eclipsed. Now, when Eclipso was reinvented in the early '90s and took someone, the hues of their costumes would grow darker, their ears pointier, their eyes red and their faces "eclipsed."

Here they look fairly similar, save for the fact that their ears don't get pointy and their faces get cracked and wrinkly throughout the eclipsed portion.

Also, the way Eclipso "worked" during the "Darknesss Within" event series of 1992 and his monthly was that when someone came in contact with a black diamond shard of the Heart of Darkness and thought thoughts of vengeance or anger, it would allow Eclipso to take over their bodies and minds; he didn't "control" them so much as they became him. The only way to drive Eclipso out of an eclipsed hero was to expose them to sunlight (There was another, lesser effect, in which someone holding the diamond and thinking ill of someone else would summon some sort of Eclipso entity that would single-mindedly attempt to exact whatever form of vengeance the person inadvertently summoning Eclipso was thinking about; it mostly depended on the needs of the story which happened).

Here things are...different. Lord still seems to be himself, rather than having turned into Eclipso. He says: "And now with the Eclipso Diamond, the Justice League will help make the world safe... ...MY WAY." While he is shown touching the diamond, at no point did any of the Leaguers touch it, and here it's unclear if they are simply being mind-controlled by Lord, or if they are Lord. Or Eclipso.

I guess we'll find out next issue...?

Justice League Vs. Suicide Squad #5 by writer Joshua Williamson, pencil artist Robson Rocha, inkers Jay Leisten, Daniel Henriques, Dandu Florea and Oclair Albert and colorists Alex Sinclair and Jeremiah Skipper

This issue opens with a five-page sequence in which the eclipsed Justice League has taken over the world and placed Lord in the White House in just under 13 minutes. I continue to not really get how Eclipso "works" now. The various scenes show the League operating at night, but in the final page, a full-page splash, we see the eclipsed Lord with his feet up on the president's desk in the Oval Office, while Superman is carefully positioned behind a curtain. Sunlight is shown streaming in the windows, here and on the next page, but the light doesn't affect Lord. And while Superman is hiding from it, he flew Lord there in the daylight, and was thus presumably exposed to sunlight on the way to the White House.

Additionally, the pair talk. Lord is apparently still Lord, and the Leaguers are all mind-controlled, but their minds aren't overwritten by that of Lord or Eclipso. I guess Williamson has reimagined the diamond as some sort of mind-control booster...?

Meanwhile, Waller, Deadshot and Batman wake up buried beneath the rubble of Belle Reve, next to Lobo's still decapitated body. Superman digs his way in, at which point Batman sees his face. He pulls out his Kryptonite ring and gets ready to box the Man of Steel, but Supes just tosses him aside, apparently no longer weakened by Kryptonite (?), and he has a short conversation with Batman, demonstrating that he is totally still Superman, just under Lord's influence. Weird.

He grabs Waller and flies away.

At that point, Lobo wakes up, his head back, and Batman said blowing up Lobo's brain so he could regrow it from scratch was the only way to break Max Lord's control of his mind. Oh that Batman, he did know that Lobo could regrow his head all along! Batman knows everything!

After contending with Cyborg, whose robot half is fighting the eclipsed human half and is explaining to Batman, Lobo and the Squad what's what, Batman recluctantly recruits them all to the Justice League. Although given that there are more Squad members than Leaguers, maybe it's more like Batman has joined the Suicide Squad...? Well, whatever. It's gonna be a Justice League vs. Suicide Squad rematch, I guess, except now the League are the bad guys and the Squad are the good guys!

Back in D.C., Max is gloating to Amanda about how he has brought peace and security to the U.S. and how he will similarly save the rest of the world, but she just backhands him, grabs him by the scruff of the neck and rubs his face in the chaos outside the White House. He realizes belatedly that the diamond/Eclipso is somehow influencing him, and was clouding his mind.

Oddly, a bunch of civilians are eclipsed, and they are fighting and killing a bunch of non-eclipsed villains. Again, not sure how eclipsing works here, but wouldn't it be easier to just eclipse everyone? Like, if Max had just taken over the Squad at Belle Reve too, it would have been game over. Now he's gotta deal with Batman, Lobo and the Squad Boom Tube-ing into DC, where they start to fight the eclipsed League.

It doesn't last more than a few dramatic poses, however, as the sun itself suddenly becomes eclipsed, Max Lord vomits up a bunch of viscous black ink and then his body transforms into that of Eclipso himself, who floats above the fighting super-people and declares his intention to corrupt all of creation...!

The best part of the entire issue, however, is when Killer Frost looks up at the sun being weirdly eclipsed and asking what's happening, and Captain Boomerang responds with the most cartoonishly Australian response possible: "That's the sign the dingo just ate our baby, Luv."

Justice League Vs. Suicide Squad #6 by writer Joshua Williamson, artist Howard Porter and colorist Alex Sinclair

This is it! The thrilling conclusion! One-time JLA artist Howard Porter takes the artistic baton to bring us on home, and he is inking himself here. Porter's art can look pretty different from project to project, depending on who he's working with and, I would assume, deadline, but it looks better here than it has in a while, in my opinion, and its quite welcome after the rather lackluster two previous issues.

Eclipso's influence has spread world-wide, with the sort of eclipsed-on-eclipsed violence leading to rioting and looting in London, Australia and...somewhere in Asia...? I think that the writing on the neon signs in the third-panel is Korean, but I don't know; all the lights make me think Japan, but I guess it doesn't really matter, huh? The point is, Eclipso is taking over the world now.

And our heroes are all busy fighting, across a two-page spread in which Batman, Lobo and the Squad fight the Eclipsed Justice League; this fight is about as silly all the previous ones, with The Flash still running circles around Captain Boomerange without, like, hitting him or anything. Again, not sure why Eclipso doesn't just eclipse them all, but it's a pretty cool fight scene. I like how Wonder Woman throws a swing at Harley and misses, punching a big-ass hole in the turf in the White House lawn.

In the midst of the fray, Batman comes up with a plan. Remembering that Waller had used sunlight to neutralize the Eclipso diamond when it was in storage, he thinks aloud about where they can get some sunlight now that the sun has been eclipsed, and he looks to Superman, currently blasting Lobo with his heat vision.

"Superman's cells are supercharged from our yellow sun," Batman tells Frost, who, remember, is also a scientist. "Can you create a prism to trap his heat blast and convert it into sunlight?"

I...don't know about that, Batman. That science seems a little fishy to me. But I am no scientist, so I can't argue with you on this point. I'll just have to assume Superman's heat-vision is indeed yellow sunlight altered by his eye-parts, and that it can therefore just be prism-ed back into sunlight.

By this time, Eclipso has realized he can just, like, takeover everyone's minds, so he possesses the entire Squad...except Frost. She makes a big prism, Batman stands in front of it and smack-talks Superman, getting him to allude to an Alan Moore script from 1,000 years ago ("Burn."), because so much of DC Comics' storytelling model seems to be based around trolling Alan Moore for whatever reason. And this plan that's so crazy it just might work...actually works!

Superman shoots his heat beams at Batman, Batman jumps out of the way and the beams hit the prism and sunlight washes over all the eclipsed super-people and makes Eclipso say "ARGH!"

But it's not enough! The prism begins to melt, and despite Batman barking at Frost to keep it from melting, she's running out of the heat-energy fuel she needs to covert into ice power to keep the prism the right...prism-ness. Batman offers to let her absorb his life-force for energy. Then Superman floats over and tells her to "take the energy from all of us."

This shared sacrifice, cheesy as it is, ends up being enough and "FWOOM," "RRAAAGH!" the day is saved! The sun, the world and even Max Lord have all been de-eclipsed (declipsed?).

And that's that...but there's still 12 pages of comic left. So there's a lot of denouement and setting-up of Steve Orlando's Justice League of America series yet to go. So the issue transitions into "stay tuned for coming attractions" mode.

Everyone goes back to Belle Reve, for a series of chats. Superman gives a slowly recovering Frost another inspirational speech and congratulates her for helping save the day, Batman tells Waller he's taking Frost with her because she was so good at being a good guy during the course of this series ("Think of it as early parole for good behavior") and that maybe he and the League are cool with her running the Suicide Squad after all and then Batman has a heart-to-heart with Lobo.

Since Batman knocked him free of Lord's mind-control, Lobo offers Batman "one freebie" job while reminding Batman that the Main Man never, ever breaks his word. Batman calls the favor in immediately, saying he already has a job for him, to "work alongside a new kind of Justice League."

I guess that works, although "joining a Justice League" seems like a lot different than doing one job. Sounds a lot like a "wishing for more wishes" kind of exploitation, but as pages of JLoA reveal, it works on Lobo.

Meanwhile, Max Lord wakes up in some kind of crazy trap/contraption, where he immediately begins monologue-ing at Waller, about how he just realized that the events of this series were all orchestrated by Waller, as a way to convince Batman and the League to accept her and the Squad, and to get her hands on Lord.

He then ticks off a series of "loose ends", which are things that will be followed up on in other books. There's a panel of Emerald Enchantress mentioning her hunt for Saturn Girl, and maybe it would be easier to do it as a fivesome (as in The Fatal Five! The name of her supervillain team in the future! As the asterisk in a previous issue said, this will be followed up on in the page of Supergirl). There's a panel showing Johnny Sorrow's mask in some facility, where a lady in a lab coat tells a guy in a lab coat that the mask "whispering--about a lost society..." (like the Justice Society!). There are also panels focusing on Doctor Polaris (who has since shown up in the pages of Green Lanterns), Rustam (the focus of the current story arc in Suicide Squad) and another of a little boy finding the/a Eclipso diamond.

Then there are two more pages of Waller and Lord, in which Lord says he assumes Waller has kept him alive so that he can use her in Task Force X, and she struts away, saying, "Your talents would be wasted in Task Force X...."But you're perfect for... ...TASK FORCE XI."

Oh hey, the X in "Task Force X" isn't the letter X, but the Roman numeral for "ten," and thus "Task Force XI" is actually "Task Force Eleven."

Huh. Kinda like when Grant Morrison revealed that the "X" in the "Weapon X" program was the Roman numeral for "ten."

And that, finally, is that. We can now join Steve Orlando's Justice League of America, already in progress.



*Technically not true. As Deadshot himself has previously clarified, it's not so much that he has a death wish, it's that he doesn't care overmuch if he lives or dies. After all, if he really wished for death, well, it would be pretty easy for a guy who has machine guns on his wrists and a remote-controlled bomb in his brain to make his wish come true at pretty much any point.

**If you missed it, you can catch it in Suicide Squad Vol. 2: The Nightshade Odyssey. The League consisted of Batman, Martian Manhunter, Green Lantern Guy Gardner, Captain Atom, Black Canary, Rocket Red, Mister Miracle, Booster Gold and Blue Beetle. The Squad consisted of Rick Flag, Javelin, Vixen, Duchess, Nightshade, Bronze Tiger, Captain Boomerang and Deadshot. Again, the League would seem to vastly overpower the Squad, but some of their most powerful members spent the encounter talking to their friends on the Squad, and this was during the period where Gardner was suffering from a blow to the head that made him sickeningly sweet and thoughtful, rather than a violent and aggressive jackass.

On DC/Hanna-Barbera's team-ups

Adam Strange/Future Quest#1 by writers Marc Andreyko and Jeff Parker, artist Steve Lieber and colorist Veronica Gandini

Here we have a relatively minor DC Comics character without his own title teaming up with one of the Hanna-Barbereboot titles (albeit one that's being canceled). It should go without saying that jet-pack-wearing, ray gun-shooting spaceman adventurer character Adam Strange is right at home with the 1960s-borne adventure cartoon characters that fill the pages of Jeff Parker and company's title starring various Hanna-Barbera adventure/superhero heroes. Created in 1958, he was spawned from the same cultural forces and pop cultural interests that inspired so many of those cartoon characters, and, if anything, one wonders if he isn't maybe too perfect for an appearance in the Future Quest milieu. There's no friction here in the way that there is, with, say, Suicide Squad/The Banana Splits or the Batman/Top Cat back-up feature that follows (which we'll get to later).

Additionally, because of the premise of Future Quest, in which mysterious portals to other times and places open on Earth, depositing a wide variety of super-characters ranging from Mightor to Space Ghost onto Team Quest and Birdman's Earth, Future Quest has a built-in excuse for any DC Comics character, no matter who or from where, to appear: Jonah Hex, Enemy Ace, The Haunted Tank, The Justice Society of America, Infinity Inc, Metamorpho, Aztek, The Legion of Superheroes, whoever.

So Andreyko and Parker have Adam Strange--the in-continuity, New 52 iteration, based on flashbacks that appear to reference his current origins and events from the recent Death of Hawkman miniseries--pop out of a portal in The Lost Valley, where Dino Boy and some agents of F.E.A.R. have been trapped by the events of Future Quest. Dr. Quest, Race Bannon, Jonny, Hadji and Bandit race there to see what came through, as do the F.E.A.R. folks, who are trying to escape the dangerous, screwed-up valley. The amnesiac Strange got bumped there in mid-zeta beam, and it takes him a while to get his bearings.

Meanwhile, there are lots of cool prehistoric creatures to run from, fight with and, in one case, befriend via snake-charming and rather generous feeding. While it's mainly a Strange/Quest crossover, Birdman appears for a few panels and Mightor and The Herculoids make cameos.

If you like Future Quest, you should like this kinda sorta epilogue to the series, and if you come for the Adam Strange, well, it's a nice introduction to some of the more likable aspects of Future Quest, the first chunk of which is currently available in trade paperback.

The back-up is an eight-page Top Cat comic which is problematically written by DC Comics Publisher Dan DiDio. Did he assign it to himself? Did someone assign it to their own boss, or their boss' boss? It's always bizarre to see DiDio get a writing credit, in a way that seeing his co-publisher Jim Lee's art appearing in a DC comic isn't, because while Lee is a proven popular commodity whose work tends to dramatically affect sales, DiDio is pretty much the opposite. The majority of his work has appeared in some sort of anthology context, and the one book he did write by himself died almost immediately upon his taking it over (his work with co-writers isn't much better).

DiDio does give himself a hell of an asset in writing Batman into the story. This is the only of the back-ups that includes a DCU co-star, but, again, are you going to say no to your boss's boss? So DiDio writes a five-page framing sequence featuring Batman and Catwoman--Batman chases Catwoman into an alley, where he finds Top Cat instead, covering for Catwoman. Batman questions the four-foot tall, anthropomorphic cat, during which time T.C. reveals his secret origin.

DiDio has basically reimagined him as a career criminal who ratted out the rest of his gang, hailing from a world very different from that of the setting of the original cartoons. It is a world of anthropomorphic cats, where Top Cat would be the equivalent of a human, rather than a regular (if talking and clothes-wearing) cat (Rather than human police officer Dibble busting T.C.'s chops, there's a panel where cat police officers bust his gang). He and Benny have journeyed to the DCU via a mad science device, which also makes this unique among the various Hanna-Barbereboot properties in that it is actually set in the DC Universe (Remember, in the lead story, Strange journeys outside the DCU to land in the world of Future Quest). These little changes basically cast T.C. as Howard The Duck.

Phil Winslade draws the feature, and he hasn't really redesigned the character in any appreciable way, other than making him much larger, and somewhat creepier, given that he is rendered so much more realistically than the flat, bright version of your parents (or grandparents) youth. Basically, Top Cat looks like a furry.

It ends, as all of the back-ups do, with the words "To Be Continued in...", which suggests a new round of Hanna-Barbereboot books on the horizon, none of which seem as promising as the ones we've already seen (And all of which, save Scooby Apocalypse, have either been canceled or are in the process of being canceled).

Booster Gold/The Flintstones #1 by writer Mark Russell, artists Rick Leonardi and Scott Hanna and colorist Steve Buccellato

This is the other special in which a DC character without a book of his own crashes into the milieu of one of the extant Hanna-Barbereboot books. Though written by regular Flintstones writer Mark Russell, it is really more of a Booster Gold story. Despite all of the panel time that The Flintstones characters enjoy, it is Booster who is our protagonists, and Fred, Barney and Wilma could easily have been played by generic characters from the distant past. Where the book really shares common ground with the modern, post-modern take on the 20th century's modern Stone Age family is in the tone. Like Russel's Flintsones book, this is social satire in a cartoon package, often quite dark, even shockingly so (Booster plays Weekend At Bernie's with a bisected corpse near the climax) and occasionally preachy.

Booster Gold, in the far-flung future of 2472, is on his way to a date in Gotham City when aliens attack. In order to save the day, Booster Gold researches the alien race on Chronopedia and uses his time machine to jump back to Bedrock 20,000 BC, the time and place of their kind's first appearance on Earth. His sudden arrival out of thin air kills the interplanetary prophet who arrived to share his advanced wisdom with the residents of Bedrock, cutting the poor sap in half...and starting the chain of events that would eventually lead to the invasion 22,500 years or so later (time travel!).

With the help of time travel and some local cave-people, he attempts to save the day, and kinda sorta does, in the process radically altering his present/our future in a way that he's pretty much the only one who can appreciate.

Russell's take on Booster Gold is pretty fun. The character seems like himself, despite appearing inn a narrative that is obviously more comedic in focus than even the Bwa-ha-ha-est of his superhero adventures, and he Russell does with time travel what he's been doing with history and American society in the pages of The Flinstones (I particularly enjoyed Booster's reaching out to other time travelers for help, all of whom seem to have chosen to inadvertently traveled to deadly, disastrous points in history).

Perhaps the scariest thing about this entire story, however? In the year 2472, people will still be dating via Tinder! I guess I should be gladdened by the knowledge that there is no way in hell I'll survive over 450 more years...

This back-up is the The Jetsons, courtesy the Harley Quinn writing team of Jimmy Palmiotti and Amanda Conner, with artist Pier Brito. I kind of hated it. It is essentially just an origin story for The Jetsons' robot maid Rosie, which is actually kind of disturbing (Spoiler alert: She is now a robot with the mind of George's mother, and thus Judy and Elroy's grandmother, implanted into it/her). She is the most drastically redesigned member of the cast--she's the creepy alien-looking thing on the cover--having lost her boxy appearance and stereotypical maid drag for a shapelier figure and lighter-colored metal placed in such a way to suggest an apron and such.

The human Jetsons all look more-or-less like realistic versions of themselves, as if Brito just cast actors to play them in a live-action adaptation. Jane wears stretch pants under her dress, and Elroy looks older and dresses less like a little kid, but that's about it.

One thing I found strange about DC's various Hanna-Barbereboot books in general--these as well as the four original ongoings--was that in making "adult" versions of these cartoons (Future Quest being the only one that's really all-ages), none of the artists involved redesigned anyone as particularly sexy. In fact, though generally drawn in more realistic faction, the 21st century reboot versions are generally less sexy, with the ladies all more demurely, conservatively dressed than their 1960s cartoon counterparts. That is especially evident here, as not only were Jane and Judy drawn as particularly attractive (um, for their milieu), they were also relatively scantily-clad for the era of television from which they were born (Same goes for Betty and Wilma, I guess, although I never found Wilma the least bit attractive, even when I was a wee child and cartoon women were the only women I really saw that I wasn't related to; her pupil-less dead eyes and the shape of her head always turned me off, whereas Betty was a stone age fox).

But anyway, rather than a futurisic version of The Flintstones, this is an end-of-life story set in the far-flung future in which we learn George uses his dead mom's brain as a maid. It is to be continued in The Jetsons, we are told.

Green Lantern/Space Ghost #1 by writers James Tynion IV and Christopher Sebela, and artist/colorist Ariel Olivetti

As with Adam Strange/Future Quest, both sides of this particular team-up fit together so naturally it's almost not even remarkable to see them sharing a book, and there's certainly none of the inherent tension of the previous book, or the one we'll discuss next. Green Lantern is a space cop who fights various forms of evil in space. Space Ghost is a space cop who fights various forms of evil in space. Neither of them has anything approaching a personality, so even having them play off one another doesn't really generate much in the way of sparks. Tynion and Sebela's story isn't bad, it's just not terrible interesting.

Both heroes receive a distress signal of sorts from the most distant edges of their universes, and they each rush to investigate. Foes of each are encountered and fought--"Agent Orange" Larfleeze and Zorak/s--and the pair end up on a rather Earth-like planet, where they proceed to duke it out, because why wouldn't they?

This planet is ruled by bad folks who have convinced the populace that there is no life at all beyond their planet, and thus when the spacemen arrive, they need to be eradicated with laser guns and mechs. So more fighting. At one point the heroes trade weapons, and I can't tell you how disappointed I was that when Space Ghost put on the Green Lantern ring he didn't receive a Green Lantern-ized costume like heroes usually do when they try GL's ring on for size. Maybe next time...?*

Ariel Olivetti's art isn't to my taste. His designs are fine, but he uses a lot of computer gimickry, dropping in photo-realistic backgrounds and robots and such that contributes to an all-around look of sterile fakery. A lot of people obviously dig this kind of art, but I like comic book art that looks drawn with pencil and ink on paper. That said, as the artist on the 2005 Space Ghost miniseries with writer Joe Kelley, Olivetti was probably a pretty ideal choice for the comic, if none of the Future Quest guys were available.

The back-up is a Ruff 'n' Reddy feature by Howard Chaykin. The cat and dog characters are obscure enough that I have actually never, ever seen a cartoon featuring them (or, if I did, it was long enough ago that I have no memory of it). I can't really speak then to what degree Chaykin reinvents them, but it's worth pointing out that it reads like a weird Howard Chaykin funny animal comic, in which the pair are professional, old time-y comedians who are down on their luck. The strongest gag, I thought, was the series of other comedians they work with, all of whom have names that lend themselves to teaming with them.

Suicide Squad/Banana Splits #1 by writer Tony Bedard, artists Ben Caldwell and Mark Morales and colorist Jeremy Lawson

This was probably the most out-there of the four books, what with there being the largest gulf in tone between the  source material, and the fact that The Banana Splits was just a really, really weird show (and not even a cartoon, but an off-putting live-action one featuring people in frightening animal costumes...Liz Phair and Material issue's cover song of their theme song from the 1995 MCA anthology album Saturday Morning was pretty awesome, though!).

Writer Tony Bedard imagines the Banana Splits as a down-on-their-luck band of hybrid animal people (for whose existence no explanation is ever given) who are apparently native to the DC Universe. On their way to a gig, a misunderstanding leads to them getting busted by the cops, and they are shipped off to Belle Reve (perhaps because they are animal people? That doesn't get explained either). They don't exactly fit in there, and when Amanda Waller needs some extremely expendable Squaddies to reinforce Harley Quinn, Katana, Killer Croc and Deadshot on their rescue mission, the Splits suit-up and join the fray.

As their opponents are robots, the Splits aren't forced to kill any actual living things during the mayhem. It all leads up to a kind of forced gag, but that particular gag was perhaps the only reason a Banana Splits/Suicide Squad crossover would ever even have been a thing. Other than sheer weirdness, of course.

Caldwell's pencil art, inked by Mark Morales, is fantastic, and among the best art applied to the Suicide Squad in their 5,000 or so appearance since The New 52boot. Dude should really be drawing the regular series, or at least an arc or two of it, as the model for the current Suicide Squad series seems to be to put a different high-profile artist on each consecutive story arc.

His Harley Quinn is just right, capturing the basic look of the movie-inspired redesign with equal parts Animated Series puckishness and Suicide Squad craziness. He basically lands right in the middle of the two most pervasive versions of the character.

He gives Katana a redesign, with a more elaborate, samurai-inspired costume that is an improvement over most of her many costumes over the years, and his Deadshot is a more stripped-down and stylized version of the current costume. In fact, Caldwell's version may be the best of that particular (terrible) Deadshot costume.

The Banana Splits all look incredibly off, even wrong, though. Bingo (the monkey) is the only one who retains the strange person-in-a-furry suit look, given his over-sized head. The rest are simply animal men, and their sizes reflect which animal they are to some degree, rather than all being the same size. I don't know what the best choice for drawing The Banana Splits in a Suicide Squad comic is though, so I can't say Caldwell necessarily did it wrong, but making them realistic animal-men certainly looks and feels wrong to me. Like, even just being able to see their eyes, or Snork being an actual elephant-man instead of the weird, gray, shaggy, Cousin It-looking thing with a trunk and ears seemed un-Banana Split-like to me.

The back-up is a Snagglgepuss story, wait, I'm sorry, it's "The Snagglepuss Chronicles." It's by Mark Russell and Howard Porter and...it's a weird one. Snagglepuss is drawn as a more-or-less realistic felid of some kind, albeit a human-sized one with pink fur, creepy-looking "backwards" hind legs and a longer version of the yellow coat he sported during Laff-A-Lympics. Russell imagines him a quick-witted, controversial playwright of some sort, making his way through what appears to be the House Un-American Activities Committee hearings with a series of bon mots. Outside, he randomly meets Augie Doggie, who similarly looks weirdly realistic, and who says he wants to be a writer. Snagglepuss offers advice that does sound inspiring and, well, true, and he also flashes-back to a tragic event in his past (cameo by Peter Potamus).

I couldn't make heads or tails of this one, to be honest, and whatever joke Russell was trying to tell went over my head.



*After that weird--but surprisingly good!--2005 Space Ghost miniseries, I had spent some time thinking about Space Ghost joining the DC Universe, even if only on a temporary basis, and what that might be like. I assumed he would run into Green Lanterns. I thought it would be cool to see him as a POV character wandering around DC's Earth for a while too, maybe joining the Justice League for a while. I think the current Justice League, which has a pretty boring and incredibly static line-up these days, would really benefit from adding Space Ghost to it.