Which is fine, I suppose, since it has been a decade since I first read this comic; obviously I would need to re-read it before attempting to write about it anyway.
(If you're not familiar with Skelly's work, I'd highly recommend it.
This particular book seems to be a self-published mini-comic (although at 8-and-a-half-by-11-inches, it's actually larger than your average, full-size comic), one containing a short, horny, 18-page story that was originally published on Slutist.com (A site that is no longer there. I suppose that happens when you wait a decade to review a comic, huh?)
It was a gift given to me by my friend Meredith, who had bought it at a past SPX. She even had Katie Skelly sign it for me:
The story stars a blue-haired model—that's her on the cover—whose shoot abruptly ends when a young man with '70s-looking clothes and a clipboard interrupts, telling her photographer that their booking ended two hours ago.
The model strips off her dress and retreats to her dressing room, where she proceeds to smoke a cigarette and masturbate, the guy from the studio watching her until she calls out that she can hear him in the hall.
Later, she sees him walking as she's driving by, so she picks him up and takes him to the beach with her. As they have sex there, she hears "The Girl from Ipanema" playing on a radio and follows the sound to a pair of bespectacled women in matching red and green who might be twins.
They lead her into a cave, where she's sucked into some sort of weird...rock...thing, within which she seems to have an orgasm. On the last page, she is again posing for the photographer, but now her hair is red and she's wearing a red and green striped minidress like those the women from the cave were wearing.
"Great look!" the photographer says, while the word "Ciao" appears on the right-hand side of the page, and a little "fin", a heart and Skelly's initials appear in the corner.
It was nice to see Skelly's art so big and colored so brightly after her first few books, which were rather small and in black and white, and, if the story seems rather sleight, it is only 18 pages long. It was collected along with other "sex-positive comics created for SLUTIST between 2014-2017" by Fantagraphics under the title The Agency in 2018 and again in 2023. The former, a trade paperback, is currently out of print, but it looks like the latter, a hardcover, is still available. I'll discuss that book as a whole here in a couple of weeks or so.
Batman '66 Vol. 4 (DC Comics; 2016) The most noteworthy inclusion of this hardcover collection is the comic book that comes at its end, one a reader would be unlikely to expect here based on the cover. That would be
Batman: The Lost Episode #1, a one-shot special that featured Len Wein and Jose Luis Garcia-Lopez's 30-page adaptation of an unproduced script for the original TV series by science fiction legend Harlan Ellison (You'll note his is the second name listed on the cover credits, right after that of Jeff Parker).
Ellison's episode, "The Two-Way Crimes of Two-Face!", would have introduced that particular villain to the show's rogues gallery (and thus to American pop culture at large). In addition to the adaptation itself, the special included all kinds of interesting material, including all 30 pages of Garcia-Lopez's un-inked, unencumbered pencil art, some preparatory sketches and Ellison's original script, all under a fully painted
cover by Alex Ross.
In this particular collection, that one-shot follows six issues of the regular Batman '66 title, from near the end of the book's three-year, 30-issue run. This volume was the penultimate one collecting the regular series, although were one looking to read the series today, the best bet might be the 2018 omnibus that collects the entire series as well as The Lost Episode or perhaps waiting a few months for August's Batman '66 Compendium.
That said, there were a lot of crossovers published as well, and those that didn't feature DC characters aren't in either collection, so if you want to see this version of Batman team-up with Archie, The Green Hornet, The Man From U.N.C.L.E. or The Avengers (as in Steed and Mrs. Peel, not Iron Man and Thor), you might want to try back-issue bins and the shelves of your local comic shop.
Anyway, these issues of the regular monthly series come from a variety of creators, including writers Parker, Mike W. Barr*, Tom Peyer and Rob Williams and artists Dave Bullock, Richard Case, Sandy Jarrell, Scott Kowalchuk, Michael Avon Oeming, Joe Prado, Ruben Procopio and Leonardo Romero (of
recent Birds of Prey fame!). Each of the included issues has a cover from Michael Allred, who handled those for the entire series, and is perhaps the ideal
Batman '66 artist, managing images that seem perfectly balanced between modern comics art, the pop art aesthetic of the television show and seemingly effortless likenesses of its stars.
While often times modern DC comics can be spoiled by having too many cooks in the kitchen, here it's quite a virtue, given that the series is essentially an anthology one, with different creators handling different stories each issue. While the designs are all obviously taken from the source material—as are the style, spirit and sense of humor of the plots—there's a fairly wide variety in art styles, as you can probably tell if you're familiar with very many of those artists mentioned in the previous paragraph.
There's quite a wide spectrum between the more realistic represented by Romero and Procopio and the more cartoony by Bullock and Oeming, but the shifts certainly keep things from ever getting boring. (I think my favorite were probably those last two; Bullock has long been a favorite artist of mine, although I seem to see his work too infrequently, and it was just plain interesting to see what Oeming would do with the characters).
Popular special guest-villains The Joker, Penguin and Catwoman all put in appearances, as do created-for-the-show villains The Archer, Bookworm, Professor Marmaduke Ffogg, Egghead and King Tut. Perhaps the most exciting villain in these half-dozen or so issues, however, is Lord Death Man, who here gets Batman '66-ized (Though originally appearing as the more prosaically named "Death Man" in 1966 issue of Batman, Chip Kidd's 2006 book Bat-Manga! introduced American readers to manga-ka Jiro Kuwata's 1960s adaptations of American Batman comics, which included the artist's version of the character. DC would later collect and publish a few volumes of Kuwata's manga).
In fact, one of the many fun aspects of this series has always been seeing the creators similarly introduce villains from the comics into the particular, peculiar world of the TV show, including the likes of The Scarecrow, Clayface, Killer Croc, Poison Ivy and even Bane and Harley Quinn.
That's at least part of what makes the "Two-Way Crimes of Two-Face!" at the back of the collection so exciting. The version of the character we're introduced to in the story seems to be lifted straight from the comics, with no significant change to his look, origin or modus operandi. Sure, he's a little more gentle than his comics counterpart (as are all the villains), simply engaging in simple thievery rather than rampant murder, and he talks in the same manner all of the characters on the show do, but he's a pretty darn accurate Two-Face (Garcia-Lopez does not engage in any sort of fan-casting here, it may be noted, at least, not any that I could detect; Two-Face looks like a comic book character, while Batman, Robin and some of the other players look like Garcia-Lopez's versions of the actors playing those characters).
Given its length and its origins, the story probably hews a little more closely to the format of the television show than many of the other stories in the regular series and is thus something of a jarring outlier when read along with the stories that precede it in one sitting.
I do wonder if it might have been too elaborate to actually ever have been filmed, though; there are a couple of rather big set pieces that seem more like something from a movie than a network television show of fifty-some years ago (There's a scene set in a peculiarly constructed lunar observatory that I will speak more of in a moment, a scene of the Batcopter chasing a speed boat, a scene of Batman swimming underwater and a climax set on what appears to be an old, derelict pirate ship in a huge cavern). All of it is easy enough for Garcia-Lopez to imagine and render, though.
Well...almost. The scene at the lunar observatory didn't really make any sense to me when I read (and then, confused, re-read it and re-read it). The scene is clearly set at night, with a moon visible in the dark sky of an establishing shot and the various vehicles involved in a high-speed chase leading all having their headlights on. But when Two-Face is about to blast Batman with a shotgun, the Caped Crusader temporarily blinds him by reflecting sunlight off the reflective buckle of his utility belt.
I didn't figure it out until I read Ellison's script later, but apparently the room the scene is set in is supposed to be an unusual one, with half of the room darkened to represent nighttime and the other half lit by artificial "sunlight" to represent the daytime (And, of course, the duality of Two-Face and the separation between good and bad).
The floor of the room is obviously bifurcated in Garcia-Lopez's depiction, with one half white and one half black, but it's' not clear from the art that one side of the room is actually dark and one is brightly-lit. I suppose the blame for this lies with Garcia-Lopez (and believe me, I feel bad finding any fault at all in such a master artist's work!), and maybe colorist Alex Sinclair. I think a bigger, better establishing shot of the interior of the room might have solved this confusion, but perhaps there was no room for one.
Is it also worth noting that Garcia-Lopez's art is, at times, perhaps a little too good...? While his Batman is clad in the TV show costume, and his facial features are those of Adam West, his figure is a good deal bigger, more powerful and more athletic than that of the actor, and certain panels can look somewhat strange, as if the comic book superhero is merely borrowing West's costumes (Note, for example, Batman crashing through the skylight of the observatory in a classic comic book moment, his cape spreading out like batwings, or, perhaps the bulging muscles of his back, chest and arm in the panel when Two-Face strikes him from behind with the boom of the ship).
Still, what kind of madman would really complain about 30 pages of Garcia-Lopez art? And, taken in total, the story is, like the rest of the book it's a part of, a lot of fun.
Elseworlds: Justice League Vol. 1 (DC; 2016) Despite the title,
this collection of various Elseworlds comics originally published between 1997 and 1998 includes everything that
didn't have either "Batman" or "Superman" in the title, rather than ones that were specifically branded as "Justice League" comics.
And so only two of them are truly Justice League comics, Justice Riders (the cover of which is repurposed for that of the collection) and League of Justice. Of the other inclusions, two are labeled "Elseworld's Finest" books, one is a Wonder Woman story and the other a Titans comic.
This being an anthology, it is probably best to take each comic in turn. I'll do my best to be brief.
•Elseworld's Finest #1-#2 Written by John Francis Moore, pencilled by Kieron Dwyer and inked by Hilary Barta, this is neither a Batman solo comic nor a Superman solo comic, but a Batman and Superman comic, and that is, I suppose, enough of a distinction to qualify it for inclusion here (A pilot named Hal Jordan and an archaeologist named Dr. Carter Hall both make brief appearances though, and there's a passing mention of an Atlantean king who lost his hand in battle).
Moore sets his story in 1928, which I at first considered curious, as it was a good decade before Superman ushered in the age of comic book superheroes. Of course, that seems to be the whole point of the setting, allowing the narrative to be technically modern, but to take inspiration from and quite regularly reference the sorts of heroic fiction that pre-figured the superhero genre: Jules Verne and early science fiction writers, the pulps, newspaper comic strips and so on...I even wondered if there was a bit of Ernest Hemingway in there. (Today's readers will likely think of Indiana Jones, and perhaps the sort of pulp adventures that inspired the character's creation.)
The story is told via the diary entries of Lana Lang. Her professor father Thaddeus is in residence at a university in Metropolis when he is kidnapped by foreign agents with demon's head tattoos on their hands. They are apparently interested in his work translating directions to the lost city of Argos, which here has a double meaning that will be apparent to Superman fans.
The only witness to the incident is 12-year-old paperboy Jimmy Olsen, who calls on the mysteriously strong Daily Planet reporter Clark Kent (who is not a superhero and, despite the cover, doesn't wear a costume yet; Lana tells us he's always been stronger and faster than the average Joe).
After Lana arrives and reunites with her former Smallville sweetheart, they rush to Paris in search of the only man who could possibly help them find her father, freelance adventurer and soldier of fortune Bruce Wayne, who Moore writes as something of a rakish cad, and, in Dwyer's design, sports a thin moustache, day-old stubble and a prominent scar (Clark, by contrast, in both characterization and in design, is pretty much the same as ever).
They manage to rescue Thaddeus from the clutches of desert bandit Ra's al Ghul (here drawn far sexier than usual), who wants to get his hands on the legendary society-destroying artifact said to be in Argos, although Wayne seems to give his life helping the others escape.
The Superman characters are then abducted by a big, red-bearded, Russian version of Lex Luthor, who seems modeled on Captain Nemo and who also wants the Argos artifact. He takes them with him to the Amazon jungle to find it. They do manage find the lost city of Argos...but not before Ra's and his men do.
Before the artifact can fall into either madman's hands, however, Bruce Wayne arrives, now dressed in mystical bat-themed Egyptian armor he discovered in a cave while stumbling around dying, and the artifact springs to life, revealing itself to be from the planet Krypton, and, in the process, explaining Clark's true heritage, the secret of his great speed and strength and his Earth-conquering destiny. It also gives him a red, blue and gold costume.
Don't worry, everything works out.
Moore's globe-trotting script is obviously full of various tropes which, at this point, nearly a century after the story is set, might read like creaky cliches, but, well, cliches are cliches for a reason, and they are here satisfyingly compelling. He also finds new and clever ways to insert the casts of both characters into this new old milieu, and mix them in unusual ways (Like, for example, having Ra's promise his daughter not to Bruce, but the obviously superior specimen of Clark).
In addition to the characters already mentioned, the creators also get in such members of the World's Finest's casts as Selina Kyle, Alfred, Perry White, a Kara and even Bibbo, as well as such unlikely cameos as The Newsboy Legion, Captain Marvel, Sugar and Spike and Fox and Crow.
One could scarcely ask for a better art team to draw them all.
Read in 2025, I'm unsure of why this didn't become one of the more classic Elseworlds comics; my best guess is that perhaps it's hook wasn't as immediately apparent as, say,
"Pirate Batman" or
"Superman-as-Batman" (I was unsure of it myself until I was actually reading it). That, or its title and the fact that it was a Batman
and Superman story rather than a Batman
or Superman story meant it was relatively under-read compared to other such comics.
•Justice Riders #1 Look, I know no one wants to read the work of Clinton Cash: A Graphic Novel writer and Trump voter Chuck Dixon, especially not now that Trump is destroying the post-World War II world order that benefited the United States, decimating the federal government, actively trying to remake American society in his image, trying to deport lawful immigrants based solely on their expressing opinions he doesn't like, sending immigrants to a prison in a foreign country with no due process and even openly discussing doing the same to American citizens, one of the very things that lead the founders to rebelling against England in the first place, but, well, if one is going to read or re-read DC comics published in the '90s, dude is kind of hard to avoid; he was all over the place (If you don't want Dixon getting any royalties from a purchase you make, maybe look for this collection at your local library? And/or just skip it?)
Anyway, this is by Chuck Dixon and the art team of J.H. Williams III and Mick Grey. As Elseworlds go, this one is a pretty simple and straightforward one, with Dixon transferring various Justice League characters into an Old West setting and then telling a basic heroes versus villains story. While Williams redesigns each player to fit their new milieu, their personalities, relationships and, in some cases, even their superpowers are kept intact.
Sherriff's deputy Oberon has locked up the insane-sounding Faust in the Paradise town jail, the latter predicting some sort of terrible cataclysm. It comes to pass, and the town is completely obliterated, every resident killed in the process and Oberon surviving just long enough to whisper cryptically about what has occurred.
Paradise's Sherriff Diana Prince, who happened to be out of town at the time of the mysterious tragedy, reckons railroad tycoon Maxwell Lord is responsible. As she rides to Helldorado, the town that Lord has built for himself and stocked full of clockwork gunmen, she picks up various allies. These are cowboy-ized versions of The Flash, Hawkman, Booster Gold, Blue Beetle, Martian Manhunter and Guy Gardner.
During the climactic gunfight with Lord and his mechanical army, a few other unexpected villains that will be familiar to DC Comics readers make appearances. There's also a cameo from dime novel writer named Colonel Clark Kent.
And that's it, really. Williams and Grey's art is, as one might expect, excellent, and the character designs are all quite solid, with that of Wonder Woman perhaps being the most striking. It's a relatively early and rare example of Wonder Woman wearing pants, and it works quite well.
•
League of Justice #1-#2 The cover for the first "stave" of this two-issue series suggests an obvious and straightforward premise, one that simply transfers the Justice League characters to a medieval fantasy setting (This would not be the last Elseworlds series to do so, either; 2001's Alan Grant-written Elseworlds book
JLA: Riddle of the Beast would do the same). And, in a broad sense, that
is what writer and penciller Ed Hannigan is up to here.
What you can't tell from that cover, though, is that this is one of the crazier DC Comics published in my lifetime, a comic so bonkers that I'm actually kind of surprised that it saw print as is.
I suspect that part of the problem—and I do think it's a problem, given how incredibly hard to read certain passages are—is that Hannigan's story is just way too big for the space allotted it.
Not only is the cast he's working with here fairly large, with some characters getting the room to be fleshed out (like Batmancer of the city of Goth), while others are named but barely explored (like The Atlantean, The Amazon Princess and characters Snappacaw and Hunkk'll, whom I just this very second realized are references to Snapper Carr and Ma Hunkel), but there is a lot of world-building to the book, so much so that it is conveyed in wordy info dumps and a few pages where the dialogue balloons fill as much or more of the panels than the drawings do. (There's a page in the first issue, wherein The Martian psychically imparts a creation story of the fantasy world to our protagonists where my first reaction was "You expect me to read all that?")
Hannigan, who is here inked by the great Dick Giordano, opens his story in Goth, with his Batmancer narrating. It's a pretty straight fantasy fiction version of Batman. He wears the skin of a giant bat as a costume, he tools around his big, crime-filled city in a chariot pulled by two giant bats, he works with "scientific detection, deductive ratiocination, dactylography" and such-like instead of sorcery to fight crime, he banters with his butler Alfred (here, a zombie) and he battles a sad version of The Joker named The Griever. He is the first of the book's many narrators.
Four pages later, the scene shifts to Brattleboro, Vermont, in the present day, and the narrator changes to a young man named Neil, a camp counselor hanging out with two of his charges, Freddy and Alcy. When they see a long-haired junkie named Kenny who looks like he's trying to mug a not-entirely-present woman (she appears to be penciled and colored but not inked, giving her an illusory sense of presence), they intervene, and then the four modern Vermonters are all transported to a fantasy forest, where they are immediately rescued from bandits by a green-clad archer who talks funny ("Hummm! Tha must be from afar away indeed if tha doon't ken Longbow Greenarrow, keeper of Yuirth's Forest Lands...").
Yuirth is the world they have arrived in and, as the un-inked woman Bird Lady will explain to them shortly, it is under great threat from someone named "Sovereign", the book's Superman (who you can see on
the cover of the second issue), "and the
dark power behind him" (That power would be Luithorr, who discovered Sovereign as a baby and raised him into an obedient soldier/son).
The four people from Vermont are referred to by various characters as "Elseworlders" and "Unyetlings" (The latter because Yuirith is somewhere in Earth's distant past, many creations ago, meaning if it is destroyed our world won't come to be). Bird Lady, the book's version of Black Canary, assigns our Elseworlders a quest.
They are given an indecipherable scroll which apparently names the various heroes they will need to gather together to defeat Sovereign; these are, in addition to the book's Green Arrow, versions of The Flash, The Atom, Martian Manhunter, Green Lantern John Stewart, Hawkman and Hawkgirl, Aquaman and Wonder Woman. Oh, and Bird Lady prophesies that, of the four of them, one of them isn't going to make it...or, as she puts it, "E'en should you prevail 'gainst Sovereign, one of your number shall not leave the world alive!"
After meeting the book's Atom, a wizard named "Atomus The Palmer", and then going through an unreadable two-page spread, our protagonists split up and begin encountering the various heroes, all of whom are individually endangered by Sovereign and Luithorr.
The two villains apparently dwell in Metropolis, a city atop a giant tower that moves through the land like a titanic chess piece, gouging a trail of destruction through the surface of the world as it does so. They also have a zombie horde.
Not all of this world's League equivalents will survive, and four of them end up passing their powers to the Elseworlders by giving them some item or power of another. (Kenny, for example, is at first changed by whatever the hell happened when Atomus took them through the "realm
Irrational!!", is then given the huge-headed Martian's cape. After donning it, he begins to lose his hair, turn green and transform into what looks like a bug-eyed, exposed-brain version of J'onn J'onnz...albeit wearing tiny denim shorts. You can see him
here.)
The narration and dialogue heavy story seems to move faster and get more crowded as it goes on; I had the feeling that Hannigan had developed all of the superhero characters to the same extent he had Batmancer, but just didn't have room to devote to each as the story progressed and the page count dwindled. This really feels like it could have, should have been a 12-part maxi-series, or even an ongoing, rather than a two-issue miniseries.
Also making it hard to read is the fact that almost every character has their own distinct speech style, just as the Green Arrow character used various archaic language, so some of the dialogue can be well, kind of irritating (Especially that of Atomus).
Additionally, the narrator changes frequently, not just between Batmancer and Neil, but also Kenny and the kids, and it's not usually clear whose thoughts we're meant to be hearing when. Complicating things further, some of the narration boxes
aren't narration boxes, but psychic messages sent between, say, Kenny-with-The Martian's-powers and his allies, or, later, Luithorr and Sovereign.
The art is nice, the designs mostly bonkers (
here's the Hawkgirl character, for example), there's at least one really great deep cut (Luithorr commands a dragon that seems to be the one from
the cover of 1961's Brave and The Bold #34) and Hannigan obviously has a big, ambitious epic he wants to tell, but, well, I'll be damned if it wasn't one of the hardest comics I've ever had to puzzle my way through that DC has published.
(As an aside, the story features an Atlantis is at war with Amazonia, with this book's versions of Aquaman and Wonder Woman the last surviving members of each race, their battle interrupted by the arrival of our heroes. Is this the first time Aquaman and Wonder Woman's mythical homelands went to war against one another? Just wondering, as that is one of the plotlines that Geoff Johns used in his Flashpoint event series).
•
Wonder Woman: Amazonia There apparently were never enough Wonder Woman Elseworlds comics produced to give her a collection of her own, so this tale by writer William Messner-Loebs and artist Phil Winslade telling a new, potent and fairly brutal version of the basic Wonder Woman story gets collected here instead.
I would say it was set in an alternate history version of Victorian England, but Victoria is definitely not England's monarch in the book, so I'm not sure saying so would be accurate. The various markers of time that Messner-Loebs alludes to, though (it's after P.T. Barnum's circus, Jack the Ripper's killings and the publication of A Tale of Two Cities), would seem to place it in the late 19th century.
Colonel Steve Trevor puts his young wife Diana on the London stage, where her great strength (and, one imagines, her relatively skimpy costume) attracts great crowds, including, on the first pages of the story, King Jack and his son Prince Charles (Remember, this is an alternate history tale). When Diana saves the royals from a would-be assassin, she and her husband are invited to dine with them at Buckingham Palace.
Before that, though, our narrator will tell us a bit of the history that lead us to this point, not just of Diana's childhood in the Whitechapel slums nor of how Jack came to be king after a terrible fire wiped out the queen and almost all her family and how British society changed under the new king, becoming even more of a patriarchy and having even greater divisions between men and women than existed at the time in the real world (How different? Well, women all seem to wear "ceremonial" chains).
We also learn of Trevor's discovery of Amazonia, where he washes ashore following an airship disaster over the Atlantic. Learning of a lost civilization of Bronze Age women warriors from Trevor, the British seek to attack and conquer it. They succeed.
Whether Diana knows that she was smuggled from there or not is a little unclear; she tells her daughters a bedtime fairytale about a similar island she calls "Kera" before she must go to bed herself and submit to the sexual advances of Trevor (Who is here very much a bad guy; this scene is quite tastefully told, though, with a panel of Trevor closing the bedroom door followed by a series of panels depicting parts of their house, as if the "camera" filming the comic were retreating from the room, through the house and to the street).
When the Wonder Woman's great strength and strange abilities are put to use defending the poor women of London's slums, who seem to suddenly be disappearing at an alarming rate, Diana finds out just how bad a man her husband is...and how bad the king is.
Ultimately, she finds herself chained in an Amazonian arena, surrounded by the other women of her homeland, while Trevor and other men rush at them, pick axes and weapons brandished to kill them for sport.
Trevor and these others have just recently taken the king's "distillate of masculinity", which he claims "eradicates all trace of the feminine within us." (And here it seems to work more like Bane's Venom than, say, testosterone, as when we see the men they all look like big, muscular, hulking brutes, their chests and arms spilling from their too-tight shirts.)
The battle of the sexes so starkly rendered, with the epitome of womanhood and her all-female race engaged in hand-to-hand combat against a murderous patriarchy that have chemically altered themselves into a savagely pure manhood, the climax will seemingly answer the question of women's place in society. A pair of men whom Diana has touched with her generosity and kindness (and power and beauty) make small but decisive acts to tip the scale in Diana and the Amazons' favor.
There's a happy ending, which one imagines William Moulton Marston himself might have approved of, with the sad, super-sexist state of the society we're presented with throughout the comic being radically reformed, in large part due to the act of a particular man submitting himself to a type of ritual bondage to a woman.
While Messner-Loebs does a pretty remarkable job of distilling some of the basics of the original Wonder Woman stories to their essence and transporting them to a half-invented setting that only accentuates their themes, I imagine it's Winslade's incredible artwork that really sold this book to readers in the late 90s.
Highly detailed and realistically rendered, the many lines on each figure and object evokes the illustrations from newspapers of the era, resulting in a comic that looks like it could conceivably have existed in this form in, say, 1895 or so. (Even letterer John Workman's occasional onomotopeiaic sound effects are old-timey in their fonts, the BAR-OOM! of an elephant gun firing or the TRUUK! of a pickaxe striking the earth looking wholly of a piece with the setting.)
While some passages are quite wordy, particularly those devoted to scene-setting, world-building and history-telling, they remain evenly illustrated, the words never overwhelming the imagery. And every panel is a true work of art, richly detailed to the point that Winslade seems to draw every single face in every crowd, every brick in every building, and the shadow of each contour in a cloud of billowing smoke.
This one's a real masterpiece. Not bad for a mostly male endeavor. (Patricia Mulvihill handles the colors; these are mostly dark and dull, befitting the setting, the reserved tones broken by the bright red of Diana's Wonder Woman costume.)
•
Titans: Scissors, Paper, Stone One brilliant comic follows another, although the two could scarcely be more different from one another. This one is by the great Adam Warren, who writes, pencils and co-inks the 48-page one-shot. (Tom Simmons is his co-inker.)
In its basic construction, the book looks fairly simple. In the far-flung future, a group of young adults with amazing powers battle "big, dumb, slavering monsters" that are imperiling their city, scenes of the battle being intercut with flashbacks in which the four heroes are introduced in turn, as their leader sets about recruiting them for this particular mission.
But Warren is engaged in something far deeper than that, the book filled with the sort of futuristic, scientific-sounding sci-fi elements associated with the now-disgraced Warren Ellis and practicing the sort of meta commentary on superhero comics usually associated with the works of Grant Morrison (Warren even prefigures the practical application of the "superheroes always win" trope into a superhero narrative that Morrison used a couple of times in his later JLA run).
It will be more than halfway through the book before it becomes apparent as to why this book is even branded a "Titans" comic, given that, unlike all of the other books in this collection, it does not transpose existing characters into a new or different setting. Rather, the heroes are all new, original ones of Warren's creation...although one, eventually assigned the name "Captain Thug", will be revealed to be kinda-sorta possessed by the downloaded personality of one of DC's greatest and most popular superheroes...who may or may not be fictional in the world of this story (It doesn't matter which, for the purposes of this comic).
The character driving the flashback action is Jamadagni Renuka, who will be assigned the name "Witchy-Poo" ("I've decided that we definitely need some muy absurd noms de guerre to be authentic superheroes...!" she tells her team once they have all been recruited and assembled).
She is a "Nietzschean Genemage," which means she has the genetic ability to actualize any sort of magical ritual, no matter what it is and whether or not she believes in it. With an unspecified threat on the immediate horizon, she's attempting to use sympathetic magic, "recreating the mythic pattern of a particular team of superheroes", The Titans.
She's the sorceress, and she's gathered "a tormented cyborg" (here a young woman whose brain was transferred into a full-body prosthetic, a super-advanced but decommissioned "bleeding-edge technology killing machine" she code-names "Prosthetic Lass") ,"a token alien" (the resurrected victim of an alien parasite capable of manipulating energy she dubs "Dead Prettyboy") and, in her boyfriend with a superhero personality downloaded into him, she gets a "Dick Grayson...a good-natured thug lacking super-powers, but well-armed with a positive attitude."
So just as Raven gathered Cyborg, Starfire and Robin to battle Trigon in the far-distant, now possibly fictional and "potentially commercial" mythic past (okay, and a few others, but this is only a 48-page comic), Jamadagni has her Titans ready to confront an impending "clysm" (Her term for "cataclysm" is one of the many bits of futuristic slang Warren peppers his characters' dialogue with; in addition to off-handed references to miraculous technological advances, they incorporate bits of foreign languages and at least one bit of profanity that is clearly a corrupted version of what people in our time exclaim, i.e. "Jeezus Rice!").
Her plan works, but with a side-effect she wasn't counting on, although the programmed superhero personality assures her it is actually a regular part of the superhero mythology, leading her to a last page exclamation that sounds like a sentiment that many comic readers would, in the coming years, most strongly associate with the sometimes cynical comics of Garth Ennis.
So yeah, I've compared Warren's work here to that of Ellis, Morrison and Ennis, popular superstar writers that I don't think we tend to associate Warren with—perhaps because he's also an artist, perhaps because he often works in a comedic mode or perhaps because he doesn't seem to have ever had a hot direct-market hit like some of those writers' best-known works. But I think it's pretty clear he deserves to be thought of in the same breath as popular comics' better, most beloved writers. (This isn't a one-off, either; his Gen-13 work and his still-unfolding Empowered are pretty brilliant, too.)
Warren is often associated with his manga inspired style, and his character designs here are all, indeed, quite manga inspired (He seems to sneak in Kei and Yuri from Dirty Pair and Ryoko from Tenchi via one character's "vid shirt," which changes images in each panel in which it appears). The page layouts and thus the storytelling, however, are purely (and appropriately) Western style, although there are a couple of action sequences that are definitely more manga-like.
This is distinct enough a work that it's easy to imagine it not having the word "Titans" in the title—Warren could have taken the name "Dick Grayson" and that of another superhero's identity out of the book entirely, excised the reference to the Titans and published this through pretty much any publisher quite easily.
Oh, and as for the sub-title, it comes from the fact that Jamadagni says that, while explaining how her powers work, that she can use any system, even children's games like rock, paper, scissors. When fighting the monsters, she uses spells based on the Japanese version of the game, jan ken pon.
Given Warren's remarkably fleshed-out future and his riffing on the idea of ancient superhero culture inspiring future would-be heroes, I'm kind of surprised DC didn't ask him to pitch a Legion of Super-Heroes project after this (although I suppose it's possible they did, and it just came to naught), but then, I guess the LOSH is only a thousand years in the future, while this seems quite a bit further, more DC One Million than 30th Century.
Anyway, as with Amazonia, this comic is reason enough to pick up this collection...if you can't find it in a back-issue bin, anyway.
•
Elseworld's Finest: Supergirl & Batgirl Despite the similarity in titles, this last comic in this collection has nothing at all to do with the first one, aside from the fact, I suppose, that they are both about team-ups from the members of the Batman and Superman families.
Most of the better Elseworlds have simple, easy to understand premises that involve either a single, dramatic change in an existent story that leads to a drastically different version of a hero, or a new setting, or even a combination of two stories (Batman + Green Lantern =
Batman: In Darkest Knight, for example, or Batman +
Frankenstein =
Batman: Castle of the Bat).
This one, however, has a whole bunch of changes, many of which seem random and unrelated. I guess the basic idea is that, instead of Superman and Batman, as is usually the case, what if each of their respective family of characters was headed by Supergirl and Batgirl...? Maybe...?
What I found the most interesting aspect of this particular comic was its credits. Writer Barbara Kesel, penciller Matt Haley and inker Tom Simmons all share a "co-plotters" credit. That's not unusual for writers and pencillers, and it makes sense if they spent a lot of prep work on the story together before setting about their individual tasks or if they made the book using the "Marvel method," but it seems quite unusual to me that the inker was involved as well.
In this particular tale, Barbara Gordon was orphaned when her police commissioner father and mother intervened to save the Wayne family from mugger Joe Chill after a movie one night. The driven Barbara was adopted by the Waynes and became Batgirl. Using her all-seeing Oracle Security System to protect the walled-off city-state of Gotham from all "paranormal" heroes and threats, she's set up a police state that one member of the group of superheroes known as the Justice Society refers to as fascist.
Having discovered her secret identity, womanizing playboy Bruce Wayne uses his wealth and wits to aid her, essentially acting like her Alfred.
Meanwhile, the last survivor of Krypton, Kara, was received on Earth by Wonder Woman and the Justice Society and became Supergirl. Based in Metropolis, she's Platonic best friends with the city's benevolent industrialist Lex Luthor.
Supergirl, Luthor and about a dozen members of the Society visit Gotham to help Bruce and Babs announce a new LexCorp clean energy initiative—after the superheroes all pass through Batgirl's incredibly stringent security protocols. Tthings go very, very wrong when Luthor is kidnapped by The Joker, here transformed and empowered by a version of Kryptonite-infused Venom given to him by Emil Hamilton.
Batgirl refuses the Justice Society's help but reluctantly accepts that of Supergirl after she flies into Gotham airspace without permission. Together the pair break into Lex's Metropolis headquarters and learn the dark secret behind his solar power innovations, as well as an atrocity he committed in the past (Here's a hint: I haven't mentioned the baby that was rocketed to Earth from Krypton before Supergirl arrived yet, have I?).
Fans of these two characters may enjoy seeing them remixed thusly. For me, the greatest pleasure the book offered was seeing the redesigns of all the heroes on this Justice Society's apparently massive line-up, which included what appear to be brand-new characters (Vectron, Revenant, Interceptor, etc), some unlikely inclusions (Civilian Tim Drake, Barda, Blue Devil, Green Lantern Abin Sur, Ambush Bug in an armored suit) and a pair Black legacy characters (Captain Marvel and Black Canary; a flashback shows the white originals).
While Wonder Woman and the two title characters have rather radically redesigned new costumes, flashbacks show them wearing their original costumes from their first appearances and, for Wondy, an intermediary costume at one point.
Jerry Siegel's The Syndicate of Crime (Rebellion; 2021) While attaching "Jerry Siegel's" to the title was probably a marketing move, I imagine there must be some legal reason that publisher released the book as
The Syndicate of Crime as opposed to
The Spider, given that the latter is both the name of the feature it collects and the character who starred in it.
Originally published in British weekly comics anthology
Lion between 1965 and 1967, the short, black and white strips were the work of writer Ted Cowan and artist Reg Bunn. Jerry Siegel, the famed co-creator of Superman, would replace Cowan after the first two storylines, "The Spider" and "The Return of the Spider," which means his work shows up about 56 pages into this this 144-page collection.
The feature's star was a brilliant master criminal known as The Spider. He was a peculiar-looking figure, a big, athletic man with elf-like pointy ears, a severe widow's peak and a prominent nose; he looked more than a little like Captain Marvel's old villain Black Adam. Dressed in a tight-fitting black costume laden with his mechanical apparatus, The Spider could cling to the sides of buildings, descend from great heights on silken threads a thousand times stronger than nylon, and entangle opponents with his web-gun.
He also possessed a variety of other gimmicks, although these were not necessarily spider-themed: Miniature jet rockets, smokescreens and a gun that fires a knock-out gas that was, as Cowan had him often repeat variations of, "harmless...but effective!"
The Spider's ambition was, as Cowan first put it, to "build an empire of crime...crime on a scale of which no man ever dreamed," and, in Siegel's later telling, to become "the uncrowned king of crime." To that end, the first serial finds The Spider recruiting his two henchmen, expert safecracker Ray Ordini, whom he rescues from a rooftop as the police are closing in on him, and crooked scientist "Professor" Pelham, who he frees from prison after orchestrating a complicated mass breakout.
The trio would emerge from The Spider's castle headquarters in a weird-looking "helicar" of Pelham's invention to commit audacious crimes, always escaping no matter how dire the circumstances may look for them, thanks to the Spider's cunning (and, in a few cases, Siegel offering him obvious help, as when The Spider turns out to be a robot duplicate of himself, or when a conveniently placed princess saves him and his team).
Opposing them are bland, characterization-free police detectives Bob Gilmore and Pete Trask ("the pals," as Siegel's narration would oddly refer to them), but, by the second story in the collection, The Spider would start to find himself matching wits with other master-criminals more often than the law.
The first of these is The Mirror Man, who beats the Spider and his gang to a robbery of ten million in gold bullion in "The Return of The Spider." A big, jolly, bearded man who Bunn draws as a sort of evil Santa Claus, the Mirror Man used mysterious technology to create life-like illusions to seize the ship carrying the bullion, fool The Spider and law enforcement and, at one point, bring a city to its knees by projecting an army of dinosaurs destroying it.
Siegel would follow up with two rival criminals of his own. The first of these was Dr. Mysterioso, a rather generic mad scientist type with a variety of fantastic inventions (a robot duplicate, a specially bred giant spider, a chemical formula that temporarily gives him Plastic Man-like powers and so on).
He was followed by the much more unusual Android Emperor, a huge, bearded Hercules of a figure who had made an army of androids, none of which looked much like robots, but rather had fantastical shapes given an unsettling degree of realism by Bunn's unparalleled art (A favorite of mine is the bemused-looking ape with large, plate-like rocket boosters under the soles of his feet and buzzsaws for hands).
Being a serialized comic strip rather than a full comic book, The Spider feature doesn't necessarily collect into a trade paperback all that cleanly. Each new installment, which came every two pages at the outset, would contain a box with a paragraph explaining the strip's premise and recapping what had come before, which is obviously unnecessary if one is reading the strips back-to-back like this (I learned quickly to just ignore these, which made the reading much easier once I did so). Additionally, that meant the stories had to have a dramatic climax, turning point or danger for the character presented every two pages or so, making for a rather clipped reading experience.
Luckily, the feature's page count expands before too long, which has the result of both bigger panels, giving readers a better look at Bunn's gorgeous linework, and making for a smoother read.
While it's Siegel's name that Rebellion included in the title, it's Bunn's work that really makes this a book worth reading. It's head and shoulders above what most of his American peers were doing in comic books at the time, highly realistic without ever looking stiff or over-referenced. Composed of many fine lines and an amount of cross-hatching that hurts my hand just to look at, it is truly beautiful stuff, more akin to a Golden Age newspaper Sunday strip or the illustrations that used to run in newspapers in the days before photography was common (which I also said about Phil Winslade's art above, I realize).
Paul Grist, who writes a short five-paragraph introduction to the book, said Bunn's drawings "look as if they had been freshly woven out of spider's webs."
The result of this style when applied to the book's more fantastic elements is to accentuate their sense of the surreal. The Mirror Man's illusions couldn't look more real, even when what they were depicting were obviously fantastic (giant, hypnotic eyes filling the sky, a huge hand pointing the way, a parade of prehistoric monsters), and then there's the matter of the androids, one of whom looks perfectly human until its limbs fly off like rockets trailing grasping tentacles, while others resemble medieval monsters come to life.
Being of British origin, I'm not sure how easy this book might be found at this point—I just checked the two library systems I have access to, and none of the libraries in either seems to have a copy—but if you should find it or be able to order it through your local comic shop, it's well worth a read.
It certainly makes me want to see other British comics from that era, if only to determine how extraordinary Bunn's work really was. That is, was that level of skill and that particular style the standard for British adventure comics of the 1960s, or was Bunn as much an outlier as he seems?
The Spider's adventures would apparently continue through 1969. Rebellion has since published two more collections, Jerry Siegel's The Syndicate of Crime Vs. The Crook from Space and Jerry Siegel's The Syndicate of Crime Vs. The Crime Genie, in 2023 and 2024, respectively.
Looking at the Amazon listings, it looks like all three collections are also available under slightly different titles, with the words "The Spider's" replacing "Jerry Siegel's" on some editions, so maybe whatever legal or marketing factors were at play, it depended on whether the editions were meant for American versus British consumption...?
Star Wars Omnibus: A Long Time Ago... Vol. 5 (Dark Horse Books; 2012) When the release of
Return of the Jedi in 1983 brought about another surge of interest in the franchise, young fans like me seemed hard-pressed if they wanted more
Star Wars.
As I recall, in the years immediately following
Jedi, "more
Star Wars" meant Saturday morning cartoons
Ewoks and
Droids (both released in 1985) and a pair of made-for-TV Ewoks movies (released in 1984 and 1985). Even though I was part of the target audience for these projects at the time, being six years old when
Jedi was in theaters, I recognized them as being baby stuff, not as thrilling, mature or, well, as
good as the three feature films.
Back then, I had no idea that Marvel Comics was regularly producing a comic book series that continued the adventures of the heroes from the films (not just the Ewoks and droids), nor that it was more in keeping in the tone and spirit of the films than the kid-friendly projects I could find on my TV set.
Of course, between the ages of six and eight, I probably wouldn't have been ready for Marvel's Star Wars comics, which, while technically an all-ages comic, still had an awful lot of words in them for young Caleb. (I wasn't the greatest of readers as a little kid. I was probably in fourth grade before I started tackling prose, and, as I've mentioned before, I didn't start reading comic books regularly until I was 14.)
Now, as an adult reading these comics for the first time in the 21st century, long after the establishment of a sprawling Star Wars "Extended Universe" buttressed by a trilogy of film trilogies and more novels, video games, comics and TV shows than I could ever consume devoted to filling in whatever blanks might remain in franchise's saga, I find these early Marvel comics particularly fascinating.
That is, of course, because they were being made at a time when so many of those blanks had yet to be filled in, and there was so much open space in which the creators could play (This 2015 Tegan O'Neil history of Marvel Star Wars will likely be of interest; O'Neil does a good job of articulating exactly what made various points in the original Marvel ongoing book so compelling...especially when read now).
As I mentioned in the previous post tackling my to-read pile, which included a review of A Long Time Ago... Vol. 4, I was particularly interested in the post-Jedi period of the comic, of which there were 27 issues spanning two years.
After all, here Marvel and its creators were free to do pretty much whatever they wanted with the characters and concepts, as the "official" story of Star Wars was over, its main villain gone, its core rebels vs. Empire premise resolved and no real canonical future yet established in tie-in media like that of the novels.
That fourth omnibus included the first five post-Jedi issues of the series, in which Jo Duffy and a few other writers were apparently casting about for a new direction, and a couple of those issues feeling an awful lot like re-purposed inventory stories.
This volume is, obviously, all post-Jedi.
Duffy writes all but two of the issues; the two she didn't write are done-in-ones written by Archie Goodwin and then-editor Ann Nocenti.
The series finds the former rebel alliance, now referred to as the Alliance of Free Planets or simply the Alliance, based on Endor, the heroes embarking on various diplomatic missions, attempting to recruit ambassadors from various planets to join them in organizing a democratic, post-Empire system of government for the galaxy. (Contrary to the post-Jedi stories told in the prose novels and later Dark Horse comics, Luke is here quite adamant about not training anyone else in the ways of the Jedi, and the Han/Leia romance is basically frozen in place.)
Imperial holdouts including stormtroopers and officers are occasionally encountered, sometimes seeking to hold on to power, other times working with various bad guys, and, intriguingly, Duffy introduces a pair of Vader replacements.
One of these lasts but an issue. This is Flint, who we met in 1983's annual (collected in the previous omnibus), when he joined the Empire as a stormtrooper, seeking the power Vader had promised him. Here he is an apparent dark lord of the Sith, with a light saber, mastery of the Force and an incredibly cool, medieval-looking suit of black armor (designed by the issue's guest artist, Jan Duursema, who would go on to draw a lot of Star Wars for Dark Horse decades later). It's kind of a shame this issue is also the last we see of him.
The second Vader replacement is Dark Lady Lumiya, who we first meet as a cyborg enforcer working with the aristocratic oligarchs on a planet Mon Mothma and Leia visit. She will later ally herself with the new threat to the galaxy that Duffy will gradually introduce in the coming issues.
These are the Nagai, a race of particularly cool-looking, white skinned, black haired space goths from a neighboring galaxy that seek to conquer this one, now that the empire has been vanquished (One of them looks an awful lot like a particular Vertigo character, who I assume we will all pretend never existed, thanks to the actions of the writer who created him).
After one of their number, named Knife, is introduced in an issue set on Kashyyk, where he is trying to reinstate the slave trade of Wookiees, the Nagai will come to the fore, dominating the last year or so's worth of the series.
As the series winds down, Duffy will increasingly focus on some of her own creations that have been added to the expanded cast, including the red-skinned Zeltron Dani, the water-breathing Kiro and the psychic Hoojib Plif, plus new additions made in these issues, like the half-Corellian giant Bey, who apparently grew up with Han Solo, and a group of teenage Zeltron males, who are assigned as attendants to the Zeltron-adverse Leia, who has long loathed Dani.
These last issues will contain a greater bit of humor (Han Solo sighing "I hate being tortured..!" was a highlight, I thought). One entire issue, #94's "Small Wars", is purely comedy. The done-in-one story features the cute but savage Ewoks declaring war on the even-cuter comics-original race of small, fluffy, bunny-like Lahsbees, part of the machinations of the cartoon bug-like Hirog, whose race the Hiromi have ambitions of conquest.
Other stories will contain comedic elements, like C-3P0 screwing up the packing of various missions, so that Leia's Zeltron aides will have to whip-up a gaudy half-dress, almost as revealing as her slave get-up, for her to wear at a diplomatic party.
As the series reaches its end, Duffy will pen an issue in which Leia and her aides meet a wounded Nagai soldier and begin to sympathize with them a bit, and she will introduce another new, even more evil alien race: the Tof, large, cruel soldiers who look like gamma-irradiated classic 17th century pirates. The Tof are invading the galaxy pursuit of their enemies the Nagai, who are apparently only here seeking to escape from the Tof.
After being teased int the Leia/Nagai soldier issue, the Tof are introduced in a fun couple of issues set on Zeltros, in which the Nagai, the Tof and the somewhat silly Hiromi all target the planet of fun-loving, perpetually horny red people for conquest at once, our heroes being caught in the middle.
All is resolved in a final issue, which seems to take place after a time-jump of unknown length (shirtless commander Luke Skywalker has much longer hair than usual, anyway, and the Nagai no longer seem like such a major threat). Our heroes have now allied themselves with both the Nagai and former Imperials in a final battle against the Tof, seeking to capture their monarch and force a peace.
It's a rather rushed but action-packed issue, ending with Luke declaring in the final panel that, "For the first time in a long, long time, all of us, as races and as individuals, have a fair chance at making peace. And I hope...no I know...we can do it!"
Much of the first half of the omnibus maintains the Tom Palmer finished and inked, realistic style of the previous volume, although Palmer is but one of the several artists involved: Bob McLeod, Ron Frenz, Al Williamson, Bret Blevins and the aforementioned Duursema (inked by her fellow Kubert School graduate and eventual husband Tom Mandrake) will all provide some art.
The majority of the second half of the book is drawn by Cynthia Martin, whose style is a such a sharp contrast to so much of what came before, especially just before, that it looks like a radical shift.
Martin has a simpler, more angular, more expressive and more dynamic style than Palmer and the artists providing pencils or breakdowns for him. She seems to be drawing the characters, rather than the actors playing the characters, which is a subtle but important distinction when it comes to comics based on mass-media properties like this; that is, one doesn't necessarily see drawings of Harrison Ford on the pages, although Martin's Han still has a bit of Ford's expressions and attitudes to him.
She's also particularly adept at the humor that Duffy increasingly indulges in (It's particularly difficult to imagine, say, the cartoony Hiromi in a more realistic style, as they have a dashed-off quality to their visuals, and her design work is incredible.
The Nagai are, as stated, pretty cool-looking characters, and each of Martin's Nagai looks distinct and individual, rather than looking monolithic in appearance as some races of Star Wars aliens tend to.
Her Nagai ships are also amazing.
There's a scene where their fleet arrives and fills the sky of a splash page (see the badly-scanned image above), and the ships look both cool and like nothing we've seen in Star Wars before. Most ships and vehicles in the comics have always been either based on the designs from the films, or more generic rockets and spaceships that could have come from any generic comic from the mid-twentieth century. These look completely original, and completely alien to Star Wars, as befits ships from beyond the galaxy.
It's kind of a shame that the book was canceled when it was, as it would have been interesting to see Duffy's plans for the Nagai and Tof play out over months or years, rather than being hyper-compressed into three or four issues after so much build-up of the Nagai as a new and particularly pernicious threat, one completely divorced from the Empire.
Just as it would have been fun to see how she would keep the heroes occupied in the long-term. And we certainly didn't get enough of Cynthia Martin's Star Wars.
Reading these final issues of Marvel's first time around with the Star Wars license, I wondered why it was canceled at all, as quality certainly wasn't an issue (Although I could easily imagine Martin's art being such a departure that it might have chased away long-time fans).
According to that O'Neil piece I linked to above, it was apparently low sales that lead to cancellation. As hard as it is to imagine now, I guess there really was a point where there wasn't enough interest in more Star Wars to justify one new issue of a comic book per month...
At any rate, beyond the "interesting" I expected for such an early, post-Jedi take on the franchise, the Duffy/Martin comics are truly great ones.
While this particular omnibus is probably well out of print at this point, surely Marvel has recollected and republished these comics in some form or another since regaining the license; hopefully you have a helpful local comics shop that can help you navigate the confusing world of Star Wars comics collections to find these.
*As is far too common a story in comics today, Barr has had some pretty severe health problems of late, and if you would like to help him, you can do so here.
