I don't really have to use the asterisk, do I...? (Eleven random-ish thoughts on the movie Thunderbolts*)

1.) Once again, I failed to see this movie on opening weekend, which is when the studios would prefer we go see their movies. Hopefully the fact that I am about to talk about it so many weeks after its original release means that any of you who were interested in seeing it have already done so, and I can therefore talk freely about its content and its couple of big surprises. If not, well, consider this a spoiler warning for the movie (and for a 28-year-old comic book!) for the rest of the post.

2.) As I feel like I have noted many times before (including just a few months ago), Marvel Studios has long since perfected their formula for producing quite decent, wholly unobjectionable superhero movies. They generally all share a very similar aesthetic, the actors are all usually pleasant ones a viewer enjoys spending some time with, the action choreography is competent if never thrilling and they tend to have a healthy sense of humor, with quippy dialogue and a degree of self-deprecation about their content. For the most part, they've become perfectly mediocre...which means they usually don't offer much in the way of surprise anymore, but that little "Marvel Studios" logo is a sort of stamp of "good enough" quality. 

Thunderbolts* is different. Much of what I said above holds true, of course, but I was quite pleasantly surprised to find that this film is actually about something in a way that many of their previous films I've seen haven't been (and not just IP management or advancing the now rather confused Marvel Cinematic Universe mega-plot). 

Rather, the film tackles mental illness and trauma by presenting us with about a half-dozen thoroughly broken people, and it does so in a way that makes it feel universal. Early in the film, new Black Widow Yelena Belova (Florence Pugh) mentions "the void" (lowercase "v", one assumes) and a bit later, discusses it with the mysterious Bob (Lewis Pullman). The way they talk about the void, it sounds like it can be something serious from the DSM-V, or it can be the low-level anxiety or depression that so many of us live with, or it could simply be the feeling of a lack of purpose, or a sense of emptiness or loneliness.

In other words, "the void" is something everyone can relate to, and amid all the superhero business, the film both explores this, and offers the solution to it: Human connection.

In this sense, it's the best kind of superhero narrative, especially of the classic Marvel superhero sort, in which basic elements of universal human nature are exploded into big, broad metaphors that take the shape of monsters and villains for our heroes to struggle against (Here, of course, it is The Void, with a capital "V"...I suspect his/its presence in the film was meant to be a surprise of sorts, but I feel like I knew The Sentry was going to be in this movie ever since it was first announced; it's hard to be too surprised by such big, well-covered movies in the age of the Internet). 

The more I think about it, the more impressed I am with what Thunderbolts* does. I guess director Jake Schreier and writers Eric Pearson and Joanna Calo know what they're doing.  

3.) Has anyone said the name "USAgent" out loud yet...? I didn't hear it during the course of this movie at all (just "dime-store Captain America" once), but then, I didn't watch The Falcon and the Winter Soldier.

4.) I thought Wyatt Russell was pretty perfectly cast as John Walker. He's very handsome, but, at the same time, there's something...punchable about his face? Like, not just in the film. Looking at the credits on IMDb and seeing his headshot, I have two simultaneous visceral reactions: "Say, that's a handsome guy" and "That guy looks like such an asshole."  (Sorry Mr. Russell! Nothing personal!). 

With USAgent in Thunderbolts* and Guy Gardner in the upcoming Superman, it's a great summer for fans of a-hole legacy characters from the '80s...!

5.) Giving The Sentry telekinesis seemed a bit much. I mean, he's already Superman with some vague extra energy powers, does he really need another superpower?  I suspect it was included just so they could have a scene of Valentina Allegra de Fontaine (Julia Louis-Dreyfus) training him and the pair of them realizing that he has great powers he can control, but, in the fight scene where he takes on the Thunderbolts in Avengers Tower, it felt a bit like overkill, as the filmmakers seemed to hurry through a checklist of The Sentry's various powers (And why block bullets in mid-air with telekinesis if they just bounce off your body anyway? Why use it to throw someone across the wall when a slap would do the same?)

6.) I thought they did a great job of making The Void version of The Sentry and Bob scary as hell; I think it was the tiny little white dots of eyes staring blankly out of the all-black figures that did it. 

7.) I thought the use of Taskmaster (Olga Kurylenko) in the film was an incredible waste. It was a little surprising that she was killed off so quickly, given her prominent placement in the marketing (see the poster above, for example), to the extent that I thought she might not really be dead at first. 

I guess, if I'm being charitable, the reason they included her at all was as an example of something Yelena articulates about the grim arc of such characters' lives, that they lead lonely existences in which they kill people over and over until someday someone kills them. 

But given how cool the character's powers and look are, it was sort of a shame to put her in the movie just to kill her off; more than most of the others, she could have used a redemptive arc, and her character some spotlight and a found family echoing the one that it was suggested she had found at the end of Black Widow. (There wasn't really room in the movie for another character, I understand—The Ghost Hannah John-Kamen gets hardly anything to do relative to the other characters as is—but I think it would have been better not to include Taskmaster at all than to use her as they did.)

8.) I thought the joke about where the name "Thunderbolts" came from in the film was effective, especially given the several callbacks to it throughout, like those involving the argument over which local business had sponsored Yelena's childhood soccer team.

That said, I thought it somewhat emblematic of the lingering embarrassment of the source material still evident in Marvel Studios movies. That is, someone somewhere along the line thought that a superhero team named "The Thunderbolts" was kinda silly and thus needed a more realistic in-story explanation, and if it could also turn on a joke, well, all the better. (You can sense this embarrassment in how time the characters spend out of their masks and costumes—although part of that is likely also due to wanting to get the stars' good-looking faces on the screen as often as possible—and the toned-down designs of the costumes. For example, while I think movie Taskmaster looks cool and scary, the design certainly leans into realism, and away from a billowing cape, pirate boots and a face that looks exactly like a human skull, for instance. Oh, and also in their reluctance to use codenames, with Walker always being referred to as "Walker" and Yelena as "Yelena", for example).

I think the filmmakers could have just as easily come to the name another way, with Red Guardian (David Harbour) excitingly, spontaneously declaring the team assembled before him "The mighty Thunderbolts, delivering justice like lightning...!" or suchlike. 

Sure, they would have lost a running gang, but I'm sure they could have found a half-dozen or so other little jokes to take the place of those about the soccer team.

(And yes, I understand that they're not really the Thunderbolts anyway, hence the asterisk, and that they ultimately get a completely different—and more marketable!—team name, which is reserved for a late in the film surprise.)

9.) It's kind of too bad that Marvel Studios couldn't have attempted something along the lines of a filmic equivalent to the big twist at the end of Kurt Busiek, Mark Bagley and company's original Thunderbolts, wherein the reader has already bought and read most of an issue before they realize that what at first seemed to be a team of brand-new heroes are actually a bunch of familiar villains attempting an ambitious new scheme). 

There are, of course, plenty of reasons why they couldn't. Of the original Thunderbolts line-up, I think only Zemo actually already exists in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Therefore, they would have needed to round up a team worth of other villains to use in the line-up (and, with Ghost, Taskmaster and Walker, they kind of did a bit of that here, although they don't seem to have actually been villain-villains) but, of course, the Marvel Cinematic Universe is awfully light on actual supervillains, given how they are generally killed off at the end of the movies in which they appear and are never really heard from again (Tom Hiddleston's Loki being the example that proves the rule). 

And even if they did assemble a handful of pre-existent supervillains from throughout the MCU to take on new superhero roles in a Thunderbolts movie, keeping them under wraps in a big Hollywood film like this is a lot harder than, say, Screaming Mimi reinventing herself as Songbird in a comic book; surely if word got out that, say, Michael Keaton was cast in a new Thunderbolts movie, one would suspect he would be reprising his role as The Vulture, wouldn't they...?

Finally, I don't think Marvel Studios could currently sell a team of five or six brand-new heroes with no immediately apparent ties to the previous films at this time. Maybe they could have years back, when the Marvel brand was enough to get a Guardians of the Galaxy film off the ground (surely no one who didn't already read Marvel comics knew who the hell they were) or sell an Ant-Man movie. But if they tried to pitch seemingly brand-new characters now? I don't think it would work, as some of the popularity has rubbed off the MCU (I have an idea why this might be the case, besides, of course, simple exhaustion, but there's no sense in getting into all that here).

10.) I don't like Walker's little beret.

11.) I hope all of the comics writers and artists responsible for creating (and/or, in Winter Soldier's case, recreating) the various characters used in the movie were well compensated. Looking at a list I made of the 23 writers and artists involved in producing these characters (which I'll post tomorrow), it looks like 17 of them are still alive; I feel like that isn't always the case with the characters in the earlier Marvel movies, given that so many of the primary Marvel characters were created by Jack Kirby, Stan Lee, Steve Ditko and the men of their generation. 

And by "compensated" I mean not just that they have their names listed under "Special Thanks" or whatever near the end of the credits, but that they got some movie money. Being comics creators, I assume some of them can really use it. 

Review: JLA/Titans: The Technis Imperative

One of the great things about comics is how reading one inevitably leads to reading another. After re-reading Kurt Busiek and George Perez's 2003 JLA/Avengers as part of my series on DC/Marvel crossovers, I felt compelled to re-read Devin Grayson and Phil Jimnez's 1998 JLA/Titans miniseries. 

Although smaller in page count, scale, stakes, cast and history (and, set in a single publisher's fictional universe, no doubt less logistically challenging), the Grayson/Jimenez book resembles JLA/Avengers in its ambition, and its efforts to successfully juggle a huge roster of heroes (giving most of them at least a moment of their own) and its completist posture. 

JLA/Avengers teamed not only the current line-ups of the two teams, but also many of their past incarnations (at least briefly) and, by its climax, every single hero who had ever been a Leaguer or an Avenger (plus an awful lot of their villains) put in appearances. 

JLA/Titans, meanwhile, featured the then quite large, post-"Rock of Ages" Justice League and, as it neared its climax, plenty of reserve Leaguers. It also featured every single living Titans character, one-panel cameo/mentions of all of the deceased ones, every super-heroic character who had been an ally of the Titans (and/or had assumed the legacies of them), plus Young Justice, Mary Marvel, Catwoman and, at the climax, one-panel appearances by Lex Luthor, The Joker and Circe, because, at that point, why not...?

It also, in its layouts and visual style, bears more than a passing resemblance to Perez's JLA/Avengers. Jimenez is an apparent Perez fan, and the late artist seemed to influence Jimenez's own art quite a bit, both in his very realistic and detailed rendering, as well as panel-packed layouts. Flipping through the pages of JLA/Titans, it's hard to imagine any artist other than Jimenez even attempting, say, 10-to-20-panel pages, or filling them with such big crowds of characters and highly detailed backgrounds. Excepting Perez himself, of course. 

A DC Comics fan whose favorite book by far was the Grant Morrison/Howard Porter/John Dell JLA and a fan of writer Devin Grason and artist Phil Jimenez, I of course bought and read the series as it was originally released in three oversized issues. At the time, it seemed like a book made particularly to appeal to me, despit the fact that, at the time, I had read relatively few Titans books (None of which were from the Marv Wolfman/George Perez team, which seems to be the best regarded era of the then almost 35-year-old franchise).

When I went to re-read it though, I looked for a trade collection from the library before approaching my comics midden of single issues in plastic bags in big, white long boxes, as I usually do. I found the 1999 collection, entitled JLA/Titans: The Technis Imperative, which also includes the Grayson-written, Paul Pelletier-pencilled and Dexter Vines-inked lead story from the 1999 Titans Secret Files & Origins #1, which kicked off the 50-issue, 1999-2003 Titans ongoing (of which Grayson wrote the first 20 issues). 

That's the cover above. It's not the best cover. Jimenez basically assembles parallel heroes from the ranks of the two teams who fight one another in the story (although Batman and Nightwing's "fight" is simply a long verbal argument), with Arsenal and Martian Manhunter an awkward fit—Oliver Queen was dead at the time, and Connor Hawke was no longer on the League—and Superman kind of presiding over everything. It's not terribly representative of what one might find inside the book, which finds dozens of heroes from both teams doing battle as an alien menace threatens to pull the moon from the sky.

I'm also not crazy about the sub-title, which is basically unnecessary (it's not like there's another JLA/Titans comic that this one needs to be distinguished from), and, though accurate, it's sort of meaningless; it might as well be called "The Maguffin Plotpoint". 

The term "Technis imperative" is used in dialogue during the proceedings, but I'm not sure "Technis" would have meant too much to JLA readers at the time, and it means even less so these days; it comes from something near the end of Wolfman's run on the 130-issue New Titans series, from around the point he was essentially putting away the main toys of his New Teen Titans run with Perez. 

I suppose I'm lucky I found this trade at a library, given that it's over 25 years old at this point, and DC never re-collected it anywhere...which seems strange for a such a big story, given that it has a Crisis or line-wide crossover's worth of characters in it, that it's attached to the oft-collected and re-collected JLA and that it features such superior work from Jimenez, who seems to have remained popular enough with fans and the publisher that he's been working regularly with them for decades now (Grayson's star, by contrast, hasn't fared as well  over the years. DC has collected precious little of her work, despite its quality. I suppose it's unlikely DC will ever collect the Grayson Titans run and its associated comics; maybe this will end up in some sort of collection of Jimenez's work though, akin to the Legends of the DC Universe: Dough Mahnke or DC Universe by Mike Mignola trades they've published...).

The plot is rather heavily tied to that of the last years of Wolfman's New Titans, with Cyborg, Starfire, Raven and Changeling (as Garfield Logan was still going by then) having by then been mostly absent from the DCU for a while, and the five Titans founders more active in their own books and/or those of their mentors than as any kind of unit. Familiarity with New Titans seems fairly important to this book, although Grayson and Jimenez, who co-plotted it in addition to pencilling it, do provide all of the necessary information.

In December of 1998, when the first issue of this book shipped, the most recent Titans book was the 24-issue, 1996-1998 Teen Titans by writer/penciler Dan Jurgens and inker George Perez, which featured four new teen heroes: Argent, Joto, Risk and Prysm. They were led by the recently de-aged Atom Ray Palmer, in a new costume with a vest, and they were later joined by original character Fringe and Captain Marvel Jr. (I had only read a single story arc of it, "Then and Now," which ran from #12-#15 and guest-starred original Titans Nightwing, The Flash, Tempest and Arsenal, the latter of whom adopted his Kingdome Come-inspired "Red Arrow" costume during it. Looking at it the series' covers on the Grand Comics Database, I see they also went to Skartarsis at one point; I'd be interested in reading that.) 

Its final issue had just shipped two months previous, and one assumes that Grayson's pitch for a Titans book had already been accepted and was in the process of being created. JLA/Titans reads, in retrospect, as a bridge between Jurgens' Teen Titans and the upcoming Titans, using JLA's popularity to help launch the next iteration of the title and, perhaps, justify the return of the founders and some of the more popular characters to the team. 

Indeed, one way to read JLA/Titans is as a celebration of the team's history and legacy, a book meant for Titans fans, and for making new Titans fans. 

As for the Justice League, JLA was entering its third year that month, and "Rock of Ages", Mark Waid (and Devin Grayson's!) fill-ins, the two-part Starro story and DC One Million were all in the rearview mirror. Morrison and company had just launched a three-part story pitting the League against General Eiling-in-The Shaggy Man's-body (who DC would start referring to as "The General," though I preferred "The Shaven Man") and his team of US government-sponsored heroes. 

At the time, the team consisted of the new "Big Seven" or "Magnificent Seven", plus Plastic Man, Zauriel, Steel, Huntress, Orion, Barda and Oracle. 

The first issue of JLA/Titans finds many of those Leaguers gathered on their lunar Watchtower base, where The Atom Ray is helping Steel, Orion and Barda install some sort of towering piece of New Genesian technology. Meanwhile, on Earth, a plainclothes Changeling is with Argent in what must be the monitor room of the dissolving Teen Titans' headquarters. 

Both begin to note strange activity, like some high-tech, morphing droids that look a little like slick, mechanical jellyfish targeting and capturing various heroes as diverse as The Flash, The Atom, Green Lantern Kyle Rayner and Starfire. And electronics all over the world going haywire. And, most visibly, a huge alien mass of mechanical debris approaching Earth, a mass that eventually engulfs the moon, setting off earthquakes and various other disasters around the world.

The issue involves a lot of heroes throughout the DC Universe observing and reacting to these phenomena and talking to one another about them. Every time one of the jellyfish droids targets a new character, Jimenez presents a little panel of the character apparently from the drone's point of view, featuring a portrait of the character, as well as their name, their team affiliation (here, always an iteration of the Titans) as well as powers.

It quickly becomes apparent to readers (and to Batman), that these drone are abducting heroes who were formerly Titans, no matter how briefly (like Kyle, Supergirl and Impulse, for example, who were only on the team for some of the final iteration of Wolfman's New Titans, the Arsenal-lead team that lasted 15 issues after Zero Hour...which I would nevertheless love a trade collection of).

These captured heroes are all then placed in virtual realities that are often pretty funny, like one in which Nightwing is hugged by a smiling Batman, which makes him realize he's in a virtual reality simulation, or one in which Flamebird is playing tennis with a bunch of Dick Graysons in Robin costumes, or one in which Tempest is presented by Aquaman with all of his past girlfriends combined into a single being ("Uh...thanks, Arthur, but--" he stutters in response.)

They are all being gathered beneath Titans Island, the space entity's beachhead on Earth. As the League beings to realize that any time the entity is attacked, as Orion does vigorously with the astro-force, Batman eventually insists that the entire League assemble on Titans Island to deal with the "hostage" situation, which has already claimed their members The Flash and Green Lantern (and The Atom).  Oh, and Catwoman also shows up for some reason...presumably just so Grayson and Jimenez can have her fight Pantha for a few panels later. 

What precisely is going on takes an explanation of events from New Titans, which Changeling gives at length. Cyborg Victor Stone had allowed himself to be absorbed into "The Technis--that cyber-alien collective all into exploring and cataloging and stuff." He took the name Cyberion (and a new body), but, when the rest of the collective was destroyed, he decided to carry on their work, with Gar at his side...until he started getting too remote and too weird for Gar, who ultimately returned to Earth.

Apparently, sometime after Gar left, Raven, who only ever appears in the story in a luminous golden "soul self" form, Vic's consciousness started using the Omegadrome, a shape-shifting super-technology once possessed by the alien Jarras Minion, to start acting upon "the Technis imperative" to rebuild itself, using what abandoned spaceships and other debris was available to make itself planet-like (that's the thing that's absorbing the moon). Then, beset by loneliness, what was left of Vic set about rebuilding the Titans, collecting them all...using not his own memories of his Titans, but various databases that included all of the Titans ever.

Once the captives have all been freed, Orion is ready to destroy the crystalline computer units housing Vic's "soul" in order to take out the menace, but Changeling pleads with the JLA to stop attacking it, as it would essentially kill what's left of Victor Stone. In the brief debate that follows, Flash sides with his old friends over his current teammates, and Changeling challenges Orion and the JLA: "If you try to hurt him again, I'll stop you."

Orion, whose inherent hotheaded nature has been driving the conflict up to this point, responds, "I believe the Earth saying goes: You and what army?"

A turn of the page reveals a bravura splash page, with the 13 heroes on the League's side (which The Atom and GL have sorted themselves to, despite their brief tenures on incarnations of the Titans), facing off against some 26 Titans, as Changeling shouts, "THIS One!"

Jimenez must have known this page was fire, as he included a little box with his signature in it, as well as the words "after Perez (of course)." I'm not sure which Perez image this is in reference too, though. (Perhaps one of you Titans fans in the reading audience might...?)

Then there's a page of various too-eager-to-fight characters engaging one another. Risk jumps to attack Orion, who backhands him ("Impertinent whelp"). Tempest blasts Aquaman with his eyebeams when his mentor grabs him, shouting, "I am SO SICK of you man-handling me!" (Was this a recurring element of their relationship? If so, it's never resolved, but in the denouement it's played for laughs, when Aquaman vigorously slaps Tempest's back.) Green Lantern creates a construct of a mech and blasts The Flash, saying, "Great. Look what your kids' table team is starting, Flash"). 

Another turn of the page, and we get an amazing two-page spread, dominated by a long shot of various pairs of heroes in a dramatic mish-mash of settings, ten panels inset along the bottom showing various characters reacting, Batman explaining that Cyborg is apparently creating a virtual reality environment setting, while there's a cryptic panel of Martian Manhunter using his mental powers that will only be explained later, and the teams devolving into battle.

This battle dominates the second issue, and is fairly spectacular, as Titans confront their mentors, characters with similar powers pair off (alien warriors Starfire vs. Orion, shape-shifters Changeling vs. Plastic Man, angels Supergirl vs. Zauriel and so on).

As the battle rages, Batman and Nightwing argue in relatively wordy panels that are off set by all the action going on around them, and Cyborg's consciousness continues to gather new allies for the Titans, now sending out those little collector droids to assemble allies like Rose Wilson, Magenta, Thunder and Lightning and more. 

On the last pages, Batman reveals that the League was engaging the army of Titans in order to keep Cyborg distracted protecting them, although it's never entirely clear to which degree various characters were just following the plan, and to what degree they were really intent on fighting. As Young Justice and League reserves appear on the island, the issue ends.

In the final issue, the two teams work together: That is how the superhero team-up ritual goes, after all. 

Superman leads a dozen or so characters to tackle Cyborg's moon-absorbing planetoid and retake the Watchtower, while Batman gives Nightwing and a team of Titans (basically the five founders plus Changeling) a chance to get through to Cyborg in space and abandon the moon for the damaged computers on Titans Island, in which they want to download his consciousness.

Meanwhile, the rest of the heroes divide up into pairings to tackle fallout, like the debris that starts crashing to earth. 

At the risk of spoiling a 26-year-old story, everyone succeeds, although not necessarily how they planned, with Cyborg's consciousness eventually being downloaded into the Omegadrome itself, the character taking on a new design of a golden-colored, shape-shifting metal. He would keep the look through the upcoming run on Titans, until Geoff Johns could change it, first writing a story in which Victor took on his original Perez design (only with the metal parts being gold, rather than silver) and, later, restoring his traditional look when he relaunched Teen Titans in 2003 with a combination of Young Justice and Titans characters. 

The book ends with a four-page epilogue illustrated by Mark Buckingham and Wade Von Grawbadger, the art team of the upcoming Titans ongoing. I do wonder if they drew this sequence to spell Jimenez, who plotted and penciled the series' previous 110 pages (all inked by Andy Lanning), or to preview the work of the upcoming art team. 

Regardless, it's clear that Jimenez is still responsible for the layouts, as each page is full of panels, and reads, like the rest of the book, a good four or five times more densely than what was by then standard in super-comics.

These scenes are set at Guy Gardner's superhero theme bar Warriors (Guy was one of the League reservists who joined the story in its third and final issue, and has a small but significant role), and essentially feature more interactions between the heroes, only here they are friendly, rather than any kind of fighting. Interestingly, many of these parallel pairings from the JLA vs. Titans fight. 

So, for example, Mirage, who cast an illusion of herself as J'onn's dead wife, here asks J'onn if he would like to hold her baby, and Impulse, who had previously tied Plastic Man in knots at superspeed, now pesters Plas to shape-change for his amusement. The sequence involves a reconciliation of sorts between ex-lovers Nightwing and Starfire and points to lingering awkwardness between Kyle and Donna.

It ends with Guy unveiling a new exhibit in Warriors, a statue of the five founding Titans...and a dedication from the creators to seven previous creators, from Bob Haney to Dan Jurgens, thanking them for "creating and sustaining such wonderful characters."

While JLA/Titans may end there, this collection does not. 

After a "One week later..." caption, the Grayson/Pelletier/Vines story from the Secret Files special appears. This tells the story of how the new line-up of the team is formed, with each of the five founders, realizing they had drifted apart at the climax of the miniseries, rejoining themselves, and each each of them suggesting a nomination. They then divvy up who goes off to recruit who.

So in addition to Nightwing, The Flash, Tempest, Arsenal and Troia, the new team would include Starfire, Damage, Argent, Cyborg and speedster Jesse Quick, the last of whom is the only one who had never actually been a Titan before (Though she was on the version of a team that Arsenal is shown trying to get going in Morrison, Val Semeiks, Prentis Rollins and company's DC One Million; I guess Grayson liked that idea). 

Though no one nominates Changeling, they do offer him membership, and he declines for personal reasons, saying he wants to try to get a career in Hollywood going again. Other characters hoping for or declining membership appear in the story, like Flamebird, Duella Dent, the former Herald and Bumblebee. Oh, and Supergirl, who memorably whispers something very dirty to Arsenal about what she considers "a good time." ("An angel with a mouth like that!...Does your boss know you talk like that?")

Despite the huge cast in the JLA/Titans, Grayson and Jimenez do a fine job of giving each at least a bit of the spotlight, especially among the Leaguers and the Titans founders. Even Barda, who has relatively little to do throughout, gets a neat two-panel sequence during the League/Titans battle, wherein Rose Wilson calls her out and introduces herself as the one who's going to take her out. Jiminez draws the much taller Barda simply looking down at the defiant Rose, a bemused smirk on her face.

That they are able to give so many characters a moment or two or ten (Superman and, perhaps oddly given the creators, Wonder Woman seem to get the smallest share of attention throughout) is due largely to Jimenez's presence, and his ability to pack so many panels, and thus so much action, into such a relatively short book. Though only three issues and around 100 pages, there seems to be as much action and overall content in this story than in most six-issue arcs, or even a year of some books. 

I've long been a fan of Jimenez's, as both a writer and an artist, and his work here is, of course, superior. Like Perez, his characters are extremely realistic, and yet all distinct from one another too, seeming like their "real" selves, rather than drawings. That is, his Dick Grayson reads and feels like the real Dick Grayson, rather than an artist's drawing of Dick Grayson, if that make sense. 

I particularly like seeing specific iterations of characters rendered in his style. Batman, for example, has the long ears and the odd points at his shoulders that many artists in the late '90s were drawing him with, but these more expressionistic elements of other artists take on a new light here; this Batman's costume, for example, seems to have literal spikes built into his shoulders, rather than his cape just resting that way.

(I didn't really care for Jimenez's Plastic Man though, I confess. He had the plastic-y sheen to his skin that Porter was drawing him with at the time, and Jimenez doesn't seem to ever have drawn him at rest, but always engaged in some form of stretching or morphing. I recently re-read the Justice League Zero Hour tie-ins, in which Jimenez drew Elongated Man, and both heroes seemed to have rather unpleasant looking, thick coils of rope-like neck. I'm tempted to say that maybe Plast just doesn't look right if rendered with too much detail, or when imagined in too realistic a style, but then, I did like Perez's version of him in JLA/Avengers, and I've always enjoyed when Alex Ross has tackled Plas, and it doesn't get any more realistic than a Ross painting.)

I do wonder what a modern reader, coming to this book relatively cold, might make of it.

Not only are we now decades, rather than years, removed from the stories that left, say, Cyborg and Raven where they were when this story picks up, but the franchise seems to have made several dramatic departures from the superhero team as a group of friends and chosen family that is central to their depiction in this book, notably so with Johns' previously mentioned Young Justice/Titans hybrid team, and the New 52 reboot (which basically applied the "Teen Titans' name to rebooted versions of the Young Justice characters) and the Damian Wayne-lead team.

Also, the Wolfman/Perez-inspired versions of the characters that appeared in the cartoon series and live-action TV series seems to have quite heavily influenced the way the characters are now depicted, to the point where the old Raven seems to be an entirely different character than the one who from the original comics.

Still, for all the departures over the last few decades, DC does seem to veer back to the founding characters regularly, and the current Titans line-up is basically that of the founders plus the most popular of the Wolfman/Perez characters. 

And I have to imagine Jimenez's artwork would be as appealing to superhero comics readers of 2025 as it was in 1998.

Although I guess the point is somewhat moot, as many modern readers won't get the chance to read this comic unless DC decides to collect it at some point...

Catching up with Katie Skelly: The Agency and Maids

The Agency (Fantagraphics; 2018) I mentioned this book in passing the other week, when discussing a mini-comic version of one of its chapters acquired from a convention. It's a collection of all of Skelly's short, playful sex comics originally created for and published online at Slutist.com, a now-defunct sex-positive feminist website founded by Kristen J. Sollee that was active between 2013-2019. 

That venue may have influenced both the content and the format of the strips, which can be as short as a page, or as long as 10, with some of the longer stories being broken up into shorter episodes.

Though Skelly's character design and rendering doesn't vary much from story to story, everything else about them may, from the use of color, the style with which it is applied and the layouts. And though the content may vary widely from a sort of Barbarella-esque space vixen engaged in space exploration to the cryptic antics of a fashion model in a Lynchian adventure to a story of a strange cult to a tale of spies, they all star sexy young women who often find themselves engaged in various sex acts.

The stories are all light and fun, a few having a sense of the weird or mysterious about them while others are more outright humorous.

The conceit is never explicitly explained within the book, but each heroine is apparently a different "agent" and designated by a number.

The first of these is Agent 8, the aforementioned space girl. When we first meet her, she is staring at the stars, and asks, "Is there more life out there?" In the next panel, an animated skeleton character is incredulous: "What? You know that there is! We met on Jupiter?!" (In perhaps Skelly's funniest strip, a black-and-white one-pager, she and the skeleton, who named Hamilton, have apparently just landed and started exploring a new planet. He mentions the interesting plant life, which is vaguely phallic, only to turn and find that 8 has already stripped naked, laid down and apparently put one inside herself.)

Among Agent 8's longer stories, she meets a fan of hers at a "weird party" (there is a deer in the foreground) who is also a seamstress, and offers to make her a custom dress, and they end up having sex. And then there's one where she meets Spider-Man, of all people. (Or, at least, someone wearing a Spider-Man costume.) Definitely the web-slinger's most unexpected guest appearance in a comic book.

Then there's Agent 9, whose story I discussed previously in the previously linked-to column. It's the brightest colored of all the stories within, and one that is fully colored (Many of the Agent 8 stories, by contrast, have limited palettes of a color or two).

Agent 10 stars in a more complex story. Snippets of news reports suggest she is a famous actress in a high-profile but dissolving marriage, who has fallen in with a cult run by a mysterious woman in a wheelchair. They talk of a ritual, in which 10 is stripped and hung from shackles while an octopus slithers from its pot and crawls all over her, after which she is apparently granted visions. She then has a heart to heart (and sex) with a beautiful transgirl wearing a leather jacket in a pool.

Finally, there's Agent 73, who stars in another longer and more complex story, this one written by Sarah Horrocks (It's the only story in the book that's not written as well as drawn by Skelly). 

Somewhere in a jungle compound, a blond woman who looks like some kind of spy movie villain (eye patch and cape, an injured leg in a wire contraption and a cane) seems to be giving dictation to another woman. This is Dr. Paracletus, and she is the target of Agent 73, who appears with a beret on her head and a gun in her hand. The two have history, and though there's plenty of exposition, it is cryptic; it would seem that 73's ex-lover Bertrand had transitioned into a woman named Rosalind, and the doctor has used her surgical skills to give Rosalind Agent 73's own face...?

I referred to the late David Lynch a couple of paragraphs ago, and, indeed, the back half of the book does have that sort of never-explained, just-suggested sense of something bigger, more mysterious and darker just under the surface that permeates some of the filmmaker's best-known works, as he would use the feelings of certain types of genre films to give his own work a tone, without similarly importing plot points or other genre signifiers. (The result? His fans liked the ways his films felt to them, while those who didn't care for his work might often dismiss it as weird or confusing).

I suppose a better point of reference might be the work of the late Richard Sala (particularly given Skelly's publisher here), who, similar to Lynch, would take notes from different genre works to imbue his comics with a sense of the mysterious or suggestions of conspiracies that are never entirely delineated. (And, of course, Sala was, like Skelly, able to create highly charged sexual characters, despite how far his particular style was from what we might call "realistic").

That's only really true for about half of the stories in The Agency, though, the ones starring Agents 9, 10 and 73. As for Agent 8, her adventures are more straightforward (One is a simple, silent three-pager in which she lolls about naked in a field of phallic mushrooms, licking them before pulling the caps off of a pair of them, riding one while fellating another, until she's apparently sexually satisfied and thoroughly tripping). 

Though obviously not as narratively satisfying as some of Skelly's longer previous works, The Agency is an excellent showcase for her art, it offers a compelling example of her engaging with various subjects and it manages to be erotic without being exploitative, sexy and sexual while wholly hers. 

To use a musical metaphor, it's more jazz than concept album. To use one from prose, it's a collection of short stories rather than a literary novel. For fans of Skelly's, it's a must-read, and for those looking for a place to start with her body of work, it's an easy entry point. 

As I mentioned before, this 2018 paperback version is now out-of-print (though it's still available electronically; I read it on Hoopla). Fantagraphics released a more recent hardcover version, which is also bigger in size and page count, apparently including a new story that wasn't available in this version. 

Maids (Fantagraphics; 2020) The sensational, brutal murders of a wealthy woman and her daughter by their two live-in maids in 1933 France is probably relatively little-known in 21st century America, even as true crime obsessed as our post-podcast culture seems to have become. But it was apparently influential to 20th century French intellectuals (including Jean-Paul Sarte), who saw it as symbolic of class struggle, and it has inspired various plays, films, books, songs, artwork and even an opera.

And, of course, an original graphic novel by the great Katie Skelly.

Skelly's short, fleetly moving book isn't a rigorous, detail-by-detail recounting of the crime and what lead up to it, but rather a more impressionistic telling of the story, stringing scenes of potent imagery together like rosary beads as it moves to the shocking conclusion those familiar with the story will be anticipating. 

Although one need not know of the case and its long afterlife in culture—I surely didn't—to follow Skelly's telling, or to experience a sense of expectant dread over its inevitable violence while reading. The book opens, after all, with a panel of a bloody eyeball, which a woman in a maid's uniform walks towards and picks up off the floor, holds in her hand, and then points towards with a finger, as if she's about to poke it...before the scene transitions to that same finger pushing a doorbell.

The woman in the scene is Lea, the younger sister of Christine, who has been employed by Madame Lancelin as a maid for several years. Christine has prevailed upon Madame Lancelin to take in and employ her sister as well. 

Their life as maids, which spans a few years before the climax, is hard, as they work very long hours cleaning a big house and preparing meals. Madame isn't the kindest boss, either, as she slaps Christine in one panel, and is demanding of the sisters—especially so after Lea is hired, since, as she explains, if she's paying for two maids, she wants twice the work done, rather than paying for Christine to simply have a companion while she works.

The girls' life wasn't particularly easy before either, though. Flashbacks imply that the girls grew up with an alcoholic, presumably abusive mother, and later served in a convent. After Christine left the convent, Lea apparently had a hard time, refusing to do her chores or pray, and there's a scene where she is kicked out of the convent (Whether or not this has to do with her cutting the head off of a pet songbird with a pair of scissors isn't made explicit; luckily, Skelly doesn't draw the act itself, just the moment before and then, later, the result. It's still pretty flinchy).

While Christine copes with the pressures of her maid job by smoking and stealing little items from the family—which Madame seems to be aware of, and to reluctantly tolerate—the more sensitive Lea eventually has a breakdown of sorts, running out to the woods to vomit after feeling sick. 

Things come to a head one night after Lea's red right hand starts talking to her, in a reddish pink dialogue balloon full of comforting words. After they accidentally blow a fuse and Madame yells at them, threatening to throw them both out, Christine puts Madame's eyes out, and then attacks her with an iron. At this point, the sisters both talk in pink-colored dialogue balloons, saying the same things simultaneously, like "She's next" (referring to Madame's daughter) and "I knew you could do it." 

What's going on isn't made explicit, and Skelly's version of the girls' story isn't as sympathetic as it could have been (From what little I've read between finishing Skelly's Maids and writing this post, Madame was apparently much more abusive of the girls than the single slap depicted in this book suggests and she apparently had some mental problems of her own). 

There's at least a suggestion of the supernatural, or that the sisters are somewhat insane, acting out not because of the fact that they had been pushed too far or in retaliation for abuse and exploitation, but more so because they were, well, murderers. (As with the bird earlier in the narrative, the violence of the murders is staged fairly tastefully, with the actual acts left to the imagination, so that we see, say, Christine raising the iron over her head, and then the action cuts to the daughter reacting to her mother's scream from another room entirely, the iron actually striking the victim off-panel).

Given my own unfamiliarity with the case, I'm not the best person to comment on how Skelly portrays its specifics here, though. There are implications throughout the book, but Skelly's telling is one of impressions and feelings, with elements of the story left purposefully cryptic and mysterious, so the readers can interpret it as they wish.

All of the swirling dark content and violent actions of the climax are somewhat in contrast with Skelly's own simple, intimate art style, which, as with the sex in The Agency discussed above, keeps the work from feeling exploitative.

Weird, engaging, scary and provocative, Maids is thoughtfully made, a true crime graphic novel in which the "true" aspects are ghost-like in their insubstantiality. 

Checking Fantagraphics' website, the book is currently listed as out of stock, although I looked at two big online book retailers, and both have it in stock, so I don't think the book is out of print just yet. As with all graphic novels, though, you should probably check with your local comics shop about it first. 

Review: Fortune & Glory: The Musical

This is a very belated sequel to Brian Michael Bendis' Fortune and Glory, which was originally published as a three-part miniseries from Oni Press in 1999, before being collected into a trade by first Oni, then Dark Horse and, most recently, DC.

It was a comedic memoir about the then still up-and-coming comics writer's attempts to pitch his early Caliber and Image crime comics like AKA Goldfish, Jinx and Torso in Hollywood as works ripe for adaptation. It was then and remains now a real outlier in Bendis' bibliography. 

For one, it was written and drawn by Bendis, who trained as an artist and drew all of his own early work, before transitioning to writing superhero comics. Despite the thousands of pages he's written for Marvel over the past 25 years and his long ago reaching the point where he could seemingly do whatever he wanted for the publisher, he's never drawn anything for them, not even as a one-off or a gag,  a short story or cover or pin-up, or just something to allow him to say he's drawn for Marvel, which I always found a little perplexing (Honestly, while it's been a long, long time since I've read anything he's drawn, I don't think his art is that much worse than that of some of his frequent collaborators over the years). 

While I had read Bendis' original Fortune and Glory via the Oni trade around 2000 or so, now, 25 years later, I remember almost nothing about its specifics, only that 1) it was drawn in Bendis' loose, more cartoony style that I wasn't necessarily a fan of (I grew up in Ashtabula, Ohio, about 60 miles from Bendis' hometown of Cleveland, and my family subscribed to the Plain Dealer, so I knew his name and work from his early 1990s attempts to get comics content into the paper), 2) I liked it and 3) it included a dirty joke reference to Marc Andreyko on a faux comics cover that was the first time I saw that particular name, and which I still think of whenever I hear Andreyko's name, which I suppose neither Andreyko nor Bendis would want to be the case. 

After reading Fortune & Glory: The Musical, I did check out the original from the library (this one the 2023 Dark Horse version), thinking maybe I should re-read it before writing about the new one. I flipped through it, though, saw all those weird, intrusive, slightly mechanical-looking, branching "trees" of dialogue balloons that I had become familiar with from Bendis' later Avengers writing, and told myself "I'm not reading all that." (Though quite wordy, which Bendis himself notes in an aside, The Musical seems less so than the original Fortune and Glory; flipping through both now, it seems the original was much more dialogue heavy, while a lot of The Musical's verbiage comes in narration boxes. Both seem good examples of something that seems true of much of Bendis' body of work—that he might be more comfortable writing these particular stories in either prose or film, rather than comics.)

Although the cover of The Musical seems quite similar to that of the collection of the original, complete with Bendis' own comics avatar on it (an avatar which seems quite thinner than the real Bendis; note that tiny neck supporting the round head, giving his bust the look of a Dum-Dum sucker), the interior is fairly different.

Most obviously, The Musical is not drawn by Bendis himself, perhaps because, so much busier and more successful as a writer this decade than in the late '90s, he just didn't have time to draw an original graphic memoir. Or perhaps because drawing comics is really, really hard work, and he was long past the point in his career where he needed to do that (In a kind of crushing, even heart-breaking scene in The Musical, we see Bendis taking a call from Joe Quesada, who clarifies that he wants Bendis to write a Daredevil fill-in for him, rather than draw anything for Marvel; "I, uh, thought your art was just in service of your writing," Quesada's voice says from the phone, "You know your artwork is not that good, right?").

Instead, The Musical is drawn by Bill Walko, a cartoonist who, according to the Grand Comics Database, has some indie comics to his name, as well as some covers for Archie and a short collaboration with Bendis that appeared in the writer's Pearl #5 (You can see a ton of Walko's art and more closely scrutinize his credits here). 

Walko's style is quite different from that of Bendis. He has a cleaner, smoother line, and the work looks a bit more finished and professional, if somewhat less personal. The format of the two Fortune books is pretty similar though, which makes me wonder if Bendis wrote in thumbnails, or laid the book out in his script. 

In a flip-through, the books look fairly similar, although, as I said, while both are extremely wordy, to the detriment of their flow, The Musical looks less tediously so. (Though Bendis is obviously the star and the draw here, it seems unfortunate to me how little Walko's name is on the cover of The Musical;  appearing a small fraction of the size of Bendis' own name and running in a strip beneath it along with those of the colorist and letterer.)

The sub-title of The Musical, appearing in a dialogue balloon being "spoken" by the Bendis avatar, is "A True Spider-Man Broadway Musical Debacle," and that seems to be the hook of the book, letting readers in on what went on behind-the-scenes of Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark, the notorious 2011 stage adaptation by Julie Taymor with music by U2's Bono and The Edge and elaborate stage stunts that became infamous for injuring performers.

Though that is the book's hook, if one really wants to read more about the production, they might be better off with Glen Berger's Song of Spider-Man: The Inside Story of the Most Controversial Musical in Broadway History (Simon and Schuster; 2013), which Bendis recommends near the end of his graphic memoir. Berger, a playwright, is one of the three people credited with the final play's "book", along with Taymor herself and Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa, who seems to have ended up being the involved "comics" person (Aguirre-Sacasa had a background in both theater and comics, and was probably therefore a better fit for the project than Bendis ever was, which I think Bendis himself would probably agree with, given the disinterest in musicals he admits to in this book). 

That is because it turns out Bendis' own involvement in Turn Off the Dark was quite limited. 

He was apparently the second writer brought on to help develop the project (circa 2004, a few years into his career-making stint on Ultimate Spider-Man), and his involvement was limited to a single face-to-face meeting with Taymor in LA and a couple of phone calls...one of which went badly enough from Bendis' perspective that he quit during it.

During that call, Taymor yelled at him as he was pitching his story, as it ignored a controversial change to the bitten-by-a-radioactive-spider origin she wanted to make, a change that may have inadvertently been inspired by a scene Bendis wrote in Ultimate Spider-Man. He responded by insulting her, replying to a few panels of shouted No!'s, profanity and a "I don't even know what you're about!!" with, "Well, maybe it's because you haven't' stopped talking at me since we met."

That said, he says he did quite a lot of work for the project, researching Taymor and musicals enough to appear conversant (In one scene, he buys a thousand dollars' worth of Broadway musicals at a Portland Barnes & Noble) and putting together his pitch. The latter doesn't necessarily translate into much in terms of the page-count of the book, as, well, the act of writing doesn't exactly lend itself to dramatization in a comic book.

So, given how little of Bendis working on Turn Off The Dark is in The Musical, what is in it? 

Well, the book is more of a biography of Bendis than it is a show business tell-all, with the working on the play aspect simply used as a framing device. The book opens one morning afternoon when Bendis awakes to suspiciously numerous and urgent phone calls, emails and instant messages telling him to call Avi Arad, and it ends with Bendis, Matt Fraction and other Marvel creators seeing the final show, a surprise that Marvel had arranged for them all after a conference in New York City (A neat, three-panel sequence on a double-page splash shows Bendis and a handful of Marvel editors and creators, all white dudes, in what looks like a small workplace break room, and then expanding to bigger, more diverse crowds in increasingly bigger and nicer looking rooms, each punctuated by a pitch for a different big Marvel event that will be familiar to readers).

The actual story of The Musical is a sort of creative biography of Bendis, starting with a young boy in Cleveland obsessed with superhero comics, deciding to become a person who makes comic books*, embarking on a life-long quest to teach himself how to draw comics (a much more difficult quest in the 1980s and '90s than it would have been a few decades later!), attending the Cleveland Institute of Art, hustling to make ends meet as an artist while pitching comics, getting published with Caliber, starting his career in indie crime comics, befriending artist David Mack and, ultimately, eventually, breaking into Marvel, where he became about as big a star as direct market super-comics produces. 

Some of it is fairly inside baseball for superhero comics readers and industry watchers (It's certainly a lot of fun seeing a very young Bendis encounter John Totleben, Walt Simonson and Gil Kane, the latter of whom has a fun, funny reaction when someone asks him what he thinks of Frank Miller's Ronin), and later meeting and working with the celebrities of the comics world, like Quesada and the previously mentioned Fraction (Some of whom aren't named, but you can try to match Walko's drawings of them at meetings to pictures you've seen). 

But much of it will be compelling to anyone interested in comics at all, especially the passages devoted to Bendis' "secret origin", which reveals just how damn hard he worked before becoming successful, essentially learning everything to know about comics, including how to draw, make, publish and sell the damn things before becoming an indie success, and then, later, a mainstream success. 

And, briefly, almost a potential Broadway success. 

Honestly, the biographical aspects are interesting enough that the book could have worked without the Turn Off the Dark connection. Sure, that stuff is all interesting, but these scenes seem here somewhat unnecessary, and they might have made for a chapter in Bendis' overall biography, rather than the foundation upon which he built it here (If Fortune and Glory were an ongoing series, for example, the Turn Off The Dark stuff might have made a single issue, or, given the way Bendis writes, perhaps a story arc). 

As is so often the case with Bendis' comics writing, especially that of the last 20 years or so, I wondered while reading this if it wouldn't have been better served as a prose book than a comic book. If you asked me what makes for the very best comics, I would tell you they are stories that could only be told in comics, and, by that measure, for all of the comics Bendis has created in his long, successful career, a great deal of which I've read and many of which I've quite liked, I don't think he's ever produced any comics that quite meet that particular criteria.**

I don't know if he'll ever achieve the sort of breakthrough, mainstream, non-comics pop culture success that the two Fortune and Glory books have been devoted to his attempts at (either on Broadway or much, more likely, in Hollywood), but, having conquered the comic book industry and lived and experienced it from so many angles now, I think these books prove that his biography is a compelling one, full of fun and funny stories. He therefore must have a hell of a (prose) book in him, whenever he's ready to write it. 

After all, he happened to work for Marvel from the period in which they seemed to be at their nadir to the heights of their Marvel Cinematic Universe-fueled cultural relevance, and that's a bigger, better, grabbier hook than making a pitch for an infamous Broadway musical.

I just hope that, when he sits down to write that particular story, he does it in prose, and produces an honest-to-God autobiography, rather than another graphic memoir (or two, or six). 

After all, how much harder can writing a prose autobiography be than writing the book for a Broadway musical...?

*At age six, he announces to his family, "I just wanted to let you all know that I will be artist of Spider-Man"; this is why I find it kinda crazy that Quesada or whoever never had Bendis draw a pin-up or gag strip in the back of an oversized Spider-Man anniversary issue, actualizing the man's childhood dreams.

**That said, it's been a rather long while since I've followed Bendis' career super-closely. I think Batman Universe was the last thing of his that I really liked, and, if you've been reading EDILW for very long, you know the site is littered with posts expressing disappointment and frustration with Bendis-written comics that I don't think really worked, like Age of Ultron and Siege and Event Leviathan. If you have suggestions of great Bendis-written comics that meet that could-have-only-been-a-comic criteria, do let me know. 

How good a writer was Peter David? Well, he made Aquaman cool.

I obviously can't speak to the early decades of the character, but certainly by the time I was growing up, Aquaman had become something of an easy joke, especially compared to his more powerful and popular peers in the various Super Friends cartoons. 

But then Peter David got a hold of him.

He wrote the character and fleshed out his fantastical setting over the course of some eight years between 1990 and 1998, writing not only an almost 50-issue run on an Aquaman monthly series, but also the miniseries Aquaman: Time and Tide and the underwater fantasy The Atlantis Chronicles. 

He fleshed the character out, immediately making drastic, provocative changes, like the beard and longhair, having him lose his left hand in battle and replacing with a harpoon, and trading in the familiar orange shirt for a gladiator-style harness. And me made the character feel moody and dangerous. 

I think Grant Morrison gets a lot of credit for writing a cool Aquaman in the pages of his 1997-2000 JLA run, depicting the character in such a way as to make him seem worthy of standing shoulder to shoulder with the likes of Superman and Batman, but, well, that was Peter David's Aquaman that Morrison included in his line-up (And the Aquaman of artists Martin Egeland and Jim Calafiore). Even when later creators would take the character on, rejecting David's aesthetic changes and hewing closer to the classic version of the character, like Alex Ross and Geoff Johns did, their work seemed to build on David's interpretation of the character as a badass. 

Though they obviously owe a lot to Johns' work on the character, I don't think we get two Aquaman feature films and the character in the 2017 Justice League movie without David's refurbishing of the character in the '90s. We certainly wouldn't have had Jason Momoa playing him. 

David's Aquaman was my first introduction to the writer's work. When I was still getting into comics and being increasingly drawn into the DC Universe setting in the '90s, I would regularly check the back issue bins at Books Galore in Erie, Pennsylvania and pick up copies of that Aquaman series, more or less at random, generally guided by what unlikely guest star might appear on the cover (Swamp Thing, Animal Man, Martian Manhunter). 

David's frequent use of guest stars and the wider DC Universe made even random issues easy to get into, but they were all well-written enough that each one was complete and enjoyable by itself, rather than being a piece of a story that didn't make sense on its own. I eventually read the whole thing, getting new issues monthly and reading the back issues in order, and I was sorely disappointed when David eventually left the title (A title, it's worth noting, didn't survive too much longer without him).

While that was my introduction to the writing of Peter David, it was hardly the work he is best known for (Nor the work of his that lead most obviously and directly to a big Hollywood production; that would instead by his co-creation of Miguel O'Hara in 1992's Spider-Man 2099, a character who played a major role in 2023's animated blockbuster Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse). 

Rather, I imagine he's best known for his long, influential run on Marvel's The Incredible Hulk, during which time he made multiple innovations to the character and introduced versions of him that have been reverberating throughout the Marvel Universe ever since (Sometimes written by David himself, sometimes by other creators who followed him). That run too seems to have influenced screenwriters and directors, notably so in Ang Lee's 2003 Hulk. 

David also wrote a lot of Spider-Man comics for the publisher, a previous version of the Captain Marvel character, and an extremely well-regarded run on X-Men spin-off X-Factor. 

Having not gotten into Marvel before the turn of the century, I missed all of these comics (although I did read his 2005 Madrox miniseries, and the first arc of the 2006 X-Factor revival it led to). But I knew his original X-Factor run must have been something special, because I read about it in a newspaper article in the Cleveland Plain Dealer (probably written by Mike Sangiacomo) in the '90s, long before it was common for editors to deem comics worthy of coverage in newspapers. 

David also wrote a long-ish run on DC's Supergirl, created Spyboy for Dark Horse (with artist Pop Mhan) and Fallen Angel for first DC and then IDW (with artist David Lopez), co-wrote the big 1996 DC Vs. Marvel crossover event series and wrote scores of other comics over the course of the last 45 years. 

In addition to Aquaman, I am most familiar with his work from the 1998-2003 Young Justice, which he wrote for its entire five-year run, working with pencil artist Todd Nauck. A team comic featuring the then most current crop of superhero sidekicks, it was notable for foregoing the soap opera-ish melodrama and teen angst that permeated the previous decade's most popular comics featuring young heroes, like the X-Men and New TeenTitans books, and instead embracing comedy, making for a particularly light-hearted superhero comic that could be in sharp contrast to the often overly serious super-comics of the era. (It also inspired a popular television cartoon series of the same name that began airing in 2010, a series that David also worked on.)

That's a career that any comics writer would be happy to have, but then, David was so prolific that comics only accounted for part of his resume. He also wrote what must be in the neighborhood of some 100 novels, including lots of licensed work on the Star Trek franchise, various Babylon 5 books, movie novelizations (many of them of films based on comics, of course) and plenty of original science-fiction, fantasy and other books. 

And then there's his short stories, his non-fiction, his essays and his writing for television. 

Despite all of that work, David and his family found themselves in rather dire financial straits of late, with a GoFundMe campaign set up on their behalf a few months ago. 

It is a failing of both the comics industry (and the major corporations that make astronomical profits based on work like David's) and of the United States of America that anyone's medical problems should lead to such devastating amounts of debt. 

Put simply, David and his family should not need to resort to crowdfunding, certainly not in a country as rich as ours, and certainly not considering how much money David's characters and stories have helped make other people. 

As David's fans and the industry as a whole spend the week noting his loss and offering their condolences to his friends and family, I hope we can all also use this opportunity to do two things.

First, to recommit ourselves to reforming both the industry's treatment of its creators and the country's healthcare (which, unfortunately, seems to be getting worse, as Republicans are in the process of shrinking Medicare coverage; I don't think it's exactly controversial to note that, had David been a Canadian or a British writer, he and his family would have been in far better shape).

 And, second, to celebrate our favorite comic book writers and artists and to let them know just how much they mean to us while they are still alive to hear it. 

That time Rex the Wonder Dog almost helped found the Justice League (On 1977's Justice League of America #144)

Justice League of America #144 is particularly interesting for two reasons.

First, it addresses the passage of time in a way that, at least here in the 21st century, seems unusual for a superhero comic book.

Second, it is premised on the never before revealed story of the true creation of the Justice League, long concealed from the world and, indeed, even some of its own members. A literal secret origin, then.

The 33-page story, "The Origin of the Justice League--Minus One!", is written by Steve Englehart, pencilled by Dick Dillin and inked by Frank McLaughlin. In its framing sequence, Green Arrow is on the League's satellite headquarters, reading through a thick book labeled "Journal of the Justice League," as one does. 

Apparently upset by what he has just read, he storms off to angrily confront Superman and Green Lantern Hal Jordan, who are playing cards, as Justice Leaguers do. How upset is GA? Well, Dillin draws an explosion of energy emanating from his head, which colorist Anthony Tollin has colored red. 

What's got him so worked up? Well, he says that Hal has always maintained that he became a Green Lantern in September of 1959 (a date, an editorial box points out, that was chosen because that was the cover date of Hal's first appearance, in Showcase #22). And Green Arrow was told that the League was founded, "with you a large part of it", in February of 1959, which is seven months before Hal was even a superhero.

So what gives? Well, Superman and Hal solemntly lead Ollie to "the communications quadrant" of the satellite, seat him before a giant monitor (Green Arrow sits down while wearing his quivers on his back? Seems uncomfortable), and play him a tape of Martian Manhunter, who will tell the story that will dominate the rest of the book's 30 pages, when the heroes who would become the Justice League all met one another for the first time and decided to form a team...but to postpone doing so for six months or so.

"It wasn't you we feared-- It was the times!" J'onn says, addressing the camera. 

But let's linger on those dates that Green Arrow rattled off, shall we? 

This issue was released in 1977, and, presumably, the framing sequence is meant to be set in 1977 as well. If Hal became a GL in 1959, that means he has, at the point this story takes place, been superhero-ing for 18 years now (and the League has been around for that long as well...meaning the rest of its members are all at least 18 years into their careers already).

If we imagine that Hal was as young as, say, 20 when he became a Green Lantern, then that would mean he is 38 in this story...and, as we know, this was relatively early in Hal's career. It would be another decade or so before Crisis On Infinite Earths altered the timestream/DC continuity for the first time. 

While those numbers work out for the purposes of this story as regards Hal and his Justice League peers, it's worth noting that Robin Dick Grayson appears in the flashback story, which, again, is set 18 years ago, in 1959. He was a teenager then. And, in 1977, he was still Robin and, apparently, still a teenager (He went away to college in 1969, though, at which point he must have been 18 or thereabouts.)

So, um, obviously that doesn't work.

That same editorial note that mentions how they came up with the month of Hal's Green Lantern origin, credited to "Julie" (who would, of course, be editor Julius Schwartz), also contains something of a disclaimer about the passage of time: "Remember-- We're dealing here with comic mag time! And comic heroes have their own ways to stop the clock and avoid aging!"

Dick Grayson especially, I guess.

As for the story, it is, for its first half or so, primarily a Martian Manhunter one. It begins with his origin, being brought to Earth by a device created by scientist Dr. Erdel, who almost immediately has a heart attack and dies, stranding J'onn.

He takes on the identity of John Jones, and becomes a police detective in Middletown, doing superhero work on the sly while trying to figure out Erdel's device in order to get back home. His life is upended with the arrival of a General Blanx and a gang of other White Martians (Who Green Arrow, and I suppose readers at the time, knew from the pages of JLoA #71).

J'onn, resuming his more familiar form of a half-naked green muscle man, is in the middle of battling the White Martians when The Flash arrives. J'onn tries to explain to Barry Allen that there's a difference between good Martians and bad Martians, but upon seeing the aliens, the locals all start to freak out. 

The Flash tries to calm down the spreading mass hysteria, telling the gathering crowd that he will get someone everyone knows and trusts to head up the investigation: Superman. 

He's never, at this point, actually met Superman though. Nevertheless, he runs to Metropolis and finds the Man of Steel, who is at present in the company of Batman and Robin. The four heroes return to Middletown, where they promptly meet Roy Raymond, TV detective.

"If we alert the nation, this story should generate a lot of help for you!" Raymond tells the heroes.

And it does. A turn of the page reveals a pretty spectacular splash, filled with the 30 heroes promised on the cover: Wonder Woman, Aquaman, The Blackhawks, The Challengers of the Unknown, The Vigilante Greg Saunders, the original Robotman Robert Crane, Congo Bill "with the amazing Congorilla", Plastic Man and Rex the Wonder Dog. (Do dogs watch TV...? How did Rex know what was going on, and how did he get himself to Middletown...? Well, I he is a wonder dog, I guess). 

Oh, and also Lois Lane and Jimmy Olsen, introduced as if they too were superheroes.

Now, even after all these years, I still haven't integrated a deep enough knowledge of DC Comics/DCU history to know this for certain, but I suspect this particular gathering is meant to represent all of—or at least most of—the DC Comics heroes who had their own books or regular features in early 1959, or perhaps those that could have conceivably been around then...excluding the various heroes who were already established as occupying other Earths in the DC multiverse, like the Justice Society and other Golden Age characters of Earth-Two, or the Fawcett characters like Captain Marvel and company, assigned to Earth-S. (A pair of other heroes from that time will turn up in the course of the story; just wait.)

That said, the inclusion of Plastic Man and the Blackhawks is curious. 

They all came from Quality Comics, the Golden Age adventures of which were apparently set on a theoretical "Earth-Quality" and, in 1973's Len Wein-written JLoA #107, a Nazi-ruled Earth-X occupied by the various Quality heroes (Plas and the Blackhawks appear in that issue, but only in flashback). 

I haven't similarly tracked the Blackhawks, but DC launched an ongoing Plastic Man comic in 1966, which was presumably set on Earth-One with the majority of the DC Comics line (although I have read that the series, like several other comedic DC comics, was set on an Earth-Twelve...?). And then there are Plas' various Brave and The Bold appearances, of which there were three prior to this issue of JLoA, to deal with. 

I guess there are, therefore, at least three, possibly four Plastic Mean in the DC Multiverse, then...? (The original of Earth-Quality, an alternate one from Earth-X, that of Earth-One and possibly an Earth-Twelve Plas.)

One can see why DC felt a multiverse streamlining crisis was needed about a decade later. 

Anyway, this massive assemblage of heroes broke up into three smaller teams. Plastic Man, The Blackhawks and Jimmy Olsen followed one lead, which lead them to almost encounter Rip Hunter. Robotman, Vigilante, The Challs, Lois Lane and Congo Bill and Congorilla followed another, which lead them to almost encounter Adam Strange. And, finally, the heroes who would eventually form the Justice League, along with Raymond, Robin and Rex, followed another, which lead them to Ferris Air test pilot Hal Jordan, and the Martians.

After a brief battle, the heroes defeat the White Martians, rescue the green one and plan future public relations. J'onn decides to stay on Earth, which he has come to love, and which he believes, in his words, needs a Manhunter from Mars. 

Given the anti-Martian hysteria of the previous pages, though, Aquaman suggests J'onn allow for a six-month cool-off period before coming out, and Wonder Woman adds that, when he does, "it could be with the backing of all of us".

"You know, we ought to form a club, or society...!" Superman suggests. While Batman says he's not much of a joiner, Flash argues the point: "But Batman-- A league against evil! Our purpose would be to uphold justice against whatever threatens it!"

And so it's decided that these heroes would form a league to uphold justice in six months' time...Hal Jordan and Roy Raymond, who were present for the discussion, both swearing secrecy. 

The eventual line-up of the Justice League, this story suggests, seems to have been determined by who just so happened to be on the team that followed one of the three leads in this adventure. Had the team's divided up slightly differently, Plastic Man or Robotman or Congorilla or Vigilante could have ended up on the team. (Of course, Plastic Man would eventually join the team, in 1997's JLA #5, and Congorilla would join around 2010's Justice League of America #41 or so, after appearing in the troubled 2009 miniseries Justice League: Cry for Justice. As for Vig, he never made it into a comics League, but he was an unlikely inclusion on 2004-2006's cartoon Justice League Unlimited's massive line-up).

Of course, the book doesn't explain why Robin wouldn't be offered membership, or, for that matter, Rex, who found the Martians in the first place...

I guess the Justice League must have put a "No Dogs Allowed" sign in front of their Happy Harbor headquarters...?

(If you would like to read the issue for yourself, it looks like it's been collected twice before, in 2018's Justice League of America: The Bronze Age Omnibus Vol. 2 and in 2020's Justice League of America: A Celebration of 60 Years, the latter of which is where I read it. I'm hopeful DC will collect the issue, and most of the Satellite Era, in future volumes of their DC Finest series, though...)

Review: Phil Foglio, Hilary Barta and company's Plastic Man

Frank Miller and David Mazzuccheilli's "Batman: Year One". John Byrne's The Man of Steel. George Perez, Len Wein and company's Wonder Woman. All three late '80s comics, published after the 1985-1986 Crisis on Infinite Earths, updated and modernized the origins of the greatest DC Comics heroes, re-presenting their specifics and establishing themes and styles that were meant to influence future portrayals and, indeed, they would do just that...at least until DC decided it wanted another continuity-cleansing Crisis. 

Does the 1988 Plastic Man mini-series written by Phil Foglio, pencilled by Hilary Barta, inked by John Nyberg (and featuring some contributions from Kevin Nowlan and Doug Rice, to be discussed later), deserve to be mentioned among those same seminal comics?

Well, probably not. Heck, DC has never even collected it into a trade paperback, let alone kept it in print as an evergreen introduction to the character, along the lines of Miller and Mazzucchelli's Batman arc. 

But nevertheless, the series did mark Plastic Man's first real starring appearance after the events of Crisis*, it did introduce the character as if he were a brand-new one (ala Perez and company's Wonder Woman) and it did present a new, updated version of his origin and his status quo.

It also established something of a style and tone for the character going forward...that of a B-List hero with a wacky sense of humor, a character who may or may not actually be somewhat insane. (In my recent reading of all of the Plastic Man appearances I could find, only 1991's Action Comics #661 and 1996's Superman #110 and The Power of Shazam! #21 seemed to honor this miniseries' conceit of Plastic Man literally seeing the world in a cartoony way that deviated from reality.) 

It wouldn't be until later in the 1997-2006 JLA series that writers would attempt to tell more serious Plastic Man stories, with Mark Waid briefly exploring his criminal past when the Leaguers find their heroic and civilian identities split apart and Joe Kelly revealing that Plas has and estranged son. 

The 1988 Plastic Man was, again, written by cartoonist Phil Foglio, who would go on to create two more humor-focused miniseries for DC, 1991's Angel and The Ape and 1993's Stanley and his Monster revamps, both of which he would pencil himself. Today he's probably better known for his own series, Girl Genius. 

He was paired with the great Hilary Barta, who spent much of the 1980s as an inker, but was here handling the pencil art, and inked by John Nyberg. In addition to inking, Barta would go on to contribute to Marvel's What The--?!, Image's Stupid, DC's Paradox Press Big Book of... series and Bongo's Simpsons comics; I personally first encountered his work with Alan Moore on America's Best Comics, where he drew the not-entirely-unlike-Plastic Man feature "Splash Brannigan," one installment of which featured a stealth cameo by Plas, disguised as a red carpet.

The creative team also included Kevin Nowlan, who was credited with "Reality Checks", pages in each issue showing the "real world," as opposed to the world as seen by Plastic Man and Woozy Winks; Doug Rice, who the Grand Comics Database says was responsible for some layouts and gags (The fourth issue credits him as "Consultant); and colorist Rick Taylor and letterer Willie Schubert.

The very first page of the series is drawn by Nowlan, in that realistic style; it could not be further apart from that of Barta, which accounts for 21 pages of each issue. It is Nowlan who draws the essential origin story, in which Eel O'Brian and a gang of other criminals are attempting to rob a chemical plant when Eel is shot, some sort of acid gets into his wound and his co-conspirators all abandon him to his fate.

Rather than making it to a swamp, where he is discovered by a kindly holy man who conceals him from the police and tells him he believes there is good in him, as in creator Jack Cole's original, 1941 Plastic Man story (collected most recently in DC Finest: Plastic Man—The Origins of Plastic Man, which I wrote about him this post) Eel simply blacks out, the last panel of Nowlan's page being all-black. 

The next page opens with similarly black panels, filled only with colorful sound-effects (CLANK! rattle CLANK!), Eel's slowly opening eyes, and his own hesitant dialogue bubbles. He finally awakens, to find himself in a garbage can, an unhoused person trying to steal his tie, and everything, himself included, looking quite different, as Barta and Nyberg have now, of course, taken over art duties.

Barta's artwork, which you can see on the cover, is the work of a humor cartoonist more than that of a superhero comic book artist; sure, based on the cover alone, his Plas may seem a somewhat heroic figure, but look at his Woozy and all the other characters on it. That gives one a sense of the look of the book.

Every panel is filled with what Mad magazine's Will Elder used to call "chicken fat," extra, extraneous visual gags built atop visual gags that don't exactly move the plot but add flavor and texture to the proceedings. Most of Barta's panels deserve to be not only read, but paused at and pored over, allowing one to enjoy the detailed characters, caricatures and other funny business in the crowd scenes, backgrounds and foregrounds.

As for his suddenly transformed Eel, Barta's take on the character actually reminded me a bit of the art of Peter Bagge (although Bagge's best-known work, Hate, wasn't yet released at the time that this Plastic Man series was being created). Like a Bagge character, Barta's post-acid Eel was all face, with long, curving, looping, seemingly bone-less limbs; these stretched out of the sleeves and legs of Eel's suit, as he tried to make it out of the alley while being inconspicuous, people fleeing left and right as he walked down the street, screaming about a monster.

He's eventually rejected by his own gang, who also think he's a monster, and then chased by the police, and then the army, all of them shooting to kill. After a disgusting escape through a toilet bowel to the sewer (he emerges from a pipe spitting brown liquid with a "SPLURT" sound effect), he tries to drink his troubles away but is eventually tossed out of a bar on skid row.

Resolving to throw himself off a bridge—which we, of course, know wouldn't actually work—he meets Woozy Winks, who is carrying a fishing pole and asks if he happens to have a spare nightcrawler in his pocket. Eel is shocked that Woozy isn't shocked at his constantly changing appearance, but the newcomer explains that he sees weird stuff like Eel all the time, and that he's pleased to see that Eel is actually real. 

"Usually the really interesting things that I see aren't real!" Woozy says, before explaining that he was happily a resident of an asylum—a sign in front of the building in his flashback says "Arkham Asylum"—"Then something called Reganomics forced them to send me out into the world" and into the streets of New York.

Barta's Woozy is probably the best Woozy I've ever seen, outside of Cole's own hard-to-get-right, jowly version of the character. Barta gives him the green polka dot shirt and now old-timey hat, and the design seems like that of the later, perfected version that Cole used to draw: A big, somewhat pear-shaped head, big eyes, a bulbous nose that looks like it belongs to a Muppet rather than a man, a mouth full of big white cartoony teeth and a round, fat figure that is still capable of many energetic and dynamic poses.

Now under Woozy's wing, Plas tests out the limits of his powers, dons "some sort of circus outfit" (the only garment they treat with the plasticity-granting acid that doesn't dissolve) and decides whether he should use these new abilities for good or ill. 

Faced with this momentous decision, they decide to flip a coin—the very same manner in which the Woozy of the 1940s decided how he would use his own supernatural gift of protection by nature (As in the Cole story, we don't see how the coin flip turns out immediately).

The answer comes when Plastic Man captures his own old gang during an attempted bank heist, after which he's mobbed by the media, and has to pull Woozy away from the open bank vault, his sidekick shouting, "Two out of three! Two out of three!"

Though there are obviously liberties taken with Cole's original origin (and a topical gag about the Reagan administration that now dates the story even more so than the gangster stereotype Eel adhered to), the basic gist remains. Foglio, Barta and company benefited from the hindsight to know where Cole was going with his feature in a way that Cole—who was, of course, making it up as he went along—did not, so their Plastic Man arrives pretty much perfectly formed.  

It's therefore a farily perfect re-telling of Plastic Man's origins, and a comic book that is completely complete on its own (It would slide neatly into any sort of future "Best of" collection of Plastic Man stories). 

There are, of course, three more issues to go.

Each of these is similarly a done-in-one comic that reads just fine on its own, and doesn't require one to have read the previous issue, or have any idea at all what might be going on in the greater DC Universe (although the final issue does have an Invasion logo, and is labeled "Not an Invasion Aftermath Extra!").

In the second issue, Woozy and Plastic are roused by some city cops along with the other unhoused folks sleeping in the park (in their case, Woozy is on hammock made out of Plastic Man tied between two trees). 

They attempt to get a job as bank security guards, but the bank is robbed mid-interview. The thieves are known as The Ooze Brothers, a trio of cartoonish criminal types who have been mutated thanks to their diet of fish from the most polluted of waters. Now living up to their name, they are essentially living ooze in human form. (I would say we're lucky to not have the same environmental problems that America had in the 1980s, but, well, the Captain Planet villains in the Trump administration seem bent on making environmental degradation great again.)

Eventually our heroes succeed, in a way that actually even improves the lives of our villains, and, with the reward money they receive, they are able to secure a rundown office and open up a private detective agency. (There are a few allusions to let us know this book is indeed a DC comic, including mentions of Martian Manhunter, Belle Reeve and Batman in the dialogue; the final issue includes a mention of Booster Gold, a Superman cameo, and Superman rattling off a list of DC heroes who owe him a favor).

If the second issue presented us with a new status quo for Plastic Man and Woozy Winks, the third issue deviates from it. Feeling underappreciated, Woozy joins a cult—a bunch of beautiful women in robes asking him to do so seals the deal for him—and he takes off for California with all of his and Plas' money (which is, of course, in a sack with a dollar sign on it).

As toga-wearing guru Ramalama (whose name is always followed by a "ding dong" sound effect made by the ringing of a nearby bell) reveals his master plan, which involves getting thousands of followers to dance on the San Adreas fault line and thus break California off into the Pacific Ocean, Woozy snaps out of it. He joins Plastic Man and an eccentric old man who claims to be an Atlantean wizard named Arion (Arion VI, not the Arion you are probably thinking of, whom he doesn't the least bit resemble) to save the day. 

There are a lot of jokes about how weird California and Californians are, especially as opposed to the "normal" people of New York, including an in-story explanation for that weirdness. Having never been to California and only ever visited NYC, these jokes didn't really land with me, and I suppose your mileage may vary. They certainly seem old and tired in 2025, but then, this series is 37 years old now. 

The final issue of the series is the one that likely aged the poorest, as its plot revolves around the unhoused, who are referred to throughout variously as winos, bums, street people and bag people. Our heroes first realize something is amiss on the bus ride back to New York from California, as the bus seems completely full of "winos" (There's even a person in the overhead baggage area). 

When they return to the city, it too is filled with the unhoused, and the city mayor no sooner hires Plastic Man and Woozy to figure out what's going on than his honor is kidnapped by a robot. 

The plot that emerges sounds vaguely Douglas Adams-y. See, the Ooblort Space Confederation's welfare department has done such a good job of taking care of all the indigent in their jurisdiction that they've now run out of customers and, if they can't find more indigent to care for by the next budget meeting, they will be shut down.

And so they turned to earth, gathering the poor from all over the country and summoning them to New York City (via voices in their heads; see, they weren't talking to themselves all this time, but with the aliens). To keep the Earthlings in their "natural habitat," the aliens—who look an awful lot like SpongeBob's Patrick Star, although that cartoon was still 11 years in the future—plan to just take the whole island of Manhattan with them into space.

With Plastic Man busy fighting their robots, it's up to Woozy to rally the assembled masses to take on the aliens. While they are unmoved by Woozy's insistence that the disappearance of Manhattan will have deleterious effects on the world economy, when he tells them that the alien ship is full of old shoes, they spring into action, raiding the ship and tearing out everything they can, carrying away vital components in their shopping bags.

It's then that Superman—drawn quite off-model, in order to comport to Plastic Man and Woozy's view of the "real" world—arrives to lend a hand, as apparently when Manhattan is dropped back into place, it's facing the wrong way. (In addition to Superman's appearances, there are off-handed references throughout the series to Martian Manhunter, Batman, Belle Reeve and Booster Gold, letting readers know it's technically set in the DC Universe, although that setting doesn't come into play at all.)

All in all, it's a quite solid series with masterful work by Barta, and one that could really use a collection.

Maybe it will finally get one if James Gunn decides to do a Plastic Man movie in the near future...

*Between the time the last issue of COIE shipped and the first issue of this miniseries, Plastic Man appeared in an issue of DC Comics Presents (which seems to be set in pre-Crisis continuity, as it has Jimmy Olsen becoming Elastic-Lad during its proceedings) and issues of DC Challenge I've read but forgot the contents of (I think that series could use a collection, personally). He also had cameos in the Golden Age-set All-Star Squadron and Young All-Stars, as well as a cameo in Infinity Inc (although I'm not sure if that last one was a flashback to the Golden Age or set in modern times having, never read that one). 

So even the fact of whether he debuted in the new, post-Crisis DC Universe's Golden Age of the 1940s or, like Wonder Woman, was debuting for the first time in the late 1980s seems to be a point of confusion right off the bat for the then-new continuity.

History of the DC Universe, an illustrated prose book published in 1986 and meant to delineate the new, post-Crisis continuity only featured a cameo of Plastic Man, in which he appears in a crowd scene devoted to the All-Star Squadron, which would have meant he was a Golden Ager.  

DC would change that in the next official history of the DC Universe they offered, however, in the timeline that followed the story in Zero Crisis #0, recently collected in DC Finest: Zero Hour: Crisis in Time: Part Two. According to that, Plastic Man debuted "8 Years Ago", during the "New Heroic Age" ushered in by Superman's debut two years previously (Interestingly, according to this timeline, Elongated Man pre-dates Plas in the new continuity by one year).

That was the post-Crisis, pre-Infinite Crisis timeline, though. Who knows what continuity is supposed to be now. Perhaps we'll find out when DC publishes its upcoming New History of the DC Universe...