The End of JLA Pt. 7: "World Without a Justice League"

Finally, we come to JLA #120-125, the six-part "World Without a Justice League" story arc, which marks the end of 1997-2006 series. It's pretty much the definition of ending with a whimper rather than a bang, as writer Bob Harras and artists Tom Derenick and Dan Green present a story in which former Leaguers Green Arrow and Manitou Dawn face old Justice League villain The Key and various other heroes come and go as they are all buffeted by the events of the Infinite Crisis event series. 

These last issues mainly exist to serve the event—the 2006 trade paperback collection bears a band reading "Infinite Crisis Crossover" across the top of the cover—as the Justice League had more-or-less disbanded in the previous arc, and its last few active members were forcibly prevented from forming a new team by a mysterious attack on its last pages. 

And if you thought that last arc, "Crisis of Conscience", was one that required additional homework to follow, given that it was devoted to the fallout of Identity Crisis, this one is far, far worse. 

After two pages of the trade paperback collection devoted to a sort of roll call identifying the major heroes involved in the volume's story (which the last few collections have also featured) and a pair of villains (one of whom is only identified here, and not in the pages of the comics themselves), there's another page that includes this list:

Identity Crisis.

Day of Vengeance.

Rann/Thanagar War.

Books of Magic.

Villains United.

The OMAC Project.

Crisis of Conscience.

It's followed by a paragraph of text, starting off with the words, "All of these recent disasters have taken a drastic toll on the Justice League of America." It then mentions that J'onn J'onnz was the only member of the team to conclude that these seemingly random events might actually all be connected and recaps the destruction of the Watchtower and his going missing afterwards.

It ends with the words, "These are the events that follow those tragic moments..."

That list? That's...a lot of other, non-JLA comics to suggest a reader might need to be familiar with before reading a JLA story. 

Now, I was still visiting a comics shop every Wednesday in 2005 and 2006, when the individual issues of "World Without a Justice League" were originally released, and I was buying a lot of DC Comics. But even I hadn't read all of these. Looking at the list now, I'm surprised to see a "Books of Magic" mentioned, and I'm not entirely sure what that refers to. (Plugging that into Comics.org, I see the Books of Magick: Life During Wartime series ran from 2004-2005, but I can't imagine what it had to do with this arc, especially since it was a Vertigo series.) 

As for "World Without a Justice League" itself, I'm going to just delineate the plot, to give you a sense of just how big and disparate the cast is, and the zigs and zags taken as the story basically meanders from Infinite Crisis-related plot point to plot point, it's fight with The Key providing something of a throughline for a couple of the characters involved.

The first two pages open on the moon, where we see the shell of the Watchtower, and Harras and Derenick then take us to Gotham City's Arkham Asylum, where the mysterious narrator has apparently just escaped, having exerted some kind of mind control over the doctors. 

This is, spoiler alert, The Key, a Justice League villain who had been around since 1965. Grant Morrison had reinvented him for his latest attack on the team in 1997's JLA #8-9, the Oscar Jimenez-drawn two-parter during which Green Arrow Connor Hawke began his short tenure on the team. The artists had rather radically redesigned him, giving him gray skin, long white hair, red eyes and a skimpy and vaguely bondage-y looking costume, complete with keys over his fingers. 

Before this story, he was last seen in 2000's Batman: Gotham Knights #5 in a story by Devin Grayson, Dale Eaglesham and John Floyd, which established that The Key was sent to Arkham Asylum after JLA #9. Curiously, Harras both honors and ignores Grayson's story, as he has The Key escaping Arkham, but doesn't refer at all to his having previously escaped the League-designed mind prison.

We then turn to the story's other narrator, Green Arrow Oliver Queen. He is currently at a sparsely-attended ceremony at the League's original base in Happy Harbor, Rhode Island, which is being lead by Aquaman (Whom writers Geoff Johns and Allan Heinberg had erroneously told us in the previous issue hadn't been a member of the team for "years" in the previous arc)..

Also in attendance, in case you're wondering, are a rather random group of former Leaguers, many of whom haven't been on the team for some time. Most  of them are on Daniel Acuna's cover for the first issue of the arc, seen above, but they are Green Lantern Hal Jordan, Green Lantern John Stewart, Black Canary, Zauriel, Plastic Man, The Flash, Captain Marvel, Batman, Mister Miracle, Big Barda and Manitou Dawn. 

That last character will play an important role in this story, but she probably won't be all that familiar to anyone who hadn't already read Joe Kelly's run on the Justice League books. She first appeared in the pages of JLA, being the wife of the League's shaman Manitou Raven. Like him, she had traveled thousands of years into the future at the conclusion of "The Obsidian Age" arc. 

If one had not followed Justice League Elite, they probably wouldn't know that she had an affair with team member Green Arrow, and that, when her husband died, she took his place as shaman, going from just plain Dawn to Manitou Dawn.

As League founders Aquaman and Hal Jordan make speeches and Ollie narrates, Dawn slips into the astral plane, where she's visited by J'onn. He assures her that he is not, in fact, dead, and tells her: "I will reveal myself in time, Dawn. When I may be of assistance...not just yet." He warns her that "a being of vast power has awakened... and yet in the current climate may be overlooked as a minor threat."

Ollie pulls her back to the real world before J'onn can name that being, but I can tell you it's The Key. 

Aquaman and Dawn, who the former says, "represent the more elemental beliefs," each take a handful of dirt from the cave entrance and then release it to be carried away by the wind, symbolizing a cleansing of bitterness and ill will. After most of the other Leaguers do the same, Dawn says that she senses the ceremony had failed. Ollie accuses Batman, who did not participate in the handful-of-dirt thing, of ruining it.

This leads to an argument involving the pair of them, with The Flash, Hal and Aquaman all chiming in. They're mostly still arguing about the same stuff they were arguing about in the previous arc. Aquaman brings up Batman's dossiers on how to defeat his teammates from Mark Waid and Howard Porter's "Tower of Babel" arc, and Batman mentions how uncomfortable he now is with such big concentrations of super-powered people like this.  Ultimately, Ollie accuses Batman of maybe, "just maybe" being the one responsible for destroying the Watchtower.

Batman eventually storms off, telling everyone he is now going to the Watchtower site to see if he can figure out who actually did destroy it. It is perhaps worth noting here how unworried all of these characters seem about its destruction and J'onn's disappearance. 

I mean, surely Green Arrow and Big Barda wouldn't be much help looking for clues on the surface of the moon, but you'd think Dawn's magic and the Lanterns' rings might be helpful...and you might think that they would rather be there than here, especially John, who was talking to J'onn when the attack happened (If you read Infinite Crisis, you know that Superman, Wonder Woman and Batman all show up there independently at the same time to investigate, so at least someone did...still, weird that Batman would squeeze in this cleansing ceremony before going to do so, right?).

Meanwhile, The Key, who still hasn't been named or revealed yet, has escaped into the sewers, where he has killed a man and scrawled "The JLA Made Me Do It!" on the wall with the victim's blood. He then hooks up with one of his robot helper Keymen (who Derenick draws to resemble those that Jimenez had drawn in JLA #8 and #9, rather than the more human ones Eaglesham drew in Gotham Knights) and he then engineers a suicide bombing. 

It will take a bit for Harras to ultimately reveal what The Key's deal is now, but apparently his old super-senses have developed into an uncontrollable psychic power during his imprisonment in the League-designed fractal maze at Arkham. 

He can now psychically dominate others and control their minds and actions, but he can't seem to block out the thoughts of others, and so he is being constantly bombarded with a cacophony of mental voices. The only thing that seems to relieve the pain, temporarily, is when he kills someone...or, in the case of the bombing, a bunch of someones. (The Key also looks a fair degree healthier than he did in JLA and Gotham Knights. His hair is now blonde, and his skin has resumed a flesh color, rather than the gray of his previous few appearances).

Several Leaguers have stayed behind in Happy Harbor after the ceremony. Aquaman and John Stewart are working on re-starting the Justice League...in one form or another, even if only as a precaution against Batman's OMAC Project gone wild or the prospect of a superhero versus superhero civil war of some kind ("You think people are going to start choosing sides?" Green Arrow, who has never read Marvel's Civil War, asks. "Us versus them?")

Dawn, meanwhile, has sought more answers from the astral plane, where she encounters the spirit of her husband and then The Key, but she's interrupted by explosions...the sound of Ollie shooting exploding arrows around the cave to blow off steam. Black Canary arrives mid-shot, and the two have a heart-to-heart (Acuna's cover for the second chapter captures this moment and seems to imply the two are fighting within the book, which they are not). 

During their talk, Ollie confesses to Dinah that he had a relationship with Dawn and how the guilt has been tearing him apart (this was explored in Justice League Elite, of course). Harras has Canary make the relationship seem even worse than just the adultery with a woman married to one of his teammates, though:

That girl is just that-- a girl! And what's worse is that she's displaced from another time!

She was vulnerable-- and you took advantage of that. As usual. 

I don't think Dawn's age had ever come up before, but Black Canary certainly makes it sound like there was a very problematic age gap at play here, on top of everything else. 

While the men go off and attempt to make their first recruit, Canary has a similar chat with Dawn.

That recruit? Nightwing, whom they find in the midst of a fight with the assassin Brutale. They make their pitch, Aquaman saying that even if there is no longer a League, there's nothing to stop "heroes like us...getting together from time to time-- --just to ascertain situations, share information-- basically to watch each other's back."

Realizing that they came to him because of his closeness to Batman, Nightwing turns them down.

Meanwhile, The Key has kept up his killing spree, finally drawing the attention of various heroes. Aquaman and company, joined by Canary, Dawn and The Flash, investigate a crime scene. (Flash is shown to be sweating, and characters repeatedly mention how bad he looks; I have no idea what this is about, and the story doesn't make it clear...something going on in his own book at the time, I guess?) 

Supergirl arrives, and they pitch her on joining their kinda sorta League.

And then a bunch of OMACs attack. There's a fight scene, which Red Tornado shows up for. Then the OMACs all freeze, perhaps because of something going on in Infinite Crisis...? During the battle, The Key captures Dawn. 

Then Donna Troy shows up, says she needs some powerful heroes for an unnamed mission, and she then leaves with Supergirl and Red Tornado to go do something in some other book. 

At this point, John Stewart and Aquaman both decide they have other stuff to do too, and they take off too. 

That just leaves Ollie and Canary to rescue Dawn. 

The Key has taken her to the top of Wayne Tower in Gotham City, and he plans to use her powers to commit a city-wide mass murder to silence the voices in his head. Ollie and Canary arrive there, as does Batman, and, rather randomly, a big green creature that readers can see but the characters mostly cannot. 

This is, apparently, Envy, one of the Seven Deadly Enemies of Man from the Captain Marvel franchise, who if I recall comics I read 20 years ago correctly, was released from imprisonment on the Rock of Eternity when it was destroyed during the events of Day of Vengeance. I think. I assumed that's who it was while reading, given that he was green, but, as mentioned previously, he's only ever named in the roll call in the collection's pre-story pages. 

I assume he only showed up at all, like the OMACs, to tie into the goings-on of Infinite Crisis and the multiple miniseries leading up to it, but, once he gets there, his influence seems to provide a reason for the heroes to fight one another (You can see Ollie and Batman doing so on the cover of #125, the very last issue of the series). 

At some point, Envy is distracted and looks away—presumably at the events happening in another book—and The Key, the only one of them who seems aware of the spirit's presence, blasts him with his new psychic powers. 

Thus freed of Envy's influence, the heroes KO Key and bicker about what to do with him. Dawn takes it upon herself to mete out justice, as she phrases it, making him disappear. There's some more bickering among the heroes, with Ollie pointing out that Batman needed help from Canary and Dawn during their fight with The Key and Batman saying over his shoulder, "Give it up, Ollie...The League is dead."

When Dawn walks away, we see where she sent The Key: To the astral plane, where he is finally in a place of utter emptiness (Indeed, as Derenick draws it here, it is now just blank panels full of whiteness, in which The Key hovers cross-legged with his hands in prayer). J'onn and Raven both appear to Dawn there for the space of a few panels, giving her a few attagirls.

On the last page, Dawn retreats into the cave entrance of the Happy Harbor base, and from there the scene shifts to the wreckage of The Watchtower, the now at-peace Key getting the final word, saying of the League that, "unlike me... ...I suspect their story is... ...far, far from over."

So, as you can probably tell from all that, Harras' plot did quite a bit of ping-ponging about, and one gets the sense that, before he sat down to write the arc, he was given a list of characters to include, when and where to pick them up and when and where to leave him, and various plot points that should be mentioned. 

While I wasn't too terribly fond of the arc when I originally read it about 20 years ago—especially as a last JLA story—I imagine it must have read better serially as originally published, rather than as a collection so many years later.

Then, were one reading other comics in DC's superhero line at the time, they would probably have a decent handle of where the various characters were coming from and going to, and what the specific events referred to or even just alluded to here actually were. 

Decades later, I've forgotten many of the details of Infinite Crisis and its many tie-ins. (Which may have to do with the fact that it's not a story I've read and re-read over the years, despite my fondness for the work of its artist Phil Jimenez, probably the second-best choice for a "crisis" book following George Perez in the early '00s. At this point, I mainly only remember a few scenes, and mostly for the wrong reasons: The Trinity arguing in the ruins of the Watchtower, Batman seemingly having a panic attack, Bizarro and some other supervillains murdering Uncle Sam and the other Freedom Fighters, Superboy-Prime slaughtering various Titans characters, that weirdly un-finished battle scene in the streets of Metropolis at the climax.)

Therefore, much of this particular book now reads like it's full of random creative choices, devoid of context, set-up or payoff. I certainly wouldn't recommend it to anyone who isn't encountering it as part of reading or re-reading Infinite Crisis...unless, perhaps, that person is a really big Manitou Dawn fan, as this is the only story I know of that features her so prominently (In fact, after this, she never really appeared much; consulting Comics.org, I see only a cameo in a Kurt Busiek-written Superman comic and some appearances in Justice League Dark, a book I never read much of).

Despite so many obvious (and, perhaps, excusable) drawbacks to the story, Harras' writing has its virtues. He does manage to tell a mostly coherent story arc, one dealing with a standard superhero vs. supervillain plot (The Key business) and some comic book soap opera emotional content (the evolution of Green Arrow and Dawn's relationship), even if he has to do so in-between and around so many other goings-on.

Harras seems to have a decent handle on all of the characters, and they all seem to sound and act like themselves, a few curious choices aside (Like everyone pausing for that ceremony while J'onn was missing and the Watchtower in ruins, for example). 

Harras also seems to have read JLA (and JLE!) and thus be familiar with the cast and some recent plotlines, something that Johns and Heinberg certainly didn't demonstrate in the preceding arc. 

I've always liked the work of artist Tom Derenick, although I also have always kinda felt badly for him, as, more often than not, he seems to be assigned particularly books for his speed rather than anything else, and therefore many of his comics tend to feel shoddily planned, comics with weird deadlines or changes in directions dictating an artist who can churn out work fast.

Thinking about it now, I'm not sure I can name a really great Derenick-drawn comic, then, though I've never been disappointed to see his art. Here he gets to draw a decent swathe of DC characters, and everyone manages to look right and properly heroic and powerful, even when arguing rather bitterly with one another.

Given the overall weirdness of this arc, Derenick's pencils are honestly probably the highlight.

"World Without a Justice League" was collected in 2006's JLA: World Without a Justice League and 2017's JLA Vol. 9.

On 2010's The Twelve: Spearhead #1

In putting together the cast for his 12-issue limited series The Twelve, writer J. Michael Straczynski seems to have scoured the pages of Timely's old Golden Age comics for any characters that Roy Thomas might have missed a few decades previous. I imagine that this is how he came up with a dozen characters so obscure—some having only a single appearance, or two or three before being forgotten—that they made The Blue Diamond look like Wolverine by comparison.

The premise for the series was that in the last days of World War II, twelve minor superheroes—The Blue Blade, Captain Wonder, Dynamic Man, The Fiery Mask,The  Laughing Mask, Mastermind Excello, Mister E, The Phantom Reporter, Rockman, The Witness, the robot Electro and a previous Black Widow—were ambushed and gassed by the Nazis, and then put in suspended animation. The Nazis hoped to be able to study them later, after the war.

Given that the Nazis lost, of course, they never got the chance to do so, and so the heroes remained cryogenically frozen until 2008, the year the series launched. In that respect, they were a little like Captain America only, you know, times twelve. And are, like most Golden Age superheroes that never caught on, a bunch of real weirdos.

The twelve are all housed together as they adjust to the new, greatly changed world, which sounds an awful lot like the set-up for a reality show, but one of them is murdered, presumably by another of them, and the series was essentially a murder mystery of sorts.

Straczynski was partnered on the book with the great Chris Weston, and so it of course looked great. It certainly seemed to have some potential and was catnip to a fan of weird Golden Age heroes like me (Of course, the #0 issue and the #1/2 issue, which featured reprints of some of the characters original adventures, were actually my favorite part of the endeavor).

I wonder if, today, the series is best known for its incredible delay though.

As I said, the book launched in 2008 and kept to a monthly-ish schedule for the first eight issues. And then Straczynski apparently got busy with his day job (a Hollywood screenwriter), and there was an long delay of about three and a half years between issues #8 and #9. That's...not ideal, of course, especially for what was essentially a graphic novel published serially, but I suppose they at least finished it, unlike some other high-profile comics from Hollywood types-turned-comics writers, like, say, Kevin Smith's abandoned 2003 Daredevil/Bullseye: The Target or Jon Favreau's half-finished  2008 Iron Man: Viva Las Vegas. 

During that extremely long gap between #8 and #9, Marvel published a 36-page one-shot both written and drawn by Weston in 2010. It was entitled The Twelve: Spearhead and was set during the war in Germany, presumably shortly before the heroes were put in suspended animation. 

Pretty much completely divorced from the plot of Straczynski's The Twelve, Spearhead's main connective tissue is Weston's strong and realistic art, which gives all the characters very distinct, unique looks, so that even characters like The Phantom Reporter and Mister E, who dress almost identically, look like entirely different people. I mean, it's a pretty basic thing, but it's not something the majority of modern American comic artists might even bother with. (One of the great strengths of The Twelve was that its cast seemed to consist mostly of guys with faces like character actors, rather than all looking like matinee idols.)

That, and Weston of course honors the various personalities of the misfit heroes Straczynski had earlier established, some of which are quite...well, colorful, I guess.

Our point-of-view character is The Phantom Reporter, whose day job is, of course, that of a reporter, although he's taken to donning a mask and cape over his suit and fighting crime. (When Dynamic Man asks him what his powers are in the one-shot, he replies, "I'm more your 'masked avenger' type.")

He's on the frontline covering the story of the superheroes in the war, or, as U.S. army officers put it, helping with propaganda (Interestingly, when various soldier characters talk to him, they often refer to him by the initials of "P.R.", which, of course, also stands of "public relations", which is what he's doing for the military, really...although I don't know if that term was in popular usage back in the 1940s).

We follow him around and he essentially runs into other members of the cast of The Twelve or, in the case of The Black Widow, just hears a brief, scary story about her (And this Black Widow is scary; she's a super-powered servant of Satan; during her brief appearance here, she's shown standing in a room full of dead Nazi soldiers, some of whom are disemboweled, others of whom are missing their heads or limbs, and wiping blood off he hands on a Nazi flag. "This whole country offered its soul up to my master..." she says, "I'm here to collect.").

So in the opening, he watches with some soldiers from the tree line as the super-powered Dynamic Man strides up to a Nazi fortification, bullets bouncing off of him, and kills them all. He's on page just long enough to let us know that a) he's super-powered and b) he's a total asshole.

Phantom Reporter will later be saved by killer robot Electro, a large, remote-controlled robot with the face of his inventor appearing on a screen where his head should be (He's the big guy in the back of the cover up there), he will meet the psychic Mastermind Excello, who is using his mind-powers to gather intel for the U.S. forces, he will take in a USO show hosted by The Blue Blade, and compare notes with Mister E and The Witness, the latter of whom talks about the horrors he saw in a liberated concentration camp.

Some characters do barely more than cameo. For example, The Flaming Mask is shown standing behind some captured troops in one panel, while Captain Wonder is shown helping a damaged plane land, and P.R. comments on his bare legs. ("Who is that anyway?" Mister E asks. "Captain America?" P.R. responds, "Captain America can't fly. And has the decency to put some pants on.")

So too do plenty of other Marvel Golden Agers, which helps contextualize the characters of The Twelve within a sort of retconned Golden Age of the Marvel Universe (Or should that be Timely Universe?). And so we see The Destroyer and Blazing Skull milling around at the side of one panel, or another featuring Red Raven, Union Jack and...actually, I don't even know who these two lifting that gun up are, although I've seen the one on the left before. (Is the guy on the right The Black Marvel, maybe...?) 

Eventually, The Phantom Reporter learns of a big superhero-led operation, and he wants in on it. This is led by Captain America himself and will feature Rockman, Mastermind Excello and some of the more prominent Golden Agers, like The Human Torch, Miss America and The Whizzer (at this point, still rocking that weird-ass bird head on the front of his cowl). 

The mission will involve a fight with The Red Skull, mostly fought by Captain America and conducted off-panel, and an attempt to recover The Spear of Destiny, which is also  here referred to as "The Lance of St. Maruice", and which is ultimately put in "safe hands" (The panel accompanying those words shows a U.S. military officer gripping the spear, which is glowing and it looks rather ominous, but I don't know if anything bad ever comes of it...as far as I've been able to follow Marvel's Spear, it will "next" show up in 1994's Wolverine: Evilution and then the 2010-2011 Invaders Now!).

The issue ends with a practically poster-ready dramatic double-page splash showing all twelve of the heroes from The Twelve  rushing towards their fate.

So it is essentially a bit of a tour of Marvel's Golden Age heroes at war, serving as an introduction, or, given the delays in The Twelve series, a reintroduction, or, perhaps even a reminder, of the cast of the series. 

Weston also seems to take some pains to point out to what degree war is hell, with Nazis quite violently killed (in addition to that panel of The Black Widow, when Electro makes the scene, it tears an enemy soldier in half), even ones that Weston bothers to briefly humanize, like those that Dynamic Man lays into in the opening pages (Later, The Laughing Mask will execute some Nazi officers, shooting them in the backs of their heads as they kneel before him). 

It's not just the Nazis who die violently and graphically either, though; at one point, P.R. is in a jeep driven by a soldier with whom he has some exchanges, and, when the Nazi's ambush them, he takes a bullet to the head, half of his head seeming to explode. 

And, of course, there's the passage where The Witness describes what he saw, Weston confronting us with the disturbing images of the Holocaust. 

Weston also repeatedly contrasts the super-people's actions with those of the regular, mortal, flesh and blood soldiers who do most of the actual fighting and dying. It's their war Weston through The Phantom Reporter repeatedly stresses. As for the people in the costumes? They just "make it look good."

I know this issue is collected in The Twelve: The Complete Series, which Marvel published in hardcover in 2013 and trade paperback in 2014 (I'm kind of tempted now to revisit the main series via one of the collections, but my local library system doesn't have seem to have a copy available, and I'm not sure if I want to buy one...if I knew whether or not the #0 and #1/2 issues were collected alongside the rest of the series, I might be moved to do so.)

Regardless, Spearhead reads quite well on its own, and delivers on the most immediate pleasures of the series—the weird, obscure Golden Age characters and Weston's art—that are the strongest selling points of The Twelve series. So, should you see it in a back issue bin, you may like to pick it up; it's also available via Amazon/Comixology. 

A Month of Wednesdays: August 2025

 BOUGHT:

DC Finest: Justice League of America: The Return (DC Comics) This particular collection covers the last 21 issues of the original, 1960-1987 Justice League of America series. Like April's DC Finest: Batgirl: Nobody Dies Tonight, it would appear that the editors chose which issues to include based on where exactly they wanted to end—here, the final issues of the series—rather than at the very beginning of a particular run or storyline.

The book features what we usually call "The Detroit League", a run of the book following "The Satellite Era," wherein Leaguers Aquaman, Martian Manhunter, Elongated Man and Zatanna founded a new iteration of the team with brand-new characters Vibe and Gypsy, plus Steel, a new legacy version of a rather obscure character, and Vixen, who had at that time only had a pair of appearances prior to joining up. 

That team officially launched in 1984's Justice League of America Annual #2 and started appearing in the main title with issue #233. The Return's first issue is #241 though, so it skips the annual and the first eight issues of this new (and ultimately short-lived) League's adventures. 

Gerry Conway would script most of these issues, with J.M. DeMatteis coming in with issue #255 and writing the series' last issues. George Tuska penciled the first three issues herein, Joe Staton the fourth and then Luke McDonnell would take over for the rest of the run (The collection also includes JLoA Annual #3, a Crisis crossover written by Dan Mishkin and pencilled by Rick Hoberg, and an issue of Infinity, Inc. by Roy and Dann Thomas and some kid named Todd McFarlane). 

The line-up would prove pretty stable. Aquaman leaves the team about three issues into this collection, Batman joins it as its new leader in #250, and Zatanna and Elongated man both leave around the start of the final story arc.

Over the course of the comics collected in this volume, the team would come into contact with old Justice League villains like Amazo, The Lord of Time, Professor Ivo and Despero (he in a storyline that explains how the fin on his head went from front-facing to sideways, I guess), as well as some formulation of the Tornado Tyrant entity that apparently lives inside Red Tornado's android body. 

New threats include an alien plant creature that feeds off of lifeforce, a yuppy cult leader named Adam who wants to steal Zatanna's magical powers and Earth-2's Infinity, Inc, which is lead into battle against them by Steel's grandfather, Commander Steel, originally a war-time hero created by Conway in 1978 for a series set in the 1940s (and, according to DC's cosmology, on Earth-2; it gets needlessly complicated, but is apparently here he is a native of Earth-2 who crossed over into Earth-1, where he lived most of his life, and helped build his grandson into a super-strong cyborg hero).

These issues actually span Crisis on Infinite Earths, and despite a few minor tie-ins—Steel being shunted to the far-flung future for a one-issue adventure during which he gets a new, open-haired cowl, and what basically amounts to a "red skies" annual—nothing about the book really changes. It's last four-issue arc, "The End of The Justice League", ties into the Legends crossover event, though, and that crossover series seems to have had a much bigger impact on the team and title, as it ends the original JLoA series and leads into the DeMatteis and Keith Giffen's new, revamped team.

Perhaps the most fun stories collected here are those in which the "old" League teams up with the new. There's that annual, in which the Satellite HQ plunges from space, Red Tornado's body is destroyed and his mind and tornado innards cause worldwide problems that eventually need to be addressed by not only the official team, but also Superman, Green Arrow, Black Canary and Firestorm. Batman and a few of his Outsiders also put in an appearance.

Later, for the anniversary issue #250, Batman, Superman, Green Arrow and Green Lantern Hal Jordan answer a distress signal from their old, original Secret Sanctuary base, and end up teaming up with the new League (after which Batman agrees to stay on as new leader). 

I enjoyed seeing the disparate heroes share panel space and occasionally butt heads, particularly the hot-headed old guy Green Arrow and the hot-headed new guy Vibe. 

Perhaps the biggest surprise for me (I had previously only read a handful of issues featuring this iteration of the League, mostly from those earlier ones not collected here) was that the so-called "Detroit League" wasn't actually in Detroit that long. 

In issue #246, the original Steel, old man Henshaw, kicks the team out of their Detroit HQ, and they all decide to move to New York City (where Vixen and Zatanna both have their own apartments already), while they headquarter their team in the Secret Sanctuary...which is actually a pretty decent drive and/or flight from NYC (Though it's supposed to be located near Happy Harbor, Rhode Island, Conway's narration repeatedly places it in the hills just outside of Metropolis). 

Given that this collection skips the earlier issues, then, the Detroit League is only actually in Detroit for about 200 pages of this 580-page collection, spending the rest of their time between NYC and wherever in New England the Secret Sanctuay is. (I may be misremembering, but wasn't Metropolis thought to be in Delaware at this point...?)

Historically, this team gets a lot of grief and, I suppose, were one looking at it from the outside, it sure might seem like the nadir of the Justice League. Certainly, if I had never read any DC comics and you had somehow lined up, say, every Justice League comic ever published before me, these issues aren't the ones I would have gravitated towards first, and I might even save them for last (Although the Hal Jodan-led Justice League International circa 1993-1994 doesn't look so great based on its covers, either). 

But reading them today? They are fine comics. I liked them well enough, and reading through this big, fat collection of them never felt like a drag or work to me. They're certainly quite well-drawn and well-told, and though I know this iteration is somewhat notorious and some of the characters (well, just Vibe, maybe) are regarded as jokes now, I found the book rather engaging, the new characters an attribute, feeling fresh after the last few decades of barely-changing "Big Seven" line-ups.

I certainly admire the audacity of Conway (and/or his editors) here, taking a look at the Justice League book and thinking, "Well, let's get rid of, say, Batman, Superman, Wonder Woman, Green Lantern and The Flash and replace them with these new guys I created and no one has ever heard of." (Conway had co-created Vixen and a Steel before this book, while Vibe and Gypsy seem created specifically for it). 

I was curious to note that the table of contents included a little paragraph reading, "The comics reprinted in this volume were produced at a time when racism played a larger role in society and popular culture, both consciously and unconsciously. They are presented here without alteration for historical reference."

I noticed it in the DC Finest collections of Golden Age comics I've read, those featuring Plastic Man and the Justice Society of America, which, yeah, certainly contained some pretty hideous caricatures of Black folks, Chinese and Japanese people, Native Americans and so on. I was a little surprised to see it here, though, given that these comics are from the 1980s.

I wonder if that appears in all of the DC Finest collections, or if it is something of a tacit admission that naming one of the new heroes after an ethnic group after a slur for an ethnic group in Gypsy wasn't a very good idea (UPDATE: Thanks to Jacob T. Levy for pointing out that important distinction in the comments below), and/or that the portrayal of Vibe wasn't...well, it wasn't always the most enlightened.

Now, I'm a middle-aged white, cis, heterosexual man, so I'm hardly the person to ask, but I didn't think Vibe was too much of a caricature here. Yes, he adheres to the "hot-blooded" Latin stereotype, but he didn't speak in an offensive dialect as I had heard (and/or remembered), although maybe that was in the earliest issues...? And, given the character's reputation, I was actually expecting him to be much more cringe-inducing than he ended up being. 

While Conway and company obviously weren't the best comics creators to give the Justice League its first Hispanic superhero, it does seem that their hearts were in the right place at the time, and I think it's cool that, at this point, DC and some of its creators were at least trying to make their superhero line-up more representative of the real world (Not only was Vibe the first Hispanic Justice Leaguer and one of the first who wasn't a white or green person, but this iteration also gave us the first Black Justice Leaguer in the form of Vixen, and, in the early issues at least, there's another black character who is League adjacent and goes into action against Amazon with them, Dale Gunn). (Also, I think it's to be appreciated that Conway and company had created Vibe and Vixen out of whole cloth as new and original heroes, rather than trying to diversify the DCU through legacy characters, which is still a too-common practice, I think.)

DC obviously didn't see much potential in Vibe or Steel though, as DeMatteis killed them both off in the last story arc, making them the very first Justice Leaguers to die in the line of duty (And, somewhat remarkably, they both more or less stayed dead in the decades since, decades during which the completely superfluous Jason Todd and Barry Allen got resurrected, the occasional appearance as a ghost or Black Lantern zombie aside...although the New 52 era did introduce a rebooted Vibe...not sure if he's alive, dead or in continuity at this point or not, though).

I can't help but wonder if Vibe and Steel would have been killed off had Conway continued to write the series, given that they were his creations. Similarly, I wonder why Vixen and Gypsy were spared. Were they thought of as more viable characters with a fair degree of unrealized potential, or did DC think it would be bad to kill off female heroes?

The pair did end up with futures with the League, of course. Gypsy later joined Booster Gold's team The Conglomerate and reunited with J'onn in the pages of Justice League Task Force, regularly appearing in its first few years featured rotating teams of specialists and then, in 1994's #0 issue, she joined the new, stable team that starred in the title and stayed with them until the end of the series in 1996 (That's  run that could use a collection, by the way; so far DC has only collected the first few issues of Justice League Task Force). Gypsy, like most of DC's female heroes, also teamed with the Birds of Prey at one point.

As for Vixen, she officially re-joined the Justice League in 2006's Justice League of America (after having rejoined J'onn and Gypsy in Justice League Task Force #7-8, probably the weirdest story of that series). She also worked with the Suicide Squad and Birds of Prey.

As for the cover image, I have no idea from where it was taken. It's not the cover of any of the comics collected within this trade, nor is it a splash. Batman and Aquaman's tenure on the League never overlapped, and The Atom doesn't appear in the book at all. It's an...interesting choice though, excluding as it does Gypsy, Vibe and Steel. (UPDATE: In a reply on Bluesky, Kurt Busiek pointed out that it was Jose Luis Garcia-Lopez's art, and by searching his name plus "Justice League" and "Vixen", I found that it was apparently taken from a wraparound cover for 2017's JUSTICE LEAGUE: THE DETROIT ERA OMNIBUS. As for where Gypsy, Vibe and Steel are, they are all in the foreground of the half of the picture that would have been on the back cover of the omnibus, along with a handful of "old" Justice Leaguers, like Wonder Woman, Green Arrow and Green Lantern. It looks like that omnibus was even more than complete, too, as not only did it contain all the relative JLoA issues, but it also had much later comics featuring that iteration of the team, like a JLA CLASSIFIED arc and a DC RETROACTIVE special.)

Justice League Unlimited: Into The Inferno (DC) Is Mark Waid and Dan Mora's new Justice League series a status quo or is it a story?

Having now read the first trade paperback collection, which includes the first five issues of the new series, I'm not entirely sure.

Regardless of the latter, it is certainly the former. Apparently inspired by the 2004-2006 animated series from which it takes its name, Justice League Unlimited features the biggest Justice League line-up ever, apparently comprised of just about every superhero in the DC Universe, even characters who are aleady on different teams, like The Titans and The Justice Society, whom we are told in the first issue have their own headquarters within the gigantic satellite base the new mega-team operates out of.

Within DC history, the only real antecedent of a team this big seems to be that of the 1981-1987 All-Star Squadron, which seemingly consisted of all the Golden Age characters DC owned at the time, the heroes all drafted into a sort of war-time superhero army.

Based on these first issues, Waid seems to be approaching his super-army similarly to how Roy Thomas approached the All-Stars, with the majority of the focus falling on particular characters, some coming and going from the foreground depending on the issue, others filling the backgrounds of various panels with color.

Those characters at the core? The expected Justice Leaguer heroes, really. 

Superman, Batman and Wonder Woman get the most panel-time and seem to operate as the de facto leaders of the team (Red Tornado, whose consciousness is loaded into the Watchtower's computers, presumably due to the damage his body incurred in Absolute Power, has an Oracle-like role, something between switchboard operator and field commander).

Martian Manhunter also has a fairly substantial role in these issues, and Aquaman and The Flash Wally West get some panel-time, with Green Lantern Hal Jordan putting in little more than a cameo. 

Also getting some focus are Mister Terrific, Doctor Occult, Black Lightning (um, can he fly now, or was that an art mistake?), Star Sapphire, Supergirl and, perhaps surprisingly, the new Airwave. 

That's hardly a comprehensive list, of course. Waid has written himself the ultimate toybox comic and fills its pages with more heroes than your average crossover event series. It's sure to be appealing to pretty much any DC comic fan. Certainly, the world's biggest Tuatara fan will be over the moon to see him appear in a panel, and good news Thunderlord fans! Your boy gets multiple panels in this collection!

Some of the characters and their goings-on seem to appear here at least in part to set up spin-offs, like the Watchtower's head of security, Question Renee Montoya (star of The Question: All Along The Watchtower) or Atoms Ray Palmer and Ryan Choi, who are busying themselves restoring the missing or mixed-up super-powers resulting from the ending of Absolute Power (and who star in Justice League: The Atom Project). In that respect, the comic certainly reads more like a status quo than a story (Those aren't the only spin-offs, either; there's also a new Challengers of the Unknown, as those characters are one of the teams-within-the-team, and the just-launched Justice Lague Red). 

I'm certainly glad that Waid is getting another crack at the Justice League, after his relatively short 2000-2001 run on JLA (which was badly hampered by an unreliable artistic partner in Bryan Hitch, who never managed to complete an entire story arc), and this premise, as temporary as it must certainly be, seems an ideal one for a fan/writer of his caliber. 

And who could complain about Mora, who has been drawing a majority of the DCU in World's Finest, Absolute Power and countless covers for the last few years, joining him? Every character looks great, even The Flash and The Atoms, who currently have rather unfortunate costume redesigns (As I've said before, I realize superheroes often have their costumes tweaked here and there, or even changing things up rather radically for a while, in order to keep things fresh, but it seems fruitless to do so with that Silver Age Flash costume or that of The Atom. Those costumes are so perfect there's not really anything anyone can do to improve upon them, you know?).

All that said, is it a story? 

Well, not quite...or, perhaps most accurately, not quite yet. 

There are certainly mini-stories featuring various characters that seem to get introduced and resolved within the pages of this very collection. For example, J'onn is frustrated by losing some of his powers and seeks to distance himself from the League...only for Batman to find him and bring him back. Star Sapphire is unsure of her role on the team and supehero-ing in general, and veteran hero (and school teacher) Black Lightning acts as her mentor. Former Terrifics teammates Plastic Man and Phantom Girl have had their powers swapped and need the help of The Atoms. And so on.

But it all feels a bit unfocused, with no real point-of-view character or regular cast (Airwave acts as  POV character for a bit, but only for the first issue/chapter, really, and he then comes and goes like all the other characters, though Waid regularly checks in on him). 

Although Superman and Batman seem to be on the most pages and in every issue, they're not the consistent leads, and they are not always present. With a team this big—with a toybox this deep—it's hard to get a sense of who the book is about, and thus what it is about. 

As much as I like the concept for its newness and unusualness, the problem seems to be this: When everyone is the Justice League, no one is the Justice League. 

I think the premise worked better on the cartoon show than it does here because so many of its episodes were standalone ones, each adventure telling a basically discrete short story within the framework of the premise. Waid, by contrast, seems to be attempting one big epic story with his super-Justice League, and it doesn't quite feel right to me. Or, again, not yet.

Of course, that might be because it is still in progress, the last issue collected within ending with a cliffhanger reveal identifying the villains (Which I will spoil in a bit, so quit reading if you don't want to be spoiled). This is, therefore, very much part one of a story, rather than a whole story, and I think that's a mistake when it comes to kicking off a new title with such a new and different premise as this one.

Just as The Flash is giving Airwave (and readers) a whirlwind tour of the new Watchtower in the opening pages, Superman is leading a team against a bunch of War Wheels devastating South Africa, while Batman and his old Brave and the Bold cartoon ally Blue Bettle Jaime Reyes are investigating what turns out to be a Parademon breeding ground in Costa Rica.

Later, the Amazon rainforest is in danger of being burnt down (um, at a larger scale and at a quicker pace than it is in danger of being bunt down in real life, I guess), which requires a squadron of magic users to go into battle (Zatanna! Xanthe Zhou! John...Constanine...? Does he have a Justice League membership card too...? And if you think that's weird and unexpected, wait until Tefe Holland shows up).

And the diplomats of the G20 are under threat.

The villains behind it all—well, behind most of it; I assume the Parademon business is part of the bigger, line-wide story about Darkseid being dead-ish—are mysterious hooded figures who call themselves "Inferno" and seem familiar with the League, even if the Leaguers don't seem to know who they are. 

They finally reveal themselves on the last page of the last issue in this collection, as probably the absolute least interesting characters to oppose the Justice League: The Legion of Doom.

Well, a Legion of Doom, anyway. Based on some of the characters we get a glimpse of—Scarecrow, Captain Cold, Bizarro—and the familiar black domed structure rising from a swamp, it seems to be a version that hews closely to that of the old Super Friends cartoon. 

Of course, because I am reading this in trade, and am thus months behind the more newly published issues of the series, I know there's something of a twist here, that this is apparently a Legion of Doom from the past, and that Waid's Batman/Superman: World's Finest and Justice League Unlimited are scheduled for a crossover story called "We Are Yesterday" at some point (I'm not sure how that will be collected; under the banner and numbering of one title or the other, or as a special standalone trade). 

So far, the book has a fun premise and is pleasing to look at, and certainly DC has found it a useful launchpad for other comics, but I didn't find this particular trade to be a wholly satisfying reading experience. Maybe—hopefully—the conclusion of the Justice League vs. Legion of Doom arc will transform these earlier issues, and it will make more sense and feel more story-like at that point.

I'll keep reading. I like it. I'm just not sure that it's actually good. 

BORROWED:

Batgirl Vol. 1: Mother (DC Comics) DC has once again launched another Batgirl ongoing, this one starring best Batgirl Cassandra Cain, who starred in the first and longest-running of their various Batgirl titles, the 73-issue, 2000-2006 one. I imagine doing so has something to do with what must be the success of Kelly Thompson and company's current Birds of Prey series, which prominently features Cassandra (The previous Batgirl series, the 2022-2003 Batgirls featuring Cass, Stephanie Brown and Barbara Gordon as a team, only lasted 19 issues).

This one comes courtesy of writer Tate Brombal, a relative newcomer whose previous credits include DC's Green Lantern Dark and work for Dark Horse and Boom Studios (none of which I've ever read), and artist Takeshi Miyazawa, whose work I've seen and enjoyed off and on since 2000's Sidekicks (notably, if I saw the interior art here without credits, I likely wouldn't have recognized it as his).

I'm honestly not entirely sure about the book, which collects the first six issues and ends on a significant cliffhanger, although I'm likely to pick up the next volume, even if based more on curiosity about what happens next than because I liked what I read so much that I can't wait for more of it.

Brombal certainly seems to have done his homework on the character. Throughout the course of the story, it's clear he seems to be trying his best to honor Cassandra's whole history, as confused and contradictory as too much of it has been, due to terrible editorial decisions (like her "One Year Later" heel turn) and attempts to retcon them into something logical (like, um, this). He certainly seems to be operating under the "Everything Happened" rubric. 

So there are references and images to significant events in Batgirl's history, like her fight to the death with Shiva in 2002's Batgirl #25 and the bit with the hook on the chain from the final issues of her series, as well as images of her in her dumb Orphan costume (and some narration that might suggest where that particular codename come from and how it might be relevant to her) and Shiva mentioning in passing the time she spent brain-washed. 

There's even a panel in which Shiva rattles off the number of different identities Cassandra has used in her relatively short career, and "Kasumi", which seems to indicate that Brombal has even read Justice League Elite, a very good 2004-2005 title that I feel has kinda been unjustly forgotten because of when it was published, and that maybe a lot Cassandra Cain fans might miss due to the secret nature of her role in it (Which I guess I am kinda indirectly spoiling here, but, in my defense, it has been 20 years now!). 

Kudos, then, to Brombal for trying to tell a tale that encompasses and honors the entirety of Batgirl's life/continuity, as messy as it can often be. It's full of enough callbacks that fans and folks who have been following the character the last quarter century or so now will recognize elements, both in Brombal's scripting, and in the costuming and staging choices that Miyazawa made when drawing them.

The story, as the subtitle likely suggests to you already, involves Batgirl's mother, the assassin and (probably*) the world's greatest fighter, Lady Shiva. The book opens with the two of them in a tense meeting in a Gotham City building, Shiva having come to Cass to tell her of a terrible peril that they need to flee together.

Apparently, there is an order of killers called The Unburied, a literally underground society, who have targeted Shiva for some offense against them, and, since Cass is Shiva's daughter, she too is on their hitlist. The Unburied are basically presented as your standard issue '80s action movie or superhero comic book group of ninjas, although, somewhat refreshingly, they are outfitted in blue costumes, rather than the more customary black and red (Mike Spicer colors Miyazawa's art, though the color choice might have been Brombal's, given that it ties into an aspect of the plot that will eventually come out). 

Aside from a faceless horde of ninjas, there are a few leaders among them, these having more distinct looks and personalities, and seem inspired either by fighting video games or kung fu movies are both (One, for example, talks in small, all lower-case words and fights with a giant pair of battle scissors).

They attack by page six, and Cass and Shiva will fight running battles with them throughout this volume, as they try to make their way to a train out of town (Um, is a train really the best way to travel when pursued by ninjas in 2025?), meet some unlikely allies (some extant DC characters, some who seem new) and are ultimately taken captive. 

As to why Cass just doesn't go to Batman, who at this point commands a whole army of martial arts-expert sidekicks, for help, Shiva warns her that involving her "family" will only doom them to death as well.

Brombal writes both characters quite well. Cass kinda sorta narrates, in a white font within black boxes, although these are often just a word long or, perhaps, a sentence. In this way, we sort of see things the way Cass sees them. On the first pages, for example, we see her "reading" her mom. 

There's a tight close-up panel of Shiva's eye, for example, looking in Cass' direction, with the word "Glance" in a black box. The next is a similar close-up of Shiva touching her earring, with the word "Touch." Then one of the vein in her neck with "Heartbeat", and one of her lips with "Smile" and so on.

Her thoughts tend to have a lot of ellipses, as does her spoken dialogue, which is terse and reserved, sometimes with odd word choices. 

All in all, he does a fine job of depicting the star's unusual way of seeing the world, her unusual thought process and her idiosyncratic speaking style; she's obviously come a long way since she was completely mute and could only communicate through actions, but she's far from a chatterbox now. 

She and Shiva think and talk a lot about their weird relationship—technically one of blood, though Cass grew up without Shiva, and their very different life paths leave them estranged, when they are not in actual conflict with one another. In that respect Brombal manages to make the book about something—the characters, their relationships to each other and to the other, unseen members of the Bat-family—in addition to just being a fight comic (Although there is obviously a lot of fighting, too).

His other innovation regards the Order of Shiva, a death cult that worships Shiva and appeared in Cass' original ongoing series, which Bombal presents as something of a civic organization that also does a lot of good, not just a group of fighters obsessed with a death-dealing killer.

In structure, it's basically a sort of chase, with Shiva trying to evacuate Batgirl and the Order from Gotham, the Unburied ninjas on their heels. Eventually, they capture Shiva, Batgirl mounts a rescue and gets captured herself, and then they try to escape. Pretty simple, really, but well told, character-focused and gradual in its reveal of key details.

The problem, and there is one, is that Cassandra often seems to make some inexplicable decisions, presumably for the needs of the plot, and Brombal doesn't manage to justify them in such a way to mask them, so that Cassandra sometimes seems reckless, cowardly and kinda dumb.

The first of these comes in the second issue. Having just been told she can't go to Batman and her Bat-family without risking their lives (and, obviously, warping the story Brombal wants to tell, and turning it into a Batman story instead), Cass instead leads to Shiva to a group of civilians she knows, wherein Shiva can have what looks like a relatively minor arrow wound stiched up.

The civilians are an older Vietnamese woman Cass calls "Ba Bao", who runs a restaurant, and her grandsons (Ba Bao, in her age, relationship with Cass and profession, reminded me a bit of Jackie from Sarah Kuhn and Nicole Goux's 2020 original graphic novel Shadow of the Batgirl). Apparently, Cass is friends with them, and trades martial arts training for the grandsons in exchange for food, and training in Ba Bao's own martial art, Vovinam.

The character is interesting, her conversation with Shiva important but, naturally, the Unburied attack, and though the restauranteers can and do fight, they are all seemingly killed, and Shiva flees with an injured Cass...who she takes to her Order on the train, who have their own healer among them and, obviously, could have handled stitching Shiva's wound himself. 

Long story short, if Cass isn't willing to endanger her circle of superhero friend with ninja attack, why endanger the folks at the restaurant?

Later, Cass spots a ninja from Ras al Ghul's League of Shadows, and attacks, leading to a five-page fight sequence which, sure, looks cool, but it turns out the League are actually Shiva's allies against the mutual threat of The Unburied here, as Shiva tries to explain during the fight and Cass, who we know can read people's intentions like a book, ignores her (and her own reading, I guess?) to fight them.

Finally, at the book's end, Shiva tells Cassandra to flee The Unburied while she holds them all off, seemingly sacrificing her life against, like, ten guys to allow Cass to escape, shouting cryptic orders that will be rather suggestive to DC fans and will likely pay off in the next arc, like, "Go and find the Bronze Tiger...He's the only one who can help you now...Find Benajmin Turner! Ask him about-- --The Jade Tiger!"

And Cassandra, quite unheroically, leaves Shiva to what is presented as her death, without either risking her life to save her, I don't know, sucker-punching her out and tossing her on the back of her motorcycle. (All of this is, of course, assuming that Cassandra Cain and Lady Shiva couldn't take out a small army of ninjas together; their fights with The Unburied throughout the book have been mixed, as they put down the first wave they fight, but then have been forced to repeatedly flee later encounters).

Again, this seems to happen because the plot dictated it must; Brombal didn't really sell me on Shiva deciding she need to fight them in order to buy Cass time to escape, that she was really in mortal danger, or that Cass would flee and abandon Shiva (or anyone) to sacrifice themselves for her. 

One final complaint. When Shiva and Batgirl are escaping The Unburied's underground base, they do so using what Cassanda says is "Something my father taught me," referring to Batman, not David Cain. To cover them, Cass somehow summons and directs the bats that live in the caverns to swarm ahead of them, providing cover as they fight through the fighters blocking their way.

I suppose this is meant to evoke the scene in Frank Miller and David Mazzucchelli's "Batman: Year One", where Batman escapes the SWAT team that has him cornered under cover of a flock of bats. Of course, Batman did that with a special high-tech device he had developed. How did Batgirl do it here? No idea, and if she had just, like, through some rocks at the bats shown in the stalactites above her and like yelled at them to get them to fly where she wanted them, well Brombal doesn't show it (Presumably because doing so wouldn't be as dramatic). 

Visually, the book is on stronger footing. As I said, I didn't really recognize the Miyazawa of Sidekicks, Mary Jane Loves Spider-Man or even Runaways or Ms. Marvel here, although I guess I can see a bit of him in Shiva and Cass' faces (when the latter is unmasked).

Martial arts action isn't often easy to depict in American super-comics, and while Miyazawa's art lacks the in-your-face dynamism of original Cassandra Cain artist Damion Scott, he does a decent enough job, often suggesting action through a series of sequential poses or, in the first two fights against The Unburied, presenting discrete actions in smaller panels around bigger splashes. 

It works fine, even if it lacks the sort of thrills one might see in a fight from the pages of manga** , which obviously had a big influence on Miyazawa when he was originally developing his style. 

As with the majority of mainstream superhero comics these days, there are far too many covers for these issues, but the David Talaski ones are quite good. He's responsible for the one that they used for the trade cover. 

Batman/Superman: World's Finest Vol. 7: Total Eclipso (DC Comics) The latest collection of writer Mark Waid's Batman and Superman team-up title, the sub-title of which seems to be borrowed from a 2007 John Rogers-written issue of Blue Beetle whose joke title referred to an old Bonnie Tyler song, is something of a mish-mash.

It includes four different stories drawn by four different artists. Only two of those stories are connected to each other. And only two of them are written by Waid who, given how busy original artist Dan Mora is drawing other stuff around the line, is at this point the only creator whose work one really expects to see when picking up an issue of this series.

The first and biggest of the stories is "Shadows Fall", a three-parter pitting the Satellite Era Justice League against Eclipso, drawn by artist Adrian Gutierrez. I'm afraid I had some trouble reading this one, as it failed to really engage me, raising a bunch of questions that I felt like I should know.

Now, I never read the original 1960s Eclipso comics from House of Secrets, even though DC did conveniently collect them in 2007's Showcase Presents: Eclipso (Which, like all of the Showcase Presents volumes I failed to buy, I now regret missing out on). My familiarity with the character, and the various rules by which he operates, thus come from the Eclipso: The Darkness Within storyline that ran through DC's 1992 annuals (which I would love to see a complete collection of!) and the short-lived Eclipso ongoing that followed it. 

Here, the character doesn't really seem to operate by the same rules—he can possess characters at will, rather than needing them to be holding a black diamond shard and/or thinking vengeful thoughts, and he and those he possesses are no longer vulnerable to sunlight—and there's an odd innovation that I didn't understand (nor did Waid really attempt to explain). 

Also, the continuity felt a little weird to me, which is perhaps understandable given the 16 years of regular reboots spanning 2006-2022 (I'll be happy when I have the collection of Waid and company's New History of the DC Universe in hand).

Altogether, then, it felt a little like reading an X-Men comic to me. That is, I spend the whole time feeling that I was missing something, and that the writer expected me to be familiar with things I was not. 

Much of the Satellite League—Superman, Batman, Green Arrow, Black Canary, Red Tornado, The Atom, The Elongated Man and Hal Jordan—have gathered in their orbital HQ to take in a total solar eclipse when, what do you know, half of them become Eclipsed, and start fighting the other half.

Meanwhile on Earth Bruce Gordon has become possessed by Eclipso (I think?), but not really Eclipsed...? At least, not in the traditional sense...? Rather, Eclipso had manipulated him into grabbing the black diamond's "golden twin", which seems to also make Gordon evil...and give him light powers...? (Colorist Tamra Bonvillain gives both Gordon and Eclispo swirling auras of light shaped a bit like the symbol of the atom, the former's yellow and the latter's purple, which they can use like weapons). 

Together, Gordon and Eclipso down the League satellite, trap the League, Eclipse Superman and Batman and then go about enacting a plan to down the rest of the world's satellites in a bid to plunge the world into chaos. 

Robin and a badly injured Red Tornado both turn to the same place for help: A brownstone in the sillily named Civic City, apparent headquarters of the Justice Society of America. (Who I guess were around in the late seventies or early eighties setting of this title, and not, like, stuck in Ragnarok or anything...? Did that still happen? Does it line up with this story? I have no idea.) 

What follows is a bunch of running around, fighting and day saving involving the two teams, with Eclipso Eclipsing the JSoA at one point and, at the end, Superman fusing the two diamonds into one (I think...?), Eclipso being reimprisoned in it and then The Spectre hurling it into the sun. (Does this line-up with Eclipso: The Darkness Within...? I don't know; I don't remember how it began, given that it's been over 30 years since I last read it).

Waid writes the action and the character's well enough, but I felt like the story was perhaps a little too fast, as I didn't have a grasp on who exactly Eclispo and Bruce Gordon were and what their relationship was (I can't imagine reading this without ever having encountered the characters before), nor did I have any sense of the League's history with the villain before this encounter, so there's no real way to appreciate what Waid is doing differently here. (Scrolling through the covers of JLoA online, I don't see any featuring Eclipso, so I'm not even sure where they might have encountered him; maybe in House of Secrets...?)

Gutierrez's art is a rather sharp departure from that of Mora. It's a lot more expressive, and the characters are more exaggerated and a bit more cartoony, which is fine, that's just the style. I think it lacked clarity at several points though, thanks to a couple panels in which the artist seemed to be taking shortcuts (And, as mentioned above, there were a few points upon which I wasn't sure what exactly was happening).

For example, multiple times throughout the issues the heroes are shown in long shot, reduced to silhouettes. Sometimes this seems like an artistic effect, and sometimes it seems like an excuse to not have to draw them (Take Red Tornado's entrance into the JSA brownstone, for example, or the weird scene where an Eclipsed Batman seems to be...bouncing the bat-signal like a dodgeball on the roof of Gotham Police HQ, maybe, and various indistinct muscular figures jump around, apparently the JSA diving out of the way...?)

Also, Gutierrez repeats one panel, in which Eclipso looks up and laughs maniacally, in two different issues. Poor form, Gutierrez! (At least the artist draws the bat-symbol correctly, though, rather than drawing the Batman '89 one that Mora always puts on Batman's chest in this series...!)

The Eclipso story is followed by a done-in-one in which Waid is joined by artist/colorist Fan Galan. In this one, Superman, Batman and Robin encounter an alien menace and are taken prisoner. In Gotham, Batgirl and Ace the Bat-Hound do their best to fill in for the missing Dynamic Duo, while Krypto the Superdog fetches Jimmy Olsen, urges him to take his Elastic Lad serum, and then flies him to Gotham to face a threat that only dogs can perceive.

It's a Batgirl/Jimmy Olsen team-up then, with each family's dog playing a big role.

It's a pretty fun story, of course, but it took me a while to get used to the art, given the coloring's somewhat garish, airbrush look and the computerized backgrounds behind the figures. 

Finally, there's the pair of non-Waid stories, one of which bleeds right into the next one. These are apparently taken from the Green Lantern/Green Arrow: World's Finest Special #1, with "World's Finest" here apparently meaning set in the same general time frame as Waid's book. Jeremy Adams writes them both. 

The first, "Livin' Free", is drawn by artist Lucas Meyer, colored by Marcelo Maiolo and finds the title heroes on a road trip (A road trip? Or the road trip? Unclear). They're attacked by Deathstroke the Terminator, who neither has ever mat at this point, although fans will recognize him immediately, even if he is given a new/old costume here, one that's basically a gray and black version of the one George Perez designed for him, minus the more dramatic elements, like chainmail and pirate boots. 

Deathstroke has apparently been contracted to kill Team Green and he tries to do so. He comes close, but the heroes hunt him down and almost defeat and capture

That 30-page story is followed immediately by "Live Fast! Die Now!", a ten-pager drawn by Travis Mercer and colored by Andrew Dalhouse that finds Green Lantern swooping into Central City just in time to save The Flash Barry Allen, who is the next target on Deathstroke's hit-list.

The art in the Flash story is much brighter than that of the lead story, and has a more comic book-y, drawn look than that of the GL/GA one, which tended toward the photo-realistic in a way that struck me as unnatural looking...but then, I do tend to have old-fashioned tastes when it comes to superhero comic book art.

It ends with Deathstroke escaping again, and a somewhat cheeky box in the last panel reading "The story continues in The New Teen Titans #2, Dec. 1980." (Say, does this help us further narrow down the exact time in which World's Finest is set? Since Firestorm has appeared in its pages, we know it has to be after March of 1978, and this suggests that it's before December of 1980, so I guess that gives us a pretty good ballpark.)

Tower Dungeon Vol. 1 (Vertical Comics) I do try to read more than just superhero comics, of course! This one I picked up on the simple strength of the cover art and superior book design, although apparently manga-ka Tsutomu Nihei is responsible for a couple of other manga, Blame! and Knights of Sidonia (Neither of which I had previously read, although I've heard of the latter one).

The story seems like a fairly simple one. In the very first pages, we see the kingdom's princess is kidnapped by some sort of bizarre-looking figure, who absconds with her to the Dragon Tower. This is a strange, floating tower that conceals within it the sort of sprawling, monster-filled "dungeon" that the Dungeons & Dragons games were originally centered around the exploring of (and, this being a comic, reminded me a bit of the setting of Joann Sfar and Lewis Trondheim's various Dungeon books, although more horrifying than cool, cute or funny).

As with a video game, each level of the tower seems to have more difficult monsters to defeat.

Rather than a single epic adventure to fight their way through the tower, the kingdom's military has been engaged in a long and protracted military campaign to conquer it, advancing and retreating through its levels, and sustaining quite visible injuries...and enough casualties that they have taken to drafting soldiers from the surrounding villages.

One such draftee is Yuva, a brave and quite strong farm boy with no military experience. 

Nihei's narrative follows Yuva to and into the tower, which is quite distinct from other such dungeon settings by its curious, portentous, even off-putting architecture and its strange monsters. (Though they encounter undead soldiers, some sort of slime and a dragon, they don't much look like the things with those names you might have seen in other comics).

The art is great, the black and white particularly stark in its rendering, something underlined by the soldiers simple, solid black uniforms, and what little world-building we get here, including a magic-user in Yuva's company and some odd, bug-like characters that appear near the end, is quite intriguing.

I don't know that I've got a good sense of what Nihei is attending here, given how straightforward the basic plot and premise is and how different the designs are, but I'm curious enough to pick up the next volume.

REVIEWED:

Chibi Usagi: Attack of The Heebie Chibis—Expanded Edition (Dark Horse Books) Cartoonist Stan Sakai was joined by his artist wife Julie for this rare, all-ages outing featuring his famous rabbit samurai character. 

The original edition came out in 2021 and featured the title story as well as a quite fun crossover between regular Usagi and Chibi Usagi. Dark Horse's new, expanded edition adds 30 pages of new content, mostly in the form of hefty gallery of covers and illustrations, but there are also a couple of short, humorous black-and-white stories that seem to be proto-Chibi Usagi stories. It's a perfect comic for kids not yet old or mature enough for epic "funny animal" samurai drama...and anyone curious about Sakai's work and world looking for an easy entry point. More here. 

Faiza is a Fighter (Soaring Kite Books) This charming, unusual and inspirational original graphic novel about a little girl who wants to be a boxer doesn't read or look a whole lot like any other comic I can think of. It's definitely worth checking out. More here. 

The Fire-Breathing Duckling (Toon Books) Fank Cammuso's riff on "The Ugly Duckling" is a pretty perfect first comic for the youngest readers...although anyone who likes great art, solid cartooning and quality comics-making will also find plenty to enjoy here, too. More here. 

Free Piano (Not Haunted) (Simon & Schuster Books for Young Readers) This new Whitney Gardner graphic novel follows a girl who wants to be a musician but gets wrapped up in the search for likes and followers, a preoccupation she gets from her aspiring musician father. And then she meets the ghost of a 1980s pop star, which inhabits the totally-not-haunted keyboard she finds by the side of the road one day. It's a lot of fun, even as it deals with some family melodrama and teaches always-relevant lessons about being true to yourself. More here. 

*If it's not Batgirl herself, of course. Although now that I think of it, I don't think I've seen Shiva fight Richard Dragon before. And I'm not sure how Conor Hawke ranks, but I can't think of an instance of him fighting Shiva either. I would like to see that happen in a comic book, though!

**Or, as I'm learning as I make my way through Haruichi Furudate's highly-recommended Haikyu!!, the most fun I've had reading a comic this year, in a high school volleyball game in the pages of a manga.

On 2023's All-Negro Comics 75th Anniversary Edition

I saw a listing for the upcoming November release of a book called All-Negro Comics, representing a Golden Age comic by that title, and, as I do for the majority of the upcoming comics I'm interested in reading these days, I went to my local library's website to reserve a copy. 

I was a little surprised that, within a week or so, I had already received a copy of it. 

Apparently, this particular edition, which Comics.org says is from publisher Very Good Books, came out in 2023, which was, as the title indicates, the 75th anniversary of the 1947 release of the original All-Negro Comics. 

Will the November release, a trade paperback with a different, slightly more interesting-looking cover being released by Image Comics, differ in content at all? I don't know; I guess I'll try to check it out and let you know then.

In the meantime, since I read this edition, I should probably go ahead and discuss it here. 

Some of the prose pieces, like Chris Robinson's foreword, Qiana Whitted's five-page essay and a contribution from Golden Age of Comics Blogging alum David Brothers help explain what exactly the book is, was and meant.

The original anthology title was the brainchild of Philadelphia journalist Orrin Cromwell Evans, who scripted all six features, a rather remarkable feat given the variety of genres: Crime, child-like fantasy, heroic action and several different comedic pieces, ranging from a page of one-panel cartoons to a one-page strip to a more extended seven-pager. (There was also a short prose story, entitled "Ezekiel's Manhunt"; like the many Hop Harrigan prose stories that interrupted the comics action in the Golden Age issues of All-Star Comics collected in the recent DC Finest: Justice Society of America collections, I skipped that completely.)

The book wasn't called All-Orrin Cromwell Evans Comics, though. Rather, the selling point was that it was the first comic written, drawn and published entirely by Black folks and, crucially, starring all Black characters. 

This was, obviously, so rare in the 1940s as to be a novelty...hell, it is and was so rare that such books are still a novelty more than 75 years later (You may note that in the last decade or so, DC and Marvel have devoted themselves to publishing occasional special issues that focus on particularly under-represented creators and characters, particularly various pride specials by LGBT+ creators focused on their respective universe's small but growing stable of LGBT+ creators. I'm not as up on Big Two comics as I used to be, but I know, for example, DC has done a couple focused on Black creators and characters in 2023's DC Power: A Celebration and DC Power 2024).

While there were some notable Black creators working in comics in the medium's Golden Age, Black characters were rare, and mostly limited to often problematic supporting characters and comedic relief, like, say The Spirit's Ebony White or Captain Marvel's Steamboat Bill (More often still, if there were Black faces in a comic feature at all, they were in the background, and more caricature than character). 

In the past few months, I read Lou Mougin's surveys of Golden Age comics, Secondary Superhero Comics of Golden Age Comics and Secondary Action Heroes of Golden Age Comics, which covered basically every feature that wasn't published by the companies that would become, or become acquired by, DC Comics and Marvel Comics, and I'm pretty sure I could count on one hand all of those that weren't white people. And still have a few fingers left.

All-Negro Comics was a remedy to that. 

The 48-page comic, reprinted in its entirety here, opened with an inside front cover featuring a short letter to readers from Evans himself, under a banner reading, "All-Negro Comics, Presenting Another FIRST in Negro History." In it, he promised "fast action, African adventure, good clean humor and fantasy" and, further, that "Every brush stroke and pen line in the drawings on these pages are by Negro artists." He hoped the comic would give such artists an opportunity to "gainfully use their talents" and "glorify Negro historical achievements."

Well, I'm not sure how that worked out, as there was no issue #2 and, reading the list of contributors, I didn't recognize any of their names (for whatever that's worth).

As for the contents, the book kicks off with "Ace Harlem," the "famed Negro detective". The 15-page story opens with a murder and robbery. Ace Harlem is called in to investigate, finds a telling clue and manages to track down the murderer, who has since killed again and will, ultimately, himself die in an ironic death that delivers a kind of final, karmic justice.

It's a perfectly serviceable crime comic, with an obvious anti-crime message—"I know it sounds like old stuff to you," Ace tells a beat cop in the last panel, "But I never heard of a crime yet that ever gained anybody any good!" 

Yet even going into it knowing the title of the book, it was still rather striking to see a Golden Age comic in which every single character is black: The hero, the criminals, the victim, the beautiful young woman, those interviewed during the investigation, every single bystander and background figure.

"Ace" is followed by "The Dew Dillies," big-headed, cherubic characters. One, a boy, has a little pair of wings, while the other, a girl, has a mermaid-like tail. They have a short, gentle adventures involving a few animals, their motivation mainly being to eat something delicious. This one reads a bit more like a children's book than a comic, with all of the dialogue and narration running in print along the top or bottom of the panels, rather than being spoken in dialogue bubbles or confined to narration boxes.

Next is the prose story, which, as I said, I skipped, as I always have with Golden Age prose stories in comics.

And then there's "Lion Man," a jungle adventure story that, despite its title, isn't quite a superhero story, but would seem to be in that particular ballpark. The title character doesn't wear a costume or have any super-powers. 

Instead, he is an "America-born, college educated...scientist, sent by the United Nations to watch over the fearsome 'Magic Mountain' of the African Gold Coast." There is enough uranium there to make "an atom bomb that could destroy the world."

Lion Man, whose real name is never used, seems to split his duty between guarding the mountain and keeping comedy relief character Bubba, a bulbous headed little boy, out of trouble. 

Real trouble comes in the form of some white dudes in pith helmets, the only white faces in the whole book. Like "Ace Harlem," it is not hard to imagine this strip continuing and evolving into something more long-lasting (Lion Man's name, scientific background and the whole huge-deposit-of-valuable metal bit reminded me, a reader on this side of 1966, a bit of Marvel's much later Black Panther character). 

That's followed by "Hep Chicks on Parade," featuring four single-panel cartoons with captions running below the quite-striking images, probably the best, most refined drawings in the whole book, each poking gentle fun at the outlandish fashions of the women in each.

That's followed by two more comedic features. 

The first of these is "Lil' Eggie," a one-page gag strip basically revolving around the idea that being married isn't always better than being a bachelor (As progressive as the "all-Negro" aspect of the book may be, one could certainly quibble with the gender politics of a few stories!).

The second is "Sugarfoot and Snake-Oil," billed simply as "Sugarfoot" in its first panel. This features some down-on-their-luck musicians getting into various scrapes, making music in exchange for a good meal from a farmer and his wife. 

It's full of slapstick humor, and characters speaking in the sort of dialects that might make one cringe if one thought the middle-aged, white, city-dweller who wrote so many books at the time were responsible for scripting it ("Wal, I dunno, but come over to my house anywhow, maybe my gal has somet'ing to eat," the farmer tells Sugarfoot, to which he responds, "Now you is talkin.'")

It ends with a kinda neat splash page featuring all of the characters together, with Lion Man and Bubba manning a magazine stand selling issues of All-Negro Comics, Sugarfoot and Snake-Oil standing before it as customers, and Ace Harlem and the Dew Dillies reading copies of their comic in the background. 

Like a lot of Golden Age comics, these stories tend towards the rough and primitive, and while there is certainly potential to some of them, it is mostly unrealized potential. Though the medium is about a decade into its existence, its format and conventions are still being realized. While none of the folks involved seem to be, say, a Jack Kirby or a Will Eisner or a Mac Raboy or a Jack Cole or a pick-your-favorite-Golden Age-artist-we-still-talk-about-today, the writing and art seems pretty standard for the time.

Also, it's great fun to get a whole issue like this, rather than just the cherry-picked lead superhero features that we so often get with modern collections of Golden Age comics.

The reprint of the original All-Negro Comics #1 only accounts for about half of this hard cover book, though. It's followed by some of the prose pieces I mentioned and, interestingly, brand-new strips from contemporary creators featuring Ace Harlem, Lion Man and the other characters and/or features of the original, including an update of the prose piece (which I also didn't read) and another four strips making light of the outrageous fashions of young black women.

These are all fine and are obviously a bit more sophisticated in their storytelling, but also lack the more simple, rough-hewn charm of the earlier stories.

Anyway, if you're as interested in the first decade or so of the medium as I am, keep an eye out for All-Negro Comics this fall (And, if you can't wait for the new one, I guess you can check your local library for the earlier edition)