Review: Invaders Now!

Not wanting to repeat the mistake I had made with last week's review of a Marvel comic, wherein I accidentally re-reviewed a book I had reviewed years previously, I took the time to search and see if I had already written about 2010-2011 miniseries Invaders Now!, which I know I had read before. I couldn't find a review of the collection on my site, so I guess I had either read it in single issues and reviewed it as part of my columns reviewing new releases, or I had read it in trade and never actually wrote about it.

The series was a collaboration between writer Christos Gage and cover artist Alex Ross, who share a "story" credit, and artist Caio Reis. Interestingly, the cover bears the logos for both Marvel and Dynamite Entertainment, and the credits page lists five folks from Dynamite. This, despite the fact that all of the characters are, of course, Marvel characters. At this remove, I couldn't even guess why Dynamite would be involved in a series like this; was Ross perhaps under some kind of contract with the publisher that necessitated their involvement...?

The stars are, of course, The Invaders, a Golden Age super-team retconned into Marvel Universe history by Roy Thomas and Sal Buscema in a 1969 Avengers story. Though some of the characters shared covers and occasionally crossed over—especially in regards to Namor and The Human Torch— in various Timely comics, they never really operated as a team during the war years. These days, they are basically Marvel's answer to DC's Justice Society of America. 

For this particular series, Ross and Gage have essentially reassembled the 1970s line-up, and added the Golden Age Vision, who functions as much as a plot device as a character. Of course, it picks up those various characters where they were in the Marvel Universe circa 2010, and so Bucky is serving as the "official" Captain America, Steve Rogers has a new, maskless costume and is the leader of SHIELD, The Torch and Toro are recently-ish resurrected, Namor is hanging out with the X-Men on Utopia and Union Jack is the Joseph Chapman version.

The story is pretty straightforward. There's a bizarre, terrifying attack at a hospital in the Netherlands, wherein a muscular, badly deformed man stumbles in seeking aid, and then attacks with what seems like super-stength and rage, his bite infecting others and transforming them into creatures like himself. Somewhat zombie-ish then, although the victims look a bit more like Hulked-out versions of Quasimodo than the undead.

Shown footage of the incident, Steve Roges, serving as Boss of All Super-Heroes, folds his hands and says, "I know what this is." Just as he's in the midst of ordering Maria Hill to alert various heroes, The Golden Age Vision and the other characters from the cover appear, Vision declaring, "Only The INVADERS can save this world now," the team's name appearing in a giant, stylized font as it does on the cover. (Though this Vision is an extra-dimensional alien rather than an android, his yellow-colored dialogue balloons are square in shape, with rigidly straight lines connecting them, which visually suggests a mechanical nature to his voice.)

We then get a series of flashbacks, showing Vision as he gathers the others in groups of two—the fact that the various Invaders were spending time with one another at this point of crisis, he intimates, was no coincidence, but part of the pull of a magical force being marshalled against them).

And then a more substantial flashback, revealing the truth behind a bombshell Steve drops at the end of the first issue. 

"She's talking about the darkest chapter in our history," Steve says of something that Spitfire breaks up while recalling, "...WHEN THE INVADERS MURDERED A TOWN FULL OF INNOCENT PEOPLE."

Pretty strong cliffhanger, right?

As for that story, it takes places in the Netherlands in 1945, wherein The Invaders were battling "the full roster of the Uberkommando", all of Hitler's superhumans: Master Man, U-Man, Baron Blood and Warrior Woman. The Nazi super-people are defending a nearby castle containing the laboratory of Arnim Zola, who was, at that particular point, still entirely human.

In that lab, he had cooked up weaponized disease glimpsed at the beginning of the first issue, the thing that turns civilians into deformed, muscular killer monsters and drives the to bite others, spreading the disease zombie apocalypse style.

Once they learn that there is absolutely no cure, and that the disease causes incredibly pain for those suffering from it, the heroes make a terrible judgement call, one that the original Union Jack refused to be a part of, even if he also said he wouldn't try to stop them from implementing it: The Invaders kill all of the infected civilians, burning down their village and flooding the whole area.

And now these same characters (with a new Union Jack in for the old) are forced to face that situation again, as the infection seems to have resurfaced and, when they return to the town, they see it magically being rebuilt and find themselves facing the new iteration of the team of super-Nazis they fought during the war (Master Man, Warrior Woman and U-Man all seem to still be around, and are here joined by a huge robot battle-suit going by the name Iron Cross and two identical skinheads in matching shirts with swastikas on them; I didn't catch their names).

So, what exactly is going on?

Well, the villain is revealed to be a survivor of the town, one whose infection resulted in his being deformed, but not becoming a mindless killer like the others. He blamed the Invaders for the deaths of his family, and has spent his life studying the occult, trying to find a way to bring his family back to life...and hating these heroes the whole time.

It certainly didn't help that almost all of the Invaders have, one way or another, not only survived the war, but also cheated death and lived, young and vital as ever, into the 21st century. Hell, several of them have literally died and been resurrected through extraordinary means. (It must be unusual for those who lose a loved one to regard death in the Marvel Universe, where there are so many famous examples of people returning from the dead, and almost as many different ways to achieve those resurrections; one imagines the loss lacks the finality that it does here in our universe.)

Using his occult knowledge and the Spear of Destiny, the vengeful old man has summoned a Lovecraftian deity associated with the area (the word "fhtagn" is repeated a lot) and attempts to trade the Invaders' lives for those of the townspeople...a bargain the Invaders themselves seem willing to make, to his own surprise. (Two quick points of interest. First, when the magic-user holds aloft the Spear, he says that it was "lost during the closing days of the war," and an editorial note points readers to 2010's WWII-set one-shot The Twelve: Spearhead, completely ignoring the fact that a kid lifted it from a German museum during the events of 1994's Wolverine: Evilution; this is Evilution erasure! Second, that Lovecraftian entity, a one-eyed ball of tentacles, is Shua-Gorath; I didn't recognize it as a pre-existent character the first time I read this, but now recognize it from the film Doctor Strange and the Multiverse of Madness.)

Naturally, despite long odds and the surprise appearance of the now weird-looking, robot-bodied Zola, the heroes end up saving the day, defeating the various villains and even providing a cure to the new crop of infected victims, something they were unable to do in 1945, back before they had the likes of super-scientists like Reed Richards and Hank Pym in their contact lists.

The story is fairly simple, and of the plot-over-character variety, but it is quite well-told, moving quite swiftly through pages with very few panels on them and driven by some particularly hooky cliffhangers. Despite Ross' predictably realistic covers, the interior art occasionally leaves something to be desired.

Reis' art is fine so long as it involves super-people in costumes posing, of which there is a fair amount here, but he's much less able to sell the scenes of various civilians, even when it involves our heroes out of costume. I'm not quite sure about his female figures, either. Spitfire, who wears a full-body yellow suit with little ornamentation, essentially looks like she's naked in every panel she appears in, color artists Vincius Andrade protecting her modesty, and there's at least one panel of Maria Hill weirdly jutting her breasts out Steve in their office (Page 20, panel 1, should you have a copy in front of you).

The whole affair reads like it was meant to be a pilot series for an Invaders ongoing, ending with a two-page spread featuring eight-person team posing, flashbacks to past adventures appearing in the clouds of mist seeming to emanate from The Vision, who declares, "Should freedom ever again be threatened... The INVADERS will answer the call." 

The Invaders did indeed get a short-lived ongoing a few years later, with 2014's All-New Invaders by James Robinson, Steve Pugh and others, but it only featured half of this line-up—Steve Rogers (back to being Captain America), Namor, The Human Torch and Bucky Barnes (back to being The Winter Soldier)—and picking up a few other characters before its cancellation 15 issues later. Then in 2019, Chip Zdarsky helmed another short attempt at an ongoing featuring the same four heroes (Where was poor Toro in all of this?), this one only lasting 12 issues.

I think Invaders Now! was an effective enough reunion sort of comic, and could have served for a decent launchpad for something like a Marvel answer to DC's JSA, so I'm kinda curios why Marvel didn't commission such an ongoing from Gage, but instead waited a few years and had Robinson, who had actually co-written DC's millennial JSA for a bit, try his hand at a version of the team. 

Revisiting it today, I think it provides a fun opportunity to see some of the original, pre-Marvel Marvel characters interacting and see some of the lesser-used characters like The Vision and Toro doing anything at all.

There's also a particularly fun bit hanging on some Marvel Universe lore, as when Namor takes The Torch back to Utopia, and a couple of shy young mutants blurt out, "IS IT TRUE YOU KILLED HITLER?"

After a silent, beat panel, where The Torch looks taken aback and Namor smiles at him smugly, two of the boys looking like they realize they said something they shouldn't have, and another flashing back to The Torch setting Hitler ablaze, he finally answers:

It's all right, son.

The answer is yes... ...I killed Hitler. 

And I don't mind talking about it at all. There are plenty of things I did in the war I'd rather forget... ...but setting that monster on fire and watching him burn...

...I regret I could only do it once.

On the following page, Namor tells The Torch that his willingness to set Hitlers on fire is part of the reason the world of the 21st century needs someone like Jim Hammond around:

What you said to those boys, Jim Hammond... You must understand that is why you're needed.

The warriors of today...The Avengers, The X-Men...They adhere to a different code. One perhaps appropriate to the modern world...but limited. 

They are reluctant to kill...even the likes of Hitler. Those who are not averse tend to relish bloodshed. Often too much.

The world needs men like you. Who will do what is necessary without hesitation, but recognize that war and peace are different states of being.

With the short life spans of these humans, such men are swiftly fading from the Earth.

Namor sold me...which makes it kinda too bad we don't see more of this Torch in Marvel comics these days. 

And it makes me wonder, were Spider-Man in Hitler's bunker 80 years ago, would he have killed Hitler? Would Cyclops? Iron Man? Daredevil? Hawkeye?

The End of JLA Pt. 4: "The Pain of the Gods"

Writer Chuck Austen and artist Ron Garney's melodramatically titled 2004 arc "The Pain of the Gods", which ran twice-monthly in JLA #101-106, is probably the worst story published in the title's nine-year history. But that has less to do with the quality of the writing or the art than it does with the story's overall conception and premise.

You see, while it was a story featuring Justice Leaguers, it wasn't really a Justice League story...at least, it didn't really become one until its sixth and final installment, which is rather late in a story packaged and sold in sequential units.

The first five chapters are all organized around different members of the team, who would take turns as the main protagonist, Garney's strong, portrait-like covers showing which hero was that particular issue's designated star. 

For the first five issues, "Pain of the Gods" reads like a series of solo stories, in which the other heroes would only play small roles. In the first chapter, for example, the only character other than Superman to appear at all is Green Lantern John Stewart, and he only appeared on about two pages.

The problem with this is, of course, was that the Justice League was originally conceived to be made up of heroes who each starred in their own comics. And while the team's book got away from that concept for a long while between 1984 and 1997 or so, this title, JLA, reestablished the team as one made of DC's most popular heroes. 

So a series of solo stories starring the likes of, say, Gypsy, Vixen, Vibe and company in the 1980s might have made for a compelling read, a series of solo series starring a team consisting of Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman, The Flash, Martian Manhunter and a Green Lantern? Well, that seems nonsensical; four of those characters had their own books at that point, and two of those four had entire lines of their own books.

With "The Pain of the Gods" then, Austen seemed to be de-inventing the Justice League concept, ending up with a Superman comic book...? A Wonder Woman comic book...? What was the point, exactly?

Now, there is connective tissue between these six chapters. The first issue is a Superman solo story, guest-starring Green Lantern. By the second chapter, which focuses on The Flash (and has a really great cover by Garney, depicting a seemingly exhausted Flash, striking the pose of a winded runner taking a break), there are four other heroes, even though they don't appear until the end, on the last four pages. The next three issues have different groupings of the heroes essentially having interventions on behalf of whoever that particular issue's god in pain is. 

By the final issue, the one with Batman on the cover (has a Justice League comic cover ever looked like less of a Justice League comic cover than that one?), all six heroes appear together, essentially working a case together.

As I mentioned, there are some throughlines in these half-dozen issues of JLA, particularly regarding a plotline that is sort of in the background through most of the arc and then comes to the fore in the final issue, but until a reader gets to that last issue, "The Pain of the Gods" reads like a series of solo stories guest-starring other heroes. 

Read all at once, as I read it this time, it's a much better story, and what Austen was doing with the overall structure makes a bit more sense. But read 22 pages at a time, as it was originally published, it seemed to make little sense, and to be incredibly wrong-headed and, frankly, quite boring...especially for this title, which spent the previous 100 issues on often quite dense, action-packed stories in which somewhere between seven and twenty superheroes would team-up to save the world...or universe...or reality itself.

Lucky for you then, if you hadn't read it before, you have little choice but to read it all at once, as a final and complete story, rather than reading one-sixth of it every other Wednesday, while the DC Universe of superheroes continued to zip by.

In the first issue—which, by itself, is actually a very good done-in-one Superman story—The Man of Steel is helping firemen evacuate a burning building that is in danger of exploding at any minute, thanks to a gigantic tank of gas in its basement, where several firemen are pinned under debris.

He gets some unexpected help from a super-strong guy in a fairly generic superhero costume, who hefts the gas tank over his head and says he will hold it while Superman gets the firemen out. (He's introduced in a double-page splash, one of three in this issue which, if you were paying cover price for new comics from the shop, was awfully annoying; that's about a fourth of the comic right there.) 

Superman agrees, but while he's doing so, a spark of flame leaps up and lands on the newcomer's arm, to which he says to himself, "I guess I'm not invulnerable." 

Soon the tank explodes (another double-page splash), and Superman finds the mysterious man's charred corpse in the burning ruins. 

Cut to the JLA's lunar Watchtower, where Superman finds himself alone, and screams in anguish, tears the meeting table in half and starts smashing chairs. Green Lantern finds him later, saying that he heard the news report and "thought you might need a-- --a friendly ear." And so Superman talks about his feelings to the silent John for a page, thanks him for listening, and then goes to visit the dead hero's wife in a suburb outside of Metropolis, where he learns a little bit more about him. 

(But not much. And we won't over the course of the story either. Like I said, his costume was a bit generic—tights, briefs, a cape, domino mask—and while he seems to have super-strength, we don't learn anything else about his powers, nor even his superhero identity. Maybe it's expecting a bit much of Austen and/or Garney to invent a cool new superhero who seems like they could plausibly be a new character in the DCU who is only meant to last the length of a single story, but, well, Grant Morrison and Howard Porter did it with Tomorrow Woman in 1997's JLA #5...and John Arcudi and Scot Eaton did it with Antaeus in 1999 one-shot JLA: Superpower...and D. Cutis Johnson did it with Moon Maiden in 2000's JLA 80-Page Giant #3...)

Anyway, it's a perfectly fine Superman story, one that perhaps tangentially has something to do with the League, given John's appearance and Superman's actions on the last page to honor the fallen would-be hero's wishes.

But that's just one-sixth of the story.

Next, The Flash Wally West also comes upon a burning building, and, with his amazing super-speed, we see him rescue people and then return to look for any other survivors...and he stumbles upon a pair of children, who have already died from smoke inhalation.

Unable to get the sight of the dead kids out of his mind, Wally buys all the smoke detectors he can from a hardware store and then runs around installing them in houses at super-speed, pausing long enough to lecture a father about the importance of keeping a fresh battery in his smoke alarm, shedding a tear, exploding at the man and then running away...and into Superman, Wonder Woman, G.L. and Martian Manhunter, all hovering a few inches off the ground in his path. 

Wonder Woman embraces him as he breaks down, and then they adjourn to the meeting table, where Flash talks with them about it, and Superman offers some advice.

On the last three pages, we see a kid on a playground, the son of the hero who died in the first issue, and we see Superman is watching him. Other than that last scene, this is essentially a Flash solo story, although at least here there are more Leaguers and they play a slightly bigger role and fill more pages than John did in that first issue. 

And it's becoming apparent that Superman's interest in the man who died wasn't confined to that one issue, and that the Leaguers can experience devastating trauma in their work and that they are there for one another when it comes to dealing with it.

Next up is Green Lantern, who doesn't happen upon a third burning building, but is put in an even more unlikely situation, of the sort only a writer could come up with. He's flying between two buildings. To his right, someone is calling for help, "Someone, please help me!" And to his left, someone else is also calling for help, "Oh my God, someone help me!" 

What are the chances that two people would call from help from two apartments directly across the street from one another at the exact same time, the time at which John Stewart happens to be flying by? He does what he can with his ring, constructing a big "STOP" sign in one apartment, while he flies into the other.

He apparently chose the wrong one, though. He finds himself in the middle of a domestic abuse situation, and when he goes to check on the other one, he finds that a man has just murdered a woman in the seconds he was occupied elsewhere.

(If this seems like too much to be a coincidence, and you're wondering if maybe this is some supervillain's plot, I'm with you; I thought the same thing too back in 2004, but no, there's no villain behind it. This was all just some extremely contrived coincidence.)

After beating the murderer half to death (as depicted on the cover), John goes a little nuts, deciding he must be on-duty as Green Lantern 24/7 in order to protect everyone on the planet. Superman comes to talk to him at one point, apparently returning the favor from the first chapter, but John blows him off. It's not until he almost collapses from exhaustion while trying to save someone later that he realizes he must take a break, which Superman, Wonder Woman, The Flash and J'onn all insist upon.

At the end, we again see Superman watching over the kid on the playground, this time interrupting some would-be bullies, but the kid tells him off.

Next? The Martian Manhunter. This one is the most...off issue of the six. It opens with the same five characters around the meeting table, with John talking about what's been bothering him since the previous issue (there seems to be a reference to the vents of Cosmic Odyssey in there too), when J'onn J'onnz suddenly stands up and announces, "Excuse me-- --But I need to be somewhere."

He goes off to get a job with a detective agency as John Jones, incongruously wearing a trench coat and wide-brimmed hat. While he narrates about how he feels alienated from his fellow teammates, he throws himself into his new work, his weird behavior making his bosses and new coworkers very suspicious of him. They even have a fellow detective try to cozy up to him to figure out what his deal is, and J'onn's super-weird with her too.

Eventually Superman, Flash and Green Lantern track him down to his mostly empty apartment, and they share their insights about J'onn: Apparently, as soon as he starts to feel comfortable around others, as soon as he starts to feel happy, he removes himself from their company, in order to protect himself emotionally, all the result of his lingering survivor's guilt related to being the last-ish Martian.

Again, it's a fairly strong Martian Manhunter story, but it doesn't really make sense for a present day Martian Manhunter story, one set some decades after he arrived on Earth (It's been a while since I've reread the 1998-2001 Martian Manhunter series, which would have been quite current in 2004, but according to that, J'onn was already on Earth when baby Kal-El arrived here, so he's been living among humans in one form or another for a good 30 or more years now, depending on how old Superman was meant to be when he debuted post-Crisis...and J'onn would have been with the Justice League for at least 10 of those years). 

Rather, it read like a "Martian Manhunter: Year One" kind of story.  No mention of the son of the dead hero from the first chapter in this issue.

Next? Wonder Woman. After a brutal nine-page fight with a new, unnamed supervillain foe (two pages of which are devoted to an unnecessary splash), Wonder Woman is upset by the fact that she very nearly died in combat and goes to the Watchtower to find someone to talk to. 

Flash and G.L., busy playing videogames, don't seem interested in listening to her, which might seem odd given that she was just comforting them. J'onn asks her, "Are you in need of emotional support, Wonder Woman?" When she starts talking to him about what just happened to her, he cuts her off: "Well, Superman is on Earth, following the child of the man who died in that factory explosion." He then turns and walks away.

She goes to Earth and finds that Superman is indeed still creeping on a playground. This time the bullies are picking on some other kid, and the dead man's son shows up in a cape and domino mask to save the bullied child. Superman and Wonder Woman have a brief heart to heart, and then look back to the playground, where they see the kid playing superhero isn't actually playing: He has super-strength. 

And that brings us to the final issue. It has Batman, who hasn't appeared in any of the previous issues at all, on its cover, but this isn't anything like a Batman solo story, nor does it focus at all on his dealing with any sort of trauma. One imagines this is probably because of how many thousands of pages of comics have already been devoted to Batman dealing with emotional pain and trauma and being in various states of mental health crisis. 

Instead, it opens on the playground, where the super-strong kid punches out Superman, sending him flying on the issue's first double-page splash (He's pretty pissed about Superman letting his dad die, it seems). 

Batman doesn't appear until the sixth page, upon which Superman, Wonder Woman, Flash and J'onn talk to the dead man's widow in her living room, while Batman is "investigating" her daughter. 

He discovers that it wasn't just the dead man who got powers from a meteor during a camping trip, but the whole family. And the League needs to intervene to stop the widow, who seems to be the most powerful member of the family, before she takes matters into her own hands to avenge her dead husband, going after the man who owned the building her husband had died in, as he apparently cheated on building codes and paid off inspectors, making the building unsafe.

It ends with a silent sequence in which Superman is standing over the grave of the man who died, gradually joined by first John, then J'onn and Wonder Woman, then The Flash and, in the final panel, we see Batman appear, although rather than standing by Superman's side, he's in the branches of a nearby tree, looking on.

As with "The Tenth Circle", there is obviously a lot going on here and, I think, it never all quite comes together.

J'onn's out-of-character alien behavior aside, Austen seems to have a pretty good handle on the characters, and here attempts to do something I don't think I've seen anyone do with them before, presenting the Justice Leaguers like other first responders or soldiers, people with incredibly stressful jobs that occasionally break down, or are faced with debilitating traumas and have to genuinely struggle just to keep doing what they do.

How do they manage? By talking to their peers, who are always willing to listen and, when they see that one of their members is in crisis, to intervene. 

If this were the only Justice League story you ever read, you would be forgiven for thinking they are not so much a superhero team as they are a support group as, aside from the investigation of the super-powered family in the sixth and final chapter, the only things they really do together is talk about their traumas.

The problem with what Austen does here, I think, is that by organizing the stories around the throughline with the super-powered family, he limits the time in which these events take place, so that in a very compressed time—a few weeks, maybe?—each of the members of the Justice League (at least those he's concerned with in this arc, anyway) is subjected to an out-of-the-ordinary event that shakes them to their core.

Like, what are the chances that Superman sees a fellow superman die in a burning building just as The Flash is seeing dead kids in a burning building just as Green Lantern is in the middle of what sounds like a philosopher-conceived moral dilemma and so on? Like the situation Green Lantern was in, it just feels too coincidental, too artificial, too...well, too written. 

I don't think superhero stories need to be realistic. Certainly no other story in JLA is anything approaching realistic. But they do need to be believable...that is, a reader has to be able to believe in them, no matter how ridiculous the characters and events of the plot may be. Like, nothing Grant Morrison wrote during their run, the one that launched JLA, was the least bit realistic, but I still believed in every story they wrote. 

But "The Pain of the Gods"...? No, I couldn't help but see the strings. 

Now, I hated this story when it was originally released, for some of the reasons I already articulated—the fact that it was a series of solo stories featuring characters who already had their own books, how disconnected it was from the DCU in general and from the stories that preceded it in this very title—and a few that I didn't, like its space-wasting splash pages (devoted to what were big moments within the story, sure, but not ones that actually needed all that paper to detail).

I like it considerably more today than I did 21 years ago, perhaps because I was able to read it all in one sitting rather than stretched out over the course of three months (And that I wasn't paying for each issue but reading it in a trade collection from the library). And/or perhaps because at this remove, it's easier to see it in the context of the whole weird last years of JLA and I'm thus not surprised at all by any aspect of it (In 2004 though, you can imagine how weird it was to read this story, while spin-off Justice League Elite seemed to be the "real" Justice League title). 

In retrospect, I think DC would have been better off publishing this as an original graphic novel, or perhaps a mini-series, or waiting a bit and running it in the pages of JLA Classified (which would launch just two months after this arc concluded) then in JLA proper. 

I do think it aged quite well. Perhaps because it is so focused on its own events, and because of its relatively small cast, it's not necessarily tied to a particular time in the DC Universe or the greater Justice League story (Looking back, based on the character involved, it seems as if this could have occurred pretty much anywhere between 2004's JLA #90, when J'onn had rejoined the League after a brief sabbatical, and 2005's #119, when he is seemingly killed by Superboy-Prime. I think it might also have worked as a story set in the universe of the Justice League cartoon series too, actually). 

In that respect, it's definitely a more timeless, more evergreen JLA story than many...perhaps most of the others. Even if it is, as I said, perhaps the weakest overall. 

Garney, who inked as well as penciled his work here, does a pretty fine job. By this point in his career, his figures were big, bold and powerful-looking, and Austen's script gave him a lot of very emotional material to work with, as well as some relatively big superhero moments. 

I've complained a bit about the splash pages, and there are a lot of them. The book actually reads a bit like manga, given how few panels are on each of the pages. It was annoying to twenty-something Caleb shelling out $2.25 per issue (Wow, comics used to be less than $3?!), but now I don't mind so much, as it made for rather lightning-fast pacing. 

Reading this story, one might find themself wondering what Garney might be able to do with a "real" JLA story, one with lots of superheroes, supervillains, superpowers, battles and exotic settings. Good thing then that Garney would stick around for the next arc too, which was much more business as usual for the title. Which is, of course, a compliment. 

"The Pain of the Gods" was collected in 2005's JLA: Pain of the Gods and 2016's JLA Vol. 8.

Next: Kurt Busiek, Ron Garney and Dan Green's "Syndicate Rules" from 2004's JLA #107-114.

On 2017's Ghost Rider/Wolverine/Punisher: Hearts of Darkness (again, apparently)

(UPDATE: So funny story, and by "funny" I mean "slightly alarming." I wanted to revisit 1991's Hearts of Darkness due to some of my recent reading of Ghost Rider comics, so I looked for it in my library catalog, found the above 2017 collection, checked it out, read it and then spent a few hours writing, oh, almost 4,000 words about it. Once I was finished and was attaching tags to it, I noticed that I already had seven for "ron garney" which seemed like a lot to me, so I clicked on that to see which of the comics he drew I had already reviewed and—surprise!—I had already reviewed this very trade, back in 2017, when it first came out. What's worse, that review was much shorter, punchier and funnier than the one I had just written. So not only is my memory deteriorating to the point that I can't remember which comics I've already written about—hell, I didn't even remember having read Dark Design before, and thought I was doing so here for the first time—but my comics-writing-about skills are apparently deteriorating, as I've grown increasingly used to writing super-long posts and publishing once or twice a week, rather than writing something daily-ish. So that's...great. Just great. Anyway, since I wasted an afternoon re-reviewing this book, I might as well go ahead and post it. But do keep in mind there's a shorter 2017 review that makes pretty much the exact same points as this one, only in fewer words. Ugh...)

This trade paperback collects a pair of Howard Mackie-written team-ups featuring three of Marvel's most violent, most badass and most popular heroes of the 1990s: Ghost Rider, Wolverine and The Punisher. 

The first, sub-titled Hearts of Darkness and featuring art from John Romita JR and Kalus Janson, was released in 1991 as a $4.95 special, with a spine and sturdier cover, essentially what DC Comics used to call "prestige format." 

The second, 1994's The Dark Design, was a fairly direct sequel, gathering the same heroes, the same villains and even a supporting character, but this one was drawn by Ron Garney and Al Milgrom (And, I see, cost a buck extra, which seems like a lot of inflation for just three years). 

As I mentioned in the first of my recent posts about Marvel's Ghost Rider character, I had actually read Hearts of Darkness before, shortly after it came out, when I was around 13 or so. If I recall the circumstances correctly, my grandfather had taken my sister, brother and I to downtown Ashtabula on a Saturday afternoon, and I convinced them to let me stop into the comic shop that was then on Main Street. My grandfather offered to buy my little brother a comic too, even though he wasn't a regular reader like I was. 

I suggested he try a Marvel comic, as I figured it made no sense for both of us to read DC Comics, and if he started reading Marvels that would double my access to comics. This book, which had a neat wraparound cover, the right half of which was reused for that of the collection, is what he chose (Why my grandfather agreed to pay almost $5 for a comic book, given that he grew up buying them for a dime, I can't imagine).

At the time, I knew almost nothing about the title characters beyond what I read in that comic (and had gleaned from the covers of their books I had seen previously in the shop), and less than that about the book's villain Blackheart, and his adversary/father, Mephisto. 

I didn't remember too much about it, other than that I kinda liked the art (At that point, the only name I was familiar with on the cover was "Klaus Janson", which I knew from reading a friend's copy of The Dark Knight Returns). That and, despite the chains, claws and guns, it must not have really spoken to me, as I didn't start following the adventures of any of these characters after that. (My brother went on to read Wolverine #48-50, which I still have in a longbox somewhere....Say, that fiftieth issue with the claw marks through the outer cover didn't ever end up being worth anything, did it...? Oh, and I did pull Ghost Rider #33 off the new rack out of desperation a few years later, but otherwise it wasn't until about 2000, when Marvel started hiring favorite DC creators and launching their new reader friendly Ultimate line that I started reading any Marvel comics regularly.)

I was curious to revisit the comic now, in part because reading Wolverine: Evilution and the first couple hundred pages of the '90s Ghost Rider comic put me in something of a mood to see more of those characters from that time period, and in part because I was curious to see how much the experience of doing so at this point might differ, decades and hundreds of comics later, when I was so much more familiar with the characters, having seen them in various cartoons, movies and TV shows...in addition to the comics.

Oddly, I have to admit my regard for Hearts of Darkness hasn't changed all that much. I still think the art is pretty great (in the years since 1990, I got to know the name John Romita JR, and gained a great esteem for his work, although I think this is maybe the earliest of his comics I've read), and the story so-so, a somewhat strained plot offering little in the way of characterization, beyond a very tell-not-show summation of these darker superheroes as belonging to a newer, more modern breed of Marvel champion.

The 46-page story opens in the town of Christ's Crown, apparently so named because of a nearby hilltop ringed in thorns, like Jesus' own crown of thorns. There some people in hoods and cloaks have gathered by torchlight to sacrifice a pretty blonde woman, her modesty preserved by a blanket, in the name of a devil that sounds more like that of an X-Men character than something from the Bible: Blackheart. 

Apparently created by JRJR himself just about a year or so previous, with writer Ann Nocenti for their Daredevil run, the character is the son of Marvel's devil figure Mephisto, and has an interesting look: He's an all-black humanoid with a tail, giant red eyes, thorny skin and a huge mane of hair that looked more like porcupine quills than dreadlocks to teenage Caleb (Wes Bentley played him in the 2007 Ghost Rider movie, although he looked far more like Wes Bentley than JRJR's weird design in that movie). 

He bubbles up from the blood spilled to summon him, strips the flesh from the bones of all of his worshipers, and then seems to have a nervous breakdown of sorts, complaining to himself about his lot in life, that his father stripped him of his free will and, holding the skull of one of the victims' head aloft like Hamlet, he talks about how "There is a new breed of man...one whose fall towards the corrupt will not be so far", a breed of man that will help him kill his father. 

Cut to Dan Ketch motorcycling into what seems like a pretty typical small town, arriving at a local boarding house with a big sign reading "BOARDING HOUSE" on it, and meeting its proprietor, a woman named Flo, and her daughter, a little girl with a ponytail bouncing a ball in the driveway.

He's only the latest boarder there, and he meets the other two at dinner: A "Mr. Logan", who, thanks to his distinctive hairstyle, any reader would immediately recognize as Wolverine, and a "Mr. Frank," who looks a lot like The Punisher wearing sunglasses indoors...save for his pencil-thin mustache.

"Something about these two," Dan thinks to himself. "I feel like I've met them before."

He has, of course. According to Comics.org, Hearts of Darkness was cover dated December of 1991; Ghost Rider met Punisher in issues #5 and #6 of his own book, September and October of the previous year, and he first met Wolverine in a string of issues of Marvel Comics Presents during the winter of 1990-1991. 

Dan apparently can't see through their disguises and aliases though, and they don't recognize him without his skull on fire, I guess, although Wolvie will later tell The Punisher "something about him tickles my nose," regarding Ketch.

This happens at night, when Wolverine sticks a claw through Punisher's door with a "SNIKT" and a "Guess who?" 

"Mr. Logan?" Punisher says, opening the door. "Thought it was you. Didn't think you'd recognize me."

"The phony mustache ain't that good of a disguise," Wolvie answers. "Besides you've got the stink of death on you, Punisher-- --Just like me!" 

Here Frank peels off his mustache, which, sadly, never reappears throughout the rest of the comic.

They compare notes, and we learn what brings the three anti-heroes to the Christ's Church boarding house: All three received short, hand-written notes signed "B.H.", each promising what might seem like their heart's desire. Knowledge about the Ghost Rider, Wolverine's true origins and how he received his claws, and who really killed Castle's family.

So not really all that sophisticated a plan, for a demon, really, this anonymous mail scam. For some reason, they had to come to Christ's Crown, too? Is that where Blackheart lives? Can he not tempt long-distance?

Anyway, that night Blackheart appears to all three separately in their rooms, apparently simultaneously, tempting them further, and talking about them as a new breed of hero:

All three of you represent humanity's newest breed of hero.

A hero that isn't afraid to approach the edge when need arises.

It's an intangible thing. A gray area which resides within each of you, in a place that my father would call your soul. 

I mean, I guess...? But it seems more of an aesthetic thing, at this point. The Punisher and Wolverine seem to kill enemies without compunction, and not fret over the morality of doing so all that much (I wouldn't exactly say The Punisher works in a "gray area," for example; he just seems to murder bad guys and save good guys). 

And while I'm obviously not sure about what happens later in his career, but at this point, Dan's Ghost Rider has never killed anyone.

Anyway, Blackheart's pitch involves making them more powerful, helping them tap into the gray area of their souls and, in exchange, all he wants from them, he says, is their help in killing "the greatest evil your race has ever known, my father, Mephisto." A little later, Blackheart refers to Mephisto as "your world's devil," which seems pretty appropriate.

Still, all three don't want to work with Blackheart, and all three answers in a curt declarative: "No."

Blackheart then, realizing he will have to try a different approach, disappears from their rooms. Flo and seemingly all of the people in the town start to walk as if in a daze towards the top of the hill. As for Blackheart, he's stolen Danny's bike and abducted Lucy.

Punisher and Wolverine struggle to get through both the mass of innocent people and then, later, the thorns. Dan, meanwhile, shouldn't be able to transform into Ghost Rider without his bike, but then looks at his palms, and sees symbols on each. His hands then burst into flame, the flesh melting off of them, and then off his face, and, transformed, he jumps onto a motorcycle stolen from a sports store and speeds through the thorns.

After a bit more tempting (during which Blackheart refers to Ghost Rider as "Zarathos! If that is who you are"; it is, we will eventually learn, not who this Ghost Rider is), the heroes all follow Blackheart to hell in an attempt to free Lucy, and there they fight hordes of little green, frog-like creatures (those seen on the wraparound cover), and, eventually, take on Blackheart. 

One would think such a thing would be impossible, but Ghost Rider takes off his gloves to reveal boney, burning fists, and shouting "Feel the pain!" he lays into Blackheart, punching him so hard he pulps half his face. Another punch, and his fist breaks through Blackheart's torso, exiting the demon's back.

From there, Wolverine lops off one of Blackheart's arms, and then Punisher spends a few panels shooting him with what I think are a machine gun ("BUDDA BUDDA BUDDA") and a grenade launcher, maybe? ("POOM POOM POOM POOM"). I don't know; I've never read an issue of The Punisher Armory, so I'm not sure what guns he carries when. 

Soon, Blackheart is just a severed head sitting in a pool of black goo, but as much punishment as his physical body seems to have taken, he can't be killed like this, and his body starts to reform. Before he can do so though, the heroes are all dismissed by Blackheart's dad, Mephisto.

This Mephisto looks nothing like the red-skinned devil with the cape and fright wig that John Buscema and Stan Lee created for Silver Surfer in the late-sixties. Rather, he looks more like a behemoth red humanoid frog of sorts, with a prominent beak, a long, long tongue and prominent breasts, each with a long, ribbon-like nipple. His weird head is crowned with an explosion of thick red hairs or tentacles, and he's surrounded by gingerbread-shaped forms that I assume are meant to be human souls in long-shot.

He scoops up the puddle of Blackheart and swallows him, making a vague threat to Ghost Rider: 

Go now, Ghost Rider-- 

--But we will meet again. 

Soon. And there will be no gray areas involved.

The truth will be revealed.

And that's pretty much the entirety of the adventure, our heroes reappearing atop the hill with Lucy, who they reunite with her mother. And while the skeptical Punisher asks Wolverine if all of that was real, and what he thinks of the business about "us being close to the edge," Ghost Rider gets the last word in, saying that, "As long as the innocent are protected-- --our cause is just."

The price tag would have been fairly steep for a book that's only twice the length of a regular comic book—that month's issue of Ghost Rider was only $1.75, after all—but I have to imagine Marvel fans appreciated the opportunity to see three of their favorite heroes in a single story like that, and Mackie certainly writes them all well (even if Ghost Rider, whose book Mackie was then writing, seems to get the most attention), and he does a fine job in the tough guy, alpha male personas (Originally, I took this as 100% straight; re-reading it today, I wonder to what degree Mackie might have been parodying a certain kind of action hero with Mr. Logan and Mr. Frank's macho portrayals).

I really can't say enough good things about JRJR and Janson's renderings of the characters (colored by John Wellington). They are big, thick and bulky as one comes to expect from JRJR, but they all also look like "themselves" in ways that other artists aren't always able to pull off (And I appreciated JRJR making Wolverine so short, particularly when standing next to the big Frank Castle).

Did the story deserve a sequel? Well, probably not, but it got one anyway, in the form of Ghost Rider/Wolverine/Punisher: Dark Design.

Things have changed a lot in Christ's Crown in three years, and things have changed a lot for at least one of the heroes. At this point, Wolverine has exchanged his brown and yellow costume with the big red belt for his blue and gold one, complete with the shoulder pads I don't think make any sense.

Additionally, he seems to have lost the metal on his claws, as here he has those jagged bone claws he sported for a while.

Oh, and for some reason, his eyes are red much of the time, whether he's wearing his cowl or not. Other times, they are white. Should we blame colorist Paul Mounts for this? Maybe, but we'll come back around to the coloring in a little bit.

The plot begins in media res, with Ghost Rider on foot, carrying a now much bigger and older Lucy, while a woman wearing a tank top crop top with no bra and carrying a big shotgun urges him on. Garney's Ghost Rider has the same basic design as the one I had gotten used to, save for in his drawings of him, G.R.'s skull seems to float in a pillar of flame rather than be connected directly to his torso, and, for some reason (the nineties, I guess?), there is often strings of spittle between his skeletal jaws.

They are on the run from Blackheart's followers, who are apparently members of the town who have been corrupted by his touch. They now all have prominent black veins visible in their skin, they dress in revealing, tight-fitting black clothes that look like they might have been worn to a goth dance club or a fetish ball, and they wield weird-looking sci-fin guns that seem to shoot lasers.

They are after Lucy, who seems to have maybe developed some kind of (mutant?) power around the time she "began...coming of age". 

The town has been physically transformed into some sort of weird hellscape with scary-looking buildings more bizarre than those even the most creative artists might draw in Gotham City. And the population divided between Blackheart's corrupted, who want to capture Lucy for him, and the regular folk, who are trying to defend Lucy from them.

Our three heroes have returned to the city, compelled by psychic distress signals from Lucy who, as Garney draws her, has apparently hit puberty in the intervening years, although her breasts aren't as prominent as those of all the other women he draws in this issue, corrupt and uncorrupt. 

Meanwhile, Blackheart is hanging out in a cathedral of some sort, looking much as he did before, only now wearing a trench coat. He talks to himself, ranting about his descent into madness, while his father, in the form of a dove, seems to torment him.

Ghost Rider, the first hero we see, has his hand touched by one of the corrupt, which spread their infection to him. In order to try and stave it off, he turns back into Dan Ketch.

Wolverine, who Garney draws not with that weird wolfman hairstyle and prominent muttonchops he always sports, but with a long, lion-like mane; after his first skirmish with the corrupt, when The Punisher saves him by gunning down a wave of a half-dozen attackers from a rooftop, Wolvie suits up, and I can't imagine how all that hair fits so snugly beneath his cowl. 

Shortly after the heroes all meet up at a camp, the corrupted attack and make off with Lucy who, back at Blackheart's cathedral, is dressed in a white wedding dress (complete with veil), where she is apparently to become his child bride, and the key to his victory over his father.

Our heroes attack, are briefly strung up on strands of ink black something-or-other and subjected to mental images to torment them. A naked Wolverine, his hair seemingly having gotten even longer, has no patience for this when he seems to find himself in the snow Canadian wilderness: 

GRRR! The north country...Canada! 

Pretty original takin' me back to my roots.

It's been tried too many times.

Don't even know what's real myself anymore.

Don't really care! Get out of my mind, Blackheart!

He's able to get through to Ghost Rider and Punisher, and once again the three triple-team the demon, Ghost Rider beating him with flaming fists, Wolverine slicing him with his claws, Punisher pumping rounds into him.

What's different this time? Well, this time Lucy runs from the heroes back to the fallen Blackheart, seemingly offering him forgiveness, at least according to Mackie's narration. But when Mephisto again arrives to collect his son, Blackheart pulls a knife, the tip of which is dripping with blood.

"I do not need the child," he says. "Only this! The blood of a child. INNOCENT BLOOD!"

So I guess Lucy either slipped him a knife with her blood on it, or, when she went back to forgive him, allowed him a bit of her blood...? That, or he cut her just deeply enough to get a few drops of her blood on his blade a few pages earlier, when the heroes first stormed his base and he briefly held a knife to Lucy's throat.

At any rate, that's apparently all one needs to kill Marvel's devil (temporarily, I assume), as Blackheart stabs his dad to death, and the last panels shows Blackheart standing triumphant, having doffed his trench coat and raised his arms in victory: "Mephisto, King of Hell, is DEAD... Long live the new king!"

I imagine that was a significant event in the Marvel Universe and was probably reflected in a few comics for a while, but I also imagine it was relatively short-lived. Certainly, I've seen Mephisto alive and well since (notably in Jason Aaron's Avengers run, which I read the first two-thirds of or so. And now that I think of it, I can't remember the last time I saw Blackheart in a comic...).

For Mackie's part, I think the script for Dark Design suffers from the classic affliction of so many sequels, that of repeating something because it was popular and there was demand for more of the same, and not because there was anything new to say. The story thus suffers from diminishing returns.

Also, because it is essentially just a few action scenes strung together, only interrupted by Blackheart ranting at his father, it doesn't have anything as fun as seeing the characters in their secret identities...or The Punisher's clumsy attempts at a disguise that we saw in Hearts of Darkness. 

And then, of course, there's no real need for Mackie to meditate on the dark nature of these heroes, because, well, he already did that three years previous, and, in that time, they all just kept on doing what they've been doing with, I imagine, little change (In this story, for example, Ghost Rider refuses to kill human beings, even those corrupted by Blackheart, while Wolverine and The Punisher mow them down without a second thought). 

I did not care for the art at all, which came as a bit of a surprise to me, given that I genuinely like Garney's art on JLA about a decade or so later (He drew the "Pain of The Gods" and "Syndicate Rules" arcs toward the end of the series). I suppose we can blame much of that on the times, as even a quick flip-through will reveal this to be a very nineties looking book.

Aside from his specific design choices, the colors, the letters and their various fonts and special effects, the layouts, the inset panels...the story reminded me a lot of the look of the earlier issues of Spawn I had read, and seemed a significant departure from the first year or so of Mackie and company's Ghost Rider, or Hearts of Darkness. 

Indeed, because it's just a page-turn away from Hearts of Darkness, I think Dark Design suffers in comparison, although I wonder how much of this is really a matter of, say, the JRJR/Janson team being better at telling a comics story than the Garney/Milgrom one, and how much of it is due to the first being published in 1991, and the second in 1994. 

Certainly, the advances in comics coloring technology and lettering style (and/or technology?) seems to have informed the latter book, which seems to take full advantage of all the new choices a colorist had to work with in the mid-nineties, whether it necessarily ended up benefiting the book in the long run or not. 

Reading both stories back to back today, Dark Design looks much darker, muddier and harder to read than Hearts of Darkness. (Also, one can't tell from this particular collection, but Dark Design was apparently published on glossy paper, which might have accounted for its higher cost, whereas I don't think Hearts of Darkness was. I'm now a little curious what similarly glossy paged books from the time might now look like in trade collections, but I'm not even sure where I could look to see...). 

Anyway, I disliked Dark Design as much as I liked Hearts of Darkness, and I would hesitate to recommend this particular collection to any reader...unless, of course, said reader was simply curious about Marvel Comics in the first half of the nineties, in which case I guess this book is a decent encapsulation, both good and bad.

Oh, and as I mentioned on Bluesky, after reading this particular trade paperback, I now find myself, for the first time in my life, as a person with opinions about Wolverine. Those being that the brown and yellow costume > than the blue and gold one, and that metal claws > bone claws. 

The End of JLA Pt. 3: "Elitism"

While it is of course impossible to know for sure what was going on behind the scenes of JLA in 2004,  this 100th issue by Joe Kelly, Doug Mahnke and Tom Nguyen, returning to the title after a nine-issue absence, definitely reads as if it was especially created to launch their upcoming Justice League Elite maxi-series, rather than to be their final issue of JLA.

Actually, maybe it's not so impossible, as Kelly himself discussed it in his introduction to the 2005 paperback collection Justice League Elite Vol. 1. He writes that Dan Raspler, who had replaced Mike Carlin as editor for the title, had wanted a story idea for the upcoming JLA #100 (Ah! Is this whole weird period of the title with no regular creative team all Raspler's fault, then...?!), suggesting that by incorporating his team The Elite, he could finally get to do the "dark team" he had been talking about for a while.

The story  that ultimately ran in the oversized, 38-page JLA #100 was entitled "Elitism", and it functions as a perfectly satisfactory JLA story, one in which something big and crazy happens—here, Gaea herself finds humanity wanting and is on the brink of exterminating them—and the League must do something seemingly impossible to save the day—here, rally the entirety of planet Earth to a single cause.

The thing is, for this particular plan to work, our heroes need villains to scapegoat, as humanity just can't be herded that quickly, nor can they be readily convinced to do the right thing simply for the sake of it being the right thing. (If that were the case, I wouldn't be nearly so worried about catastrophic climate change!)

"There's no time for diplomacy here," Batman tells his fellow Leaguers. 

No time for the world to debate and confer and verify our discovery.

People rally in the face of crisis, but it has to be a crisis they understand...

With victims they can relate to.

And so, with the world facing increasingly apocalyptic natural disasters, and with Gaea/Mother Earth herself articulating the problem and how she intends to solve it, using Major Disaster as a mouthpiece, the League comes up with a plan...Well, in actuality, they accede to Sister Superior's plan.

Who is Sister Superior? She's Vera Lynn Black, a powerful cyborg whose mechanical arms can transform into veritable trees of branching weaponry...and she's also the sister of Manchester Black, a character who would have been fairly familiar to Superman readers in the first years of the new century.

Manchester Black was the cynical, cigarette-smoking, Union Jack t-shirt wearing, psychic leader of The Elite, an Authority analogue team that Kelly, Mahnke and Nguyen introduced in 2002's Action Comics #775, the instant-classic "What's So Funny About Truth, Justice and The American Way?"

In that earlier anniversary issue, Kelly used Black and The Elite to articulate the arguments espoused by the then still-popular Authority of writer Warren Ellis and artists Brian Hitch and Paul Neary, regarding pro-active, aggressive, ruthless, efficient and unsentimental superheroics being employed to make the world a better place, whether the world liked it or not. 

Thes nature of such might-makes-right superheroics were, in Kelly's issue, contrasted with the more traditional superheroics as represented by the old-fashioned Superman. 

Naturally enough, Superman won the fight against The Elite in his comic book, and, seemingly, the argument of ideas (In a way, "What's So Funny..." read a bit like Kingdom Come, albeit hyper-condensed into less than 40 pages, and more focused on the Ellis/Mark Millar-style "realistic" superheroes of the time than the grimmer and grittier trends of the '90s). 

Kelly actually addresses this in that JLE trade intro too. He doesn't name any particular writers or titles of course, and said it wasn't meant to be anti-dark comics or anti-"angry, kick-ass heroes.":

As I've said on many occasions, I like dark stories. I prefer dark stories, in fact. What ticks me off is stories that beat down their predecessors under the guise of "post-modern reexamination." A one-sided butt-whupping of comics' good old days, where imagination, pulp, and innocence sold a story. Because, as everyone knows, "In the real world, superheroes would act like this, and you're an idiot for thinking otherwise..."

Crap. Crap. Crap.

Manchester Black went on to become a superman villain of sorts, featured most prominently in the Superman event story "Ending Battle," at the end of which he seemingly died. Kelly said he used Black again solely to kill him off, so no one else would end up using him. 

"He was a one-note villain," Kelly wrote. "Maybe two at best."

Anyway, in "Elitism", Kelly plays with the timeline of recent events, only gradually revealing that despite the conflict between a new, reconstituted Elite lead by Sister Superior and Superman's Justice League, the two teams were actually working together all along, the League helping prop up The Elite as villains that the entire world could rally against and, thus united, could convince Gaea not to destroy the world.

And so after a series of brief portentous scenes—a mysterious appearance by the late Manchester Black, Superman waking from a dream, the Trinity seeing a series of coordinated attacks, Major Disaster being unable to control his emotions—The Elite tear the roof of the Capitol Building, Sister Superior announcing that, because they have done such a shitty job so far, "the governments of the world are hereby disbanded" and that "In twelve hours, you will prepare for new management-- --and hand the keys to the Earth to the people who can do it right."

It's the kind of audacious declaration a supervillain might make, delivered with the sarcasm typical of Ellis or Millar characters...although it's not an argument entirely without merit. 

I mean, if Darkseid or Lex Luthor made it? Sure, but they're bad guys. The Elite aren't villains, but anti-heroes and well, the world is kind of screwed up, isn't it?  Throughout the issue, Vera and others will drop bits of dialogues suggesting the various ways in which it is. Maybe if there was someone powerful enough to take over the world and straighten it all out for the better, that wouldn't be the worst thing ever, would it...?

Naturally, Superman and the Justice League appear to fight The Elite in Washington D.C. and, despite the League's superior numbers—The Elite are here just Sister Superior, The Hat, Coldcast and a new, second Menagerie—our heroes are defeated, with The Flash and Manitou Raven seemingly killed during the battle (An early tell, of course, that there's more than meets the eye going on).

Standing over the prone and unconscious Superman, Wonder Woman and Batman, Vera sneers, "Back to the funny papers, you lot."

"Reality rules," she says. "Dreams are dead." This is a reference to her brother's argument with Superman in Action Comics a few years earlier, in which Manchester Black told Superman that he's "living in a bloody dream world," and Superman made a short, punchy speech about the power of his dream, and how he will never stop fighting to make it a reality.

As becomes increasingly clear throughout the issue, though, the Elite vs. JLA fight was all a ruse, a way to show the world that the League can't save them this time, and that the governments of the world will all need to fight together this time, joining forces to take down The Elite.

This all leads to a scene in which The Elite are teleported to a battlefield, where they are surrounded by a handful of Leaguers...and every single army in the world. 

The Elite loses that fight, of course, but mid-battle Gaea appears, saying, "I have seen enough, my children... And I am sorry that I doubted you." Convinced in humanity's ability to work together, she calls off the natural disasters, and the end of the world. 

It's a very satisfyingly told story, maybe the best of Kelly's JLA comics (it certainly helps that, due to its relative brevity, it can be quite tightly constructed), and one that demonstrates the many virtues of various Justice Leaguers and their ability to successfully work their peculiar beat, the routine saving of the world.

It's also another great showcase for the Mahnke/Nguyen art team, allowing them to draw not only their League, but also revisit the Elite characters, and sell some pretty big moments.

For these first 36 pages, it's a perfectly solid Justice League story, and a nice introduction to a new character in the form of Sister Superior and, perhaps, a new direction for The Elite, as darker heroes who can play villains when necessary, foils or scapegoats for the Justice League, whose goals they ultimately support, even if they have arguments with the specifics of their methods.

But then there's the last two pages. 

In the course of 11 panels, Vera argues with Superman, Batman and Martian Manhunter about the prospect of continuing to work with the League...sort of. 

"There are threats that the JLA could confront using...unconventional means," Vera says, "But shouldn't, because of what you guys represent."

While Batman sees some value in the League being "more...subversive," he says he doesn't know Vera well enough to approve any such operation with her at its head, while Superman is opposed to the whole project.

"It's dangerous and naive," he says. "How long do you think you can wallow in the filth without getting dirty?"

Major Disaster seems swayed ("...have talked about bein' more pro-active--" he says under his breath), as does, somewhat surprisingly, The Flash, the only one on the League who seems to be actively taking Vera's side. 

As Superman dismisses Vera and she walks away, The Flash follows her, saying over his shoulder, "She's earned the right to be heard, Superman...she's earned it."

"That's it then..." Superman says, rather melodramatically. "The end of the JLA as we know it."

And he was sort of right, although that probably had more to do with DC simply not hiring a new, ongoing creative team for the book's last two years, instead having four different writers and and art teams produce four more arcs, two of which seemed to be evergreen fill-ins that could just as easily have been slotted into the upcoming JLA Classified  series ("Pain of the Gods", "Syndicate Rules") and two of which tie-in to crossover events storylines ("Crisis of Consciences", "World Without a Justice League"). 

Meanwhile, Kelly, Mahnke and Nguyen would follow Vera Lynn Black and The Elite, and follow-up on those last two pages of JLA #100, in the 12-part Justice League Elite series. In that series, the JLA's Manitou Raven, Major Disaster and The Flash would join Vera, Coldcast, Menagerie and Green Arrow Oliver Queen and "new" character Kasumi to form a new undercover, black-ops team (The Flash would remain on both The League and The Elite and, in JLA Secret Files & Origins 2004 #1, actually work the same case for both teams simultaneously, which is, of course, only possible for a speedster; interestingly, DC had "The Tenth Circle" pencil artist John Byrne draw the JLA half of that particular story). 

JLE is a pretty great series, and well worth seeking out if you haven't read it already.

"Elitism" was collected in 2005's Justice League Elite Vol. 1 and 2016's JLA Vol. 8.

Next: Chuck Austen and Ron Garney's "Pain of the Gods" from 2004's JLA # 101-106

A Month of Wedesdays: July 2025

BOUGHT:

DC Finest: Justice Society of America: The Plunder of the Psycho-Pirate (DC Comics) This second DC Finest collection of the Golden Age All-Star Comics suggests that the Justice Society is finally going to get to fight an actual supervillain, after spending the first dozen or so issues of their adventures beating up gangsters and the occasional Axis agent or soldier. I mean, it's got the name of a supervillain right there in the title, doesn't it?

Well, sorta.

The Psycho-Pirate in question isn't the one you're probably thinking of, the one in the red tights and cape, with the Medusa Mask that controls people's emotions. That guy wouldn't come along until the Silver Age. This Psycho-Pirate is, well, I don't want to spoil it, but let's just say he's a different guy, one with no costume and no super-powers. He just plans crimes organized around human emotions and he can't stand up to anyone in the Society in a fight (Indeed, he doesn't even put up a fight when discovered, but, after experiencing a range of emotions himself, collapses into the Thunderbolt's arms).

In addition to Psycho-Pirate and a couple of  other "name" villains like The Bee King, a scientist who feeds specially-developed insect hormones to people to give them the powers of various bugs, and The Monster, a criminal mastermind who looks a bit like Mr. Hyde from the 1931 and 1941 films and may also have a degree of super-strength, there's Brain Wave. 

A bespectacled genius with a huge bald head wearing a green, dress-like smock, he does seem to have a super-power, the ability to project realistic images across great distances to trick his victims and try to drive them mad. He seems to be as close as we'll get to a supervillain in these 12 issues, which provide another 600 pages of crude Golden Age superheroics by writer Gardner Fox and a stable of different artists (including Jack Kirby drawing the now purple-and-gold clad Sandman, as well as Sheldon Moldoff, Joe Kubert and plenty of guys whose names I don't really know). 

Brain Wave even came back for a return engagement, having survived what seemed like a plunge to his death at the end of his first story, although, in his second story, he didn't use his powers at all, but instead shrunk the various members of the JSA down to doll-size, and they had to fight to foil his plans at that significant disadvantage before being restored to full height.

The format of these issues is just the same as those in the previous collection, last December's For America and Democracy. The issue would open around the JSA's meeting table, where they would usually receive six-to-eight different related missions. They would then split up, each character starring in their own individual adventure, and then reconvene in the final pages, often dog-piling the villain of the piece. Conveniently, the various master criminals would seem to plan, say, eight different crimes to be executed simultaneously, and thus the members need never actually team-up with one another...at least not until the final pages, anyway, where they swarm the villains.

(I like this sequence above, in which the JSA seem to be falling all over one another to get to Brain Wave.)

At this point, the JSA consists of Hawkman, The Spectre, The Atom, Doctor Mid-Nite, Doctor Fate, Starman, Johnny Thunder and The Sandman (sometimes accompanied in action by Sandy, who doesn't seem invited to the meetings). 

Wonder Woman, though she had her own title and thus should, like Batman, Superman, The Flash and Green Lantern have "graduated" to "honorary" status, has volunteered to stay on as the team's secretary. Thus, she usually appears on the covers and the opening splash pages, and is often seen at the beginning and end of the stories, but rarely has an actual adventure like the boys do (Issue #13's "Shanghaied Into Space", in which the Nazis gas the team meeting, load them into eight individual rockets, and shoot them to different planets in the solar system was a rare exception. In that issue, Doctor Fate, who was too busy to attend the meeting, didn't appear, and so Wondy's creators William Moulton Marston and H.G. Peter handled a six-pager in which she is temporarily banished to Venus). 

In the last issue collected herein, Wildcat and Mister Terrific appear, with no more explanation than that Hawkman had called them in. Doctor Fate, Spectre and Sandman are all MIA in that issue, and The Flash and The G.L. show up for the meeting, but don't travel through the timestream with the others. 

This strict adherence to the format obviously makes reading huge swathes of the comic at a time like this repetitive, and, especially when the premise isn't terribly engaging, even tedious (I generally read an issue per sitting, as it could be hard to read much more than that at a time). The music-themed crimes of issue #19, for example, didn't do much for me, nor did the three (three!) different stories in which the members of the JSA traveled backwards through time on extremely weird missions (Two of these through the power of "The Conscience of Man", an all-white fairy with a wand who visits their meetings). 

It certainly doesn't help that Fox essentially writes all of the characters the exact same, with the same personalities and the same style dialogue, the only thing really differentiating one from the other being their costumes and the nicknames Fox uses for them in the occasional narration boxes. 

Heck, they only rarely use their various crime-fighting gimmicks or fantastical super-powers, with even the nigh-omnipotent Spectre, Fate and Thunderbolt generally just using their fists on their opponents. In fact, Doctor Fate, for example, doesn't seem to use any magic at all throughout these dozen issues, with, perhaps, the exception of flying in one issue (And this he does by seemingly running through the air, rather than adopting a more Superman-like flying pose).

Golden Age super-comics dabbling in war-time propaganda is nothing new of course, but I was still somewhat surprised to see how far Fox and company went in these issues, and I wondered what those loud online voices who say that superhero comic books shouldn't be "political" would make of All-Star Comics between 1942 and 1945.

It's not just that the JSA fought the Nazis and the Axis powers, with Hitler being the only villain to appear in this book more than Brain Wave (And he's usually depicted as a sort of evil clown figure; Kirby seems to have drawn him more than any of the other artists). 

Sure, the JSA are the victims of a Nazi plot in the first issue, the one that attempts to exile them all into space. And in the very next issue, our heroes sneak into war-torn Europe to deliver miraculous instant food pills to various allies in conquered countries, fighting the Nazis as they do so. 

In another issue, the team tackles the problem of Nazi propagandists infiltrating the U.S. to spread division based on class, race, nationality and religion, an issue that ends with what amounts to a three-page, 20-panel lecture about Americans needing to all band together as a united people to defeat the Axis in the war. 

There are a couple of one-page strips in which Wonder Woman and Doiby Dickles explain the importance of saving paper to the war effort, another strip in which Wondy praises President Roosevelt's work with the March of Dimes and, in issue #21, which isn't otherwise a war-related story, the bottom of each page includes a little rhyme encouraging kids to help the war effort through efforts to invest or save material, like "Every Time You Buy a Stamp, You Feed the Flame in Freedom's Lamp!" or "If You Still Have Metal Scrap, Turn It In To Beat The Jap."

And then there's spring of 1945's issue #24, on the cover of which our heroes have assembled in a theater balcony to watch a film about war-like Germany, the text reading "All-Star Comics Presents This Is Our Enemy!"

The story is a doozy, and made me, an adult reader coming to it 80 years after it was created, awfully uncomfortable because of its stridency (I'm assuming it hit differently with children in the 1940s, though).

It opens with a splash page with prose reading:

This is the story of a nation—a degenerate nation whose people throughout the centuries have always been willing to follow their military leaders into endless, bloody, but futile wars!

What was the reason for their constant belligerency? It was due entirely to a mad notion that they were a master race and destined to rule the world!

See, the story says, it's not just the Nazi regime running the show now that is bad, but Germany and its people are just terrible and, what more, they always have been terrible! 

The JSA is presented with a young man who has been drafted, but who isn't convinced that America should really be fighting Germany at all. He's not a coward or afraid to fight, "It's just that I...I resent being fooled!", he says.

He makes various arguments, including that "Germany is in Europe...which makes it Europe's problem— Not ours!"

The JSA members make various counter arguments, but none seem to work until The Conscience of Man, whom Hawkman just calls "Conscience" for short, reappears. She offers to send the young man, Dick Amber, back through German history, where he would essentially incarnate as a person native to the country at that time, and he could see for himself Germany's inherent war-like character and conquering ambition. In each stop, he's watched over by a different member of the JSA. They generally just appear at the climax of the sequence to punch out some German bad guys.

And so Dick starts out as a Teutonic knight in 1250 A.D. as he and his fellow knight make war on the Poles, and then he's whisked to 1725, where he spends a lifetime as a friend of Frederick Wilhelm, who will grow up to be king and wage wars of conquest, and on and on for four more stops, until 1923, when Hitler is starting to amass followers. ("Hitler? Phooey!" Johnny Thunder says, his head emerging from a cloud to scold an early follower of the future fuhrer. "You aren't paying any attention to that crack-brain, are you?" he says, before remembering he's not supposed to get involved and retreating back into his cloud).

 

Dick eventually returns to the present, a changed man, and makes with a speech:

I have learned the truth! That...for many centuries...Germanic rulers and military leaders have led a willing German people into war after war!

And, believe me, all this senseless useless, bloodletting was only for the personal satisfaction of these same military men and rulers...to build up their own ego! 

...

Unless we uproot the idea of a German "master race" above all religions, races and nationalities, Germany will always be a menace to peace!

Well, a comic book could hardly get more political than that, right?

Oh, it can...?

Yes indeed, for the story's last page ends with a four-point "Formula For A Lasting Peace" written out on a scroll of paper that Wonder Woman gestures to, calling for a complete re-education of the German people, guaranteed by the allied nations, who must "get together in a 'World Organization For Permanent Peace'."

The plan is signed by the individual members of the Justice Society of America, as you can see above.

Now that's politics in comics. Some fans today whine if Superman says "a better tomorrow" instead of "the American way", while, 80 years ago, Gardner Fox had Wonder Woman and the also-rans of the JSA making specific foreign policy prescriptions!

Looking at comics.org, it would seem that All-Star Comics would run for 33 more issues, so I imagine three more DC Finest volumes could collect the rest of the series, although so far DC has announced any more Justice Society of America comics (UPDATE: I was told via Bluesky that the page-count per issue shrunk as time went on, so maybe it won't take quite so many volumes to collect the rest of the series after all). I would buy them if they did; as tedious as reading them may be sometimes, I'm still fascinated by these comics, and it looks like future issues will contain more supervillains, with Solomon Grundy, The Wizard and Per Degaton on the coves of All-Star #33-35, and #37 boasts this striking cover of an alliance of various name villains.

I wonder if DC would do better collecting the 17 issues of the 1976 revival, though...or might that book be a little too Earth-2-y at this point...? (Scanning the covers, I see a lot of Power Girl, Huntress and gray-at-the-temples Superman). 

Godzilla's Monsterpiece Theatre (IDW Productions) Two guys whose comics I like to keep an eye on are Tom Scioli, who I came to regard as a literal genius after reading 2014-2016's The Transformers vs. G.I. Joe (and haven't seen any work of his since to make me reevaluate that assessment), and Godzilla, whose licensed comics aren't always great, but usually have great potential, potential that is quite often realized.

So Scioli making a Godzilla comic? Yes, that sounds like it was commissioned specifically to appeal to me. The result, Godzilla's Monsterpiece Theatre, is a particularly weird comic, as the Fantastic Four #1 homage cover above suggests. 

Somewhere along the line, Godzilla license holder IDW Productions seems to have had an important epiphany, one that unlocked all kinds of unusual takes on the King of the Monsters. That is, to tell a Godzilla narrative, all you really need are two things, and these things only need to intersect occasionally, rather than "seem like something Toho would make a movie out of" or even "make sense". 

First, you need Godzilla, the huge, unstoppable monster, engaged in the doing of Godzilla things, like wrecking cities or fighting other giant monsters. 

Secondly, you need human beings, doing human being things...and these humans, and the things they can do, can be any human beings, engaged in pretty much any human activities.

So you can make Godzilla comics where the humans are pirates, or little girls at summer camp, or Australian skateboarders, or superheroes, or the Mighty Morphin Power Rangers. Whatever; there are no real rules here.

Can the human characters even be those from F. Scott Fitzgerald's classic 1925 novel The Great Gatsby?  

I don't see why not. 

Neither, apparently, did IDW nor Scioli, which is how we got Godzilla's Monsterpiece Theatre. 

The obscenely wealthy, intriguingly mysterious millionaire Jay Gatsby, who Scioli draws as a handsome blonde Adonis in pink suits, hosts lavish parties at his mansion in West Egg, Long Island, all in a vain attempt to draw the attention of the love of his life, Daisy Buchanan, who has married another man and now lives directly across the bay from him.

So much, so familiar, right? And then on page six we see Godzilla's huge feet stomping toward Gatsby's estate, now bathed in blue flames. The leviathan leers through the windows. Gatsby and new friend (and novel narrator) Nick Carraway hop into a speedboat and cross the bay to save Daisy, Godzilla hot on their heels. They load her and her asshole husband Tom Buchanan aboard and take off, but Godzilla smashes the boat, and Daisy is lost at sea.

And so, in addition to hiring detectives to search for Daisy, Gatsby pours his money into the creation of G-Force—the "G" stands for "Gatsby", of course; what else might it stand for...? This private military is devoted to the eradication of Godzilla, who quickly reappears in New York City, where they have their first battle with the monster, seemingly driving it away after a thrilling rampage (The bit with the teeth and the train? Sublime).

Throughout the first issue/chapter, Scioli juxtaposes sentences and paragraphs of Fitzgerald's novel, here also presented as Nick's writing, making this inspired comic something of a collaboration between the late Fitzgerald and Scioli...whether the former likes it or not, I suppose (There are some obvious changes here and there, though, like Fitzgerald's "line of yellow windows" becoming a "line of yellow teeth," for example, above a splash in which he see an oddly grimacing Godzilla towering over Manhattan.) 

Now, I have to imagine that as cool, as crazy, as funny, as post-modern or punk rock or whatever you like to call it a "Godzilla Vs. The Great Gatsby" comic might be, I have to assume that someone at IDW—perhaps even Scioli himself—realized that it might be a little too niche, even for the world of mainstream comic books, which essentially nothing but niches these days. 

And so there are other characters. The cover of the trade names Gatsby, Sherlock Holmes, the "Time Machinist" (that is, the character from H.G. Wells' 1895 novel The Time Machine) and, of course, a character identified as "?", who is quite clearly Dracula (And the original version, from Bram Stoker's 1897 novel, the events of which he had apparently survived, rather than the more famous filmic version). 

So is this Scioli doing a Godzilla vs. The Lague of Extraordinary Gentlemen riff...? 

It sure seems like it from that cover, but no, not really. Gatsby remains the main human protagonist, and Daisy, almost immediately found washed up on a beach, and Tom ("Do you think I'd let my wife go on this fool misadventure without me?!") are key members of the supporting cast joining Gatsby as he travels the world, hunting Godzilla with various fantastical weapons with literary origins of their own. (As for Nick, he seems to have suffered a nervous breakdown after his encounter with Godzilla in the city, but not to worry: Gatsby has found Nick's "manuscript" and has decided "as a tribute to my good friend to complete his work, to tell the story of this moment in time, this turning point in history.")

Gatsby approaches various allies to add to G-Force, some of them real people, some of them fictional characters from popular literature, one a hilariously fictionalized real person (he's named on the cover of the second issue, if you don't want to enjoy the surprise of his introduction) and a few characters extrapolated from works of literature, being the descendants of familiar characters. One character, the mysterious Time Machinist, approaches Gatsby, retuning to this point in time haunted by the knowledge of what Godzilla will do in the future.

In addition to a string of unlikely cameos, Scioli mixes and matches the characters in fun ways, many of which make perfect sense, and so we get to see the elderly Sherlock Holmes fight Dracula, for example, and, later, Dracula professes an unhealthy interest in Daisy, complicating the Jay/Tom rivalry for her affections with a third party, this one an even bigger villain than Tom, but also supernaturally irresistible.

Meanwhile Scioli's Godzilla, which he draws to resemble a particularly sharp-eyed, -clawed and -toothed version of one of the Showa suits as if it had somehow come alive (A neat trick also pulled off by Jake Smith in Godzilla: War for Humanity, although Smith's art has more detail and depth than Scioli's), travels the world, destroying its most interesting monuments.

Godzilla visits London, Paris, Egypt and finally Dracula's Transylvania, destroying various landmarks in visually striking, occasionally anime-inspired ways (this Godzilla has a tendency to destroy things by cutting them perfectly in half, as if he had used a giant sword), and picking up unlikely enemies along the way. (In one scene, a mummy rises from the wreckage of a pyramid, to the horror of the men gathered around it, one of whom says, "The curse of the pharaoh Utma Utep says that whomever disturbs his tomb will be pursued to death and beyond," while the mummy proceeds, arms outstretched horizontally, to walk right past them. "We didn't disturb the tomb," one says, watching the mummy walk off-panel. "Godzilla did." Naturally, the mummy will play a role later.)

It all comes to a head at Dracula's castle, where he has taken Daisy in order to make her his bride, and also attempt to gain control of Godzilla with his mesmerism powers. Neither plan comes off, although there are a lot of big, splashy, instantly iconic scenes, including maybe the last thing I ever expected to see in a comic book, even after I started reading this very comic book. (The splash page wherein the Time Machinist says, "He has truly become...The Great Gatsby," those last three words in a big special font as if taken right from a book cover? One of the coolest things I've seen in a comic book in I don't know how long.)

Now I know I have mainly been talking about the story, rather than the art, which is a failing that comes from my being a writer rather than an artist. If you've read Scioli's work before—and I do hope you have, given how great it is—then you should know what to expect. It's definitely still Jack Kirby-influenced, although he's not working in the same deliberate Kirby pastiche of some of his earliest comic work, and his art is still tending towards simplification, the pages consisting of a few big, bold, flat, colorful images, those colors carefully chosen, and tending to be solid and primary, with no real gradation.

Scioli's image-making power is on full display here, as he approaches Godzilla's acts of destruction as works of cartoon art, symbol acting upon symbol to look cool and have as much impact as possible, rather than necessarily detailing what, say, Godzilla bathed in flames, or Godzilla being shot through with electricity while gripping the Eiffel Tower, or what Godzilla smashing The Great Sphinx of Giza might look like "in real life."

Scioli also just does some really fun stuff, my favorite example being a splash page in which Jay and Tom, each holding a hammer and stake, enter a cross-section of Dracula's castle, and Scioli draws dozens of tiny Jay Gatsbys as they explore the many rooms and face the many dangers of the castle, the multiple figures showing dynamic action the way that some artists used to draw, say, Spider-Man in action, but here taken to the most extreme degree.

Here's a bad photo:

The book is full of weird, fun, inventive, Tom Scioli-ish stuff like that.

Because Godzilla is Godzilla and Gatsby is the hero—and this is neither 1954's Gojira nor Fitzgerald's novel—neither can be killed nor can they even really be defeated. So, after the climax, which does finally kill off Dracula, the two spent adversaries essentially just part ways, the time and space allotted for their battle at an end. (If this were a Toho movie from the later Showa era, they might have fallen into the sea together, or a convenient volcano might have erupted to signal the end of hostilities.)

Godzilla heads east, literally walking into the rising sun, while Gatsby, Daisy and Tom head home, Daisy again choosing to stay with Tom over Jay. He doesn't get the girl, but he doesn't get killed, either, so he gets a far happier ending than Fitzgerald gave him (Hey, that's a spoiler that is literally 100 years old. Pretty sure that's the oldest spoiler I've ever written...!)

Anyway, this comic book is pretty much the best thing ever, and I would highly encourage you to read it, if you haven't already.

Of course, I am curious how it would read if one has never read The Great Gatsby (or at least seen one of the many movies), just as I'm not entirely sure how it would read had someone never seen any Godzilla movies, although I think the imagery of those films is more ingrained in our pop culture than any of that from Fitzgerald's novel.

I suppose, to be on the safe side, if you haven't read The Great Gatsby, read that, and then pick up Godzilla's Monsterpiece Theatre....

BORROWED:

Birds of Prey Vol. 3: Bird Undercover (DC Comics) The latest Birds of Prey trade paperback collects issues #14-19 of the series, comprising two story arcs, each with two different artists. Sam Basri draws the four-part title arc, while Juan Cabal draws the two-part "Divide and Conquer" that follows it. 

Both seem to be much smaller scale and to deal with smaller stakes than the stories of the first two volumes, and, perhaps because of this, felt a little bit more like Birds of Prey stories. That is, they seem to be a bit more grounded and realistic than the more fantastical arcs dealing with Amazons, Greek gods and interdimensional travel; more espionage than superhero. (It's all a matter of degree, of course, as Bids is still a DC Universe superhero title...these particular stories just felt a bit more Batman than JLA to me, if that makes sense.)

In "Bird Undercover", we see Cassandra Cain in a quite cool outfit interviewing/fighting for a job as some kind of security consultant for a shady corporation. Said corporation has apparently taken various Amazons captive, and is doing something horrible to them; Cass' job is to make sure they are there, and then call in the rest of the team to bust them out.

Here, that team includes not only series regular Oracle, Black Canary and Big Barda, but also guest-stars Grace Choi and Obsidian, both of whom Basri draws as extremely big and buff (And neither of whom I've seen anywhere in quite a while). 

There is, of course, a complication, and the team loses contact with Cass, fretting over whether or not to intervene, balancing their concern for her well-being with endangering the mission (and thus the Amazons and other victims).

Like I said, it's much smaller scale than the previous stories, but it's also much more emotionally satisfying, I think, as Thompson presents us with a great Cassandra Cain action story, while also showing us how the team feel about one another and how they deal with the stresses of their job...I can't remember the last superhero comic I've read in which the characters worried so much. 

While I still think it's a bummer that the book's initial artist, Leonardo Romero, didn't stick around (he does continue to contribute covers, including that for the collection above), Basri's art is so great, I didn't really miss Romero here. Thompson has a welcome habit of writing very distinct characters—even the handful of bad guys here are quite distinct in personality—and Basri follows suit in his designs and rendering for the characters.

I thought the bad guys' super-drug that turns those injected with it into Hulked-out monsters bulging muscles streaked with pulsing veins, was a little much, with Basri drawing its effects kinda like it was the steroid/helium blend that later artists tended to depict Bane's venom injections with. Surely by this point, we know that a Cassandra Cain that wants to hurt you is terrifying, whether or not she has huge biceps. 

Anyway, if Basri were to become the title's regular artist going forward, I wouldn't mind at all.

In "Divide and Conquer," Oracle learns that the ninjas who are traditionally after Sin are still after Sin, and so, with Black Canary and Sin, she sets a trap, in which the bait beats the holy hell out of all the ninjas, hopefully convincing them to leave Sin alone from now on (The goddess she shares her body with, Megaera, providing quite a bit of unexpected help in the matter).

Meanwhile, to give Batgirl and Barda something to do, they go to that weird magic place from the first volume to help out Constantine; it's mainly busy work, it seems, but it's a visually interesting place and, in costume, they're both visually interesting characters. (I must confess that it's a little weird that Constantine has become something of a Birds of Prey regular; that's certainly not something I would have expected to ever be the case, say, 20 years ago...)

Oh, and I noticed that in this volume Sin no longer has the green streak in her hair. I wonder if someone at DC heard me when I pointed out that Asian women-with-colored-streaks-in-their-hair is a prevalent media stereotype that annoys real Asian women or, more likely, they heard an actual Asian woman raise the same concern somewhere...?

Anyway, this was a very enjoyable book, and probably my favorite of the three so far. 

Now That We Draw Vol. 2 (Seven Seas Entertainment) The cover of writer Kyu Takahata and artist Yuwji Kaba's second volume of Now That We Draw is much less embarrassing than the first (Covered in this column). I felt I could read this one in public without feeling like a pervert. I think the imagery focused on female lead Miyamoto Niina has been toned down a bit too, but maybe just a bit...? 

The book opens with her, dressed only in her underwear and a robe, stumbling into male lead Uehara Yuuki, falling on top of him. Rather than being embarrassed, though, she's excited: "It really happened," she says, excitedly, "The suggestive collision happened in real life!" Of course, the premise of the series is that the two young aspiring manga artists are complete neophytes at romance, and are thus teaming up to pretend to date, in order to get more experience with relationships, and thus, hopefully, material for their manga.

There's also a scene where, when Uehara says he need to get better at drawing the human figure, Miyamoto invites him to the beach, where she poses for him in her bikini. Too embarrassed to look directly at her body though (something artist Yuwji certainly isn't afraid to draw), he looks past it, and thus his art isn't really any better ("I'm pretty sure my boobs are bigger than that," she says, examining his sketchbook).

That's also where, when some guys start hitting on her, he feels a weird tightness in his chest and is unsure of what this new feeling is (It's jealousy, and he'll experience it a second time, with more disastrous results, later in the book). 

This volume also reveals the rather touching origins of each character's desire of growing up to be an artist, and progress in their budding careers, as each gets a job as a manga assistant, for an artist of the opposite sex who is certain to complicate the romantic arc between the two, as unlikely as that seems at this point  As I said before, Uehara seems to need to have a growth spurt before the two even begin to look like a potential couple). 

The manga-ka Miyamoto will be working on is a legendary one, a very popular female artist with an entire staff...who actually turns out to be a handsome young man, one who is, according to Miyamoto, "super hot!!" and "exactly my type!"

Meanwhile, Uehara is assigned to work with a mysterious artist who is reportedly very difficult to work with, who turns out to be a very cute (and, when he meets her, very underdressed) young girl about his age, despite how much more skilled (and successful) she is. 

I remain intrigued by the premise and seeing how on Earth the creators are ultimately going to get these two characters together, as, despite the similarities, they are so very physically different from one another.

Oh, one thing that I'm not sure any of you will be able to answer or not. On two occasions during this volume, adult characters refer to Miyamoto as a gyaru. This despite the fact that she doesn't have the dyed blonde hair, tanned-skin or over-the-top make-up of gals I've seen in other manga, like Manbagi Rumiko from Komi Can't Communicate or Miku Okazaki from Gal Gohan. Are there different styles of gyaru and, if so, what about Miyamoto denotes her as one? Is it just a fashion thing...? 

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Vol. 1: Return to New York (IDW Productions) When IDW announced that they were relaunching their long-running Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles comic with a new #1 and a new creative team, I had every intention of buying the eventual trade collection. 

I mean, I like the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. I like everything of writer Jason Aaron's that I've read. before. The high-profile, rotating artists on the first handful of issues—Rafael Albuqueque, Chris Burnham, Cliff Chiang, Joelle Jones, Darick Robertson—sounded intriguing. And after some dozen years and who knows how many hundreds of pages, a new direction and potential starting point for what has long since become the longest-ever TMNT narrative seemed like a pretty good idea.

But then I noticed the trade was already being ordered by my local library before I bought a copy and, given that I already have way too many books on my groaning shelves, I decided to save myself $20 and just borrow it rather than buy it. That's why it's down here in this section of the column, rather than up top, with the other books I was so excited about that I had decided I had to own them (It's occurred to me that this format has probably outlived its usefulness; like, do any of you care whether I buy a particular book or borrow it from the library? At one point, I figured it denoted a level of interest/excitement regarding the books, but, like I said, I now have so many books that I'm buying fewer and fewer...)

In the end, I'm glad I didn't buy this. At $19.99 for six issues (plus a 10-page short and a variant cover gallery), it's a pretty great value, but, overall, I wasn't too terribly impressed with the book and can't imagine it being one I wish to read over and over again. 

It certainly starts strong, though.

The first four issues of the book each featured a different one of the four original Turtles (the newer, fifth turtle, Jennika, is surely appearing in one of the other IDW book set in their TMNT universe, but I don't know which one), all of whom have been separated and scattered, leading extremely different lives after something mysterious and as-of-yet-unrevealed happened to them. And each of these issues is dawn by a different artist.

After a 10-page short featuring Donatello drawn by Burnham (taken from the pages of the line resetting TMNT Alpha one-shot), we get a story of Raphael in prison, where he is apparently serving as some kind of undercover enforcer for the warden, drawn by Jones; the story of Michelangelo in Japan, where he is a feted celebrity and the star of his own goofy live-action TV show, by Albuquerque; the story of Leonardo on the banks of the Ganges River, where he seeks enlightenment, and develops a weird relationship with the local population of regular turtles, by Chiang; and, finally, the full story of Donatello, half-starved and half-mad, being kept in a cage at a weird safari park, where customers pay to fight and kill mutants, by Burnham.

That accounts for much of the book, and it's pretty intriguing. Each issue is very different from the next, in terms of premise, tone and, obviously, the visuals, and all have a suspenseful element of mystery about them, as the reader is left wondering why the protagonists aren't together at the moment, and how each of them ended up where they are.

While there are few clues offered in the stories themselves, they all sort of end the same way, with the Foot Clan attacking the Turtles where they are, and thus driving them to seek one another out, so that by the end of the fourth issue, they are all in the same place at the same time again, even if not exactly all on the same page (Raph and Mike are at one another's throats about whatever had happened prior to the story, and Donnie is still half-mad...I'm not entirely sure if this is the result of his messing with time, space and magic at the end of the previous volume of the title, or of his treatment as a captive or a combination of both things).

Along the way, it's teased out that Karai's Foot Clan seems to be operating alongside a new villain, the new New York City District Attorney with the unlikely name of Heironymus Hale. Issue #5, drawn by Robertson, focuses on Hale, who he is and how he came to be, and it is pretty much free from the Turtles, who only appear in a quartet of panels showing each being attacked by the Foot.

The issue opens with Hale on the steps of the state Supreme Cout building, telling the press he won't be taking any questions at this time ("Or ever"), and then ordering what appears to be his personal security force, "The Foot Patrol", to violently dispense with the "mob" that is there to protest against them. 

Dressed in red and black, with their faces covered with masks and wrap-around sunglasses, they look like a combination of regular Foot ninja and our over-militarized police forces. (The issue came out in December of last year, so if Aaron's Foot Patrol reminds you of ICE, that's just one more example of the current American government acting like comic book supervillains, rather than the comics addressing their actions; more likely, Hale's new force is meant to reflect the old, run-of-the-mill form of overbearing, abusive, militarized policing, of the sort we saw so many examples of during the nationwide Black Lives Matter protests.)

So the new villain is apparently an evil, species-ist (read: racist), wannabe fascist who has all of the power and prestige that comes with being in control of a government institution. With the title being launched between the end of the first Trump administration and the beginning of the next, that probably seems pretty timely, but, given that it's taking place in what is essentially another mainstream superhero comic book series, it also seems a little tired.

I mean, DC had Lex Luthor elected president of the United States in 2001. Marvel had Norman Osborn put in charge of H.A.M.M.E.R., and thus was the government's Boss of All Superheroes, throughout its 2009 "Dark Reign" era. More recently, Marvel had made The Kingpin Wilson Fisk the mayor of New York City. And, closer to home of course, long-time villain Baxter Stockman was the mayor of NYC in the pages of the previous volume of TMNT and its related comics.

So, between real bad guys being in charge of the federal government in real life and a string of bad guys in charge in the comics over the last 25 years or so, Aaron positing an evil DA? It doesn't seem particularly new, and thus isn't terribly interesting, let alone compelling.

It's certainly not as interesting as the handful of unanswered questions that the first four issues raised, including, I suppose, why the Foot has become enemies of our heroes once again, but Aaron doesn't really address those in the sixth and final issue in this collection, which was drawn by the series' regular artist-to-be, Juan Ferreyra.

That issue involves the Turtles bickering with one another as they return to the city (see the sub-title), where they find that it has completely turned against them, and they are branded criminals and chased around and fought. Not only is the Foot Patrol after them, but so too are regular police officers and even firemen. It ends with our heroes seemingly cornered in Times Square.

Aaron's off to a fairly strong start then, seeding the narrative with enough question marks to guarantee a degree of suspense, more so about what happened into the past to get us to this point than what might happen in the future (This being a Turtles comic, we can safely assume the Turtles will survive their current predicament and go one to have many more years or decades of adventures, of course). 

On the other hand, the Turtles fighting the Foot Clan yet again isn't exactly a terribly exciting premise, nor, as I've said, is the prospect of another bad guy-in-charge storyline. I suppose we'll see.

I appreciated the opportunity this book gave us to see so many different artists draw these so familiar characters. Burnham's Turtles were my favorites. He seemed to draw the beak/mouth area on them just right, so that the characters looked like "themselves", as I remembered them from the old Mirage comics. 

I also liked that he tended to draw them a little smaller and thinner...particularly Donatello, whom I think is meant to be significantly thinner than his brothers, perhaps because he was being starved, and perhaps because the gradual tendency to depict the characters as more physically distinct from one another across various media (and Donnie usually being taller and or thinner than the others). Regardless, he's still notably thinner in the sixth issue, when Ferreyra draws them all.

Burnham's art also has a lot of dark, thick ink on the page, and thus has a grittier look that calls to mind Kevin Eastman and Peter Laird's Turtles art (Eastman continues to contribute covers; you can see some of them in the back of the book).

I also liked Roberston's issue, although, as I said, we only get a glimpse of what his Turtles might have looked like, the rest of the book being devoted to Hale, the Foot, Casey Jones and, in a few panels, April, Bebop and Rocksteady (Robertson also drew some covers featuring his version of the Turtles, which you can see in the back).

Chiang's art was also quite notable, perhaps because of how dramatically it differed from that of all the other artists. He colored his own issue, and his art is notably cleaner, flatter and with brighter, more solid colors than those in any other issue here. I certainly wouldn't mind seeing Chiang do a miniseries or something with these characters in the future. 

As always, there were a gazillion variant covers, enough that there's a 15-page gallery in the back, most of those pages featuring four covers a piece. There are some surprising names among the artists who drew them, including Lee Weeks, Peach Momoko, Sean Murphy and Lee Bermejo (whose scaly Turtle skin recalls the weirdly realistic Turtles of the late Michael Zulli). I liked the four portrait-style ones from a J. Gonzo, whose big-eyed Turtles reminded me a bit of the way Eric Talbot draws them...and, look at that, there's even a Talbot cover, featuring a wounded and mean-looking Raphel.

Oh, one unexpected aspect of the book? Once the Turtles get back together and shed the clothes they were wearing—Raphael's prison jump suit, Donatello's hooded cloak, etc.—they appear as they traditionally have, in just their masks, belts, pads and straps. But after reading Sophie Campbell's fairly lengthy run, where the Turtles were almost always dressed in at least pants or shorts or capes, they all look so nude now...!

I think it's actually going to take me a while to get used to seeing the Turtles depicted this way again, after having spent the last few years seeing them fully dressed...

Titans Vol. 3: Hard Feelings (DC) This book collects the first six issues of writer John Layman's run on the title, which he takes over after a very brief 15-issue run by Tom Taylor (Although, if you count the Titans; Beast World tie-in miniseries, that's actually 21 issues; for context, Marv Wolfman's short-lived post-Zero Hour Arsenal-led line-up lasted 17 issues of The New Titans and an annual before the title was cancelled, and Devin Grayson wrote 20 issues of the 1999 Titans before passing the baton to a successor). 

Layman doesn't seem to stray too far from Taylor's conception of the team, which is of the Teen Titans founders and the New Teen Titans additions of Cyborg, Starfire, Raven and Changeling/Beast Boy reuniting as experienced adult heroes. 

Still, there are some changes, many of them made right out of the gate in Layman's very first issue. Flash Wally West gives the Titans a tour of the new Justice League satellite headquarters, as the heroes are now all officially members of the League, which, thanks to whatever Mark Waid is doing in the pages of Justice League Unlimited, is now no longer such an exclusive club, but something more akin to the old All-Star Squadron, wherein seemingly every active superhero is now considered a member in good standing (I guess I'll be catching up shortly, as the first JLU trade will be released the first week of August).  (There is some early, brief discussion about how exactly this will work, with the Titans remaining a team within the bigger team, and, later, we'll see some gaps between the way in which the Titans and the League seem to want to operate, but Layman doesn't get stuck on the mechanics of the new status quo.)

The Flash, wearing an astonishingly terrible new costume with a lot of black in it, says he's stepping away from the team, so he can focus on being The Flash and on the Justice League (Starfire asks the obvious question in an aside, about how this makes sense given the fact that the Titans are also the Justice League).

Tempest, we're told in dialogue, will also be stepping away to focus on the goings-on in Atlantis.

Arsenal, who has been notably MIA thus far, will be joining the team.

And, finally, Donna Troy will be assuming the role of team leader, something that her and the other characters talk about more-or-less constantly for these half-dozen issues.

Oh, and the team is moving to a new HQ, too, abandoning the still-new Bludhaven Titans Tower that they moved into at the beginning of the series to move into a new underground base in New York City. 

What hasn't changed, unfortunately, is series' focus on rehashing conflicts with old Titans foes. During Taylor's run, that meant that, aside from the ongoing issues with Amanda Waller, the team dealt with a new iteration of Brother Blood and then Trigon. Here, Layman uses two members of the Fearsome Five and The Clock King (who lead a villain team against Sean McKeever's Teen Titans) among a series of villains (which also includes a manipulated Killer Frost and The Psycho-Pirate), the villain behind all of the others being Deathstroke, The Terminator.

Here his intent seems to be founding a new version of The Crime Syndicate for some reason but, regardless, it means that the Titans are once again fighting another member of their traditional rogues gallery instead of doing...well, literally anything else. 

While Layman's issues move swiftly through the changes and they are presented as a series of one-off encounters with various villains that is clearly all part of bigger, behind-the-scenes plot by Deathstroke, it's not as tight as one might hope. For example, both Clock King, exhibiting new powers apparently gained during the climax of Absolute Power, and Psycho-Pirate are employed by Deathstroke to drive various players crazy, and it seems odd to have two entirely separate villains doing the exact same work. 

While Taylor didn't have a consistent artistic partner during his run (the title launched with the great Nicola Scott handling pencils, but she only lasted about an arc), Layman's run is mostly drawn and colored by Pete Woods (Serg Acuna providing fill-in art on one issue). 

Woods has a very animated style here, the characters all look a bit more exaggerated and brighter than what I expected based on his previous art. Coupled with Wes Abbott's lettering, which foregoes black borders around the dialogue balloons, there's a real animated cel-like look to the panels. 

Woods doesn't get too much out of the ordinary to draw, however; it's mostly just the expected heroes and the expected villains, in standard superhero settings (the streets of New York City, various labs and bases, etc). I did rather like his revamp of The Clock King's costume, which is a more highly stylized take on what he wore on Batman: The Animated Series. 

I was a little disappointed with his Boom Tubes, which he basically just draws as normal portals through space and not, you know, Boom Tubes, but then, I feel that's pretty common for current DC artists these days, as they've become so common, not just employed by Cyborg on behalf of the Titans but, as far as I can tell, by the new version of the League as well. 

Anyway, Titans is, as it was under Taylor, perfectly competently made, just fine super-comics, unfortunately lacking in any new ideas, which makes it a not terribly exciting book to read. 

REVIEWED: 

Good Boy (First Second) I talked a bit about Andy Hirsch's book, which tells the tale of an anxious young boy and his dog's budding relationship, on Bluesky a bit already. Hirsch does a phenomenal job of discussing and depicting childhood anxiety, I thought, and handles it visually through the power of comics quite remarkably. More here. 

Iron Man: Something Strange (Abams Fanfare) Dean Hale and Douglas Holgate continue the "Mighty Marvel Team-Up" series from Mike Maihack's trilogy of Spider-Man books. Here awesome facial hair bros Iron Man and Doctor Strange team up to deal with an extra-dimensional menace, which a suspicious-of-magic Tony Stark turns into a contest between the pair and their respective disciplines. The stakes? Their moustaches! Guest-starring Spider-Man, Ms. Marvel and the movie Avengers. More here. 

Superman's Good Guy Gang (DC Comics) I read and reviewed this before seeing the new Superman movie (the comic book came out first), and I had wondered how much cartoonist Rob Justus might have known about the movie while he was making it, as it looked and read a lot like a short comic inspired by the first trailers for the movie (In addition to starring Superman, it includes Green Lantern Guy Gardner, a Hawkgirl, Lex Luthor and a has a Mister Terrific cameo). Well, I guess Justus must have known at least a little bit more than just what he saw in the trailers, as he knew to include the word "gang" in the title. 

So, question: Is "Good Guy Gang" a better team name than "Justice Gang"...? I think so, but I guess they should vote. 

I really like Justus' version of Guy; this one is supposed to be a little kid, but he sure gets the hair and attitude of the character down, despite how far removed his art style is from that of, say Kevin Maguire or Joe Staton. Anyway, I reviewed it here. 

Walt Disney's Mickey Mouse and the Amazing Lost Ocean (Fantagraphics) Denis-Piere Filippi and Silvio Camboni's beautiful, over-sized album tells an epic, steampunk-style adventure in which Goofy is a brilliant inventor (despite still talking like, well, Goofy) and Peg Leg Pete is now "Steampunk Pete." The lost ocean of the title? It actually is amazing, and almost certainly not what you expect, despite the cover kinda sorta spoiling its nature a bit. Like so many of these modern Disney comics, it's a great read, and one that pretty much anyone can pick up and enjoy, regardless of how many comics (Disney or otherwise) they may have read before. More here.