On the first year or so of Kelly Thompson's Birds of Prey

I'm not entirely sure who gets the credit for originally conceiving of the Birds of Prey. 

Long-time Batman group writer Chuck Dixon penned the original Birds of Prey adventure, which appeared in the 1996 over-sized one-shot special Black Canary/Oracle: Birds of Prey #1 and was drawn by Gary Frank and John Dell. On the other hand, I've also heard that editor Jordan B. Gorfinkel came up with the idea (Wikipedia doesn't offer any clarity; the entry for "Birds of Prey (team)" credits Dixon as the creator, while Gorfinkel's entry says he created the team.)

At any rate, Dixon was certainly integral in creating the team and setting the template for the many other writers to follow him, as he wrote all of the team's original late-90s adventures in one-shots Birds of Prey: Revolution and Birds of Prey: Wolves and miniseries Birds of Prey: Manhunt. 

At its inception, Birds of Prey seemed to be a way to give both Black Canary Dinah Lance and Oracle Barbara Gordon something to do in the DC Universe other than playing occasional supporting characters in Green Arrow and Batman comics, with Canary going on missions planned and coordinated by Oracle, who would feed her intel remotely through an earpiece. 

At the outset, Canary had never actually met Oracle, nor even knew her actual identity. Other female characters would occasionally join Canary on these missions, like The Huntress and Catwoman in Manhunt (Or, in the case of a Showcase '96 short written by Gorfinkel, Lois Lane). 

Dixon was also the initial writer of the eventual ongoing monthly series, writing the first 46 issues for a variety of artists, including Greg Land, Butch Guice and Rick Leonardi. Dixon was followed on the book's 10-year, 127-issue run by a pair of talented, if perhaps unlikely, writers, in the form of Strangers in Paradise's Terry Moore and Love and Rockets' Gilbert Hernandez. 

And then Gail Simone took over with 2003's issue #56, initially working with pencil artist Ed Benes, and she stuck around for four years. (Writers Tony Bedard and Sean McKeever would follow her, keeping the title going another year and a half before it faced cancellation.)

Though that was hardly the last we would see of the Birds of Prey, Simone's run was probably the high point of the team's history. She added first The Huntress and then, later, Lady Blackhawk to what became a core line-up, although that line-up would quite frequently feature guest-stars, almost all of them female superheroes, who would come and go. 

And that eventually became the default premise of the book, for all the iterations that followed: A team of female superheroes, led by Canary, Gordon or both. 

While no other ongoing lasted nearly as long as the original—and, let's be honest, at a certain point DC and Marvel stopped even allowing books to run that long, preferring to relaunch books with new #1s every time the writer changed—the concept was popular enough that it never really went away, either. 

It was relaunched in 2010 by the returning Simone and Benes (and canceled at issue #15, both creators having left by then), and again as part of the New 52 in 2011 (lasting 35 issues) and in 2016 as Batgirl & The Birds of Prey (22 issues).

The comics also inspired a 2002 TV series (which, despite veering pretty far from the source material, was pretty fun, and my friend Meredith and I certainly enjoyed watching it for ComicsAlliance), and a 2020 film that had a lot to recommend it (despite some extremely questionable choices, especially regarding the use of a character named "Cassandra Cain", and the fact that it was a stealth Harley Quinn film).

After a weird film-inspired 2020 Black Label miniseries entitled Harley Quinn and the Birds of Prey by Amanda Conner and Jimmy Palmiotti and a weirder still Black Label one-shot by Brian Azzarello, Emanuela Luppacchino and Ray McCarthy (the apparent results of what was originally announced as an ongoing), DC was ready to relaunch the team yet again in 2023, this time with writer Kelly Thompson and artist Leonardo Romero.

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I've long enjoyed the work of blogger-turned-novelist-turned-comics writer Kelly Thompson, ever since I used to regularly read her 1979semifinalist blog back in the Golden Age of Comics Blogging (I just looked, and I can't find her old blogging online anymore, though; I assume it's all been taken down. I guess you just had to be there!). 

I haven't read everything she's written since going pro, but I've read a lot of it, and I haven't read any of it that I didn't like. 

That includes 2015's Jem and the Holograms (with Sophie Campbell, one of my favorite artists), 2016's Mighty Morphin Power Rangers: Pink and Hawkeye, 2017's Journey to Star Wars: The Last Jedi—Captain Phasma, 2018's Jessica Jones and the first volume of West Coast Avengers and 2019's Sabrina, The Teenage Witch, as well as some anthologies she's contributed to, 2016's Lumberjanes: Don't Axe, Don't Tale 2016 Special and 2019's Amazing Spider-Man: Full Circle (Looking at her credits online, I see there's actually an awful lot of stuff of hers that I've never read, much of it published by Marvel. As you guys can probably tell, I've always preferred DC to Marvel, and I have an especially hard time generating interest in comics featuring the X-Men or Captain Marvel Carol Danvers). 

Considering her facility with writing great comics starring compelling female characters (characters as disparate as Jem and Sabrina and Jessica Jones and the Pink Ranger) and her years writing various superhero and genre comics for publishers throughout the mainstream market, she seemed like a slam-dunk choice for a new Birds of Prey comic, and I was excited when she was first announced as its writer, although I had at least one big reservation, which we'll get to in a moment.

I'm much less familiar with the work of artist Leonardo Romero, whose name I did not recognize. Consulting his credits though, it appears he has experience at both big superhero publishers, as well as for some other genre comics publishers, and I have in fact at least read a little of his work, in the pages of Batman '66, Wonder Woman: Black and Gold and Thompson's own Hawkeye, even if I couldn't connect my memories of reading those books to the name.  

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Like I said, I had a few reservations upon the solicitation of that first issue, which was released with the above image of Romero's, an image that ultimately became the cover for the first issue of the series and, later, the first trade collection.

These reservations all had to do with the line-up.

First, someone seemed to be missing. There was no indication that Barbara Gordon was involved. That, of course, seemed odd, but then, maybe she just didn't make the cover; if her role was going to be as Oracle rather than as a Batgirl, then it would make sense not to have her leaping into action alongside the rest of the team.

Second, Jack Kirby's Barda seemed like an...unusual choice. I've always liked the character, of course, even though she usually appears as a supporting character in Mister Miracle or New Gods comics, rather than a protagonist or a hero in her own right*. She had of course been a Justice Leaguer, later in Grant Morrison, Howard Porter and John Dell's JLA run (when she and Orion joined the already power-heavy line-up in preparation for the coming of Mageddon, a relatively rare case in which we saw Barda without her superhero husband), and she had obviously teamed up with the Birds before, as one of Oracle's many occasional operatives during the original Simone run.

Still, in her origins and her powers, she's a pretty cosmic character, more suited to straight superhero adventures than the more street-level and espionage style stories that the Birds are most associated with (Although, to be fair, at a certain point in their runs, both Dixon and Simone did stray pretty far into standard superhero fare; in fact, in one of her later stories, Simone even featured resurrection of a dead Justice Leaguer). 

Third, while I was of course happy to see Batgirl Cassandra Cain, one of my favorite DC characters, I was a little unsure about her presence here...at least at this particular time. Don't get me wrong, I think the character is perfect for the team (and, for a while, I thought she and her fellow Gotham City teen vigilante Spoiler should have been official junior members, working with and learning from Canary and Huntress). But given where we last saw her, fighting alongside and living with Stephanie Brown and Barbara Gordon in the short-lived series Batgirl, it seemed...well, I hate to say "odd" again, but I will...odd that she would join a Birds line-up without Steph or Barbara. (Hey, now that I think of it, I'm not sure I ever read the final Batgirls collection...maybe they all broke up and went their separate ways in the end of that volume? I suppose I should look into that...)

All of those were really just questions I had about Thompson's new line-up, questions I assumed would be answered in the book itself (And, to be perfectly fair, they all were...immediately. By the time the first issue ended, which, reading the trade, meant by the time I finished the first chapter, I understood why all of the characters, including wild card Harley Quinn, were on the team, and was sold on Thompson's logic in justifying their use...which, even if it was in reality "Because Harley will boost sales," got a compelling in-story reason nonetheless.)

But then there was that other character on the cover: Zealot. 

Created by Jim Lee and Brandon Choi for their 1992 Image Comics series WildC.A.T.s: Covert Action Teams**, she and the rest of Lee's "WildStorm Universe" characters became the intellectual property of DC Comics when he sold them to the publisher in 1999. 

For a long time, the various WildStorm characters seemed to occupy their own little discrete fictional universe, separated from the DCU, but during 2011's ill-considered New 52 line-wide reboot, we saw a concerted effort to insert the WildStorm characters into the DCU proper. This led to books like a 30-issue Stormwatch in which Martian Manhunter was on a line-up with redesigned members of The Authority and a nine-issue Team 7 which included Black Canary along with characters from Gen 13 and WildC.A.T.s.

For the most part, the DCU seemed to reject these attempts to graft WildStorm characters into it like a body rejecting transplanted organs, and, of course, whether it was market pressure, creators' dislike of the new status quo or the utter revilement of the DC fanbase, the New 52 status quo itself was done away with, writer Scott Snyder devoting two event crossover series (2017's Dark Nights: Metal and 2020's Dark Nights: Death Metal) and a 39-issue run on a Justice League comic that basically amounted to an epic, years-long undoing of the New 52. 

Still, a few WildStorm characters seemed to fit in better than others, and a few even stuck around after Death Metal. The ones I've always had the hardest time avoiding were Superman and Batman analogues Apollo and Midniter, and Grifter, who appeared in some Batman comics after the de-reboot.

And, of course, here's Zealot, apparently a new member of the Birds of Prey.

I've read a few comics featuring the character, most memorably Morrison and Val Semeiks' 1997 one-shot JLA/WildC.A.T.s, and surely she must have appeared during the Alan Moore-written issues of WildC.A.T.s, which I read from library-borrowed trades in the years before I started EDILW, although I'll be damned if I can remember much of anything about those comics (There was a punk rock cyborg with a purple mohawk and tank top, right?). Basically, all I knew about Zealot was that she had white hair and a sword. (And that both she and Wonder Woman have seen Tom and Jerry, as is revealed in the aforementioned crossover.)

Anyway, that was basically just a four-paragraph way of saying, "Ugh, a WildStorm character." 

I guess DC has officially owned them for over 25 years now, but they still feel...weird and wrong to me, especially in DC team books like Birds of Prey. (I wonder, did older DC Comics fans feel this way about, say, The Marvel Family or Charlton characters like Blue Beetle and The Question officially joining the mainstream DCU after Crisis on Infinite Earths...? Did they still feel that way 25 years later?)

As you can see by the fact that I am just now writing about a run that started in the calendar year 2023, it took me a while to get around to Thompson and company's Birds of Prey. Sure, that was, in large part, because I have switched from comic book-comics to trades, but I have a feeling knowing that Zealot was in this comic made me drag my feet a bit in finally picking it up.

I am assuming that was probably just me, though.

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Birds of Prey Vol. 1: Megadeath Kelly Thompson and Leonardo Romero hit the ground running in the first issue of their new Birds of Prey series. Indeed, within the very first panel—depicting a shirtless Oliver Queen in a bed talking to Dinah Lance, who sits on the edge of the bed with her hands folded, looking somewhat worried—they have already begun to establish the building of a new Birds of Prey team.

I mentioned how thoroughly Thompson answered questions regarding the new lineup in the first issue above, and it is quite a remarkable first issue, as they use those first 25 pages to introduce the full six-characters who would make up the new version of them team, thoroughly enough that even if a reader wasn't already  terribly familiar with them they would be almost immediately, as well as establishing a rationale for Black Canary needing a team, the criteria of its make up (and why Barbara Gordon can't be on it), their incredibly dangerous, fairly crazy-sounding mission and an in-story excuse for Dinah to take such an enormous risk and work with such an unusual team in the first place.

It's a remarkably effective and efficient first issue, and one that not only doesn't waste any time, but also has room for multiple well-orchestrated and executed action scenes, and some really fun grace notes, like a two-page spread in which multiple drawings of Canary and Batgirl Cassandra Cain are shown taking on a small army of ninjas, or, even better, a four-page sequence in which Cassandra tells the others a story about a past fight with Harley Quinn, one that evokes both 2002's DC First: Batgirl/Joker #1 and the 1993 film Batman: Mask of The Phantasm (Both on purpose, I presume). 

As for the mission, it is this: Black Canary's little "sister" Sin is being held captive on Themyscira by the Amazons, where she is in danger of being possessed by a supernatural monster that will use her to destroy the entire island, and, perhaps, the world. 

This is all according to half-new time-travelling character from the future named Meridian, who is apparently Gotham Academy's grown-up Maps Mizoguchi. (Maps also tells Canary she can't bring Barbara, or she'll die and, if you're wondering why they don't just ask Wonder Woman to release Sin, Thompson has an answer for that, too: If Wondy refuses for any reason, Canary and her team will have lost the element of surprise necessary to invade a remote island full of formidable warriors.)

The review of Megadeath that recently ran at Collected Editions already effectively pointed out the problems with this set-up. 

First, there's the fact that the time-traveler warning of peril to a hero's family (and being the driving force behind a new series) was so recently used in Green Arrow Vol. 1: Reunion (featuring Black Canary!). 

And then there's the fact that we haven't seen or heard anything of Sin, a character introduced during Simone's original BOP series, in a while...2007, during the Tony Bedard-written Black Canary miniseries that essentially wrote the character off, if I am remembering correctly (And not only is that close to 20 years ago, it was on the other side of that weird gaping continuity gulf of the New 52, which makes it difficult to be confident which events prior to, say, Death Metal are actually canonical). 

Those elements aside—and I didn't have any trouble putting them aside, given how well they end up setting up the story—it's damn good comics. This first six-issue arc, which fills the entirety of the first trade, scans a bit like a superhero comic/heist movie mash-up. There's the recruiting a team of misfit, mismatched specialists, the plotting and planning, the gathering materials and making preparations and then the heist itself which, naturally, has dramatic complications that challenge our heroes in unexpected ways.

Given that the plan involves sneaking onto Themyscira, one of those complications is, of course, Wonder Woman herself, and we get to see not only Barda try to go one-on-one with her (as is depicted on one of the covers), but also Cassandra, who surprisingly attacks her in a very Batmanly way, using trickery and a utility belt full of gadgets and weapons (I had, back when I still thought I might grow up to write comics myself, previously imagined a Cassandra/Wonder Woman fight that went quite differently than this, making this one an awful lot of fun to read). 

For all the sneaking around and fighting, things eventually go pretty much as the heroes would want them to, with Wonder Woman ultimately taking the side of the Birds, Sin being rescued and the threat of her being possessed by the Fury of Greek myth Megaera adverted...sort of. (Don't read the later sections of this post if you don't want that plot point to be spoiled later.)

While the focus is obviously and appropriately on the ladies, several male allies also make notable appearances, giving the book a slightly more expansive feel, and further anchoring it in the DCU. 

This obviously includes the previously mentioned Oliver Queen, who is tasked with attacking Wonder Woman in Washington, D.C. and holding her off as long as possible (And he fares about as well as you might expect a guy with a bow and some trick arrows to fare against Wonder Woman, in what turns out to be a great six-page action sequence). 

And then there's John Constantine—who Romero actually draws to resemble Sting, as his creators Alan Moore, Steve Bissette and John Totleben intended—who helps Canary procure some magical supplies for her mission. 

And a brief surprise appearance by one of Harley's Suicide Squad colleagues, who proves integral to her plan of arriving on the island undetected. (Oh, and Grifter Cole Cash makes a brief appearance; I guess he and Zealot are an item? No cameo from Scott Free though; Barda gets recruited in the middle of a brawl, rather than at home.)

It's actually kind of hard to over praise Romero's work on this book. It's really that good.

If you look back at BOP history, some of the many artists to have drawn the books have had the unfortunate tendency to draw all of the characters the exact same, veritable clones of one another, distinguishable by their hair color and costumes (I'm thinking of one particular artist here, who had a couple of runs on the title). 

Romero doesn't do that. The characters not only have a variety of body types—a task perhaps helped along by the fact that there is such a natural variety to the characters, from the giant Big Barda to the petite Cassandra Cain, who the former charmingly refers to as "Small Bat" throughout—but easily distinguishable designs, including their faces, expressions, postures and attitudes. 

He also manages the neat trick of drawing the characters in a style that looks realistic, but without being staid and boring; his work still looks very drawn and very comic book-y. I was repeatedly reminded of the work of the great Javier Rodriguez throughout.

I've already mentioned the quality of the action scenes, something that modern American comics are usually, well, fairly trash at depicting, but are here quite strong, with actual image-driven storytelling and fight choreography, rather than the more standard drawing of heroes posing while their foes are drawn in freefall (We'll actually see a fight of that style in the next volume, drawn by different artists).

And Thompson certainly gives Romero a lot of fun stuff to draw, including some fun costume designs. I mean, these are some really fun designs to begin with, like Kirby's Barda (who appears in both her full armor as well as her bikini costume) and the Batman x Spider-Man design of the Cassandra Cain Batgirl that artist Damion Scott perfected (I really like how Romero draws this Batgirl's ears here, by the way, set as they are on the side of her head and extending at an angle, evoking the first appearance version of Batman). But there's also a very short sequence in which the Birds all adopt aquatic gear, and rather than generic matching scuba suits like the one Canary dons, they all get what look like personalized, toy-ready costumes of their own. 

Unfortunately, Romero doesn't draw the whole story arc. The fill-in artist, Arist Deyn, comes in at a rather inconvenient time, drawing the fifth issue of a six-issue arc, and, worse, has a style that couldn't be more incongruous with that of Romero's.

Remember what I said about some Birds artists drawing the characters more or less identically? Well, that's what Deyn does. Not only do they all have the same slim body type (Barda is just a bit taller than the others), but they all have the exact same face, with a big forehead and large, glossy eyes that give them all a doll-like look.

A change in the art in the middle of an arc is always annoying, and Deyn's work, while fine on its own (Googling the artist later, I quite liked a lot of what I saw), it is incredibly jarring to read here (Deyn also handles the coloring on that particular issue, further distancing the imagery in this chapter from that of the rest of the story, which is colored by Jordie Bellaire; you probably can't tell from my scans from the book, though).

The denouement of the final issue, for which Romero returns to draw, pretty deftly moves the characters on to a new threat, one that manages to justify the team's continued existence....at least in some form. As Canary and Cassandra discuss the new threat that Meridian/Maps has shared with them, the last panel has Canary declaring "We're going to need a new team."

I was heartened to hear that. A small core team with Canary and Cassandra (and, as we'd find out in the next volume, Barda and Sin) and rotating guest characters is not only in keeping with earlier iterations of the book, and not only means we will get to see more characters get a story arc or so in the spotlight, but it also means I don't have to keep reading about Zealot (although she does make appearances in the next volume) or Harley Quinn, who is fine in this book, but is definitely a character I've had my fill of over the last decade or so. 

Megadeath is pretty much a perfect trade paperback, telling one single, complete story in such a way that is perfectly acceptable to long-time fans of the team or individual characters while also proving accessible to newer readers (And I do hope Thompson brought some of the fans of her Marvel work to Birds of Prey for the first time). Simultaneously, as all good serial narratives should, it teases the next story in a way that is compelling enough to make one want to keep reading.

The good news for me then is, because I waited so incredibly long to actually sit down to read this first collection, the second one was already available, and I could read it immediately. 

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Birds of Prey Vol. 2: Worlds Without End Unfortunately, the series kind of falls apart a little in the second volume. 

It's easy to diagnose the problem—Leonardo Romero stops drawing interiors, retreating to covers only, and instead of the previous volume's two artists, this time we get six —but not necessarily the source, as it is all behind-the-scenes.

Obviously, comics work best when there is a solid, stable creative team working together throughout the run, and while it's become increasingly rare for any super-comic from any publisher to produce comics with a consistent writer/artist team for very long anymore—and I should note that that may be considered a good thing, if it means publishers and fans are no longer pressuring artists to work themselves to death to meet monthly deadlines—there are better, smarter ways to handle fill-ins (I think Mark Waid and Dan Mora's run on Batman/Superman: World's Finest did a pretty good job of this, with Waid crafting story arcs for Mora to draw, then writing a done-in-one single issue for a guest artist to draw and give Mora a break, before launching a new arc for Mora). 

Anyway, whatever went on with Birds of Prey personnel behind the scenes, that's all on DC. All I can say, as a reader, is that it's disappointing and annoying to get a truly great creative team on (most) of a story arc, only for that team to change in the very next arc.

Romero's main replacement seems to be the top-credited Javier Pina, who draws the entirety of the first of this collection's seven issues, and then parts of three other issues. 

I didn't personally care for Pina's work as much as I did Romero's (The downside of Romero's art on the first arc being so great? They set a very high bar for every one that follows him). There's nothing wrong with it, though. 

It's very realistic, far more so than Romero's slightly more cartooned work, although Pina does have a habit of dropping photos into the panels as backgrounds, a practice that has always annoyed me. At least with Jordie Bellaire still on colors, the art is somewhat in keeping with the tone of most of the first volume. (I think Gavin Guidry, who draws the entirety of the final issue and portions of a few others, bears a style closer to Romero's, and might make for the best replacement of any of the artists whose work appears here.)

The title story arc at least has a premise that seems to incorporate the game of artist musical chairs (There are actually two story arcs in this volume, a two-part "Undercover Animals" and a five-part "Worlds Without End", although they blend into one another in such a way that they read as one story.)

Canary and Meridian finally bring in Batgirl/Oracle Barbara Gordon and begin working their new case: A rogue time-traveler from the future is targeting the Birds, and Barbara in particular. They kinda sorta recruit Vixen, and with her help they set a trap for their mysterious antagonist, which leads to the very fun sequence in which the Birds act as scantily-clad models at a fashion show (At one point, Barda sheds her clothes to fight, so Kelly Thompson and Pina can repurpose a gag from the Matt Fraction/David Aja Hawkeye, where a classic image of the character's head is super-imposed over the art to censor nudity, looking a bit like a sticker applied to the page of the book).

During that fight—one notably not as strong as those in the first volume—a portal opens, and Barbara goes through it, the rest of the Birds going after her. What follows over the course of the next five issues is a sort of chase through different portals, each one resetting and "re-skinning" the characters and the pocket reality our heroines find themselves trapped in, their costumes and the setting changing dramatically, depending on which character enters the portal first and thus determining the style of the next "world."

So you can see how this scenario would be unusually compatible if one is working with a half-dozen different artists (Although I don't think the other artists involved necessarily all line neatly up, so that each one is given their own world to draw...if so, only one draws in such a style that it is too terribly dramatically distinguished from that of the others, but we'll get to that in a moment).

And so Black Canary, Big Barda, Vixen, the newly redesigned and empowered Sin, both Batgirls and a newcomer they meet in the pocket dimension find themselves being pursued by the monstrous, reality-altering villain who has been targeting them, from a nightmarish Gotham, to a more optimistic mid-century America, to a world of dinosaurs and a cartoon world, their costumes and/or appearances getting redesigned each time (The dinosaur world thus gives us a sort of Savage Land-ized version of the Birds, for example).

The most dramatic change comes in the penultimate chapter, when Sin tries to control the nature of the next world by thinking of cartoons when jumping through the portal. Here Thompson reunites with her original partner from Jem and The Holograms, EDILW favorite Sophie Campbell. Campbell draws the Birds as chibi versions of themselves, and they are adorable, especially Campbell's Cassandra. 

(As fun as this chapter is, I do hope Campbell returns to the book at some point and draws it in her regular style; that's the style she draws the villain in during the four panels in which she appears, and, as Campbell has proven in her contributions to 2021's Batman Black and White #2 and Superman: Red and Blue #6, she can draw the hell out of DC superheroes). 

Constantine, Zealot and a shirtless Cole Cash all return, the first two gathering with Merdian outside the mysterious portal that appeared at the fashion show and worrying about how to get the Birds out of it, and there's also a brief and unexpected appearance by Xanthe Zhou, from 2023's Lazarus Planet: Legends Reborn #1 (And there's an footnote pointing to her appearance with Cassandra in the 2023 Spirit World miniseries). 

The story works, and certainly has plenty of fun moments in it, but, unlike that of the first volume, it doesn't seem as specific to the characters (despite a somewhat surprising link between the villain and a rather old Barbara Gordon foe), and the basic scenario is one that it's easy to imagine any other hero or team of heroes going through. 

Once again, Thompson gives us a last-panel cliffhanger that, while as vague as can be, points to a next adventure, and left me wanting to find out what happens next.

Based on these first two volumes (and/or 13 issues), Thompson seems to have a great handle on the characters, and a pretty good idea how to keep them together as a team. She also manages to have a fairly light touch, with lots of organically funny moments that make the book truly fun to read.

Despite all of the chefs in the kitchen involved in this particular volume, this is still the best Birds of Prey comic we've gotten since Gail Simone was writing it, and among the better showcases for many of the characters featured (like Barda and Cassandra, for example).

 I'm looking forward to volume 3...and hopefully many more volumes after that. 

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Looking ahead at the five issues that have been published since those collected in Worlds Without End, it looks like the next few issues will introduce Grace Choi and Onyx to the mix, as well as another new artist: Sam Basri, who has drawn plenty of comics for DC, including female-starring ones like Harley Quinn, Power Girl and Voodoo. 

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Here's something I did not care for at all:

As you can see in the Deyn-drawn panel above, Kelly Thompson has Black Canary quote a line from Watchmen to Megaera. 

Can't we all just agree to leave Alan Moore alone...?

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Finally, there's this, which is more of a note than a complaint or nitpick.

When Sin finally merges with Megaera, the immediate aftermath of which is pictured above, she gets an instant, magical makeover, the evil goddesses' vine-like threads forming a green, triangular pattern over her torso, and giving her matching boots and other accessories.

She also gets a green shock of hair.

Now, I am totally not the right person to be bringing this up all, being a middle-aged white guy (and a bald one at that!), but I guess I will anyway, since I don't know if anyone else has yet: It was my understanding that giving Asian female characters colored streaks of hair was something that real Asian women found to be a tired, annoying stereotype in pop culture.

I first heard this in regard to 2021's Shang-Chi and The Legend of the Ten Rings. I had read that Meng'er Zhang, who played Shang-Chi's little sister Xialing in the movie, had said that her character was originally intended to have a streak of red in her hair in the film, but that she had asked that the element of the character design be removed, as the Asian-girl-with-a-streak-of-colored-hair had become a stereotype. I'm now not sure where I read it; it might have been this Axios article, as I used to read that site regularly-ish for a while, or it might have just been a headline I had seen somewhere on social media.

At any rate, so that you don't have to take my word for it, here's the Teen Vogue article that apparently struck a chord with Zhang, and here's a HuffPost piece on the same subject that was published a few years previous to that. 

I confess to having been completely ignorant of the phenomenon until I read about Zhang calling it out, even though I have seen at least a couple of the sources of the stereotype that were cited (Scott Pilgrim Vs. The World, Big Hero 6 and the various X-Men films, for example).

In the case of Sin, I am fairly certain none of the creators gave her the green hair to signify any particular character traits or comment on the typical behavior of Asian women but were instead only using the change as a visual signifier of her transformation, her green-colored hair being a change along the same lines of her wardrobe changing and her gaining new powers. Not unlike, say, Jason Blood or Jim Corrigan, both of whom similarly merged with powerful supernatural entities, having white streaks in their hair. 

(And, for what it's worth, Sin is only one of four characters of Asian descent in that first year of the series, and she is the only one of them with a streak of color in her hair; Cassandra and Maps both have all-black hair, as does the non-binary Xanthe Zhou. On the other hand, future issues of the series will apparently feature Grace Choi, an Asian American character who has dyed red hair.)

Anyway, now that my attention has been brought to the stereotype, I can't help but notice it whenever I see it. Maybe if it's brought to the attention of the creators or DC, they will gradually phase it out. Or not. After all, as I said, the book already has several Asian female (and/or non-binary) characters, and they have a somewhat admirable variety of backgrounds, powers, personalities...and hair styles. 

*You guys did read Nogzi Ukazu's original graphic novel Barda, the very first time the character starred in her own comic, last year though, right? If not, here's my review of it. If you're a Barda fan, you definitely want to read it. It's great. 

**To be honest, just typing out the name "WildC.A.T.s" irritates me. 

DC Versus Marvel Omnibus Pt. 11: Silver Surfer/Superman #1

Okay, serious question for those who were reading Marvel comics at the time: Was the Silver Surfer a really popular character in the mid-90's...? 

I only ask because this was the second consecutive DC/Marvel crossover in which he starred, and if we look at all four of the standalone crossover one-shots that the two publishers released in 1995 and 1996, the Surfer was prominently featured in three of 'em. 

I know he was carrying his own ongoing title back then—according to Comics.org, The Silver Surfer launched in 1987 and lasted through 1998, running 146 issues—but when I think of popular Marvel characters of the '90s, I tend to think of Spider-Man, Wolverine, The Punisher and Ghost Rider, not Norrin Radd. 

Was he really one of their top characters, or was he simply over-represented in these crossovers, a Marvel character that the various creators involved just saw fit to repeatedly meet with members of the Distinguished Competition's roster? 

At any rate, the character returned to the spotlight in Silver Surfer/Superman #1, a one-shot special published just six months after the DC Versus Marvel miniseries wrapped; obviously, that event series wasn't meant to be any sort of climax or culmination of the publishers' 1990s crossovers, as they would continue unabated for a few more years. (Which means, of course, there are still plenty more posts yet to go in this series).

This time the creative team would consist of the popular and talented George Perez, here relegated to scripting only, with no hand in the art, and the prolific Ron Lim, who had by this point produced plenty of pages for the Silver Surfer comic, not to mention many of Marvel's other titles. (He'd also drawn Superman at that point, but not for any great length.) 

Perez, meanwhile, had written a run on Silver Surfer, and had plenty experience drawing Superman in different capacities for various titles.

Finally, rounding out the creative team was veteran inker Terry Austin, whose name didn't make the cover, as you can see above. (Nor did that of colorist Tom Smith.)

Their Silver Surfer/Superman story really seems premised on the meeting of the villains in the piece; while Superman and the Surfer do indeed have a couple of things in common, it's the villains of this story fulfill similar niches in each publisher's respective universe. In fact, a pretty strong case can made that one's portrayal is based on that of the other.

These villains are, of course, Mr. Mxyzptlk, a character dating back to a 1944 comic from Superman's creators Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, and The Impossible Man, a one-time Fantastic Four character created in 1963 by Jack Kirby and Stan Lee who had since gone on to mess with various other Marvel characters, the Surfer included.

Though their exact natures and powers varied a bit—Mxy was a fifth dimensional imp with seemingly limitless magic powers, while the Impossible Man hailed from the planet Poppup and had extraordinary shape-shifting abilities—both were diminutive pranksters that enjoyed teasing strait-laced heroes, and the stories featuring them were generally more comedic in nature, offering a temporary respite from the more standard and serious superhero fare. 

Thus, this story, entitled "Pop!" is really more of a Mr. Mxyzptlk/Impossible Man crossover than a Superman/Silver Surfer one. 

It's kind of too bad that the villains, if we can really call them that, are so prominently placed on the book's wraparound cover, as it spoils their presence, draining the What's going on? melodrama that our heroes experience at the beginning of the tale, when they find themselves in strange, even impossible circumstances. 

Superman is just finishing up a routine patrol of Metropolis when he disappears in a "Pop", reappearing on what seems to be an intact and populated Krypton...although he can tell from the positions of the stars that he hasn't traveled back in time, and that, as impossible as it seems, this Krypton exists in the present day.

After tangling with Kryptonian soldiers, he's faced with a much more formidable foe: The Super-Skrull!

Meanwhile, The Silver Surfer is investigating a mysterious planet in deep space, when he also disappears in a "Pop", reappearing in Metropolis, where he finds things are very wrong. It's not just that everyone's afraid of him and calling for a "Superman" to come save them, but his powers don't seem to be working quite right, and when he tries to flee for space, he rams into and shatters some sort of glass barrier.

The Surfer soon finds himself standing outside a miniaturized, "bottled" Metropolis, in what appears to be Superman's Fortress of Solitude...although the fortress seems endless, ever-changing, sentient and...to have a sense of humor...?

Superman eventually figures out what's going on—or at least thinks he does—and he punches out the Super-Skrull while shouting in big red letters, "GAME OVER, IMP!!"

It turns out he's got the wrong alien prankster though, as the Super-Skrull was really the Impossible Man in disguise, not Mxyzptlk. Impossible Man then explains the situation to Superman: He ran into Mr. Mxyzptlk (who he continually refers to as "Mixed Pickles") in one of the "dimensional interfaces" that he travels through when popping. They hit it off, and came up with a challenge of sorts, where they would swap playmates with one another. 

Mxy doesn't play entirely fair, however, leading to he and Impossible Man battling one another in a fun four-page sequence where they each take on the appearances of heroes from their respective universes, only color-coded, so that green and purple Marvel characters fight orange and purple DC characters. This gives us a rapid succession of strange panels like Thanos punching out Plastic Man and Wonder Woman blocking Wolverine's claws with her bracelets and so on.

Eventually, thanks to the Impossible Man's trickery and some similar quick-thinking from our heroes, all four end up in the same place at the same time, and Mxy is prevailed upon to join his powers with the Impossible Man's and put the heroes back in their home universes.

This is, by the way, another crossover in which the DC and Marvel characters are explicitly denizens of two separate universes, their crossover only made possible by the villains' extraordinary powers piercing the border between the DC Universe and the Marvel Universe. Perhaps also worth mentioning? At one point, Access from DC Versus Marvel is name-dropped by the Impossible Man: "Mixed Pickles and I found out it took both our combined powers to make the switchover between you and the Surfer work," he explains to Superman, "Neither one of us is Access after all."

Overall, it's a rather fun outing, and the best kind of crossover, one that finds similar characters from each publisher and lets them play off of one another, comparing and contrasting them. It's just that in this case, somewhat unusually, it's the antagonists more than the heroes who are most similar.



Next: 1997's Batman & Captain America #1

A brief DC Versus Marvel interlude

In my review of 1982's Marvel and DC Present Featuring the Uncanny X-Men and the New Teen Titans #1, and probably elsewhere throughout my series reviewing the history of DC/Marvel crossovers, I talked a bit about how the publishers stopped cooperating on crossover comics after that particular book was published. 

It would be 12 more years before DC and Marvel would work on a crossover of their characters again, not resuming them until 1994's Batman/Punisher: Lake of Fire #1. 

From the outside looking in, suspending the crossovers didn't seem to make much sense. Those first four were all pretty solid comics; a couple of them even great comics. They seem to have sold like gangbusters, and both the fans who read them and the pros who made them seemed to enjoy the relatively rare opportunity of seeing the rival publishers' characters interacting.

Whatever exactly happened, it seemed to center on the proposed fifth crossover, a George Perez-drawn pairing of the Justice League of America and the Avengers. I did a little Googling and found at least one player's version of events as to what exactly happened on his blog, but I didn't comment or even share a link to it here, not wanting to wade into 40-year-old dispute that occurred when I was in kindergarten.

Well, just this week I found a very thorough accounting of the collapse of the original JLoA/Avengers crossover, one that was based on reporting in the fan press at the time, public statements from many of the participants and apparently original interviews with some of the men involved. 

That would be the late KC Carlson's oral history of the project, which he apparently put together after being asked to write a piece for the collection of the 2004 JLA/Avengers crossover. 

Carlson's piece didn't end up appearing in that collection, however, and, once you read it, you'll see why: No one comes out looking particularly good. Rather than one actor or another being the villain in the story, the book seems to have been doomed by a series of bad decisions, miscommunication, some unprofessional behavior and a lot of hard feelings. And the damage done was apparently significant enough to put a stop to DC and Marvel's cooperation with one another for over a decade.

While Carlson's piece didn't end up in a JLA/Avengers book, The Beat eventually published it in a series of two posts in 2022. You can read the first one here. 

If you've been reading the DC/Marvel crossovers as I have lately, it seems like a pretty valuable piece of the behind-the-scenes story, one that explains not only what happened to that particular crossover but also answers the question as to why the two publishers stopped working together for so long. (Also? The Beat posts are illustrated by some great Perez art originally produced for the crossover, like the image atop this post.)

Now if only someone would do all the necessary interviews to write a piece explaining why DC and Marvel ceased publishing crossovers again after 2000's Batman/Daredevil: King of New York, and then why they temporarily resumed cooperating just long enough to finally publish JLA/Avengers...

On the passing of KC Carlson

I was very sorry to hear about the death of comics editor and writer KC Carlson.

I had never met Carlson. I knew him primarily as the husband of long-time writer-about-comics Johanna Draper Carlson, who has been writing about comics and pop culture at her site Comics Worth Reading since 1999, as well as contributing all over the Internet, including at, among the sites I read or have read, The Savage Critics, The Beat and Good Comics for Kids. 

Secondarily, I knew Carlson as a well-liked former editor of DC's Legion of Super-Heroes comics in the early '90s. 

Having never really been much of a LOSH reader or fan, though, I didn't think Carlson had any impact on my personal comics reading experience. But as I've been reading remembrances and obituaries of him this week (like this one from my Good Comics for Kids editor Brigid Alverson at ICv2 or this one from Heidi MacDonald at The Beat) and looking more closely at his editing credits, I see he did indeed have an influence on the comics I read in the '90s, when I was first forming my love of the medium. 

He was the assistant editor on 1989's Deadman: Love After Death, a book drawn by former Micronauts, Action Comics Weekly and First Comics artist Kelley Jones, a book where the man who would eventually go on to become one of my favorite comics artists really seemed to find and start to perfect his own unique style. (Jones mentioned the importance of Carlson in his career here). 

In 1990, he was the collections editors for some of the publisher's earliest of the then still-emerging format that we would come to call graphic novels, including V for Vendetta, Swamp Thing: Love and Death and The Sandman: The Doll's House. I don't have to tell you how important that format would go on to become for the North American comics industry and the medium itself, and those early, more literary DC Comics trade paperbacks went a long way toward popularizing it. 

In 1992, he edited the excellent if short-lived Eclipso, a then-unusual comic series that featured a villain as a lead (and which could really use a collection). 

In 1994, he edited Dan Jurgens and Jerry Ordway's Zero Hour: Crisis in Time, a favorite of mine among DC's crossover event series, and a story I was just re-reading as recently as last December. 

In 1996, Carlson replaced Mike Carlin as the editor on the Superman line, helping guide the character for part of what proved to be a creatively and financially successful decade in his history. 

And in 1997 he was the editor for the launch of Adventures in the DC Universe, a consistently great title that gave the Bruce Timm-style "animated series" look of Batman: The Animated Series and Superman: The Animated Series to the rest of the DC Universe, the appealing artwork paired with inviting, all-ages stories that proved perfect introductions to the characters that populated the publisher's line at the time (and which could also really use a collection). 

So I guess it turns out that a lot of the comics filling up my long boxes got there thanks in part to the work of KC Carlson.

In addition to his work as a DC editor, Carlson held many and varied jobs related to the comics industry during his life, including writing about comics for, among other places, the Westfield Comics blog, Comics Worth Reading and The Beat...where he contributed an oral history quite relevant to what I've mostly been blogging about here lately. 

My sincere condolences to Johanna, and to Carlson's friends and family and the many comics creators and professionals who have worked with him. 

A Month of Wednesdays: January 2025

BOUGHT:

DC Versus Marvel: The Amalgam Age Omnibus (DC Comics) Now that almost 30 years have passed since 1996's DC Versus Marvel was first published and the series has become a part of comics history, it can be easy to lose sight of just how bold, just how weird, just how crazy the idea at the center of the story really was. 

In the two years previous, the two long-time rivals for market dominance had resumed cooperating on crossover comics again, publishing a handful of 48-page team-ups, but this much bigger series was an attempt to do something in the mold of an event series, something like a DC-style "Crisis" comic, only involving both companies, and pitting their entire rosters of heroes against one another. It was planned to span four issues, with a dozen tie-in comics. 

And while, on the surface, editors Mark Gruenwald and Mike Carlin and the writing team of Ron Marz and Peter David were engaged in the most straightforward and predictable of stories involving the two groups of heroes—that is, making them fight one another—the decision was made to do something extremely unexpected at the climax. After the third issue, and filling up all of those tie-in comics, the creators would combine the two universes...not into a single setting in which all of the extant characters could share space, but into a brand-new universe populated by brand-new characters that were actually smooshed-together composites of DC and Marvel characters.

So rather than presenting a story in which Batman encountered Wolverine, for example, DC and Marvel commissioned Larry Hama and Jim Balent to create a story for Legends of The Dark Claw, starring a weird-ass character that was part Batman and part Wolverine. This led to a whole "Amalgam" universe populated with such amalgamated characters, characters that ranged anywhere from inspired, like Super Soldier (Superman + Captain America) and Spider-Boy (Superboy + Spider-Man), to somewhat strained, like Doctor Strange Fate (Doctor Fate + Doctor Strange) and Speed Demon (The Flash and Etrigan + Ghost Rider), to completely ridiculous, like Shatterstarfire (Starfire + Shatterstar).

Were the resultant line of Amalgam Comics necessarily good...? Well, not exactly. But they were fun, they were weird and they were unexpected, and, for that, the men involved with the series definitely deserve credit (Based on the introductions to DC Versus Marvel from Marz and Carlin that appear in the collection, it would seem that it was the late Gruenwald who came up with the idea of an amalgamized universe).

This 1,000-page hardcover collection includes pretty much every DC/Marvel collaboration that didn't make it into last year's DC Versus Marvel Omnibus, which means DC Versus Marvel and its Amalgam Comics tie-ins, sequel series DC/Marvel: All Access and its round of 12 new Amalgam comics and the Unlimited Access miniseries. There's also a couple hundred more pages of supplemental material, including introductions and afterwords, scripts, sketches, promotional art and the entirety of the DC Versus Marvel and Amalgam trading card lines, with histories of each and all of their respective cards.

As with the sister volume that preceded it, it's a lot of content, and while I don't think there are any truly great comics in this particular collection, there sure are a hell of a lot of interesting comics, with the three major crossover storylines exploring lots of little collisions between the two sets of characters and their universes that no one would have had time, space or likely interest in exploring in a crossover story of the era (Like a doomed superhero version of Romeo and Juliet involving then-Robin Tim Drake and the X-Men's Jubilee, or what Darkseid might have said had he ever met Thanos, or a meeting of the original Justice League and Avengers line-ups and so on). 

As to the specifics of each of these three major stories and their relative qualities, I don't think there's really enough space to explore them fully here, so I'll be giving them their own devoted posts in the still-ongoing DC Versus Marvel series that I started after reading the first DC Versus Marvel Omnibus. 

I will here note, however, that one could scarcely hope for a more thorough accounting of this particular series of crossovers, with memories as well as plenty of notes from some of the surviving participants, and the card collections expanding on the scope of the original event...and explaining why certain decisions were made, and what the story might have looked like were it bigger and the writers had more space, as Marz seems to suggest he and David would have liked in his introduction.

Marz wrote the text for the cards, and here we see additional crossovers that just didn't make it into the original DC Versus Marvel comics, like, for example, Warrior Guy Gardner vs. War Machine, The Penguin vs. The Mole Man, The Ray vs. Nova, Blue Beetle vs. Spider-Woman Julia Carpenter, Electro vs. Black Lightning and more, plus a few series of cards pitting the JLA vs. The Avengers and the X-Men vs. The Teen Titans. 

These were of particular interest because so many of these characters don't actually make it into DC Versus Marvel...like, at all. I was frankly sort of shocked, for example, that the entire crossover series passed without so much as a cameo from characters we now think of as preeminent ones in the Marvel Universe, like Black Panther and whatever Carol Danvers was going by in 1996—Ms. Marvel, I assume? Dr. Strange, Hawkeye, Black Widow, Iron Man, The Vision and Ant-Man do get cameos, but just cameos.

Regardless of the various merits and detriments of the comics, one does get a sense of what the DC and Marvel Universes looked like circa 1996 and 1997 (Surprisingly, even shockingly, white, male and straight, when compared to both publishing lines in the 21st century), and what the talent pool working with both major publishers was in those same years (Also pretty white, male and straight, as far as I can tell...Barbara Kesel seems to be the only woman who wrote, penciled or inked any of the hundreds of pages worth of comics collected herein; there are a few more female names among the 20 or so colorists involved).  

It's definitely a good book for a fan of DC or Marvel super-comics to have on their shelves, and I'd definitely recommend it. If you're turned off by the massive price tag (and I don't blame you!), I would at least ask your local library if they can order a copy for their shelves that you can borrow and peruse. 

BORROWED: 

Chickenpox (Henry Holt and Company) The latest book from cartoonist Remy Lai (Pawcasso, Ghost Book) is a fictionalized memoir of events from her childhood, but with a perhaps unusual twist. Instead of following the young Remy Lai, the book's protagonist and narrator is actually her older sister "Abby", the eldest of the five Lai children (Remy is, of course, one of them, and thus has a supporting role in the story...and it's a not too terribly flattering portrayal of the then eight-year-old).

Set in Indonesia in 1994, Chickenpox introduces us to 12-year-old Abby, who has a complicated relationship with her younger siblings. Well, maybe it's not that complicated. They're really annoying, and she likens her home to a zoo full of animals. 

Thus, she looks forward to any chance at all to get away temporarily, which is why she loves school, and, especially, spending time with her two best friends, Monica and Julia. One day, her friends prevail upon Abby to hang out at her house for a change, and things go predictably awry. First, Abby finds herself getting lured into a fight with some of her younger siblings, which leads to her acting immature in front of her visibly awkward friends. Then, and worse, it turns out that one of her friends had chickenpox and had accidentally infected the entire Lai household.

And so Abby finds herself trapped in the zoo of her house with her little siblings for an indeterminate amount of time while they all suffer from the childhood disease (Which, I learned from this book, kids no longer get, thanks to a vaccine that came out the year I graduated from high school). 

While physically trapped at home, and her relationship with her friends strained, Abby finds herself feeling guilty and responsible for her sick younger siblings, and while she struggles with the quarantine and her relationship with them, she does learn just might be upsides to that relationship.

Lai, a superior cartoonist, works in a beautiful, friendly, appealing style, and here regularly detours to depict visual metaphors. As a storyteller, she occasionally needs to stop and explain aspects of her story that might be foreign to her young readers, pertaining not just to Indonesian culture, but also the technology or practices of the mid-90s.

Another winning book from Remy Lai, this one should prove particularly compelling to anyone who grew up—or is currently in the process of growing up—with brothers or sisters. 

DC Finest: Catwoman: Life Lines (DC Comics) I didn't even consider buying this particular volume of DC's new-ish DC Finest line, as I assumed from the cover image and the sub-title—"Life Lines" being the first story arc of the 1993 Catwoman ongoing that launched out of the events of Knightfall— that the book was simply collecting the first chunk of that Jim Balent-drawn series, which was previously collected in the two volumes of Catwoman By Jim Balent, released in 2017 and 2019 (Which I had purchased at the time...although I did already have many of those issues in their original, serially-published comic book form, mostly the ones that tied-in to Batman goings-on.)

When I actually handled the book in person at the library, though, I realized I was only half right. 

The book does contain the first chunk of the Catwoman ongoing—the first 12 issues, which were collected in Catwoman By Jim Balent Vol. 1, plus the first annual—but that only accounts for the second half of the book. 

The first half includes the four-issue 1989 Catwoman mini-series by Mindy Newell and J.J. Birch (whose names are, um, right there on the cover, I see now), the 1992 one-shot Batman: Catwoman Defiant that was released in conjunction with that year's Batman Returns movie and stories from anthology series Action Comics Weekly and Showcase '93. Altogether, that adds up to a good 250 pages of pre-ongoing Catwoman comics, none of which have been previously collected in their entirety. (At least, not to my knowledge; do correct me if I'm wrong.)

The organizing principle for this book, then, seems to be that it collects the first 600 pages worth of stories in which Catwoman is the protagonist, rather than just a villain or supporting character in a Batman story (Batman will appear throughout this book, of course, but always in a supporting role.) 

Let's take each briefly in turn.

The collection begins with a 1988 story by Mindy Newell, Barry Kitson and Bruce Patterson that ran through four issues of Action Comics Weekly, during the 42 issues that the Superman title became an anthology (Come to think of it, those issues would all make for a pretty solid DC Finest collection.) 

Entitled "The Tin Roof Club," the story finds Selina Kyle rather randomly the owner of the titular night club ("Bought it from a guy who needed money--fast," Newell's terse narration explains). She hasn't given up her nocturnal activities though, and the story opens with her stealing a cat-shaped brooch from a museum. 

(This Catwoman, by the way, wears a purple costume with a green sash around her waist, her long hair pouring out of the back of her mask. That mask has pretty big ears, and she sports a tail; it essentially looks like a cross between her "Batman: Year One" costume and the one she would eventually sport five years later in her own ongoing.)

Newell seems to have already written, or at least planned out, the Catwoman mini-series that would see release the following year, as this story rather prominently features a police officer named Geroge Flannery that Selina says she has history with, and who would later appear in that series. 

The theft of the brooch attracts a lot of attention, from Flannery as well as the criminal element who frequent Selina's club, and to get it out of town, she gives it to her old friend Holly Robinson from the pages of "Batman: Year One", who is here grown-up and married to a gangster and lives in New Jersey. 

The story is probably most notable for killing off Holly...which will likely come as a surprise to anyone who has read Ed Brubaker's 2002 Catwoman ongoing series, wherein the writer reintroduced Holly and made prominent use of her throughout. (Maybe DC should have collected this story earlier, as Brubaker apparently didn't know Holly had been killed off; eventually he would address it during his run, with the events of Zero Hour being used as an explanation for the discrepancy. I guess "Tin Roof Club" is no longer continuity then, having been over-written by Brubaker's run.) 

Also of note is the fact that Selina rather casually murders two people. Neither of them is involved in Holly's death, but she does pin their deaths on the man who murdered Holly. The killings seem a little odd because they are rather out of character for the post-Crisis Catwoman; in fact, whether to kill or not is part of the story of Newell's upcoming Catwoman series which, again, seems to have already been planned by the writer and publisher at the time of this story's release. 

That series immediately follows the rather short, 28-page Action Comics Weekly story in the collection. It's the work of Newell and pencil artist J.J. Birch (who I am completely unfamiliar with) and inker Michael Bair. It is essentially an extended extrapolation of Frank Miller and David Mazzucchelli's 1987 "Batman: Year One," which offered a new, post-Crisis origin for Catwoman in addition to that of Batman, and it does a fairly phenomenal job of honoring that darker, grittier, more realistic, more crime story take on the superhero characters. Hell, Birch and Bair even do a pretty decent Mazzucchelli, with the pair drawing several scenes that are taken directly from "Year One", wherein Bruce Wayne and Selina Kyle's stories intersect. 

(As for the longevity of this particular origin, various aspects of it would begin being challenged in a matter of years, and revised fairly frequently, with many fans not really taking to the idea of one of comics' most prominent female villains have started out as a prostitute. The revisions piled up to the point that during Tom King's Batman run, he made her conflicting origins part of the story, with Batman and Catwoman always arguing over how they first met; as in the Golden Age, or as in "Year One".)

The series bears a "Suggested for Mature Readers" tag on each of its quite striking covers, and while it does seem more mature and sophisticated in its writing than anything else in this particular volume, it's not that spicy or violent by the standards of 21st century DC comics. It even seems to play coy with certain elements, including whether or not pimp Stan actually rapes Sister Magdalene. Still, it's far more Law & Order: SVU than Batman: The Animated Series. 

Young Selina Kyle—"How old are you, anyway? Sixteen? Seventeen?" vice cop Flannery asks her—is found badly beaten in an alley outside a Gotham City convent. Interviewed by Flannery in her hospital bed, she's reluctant to give him anything, and before he walks away, he hands her a phone number belonging to "a guy who can teach you how to take care of yourself."

That number belongs to an older man with graying temples and a line-filled face who trains her to fight. He's always referred to as "Ted" or "Teddy" throughout the story, but finally, near the climax, we hear his full name: Ted Grant. That that's the name of the secret identity of Golden Age superhero Wildcat never comes up but is instead left like an Easter egg for long-time fans to discover, I guess. Is this, then, the beginning of the idea of Ted Grant as a trainer of the younger generation of heroes and vigilantes...? 

While she trains with Grant, she makes up with Stan, the pimp who had so badly beaten her, who also appears in "Year One." (Curiously, he's colored chalky white all the time, as if he's meant to be an albino, in addition to being years—perhaps decades—older than Selina.)

After we see a few of the events of "Year One" from Selina's point of view—the fight between a disguised Bruce Wayne and Stan and Holly during his disastrous first attempt at fighting street crime, Batman's escape from the SWAT team using a flock of bats as a distraction—she puts on a cat suit for the first time, at Stan's urging, and against her will. 

This suit is basically straight-up fetish gear. All black and looking like vinyl or latex, it includes a bustier and a mask that covers the whole face, save for tiny holes for the eyes and mouth. She wears this to confront and beat up Stan, who will eventually retaliate by kidnapping Sister Magdalene, one of the nuns from the convent, who is apparently Selina's sister (It's pretty clear from this story that she is, anyway; later stories, including one in this very book from Jo Duffy's run on the ongoing, imply that Sister Magdalene is crazy, and that she thinks Selina is her sister only because of a delusion).

Catwoman will soon adopt a new costume, the all-gray one with wide ears, whiskers and a tail that she donned in "Year One" and would primarily wear until 1993. She also cuts her hair short here, at Ted's urging: "First lesson: Long hair is too easy to grab--Lose it."

She goes after Stan to rescue Sister Magdalene/her sister, a case also being worked on by the Batman. During a fight in a theater, Stan throws Magdalene off the catwalk, and, rushing to save her, Catwoman seems to push him over the railing (The staging here is intentionally equivocal.) Luckily, Batman arrives in time to catch Magdalene, while no one is there to catch Stan. 

That's only the end of the third issue, however. In the fourth and final one, Selina discovers that Holly has been badly beaten by a Gotham City police officer, and, after taking Holly to the convent (where she will remain at the end of the story), Catwoman goes to avenge her, and is stopped from killing the apparently guilty police officer by the intervention of Batman. On a rooftop, they share a kiss...immediately after which she hits him with the hilt of her whip repeatedly, and then claws him. (Reading this scene today, I now wonder if it influenced the similar rooftop encounter in Batman Returns).

And that's essentially where this origin story, a sort of "Catwoman: Year One" would leave the two characters and their relationship for further exploration in the early years of the next decade (Although Catwoman would have relatively few appearances in Batman-starring comics between then and the launch of her own title four years later. Aside from "Knightfall", I think perhaps just 1990's Detective Comics #612 and 1991's Batman #460 and #461... could that be right? If so, they might as well have collected those in this volume instead of a few issues of the ongoing). 

Overall, I quite liked the story, and wasn't at all disappointed, despite how long it sort of lived in my imagination (I remember the first issue hanging on the wall at the first comic book I ever visited, probably in 1990 or 1991 or so.) 

Birch and Bair's art is pretty great. Not only was it in-keeping with Mazzucchelli's style at the time, but they also excel at drawing an excellent Selina, who, as Catwoman, manages to look sexy—in her gray costume, she is essentially a nude female form—and dangerous at the same time, and they do so without having to sacrifice any realism (Of course, is she's really meant to be as young as the vice officer guesses in the first issue, I suppose this is pretty problematic. I'm assuming she's actually meant to be somewhere between 18 and 20 though, given the fact that she does make out with the adult Batman in a scene). Their Catwoman, then, is a far cry from that of Balent, who would transform the character into a rather typical '90s comic book "babe" character (as seen on the cover of this collection). 

This was, in the grim and gritty, mature readers, post-Dark Knight, pre-Knightfall era, the Catwoman story DC offered to stand alongside such works as "Year One" and The Killing Joke. 

The tone of Catwoman stories would shift almost immediately, as seen in this collection. They might still be technically crime stories, but more so in the mode of action movies or super-comics.

The next entry is the 47-page Catwoman Defiant one-shot, by the unusual team of writer Peter Milligan, pencil artist Tom Grindberg and inker Dick Giordano (who would also go on to ink the first seven issues of Balent's run). Typical of Milligan's relatively (and unfortunately few) Batman stories, it's at once a fairly typical, even generic sort of crime caper comic...although one that boasts enough deeply weird elements to make it feel fresh, even unique.

Catwoman, here still dressed in her gray costume (and drawn on the included cover by the great Brian Stelfreeze) is currently being targeted by crime boss Mr. Handsome, who keeps sending his men to capture her. These henchmen all wear fairly disturbing-looking plastic face masks with a broad smile that suggests a kind of generic handsome guy and, from the right angle, gives off a weird, white shine.

Like all classic Batman villains, Mr. Handsome has a gimmick, and while it used to be the acquisition of beautiful things for their own right (and the profit they can bring), we are told after the loss of his wife and a throat surgery, he has changed and now wants beautiful things only so he can destroy them. (His gang go along with his eccentricities because he's so good at planning out crimes for them to commit, apparently).

Batman, who is of course after the criminal, proposes an alliance, in which he will use Catwoman as bait to track down Mr. Handsome to his headquarters. Catwoman goes along with it, but things go awry almost immediately when the bad guys set a counter-trap, throwing Batman off their trail and finally successfully abducting Catwoman.

Mr. Handsome, of course, wants her because she's beautiful—"Her skin...Her skin is as taut as a trampoline of silk..."—and plans to destroy her beauty. This he does by having her lowered into an underground labyrinth outside his base, where he keeps a "beast", a hideous, half-human brute that he uses to kill for him (and we first meet when it is being fed a live dog), a creature that Grindberg never draws a completely revealing image of, rather keeping it in shadows or semi-obscured by clouds of smoke most of the time.

Milligan is not shy about the beauty and the beast metaphors.

Catwoman finds an unlikely ally and, while Batman tries to scare her location out of a captured thug, she must fight her way through the compound, facing both the beast and the mastermind before Batman belatedly hang-glides onto the scene.

"Oh. Yeah. Mister Handsome. I've kept him in there for you," Catwoman tells Batman when he finally arrives. "Why don't you go in there and arrest him or something." She immediately flees, while Batman walks through the door to unexpectedly face the beast. He ultimately prevails off panel, and we only see the results of their battle, with Batman drawn sitting down, a sling around one arm and one of his long bat ears cut off, while the beast and the bad guy are shown laying prone and tied up.

Though relatively brief, it's a fun story, with a fair degree of humor to soften the horror and weirdness, and a story of Catwoman that positions her somewhere between bad guy and good guy, the position she would occupy pretty much for "Year One" on.

Next up is the four-part "Sorrow Street" arc which ran in Showcase '93, an anthology series made more enticing to readers at the time by featuring a Batman character in the lead feature of each issue (I had previously read all four of these issues, but didn't really remember them very well; they weren't too terribly compelling, and I don't think I had ever re-read them before I did so here). 

The covers are all included, and these all tended to be from pretty great artists (the Catwoman ones are from Arthur Adams, Kevin Maguire, Brian Bolland and Michael Golden), though they look a little odd here, featuring as they do Catwoman in group shots with the other heroes that appear in those issues' back-ups, like Cyborg and Blue Devil and so on.

Written by Doug Moench and drawn by Ed Hannigan, the arc would find Catwoman forced into the role of crime-fighter when she's set-up as the fall guy for a museum heist by her treacherous fence and a new local crimelord with sharpened teeth named Ramon Bracuda. To get paid, and/or to get revenge, she will have to figure out Bracuda's scheme, find him and defeat him.

This story has Catwoman in the same gray suit she's been wearing, although on both the covers and the Joe Orlando-colored interiors, it often looks black or purple. In the case of the former, it brings her design closer in line with that of Batman Returns; in the case of the latter, it shows evolution towards the suit she would turn up in during "Knightfall", and then in her own series.

As for Selina's status quo in the story, she is now sharing a cat-filled apartment with the teenage Arizona, a sort of  replacement Holly, who was introduced in Alan Grant and Norm Breyfogle's 1991 Catwoman-centric arc in Batman #460 and #461. 

Finally, we get to the launch of the Catwoman ongoing, which, at its inception, was written by Jo Duffy. (Balent was the main constant on the title, pencilling it for six years, while the writers would change much more frequently, including Batman comics writers like Doug Moench, Chuck Dixon and Devin Grayson.) Duffy writes all of the issues of the ongoing included here, save one which she plots while Dixon scripts, and the annual, which Christopher Priest writes.

That first four-issue arc, "Life Lines", finds Balent's Catwoman—whose breasts have swelled, waist shrunk, legs lengthened and hair grown out—dressed in the purple costume with gloves and thigh-high boots that she wore during "Knightfall". DC essentially used the occasion of the changing status quo of the Batman line to launch the book, with Catwoman reluctantly working under Bane, who has appointed himself the city's undisputed crime boss after breaking Batman's back. He has also begun taking a cut of all of her ill-gotten gains.

By the story's end, Arizona would be written off, and Catwoman relocated to a fancy skyscraper apartment, with a younger, hotter, Alfred-like butler named Wilder taking on the role of person-for-Selina-to-talk-to. During its events, Catwoman would find herself targeted for an assassination attempt through Bane's machinations, and visiting his home country of Santa Prisca in search of her would-be killer. When she gets back, new Batman Jean-Paul Valley had defeated Bane, so that the series essentially re-sets itself at issue #5 with a new status quo (during which the new Batman makes an appearance).

Issues #6 and #7 are branded with the "KnightQuest" logo and are the first and fourth issues of a four-part crossover with Batman, in which Catwoman and the new Batman run afoul of one another and eventually team-up to stop some rogue environmentalists from becoming eco-terrorists and poisoning a bunch of industrialists. Issue #12, which bears the "KnightsEnd" logo, features a sequence in which the newly recovered and newly re-trained Batman Bruce Wayne swings around Gotham, and ends with a panel in which he, Nightwing and Robin confront Jean Paul-Valley, who had spent the issue going after the same arms dealer that Selina has targeted.

So the first year of the book found it fairly tightly tied to goings-on in the rest of the Batman line of books, a trend that would continue, as each "event" that followed would seemingly require at least a tie-in issue of Catwoman. 

Not everything had to do with Batman, though. This first year of the book also includes stories in which Catwoman attempts to stop a street gang preying on Christians and runs into a traveling family of florist/trucker/ninjas, another in which she pursues a gang of teenage thieves working under a masked super-villain with rather limited wind-controlling powers named Zephyr and, after a tragic accident, trying to steal an advanced piece of medical technology to help an old friend before it can be put to use to power cyborg soldiers instead. 

Balent has grown to be a somewhat controversial figure among many fans, leaving Catwoman after his remarkable six-year run to create his own, similarly "babe"-centric series, Tarot: Witch of the Black Rose. It has seemingly been quite successful, at least successful enough that Balent's been able to keep self-publishing it for quite a while now. (I've never read it, but Comics.org has it running from 2000 to present and numbering close to 150 issues.) 

I don't think his is necessarily the best Catwoman, in either terms of rendering or design (I like the "Year One" costume best, and Birch and Bair probably do the best Catwoman in this collection, although Grindberg's is pretty great too). But he is certainly good at what he does. His Barbie doll Catwoman is as sexy as such '90s comic babes got and he rarely missed an opportunity to draw her body, in costume, in torn-up costume and, occasionally, out of costume (but in shadow or just-covered, this being what is supposedly an all-ages comic, of course).

He also drew one hell of a Batman. His version of the Valley Batman is maybe my favorite of those years (in the original costume he donned, the one with the Black Panther-style cowl; later in the trilogy of storylines Valley's Batman would adopt more armor and a helmet), and Balent does a pretty solid version of the classic Batman too, as seen briefly in issue #12 of Catwoman (where he's inked by the great Rick Burchett). 

Rereading his art as an adult with 30 more years of comics-reading under my belt than as the teenager I was when I first encountered it, it is of course, easier to pick out weaknesses in Balent's work. He certainly seems less interested in designing and rendering the secondary characters, those that aren't Catwoman, Batman or a female character, and these figures tend to look slightly rougher and far more generic.  

The poses of these characters also tend to feel desultory, lacking the impact of his dynamic and statuesque Catwoman (who seems to have an odd tendency to stand on her toes, or seems to be wearing invisible high heels much of the time). The storytelling is fine too, although it does tend to read a little worse in this particular collection, wherein there are other somewhat stronger cartoonists to compare Balent against.

Still, he obviously had a vision, he executed it and he connected with an audience, so much so that he drew a monthly book for six years, far outlasting any of the writers or inkers he was paired with over that time. By virtue of the time he put in and the strength of his vision, it's almost 30 years since his Catwoman #1 was published, and I think his may still the definitive Catwoman, even if her costume has changed (and improved) and other, all-around stronger artists have taken a turn drawing her adventures (And all of these rather quickly abandoned her, though, compared to Balent's time spent on her).

(Although, granted, I suppose it's unlikely DC would even let a single artist draw a single book for six years straight these days, even if an artist was capable of and interested in keeping such a grueling schedule for so long.)

As for Duffy's writing, it's hard to judge because of how often the book seems to re-set itself, even in just these 12 issues, which include a lot of spillover from the Batman franchise. Duffy finds a fine voice for Selina, and she manages to find a way to make the perennial villain into more of an anti-hero, a crime-fighter with the bad habit of also being a high-end thief, I guess, setting up what would end up being a rather long-lived title. 

Still, these issues lack the realism and melodrama of Newell's stories, or the imagination of Milligan's, and one can't help but wonder what those particular writers would have done with a Catwoman ongoing in the early '90s.  

Interrupting the Duffy/Balent run, included here between issues #7 and #8, is the 1994 Catwoman Annual. By that point, DC had given up on the event crossovers being told in their annuals and instead moved to thematic ones. That year it was Elseworlds, and so we get a 54-page Robert E. Howard pastiche, somewhat irritatingly told through sanctimonious knight Timon Vicar's journal entries (The entire first page of the story is prose broken up with an illustration). 

In it, Vicar, dressed as a medieval knight-style Batman, leads his men to a final confrontation with the leader of their mortal enemies, the House of Selene. This is Ra's al Ghul, who is here a were-cat whose near immortality comes from his having a cat's nine lives. 

Timon prevails but is badly injured. After the battle, his men are waylaid and all killed by highwaymen and he is rescued by a scantily clad female were-cat. Though they are from different sides of the war, they travel together. This is Talia, and the pair eventually fall in love, Timon learning that his people were wrong about hers, and that he had devoted his life to a violent crusade against them in error. Though their pairing might seem like the beginning of peace between their peoples—Timon is the son of his people's emperor—it ends tragically.

This is written, as I said earlier, by Priest, and, though fine, it is hardly among his better work in comics (And he's done a lot of good work in comics since).  The annual is penciled by Frederico Cueva and inked by Alberto Pez, while Balent provides the cover for it. 

Anyone reading this collection who finds themselves particularly enamored of Balent's Catwoman, and/or wanting to know what happens next, there's Catwoman By Jim Balent Vol. 2, collecting the next dozen issues and the next annual. Or they could just hang tight, as DC is publishing DC Finest: Catwoman: Vengeance and Vindication, which collects the next 22 issues and the next two annuals, in June. It will be interesting to see how much of the Balent series they ultimately end up collecting. I certainly wouldn't mind if they got all the way to the Devin Grayson-written issues. 

Destroy All Humans. They Can't Be Regenerated Vol. 1 (Viz Media) I somewhat impulsively grabbed this off the new cart at work one day, noting only that it had an intriguing title, it was the first volume in a new series and that it seemed to star Japanese students.

I did not notice the little Magic: The Gathering logo in the lower left-hand corner, and did not realize this was an officially licensed manga based on the card gmae until the final panel on page 10, after the narration boxes give the date of "May, 1998" and note that "A new game has gotten popular among me and my friends... Magic: The Gathering!" Not a Magic-like game, as I assumed the characters were playing during the preceding pages, but the actual Magic: The Gathering, "the world's first trading card game, or TCG for short," the narration says. 

Had I known this, I probably wouldn't have picked the book up, as I know absolutely nothing about the game, nor have I ever rally been interested in finding out more about it. When I finally realized what I had just started reading, I decided to go ahead and give it a try, anyway. Afterall, I had previously read and enjoyed manga about tennis, dog grooming and bread baking, none of which I knew anything about or were necessarily interested in either, so maybe creators Katsura Ise and Takuma Yokota had similarly produced a compelling comic on this particular niche subject....? 

Well, I can't say I really cared for it. 

The Magic games or matches are fairly frequent, and I obviously had no idea what was going on during them, despite the creators taking some pains to explain them, with footnotes frequently appearing in the thin strips of white space between panels. 

These games are sometimes presented in ways that increase the drama, with lots of speed lines and juxtaposed images of the spells or monsters appearing behind the playing characters, but the game is complex enough that I never got it enough to be able to follow along, let alone become invested in them. 

That said, the premise of the book seems solid enough, and the art and storytelling around the game play itself is well done. 

In the late '90s, nerdy, bespectacled middle schooler Hajime Kano has discovered the then five-year-old MTG, which he and his friends play in their free time at school, despite the rule against "non-essential paraphernalia." He's scolded for it—in addition to being in the wrong classroom, and for being an overall nuisance—by Emi Sawatara, his beautiful and proper rival, who has always beat him out for the top spot in grades ever since she transferred to his school in fifth grade. (That's them on the cover, with Kano regarding a meteor, millennial apocalyptic anxiety being a theme in the book.)

The very next Saturday Kano visits a coffee shop/MTG specialty store an hour away by bike, looking for new cards, and is shocked to find not only is it a place full of MTG players, but at the center of it all, seemingly running the tables with a 10-game winning streak, is none other than Sawatara!

Poorly disguised by a baseball hat pulled down low over his eyes, he challenges her to a game, and realizes that not only is she his better at school, she just might also be his better at Magic! Their initial game proves inconclusive, as when Sawatari finally realizes she's playing Kano, she storms out of the shop, leaving her card deck behind.

In on her secret—which she insists on him keeping a secret, as she has a reputation to uphold at school—Kano rather quickly becomes Sawatari's friend as well as her rival, as the pair have so much in common. They begin visiting the shop and playing each weekend, with Sawatari always riding home on the back of Kano's bike.

The predictable will they/won't they romance begins, with many of the familiar tropes, like the accidental touching of hands and a promise between them, despite their intense rivalry in school and MTG and the many differences in their personal lives and public bearing. 

It all revolves around games of Magic: The Gathering, of course, so one's interest in the manga's interpersonal storyline and its ability to hold one's attention will likely be determined by whether or not one is already into Magic...or, I suppose, to what degree one is interested in learning about it. 

A potential secondary audience, beyond MTG players who also read manga, may be those with a degree of nostalgia for the Japanese pop culture of the era, as the backmatter includes not only a card index, listing all of the cards used during specific panels throughout the book, but five pages of "Context/Translation Notes," listing all of the references to pop music, movies, video games, anime and various consumer products that sailed over my head while reading. 

Again, this manga is obviously not for me, but it's seemingly well-made enough that even if it doesn't completely transcend its primary subject matter, it should certainly satisfy those in its target audience. 

Komi Can't Communicate Vol. 32 (Viz) As this volume's cover indicates, it includes a story in which Komi and Tadano a tea ceremony held by Hafuru Ogiya, the character who wears a bib, sucks a pacifier and seems to only speak in baby talk (or is that because there's always a pacifier in his mouth?), although Tadano, of course, can always understand him perfectly. During this story, we learn the origins of his...unusual behavior, and, after some effort, Komi is able to add him to her list of 100 friends.

Speaking of, this volume also contains an unusual story where we see Komi going about her day, interacting with various classmates and others, each of whom is introduced by their name and a position, "1st: Tadano", "3rd: Agari" and so on. It takes a while to figure out—it took me a while, anyway—but Tomohito Oda is showing us where Komi is with her making-friends project, re-introducing us to each character and the order in which Komi officially befriended them. It's a nice little refresher on the by-now quite large cast.

Other stories include the next step in the stumblingly progressing relationship between the very forward Manbagi and the very shy Wakai Taketoshi, a very (here, physically) sick Ren Yamai's scheme to use her illness to get Komi to do something perverted with her that fails but ends up revealing the loyalty and affection of her friends and Komi and Tadano's efforts to get through to the "emoi"—we'd say "emo"—obsessed Emoyama Yuragi using the only language she understands. 

I can't believe this series is now in its 32nd volume, and though the long-teased romance between leads Komi and Tadano has long since been realized, it continues on unabated. With 21 more friends yet to make, it seems like it might go on for a while yet. I am no wondering if Oda's plan is to end the series when the kids graduate high school? 

I guess we'll see. I'll be sorry when it does finally end but, at the same time, I realize no manga can last forever, and this one has had a particularly long life, at least among the manga I've managed to follow over the years. 

Otaku Vampire's Love Bite Vol. 1 (Viz) Vampire Hina Arukado looks like a sweet young woman, but she must be far older, given the fact that she hasn't left her house in Romania for 30 years. Drawing sustenance from blood bags, she doesn't even need to go out to hunt. One day her worried father gives her a DVD of the anime Vampire Cross in an odd effort to reach out and breakthrough to her, and it...works?

Maybe a little too well, though. Not only does Hina become obsessed with the show and its young hero Mao, but her burgeoning fandom introduces her to all these strange new concepts, like "merch" and "collab cafes" and "anime pilgrimages." So not only does she leave the house for the first time in decades, she leaves her father and moves all the way to Japan to devote herself to the life of a Vampire Cross otaku. 

That's the basic premise, although there's one more important twist: Her new next-door neighbor Kyuta, as plot convenience would have it, just so happens to look exactly like Mao!

She soon ropes him into her otaku activities, some of which require a human digestive system, like, for example, trying the bloody pancakes at a Vampire Cross-inspired dish at a collab cafe, since she can't eat anything but blood. 

As it turns out, Kyuta was already involved with vampires before Hina even moved in: A month ago he was the victim of a vampire attack, and his attacker has been visiting him regularly and feeding off him, savoring his apparently particularly sweet-tasting blood. She comes to his rescue, which reveals she's apparently a pretty powerful and/or high-ranking vampire and, by book's end, she will discover another vampire circling Kyuta. 

Who knew modern Japan had so many vampires?

There is, of course, an element of the will they/won't they about the pair's relationship...both in terms of romance and in terms of a vampiric relationship, with Hina drawn to Kyuta's sweet smell but reluctant to actually bite him, as it's something she's never done before (As has so often been the case in vampire stories throughout history, there is an element of sexual metaphor to the idea of the biting and the blood-drinking.)

Hina is obviously drawn to Kyuta because of his looks and the sound of his voice, both of which exactly resemble those of her anime crush, and though Kyuta seems cold and biting and to look down on Hina's otaku ways, he does go along with her on a few endeavors, and later grows protective of her when she's targeted by the men at a club and, later, when one of his college classmates shows romantic interest in her. 

Manga-ka Julietta Suzuki's style and visual storytelling is very much in the realm of what most readers will think of as the standard sort for manga. While Hina is mostly drawn like a normal young woman, she often has pointy ears and pointy teeth. Some of the other vampires in the book, including the one who has been feeding off Kyuta and another who makes a dramatic appearance in time for the cliffhanger ending, are a bit more of the generic vampire variety, sporting lacy shirts and black capes, something of a romantic hybrid of an Anne Rice type with the default, Universal version of Dracula. 

While I can't say that I'm too terribly invested in the predictable relationship dynamic between the two leads (even if the vampire angle makes it somewhat different from the usual one), I do admit to a little curiosity regarding what happens next, given the last-minute complication at the first volume's end. I therefore might pick up the second volume if I see it at the library, although I would hardly call this a must-read or anything. 

REVIEWED:

Fresh Start (Scholastic) In a fictionalized memoir that modernizes the setting, a young girl starts seventh grade at a brand-new school, and has to navigate new friendships and find her place, while encountering various coming-of-age milestones, like getting her first period and shopping for training bras. In that respect, this new book from cartoonist Gale Galligan (Freestyle, Baby-Sitters Club) reminded me a bit of Tegan and Sara Quinn and Tillie Walden's Tegan and Sara: Junior High. 

Some similar subject matter aside, though, Galligan's book is nothing like Walden's and the Quinns', either in tone or style, in large part because Galligan's stand-in Ollie, is such a...unique character, one seemingly prone to embarrassing situations, but made immune to worrying about them due to the fact that she changes schools every year or two. As far removed as I am from the drama of middle school, I had a blast reading about Ollie and her misadventures, thanks in large part to how great Galligan's comedic timing is and how effectively they set up their gags. I'd highly recommend it...even to those who don't normally dabble in kids' comics. My formal review is here. 

Green Eggs and Ham Take a Hike (RH Graphic) The latest cartoonist to tackle a Dr. Seuss creation in RH Graphics' line of Dr. Seuss graphic novels is James Kochalka, who I just realized has been professionally publishing comics for 30 years now, or about as long as I've been writing professionally (although my earliest professional writing was covering movies, music and theater...I don't think anyone ever paid me to write a comics review until maybe 2000 or so). Anyway, that's more than long enough for Kochalka to develop and perfect his own particular style, so I found this a particularly interesting work, just from a plain, old rubber-necking situation; how would an artist with such a well-defined style of his own tackle the characters and world of another artist with such an instantly recognizable style? The result is of course interesting—and as you can guess from the cover, very much a Kochaka-ized Seuss, with far more of the Kochalka's style in evidence than Seuss'—as is the book itself.

I'm not entirely sure how good the book is, though. I find these new-ish Seuss comics fascinating, while not always really enjoying them. I would love to convene a focus group of little kids to have them tell me if they are good comics are not. Like, I can tell they are all obviously well-made and read like good comics, even if they don't appeal to me on a personal level (not that 47-year-old comic critics are their target audience). I imagine RH Graphic must be doing some such research, right? I wish I knew what they were finding.... 

Anyway, more here. 

Mini Marvels: Hulk Smash (Marvel Entertainment) While the collection is new as of December, the contents are much less so, as you can probably tell from a glance at the cover. That means there's a good chance that if you're interested in Chris Giarrusso's gentle parodies of Marvel Comics, you may have read and even re-read these before (In addition to Giarrusso, who draws all of the contents, writers Paul Tobin and Audrey Loeb provide a few scripts). For the most part, I don't think the relative age of the comics, and the comics they refer to, is necessarily a deal-breaker, given how later adaptations have helped comics like, say, World War Hulk, become part of a never-ending "now". That said, there is a line of joking around that aged particularly, spectacularly badly, referring to comedian Bill Cosby. In retrospect, The Illuminati should have left the Hulk alone and maybe shot Cosby into space instead. Review here. 

Visitations (Farrar Straus and Giroux) Corey Egbert's fictionalized memoir about his childhood features his stand-in and that of his little sister in what seem like pretty impossible situations, from being asked not to speak to their father during their regular visitations with him to being kidnapped by their own mother. The book wrestles with some extremely tough subjects, especially for young people to have to process, like divorce, allegations of abuse, religious faith, mental illness and, perhaps toughest of all, trying to discern a line between those last two. I don't want to say much more about the book for risk of spoiling it, but it's a very powerful story extremely effectively told. I had tears in my eyes when I set it down. More here.