On 1994's Wolverine: Evilution by Ann Nocenti, Mark Texeira, John Royle and others

A long time ago, I somewhat facetiously titled a blog post "Ultimates 3: The worst comic book ever?" I was likely being far too hasty, as there were, at the time as well as now, just so many bad comics I had never even read. 

I was reminded of that fact recently when I read 1994 over-sized one-shot Wolverine: Evilultion—the subtitle of which I swear is real, and not a typo on my part. Not because Evilution is that bad, of course, although it is a very badly made comic. 

No, rather because it's simply an X-Men comic from the mid-nineties, making it one of the many, many comics that I had never read, and thus, as far as I know, it is simply the tip of the iceberg of what might be some truly terrible comics (I generally don't read comics that I'm pretty sure I won't like, which is why I've only read a handful of comics featuring Wolverine from that era). 

For the record, I don't think this is worse or even as bad as Ultimates 3, but it did remind me of just how many really bad comics are probably out there (And Evilution is from Marvel, one of the premiere superhero publishers, rather than, say, Image, or any of the other many small publishers that tried their hand at the genre during the '90s boom years!).

Anyway, this is a pretty bad comic book, and it's bad in a particular sort of way that I think it could probably be used in some sort of How To Make Comics class as a textbook, the professor pointing to various aspects of it and passages from it as negative examples, of what not to do when trying to tell a story in comics. 

It's written by Ann Nocenti, which, based on her reputation and the relatively few comics of hers I've read, sure sounded promising to me. As for the art team, the first credited artist is Mark Texeira, who handled the layouts. The book was penciled by John Royle and inked by Philip Moy and Andrew Pepoy. 

If I had to diagnose what exactly went wrong with the creation of this book, some 30 years after it was first published, I would guess that it was created using the "Marvel method" and that the point at which it fell apart was when Texeira was laying it out, as what now seem like the most egregious mistakes have to do with what is being shown when (Although maybe the most blame should be reserved for the editors, three of whom are listed: regular editor Suzanne Gaffney, group editor Bob Harras and editor-in-chief Tom DeFalco...?)

Essentially, whatever one might think of the plot or characters or conflict, it's the storytelling that seems most obviously, glaringly wrong to my eyes in 2025. 

The book is all but devoid of establishing shots, and, when they do occur, they sometimes do so after a character has already arrived at a particular location, so the reader is never really introduced to the settings. Curiously, where establishing shots might be used, we instead often see tight close-ups of Wolverine's head. 

We get these also in place of panels that would now more commonly be used for a character's narration and, oddest of all, during early scenes wherein Wolverine is apparently traveling to the small New York town that most of the action is set in. 

From my experience with the X-Men cartoon from around this time, I imagine that he hopped on his motorcycle to get there, but we never see him doing so, just tight, background-less panels of his face as he travels. Imagine a scene in a film where the director frames a scene of a character riding a motorcycle such that all you saw was his face, and never the motorcycle. 

That would be weird, right...? 

Also, we'll get images of Wolverine, sometimes in action, sometimes just standing around, interjected at random in the narrative, at the pace of about once a page.

I imagine the artists really, really wanted to draw Wolverine, and getting the popular star on the book on every page makes sense, but they do so at the expense of the storytelling. There are also several instances where a character is having a conversation with Wolverine, but he's the only one in the panel, the other character's dialogue coming in balloons whose tails point off-panel.

Finally, Texeira and/or Royle show little diversity in their character design. The book is filled with blonde, white young people, and some of them look so much alike that it sometimes took me a moment (or, in one case, the entire book) to tell if, say, this blonde teenage girl is supposed to be the same blonde teenage girl as the one who co-stars in the book.

These are deeper concerns than the style of Royle's art in the book, which was not to my personal taste, either. I mean, we expect certain things from mid-90s books, and certainly Marvel's X-Men seems emblematic of what one thinks of when they think of "'90s comics," but there isn't really any of the expected excesses.

There are a few panels in which Royle's big, body builder-looking Wolvie has humorously dainty feet, for example, but I think that is more a matter of style than any sign of deficiency. Typical of the era, though, we rarely see his feet; in several scenes they are obscured by a curious cloud of ground fog. (There's only one real example of really wonky anatomy, on page 10, when we get a full body shot of Wolverine, and his torso looks too long and his legs too short....Oh wait, there's also a bit in the climactic action scene, but I'll mention that when the time comes.)

The script itself feels somewhat Vertigo-esque, with its focus on religious concerns, the supernatural and the environment; Nocenti had, of course, just been working for DC's mature readers imprint, attempting a Kid Eternity revival with Sean Phillips that lasted 16 issues between 1993 and 1994. But it's Vertigo-esque paired with what otherwise feels like an episode of the X-Men cartoon, the two aesthtetics wedded to one another with the violence of a car accident. 

The original comic book had a cardstock cover and glossy interior pages and sold for $5.95 at a time when the Wolverine monthly was just $1.95, apparently denoting that it was meant to be something special. 

There's a little poem on the inside front cover discussing the pollution of the environment and ends with the line, "We are going the wrong way." (At the bottom of the page, it notes that this story takes place before X-Men #25, published a year previous, whatever happened there...Oh, wait, I just looked it up, and that appears to be the issue that Magneto pulled the adamantium out of Wolverine's body. So that note is probably there to explain why this issue's Wolverine has his normal metallic claws, rather than gnarly bone ones.)

The first page is a splash, revealing a young blonde boy holding aloft a severed head pouring blood from its neck, while a huge Wolverine face emanating action lines is seen in profile in the background, and a big blue "Stan Lee Presents EVILUTION" is super-imposed over one of Wolvie's mask wings.

A younger little girl opens a door, calling for Jimmy, and understandably freaks out when she sees him with the bloody head; his ranting probably does little to calm her: "I met a man in the woods-- --with the face of God! Wanna meet him?" As she starts to cry, he reveals that it is a fake head and stage blood, and that he was "just funnin'."

Meanwhile, at the bottom of this second page, pink narration boxes over the bust of Wolverine tell us that he's in a waking dream. 

In the dream, he is gigantic, looming over the cooling towers of a nuclear power plant with his claws out and his thighs disappearing beneath the horizon. He's wearing a strange necklace (And his blue shoulder pads, by the way, look bigger, thicker and pointier than those worn by football players; one might reasonably ask why a guy with a healing factor needs such armor, but then that's like asking why Wolverine wears a cowl shaped like his hair. The answer is because someone—the artists, the audience or perhaps Wolverine himself—must think they look cool). A missile heads straight for his chest.

He rears up with sweat on his brows, in a bed in a darkened room (Where isn't clear; I assume the X-Mansion in Westchester). One of those weird, super-tight close-ups shows a sliver of his figure in full costume, as he narrates: "I don't believe in all that psychic garbage about visionary dreams...But...well...what the heck. It can't hurt to visit the town with the twin towers."

Cut to "Some faraway garbage dump at the edge of a rural shantytown," where a pair of young boys (Is one of them the boy from the first scene, given that their faces are the same? No, as it will eventually turn out) find a cannister that looks like the one that blinded Daredevil and created the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, open it up, and play with the sickly-looking green glop found within.

Back to a background-less close-up of Wolverine's face in profile and then, in the panel below that, a rare establishing shot, showing what looks like a downtown street, tiny buildings in the background dwarfed by impossibly huge cooling towers. The perspective of the panel is pretty screwy; if one ignores the buildings in the background, it looks as if the town is built right up against the towers. If one takes those buildings into account, the towers look too big, something on the scale of the Death Star or similar sci-fi construct. 

This is Prescott, which Nocenti's narration tells us is "a seven-mall, three-church, ten-saloon kinda town..." (Seven malls! That is so many malls!) A town that is "Complete with bored, restless, frustrated teenagers."

Suddenly we are inside some sort of teen hangout with a juke box and kids dancing in the background. In the foreground, two busty girls are talking, one of them a blonde with a huge pair of opaque pink sunglasses who the other girl refers to as "Boom Boom." 

This is our introduction to the other character on the cover, a more minor X-Men character whom I have heard of, but who I don't remember appearing in any of the X-Men movies or cartoons I've seen and I don't think I have ever actually read anything in which she appeared. (UPDATE: Wait, she was in Nextwave, a series that must now be memory holed due to the malfeasance of its writer. Does that count as the real Boom Boom, though...? After all, the whole cast were basically just written as standard Warren Ellis characters... Anyway, I read that.)

Based on what I see in this comic, though, it's hard to tell what, exactly, differentiates her from Jubilee. Both are teenage mutants with big pink glasses and whose super-powers seem to be explosive light shows; Boom Boom's powers are repeatedly referred to as "fireworks" in this comic, too, which I was sure was Jubilee's deal. Checking her Wikipedia entry later—and asking about what differentiates her from Jubilee on Bluesky—it would seem to be that her energy powers are more akin to time bombs than fireworks, as there is sometimes a delay in the explosions she creates...?

We won't see a full body shot of her until the page after she's introduced, but in addition to the big glasses and a pair of high heels, she's dressed in a tight-fitting mini dress, with cut-outs exposing her abdomen, hips and cleavage. (Wait, she is a teenager, right?)

She's trying to ignore her friend, and listen in on the conversation of Jimmy, the boy with the bloody head from the opening scene. He's holding a primitive-looking idol and ranting to two other kids about modern progress, and how, "Ultimately, we'll die by machine."

"That's why we're the Devos," he says. "Our gang is for devolution! We gotta drag the human race back to before cars and computers and iron lungs and missiles..."

I'm not sure what's playing on the juke box Jimmy is leaning over, but I wouldn't be surprised if it's a particular new wave band from Akron, of which he must be a fan. 

The scene in interrupted by another close up of Wolverine's bust, his thought cloud telling us that he's asked Professor X for some time off to visit Prescott, "the town in my dreams," and that Xavier told him that X-Force's Boom Boom has "been known to hang out there."

Scan appropriated from The Real Gentlemen of Leisure's much shorter and punchier blog post on the book.

Boom Boom approaches Jimmy, whom she calls by name (Does she know him? Or did she just overhear the other kids call him that?), and he stammers when he sees her (Because she interrupted him? Or because of her revealing dress?). She seems to roofie his drink, then asks about the idol, before walking away. His drink mysteriously splashes soda all over his face (After learning a bit more about Boom Boom online later, I guess the little white round object she dropped in his drink wasn't a pill, but an energy time bomb).

Then there's a page I couldn't make sense of. 

The narration boxes talk about Silvo, who was a little boy when the Wright Brothers first flew, and an old man when America landed on the moon, although he didn't believe the reports of it on the TV and then the nature of television. There are four panels of art running alongside the narration. The first shows a shack, the second shows three boys faces; one looks delighted, another is terribly distressed. The third shows the boys silhouettes in the foreground, a bright TV screen emanating light in the background. In the fourth, the distressed boy collapses backwards. And the fifth is yet another close-up of Wolverine's head with no background, thinking to himself, "Humph...looks like a normal, peaceful American town like any other." (The comic won't show us what Wolvie's seeing until the next page, though.)

(After finishing the book and re-reading the parts I didn't understand, I think Silvo is supposed to be the dead man who figures prominently later on, and the collapsing boy is one of those from the earlier scene who found the environmental waste and smeared it on his face; here he is in the process of dying from it, as will be made explicit later in the book.)

Wearing a little backpack, Wolverine stands upon a hill overlooking the power plant and thinks about how he heard something about a threat to close it down, while popping one set of claws (This is the panel with the wonky anatomy mentioned previously, by the way). These he suddenly whirls to drive into the trunk of a tree directly behind him, narrowly missing the head of an older, white-haired Native American man, who apparently snuck up behind him, then sat down cross-legged at the base of the three.

The man tells Wolverine he had a vision about his arrival, and then the scene jumps to Jimmy again, somewhere outdoors, and talking to a disembodied voice that appears in tail-less thought clouds. The voice instructs him to dig, and he does so, until an extremely buff ghost appears, telling him to "Get a woman."

Instead, Jimmy keeps digging, until his shovel makes a "KEK" sound and he says, "A coffin!"

Halfway through the page, the scene shifts to Germany (!), where a little blonde boy that looks just like Jimmy is in some kind of museum as someone off-panel talks about "the tip of a metal spear that pierced the side of Christ...And so called the Spear of Destiny... ...It was stolen by Charlemagne and then by Hitler... ...Each man who possessed it believed that he rode the crest of fate itself."

The boy steals the spear, which is really just a small spearhead attached to a bit of shaft. It will take a few more pages to explain, but apparently the boy is at the museum with his father, a Mason who brought him to attend the meeting to learn about Mason stuff.

Meanwhile, the narrative checks in on the other players. The old man talks to Wolverine about their dreams ("'Dream' is a white world...what you call dreams we call reality"), and how the government is threatening to shut down the plant, and an idol that was stolen from a local museum and something old and evil awakening in the forest. Boom Boom, now dressed in the costume seen on the cover (which also has a cleavage cutout), sees a newspaper article about the stolen idol, which is the one that she saw Jimmy with at the teen hangout. And Jimmy stops digging up the coffin long enough to read the newspaper, in which he sees an article about how the green goo from earlier in the book killed one of the kids who found it.

We're then introduced to a new character, a mustachioed man in a suit at a podium, giving a speech to a crowd about the economic importance of Gycon's power plant to their town of Prescott. He says the plant is apparently being shut down because of "one old man", referring to the Native American man hanging out with Wolvie, whose name is actually Red Water Fall. It's a threatening-sounding, vaguely racist, or at least impolitic, speech:

The old man doesn't understand... Just as his people did not understand a hundred years ago. It is now as it was then--when two cultures clash, one must relinquish. 

There is a natural progression, an inevitably to change. People must adapt to our ways-- --or perish.

In a classroom at Prescott High School, the students are dissecting frogs. A blonde girl who looks so much like Boom Boom that I'm unsure if it is meant to be her or not (Does she live in Prescott? Or just hang out there...for some reason...?), stands up from her table, saying "EEEEK! Forget it...I'm not going to do it."

Meanwhile, that little psychopath Jimmy has perfectly removed his frog's tiny heart, and it's still beating, which his teacher lauds him for (Are frogs dissected while still alive in high school biology...? That's not dissection, it's vivisection, isn't it? We only did some kind of big worm at my school...)

Friday night in the woods, some teens dance around a big red pentagram painted on the ground, chanting "We're the Devo's! [sic]" and "We're the chumps!" One of them says "We can't wake up no corpse" mid dance move. A coffin containing a body wrapped up like a mummy is leaned up against a tree (and partially covered by the narration box reading "Friday night, the woods"), and chickens hang by their necks from ropes in the foreground. Jimmy tells his gang to shut up, and then one of them notices the body has disappeared, as there is now only wisp of smoke in the coffin/crate where the wrapped-up body was.

Boom Boom, in costume, sneaks into Jimmy's house, looking for the stolen statue, and uses a "light bomb" on Wolverine, who has snuck up on her. After an argument over whether or not she's a little kid in over her head, Wolvie drags her out to the woods, showing her another red pentagram, this one surrounded by various dead animals, all wrapped up in phone cords and dripping blood.

Boom Boom finally agrees with Wolverine to leave whatever's going on up to him, and says she'll leave town—"Okay... I'm gone... I'm history..."—but she actually returns to Jimmy's house, this time finding him in the dark, surrounded by a halo of light, his eyes glowing and a grin of bright teeth on his darkened face.

He addresses her as Boom Boom, so either they do know each other, or perhaps the heroes of X-Factor were more well-known to the civilian population of the Marvel Universe in 1994 than they were to 17-year-old Caleb, and he tells her that the stuff with the statue and the animals? Well, "It's a boys' club. For boys only. Wanna join?"

She agrees, and the next panel is the most superfluous image of Wolverine in the entire book. It's an image of half of his head, just randomly juxtaposed between two panels. He's not doing anything, or saying anything, or thinking anything. There's just an image of Wolverine's face on the page there for some reason.

When the scene finally does return to Wolverine, he is being instructed by Red Water Fall, who tells him that he's going to go inside Wolverine's vision to look for clues and asks Wolverine to protect his body as he does so. He then drops onto his back and closes his eyes.

Are we nearing the climax? God, I hope so...

Jimmy takes Boom Boom to the nuclear power plant to meet the other Devos and to discuss her initiation. Ground fog envelopes Wolverine's feet at the ankles, and menacing silhouettes come out of the trees, Wolverine picking up the scents of "nine, ten--a dozen men!"

Before the other boys and the muscular ghost, who has appeared and addressed Boom Boom and the Devos, Jimmy uses a scalpel to take a wild slash at a chicken, eliciting a long, arcing gush of blood, the panel juxtaposed with Wolverine doing something similar with his blades to one of the attacking men. 

During the few panels of violence, Red Water Fall, whose name seems to have changed to the simplified "Red Fall" in the narration, has a vision in which he sees a huge spear flying towards a figure tied to a huge cross in the distance, the cross perched atop a cooling tower. A few panels later, we get a close up of the figure on the cross, and it's not Christ, but a seemingly nude Boom Boom, the border of the panel terminating just before where her nipples might be, keeping this book all-ages, I guess.

When the real, non-visionary Boom Boom makes a big pink explosion to free the other animals that the Devos had gathered for sacrifice, Jimmy pronounces his disappointment in her: "She is weak, weak and forever a girl!"

Then things get weird. Jimmy goes home, his thought clouds telling us that they made Boom Boom surrender between panels. He eats some chocolate chip cookies with his mom before an image of TV set on the table, half-melted as if it were made of ice cream. He notes that he has bloody feathers on his bomber jacket, but it's drawn and colored as a green liquid. His dad confronts him: "Come on son, who melted the television set?"

They argue. Apparently, Jimmy's dad is the head of the nuclear power plant, the mustachioed guy we saw giving a speech about the old Native American man earlier, and he wants his son to inherit and run the plant someday. He doesn't seem to be aware of Jimmy's anti-progress Devos beliefs.

Back at the plant, we see that Boom Boom is tied up to pipes that form a cross, mirroring the crucifix-like pose of Red Fall's vision, but here she has all her clothes on (She has lost her big, dumb glasses though). 

Finally, the next morning, it seems that whatever Jimmy and the Devos have been up to, it's starting to have some effect on the modern world, beyond resurrecting the buff dead guy. A man in a phone booth notes that the phone in melting. At Jimmy's house, just as the other blonde boy presents the tip of the Spear of Destiny to Jimmy, the engine in Jimmy's dad's car starts to melt. 

Father and son repeat their argument from the previous night, at greater length and at greater intensity, and they end up exchanging blows before Jimmy runs off, returning with his gang to the plant, where Boom Boom is still captive, awaiting being sacrificed.

Nocenti than engages in one of those passages that seemed not uncommon in the '90s, wherein the writer rattles off a list of phenomena related to some supernatural goings on, the art team not quite keeping up as they attempt to provide visual images to match her verbal imagery.

And in the natural world...

A flock rises, and heads south months too early...

A few towns away electricity shoots out of a socket... ...looking for appliances to power...

Call it unholy, call it unnatural-- --it's impossible to name but somehow things are just wrong.

This goes on for a few pages, with technology melting and people and animals acting weird, the panels interrupted only to check in with the captive Boom Boom and the ranting Jimmy, preparing to sacrifice her using the Spear before the body in the crate, and images of Wolverine posing (as, indeed, every page of the book seems interrupted by an image of Wolverine).

After hearing Boom Boom's "EEEEEEK", Wolverine prepares to go into the plant, tarrying a bit to have an argument with Red Water Fall/Red Fall about whether or how badly to stab the Devos and some stuff about tests and culture clashes (most of this plays out in a splash page, in which we get a rare full body image of Wolverine, one of those that reveals his dainty little feet).

He ultimately enters the power plant straight through one of its walls (!) and then he retracts his claws to punch and kick the kids around with a "THAK" a "KRUP" a "SPAK" and so on. With the Devos down and Boom Boom freed, things finally seem to be winding down—but there's till the ghost to deal with! Now boasting a size and musculature like that of The Incredible Hulk in the '90s, he engages with Wolverine. 

"Can't kill the dead, wild man," the ghost says, grabbing Wolvie in a bear hug from behind. In the weirdest-looking bit of anatomical drawing in the whole book, Wolverine seems to fold like a lawn chair at the shoulders and thighs, allowing him to kick his attacker in the head. "Then I guess I'll die tryin'!" he retorts.

As it turns out, he does not, in fact, die tryin'. Red Fall knows the Spear can kill the dead man, and after some wrestling, Boom Boom finally gets it into Wolverine's hands, and he proceeds to stab it into his undead opponent's side, and he dissolves into mist, promising to be back. ("Wow! He's gone," Boom Boom says. "Too bad his stink ain't," Wolverine grimaces.) 

On the final page, Jimmy starts to apologize, but Wolverine dismisses the Devos over his shoulder as he walks away with Boom Boom and Red Fall, apparently leaving the Spear of Destiny behind (or maybe it dissolved with the dead hulk?). A church bell starts to ring, and we see an image of the power plant in the distance, a sign noting that it's closed and condemned in the foreground. Red Fall tends his garden. Wolverine regards a church in the distance, disgusted that the same men who he saved the sleeping Red Fall from and the Devos were attending Sunday church, "like nothin' happened."  "Sometimes I can't stand the human race," Wolverine says over his cigar. "Maybe that's why nature created mutants!" Boom Boom grins and shrugs, and one of them laughs in big block letters as they walk off into the sunset...er, maybe it is sunrise, since it's Sunday morning. Fin. 

Woof. 

So that was rough, but I survived. If you refuse to take my word for how badly made this book really was, or think that perhaps I was exaggerating at all, it has been collected, in the pages of 2023's Wolverine Epic Collection Vol. 7: To the Bone. I was unable to find a copy in either of the local library systems I have access to, but I did find it on Hoopla, and Evilution itself is, of course, available on Amazon's Comixology, if you don't mind supporting a Jeff Bezos venture. 

(And, because I read it electronically, I was unable to scan any images to illustrate this review, which is too bad, as so much of it needs to be seen to be believed. I did try my best to seek out images of the interiors online, but found relatively few, and only used the one showing off Boom Boom's dress and apparent roofie-ing of Jimmy. I don't think there are very many images of the story online in the first place, but also my search was frustrated, as Google, for example, kept assuming I was looking for Wolverine + Evolution, not Evilution.)

Anyway, I think I'm going to go read the latest collection of Ernie Bushmiller's Nancy to help me recover from this...

A Month of Wednesdays: May 2025

 BOUGHT: 

DC Finest: Zero Hour: Crisis in Time: Part Two (DC Comics) This 1994 event featured a five-issue main miniseries entitled Zero Hour, the issues of which were published countdown-style, starting with issue #4 and concluding with #0. The rest of the publisher's superhero line tied-in, each of the involved issues featuring a story having something to do with the premise of time going crazy (and, ultimately, all of time and space fading into the white nothingness of a blank comic page, as reality was unmade at the climax of the miniseries). Each of these had a "Zero Hour" logo atop its cover, featuring two arrows pointed in either direction, and a splintering zero for the first "O".

The heroes succeeded in defeating the villains and recreating all of time and space by initiating a new Big Bang , resulting in a handful of continuity tweaks (Or, as time-travelling hero Waverider explains it to a crowd of heroes who weren't present for the climactic event, "Time naturally fell into the pattern we remember...with subtle differences.")  

Following the events of the miniseries, each DC comic interrupted their usual numbering with a special #0 issue, featuring silver ink on the cover's "#0" and the logo, and a banner reading "The Beginning of Tomorrow!" 

Several new series launched with those #0 issues, some of which lasted quite a while and achieved great acclaim (like James Robinson and Tony Harris' Starman), and others that...didn't (like Steven Grant and Vince Giarrano's Manhunter). Oh, and I see now that there was one I have absolutely no memory of ever having existed at all (Xenobrood...?).

All of these new zero issues were designed to be done-in-one stories and jumping-on points for new readers, presenting new line-ups for existing teams or teasing upcoming storylines.

This particular 500-ish page volume collects the second half of the event, which means the last three issues of Zero Hour proper by Dan Jurgens and Jerry Ordway, plus 13 tie-in issues and, somewhat surprisingly, four #0 issues from  after the event...plus some 25 pages of backmatter, consisting of DC's promotional "Zero Month" sampler, a short 2019-written prose piece with a bit of behind-the-scenes info prominently featuring late editor KC Carlson and a black-and-white "ashcan" of the climax of the final issue that obscured the identity of the villain with blacked-out art and redacted mentions of his name, originally produced for a long-ago San Diego Comic Con.

You guys all know who that is by this point, right...? Hal Jordan, now calling himself "Parallax" and powered-up by absorbing anomalous energies left over from Crisis on Infinite Earths, anomalies that are depicted as balls of blank-page whiteness. 

Using the energy he has gathered throughout the series, he creates waves of entropy at the beginning and the end of time, eating it away from both directions in order to unmake reality and, then, restart it, with himself as its intelligent designer, so that he can make a perfect universe free of such tragedies as the destruction of Coast City...and his own reckless and violent actions that followed it, of course.

I liked this portrayal of Hal, and thought his actions had a logic to them, and that he had enough of an in-story justification to propel him on this path (He didn't necessarily enjoy killing Hawkman, for example, but since he now had the power to resurrect him in the near future, he didn't mind doing so either if it got him out of his way). 

These issues of Zero Hour mostly involve some running around and some status quo changing (like revealing which members of the JSA survived Extant's attack and what they might do following the restoration of their old ages, for example) on the way to the big revelation that Hal is behind it all, when he makes his entrance decking Superman, and then a final battle in which the various allies Waverider gathers outside of time at Vanishing Point are confronted with Extant and a handful of heroes who are swayed, at least temporarily, by Hal's "perfect universe" pitch. 

All that action was followed by what to a young letter hack and future blogger was really exciting: A four-page illustrated timeline of the DC Universe, beginning 15 billion years ago with the creation of the universe and ending with "Today" (plus a tease of "The Future", which includes Professor Zoom, Booster Gold and the Legion of Super-Heroes). 

While there are a few dates given, associated with the World War II era Golden Age heroes for example, this is basically a formal sliding timeline. It doesn't get into the specifics of continuity, but it does establish who debuted when in relation to one another, keeping straight things like which heroes founded the Justice League (Black Canary, not Wonder Woman), for example, whether Plastic Man was a Golden Age or Modern Age hero (the latter), when Wonder Woman arrived in Man's World (recently) and so on.

(Having studied this so rigorously in 1994, one of the things that would later annoy me following future continuity fussings-with like Infinite Crisis, Flashpoint and so on was that DC never deigned to let readers know what's what in a similar fashion...often to the detriment of stories that relied on DCU history, as individual editors and creators often didn't seem to know themselves when or if particular events happened or not.)

As for the tie-ins, they are fairly all over the place. 

Some, like Guy Gardner: Warrior, are tied pretty closely to the events of the miniseries, with Guy, Steel, Supergirl and a Batgirl from an alternate timeline bouncing around time, only to be deposited directly into the action of Zero Hour #1. 

Some, like Robin and Catwoman, are standalone "time goes crazy" stories, in which Robin Tim Drake works a case with Robin Dick Grayson and Catwoman and a handsome caveman chase a saber-toothed cat. 

And some seem to have almost nothing at all to do with Zero Hour, other than the action fading into whiteness at the end, like Anima. 

The four #0 issues are sort of curious inclusions, I think.

Two make rather perfect sense, as they deal with plotlines left dangling from Zero Hour #0. Of these, one is Green Lantern #0 by Ron Marz, Darryl Banks and Romeo Tanghal, which lets us know what happened to Hal and Kyle Rayner after they were lost during the new Big Bang and, after some teasing, resolves who will be Green Lantern going forward. It's Kyle, obviously (Marz has him narrate on the last page something along the lines of the fact that Hal's gone, he's the Green Lantern going forward, and he'll try his best.) 

And the other is The Flash #0 by Mark Waid, Mike Wieringo and Jose Marzan Jr, which lets us know that Wally West did not, in fact, die during Zero Hour, but was merely temporarily lost, phantom-like, in the timestream. 

The others are more-or-less random ones and could have seemingly been substituted by any of the post-Zero Hour #0 issues, I think. These are Damage #0 and Superman: The Man of Steel #0. The latter at least devotes its first few pages to Superman returning home after the event series and checking in with Lois Lane about what has or hasn't changed, as he tries to communicate to her what happens as he understands it, but it soon changes focus to setting up the next Superman storyline.

The most interesting comics in this collection? 

I really rather liked Green Arrow #90 by Kevin Dooley, Eduardo Barreto and Buzz Setzer, a mostly silent issue that splits into two similar but slightly alternate timelines on the second page, one running along the top of the pages, the other on the bottom. In one Green Arrow survives, in the other he is shot to death and, as the timelines rejoins one another, he finds himself regarding his own corpse. Batman arrives, puts his hand on his shoulder, and speaks the issues only line: "We need you." 

It's a time goes crazy issue, then, but a thoughtfully made one, and one which plays with a comics narrative in an unusual way.

The aforementioned Robin issue by Chuck Dixon, Tom Grummett and Ray Kryssing comparing and contrasting the two Robins is a lot of fun. So too is an 11-page short from Showcase '94, in which writer Mike McAvennie and artists Jason Armstrong and Stan Woch have a group of time-themed supervillains (Chronos, Clock King, Time Commander and Calendar Man) all team up for a heist, only to be frustrated by various time disturbances, like having to repeat actions over and over, or being interrupted by their future selves. 

And, surprisingly, I kind of enjoyed the Warrior issue (I don't like Gardner as a protagonist, nor did I much care for this run of his solo comics), in large part thanks to the art, which featured pencils by Mitch Byrd, Phil Jimenez, Howard Porter and Mike Parobeck over layouts by Jackson Guice. That's a lot of cooks in the kitchen, of course, but writer Beau Smith's plot basically consists of the characters being shunted from one time period to another, the art changing each time they arrive at a different location, so it works (Jimenez's dynamic but highly detailed, rather realistic section is the Old West, wherein we get cameos from a bunch of DC-owned Western characters, while Parobeck's simple style comes into play in a sequence set during the early years of Hal Jordan's Green Lantern career).

Also of interest is the three-part storyline that ran through the Justice League titles, the Christopher Priest-written "Return of the Hero", which introduced Triumph. The powerful hero apparently helped found the Justice League, gathering Superman, Martian Manhunter, Aquaman, Flash Barry Allen, Green Lantern Hal Jordan and Black Canary to all aid him in combatting an alien threat, but, at the end of the mission, he and the aliens get knocked out of timestream and accordingly forgotten. 

Triumph tells this story to what's left of the Justice League in the wake of the just-concluded "Judgement Day" story arc, which here means Elongated Man, Fire, (a) Crimson Fox, Tasmanian Devil and L-Ron-in-Trigon's body. He tries to rally this motley crew (which, of course, he is not impressed with) to help him fight the aliens, who, he assumes, must have also been released from the timestream along with him. He does this by fighting the heroes, which probably isn't the best strategy. 

By the final chapter, Martian Manhunter joins them all, and ancient Atlantean sorcerer Arion makes an unexpected appearance. 

Different artists draw each chapter in their vastly differing styles; I, obviously, liked the final chapter, drawn by Jimenez, the best, although Greg Larocque's pencils on the second chapter were interesting too. Howard Porter drew the cover of the first installment, featuring Triumph standing among the League founders, which made me wonder, was this the future JLA artist's first time drawing a Justice League...?

Priest would go on to write Justice League Task Force, featuring a new, stable line-up that included Triumph and ran for 20 issues. (It could use a trade collection, maybe a DC Finest one; so far DC has only collected the first handful of issues of the Task Force series, but that was in 2018). There was also a Priest-written Triumph miniseries in 1995, but I never read that. 

While writing about Part One of the DC Finest collection of Zero Hour (in this column), I noted that one of the things that most excited me about it was that I had never before read a superhero crossover event series in its entirety, so I was curious about what that experience might be like.

Having now done so, I don't know that I would recommend it.

I'm not entirely sure of the logic employed in putting this collection together, if it was done so in the order of the books' release or if the editors were going for some sort of readability. But, if you were to approach me today saying you had never read Zero Hour and wanted to know the best way to do so, I think I would recommend reading Zero Hour #4-0 first and then going back to read the tie-ins that interest you most, based on either the characters or creators. 

It won't hurt to read them all, of course, but reading them as presented in these two collections means a lot of starting and stopping of the main story's momentum, and a lot of detours, many of which have little if anything to do with Zero Hour. (And if you're interests are piqued by what you read in the pages of the Anima book, for example, well, good luck tracking the series down now!)

That said, I had fun with the reading experience, revisiting the event in general, and, especially, reading the handful of tie-ins that I had actually never read before, either in single issues from when they were released, fished out of long boxes from conventions, or in the previous Zero Hour collections. 

And while so far the only events DC has collected in this format have been Zero Hour and the oft-collected Crisis on Infinite Earths, I'm hopeful the publisher will eventually turn its attention to its many other events, particularly those that ran in the annuals like Eclipso Unleashed and the Bloodlines books, which, due to their pages counts, are just far too big for individual trade collections, but might work in series of big collections like this.

REVIEWED: 

Band Nerd (HarperAlley) The cover of this book is probably a bit deceptive. The title and image suggest a book about a young girl devoted to the school band, and while the story is that, it's actually more about her trying to cope with one of her parents' alcoholism, which she does by channeling all her time, energy and focus into earning first chair in band. Written by Sarah Clawson Willis and drawn by Emma Cormarie, it's well-made enough, and has a very distinct visual style which took me a bit of getting used to. More here. 

Carousel Summer (HarperAlley) This coming-of-age story of a middle-schooler's summer-long journey learning to be herself and, even harder, coming out to her friends and family as her genuine self—while also helping her small town decide something about its own identity—is charming and effective, at turns funny and potently dramatic. It's by Kathleen Gros, who may be best known for previous queer readings and retellings of works of classic literature featuring strong female protagonists in her 2020 Jo: An Adaptation of Little Women (Sort Of) and 2022 Anne: An Adaptation of Anne of Green Gables (Sort Of). I suppose it's technically what one might refer to as a "gay" book, but the protagonist's conflicts involving growing up, changing, a first relationship and all the stuff with her family and the town itself should be relatable to anyone who is a middle-schooler or has ever been one, gay, straight or other. More here. 

Ghost Town (Abrams) I thought this original graphic novel from Eric Colossal, the cartoonist responsible for Rutabaga the Adventure Chef, was a blast. Another story chronicling the last summer of a young woman before starting middle school, it features a group of kids trying to save their town from the plague of ghosts haunting it, their ghost-busting leading to a mysterious plot spanning generations and, unexpectedly, a great metaphor for the human need to move on, no matter how scary one might find change and how badly one might wish to stick with what they know. More here. 

It's Jeff!: Jeff-Verse (Marvel Entertainment) Did you miss any of writer (and co-creator) Kelly Thompson and art team Gurihiru's comics starring Jeff, the puppy-like land shark? I know I did. In fact, I missed all of them after the first one, 2023's It's Jeff! Well, fear not. They are now all available in a single trade paperback. If you need to know more, I reviewed it here, but, given that this is Kelly Thompson and Gurihiru, I can't imagine anyone needing more information than that to be excited about picking this book up. I'm a huge fan of the Gurihiru team's superhero art, and Thompson gives them the opportunity to draw a wide swathe of the modern Marvel Universe here, including a story set during a pool party, which is like a Marvel Swimsuit Special embedded within a chapter of It's Jeff!...

Credit where credit is due: Who created who in Thunderbolts*

•Bucky Barnes, Captain America's sidekick, was created by Joe Simon and Jack Kirby in 1941's Captain America Comics #1. His Winter Soldier look, identity and backstory as a brainwashed assassin with a robot arm were the creations of Ed Brubaker and Steve Epting. Barnes first appeared as the Winter Soldier in 2005's Captain America #6.

•La Contessa Valentina Allegra de Fontaine, an agent of the espionage team SHIELD, was created by Jim Steranko in 1967's Strange Tales #159.  

•Red Guardian Alexei Shostakov, the Soviet Union's answer to Captain America, was created by Roy Thomas and John Buscema in 1967's Avengers #43. 

•Taskmaster, a mercenary and combat instructor with "photographic reflexes" that allow him to mimic the moves of his opponents, was created by David Michelinie and George Perez in 1980's Avengers #196.

•John Walker, a one-time Captain America antagonist, was created by Mark Gruenwald and Paul Neary, appearing for the first time in 1986's Captain America #323, wherein he used the name "Super Patriot." He later became the new (and temporary) Captain America, before finally settling on the name USAgent in 1989's Captain America #354. I'm afraid I'm not sure which artist deserves credit for the black, white and red variation of the original Simon and Kirby Captain America costume that Walker eventually adopted as his USAgent get-up. (Tom Morgan seems to have penciled its first appearances). If you know, please tell us in the comments and I'll update this post. 

•The Ghost, an Iron Man villain with a power suit that allows him and objects in his possession to become invisible or intangible, was created by David Michelinie and Bob Layton in 1987's Iron Man #219. 

•The Thunderbolts, a group of long-time Marvel supervillains who secretly adopt new codenames and costumes to pose as a superhero team, were created by Kurt Busiek and Mark Bagley for the 1997 Thunderbolts series (Although they first appeared in The Incredible Hulk #449 by Peter David and Mike Deodato Jr.).  

•Yelena Belova, the second Black Widow, has some rather convoluted creation credits. She first appeared as a sketch by artist J.G. Jones in 1998's Marvel Knights Wave 2: Sketchbook #1, made her first in-story appearance in a 1999 issue of Paul Jenkins and Jae Lee's miniseries Inhumans and then starred in a 1999 Black Widow miniseries by Devin K. Grayson and Jones, who are usually credited as her creators. (Wikipedia lists Grayson, Jones, Jenkins and Lee all as her creators, though). She is, obviously, a legacy version of Black Widow Natasha Romanoff, who was created by Stan Lee, Don Rico and Don Heck for the Iron Man feature in 1964's Tales of Suspense #52. She has since adopted the name White Widow.

•The Sentry, a Superman analogue with mental health problems that manifest as the alternate identity The Void, was created by Paul Jenkins, Jae Lee and Rick Veitch for 2000's The Sentry #1. 

*******************************

Speaking of who created The Sentry... You'll note that I credited Paul Jenkins, Jae Lee and Rick Veitch above. As you've probably noticed, I was going by Wikipedia's credits for all of those I didn't already know. A few months ago, I would have told you that Jenkins and Lee created The Sentry, but then, that was before I stumbled upon this interview with Veitch at the website Popverse, which includes various sketches of the character in the style of different artists apparently created to support a pitch. It's a fascinating (if rather sad) interview, and paired with this follow-up story, it seems like Veitch and Jenkins are currently in rather strong disagreement about whether or not Veitch contributed to the character's development at all.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Review: JLA/Titans: The Technis Imperative

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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