A Month of Wednesdays: March 2025

 BOUGHT:

DC Finest: Plastic Man: The Origin of Plastic Man (DC Comics) I've been waiting a long time for this book. And I don't just mean since DC first announced their new DC Finest format, or the particular comics they would be collecting in them. No, I've been waiting for this book—a big, thorough, affordable collection of Jack Cole's Golden Age masterpiece—since 1999 or so, when I first encountered Cole's Plastic Man in the pages of DC's Archive Editions, $50 hardcovers that collected restored Golden Age comics. 

DC ended up publishing eight volumes of Plastic Man comics in the Archive Edition format and, for the longest time, those volumes were really the only way to read Cole's Plastic Man comics (Ditto for Golden Age Captain Marvel comics, which I'm hopeful will appear in a future DC Finest collection). 

This 580-page collection includes the first three years' worth of the character's appearances, from Quality Comics' Police Comics #1-#36 and Plastic Man #1 and #2 (That, of course, leaves a lot still uncollected; the Archives Editions collected comics from the character's first seven years or so, making it all the way to 1948. Meanwhile Police Comics ran with Plas material on its covers through 1950's issue #102, while Plastic Man continued until 1956's issue #64... although it's worth noting that while Cole was credited with all of those books, ghosts became increasingly involved as time wore on). 

You can see the character's rapidly increasing popularity play out within this DC Finest collection itself. 

On the cover of Police #1, Plastic Man is just one of four characters whose head and name floats along the lefthand side of the image (along with The Human Bomb, The Phantom Lady and someone named The Mouthpiece), while the cover is dominated by the pink and red clad Firebrand, shown fighting a pair of soldiers trying to operate an artillery piece (If you know Firebrand at all today, it's likely because of his inclusion in 1980s series All-Star Squadron, where his sister took on his name and heroic role...that, or you read one of DC's various attempts to reboot the character, like a 1996 nine-issue series or as part of various Freedom Fighters line-ups). 

By the fifth issue, Plastic Man had taken over the covers, and they would be his until the book switched focus to crime stories in in 1950, save for a handful of ones he shared with Will Eisner's The Spirit, which, perhaps curiously, are  here altered to remove The Spirit (According to the fine print on the table of contents, "Some covers have been altered from their original versions due to copyright reasons, or to remove material that may be deemed offensive to modern audiences").

Additionally, while the first Plastic Man stories are just six pages, they will soon expand to nine pages and then 15 pages.

As for that first Plastic Man story, it's fascinating in how relatively simple and, well, regular it appears, at least compared to what would soon follow. 

Its short six pages are all packed with as many as ten panels each, mostly uniform rectangles, with the occasional circle to break up the monotony. The images are mostly medium shots, and, aside from a few panels of Plas first discovering his new stretching powers or a panel that uses foreshortening to depict his long elastic reach, there's little in the way of visual interest; the character designs of all the characters who aren't Plastic Man are remarkably straight and realistic. There's actually relatively little to distinguish it from any of the other Golden Age super-comics I've read before (Most recently, a few hundred pages of All Star Comics in DC Finest: Justice Society of America: For America and Democracy).

What it does have is a striking character design for its hero, an intriguing name for its new character, interesting if not unique super-powers and a compelling hook—this new superhero's secret identity was that of a crook.

After a chemical accident, betrayal by his own gang, and an act of mercy from a holy man, notorious gangster Eel O'Brian turns over a new leaf, deciding to use his strange new powers to become a crimefighter. Rather than simply switching sides, however, he retains his Eel identity to continue to get information from other criminals that he can then use against them as Plastic Man, an identity he adopts by rearranging his face like putty into a new appearance and donning a red rubber suit and goggles.

As this collection evinces, the feature would rather quickly evolve. 

Plastic Man would soon get a job with the local police department. He would encounter magic for the first time in Police #6 (when he must foil a pair of disembodied hands, empowered by a curse on their former owner by an Indian prince to be proficient thieves), a mad scientist in #8 (this one has invented a titanic eight ball which destroys everything in its path, while also functioning as a super-magnet that attracts gold and silver), an Axis sympathizer in #9 and a super-powered villain in #11 (the undying brain of a 19th century scientist, which, through unlikely circumstances, ends up transplanted into the skull of a modern man, who then uses a formula to grow into a giant).

Such parameters set so early, a Plastic Man adventure could entail pretty much anything that Cole could come up with, although, for the most part, he would stick to pitting Plastic Man against gangsters and other real-world style criminals, even if these would increasingly take on silly-sounding names and their designs would get gradually more exaggerated and cartoony (just as Cole's comics would get increasingly more inventive in lay-out and rendering, and Plastic Man's powers would be stretched to new and inventive limits). 

The earlier stories are notably violent in a cartoonishly grand guignol kind of way, and some of the villains are quite garish in design, particularly "Hairy Arms", an unseen criminal mastermind who is ultimately revealed to be all arms, legs and head attached to a tiny, barely-there body.

After what looks like a few sidekick try-outs—a chubby cop named Plotz who helps Plast take on Hairy Arms and an army of robots, a goofy-looking Western Union employee named Omar who helps our hero break up an Axis slave labor racket—Woozy Winks is introduced in Police #13 (about 100 pages into this collection), and he would stick around for all future Plastic Man stories.

Woozy rescues a drowning man, who introduces himself as "Zambi ze soothzayer." In thanks for saving his life, Zambi blesses Woozy with his magic: "I hereby bestow upon you the protection of nature!! From this day forth, no harm you!!" 

Woozy tests this out by banging his head with a hammer and then throwing himself off a cliff. Realizing the power is legit, he flips a coin to see if he should use it for good or evil and then immediately embarks upon a criminal enterprise: Helping an art collector increase the value of his holdings by destroying the sculptures of a particular artist.

This attracts the attention of Plastic Man, who, in his Eel identity, teams up with Woozy, but try as he might, our hero is unable to lay hands on Woozy, nature continually protecting him by, for example, sending a lightning bolt, giant hail stones or a full-grown tree sprouting from the earth to thwart Plas.

Eventually, Plastic Man guilts Woozy into turning himself in, but it turns out that, thanks to his supernatural protection, no jail can hold him, and so Plastic Man takes him on as his crime-fighting partner (At first, Woozy allies himself with Plas because he wants to get even with Eel, who Plas is inconveniently assigned to bring in, but apparently Woozy enjoys crime-fighting, as he sticks around after that story). 

Woozy's powers would seemingly come and go as time went on, something the characters themselves would occasionally comment on, as apparently the blessing of Zambi would gradually wear off. Woozy's criminality would also fade, with the character only occasionally picking a pocket here or there.

Plas eventually joins the FBI in Police Comics #18, by order of the President of the United States, who wants him working on domestic crime-fighting rather than joining the army to fight overseas as he originally intends to do. Woozy comes along as his unofficial partner, and, at that point, the feature would settle into a status quo that would remain for the rest of the comics collected herein. 

Plastic Man would abandon his Eel O'Brian identity completely and become Plastic Man full-time, Eel only being brought up once more, when FBI Chief Branner discovers Plastic's past, and makes a deal with him: If he solves the three most challenging bureau cases, he'll keep him on and keep his secret.

In modern imagination, Plastic Man is primarily thought of as a comedic character, and so it's interesting to read or re-read these earliest adventures, where that's very much not the case. Plastic is a pretty straightforward and serious superhero character (even more so than those Justice Society guys, who were more prone to jokes and quips), what comedy there is in the series coming from the funny-looking, id-driven Woozy, who plays comic relief against Plas as straight man, and, perhaps, the criminals themselves, who, as stated above, Cole depicts as more outlandish as time goes on (and many of their schemes would become more silly in set-up and presentation). 

(Where did the idea of Plas as a comedic comic character originate then, I wonder? Is it from Cole's own, later Plastic Man stories, which I haven't yet read? His stories even here are certainly at least trending increasingly comedic. There are at least two stories in this collection that are pretty pure comedy stories. In the first, from Police # 20, Woozy teams up with Jack Cole himself, who Cole portrays as a badly stuttering cartoon character, while Plas is sidelined, though it turns out to all be a dream. In the other, from Plastic Man #2, Plas and Woozy investigate Coroner's Corners, a town where everyone is insane. Was it the 1960s series from DC? The 1979 cartoon show? The 1988 Phil Foglio mini-series? At any rate, by the character's late-'90s resurgence in the pages of JLA, Plastic Man had essentially become a Looney Tunes character of a superhero, and the wacky comedy relief on the team.)

It should as ever be noted that for all his brilliance as a cartoonist, Jack Cole's work at the time was not exactly racially enlightened, and his depictions of non-white characters can read particularly cringy today.*

There are only three Black faces in all of the book's many pages; two are male railway employees, the other is a female servant to a rich white lady. All are colored dark, almost inky black, and have big red lips. The only one with any speaking lines is one of the railway employees in a story about a haunted train. He speaks with an accent and is depicted as being terrified of the faux ghosts.

There's one story involving Native Americans, in which Plast uses grease paint to disguise himself as one of their number, part of an investigation into Chief Great Warrior, who urges his tribe to revolt against the United States while they are distracted by the war in Europe. Woozy refers to them as "red skins."

Another, very early story features Plas as Eel infiltrating a drug-smuggling racket, part of which involves him beating up some Chinese characters in an opium den. They speak in broken English and, in one case, a fake Chinese character in a word balloon, and Plas calls them "yellow dogs."

As if often the case for such war time comics, though, the worst portrayal seems reserved for the Japanese characters. In a story from Plastic Man #1, Japanese spies are after an American inventor's miraculous new camouflage, which renders anything it's sprayed on completely invisible, and they end up capturing Plas and taking him back to Japan.

Plastic Man refers to the Japanese agent Amisaki Komiwabi as a "Jap" a "Nip" and "Horse-teeth," and there are more instances of made-up characters in word balloons to denote an Asian language. While the various Japanese characters all look like unfortunate caricatures in this story, I suppose it's worth noting that, by this point in the character's comics, all of the characters look like caricatures, regardless of race, with really only Plas himself and some of the female characters drawn in a straighter, more realistic style. 

At least the fact that the Police Comics covers featuring The Spirit were all altered mean we're spared a couple of appearances by Spirit's sidekick Ebony White on a few of them. 

At any rate, that handful of uncomfortable scenes or stories aside, these remain some of the best superhero comics produced during the Golden Age superhero boom, one's well worth reading for modern fans of the character and of great cartooning in general. 

Given how much Plastic Man material is yet available, I'm hopeful that we'll get another DC Finest collection (or five) featuring Cole's Plastic Man comics. 

BORROWED: 

Batman/Superman: World's Finest Vol. 5: Secret Origin (DC Comics) This collection of Mark Waid's series of the earlier adventures of Batman and Superman is a lot less consistent a work than the four previous ones, each of which were more or less devoted to a single arc. But then, I suppose that will happen when a comic book writer doesn't write for the trade.

And so here we get seven distinct stories from four different issues—World's Finest #18, #19 and #25, plus World's Finest 2004 Annual #1—some of which do not even feature the title characters. (If you're wondering what happened to issues #20-#24, we already read those; they were the Kingdom Come story collected in the fourth volume, which I reviewed in this column). 

They are, as follows...

•"Phantom Riddles" by Waid and artist Travis Moore presents another new first meeting between the title characters (Magpie, who was the villain of John Byrne's 1986 story of the pair's first meeting, makes an appearance). This one is set "Years Ago," somewhere near the beginning of Batman's second year on the job ("I've done a lot of good this past year," Bruce Wayne tells Alfred of his vigilante career in one panel). Superman looks the same as he does in the regular World's Finest setting, but Batman's cowl here a little different, and he's yet to adopt the "new look" yellow shield around his bat-symbol.

The Riddler has reared his head again, this time leaving his riddles in "Kryptonese," which means he must be in league with someone from Krypton, which brings Superman to Gotham. Batman teams with him, revealing his secret identity in the process...but only after he reveals to Superman that he's figured out his secret identity.

Filling issues #18 and #19 of the series, it's a decent enough story, though it doesn't seem like the instant classic one would hope a story devoted to telling of such a momentous occasion to be. I liked Superman's line about his dog. I suspect this story has bearing on one that Waid was working on for the Superman titles, given an unresolved dangling plot thread.

•"The Ties That Bind" by writer Dennis Culver and artist Travis Mercer is a ten-page Metamorpho solo story, the first story from the pages of the annual, which was an anthology of such shorts. Batman and Superman (and Robin) only appear in the background of the first panel, an asterisk in an editorial box informing us that this story is set "directly after Batman/Superman: World's Finest #17 page 23 panel 5."

As Metamorpho appeared in the series previously, then (in the third volume, Elementary), he apparently earns a solo story in the annual. There's not much to it. Simon Stagg sends Rex to collect a treasure, where our hero finds himself face to face with his own estranged father, an Indiana Jones homage/parody named "Montana Mason."

•"Sting Like a Bee" by writer Stephanie Williams and artist Rosi Kampe seems like a bit of a stretch for inclusion, as I don't believe its star, future Bumblebee Karen Beecher, appeared in the Batman/Superman title at all, but was instead part of the team in World's Finest: Teen Titans (an editorial box in the first panel uses that comics' logo).

Set when she was still a little kid, the story follows Karen as she uses her various inventions—including a brand-new set of wings—to infiltrate the headquarters of a nefarious superstore that seems to be victimizing her community, not completely unlike the way real-life superstores often do.

•"Time Check" by Christopher Cantwell and Jorge Fornes is a Challengers of the Unknown story. I didn't recall the Challs actually being in World's Finest at all, but upon flipping through Elementary again, I saw they did indeed make a brief appearance, which is apparently good enough to make it into the annual. The story is very weird and jumps back and forth between their origin and a new, perilous adventure; I found it a little hard to parse, and not terribly rewarding, although I do like Fornes' art a lot, and am always happy to get more of it. •"Joker-Luthor: World's Vilest" by Waid and artist Steve Pugh is taken from issue #25 and is something of a companion to the earlier "Phantom Riddles," here purporting to detail the first meeting between Lex Luthor and The Joker.

Luthor apparently has gotten possession of a cursed manuscript leading to a magical treasure, but every expert who tries to translate it for him is driven insane in the process. So he figures he will have someone who is already insane try to translate it for him, and thus breaks The Joker out of Arkham, fits him with a bomb collar to make him compliant and then the pair set out for the treasure, a magical maguffin that grants whoever holds it their greatest wish. Its location? The Rock of Eternity. Pugh's art is as solid as always, and Waid writes the characters well, although I'm personally not so fond of the Joker/Luthor alliance being quite as adversarial as this. I've always thought of them more as...well, if not friends, per se, then genuine allies and kindred spirits, bonded by the fact that the other is the only other person on Earth who knows exactly what it's like to be the archenemy of one of the World's Finest. That's just me, though. •"IMPeriled" by Waid and co-writer Cullen Bunn and artist Edwin Galmon, which actually appeared in the annual but is shifted back a bit in the collection for clarity's sake, finds Mr. Mxyzptlk and Bat-Mite at a meeting of "The Just-Us League", which consists of various mite versions of Justice Leaguers, like Wonder Woman, Hawkman, The Flash, Metamorpho and so on (As was suggested in Alan Grant and Kevin O'Neill's 1992 Legends of the Dark Knight #38, the idea seems to be that every DC hero has a mite equivalent of their own).

The various mites all fight over whose respective hero is the best, with "Green-Mite" simultaneously championing both Green Lantern Hal Jordan and Green Arrow Olliver Queen ("Why choose?" he tells a scolding Flash-Mite, "They're both so awesome!"). I won't weigh into the mites' argument, which leads to violence and spans a few too many pages, other than to note that Green-Mite is obviously wrong, as Hal Jordan is demonstrably the worst.

The mite-on-mite violence gets much more serious when a bunch of mites of various villains show up, the Sinestro-Mite seemingly killing Green-Mite. Mxy and Bat-Mite escape as a large, hooded figure with its own unusual dialogue balloons—red type on black ovals—makes the scene, talking smack and apparently leading the bad mites on.

•Finally, the collection ends with "Impossible: Prologue," an eight-pager by the original World's Finest team of Waid and artist Dan Mora that originally appeared in issue #25. Chaos breaks out in the heroes' headquarters—like, for example, a giant, copper Abe Lincoln stepping out of Batman's giant penny to fight the suddenly alive dinosaur statue in the Batcave—and the expected mischief-makers eventually come forward. But the chaos magic wasn't their doing, Mxyzptlk explains, and Bat-Mite appears cradling the dead Green-Mite, saying they're being hunted and that Earth could be next.

It's a heck of a cliffhanger, which one imagines will be picked up on "Impossible," the series' next four-issue arc, and will therefore likely account for most of the sixth trade paperback collection. I'm not quite sure how I feel about Mora's particularly elfin, big-headed imps just yet, but I suppose I'll get a better sense of them in "Impossible" proper.

None of these are bad stories, of course, and there is certainly a lot to enjoy in this collection, but due to its fractious nature, it's the least satisfying read in the series so far.

Bowling With Corpses & Other Strange Tales from Lands Unknown (Dark Horse Books) When people talk about this book, they will understandably refer to it as Bowling With Corpses, leaving off the second half of the title, as one inevitably does with a long book title. But the second half of the title may ultimately prove to be the more important half, as the Lands Unknown seem to be the true focus of this compelling anthology of eight, interconnected fantasy stories by Mike Mignola (and colorist Dave Stewart and letterer Clem Robins).

The title story is an adaptation of an old Italian folktale, and here Mignola proves that comics is perhaps the perfect medium in which to tell these sorts of stories, stories that readers are most likely to have encountered in collections from the likes of the Brothers Grimm or Andrew Lang. The matter-of-fact statements of the magical or fantastic in such stories are doubly effective in comics, where each beat comes with a new image and in a discrete unit of time, so what might seem a little like a storytelling non sequitur in prose will here feel perfectly natural.

So, for example, in a narration box, Mignola can write, "His whole life he lived in a wooden tub in a kitchen. Then, one day--" and we see an image of the boy under discussion, seemingly interrupting the narration to directly address the reader with his announcement-like bit of dialogue, "It's time for me to go out into the world to seek my fortune."

Or, for another, the prose narration may simply state, "And that very night he was set upon by a gang of corpses," while the image shows just that, a question mark in a dialogue balloon above the boy, and some conversation between the corpses giving parallel bits of storytelling information.

In that title story, the boy Yeb is asked to go bowling with a group of undead, who challenge him: If he wins three rounds of the sport, here played with a skull for a ball and upright bones as pins, he shall have their fortune, and if he loses, well, this question is simply answered by a silent panel depicting a close-up smile of one of the corpse's.

He wins all three rounds, being awarded a handful of gold coins, then some buttons and teeth, and finally the right arm plucked off the mummified corpse of what seems to be a saint or holy man. This comes in handy when he journeys to the tower home of a group of shape-changing warlocks, who attack him in the form of giant bats (They seem to be vampires, although that word is never used in the book). Striking them with the fist of the dead holy man transforms them into piles of broken human bones.

That story is followed immediately by a creation story told by the skull-faced "Library Ghost of Castle Yarg." Then another, shorter creation story told by a talking bird (Animals talk frequently in this book, sometimes just making asides, like some birds in the title story). Then there's another folk-tale inspired adventure, this time featuring a holy man who investigates a haunted house in a far-off, exotic-looking land. 

The second half of the book consists of a story involving the quest for immortality and its terrible results, an old soldier's story of his adventures with the king of a fairy-like species (which also feels like it was inspired by a folk tale or fairy story), a longer story involving a young woman who does a deal with the devil and turns into an apparent vampire and, finally, a story entitled "Lands Unknown", in which the narrators of the creation stories talk to one another, giving readers a sort of world tour of the strange and fascinating places in this new setting Mignola is building, including ruined kingdoms that prehistoric monsters patrol and a land with giant pack animals that resemble bipedal elephants with no trunks.

The connectivity of the stories is sometimes somewhat subtle, that from the title story and those that follow it seemingly limited to the staff that a religious figure in it bears to the dragon of the creation stories, for example. 

Mignola writes of the origins of the setting of these tales in an afterword, in which he explains that this book came out of his retirement, when he was free to draw or paint whatever he wanted "just for fun," but realized "I love drawing comics so I'll just keep drawing comics."

He notes that he decided to "make up a whole other world" where he would set the "Bowling With Corpses" story, the exact opposite of what he normally tells people to go about world-building ("[S]tart with a character, I always say. The world will grow up around them.")

This book, then, isn't the last we'll see of these Lands Unknown, which, I suppose, will gradually become less and less unknown as Mignola tells more comics stories in the setting. 

The book should particularly delight long-time fans of the creator, as it tells the sort of supernatural-tinged stories and re-told classic stories that so informed his Hellboy and other work, although here without being at all dependent on the structure of that series' ongoing internal saga. 

His art is here more stripped-down and abstracted than ever before, which often works quite well with his animal, old man and supernatural characters, but doesn't fit quite so well with a few of the protagonists, like the bowling boy Yeb or the young woman who becomes a sort of vampire after dealings with the devil in "Una and The Devil." Their eyeballs ever in shadow in their sockets, the characters look even more abstract than the more lovingly detailed skulls of the corpses, ghosts and skeletons that fill the book, which often have detailed teeth and cracks in addition to their big, empty eye sockets. 

After the afterword, the book includes a ten-page sketchbook section with notes from Mignola, in which we see some of the kitchens, castles, ships and bits of nature that Mignola used as settings and backgrounds throughout the preceding stories, offering some insight into how he creates and how he works. 

Bowling With Corpses should obviously appeal to the many readers who are already ardent fans of Mignola's peculiar art style and storytelling impulses and interests, but, because of its standalone nature and new world, it is also a perfect book for those curious about the artist's work too. 

Komi Can't Communicate Vol. 33 (Viz Media) The latest volume of Tomohito Oda's high school comedy is dominated by an almost 70-page passage devoted to Itan High School's Sports Festival, which gathers all of the characters from Komi and Tadano's class with students from other classes, as well as introducing a few new weird characters. There are also some chapters detailing the festival's aftermath, and a story tangentially connected to it, in which Komi gradually befriends an old lady in the neighborhood over the course of years.

Near volume's end, we're introduced to "an ordinary high school girl" named Maruko Tadano (no relation to our Tadano, apparently), who has to participate in a group discussion as part of her application to college. Her group seems like a nightmare one, as Komi is the most normal one in the group; there are also a group of triplets who function as a single entity (and were admitted into the group as one person), and a girl who appears to be an ancient Egyptian, and who only speaks by saying some random Egypt-related word, such as "King Khufu" or "Obelisk." (That's her on the cover; we'll get her origin story by the end of the book and, as always, her cartoonishly bizarre behavior is an overreaction to more mundane circumstances that nevertheless impacted her school life.)

I can't shake the feeling this book has to be winding down sooner or later—perhaps when its characters finally graduate high school and head to college—but I'm quite happy to keep reading it as long as Oda keeps making it.  

True Weird Vol. 1 (Dark Horse) This book's cover sold me on it immediately, featuring as it does a Michael Avon Oeming drawing of what appears to be one a Hopkinsville goblins peering into a window. The book contains the five back-ups from Oeming and writer James Tynion IV's 2023 miniseries Blue Book, which seems to have been a comics re-telling of the Betty and Barney Hill abduction case, widely thought of as the first modern alien abduction story**, as well as seven other stories, the providence of which I am unsure of (The fine print on one of the early pages says the book "collects True Weird stories 1-10 and 12-13", suggesting they appeared somewhere else previously. Perhaps online...?)

These are all short black-and-white comics, ranging from 10-14 pages, by different creative teams. Despite Tynion's name below the logo on the cover, and a "created by" credit on the title page, he only writes the first story, "Coney Island." Oeming writes and draws the second story, "The Green Children" (which is the only story that isn't purely black and white, adding green to the limited palette). Other creators a reader is likely to be familiar with include writer Steve Orlando and artists Klaus Janson, John McCrea and Ming Doyle.

The stories, which sadly do not include a telling of the Hopkinsville incident depicted on the cover, are, as the title suggests, on some aspect of the maybe true-ish variety of weird story. Many of them are quite famous stories likely to already be familiar to anyone with an interest in Forteana: The aforementioned legend of the green children, the Count of St. Germain, spontaneous human combustion, India's Monkey Man and the hoax of the Piltdown Man. Perhaps less well-known stories detail a woman who investigated spiritualists, an insatiable man from revolutionary France, a campfire-like story of an undead killer and an 18th century English woman executed as a witch. 

The approach of the stories differ from entry to entry. Some are fairly straight recountings of relevant facts, reading a bit like illustrated encyclopedia Wikipedia entries with a bit of sequential art inserted for dramatization, like the McCrea-drawn spontaneous human combustion story, which centers on "Cinder Woman" Mary Hardy Reeser (This one reminded me a bit of what little I remember of the DC's old Paradox Press Big Book Of... series, like The Big Book of the Unexplained, The Big Book of Urban Legends, and so on). 

Others take on various narrative structures. The Orlando-written, Levi Hastings-drawn story on Piltdown Man, for example, has a character telling the story directly to the reader, apparently trying to entice them into paying to see the statue for themselves, while Chris Condon and Jacob Phillips' "Come Along...To Clinton Road!" has a carful of New Jersey teenagers sharing a joint and telling one another various local urban legends before seemingly experiencing one for themselves.

While there's nothing particularly revolutionary or revelatory in True Weird, many of the stories have proved of perennial interest, and are thus likely to pique that of many readers, whether they've heard prose versions of these stories (or those like them) before or are here hearing of them for the first time. 

And there is naturally some nice art in the collection. I expected to like seeing that of Janson, Oeming and McCrea, of course, but that of Jack T. Cole, who draws the Josh Trujillo-written story of the Count of St. Germain, was surprisingly great, and made me want to see more from him. Same with Flavia Biondi, who drew the story of Mary Bateman, an accomplished con woman executed as a witch. 

REVIEWED: 

Halfway To Somewhere (Random House Graphic) Cartoonist Jose Pimienta's latest graphic novel stars Ave, a non-binary middle-schooler who has moved with half her family (her mother and little brother) to Kansas, while the other half (her father and older sister) stayed behind in Mexico. 

Ave thinks their parents' separation is only temporary, which might be helping to fuel their reluctance to try to fit in and be happy in their new home (That, and a fear of assimilating, which they fear will sacrifice their Mexican identity). 

As Ave struggles with this new life, Pimienta explores the dynamics of immigrant identity and the tensions that exist when one's "home" is actually two entirely different places, each on a different side of a border. While not addressing the current fears and anxieties that must be permeating immigrant communities—the book was obviously written and drawn before the start of the second Trump administration—it still makes for a rather compelling read. More here. 

How to Draw a Secret (Allida/HarperCollins) Cindy Chang, a children's book author and illustrator making her comics debut here, presents a fictionalized memoir about dramatic events from her own childhood. At 12-years-old, Cindy had long since gotten used to keeping her family's secret—that her parents had separated, and her father had moved back to Taiwan—even if she didn't really understand why it was such a secret. What she didn't know was the secret behind the secret, which she will discover when she, her sisters and her mother all travel to Taiwan for a family funeral. More here. 

Mixed-Up (First Second) EDILW favorite Brittney Williams teams with YA author-turned-comics writer Kami Garcia for the story of fifth-grader Stella, whose troubles with reading get bad enough to start impacting not only her schoolwork, but also her friendships. Stella eventually discovers that she's actually dyslexic and needs some special help to get back on track, which she does before book's end. This good comic for kids is more of a kids' comic than an all-ages one, but even the most jaded adult comics reader should at least enjoy Williams' always bright, expressive artwork. More here. 

*As with the previously mentioned DC Finest: Justice Society of America collection, there's a note in the fine print on the book's table-of-contents reading, "The comics reprinted in this volume were produced at a time when racism played a larger role in society and popular culture both consciously and unconsciously. They are presented here without alteration for historical reference."

**I of course tried reading Blue Book in its collected form, as Oeming illustrating a famous chapter of UFO history seemed irresistible. I made it about one issue/chapter into the trade, but Oeming's drawings of the aliens, which he depicts as being of the standard "grey" alien type, started to disturb my sleep, and I quit reading the book to spare myself further such disturbance. As some of you may know, I have something of a phobia about alien abduction, as I wrote about in one of my failed mini-comics, The Ghost in the Bathroom. I did note that the aliens in Blue Book were nose-less, as grey aliens are usually depicted, rather than having the prominent noses that Betty Hill described.

 

DC Versus Marvel: The Amalgam Age Omnibus Pt. 1: DC Versus Marvel/Amalgam Comics

After resuming inter-company crossovers in 1994 and publishing a handful of 48-page specials, DC and Marvel initiated the big one in 1996: A big "crisis"-style crossover that would imperil both universes and star both publishers' line-ups of characters (or, at least, the most popular ones), with 11 champions from each publisher battling one another to decide which universe would live and which would die. 

In other words, it would essentially be an official version of a sort of game comic fans were forever playing, who would win in a fight between so-and-so and whoever.

The comic would play out across four over-sized issues in a special mini-series, plus a suite of 12 special tie-in one-shots. To encourage fan interest and engagement, the publishers would even have five of those 11 fights decided by popular vote.

I can't tell you how DC Versus Marvel (every other issue of which was technically entitled Marvel Versus DC) went over for the comics shops at the time, as I was only about 17 at the time, but it definitely worked on me. A teenager still new-ish to comics, I bought the main series and a handful of the tie-ins, despite my then complete ignorance of and disinterest in Marvel Comics. (At the time, my experience with Marvel characters was basically limited to what I had seen on the X-Men cartoon and childhood memories of a pair of Spider-Man cartoons.)

In assembling the creators, the co-editors—Marvel's Mark Gruenwald and DC's Mike Carlin—chose writers and artists from each publisher's talent pool, so there would be a pair of writers switching off on each issue, and two different art teams, with these changing every eight pages.

The DC writer was Green Lantern's Ron Marz (although he had written for both publishers, including runs on Thor and Silver Surfer for Marvel), and the Marvel writer was long-time Incredible Hulk writer Peter David (who was, at the time, also writing DC's Aquaman). 

Both seem to have done a fine job, although there doesn't seem to have been too much room in the overall plot's construction to matter overmuch who was actually writing the comics; the broad mechanics of the story seem to have already been determined by the editors, and then there was, of course, the fact that fans would be determining the winners of many of the battles, leaving the writers to only come up with the hows for those bouts with fan-picked endings.

Which isn't to suggest that the writers' jobs must have particularly easy on this obviously big assignment, of course. In addition to moving the story from plot beat to plot beat, Marz and David also had to write all the characters so that they felt and sounded like themselves and stick to the continuity of the time while simultaneously being as welcoming to new readers as possible. 

In this, both Marz and David seem to have succeeded...although I suspect the book might have been better served by having a single writer rather than two, if only for a slightly more consistent tone. (Re-reading it today, David's tendency to insert humor in his stories is definitely more noticeable in his sections of the series, with the various characters all cracking wise. It is perhaps most notable in his scenes featuring a particularly chatty, quippy Aquaman, who sounds more like Spider-Man than his usually grumpy himself (Odd, really, since, again, David was writing Aquaman at the time).

As for the artists, according to Marz's introduction in the DC Versus Marvel Comics: The Amalgam Omnibus, which of course collects the series, the first choices were Jose Luis Garcia-Lopez and John Romita Jr., "both understandably seen as emblematic of each publishing house." 

That...that would have been awesome. 

That pair of artists do indeed represent the characters of each universe well in their particular styles, but, beyond that, both were (and are) phenomenal artists. Their styles are so different that I don't think they could have overcome the main problem with the two-art team approach to the book, though, which was the distracting visual inconsistency...one that was only emphasized by how often the pencil artists handed the baton back and forth. But still, Garcia-Lopez and JRJR on DC Versus Marvel would certainly have been a book to see...!

For whatever reason though, Marz said both had declined. (Garcia-Lopez would contribute pencil art to the Marz-written Amalgam Comics tie-in, Dr. Strangefate, which gives us an idea of how his DC Versus Marvel pages might have looked, at least). Thus the publisher sought out different options (No mention of whether or not George Perez, who was, at the time, the ideal artist for the assignment, was considered or approached). 

Ultimately, it was decided that Dan Jurgens would be the DC artist and Italy's Claudio Castellini would be Marvel's artist.

Jurgens was, of course, a solid choice. His work on the Superman titles and its various "event" stories like "Panic in the Sky!" and the "Death of Superman" cycle (not to mention his early '90s Justice League America run and 1994's Zero Hour) meant that he had drawn pretty much the entirety of the DC Universe at that point...many of the characters repeatedly. I don't know that I would say that the DC Comics of 1996 had much in the way of a house style, but a glance at Jurgens' art sure looked like DC Comics, especially at that time. 

Castellini was more of an unknown quantity, his only American work at the time seemingly being a 1996 one-shot with Marz, Silver Surfer: Dangerous Artifacts, as well as some Marvel covers. 

One thing is certain though: Their styles did not match up well at all, and were, in fact, so different it was actually quite jarring to see every time they would trade off on art duties, which was, of course, quite often. 

Jurgens, inked by Josef Rubinstein, created solid figures with more realistic shapes and builds, usually grounding them in recognizable backgrounds (Having so recently re-read parts of Zero Hour in the new DC Finest collection, in which Jurgens was inked by Jerry Ordway, I think I prefer his work under Ordway's pens far more than I did here). 

Castellini's art looked much more of the moment than Jurgens', which is to say it was more '90s...a fact that many readers might now consider a drawback more than a virtue. It was definitely more dynamic, though, his characters always seeming poised and ready to move, if not already engaged in some act of running, punching, jumping or flying.  

They were also all incredibly muscular and statuesque in build, which could actually often make them look "off", especially when compared to Jurgens' versions of the same characters (Castellini's Superboy and Spider-Man, for example, were towering bodybuilders, rather than, say, a typical if well-muscled teenager and a slimmer, acrobatic type).

Castellini also had a tendency for cheesecake, his female heroes all having the sort of '90s default "babe" proportions of a Jim Balent figure, sometimes paired with huge size and musculature, as in his Wonder Woman. 

Where it is most noticeable, however, is in his drawings of Lois Lane. While Jurgens would draw her in business attire, Castellini would give her short, skin-tight dresses that look more appropriate for the club than the office. In one odd sequence (Page 18 and 19 of issues #2), the blazer she's wearing over her dress even disappears between panels. 

Castellini, who also had a much thinner line than Jurgens and tended to eschew backgrounds altogether in many instances, was inked throughout by Paul Neary. Castellini is obviously a good artist, and I thought he handled both publisher's diverse array of characters well enough; in 1996, teenage Caleb would have even told you he was the better of the two artists. 

But the vast gulf in styles made the book something of a mess visually, and hard to ever really lose oneself in. The obvious solution would have been to find a single artist equally adept at the look and feel of both superhero publishers'' lines (which is why I thought of George Perez); I think either Jurgens or Castellini would have been a fine choice to pencil the series, but both of them? Not so much. 

The first issue, which was written by Marz, begins with a Jurgens-drawn splash page of Spider-Man (or a Spider-Man, I guess), swinging through a rainy big city. He's not in his classic suit, but one he was apparently wearing in 1996. Marz writes in his introduction that there was some consideration given to whether or not the creators should use the original, classic (and thus more recognizable) versions of the characters, or keep their portrayals consistent with the comics being published at the time. They had decided on the latter, as the whole idea was to interest new and lapsed readers into picking up other comics from DC's and Marvel's respective publishing lines.

For the DC characters featured, I don't think that matters all that much; they were in 1996, for the most part, as they always were and would mostly always be, with a few minor tweaks. Superman's hair was still being worn long, for example, and Batman was in an all-black costume akin to that of his movie. But Captain Marvel, for example, was wearing what he had been wearing since the 1940s. In all, I think only the bearded, hook-handed Aquaman and the presence of then-new Green Lantern Kyle Rayner really stand out as particularly 1996 versions of themselves.

With the Marvel characters, though, Thor seems to be costumed particularly egregiously, The Hulk is in one of his "smart Hulk" phases, and then there's Spider-Man. I didn't really pick up on this back in 1996, but it felt far more glaring re-reading the series today: I had no idea what was going on with Spider-Man, and whether this was a Spider-Man or the "real" Spider-Man. 

Not only is the costume a different one than that of the original cartoon or Spider-Man and His Amazing Friends that I knew Spidey from, but, when he introduces himself to Clark Kent and Lois Lane, he does so thusly: "It's really Ben Reilly, but my professional name is Peter Parker, so I guess that's what you can call me." 

And in the little character profiles in the back of the first issue, Spider-Man's lists his "Real Name" as "Peter Parker" and, under "Other Current Aliases" it says "Ben Reilly." (Under "Hair" it says "Brown (dyed blonde)", but colorist Gregory Wright has it as brown throughout the book.) 

So I honestly had no idea if this was really the real Peter Parker, or if it was Ben Reilly...and if the Spidey used throughout the series was a clone or not. Turning to Bluesky for help after just rereading the series in the new omnibus collection, I got an answer, I think: This was Ben Reilly, the clone of Peter Parker, although at the time he thought he was the real person, and the real Peter Parker was the clone...? Is that right...? (I just looked up "Clone Saga" on Wikipedia but had to stop reading the synopsis in order to preserve my sanity.)

Anyway, whoever he really is, Spider-Man soon meets The Joker on a rooftop, and the Clown Prince of Crime recognizes him as Spider-Man, presumably because they had recently-ish met in the pages of 1995's Spider-Man and Batman. (Which, um, shouldn't be possible, as that story would have been non-canonical, if the very premise of this series, which is that the DC and Marvel Universe are two separate and inviolable universes within the multiverse, is to be believed.) 

From there, much of this first issue is devoted to page-long sequences that introduce the various characters shown on the cover and then have them disappear in bursts of light. Eventually, there's the beginnings of various crossovers, like Bullseye holding Robin hostage in the Batcave and J. Jonah Jameson and Ben Reilly/Peter Parker showing up as new employees at The Daily Planet. (Which, while fun, doesn't make a lick of sense; Spider-Man, and apparently Jameson, find themselves transported to an entirely different universe than their own, and the first thing they do is...apply for new jobs in their field...?)

There are also a rather rapid-succession of mini, one-panel team-ups and battles—Daredevil vs. The Riddler, Batman vs. Venom, The Punisher vs. Deathstroke, Etrigan vs. Ghost Rider—that won't be expanded upon in any future scenes (In a relative rarity, a panel showing Bane punching Captain America's shield will get explored in a future issue, though). 

The gist of it all is that characters from the two universes are bleeding into one another's realities, an event that a strange old man in an alley with a glowing cardboard box seems to be trying to prevent. So too are The Spectre and The Living Tribunal. 

In the second issue, written by David, we see more of the characters interacting with one another—Wolverine fighting Killer Croc and then joining Gambit to steal the Batmobile, for example, or Marvel and DC's villains both named The Scarecrow teaming up to kidnap Lois—before the premise of the series gets explicitly spelled out for the characters and the readers. 

Each universe is represented by a god-like cosmic entity, one of two "brothers" that look a little like Jack Kirby-inspired space knights, one red and one blue. The pair have apparently just become aware of one another and are coming into conflict. They will combat one another by choosing 11 heroes from each universe to participate in fights for the sake of their home universe. When one opponent is defeated, which can be as simple as "pinning" them immobile for a few seconds, the match ends. Whichever brother/universe/publisher loses, their universe will cease to exist entirely.

The chosen combatants are, for the most part, the very ones readers and fans have long debated and argued about, regarding who is stronger, smarter, faster, a better fighter, etc. Again, it's basically who would win in a fight between so-and-so and whoever. 

And so speedsters The Flash and Quicksilver will face off, as will power-houses Superman and The Hulk, and water-going Kings of Atlantis Aquaman and Namor. Some of the matchups are fairly odd, though, and seem to exist mainly to give a popular character from one publisher a reason to be featured. 

Wolverine, for example, is paired with Lobo, despite the fact that the Dc character vastly overpowers him, and is more in Superman's weight-class than that of the mutant scrapper's. ("Who is meaner?" the back cover of the first issue asked of this particular pairing, their attitudes apparently accounting for their being chosen to fight one another...?)

Or, for another, in order to get Robin involved, the writers needed the Marvel equivalent of a premiere sidekick...of which the then sidekick-less Marvel had none, and so they went with teenage X-Man Jubilee, who, during the decade, was sometimes portrayed as something of Wolverine's sidekick.

And then there's Wonder Woman. While I would have chosen Marvel's Hercules or Thor (who is actually pitted against DC's Captain Marvel) to pit against her, or maybe Wonder Man, Ms. Marvel, Rogue or She-Hulk, Marvel apparently went with its most prominent original female character at the time, resulting in the X-Men's Storm facing her.

The fights, which then occupy most of the second and third issues, are all short, lasting between two and four pages and, I should note, fairly predictable. 

In the six whose outcomes were chosen by the writers, there's usually a clear winner on paper (Like, The Flash being much faster than Quicksilver, for example, naturally leads to his victory), or an easily plausible way for the ultimate victor to win (Thor's storm powers disrupting Captain Marvel's magic lightning, for example). 

The one that felt wrong or off to me in 1996 (and again in 2025) was Aquaman's defeat of Namor; I was obviously a DC partisan, and liked Aquaman more than Namor, but with the latter's superhuman strength and ability to fly, it seemed like he would easily best Aquaman. Not so, as Aquaman writer Peter David had the hero use his ability to communicate with sea life to summon a whale to jump on Namor and pin him. But it was just a killer whale; surely Namor could have lifted that off himself easily, right? 

As for the five fights chosen by fans, well, in most cases the more popular character was also either the more powerful and/or more experienced hero, and so who would really question Superman out-punching The Hulk, for example, or a Spider-Man besting the new Superboy, who had only been around about three years at the time?

The two that felt most forced to me were, of course, the Lobo/Wolverine and Storm/Wonder Woman fight. In both instances, the X-Men characters won. 

As I said, Wolverine, as unkillable as his healing factor might make him, shouldn't have had the strength to go too many rounds against a guy who could uppercut him into orbit. Marz, who had to write the scene, seems to have been aware of the fact it would be hard to write a Wolverine victory in such a way that would please fans, and so the characters' extremely brief fight happens off-panel, the pair tumbling behind a bar for two panels before a hand reaches up, grabs a cigar and takes a puff. 

In the published book, it was, of course, Wolverine who did so (Marvel heroes were still allowed to smoke in the '90s). The omnibus does contain alternate art that would have been used had the fights gone the other way, though, and so there is, later in the collection, a page in which it's Lobo who takes up the cigar. (There are similar pages showing alternate results for each of the voted-upon fights.)

And as for Storm, as powerful as her weather powers are, they just don't seem a match for Wonder Woman's various goddess-given strengths. In their fight, Wondy is essentially just zapped with lightning and crumbles. (In the alternate scene revealed in the unused art, where Wondy wins, she does so by blocking the lightning bolts with her bracelets and then punching Storm out.) 

In his intro, Marz writes that the Wonder Woman/Storm fight was the only one of the voted-upon matchups that they weren't really sure of how it would play out and, as it turns out, it actually ended up being the closest vote. (He also says in passing that fans should get over the Lobo/Wolverine fight ending as it did.)

Anyway, the results of the fights are 6-5 in Marvel's favor, and so that would seem to spell doom for the DC Universe...were it not for the actions of that old man in the alley, an apparent guardian who keeps the worlds separate from one another, and the newly deputized Axel Asher, who gets a snazzy red and blue costume and the superhero codename Access (along with some various super-powers, the most notable of which would ultimately be the ability to travel between the DC and Marvel Universes).

Because of Access' efforts—not to mention those of the old man, The Spectre and The Living Tribunal—there's a very unexpected, last-ditch effort to save both universes. This is, of course, by creating a third, shared universe that would combine the DC and Marvel universes into a single new universe. 

The result? Amalgam Comics, a new line of comics presented as if they had always existed (and DC and Marvel Comics never had), featuring amalgams of various DC and Marvel characters. 

So, for example, there was no longer a Captain America or Superman, but there was a Super Soldier, who was a combination of them both. Just as Logan never became Wolverine, but instead the dark, caped guardian of Gotham City, whose adventures played out in the pages of Legends of the Dark Claw. 

There were a dozen of these special one-shots produced, all of which featured a "#1" on the cover, but all of which also presumed an imaginary past and future, editorial boxes referring to events in comics never published, next issue boxes hinting at futures that would never be and even letter colums in the back of each book.

It was, as I have said, weird, wild and, at least for me in those days, completely unexpected, maybe the last thing one would expect DC and Marvel to do if they had 12 22-page tie-in comics to produce as part of the DC Versus Marvel event series. 

I think, for me at least, this idea really seemed to redeem the whole event, which was otherwise pretty predictable and not all that fun or engaging, with many of the attendant crossovers and interactions between the different groups of characters limited to either single panel suggestions of stories, or short, often unsatisfyingly executed fight scenes. 

(The main exception? The unexpected but fun star-crossed romance between Robin and Jubilee that played out throughout DC Versus Marvel; not only were they forced to fight when they would rather be making out, they came from two entirely different universes...! I always regretted we didn't get a full Romeo and Juliet-inspired Batman/X-Men crossover exploring their doomed attraction, although Marz would prominently feature the pair in DC Versus Marvel's first sequel series, DC/Marvel: All Access.) 

From what Marz and co-editor Mike Carlin wrote in their introductions to the omnibus, it seems to be editor Mark Guenwald who came up with the Amalgam concept, including some of the specific amalgams.

Now, in 1996, back before I had an actual job and thus money to waste on things as frivolous as comics, I had only read a pair of these: Karl Kesel, Mike Wieringo and Gary Martin's Spider-Boy (featuring an amalgamation of the '90sSuperboy and Spider-Man) and Larry Hama, Jim Balent and Ray McCarthy's previously Legends of the Dark Claw. 

(Remember what I said about never having read an entire crossover event series in its entirety before, in discussing the opportunity that the DC Finest: Zero Hour collections offered?  Well, I guess this omnibus does present the same opportunity, on a much more manageable scale, as there are far fewer Amalgam issues than Zero Hour tie-ins).

Something of a feat of editing and coordination, the new, temporary Amalgam Universe necessitated a degree of world-building to make for a cohesive whole and keep the writers from re-using different characters in different amalgams (I noticed a few mistakes, here, though. There are two Huntresses, one named Barbara who appears in Bruce Wayne: Agent of SHIELD and another named Carol Danvers who appears in Dark Claw. Catwoman seems to have been a component in both Bruce Wayne's Selina Luthor and Assassins' Catsai. And while Jimmy Olsen is the editor of the Daily Planet in the pages of Super Soldier, there's a red-headed, freckled reporter named Jimmy Urich in Assassins).

While some simply mashed two characters together (Or, in the case of the title characters of Speed Demon and Dr. Strangefate, three characters), some had bigger, weirder takes. 

Chief among these is Karl and Barbara Kesel, Roger Cruz and Jon Holdredge's X-Patrol, which combined the X-Men and the Doom Patrol (which, at their start, anyway, were both about men in wheelchairs assembling teams of outsiders to serve as heroes), and was full of weird composites that actually kinda sorta worked, like Beastling (Beast + Changeling), Dial H for H.U.S.K. ("Dial H for Hero" + Husk) and Shatterstarfire (Shatterstar + Starfire). With Cruz drawing them in a high-90's X-Men style, it was delightfully weird. 

And then there was John Ostrander, Gary Frank and Cam Smith's Bullets and Bracelets, starring Amazon Princess Diana, in her short-lived biker-shorts and bra look, and The Punisher Trevor Castle fighting The Hand and the forces of Thanoseid's Apokolips to save their kidnapped son. 

I actually rather enjoyed most of this suite of comics, with Mark Waid and Dave Gibbons' Super Soldier (Confession: I didn't actually know who either of those men were in 1996, or I probably wouldn't have skipped it) and Spider-Boy being particular standouts. 

There were two I was a little iffy on during this reading via the omnibus, though.

The first of these was Chuck Dixon, Cary Nord and Mark Pennington's Bruce Wayne: Agent of S.H.I.E.L.D., which had a fantastic logo, but didn't really sell me on the idea of a Batman-ized S.H.I.E.L.D. or do too much with the concept beyond the requisite action scenes. 

And then there was John Byrne and Terry Austin' Amazon, which starred a new version of Wonder Woman, who is literally, unimaginatively named "Wonder Woman" (which seems counter to the whole Amalgam narrative, doesn't it?). This is basically just Storm in a Wonder Woman-ized version of her own costume. Here, she's a young girl who was lost at sea and rescued by Hippolyta, who raised her alongside her own daughter, who would of course end up growing up to be the Diana from Bullets and Bracelets. The story is an extremely wordy affair that weaves Storm-as-Wonder Woman's origins into a conflict with the god Poseidon. It was honestly something of a chore to get through.

With the 11 fights between DC and Marvel characters all fought and the Amalgam books published, there's relatively little for David and the artists to do in the fourth and final issue, aside from the process of putting the toys back in their respective boxes and returning things to the status quo (Unlike DC and Marvel's individual crossover event series, there's little pretense here that this story will change either universe forever; indeed, the only real lasting change seems to have been the creation of Access, who could potentially provide an ongoing rationale for future DC/Marvel crossovers...although, as we've seen from the crossovers collected in the first DC Versus Marvel Omnibus, those comics mostly ignored him...and the two separate universes premise in general). 

David and the artists do use the space in this issue to offer up scenes of the heroes who were forced to combat one another now cooperating and taking on various villains, with Elektra and Catwoman facing The Abomination, Flash and Quicksilver getting stuck in Venom's goo, and a whole mess of heroes tackling Thanos and Darkseid. 

Ultimately the universes are separated again through the efforts of Access and his new powers, with the help of Batman and Captain America, who seem to have impressed the universe brothers with their personal resumes enough that the cosmic giants call off their conflict and shake hands. 

And then everything returns to normal. 

The ending seems a bit of a let-down after the fights and the Amalgam Universe, and, rather curiously, the conflict is ultimately resolved with fairly minimal participation from the DC and Marvel heroes (Batman and Cap excluded, of course). 

While many of the heroes do make mention of the fact that they should be working together to solve the problem instead of fighting like pawns throughout the series, they never actually do all band together to save their universes. Instead, they basically spend the entirety of the crossover engaged in small scale fights, unknowingly leaving the issue of the warring universes to Access and the old man to fix for them.

Access, a character jointly owned by DC and Marvel, was, of course, the biggest new thing to ultimately come out of this story, and he would reappear almost immediately in the same-year sequel, DC/Marvel: All Access, a series that was smaller in scale, but did manage to explore more interesting character interactions than DC Versus Marvel, and bring with it another round of Amalgam comics. 

But that will be the subject of the next post.

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

A few other things of note...

•I sort of mentioned this in passing when I included the DC Versus Marvel: The Amalgam Age Omnibus in January's "A Month of Wednesdays" column, but it was quite striking just how white, male and straight both the DC and Marvel Universes come across in this series today. Certainly compared to what the shared settings look like right now, or would have looked like ten years ago, or even 20 years ago.

The participating heroes are overwhelming male. Of the 22 heroes participating in the 11 matches, there are five women: Wonder Woman, Catwoman, Elektra, Storm and Jubilee. And, as discussed above, those last two X-Men seem to be there mainly because there weren't any better choices for Marvel characters to throw at their chosen opponents, Wonder Woman and Robin.

Few other female characters even appear throughout the pages of the series, though. Supergirl and She-Hulk both share a single panel, Jean Grey and Psylocke both appear once apiece in panels featuring other X-Men, a blonde X-Men member I didn't recognize appears alongside Jubilee in one panel (this was Husk, according to Bluesky), and that's about it for female heroes in the main DC Versus Marvel series. 

Superhero girlfriends Betty Ross and Tanya Moon briefly appear alongside The Hulk and Superboy, but the female character who is most prominent throughout the entire series was Lois Lane. 

She gets the most panel time and the most dialogue of any other woman, by far. Her portrayal isn't necessarily all that flattering, though, as she needs to be rescued from the Scarecrows by Ben Reilly/Peter Parker.

And Ben/Peter will later, erroneously think to himself, "Jeez...I think she wants me!" He'll eventually even ask her out and get shot down, when she flashes him her ring and tells him she's engaged, at which point a giant Clark Kent appears to loom over Ben/Peter. 

As for characters of color, there are hardly any, and they are mostly limited to the X-Men Storm and Jubilee again. They are the only heroes of color among the 22 in the multiversal matchups, and about the only ones who so much as cameo.

Steel appears briefly, seen fighting The Absorbing Man in two panels and then flying alongside Iron Man in a massive, character-filled two-page spread. That same spread also features a tiny image of then-Green Arrow Connor Hawke, who is of mixed race (including Black and Korean ancestry), although he is there colored pretty white.

And that's it, really. No Black Panther (which seems crazy in 2025), no Luke Cage, no Blade, no Falcon and no War Machine. Not even Bishop, in this X-Men heavy tale. On the DC side, we don't see any of their more prominent black characters either, like Cyborg, Black Lightning, Vixen, Bumblebee or John Stewart. 

Finally, as for gay characters, I don't think either publisher had terribly deep benches in the mid-90s, with Marvel's Northstar and DC's Obsidian being the most high-profile gay characters at the time. Neither even cameos in the story, though. (Wait, was Obsidian officially out in 1996? Now that I think of it, he may not have been...)

•Rereading it in 2025, it was rather weird to see who wasn't in this crossover, which really demonstrates how much the Ultimates-inspired Marvel Cinematic Universe did in raising the profile of the Avengers characters in the years since the late '90s.

Completely absent from the main series are the previously mentioned Black Panther, as well as Scarlet Witch and The Wasp. Black Widow, The Vision and Ant-Man only appear in one panel apiece. Hawkeye and Iron Man appear in two panels each. 

Dr. Strange—who, like Black Panther and Iron Man is now a staple of Marvel's line-wide event stories—is also mostly absent, only appearing in a single panel. Also MIA, somewhat surprisingly, were Mister Fantastic Reed Richards (no battle against Plastic Man...or even The Elongated Man?) and Invisible Woman Sue Richards. (The other half of the Fantastic Four, The Human Torch and The Thing, only appear in a single panel, facing off against Firestorm and Martian Manhunter.)

And then there's Carol Danvers, who would of course be promoted to Captain Marvel in the 21st Century. She doesn't so much as cameo either. 

Granted, I have no idea which Marvel characters were retired, dead, in comas or in alternate universes at the time, so maybe all of the above had very good excuses for not being featured or even making cameos. But after having read so many line-wide Marvel event series in the last 25 years or so, it was striking how greatly the players differed in the '90s. 

•So if DC Versus Marvel were published today, who do you think the main "champions" from each universe forced to fight one another would be, aside from the absolute certainty of a Harley Quinn vs. Deadpool matchup? 

I thought about this off and on while reading, as it is certainly the case that Lobo and Superboy would not be participating were the event held in 2025...or at any point in the 21st century, probably. 

On Marvel's side, it's fairly certain Storm wouldn't be involved; she mainly seems to have been chosen to give Wonder Woman a similarly high-profile woman to fight and, in 1996, that's probably the closest Marvel had to a Wonder Woman of its own (Today, I'm sure they would pit Wondy against Captain Marvel Carol Danvers). 

And, as I said, I think Jubilee was mainly involved because Robin needed an opponent.

Otherwise, of the five main fights that readers could vote on, I think the other participants are mostly as popular today, and/or seen as the preeminent in their respective universes, as they were in the late '90s: Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman, Captain America, Spider-Man, The Hulk and Wolverine. (Maybe they would have replaced Hulk with Thor in a fight against Superman, were one held today, though? I'm not sure what sales or fan esteem for Thor and Hulk are at the moment, of course, but I've obviously seen much more of Thor in various Marvel events and team books than I have The Hulk in the 21st Century).

As for the six undercards, I think we'd definitely see some of those same matches repeating, like speedsters Flash vs. Quicksilver and Atlantean monarchs Aquaman vs. Namor. Others I'm not so sure about. 

If we saw a Robin today, it wouldn't be Tim Drake, but Damian Wayne, and I would therefore be surprised if Jubilee showed up at all. I think DC and Marvel would now be more likely to pit a Green Lantern against a Nova (instead of the Silver Surfer). And with both universes filled with more female characters, I don't know that a Catwoman vs. Elektra fight would even be included. 

With Green Arrow Oliver Queen now alive and well and Hawkeye more prominent, I imagine we would get an archer showdown, just as I assume Black Canary and Black Widow would be pitted against one another.

At any rate, I have to assume were the crossover published today, Marvel's participants would be tilted more toward the Avengers than the X-Men than this one was. 

Next: 1997's DC/Marvel: All-Access/Amalgam Comics