On Star Wars Legends Epic Collection: The New Republic Vol. 2

The first volume of Marvel's "New Republic"-branded epic collection series, featuring Dark Horse-published comics the '90s and '00s that were set after the events of Return of the Jedi, had a fair degree of variety in the types of comics it included, the characters featured and even the genre of stories.

It contained miniseries and one-shots along with plenty of shorter stories taken from the pages of Star Wars Tales, and these featured not only the heroes from the films, but also a couple of heroines from the prose novels (Mara Jade and Guru) and more minor characters from throughout the galaxy (including Boba Fett, Jabba the Hutt, various criminals, former stormtroopers and some Ewoks, Jawas and even an ex-Gamorreon guard). 

This second collection, by contrast, is much more narrowly focused on a particular set of characters from a particular thread within the greater Star Wars saga, the result, I suppose, from there being so many comics focused on a particular franchise from within the franchise.

That is the adventures of the Rebel Alliance-turned-New Republic's Rogue Squadron, an elite group of pilots first mentioned in The Empire Strikes Back and then featured in the Star Wars: X-Wing series of prose novels that writer Michael Stackpole began in 1996. There was also a Star Wars: Rogue Squadron video game series that started in 1998.

The entirety of this collection consists of Rogue Squadron stories, all published between 1995 and 2005. The book is dominated by the first 16 issues of the 35-issue, 1995-1998 Star Wars: X-Wing Rogue Squadron ongoing series, preceded by a 2005 miniseries (Star Wars: X-Wing Rogue Leader), a 1995 one-shot (Star Wars: X-Wing Rogue Squadron Special) and some shorts from the pages of Star Wars Tales. 

Also unlike the first volume in the New Republic series of epic collections, this volume heavily represents the work of a single creator, as Stackpole plots all 16 issues of the ongoing that appear within. 

Were one not terribly interested in the adventures of Wedge Antilles, a minor character from the films who assumes leadership of Rogue Squadron after Luke Skywalker moves on to concentrate on Jedi stuff,  and his daring pilots dog-fighting TIEs in the air and battling various plots by Imperial holdouts on the ground, there's probably little to recommend this particular volume of Star Wars comics. 

That said, it is certainly important both chronologically, for anyone wanting to follow the old, now obsolete "Expanded Universe" version of the Star Wars saga (i.e. that relegated to "Legends" status), and as an indication of where the franchise's focus was at a particular point in time. (I should perhaps note that the heroes of the films are almost entirely absent in this particular volume, with only Luke Skywalker appearing at all, and even him only in the first three stories collected herein). 

As we did with the first volume, let's take them each in turn...

•"A Day in the Life" This 12-page short by writer Brett Matthews and artist Adrian Sibar comes from a 2002 issue of Star Wars Tales. Specifically, it comes from an issue with a cover by EDILW favorite John McCrea. 

The opening is pretty inspired, given how in the movies the many battles in the vacuum space are always filled by exciting sound effects. "They say there's no sound in space," narrator Wedge Antilles says, "They're wrong. Or I'm just crazy, because I swear I can hear them." These words appear over an image of Wedge's X-wing blasting a TIE fighter from behind and then flying through the explosion, accompanied by a big THRA BWOOM! sound effect.

As the title indicates, the story follows Wedge through what is apparently an average day for him, this one being just days after Jedi's Battle of Endor. He and two other pilots engage TIEs and blow up a still-functioning Star Destroyer that has crash-landed on the surface, and one of their number die in the process. Wedge tries and fails to comfort the surviving pilot, then retires to his office to type out a condolence letter and, finally, to look for something to eat in what I assume is the Rebellion's cafeteria. There he finds Luke, and they talk over a pair of giant sandwiches.

Aside from the clever opening line, I also liked the bit where Wedge references the wild party that ensued after the destruction of the second Death Star, which sounds a bit like the one Archie Goodwin described in a Marvel-published comic set the night after the destruction of the first (I wrote a bit about that moment in my review of Star Wars: Wild Tales Vol.1, in this recent-ish column).

"Three days since the Battle of Endor," Wedge narrates. "Two of which I actually remember. Note to self--never accept a drink from an Ewok wearing a stormtrooper helmet."

Noted. 

Sibar's art is noteworthy for how unusual its style is, particularly compared to much of that which will fill the rest of this volume.

•Star Wars: X-Wing Rogue Leader This 2005 three-part miniseries from writer W. Haden Blackman and artist Tomas Giorello seems to be something of a retroactive origin for Rogue Squadron, or at least to its iteration under Wedge Antilles. 

Giving each character an information box including their name, home world, ship of choice and a brief military biography, Blackman and Giorello introduce us to Luke, Wedge, Ten Numb (an alien of the same species as Nien Nunb, who was Lando Calrissian's co-pilot in the Millennium Falcon in Jedi) and a couple more white guys I often had trouble keeping straight throughout the rest of the collection. Then the creators give them a mission: They are to assess the state of the Corellian system in the wake of The Battle of Endor.

(This story is also apparently set just after that battle, by the way, as the various characters were all engaged in various activities on the forest moon when we are introduced to him. One of those white guys, Tycho Celchu, expresses his belief that "the war is basically over," but Luke corrects him, asking him if he would stop fighting just because he or Wedge or "Senator Organa" were killed, and noting that there were millions of Imperials still scattered across the galaxy. I guess that will explain why for the next 450 pages or so, Rogue Squadron will keep on fighting the Empire, as if the events of Jedi hadn't really changed anything in the galaxy.)

As for the state of things in the Corellian system, they are pretty grim. Shortly after our heroes land on Corellia, Imperials arrive with a bunch of scout troopers on speeder bikes and a pair of the two-legged walkers and start attacking the city indiscriminately, bent on instilling terror of Empire.

They're led by a scout trooper in cool-looking all-black armor. The bad guys capture Ten and end up torturing him to death before the good guys can rescue him, although Rogue Squadron do manage to shut down what the guy in the black armor calls "a new counter-rebellion."

"Defeating me won't stop the Empire," this villain says, as Wedge ties him up after beating him in hand-to-hand combat. "I'm just one man. The Empire is legion."

"I know," Wedge replies. "But I also know the difference that one man can make."

In the epilogue, Luke and Wedge have a heart-to-heart conversation about the future, with Luke saying, "The New Republic -- the galaxy --still needs Rogue Squadron. But it also needs a new Jedi Order..." 

Essentially, he passes the torch here to Wedge, and the penultimate page features a big panel filled with would-be pilots being presented to Wedge as potential recruits; a few will be recognizable as characters that have appeared in previous Rogue Squadron comics, although in this collection (which is organized by where the stories appear on the Star Wars timeline, not when they were published) they haven't yet appeared in the book. 

I thought it noteworthy that when the team first arrives on Corellia, Wedge, a native Corellian like Han Solo, wears a black vest over a long-sleeve white shirt and a pair of pants with a red stripe down them. I had thought that was a unique look of Han's, but I guess that's just the style there...?

•Star Wars: X-Wing Rogue Squadron Special I was curious about the providence of this particular story, because it seems to be presented here as if it were a standalone one-shot, but the story is incredibly short: Just 16 pages. Looking it up on comics.org, it appears that it was a giveaway included with Hero Illustrated magazine, which I guess explains its low page-count. 

It's written by Ryder Windham, penciled by John Nadeau and inked by Monty Sheldon. 

Its fairly melodramatic opening has a Grand Moff declaring to a planet's population that they are now under the control of The Empire, while an Imperial Walker looms large in the background.

"Oh, Father!" a child cries, "Can't anyone help us?"

And then a two-page spread reveals a half-dozen X-wings dive-bombing the walker, the ships surrounded by speedlines. 

Our heroes' victory isn't assured, however, as one of them sees a landing strip lined with a hundred TIE fighters. Wedge manages to shoot down a conveniently placed tower, which topples onto the TIEs and destroys them all before any of them can left off to engage our heroes' X-wings.

The people of the planet are pissed off, however, as that tower was apparently some sort of important monument. As they argue with Wedge, another rebel pilot wearing a helmet and visor tells Wedge to take a walk, and this pilot then spends a few pages telling the crowd what a great pilot and hero Wedge actually is, essentially vouching for him. 

When a kid asks this pilot who he is, he finally takes off his helmet and responds, "Luke Skywalker, at your service!"

(Um, spoiler alert for 30-year-old story, I guess.)

And that's pretty much that. 

It's a nice enough introduction to the Wedge character, focusing on his small but apparently important role in the films' adventures, and the basic Rogue Squadron premise. I quite liked the art on this one; it felt very "classic" looking in its style. 

Nadeau will return later to draw a few more stories in this volume.

•"Lucky" A 14-page short from a 2005 Tales by writer Rob Williams, penciller Michel Lacombe and a pair of inkers, this is another portrait of Wedge story, this one narrated by the character himself, featuring a generous flashback to his youth on a Corellian moon and the tragedy that drove him to join the Rebellion. A tragedy that, apparently, still haunts him.

It's not a fun story. After reflecting on the major battles he's survived (those of the films) and then rather miraculously surviving a new bit of danger, Wedge narrates about whether he's managed to live through all of his many adventures due to skill or luck.

Then we see his pre-Rebellion life, including a girlfriend whose father was secretly a rebel, a job as a pilot and a devastating Imperial attack.

These events don't come up in the next 350 pages, of course, but then, the comics that follow it are all from a decade or so previous, so why would they? Still, this seems to be giving us something of a belated origin to the character. 

I wasn't necessarily crazy about Lacombe's art style, but I did really like the long-necked, weasel-ish looking guy that worked for Wedge's girlfriend's dad.

•Star Wars: X-Wing Rogue Squadron #1-#16 These issues account for the rest of this particular collection, and they are a little less than half of the ongoing series. 

The fact that there was an ongoing at all strikes me as a bit unusual, as when I think of Dark Horse comics, especially those of the '90s, I think of their publishing model as more of a series-of-miniseries, rather than ongoings (Although I know they've published other Star Wars ongoings as well, having read a few in trade paperback). 

It's not hard to imagine the series being published that way instead, though, given that it is written in quite distinct, trade paperback-ready story arcs, and that the art teams and scripters change with each new arc, the one constant in all of these issues being the aforementioned Michael Stackpole, who would start telling these characters' adventures in his prose novel series just after the first arc of the comics series.

There are four four-part arcs here, "The Rebel Opposition," "The Phantom Affair," "Battleground: Tatooine" and "The Warrior Princess". 

In addition to Wedge and his fellow white guys (Tycho, Janson, Hobbie)*, the cast also includes Dllr Nep, another Sullustan (i.e., the alien race of Nien Nunb and Ten Numb) who apparently has super-hearing and a deep love of music, and Plourr Ilo, a hard-drinking female prone to brawling who I at first took to be an alien of some kind given her weird hair, but it turns out she just shaves her head and wears some kind of dumb headdress that gives her an artificial mullet. 

As the book progresses, they will pick up other characters, like Elscol Loroanother, another human female, as well as a blue-skinned Mon Calamari and a Quarren. (Do feel free to look any of these names or words up on Wookieepedia. There's no shame in that! God knows I kept a tab open to regularly consult it while reading these collections. It's not like I knew the word "Quarren" off the top of my head, when I first saw that character I simply thought, "Ah, one of those squid guys.")

The four stories are all quite well-crafted. Each works as a standalone story (Stackpole and company seem to be operating on an updated-for-the-'90s version of the Stan Lee maxim that every comic is someone's first comic: Every trade paperback collection is someone's first trade paperback collection). And each manages to successfully present readers with "more Star Wars", although I confess to being somewhat disappointed that the conflicts were all various riffs on the Rebellion vs. Empire conflict of the films, rather than any ambitious attempts to reinvent the wheel (as Jo Duffy did in the later issues of Marvel's original Star Wars comic, especially when she and artist Cynthia Martin introduced the Nagai). 

I also got a sense, apparently common among these Dark Horse Star Wars comics, that by having not read the novels (and/or played the video games...? Or role-playing games...?) that I was missing something, with certain characters appearing in the comics for the first time as if they were characters I should recognize and know, apparently having been introduced...somewhere else (The first of these in this volume is a Dame Winter, who is apparently some sort of intelligence agent for the Rebellion/Alliance and a Princess Leia lookalike...although one can't really tell from the more generic way that penciler Allen Nunis draws her).

In "The Rebel Opposition," scripted by Mike Baron and drawn by Allen Nunis and Andy Mushynsky, Rogue Squadron is stationed on the planet Cilpar, where they are trying and failing to make contact with the local underground, led by a woman code-named "Targeter". They find themselves caught between the planet's own, homegrown rebels and the Empire, the former not trusting the Rebellion/Alliance, and Wedge and company eventually have to prove themselves to them.

In "The Phantom Affair", scripted by Darko Macan and drawn (and lettered) by Edvin Biukovic, Rogue Squadron find themselves in an unusual setting for a Star Wars story, I thought—the equivalent of a college town planet. They are there to negotiate with the planet's leadership to gain possession of a fantastic new weapon that could tip the balance of the still-going galactic civil war...as are representatives of the Empire (The main bad guy here is an Imperial officer with some kind of space parasite permanently attached to his face).

"Battleground: Tatooine", scripted by Jan Strnad and drawn by Jon Nadeau and Jordi Ensign, is obviously set on the oft-visited desert planet that Luke and Anakin both hail from. There, Wedge and company reunite with agent Winter to aid in her investigation of a local conman who may or may not have had connections to the Empire. They attend a fancy party, get in the Star Wars equivalent of a car chase and ultimately uncover a secret Imperial base. This story includes an appearance by Jedi's Bib Fortuna, who has apparently had his brain removed from his body and put into some sort of spider-y droid at some point...?

Finally, "The Warrior Princess", scripted by Scott Tolson and drawn again by Nadeau and Ensign, primarily focuses on Plourr, as the action is set on her home world. To the surprise of the rest of Rogue Squadron, she is actually a princess, which comes out when they are drawn into the political intrigue of her home planet, involving a suspicious aristocracy, her arranged husband-to-be, her long-lost brother, anti-royal rebel freedom-fighters and, of course, an Imperial presence. 

Visually, I was most fond of Nunis' style on "The Rebel Opposition," which, again, had a "classic" comics feel to it, and that of Biukovic on "The Phantom Affair," which was highly idiosyncratic and had the look and feel of European comics to more standard American comics of the era.

While all four stories are perfectly serviceable, balancing the war story aspects of the franchise with various bits of local political intrigue, I thought "The Phantom Affair" was the most fun, in large part because of its campus-like setting and colorful villains and side characters. 

While I was a little disappointed that this collection was exclusively focused on Rogue Squadron at the outset, I have to admit that it proved more interesting than I had originally feared, and that when I closed it and set it down, I found myself looking forward to the next volume which seems to be, again, all Rogue Squadron. 

It might be a bit until I can read and write about that next volume, though. As I recently discovered, these collections are much fewer and farther between now than I would have guessed, given that they are, you know, Star Wars. In fact, it looks like they may actually be out of print now....? Regardless, I'll keep trying to get my hands on them. 

*Obviously, modern Star Wars has been plagued with a particularly noxious group of "fans" who loudly complain online about the franchise's efforts to add more women and characters of color to the most recent films and Disney+ TV shows. These terrible people apparently see any attempts to make the casts of these newer works better reflect the audiences that are watching them as some sort of affirmative action run amuck, somehow tainting the franchise by finally, belatedly giving it the diversity it so sorely lacked in the 1970s and '80s. 

I obviously agree with the powers that be who are now making the films and shows that diversity is a good thing, and that the setting could use more women and people of color to better reflect the people watching these films and shows...and, one would hope, give the young people perhaps looking up to new heroes the chance to more easily see themselves in the rebels and Jedis.

That said, another benefit of diversity? Well, if there were a few women or Black or Asian folks in Rogue Squadron, it would be a hell of a lot easier to keep all the characters straight. Instead, the team is like 90% young white guy with short hair, and the fact that the artists drawing them changes almost every arc makes it even harder to get a sense of who is who. 

This post actually came to me in a dream the other night, if you're wondering what my subconscious mind dwells on.

Sabacc is a fictional card game in the Star Wars franchise. According to Wookieepedia, it was first mentioned in L. Neil Smith's 1983 prose novel Lando Calrissian and the Mindharp of Sharu and apparently based on a line excised from a draft of the Empire Strikes Back script, in which Han Solo says Lando won Cloud City in a "sabacca game." While it would occasionally be played or mentioned throughout the various Star Wars "Extended Universe" media, it's first film appearance was in Solo: A Star Wars story, wherein Han wins The Millennium Falcon from Lando in a sabacc game. Being a Star Wars thing, there is of course more detail than you might imagine possible about the game online. 

Sabbac is a Captain Marvel Jr. villain. He was created by Otto Binder and Al Carreno and first appeared in 1943's Captain Marvel Jr. #4. A sort of demonically powered evil opposite of the Marvels, Timothy Karnes could transform by saying the magic word "Sabbac", an acronym that would summon underworld lightning and gift him with the strength of Satan, the indestructibility of Aym, the wisdom of Belial, the fire powers of Beelzebub, the courage of Asmodeus and the flight of Crataeis. 

On every DC/Marvel crossover ever

Collected in the DC Versus Marvel Omnibus 

    •Superman vs. The Amazing Spider-Man #1 (1976)    

    •Marvel Treasury Edition #28 (1981)

    •DC Special Series #27 (1981)

     •Marvel and DC Present Featuring the Uncanny X-Men and the New Teen Titans #1 (1982)

    •Batman/Punisher: Lake of Fire #1 (1994)

    •Punisher/Batman: Deadly Knights #1 (1994)

    •Darkseid vs. Galactus: The Hunger #1 (1995)

    •Spider-Man and Batman #1 (1995)

    •Green Lantern/Silver Surfer: Unholy Alliances #1 (1996)

    •Silver Surfer/Superman #1 (1996)

    •Batman & Captain America #1 (1997)

    •Daredevil and Batman #1 (1997)

    •Batman & Spider-Man #1 (1997)

    •Superman/Fantastic Four #1 (1999)

    •The Incredible Hulk vs. Superman #1 (1999)

    •Batman/Daredevil: King of New York #1 (2000)

Collected in the DC Versus Marvel: The Amalgam Age Omnibus 

    •DC Versus Marvel and Amalgam Comics (1996)

    •DC/Marvel: All Access and Amalgam Comics (1996)

    •Unlimited Access (1997)

JLA/Avengers (2003)    

So I guess I am reading Star Wars comics now...

After having finally finished reading the original 1977-1986 Marvel Star Wars series via the last few Dark Horse omnibus collections of it that have been gathering dust in my to-read pile, I was curious about how the Dark Horse comics addressed the post-Return of the Jedi era, wherein creators seemingly had free reign to come up with their own ideas about what "more Star Wars" might entail, without having to worry about being later contradicted by any future movies. 

That era is—or at least was, before the 2015 reboot of the official Star Wars "Extended Universe" continuity that accompanied the release of The Force Awakens movie—referred to as "The New Republic" era. So naturally I turned to Marvel's re-collections of the Dark Horse-published material, in the publisher's "Epic Collection" format, 500-ish page anthologies that collect the various eras of Star Wars comics in the order in which they are set, labeled The New Republic. (Do note the band along the bottom of the cover reading "Legends" along the bottom of the cover above; that designates these comics as no longer canonical.)

Marvel has published eight volumes in The New Republic series of Epic Collections.

When I sat down to read the first volume, I was expecting to read comics akin to those that Jo Duffy was writing in the final 20 or so issues of the original Marvel series, stories of the heroes of the Rebellion dealing with the remnants of the Empire, setting up the New Republic (it's right there in the title, after all) and embarking on new adventures that had little or nothing to do with the continuity of the films. Only perhaps a little bit more mature and sophisticated, as the Dark Horse comics of the '90s were compared to the Marvel comics of the early '80s.

Basically, I was expecting a bunch of comics like Star Wars: Dark Empire.

What I found within the collection was...not that. Despite the fact that Marvel put the heroes of the original films on the cover, in a gorgeous but somewhat weird looking cover from the great Duncan Fegredo (It's taken from 1998's Star Wars: Shadows of the Empire—Evolution #3).

The collection contains comics published between 1997 and 2005, organized not as they were originally published, but rather by the order in which their events occur along the old Star Wars timeline, which here means how close they are to the events of Return of the Jedi. And so sprinkled throughout the various series and one-shots are much shorter stories taken from the pages of Dark Horse's 1999-2005 anthology series Star Wars Tales, which was notable for occasionally offering straight comedy or parody shorts and for giving unlikely creators a chance to play with the franchise's toybox (How unlikely? I remember stories from the likes of Jason, Andi Watson and Tony Millionaire; trades of Tales are among the few Star Wars comics I ever actually bought trades of).

The longest stories collected within the first volume—1998's Mara Jade—By the Emperor's Hand and Shadows of the Empire—Evolution—are both quite closely tied to the events from Star Wars prose novels, and are, in fact, written by the novelists who introduced the characters they star in their previous work, Timothy Zahn and Steve Perry.

The "Star Warriors", as Roy Thomas used to call the films' heroes, technically appear in both. In the former, they are relegated to the background and, in Luke's case, a few psychic flashes. In the latter, they play much more substantial roles, even though the protagonist of the series is actually Guri, "The only assassin-programmed human replica droid (HRD) in the galaxy", apparently introduced in Perry's 1996 Shadows of The Empire novel...and/or the related "Shadows of the Empire" suite of media that the novel was a part of.

Our heroes do star in a couple of stories within this collection, although these tend to be the shorter Tales stories. Also featured in this first New Republic collection are side characters from the films, like Boba Fett, the late Jabba The Hutt, as well as the Ewoks, a Jawa and a retired Gamorreon guard. 

I suppose the best way, or at least most thorough way, to review such anthologies is to go through them story by story, so let's do that. 

•Star Wars: Mara Jade—By The Emperor's Hand This seven-part series from 1998, consisting of a four-page webcomic labeled issue #0 and then a six-issue comic series, stars the Imperial agent who was first introduced in writer Timothy Zahn's 1991 prose novel, Heir to the Empire (and who would go on to play a major role in the old post-Jedi "Extended Universe" continuity).

Zahn actually writes this series too, plotting the first half of the series while fellow Star Wars novelist Michael A. Stackpole handled the script, and then getting the only writer's credit on the second half of the series. The pair couldn't ask for a better collaborator, as the series was drawn by the great Carlos Ezquerra.

The events of the series are so close to those of Jedi that, after the zero issue prologue, it actually begins during the events of the film. Apparently Mara, a light saber-wielding Force user mysteriously given her abilities through The Emperor's own force mastery, was charged with assassinating Luke Skywalker, and, in an effort to do so, she sought employ as a dancer in Jabba's palace (It's here we see a chained and bikini-ed Leia in the background of a few panels, along with C-3PO).

From there, she moves onto her next assignment, the assassination of a criminal cartel leader, which seems to go easily enough, but then her life gets immensely harder. The Emperor sends her some kind of psychic message just before his death, which here shows her a different version of the events we saw in Jedi: Rather than Darth Vader pitching the Emperor over a railing to fall to his death, Mara sees Vader and Luke teaming up to kill the Emperor with their light sabers, and she gets a final entreaty from the Emperor to kill Skywalker. 

The rest of the series details her attempts to navigate the immediate aftermath of the Emperor's death, which means she no longer has the favor of the Empire's leader (and she spends some time in an Imperial prison) nor access to her full force powers, and her attempts to re-assassinate the crime boss she targeted earlier, when she learns she had actually only beheaded a decoy.

Though Mara Jade is a character from the novels, Zahn and Stackpole do a fine job of introducing her here, and one need not know anything other than what is presented here to follow and enjoy the story (although I suppose having seen Return of the Jedi is something of a requirement). 

Ezquerra's art is among some of the best I've seen in a Star Wars comic thus far. His Mara Jade is beautiful, statuesque and hard-faced, and his gift for faces is perfect for drawing the various arrogant and severe Imperial officers. He also draws some cool, weird-looking aliens; I particularly liked the skunk guy who hangs out at a bar Mara works in for a bit, and the strange, pointy-headed species that the crime boss apparently belongs to (Both seem to be original to this series). 

•"Mara Jade: A Night on the Town" A 1999 16-pager from Tales by Zahn and artist Igor Kordey, this is a much less successful comic. The plot involves Mara hunting down an Imperial governor who had stolen from the Empire for his personal enrichment, a task that involves her crossing paths with the Alliance and its soldiers, as they currently hold her target captive. 

Partially told as if through Mara's eyes and very heavy on her narration via thought cloud, it reads more like a short prose story clumsily adapted into a comic. I'm not sure what went wrong here, considering the relative strength of the Zahn comics series that this short follows, but it does seem to argue for the importance of Ezquerra's importance...and maybe that of Stackpole, as well.

•"Do or Do Not" This 2003 four-page Tale features the first real appearances by Luke and Leia in this collection, with the former feeling a little lost after the Battle of Endor and the sudden silence of the force ghosts, and the latter listening to him vent. Yoda's force ghost puts in a brief appearance, which is why the story is titled what it is. Jay Laird writes, and Timothy II provides the art, which is pretty cool in how different it is from so much of the franchise's comics art. 

I thugh the story in notable for Luke's line "And now I've got to rebuild the Jedi order all by myself!" That's something he will dedicate himself to in the '90s Extended Universe continuity, of course, but is in sharp contrast to his attitude in the Marvel comics, where he refused to teach anyone else his Jedi skills, fearing that they might be used for ill. 

•"Free Memory" A 2001 Tale by Brett Matthews and Vatche Mavlian, in which R2-D2 shares with C-3PO the various holographic farewell messages that the original trilogy's heroes had him record, as well as the "You're my only hope" message from A New Hope and the group "photo" that accounts for the last image of Jedi. 

•"Lando's Commandos: On Eagles' Wings" Wait, what's an eagle? Is that something like a falcon? Do they have these birds in the Star Wars galaxy...? 

I have to assume this 2000 22-page Tale by Ian Edginton and Carlos Meglia started with its title. After a series of Alliance convoys are attacked and plundered by imperial TIE pilots gone pirate, leadership turns to Lando Calrissian for an "unconventional" approach to shut down the bad guys ("Send a thief to catch a thief, right?" Lando says).

He assembles a team to accompany the next convoy, a diverse team that includes a former officer of the Imperial navy who has since joined the Alliance. Through a couple of sneaky tricks, Lando manages to draw out a traitor and take down the pirates. 

It's a nice enough character portrait of one of the more colorful characters from the films, but what really makes it sing is the angular lines and explosively cartoony faces of artist Meglia. I particularly liked his tiny-eyed, big-eyebrowed Lando with his permanently smirking face, and the severe, axe-shaped face of the former imp officer. 

The story has more room to breathe than the other Tales, which might be another factor in why it is probably the best of these in this collection. 

•Star Wars: Shadows of The Empire—Evolution As previously mentioned, this 1998 five-part miniseries is a Steve Perry-written sequel to the events of his own Shadows of The Empire novel (and its attendant video game and other related media). That was set between Empire and Jedi, so some time has passed between the events of the earlier story. 

I found the story easy enough to follow without any prior knowledge of Shadows, but it doesn't read nearly as self-contained as the earlier Mara Jade miniseries, a fact highlighted by a character guide to nearly a dozen different players that is presented before the first page of the miniseries.

This story really cemented for me the fact that Dark Horse's Star Wars comics were going to some pains to fit into the emergent "Extended Universe" continuity, to the point that many of them seemed made more for the sorts of Star Wars super-fans who were reading the prose novels and playing the videogames, rather than more casual comics readers whose familiarity with the saga began and ended with the films.

Our protagonist is the human-looking assassin droid Guri, who was apparently a lieutenant for the criminal organization Black Sun's now dead leader, Xizor. She is on a quest to find someone able of stripping her memory of her own criminal career, allowing her to start over with a new life. 

Others are on the hunt for her, though, including Xizor's niece and would-be successor, a rogue scientist, a pair of twin sister martial artist/mercenaries and, most colorfully, a bounty hunter named Kar Yang, who looks like a huge, humanoid rubber chicken and speaks in big, bold, jagged dialogue bubbles filled with all-caps dialogue (His entry in the opening character guide refers to him as "the second-most skilled and feared bounty hunter in the galaxy," with Boba Fett presumably being the first...?)

In the middle of all this are the heroes of the films, most of whom had some dealings with Xizor and Guru previously (as seen in flashbacks to her memories), and who are currently trying to stave off a gang war between various criminal factions. They first appear in the series' third issues and will appear intermittently throughout the rest of the series. 

Perry seems to have a lot of fun writing them, paying special attention to the screwball comedy bickering between Han Solo and Leia, making a running joke out of Han's interest in (and to) other women. It's also interesting to see how other characters react to them in the course of the proceedings; when the twin mercenaries' employer dismisses Luke and company's many victories as a matter of luck rather than skill, they reply with, "Listen...they took out Jabba The Hutt, blew up two death stars, and destroyed The Emperor himself!" and, "With that kind of luck, they don't need any skill." 

Pencil artist Ron Randall and inker Tom Simmons provide clean, smooth art, portraying a particularly sexy Guri (her outfit getting provocatively but strategically shredded in battle) and doing a quite striking job on the movies' heroes, pulling off an impressive balancing of celebrity likeness with vital and animated looking characters.

As alluded to above, Duncan Fegredo provides covers for the series, and these match realistic renderings of the characters (albeit with some somewhat awkward posing and a weird energy), with flat star and blast iconography. 

As with the Emperor's Hand story that kicks off the collection, it's a quite solid graphic novel embedded within the collection.

•Star Wars: The Jabba Tape A 1998 one-shot from a creative team with a respectable pedigree (writer John Wagner and artist Killian Plunkett), this story stars a pair of low-level members of the now late Jabba's criminal organization, swoop riders Spiker and Big Gizz (A "swoop" is apparently the Star Wars answer to a motorcycle, making this colorfully designed pair essentially a couple of biker types).

Seeking to profit after Jabba's demise, they set out to acquire a luxury ship stocked with treasures that Jabba had hidden in a cave in case he ever needed to make a fast escape from Tatooine. The only problem? Jabba's greedy nephew Gorga has also heard of the ship and wants to get his slimy hands on it. 

Our "swoop scum" protagonists manage to wrest it away from Gorga's men and, along with the ship's sole guard Onoh, make it into space with it. The only problem? It's programmed with an "interactive security tape" of Jabba himself (thus the name of comic) which, without proper authorization, shuts down the ship and vents all of its oxygen. Oh, and Gorga's men also have a ship of their own in orbit to stop them from escaping with the treasure.

Plunkett draws the hell out of the book, and it's filled with lots of fun character designs, particularly that of the small, spindly Onoh, who, like many of the Star Wars aliens in the films (but too few in the comics) looks an awful lot like a Muppet. 

I wasn't expecting much from this particular comic—and was wondering how there could be a Jabba comic set after Jabba's death—but it proved a lot of fun. 

•"Sand Blasted" Killian Plunkett both writes and draws this 28-page story from a 2000 issue of Star Wars Tales, a direct sequel to his and John Wagner's The Jabba Tape. On the surface of Tatooine, where they crash-landed in the previous story, Spiker, Big Gizz and Onoh encounter a caravan of shot-up Jawa sandcrawlers...as well as what shot them up, an Imperial battle droid which had laid buried under the sand for years (This resembles a particularly big and brawny stormtrooper, one capable of flight and carrying a huge blaster rifle).

The story consists mostly of our heroes—well, our protagonists—and a surviving Jawa battling against it. They ultimately prevail, but in a twist ending, a group of those pop-up pit droids from Episode I discover its wreckage and start to reassemble the battle droid. 

There's not a whole lot to the story, really, but it's another opportunity to enjoy Plunkett playing in the Star Wars sandbox. 

•"Three Against the Galaxy" Another 2000 Tale, this Rich Hedden-written, Rick Leonardi and Mark Lipka-drawn 22-page story details a young aristocrat who chance leads to teaming up with a former Gamorrean guard and a Jawa. Together the three outlaws take on her corrupt uncle and avenge her father. The Jawa is given a name, Tek, and his dialogue is translated into Basic/English for the benefit of the reader. Me, I prefer when those little weirdoes just talk gibberish, like the one that appeared in the previous story did. The comic is fine, though unremarkable.

•"Apocalypse Endor" If the title of this 2002 short doesn't clue one into its filmic inspiration, the cover of the issue of Star Wars Tales it appeared in ought to. An old man drinking in a bar, a former stormtrooper, is questioned by some young punks about how it was the great Empire was defeated by "those cute, fuzzy widdle Ewoks." 

"You guys had walkers, blasters, armor, speeder bikes, starships," one chimes in. "What did the Ewoks have? Pointy sticks and a happy song."

The old man, who actually seems way too old given how close to the Battle of Endor this story would seem to be set given its placement in this particular collection, responds by detailing what horrifying little monsters the Ewoks really were, and how they drove his fellow soldier mad with their stealth attacks, constant drumming and primitive death traps. We know, we saw Jedi; they clearly eat human flesh. 

This one is by Christian Read and the art team of Clayton Henry and Jimmy Palmiotti.

•"Marooned" Another Tale set on Endor, this 2005 story written, drawn and colored by Lucas Marangon is set a little over a year after the climactic battle there in Jedi, and chronicles the meeting between an Imperial scout trooper and a rebel fighter and the uneasy friendship that develops between the pair. Both abandoned there by their respective armies, this odd couple proceed to bond with one another, hang out with the Ewoks, liberally smoke whatever it is that the Ewoks stuff their little pipes with and eventually send out a distress signal to be picked up from Endor. The former Imperial trooper opts to stay behind, worried a soldier like himself won't fit into the new galaxy...and maybe having developed a liking for those Ewok pipes...?

•Star Wars: Boba Fett—Twin Engines of Destruction Dark Horse reprinted this 32-page story in a 1997 one-shot, although it was apparently first published across four issues of Star Wars Galaxy Magazine in 1995 and 1996. Written by Andy Mangels and drawn by John Nadeau and Jordi Ensign, it seems to be another one of those stories that that picks up on plot points from somewhere other than the films themselves (If I understood what I read about him on Wookiepedia correctly, one of the main characters here seems to have originated in a souce book for a Star Wars role-playing game...?).

Someone who sure looks a lot like Boba Fett is bounty-hunting and eventually finds himself facing another bounty hunter briefly seen in The Empire Strikes Back, Dengar. After initially mistaking the guy with the jetpack and wearing the same armor as Boba Fett as Boba Fett himself, just as the reader was likely meant to, Dengar eventually recognizes this guy as Jodo Kast.  

Dengar tells his colleague Boba Fett about the encounter, as apparently the newcomer has been trading on his resemblance to Fett to further his bounty-hunting career. In order to deal with imposter, Boba Fett secretly hires him for a job and leads him into an elaborate trap, one that seems to end with Kast being killed in a kinda roundabout, indirect fashion.

Colorist Cary Porter isn't as consistent with the portrayal of the two guys in similar armor as I would like—sometimes Kast has a yellow and gray helmet which distinguishes him from Fett, sometimes they both have red and gray helms—and yeah, having never heard of Kast and his whole deal before, I was on somewhat unsure footing the first time through this story.

Still, it's a decent enough portrait of the taciturn Boba Fett as one of the galaxy's ultimate badasses, and it's certainly fun to see him battle a "twin" with the same weapons and accessories as him.

It was interesting to read this story in 2025, after having seen the new post-Jedi Fett onscreen in the Disney+ series The Book of Boba Fett (a series I actually managed to watch, before Disney started producing so damn may of the things that I couldn't keep up any longer and ultimately gave up on them). 

While the live action Boba Fett, played by Temuera Morrison, was more or less healed from the Sarlacc pit thanks to his many long baths in a bacta tank, here he is apparently so scarred that when he's not in his Mandalorian armor, he's bandaged up like a mummy (Actually, he looked an awful lot like DC's old Unknown Soldier character). 

•"A Wookie Scorned!" This fun 2001 Tale from Jason Hall and Christina Chen depicts the friction in the Han Solo/Chewbacca friendship caused by Leia, who keeps pulling Han away for various missions, so that it starts to seem that he's spending all his time with her, rather than doing stuff like repairing the Millennium Falcon with Chewie. And Chewie has noticed that Han returns from some of these missions with lipstick on his face. 

Even when Chewbacca makes a special effort, like preparing an elaborate dinner for his best friend, Han seems to barely notice or appreciate it, instead piling up a plate and rushing off to see Leia again. 

Talking to C-3PO and Luke doesn't help, but the neglected Chewie eventually gets a form of revenge when he takes Leia shopping, the two of them leaving Han all alone for a change.

Chen's art in this short story is quite delightful, as she gives Han and Luke a neat, dreamy, manga hero look.

•"Problem Solvers" The final story in this massive collection is one of those occasional stories from Star Wars Tales that is a piece of pure comedy, and a story that I don't think we were ever meant to take as canonical, even before the 2015 reboot. A 2004 four-page effort by Chris Eliopoulos of Franklin Richards: Son of a Genius fame, the strip's premise is that Leia asked Han to hire an I.T. crew to get the New Republic's computer systems up and running, and he delegated it to C-3PO, who apparently hired the Ewoks.

Over the course of two-pages, the Ewoks attack the computer problems the same way they attacked the stormtroopers: With logs, ropes and rocks. On the final page, there's another inappropriate-for-the-task gag, and a riff on an oft-repeated line of Star Wars dialogue. 

It's an effective gag strip, and a lot of fun to see a handful of Star Wars characters rendered in Eliopoulos' distinctive style. 

I imagine page count and chronology had more to do with its placement as the final story in this particular volume than anything else, but it proves a perfect capper for some 500 pages of Star Wars comics. 

DC Versus Marvel: JLA/Avengers

It's perfectly appropriate that the final DC/Marvel crossover was 2003's JLA/Avengers, as that makes it the ultimate DC/Marvel crossover in both senses of the words. Writer Kurt Busiek and artist George Perez, the latter of whom was attached to the project when it was first in development back in the early '80s, produced the biggest and best of the 20 such comics that were published previously. 

And it's big in every way. Originally published as a four-issue mini-series, with each issue numbering 48 pages, it was nearly 200 pages along. The page count is similar to that of 1996's DC Versus Marvel, but, thanks to Perez's panel-packed pages and intricate, detailed artwork, the full series reads much denser than its closest relation in the sub-genre, more like a graphic novel than a comic book miniseries. 

The stakes are, naturally, also big: The fate of both the DC and Marvel Universes...which, of course, were also imperiled in DC Versus Marvel, but here that threat feels more immediate and visceral, more akin to Crisis on Infinite Earths than DC Versus Marvel. Indeed, the epic opens with a four-page prologue in which two alternate universes are destroyed, that of Marvel's Arkon the Magnificent and DC's Qward, which was in the process of being visited by the Crime Syndicate of Amerika. 

And the cast? Mind-boggling big. Not only does it feature both of the then-current title teams, it also features their various reserves and former members called in to help out with the crisis...as well various past, dead members temporarily resurrected by the cosmic goings-on...and characters from throughout both teams' history when their universes are temporarily fused...but, by the final issue's climactic battle, the series will feature every single hero who has ever been a member of either the Justice League or the Avengers.

Oh, and there are also plenty of characters from both universes that play small roles or make cameos, from The Spectre, Lobo, The Phantom Stranger and various Titans to The Watcher, The Thing, Spider-Man and The Defenders. It's a massive cast of characters and one that, frankly, it's hard to imagine any artist other than George Perez even attempting, let alone drawing so well. 

So it's an incredibly satisfying read, one that I have to imagine was welcomed not just by the fans of either or both title teams, but by anyone who had ever been a fan of either team...maybe (hopefully!) even those who were looking forward to the originally proposed, 1980s crossover, fans who ended up having to wait over 20 years to see Perez drawing all those heroes (Because of various time travel elements, the '80s teams do meet—in fact, I'm pretty sure Perez's original art for the original, proposed meeting was repurposed in a big panel here—and versions of the characters that existed then, like Flash Barry Allen and Green Lantern Hal Jordan, end up playing substantial roles in the proceedings). 

How do the creators manage to get all this fan service in, and still tell a compelling, let alone coherent, story? 

Well, again, much of that is due to Perez's artwork, and his ability to fit so much in each panel and on each page, while Busiek comes up with an exceedingly clever, three-stage story, one that reads a bit like several different crossovers in one. And he leaves a lot of room to explore the universes, comparing and contrasting the ways they differ in terms of, say, geography, or the way they treat their heroes or even the way their various physics work.

The story opens with Krona, a cosmic villain introduced in Green Lantern in the 1960s, whose deal was that he was seeking to unlock the secrets of creation. Here, his inquests result in the destruction of universes. After the aforementioned destruction of two alternate universes, he arrives in the Marvel Universe and meets the Grandmaster, a Marvel Universe mainstay that was first introduced in an Avengers comic from the late '60s. 

The Grandmaster negotiates with Krona, and is in possession of some pretty valuable information, as he does actually know a being who witnessed the/a universe-creating Big Bang (that would be Galactus, of course). As is his wont, The Grandmaster proposes to Krona that the two of them play a game; if Krona wins, he will give him Galactus, while if Grandmaster wins, he won't. The specific rules of the game will be explained to our heroes a bit later in the story.

Meanwhile, Busiek and Perez introduce the then-current title teams, each in a spectacular two-page spread as they face a major threat from the opposite universe, followed by a several-page sequence where they triumph, introducing readers to each team's members, powers and dynamic in the process. 

The JLA comes first, and they are in a pitched battle against the giant Terminus (Never heard of 'em; not in 2003, and not 22 years later, either. This is the relatively rare comic that could actually use an annotated edition).

The League is that which existed when Mark Waid took over JLA after Grant Morrison's departure and excised the bigger roster Morrison had gradually built up to deal with his climactic "World War III" arc. That means we're looking at the Big Seven that founded this iteration of the team, plus Plastic Man (And if you need an even more specific marker of where we are in League history, Green Lantern Kyle Rayner, who Perez does a great job of drawing much younger than the other heroes, is wearing his unfortunate, Jim Lee-designed costume...although Perez will draw him in his original costume in one panel at the book's climax). 

And in the Marvel Universe, the Avengers are dealing with Starro, referred to as "The Star Conqueror." If the splash page is accurate, this team, which Busiek was actually writing for Marvel around that time, consisted of Iron Man, Jack of Hearts, Quicksilver, Warbird, She-Hulk, Yellowjacket, Thor, The Vision, Triathlon, The Wasp, Captain America and The Scarlet Witch. (I say seemingly because this book, when I originally read it in 2003, was my very first exposure to The Avengers, unless you count Mark Millar and Bryan Hitch's version that existed in The Ultimates. I wouldn't buy my first Avengers comic until a few years later, when Brian Michael Bendis launched New Avengers).

As both teams begin to investigate the extradimensional visitors—with Flash Wally West using his powers to enter the Marvel Universe, where he discovers mutants, that world's hatred of mutants, and the fact that the Speed Force doesn't seem to exist there—each team gets a cosmic visitor, there to explain the basic parameters of the Krona/Grandmaster game to them.

The Grandmaster himself visits the JLA Watchtower, telling the League they must race against a team from the other world to assemble 12 items of great power from across the worlds, including the likes of The Spear of Destiny, The Cosmic Cube, Green Lantern's power battery, The Infinity Gems, The Orb of Ra, the Ultimate Nullifier, and so on. Joined by The Atom, who is there to replace The Flash, who is powerless there, they visit the Marvel Universe. After some exploration and giant monster fighting, they are repelled by The Avengers (who are joined by Hawkeye, who will play a pretty prominent role throughout the series).

The Avengers are then visited by Metron of the New Gods, who gives them a similar spiel, about a team of others and a dozen power objects, and gifts Iron Man with a Mother Box, capable of opening Boom Tubes to the DC Universe, which seven of the Avengers take there.

That's pretty much the first issue, which ends with the Avengers being confronted by the JLA, and Thor throwing his hammer at Superman.

The second issue thus opens with what one might expect as the first stage of a typical superhero crossover ritual: The fight. It's a good one, far better than any of the many fights in DC Versus Marvel, including a great splash in which the 15 heroes do battle with one another, before we get various passages of break out fights, like Flash vs. Hawkeye ("They're not so tough, Thor," Hawkeye says, "They're just Squadron Supreme Lite") and Captain America versus Batman (After an exploratory page or so of strikes and counterstrikes to test one another, the pair agree they are just pawns in a larger game, and leave the battle to work on the case together).

Much of the rest of the second issue/chapter are devoted to the teams, their rosters expanded and fortified by reserve members, playing the game. And so the JLA and Avengers break into smaller teams to pursue the items in various locales throughout the two universes, giving us scenes like Hawkman, Black Canary and Blue Beetle vs. Scarlet Witch and Quicksilver in The Flash Museum and Wonder Woman and Aquaman vs. Hercules and She-Hulk in Asgard.

This all culminates in a huge 30 hero battle in the Savage Land for the final item, the Cosmic Cube. There we get such conflicts as a Hawkeye vs. Green Arrow archer off and a fairly long Superman vs. Thor battle, which Superman eventually wins ("Sorry to...disappoint..." Superman struggles to say, holding off Mjolnir with his left hand, before delivering a knockout punch with his right, "But in...my world, it looks like...the dials... ...go up to eleven!").

When Quicksilver finally secures the cube, the game seems to end in a tie...until Captain America knocks the cube from the speedster's hands, and into those of his new ally Batman, the final score being 7-5 in the Justice League's favor. Thus Krona, who had chosen the Avengers as his champions, has lost. The Marvel Universe is saved! 

Or is it? 

Krona, being a sore loser, attacks The Grandmaster, pulls the name of Galactus from his mind, and then summons the giant planet-eater, who he then attacks. The heroes get involved, and the seemingly dying Grandmaster uses the various gathered objects of power to...do something. 

What exactly will remain mysterious for much of the third issue/chapter, which is devoted to an exploration of a new, weird, but rather neat status quo. Here, it seems that the Justice League of America and The Avengers are long-time allies, getting together for annual, cross-dimensional get-togethers in the same manner that the JLoA and the JSoA used to (Iron Man and Green Lantern Hal Jordan seem to have a friendly argument over which world is Earth-One and which is Earth-Two).

This leads to long-ish sequence that opens with what I am assuming are the Bronze Age versions of the team, with the Satellite Era Justice League meeting with an Avengers team that includes Beast, and then we get a series of cameo-filled get-togethers between various incarnations of the two teams, giving us such moments as Snapper Car and Rick Jones talking barbecuing with Jarvis, Moondragon psychically fending off Guy Gardner's would-be sexual harassment and a Wonder Woman and Wonder Man arm-wrestling match.

Throughout the sequence, both Captain America and Superman, both of whom have been acting off throughout the series, sense something is wrong with what they're experiencing, and eventually things break down, the scene shifting to snow-covered ruins of a pair of cities, New York and Metropolis, with various heroes trying to make sense of the apocalyptic cityscapes, where civilians seem to randomly shift between worlds and mind-controlled villains prowl.

Apparently, the two Earths have been smooshed together, but they are too different to be stable and are thus tearing themselves apart. Teams of Avengers and Leaguers eventually convene, and their members seem mostly composed of past versions of the characters, based on their costumes, like those worn by The Wasp, Scarlet Witch and Hank Pym, who is here a Giant Man, rather than Yellowjacket. 

Oh, and The Flash is now Barry Allen, while the Green Lantern is now Hal Jordan. 

After some intervention from The Phantom Stranger, who shows these 13 characters their futures, which involves a lot of bad for some of them, like Hal going mad and becoming Parallax and Scarlet Witch and Vision losing their children, the heroes nevertheless decide to work together to take on Krona and save their worlds and futures,. This will involve building a special ship and invading the villain's extra-dimensional base, which is built of the corpse of Galactus.

There they encounter various villains in Krona's thrall, who at first are just assorted goons from the two universes (AIM, Kobra, Moleoids, two different versions of Parademons, etc.), but will eventually include dozens of villains who have fought either team throughout their history.

After a weird bolt of black and red lightning splits a panel and Aquaman and Scarlet Witch disappear to be replaced by Quicksilver and Green Arrow (and Hank Pym switches from a Giant Man costume to a Yellowjacket one), Pym theorizes that "chronal instability" is responsible, and this will be the vehicle through which we get all of the Leaguers and Avengers (and, in some cases, many of their various costumes and designs over the decades) to show up in a huge, sprawling fight scene that sees the various heroes fight their way through a gauntlet of villains to get to Krona. 

And so we get panels featuring The Falcon in a sky full of DC's winged heroes (Zauriel, Black Condor and various Hawkpeople), of "Batroc, Ze Leapair!" challenging Batman, of Prometheus threatening Captain America, Aquaman vs. Attuma, Superman wielding Cap's shield and Thor's hammer, and an incredibly fun game of cameo-spotting.

(On my first, original read-through of the single-issues published in 2003 and then again during my re-read of a trade collection a few weeks ago, I was trying to figure out if Busiek and Perez actually managed to get everybody in, which meant lingering on each page, scanning panels for the likes of lesser Leaguers like The Yazz, L-Ron-in-Trigon's body, Justice League Antartica and Tomorrow Woman, that last of whom was only on the team for the space of a single issue, JLA #5...although she was later also featured in 1998's JLA: Tomorrow Woman one-shot. They are, indeed, all there. Hell, I saw that Moon Maiden is on the cover of issue #3, and her single appearance was in 2000's JLA 80-Page Giant #3, an excellent novel-length story in which she was a member of the League from a forgotten timeline.  I didn't have the knowledge to do the same with The Avengers, obviously. When I posted about this after my re-read on Bluesky, Busiek himself responded to confirm that they did indeed get everyone in, working from official lists provided by DC and Marvel, and they did so because Perez wanted to draw them all.)

Our heroes are, obviously, successful in the end, the two universes  are saved and Krona is defeated...but in such a particular way that he will get what he wants, to see the birth of a universe. Eventually. 

While I had originally bought and read all of these issues, for the purposes of rereading it and writing about it as part of the series on DC/Marvel crossovers I ended up doing on Every Day Is Like Wednesday, I turned to a copy of the trade collection that I was able to get from the library system I work at. 

I felt lucky to find a copy, and to find one in such good shape, considering that it was published in 2008 (There was a tear on one-page, but that was the only injury to the 17-year-old book).

And that was the last time the book was published, other than, of course, a special, limited-run edition that the Hero Initiative published in 2022 to help fundraise for the ailing Perez. 

It seems fairly insane that this particular book has not been in print since it was originally released, especially now that the Avengers brand is so much more valuable than it was then, and so much better and widely known than it was in those pre-Marvel Cinematic Universe days. 

One imagines the publishers could sell a lot of copies of it, were it to be reprinted today. With the relatively recent release of the two omnibus collections collecting the other 19 DC/Marvel crossovers, one hopes a new JLA/Avengers collection will be along before too long. 

Like I said, I have the original issues, but I'd happily buy a new collection. It would be worth it just to have the covers unencumbered by the logos and text, as are presented in the back of this collection. Not only is that of issue #3 worth spending long minutes studying, but issue #2, depicting almost 40 different heroes all actively engaged in battle with one another, is something of a masterpiece of superhero combat. 

Editors from DC and Marvel have quite recently teased a future collaboration, and, honestly, I don't envy whoever the creators who get that particular assignment might be. One imagines their work will be much smaller in scale than JLA/Avengers was (how could it not be?), but, even still, with this the last of the crossovers, it's also the one any future crossover will have to try and top and, honestly, I don't see how anyone can hope to top this comic.  

On Annie Hunter Eriksen and Lee Gatlin's marvelous comic creator biographies With Great Power and Along Came a Radioactive Spider

In 2021 and 2023, writer Annie Hunter Eriksen and artist Lee Gatlin released a pair of children's picture books through Page Street Kids, both unauthorized biographies of two of the three primary comics professionals who created what we now think of as the Marvel Universe, Stan Lee and Steve Ditko (the third, Jack Kirby, appears in both men's stories, but doesn't didn't get his own book...at least not yet).

Attracted both by Gatlin's highly idiosyncratic, cartoonistly work, which I was familiar with from his posting on social media (where he posts great drawings of The Thing and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles), as well as curiosity about how a writer might go about reducing such men's complex careers into something short and simple enough for a picture book, I recently brought them both home from the library. 

As a grown-up and a long-time comics reader, I liked them both well enough, and I would certainly recommend them to anyone in that same demographic. As far as the intended audience of children goes, well, I'm afraid I can't really imagine how these would go over, as it's hard to imagine anyone young enough to be read to really being too terribly interested in Stan Lee or Steve Ditko. They do seem to be serviceable first biographies on the men, though.

The first, With Great Power: The Marvelous Stan Lee, tackles the most famous figure American comics history has ever produced, whether rightly or wrongly. With just 30 pages to work with, most of which could only support a sentence or two in addition to the images that will dominate them, Eriksen would zero in on Lee's career as a would-be novelist who stumbled into the writings of comics and then hit the big time when he wrote some heroes who were extremely popular in the 1960s, heroes who would eventually become movie stars in the 21st century.

In fact, there's a jump in time from mid-1960s to the turn in century, with an image depicting Lee walking down a red carpet, leading Spider-Man and the Avengers characters, most of whom are drawn wearing sunglasses (Except for Black Panther, whose all-black garb  wouldn't look right with them, and a tiny, too-small-for-them Ant-Man, shown running to keep up with the long strides of the regularly-sized heroes). 

The focus is mostly on Stan Lee as a youngster (appropriately enough, given the target audience), and his time working for Timely/Atlas/Marvel, until he co-created The Fantastic Four and Spider-Man, at which point Stan Lee really becomes the Stan Lee we now imagine when we think of him (For a significant portion of the book, he will be balding, his face looking naked without his signature glasses and mustache).

It's not a bad way to frame Lee's career, really, and certainly focuses on what is perhaps most significant to the broader, mainstream world beyond the comics shop.

The opening, thesis-like two-page spread is pretty great. Eriksen writes:

Stan Lee didn't have hulking strength.

Or fantastic flexibility.

Or catlike reflexes.

His superpower was creating heroes who did.

Each of these sentences is illustrated by an image of Lee as we usually imagine him now, with the shaded glasses, mustache and full head of gray hair, exhibiting one of these powers. 

So there's an image of a huge Stan Lee holding a coffee mug pinched between the fingers of a massive hand, the other one pinching the knob of a door that he's accidentally torn from its hinges. And then one of his left arm stretching into loops before returning to write on the yellow pad of paper he held in his other hand, as Mister Fantastic might be able to. And then one of him dressed in Black Panther's costume, complete with cute cat ears, the cowl open to reveal his familiar, grandfatherly face. And, finally, an image of him with his feet up on a desk, a lightbulb appearing over his head, while he raises a finger in a "Eureka!" like pose.

From there, Eriksen rewinds to his childhood: "But back when he was Stanley Lieber, a kid growing up in New York City, he didn't feel super." After a few pages on his childhood, the young protagonist lands a job in publishing: 

Luckily, a magazine called Timely Comics was hiring. With this gig Stanley could get his foot in the door in the world of writing. But for now, he would be Stanley Lieber: Errand Boy!

Eriksen doesn't mention a fact that tempers that "Luckily"; Lee's cousin was married to publisher Martin Goodman, a relationship which likely had something to do not only with his hiring as an errand boy, but also with his becoming an editor while still a teenager, after the famed comic book team Joe Simon and Jack Kirby quit Timely. 

She does detail Lee's work on that team's most famous creation, Captain America, which is when Stanley first became "Stan Lee," writing a filler story for the superhero under the pseudonym, wanting to save "Stanley Lieber" for his future great American novel. (Unfortunately, the story isn't clear that Captain America was Simon and Kirby's creation; the character just sort of exists here and is a steppingstone in Lee's transition from errand boy to writer.)

Gatlin's illustrations for the momentous occasion are pretty cool, though, with one page showing a cartoonish Captain America—none of the many Marvel heroes depicted within the book have the big, muscular, dynamic figures one would expect to see in an actual Marvel comic book—standing before a Hollywood-like chair labeled "Cap" and holding a script, saying, "Line? Line?...This is blank" in comic book dialogue balloons.

On the facing page, we see Cap and Bucky in action, battling the Red Skull and his men, while a young Stanley picks at a typewriter in the foreground.

That's soon followed by a scene in which Stan's wife Joan suggests he "finally sneak in a story he'd always wanted to tell," resulting in his "teaming up with Jack Kirby" and creating the Fantastic Four.  And then, "Stan furiously drafted while artist 'Sturdy' Steve Ditko drew the perfect design until a new face peered back at them: Peter Parker... The Amazing Spider-Man!"

After that second hit, his publisher's ask Stan, "What other superheroes do you have up your sleeves?" 

And this then leads to an image of a smug-looking Stan pulling at one of his sleeves, from which emanates a gusher of colorful stars, lightning, and Marvel ephemera (Mjolnir, pumpkin bombs, ants, Doctor Strange's cloak and so on). It's followed by a two-page spread featuring The Hulk, Thor, Silver Surfer, Iron Man and Doctor Strange. 

The contributions of Kirby and Ditko (and Don Heck and Larry Lieber) aren't mentioned here.

It's a certainty a version of the creation of Marvel's most famous characters and the creation of the Marvel Universe that Stan Lee himself would have like! 

Granted, the creation and development of these characters has been something that the men who made them and the fans who loved them have contested and debated endlessly over the years and have long since been the source of high-stakes controversy. While Eriksen and Gatlin obviously include Kirby and Ditko as collaborators (at least on the FF and Spidey), reading this book, it does seem to suggest that Lee did the heavy lifting in the process. 

I don't think this is necessarily a sin on the part of the book's creators. I mean, how nuanced can we expect a book intended for a pre-literate audience to be, after all? And how much controversy should there be in a book serving as a first introduction to Lee's career? Still, adult readers (like me), are sure to notice these aspects, and to raise an eyebrow here and there. 

After the story ends—not with Lee's sad last years, nor his death, but with him standing in a crowd of cosplaying fans and declaring "'NUFF SAID!"—there's a two-page spread of mostly prose, followed by a bibiliography of sources (Not included? Jordan Raphael and Tom Spurgeon's 2003 Stan Lee and The Rise and Fall of the American Comic Book from Chicago Review Press, which I'd personally recommend over some of those cited instead). 

There are three short sections across this spread, one on Stan Lee's cameos in Marvel movies, another on his collaborations with other creators and one on his "Stan's Soapbox" column. That second section, which appears under the heading "Friendly Neighborhood Bullpen", does mention Kirby, Ditko, Heck, Lieber and Bill Everet ("Like any good hero, Stan teamed up," Eriksen writes). 

This section also briefly details "The Marvel Method" of making comics (as opposed to the assembly line way they were mostly created previously), which allowed for greater collaboration between writer and artist...but, as an unfortunate side effect, likely contributed to the historical disagreements over who deserves credit for what (As I've understood it, artists working in "The Marvel Method" like Kirby and Ditko did with Lee are more properly understood as co-writers and artists, not just artists). 

Eriksen and Gatlin's next book, the wonderfully titled Along Came a Radioactive Spider: Strange Steve Ditko and the Creation of Spider-Man, seems to have been born, at least in part, by Eriksen's own dissatisfaction in the limited role Lee's collaborators played in the first book.

In fact, her bio on the back cover flap, begins with the fact that she 

realized while writing With Great Power: The Marvelous Stan Lee...that she, like most people, was overlooking Steve Ditko's role in the Spidey origin story, which inspired her to create the biography he deserves (even if he would totally hate the attention).

It's true that Ditko doesn't get the credit Stan Lee does for creating Spider-Man, but then, much of that is likely due to the two men's very natures. Stan Lee craved the spotlight and spent much of his career in pursuing it and then nurturing the fame his comics work brought him (I think it's safe to say that the various producers and directors didn't have to twist Stan's arm too hard to do all those movie cameos he's now so well known for). 

Ditko, on the other hand, was Lee's polar opposite. He eschewed the fame his creation brought him (as Eriksen's bio alludes to) and eventually gained a reputation for being something of a recluse.

So yeah, the late Ditko likely wouldn't have wanted to see this biography about him, as flattering as it is. That said, it's a good one, and I enjoyed it more than the Stan Lee one that it followed, probably because, unlike Lee, I've never read an actual biography of Ditko, and, in fact, couldn't tell you anything about him other than maybe rattling off a list of comics characters he created, and what I've seen of his work.

The word the Eriksen and Gatlin team attach to Ditko is the one in the sub-title, "strange," and which, given the name of his second most famous Marvel hero, naturally has something of a double meaning. 

"There was absolutely nothing strange about comic book artists Steve Ditko," Eriksen writes in the book's opening, the format of which is an identical, four-part two-page spread to that which opened With Great Power. "His life was an open book!" 

This ironic statement comes above Gatlin's drawing of an annoyed looking Ditko shouting "No comment!" and trying to close his front door while a grinning, generic-looking reporter leers around it, and various arms holding cameras, microphones and notepads are seen on the other side. 

This continues into two more similar situations, in which the prose narration contrasts with Gatlin's cartoon-like illustrations (It's worth noting that this book is a much funnier one than the first), culminating in Eriksen relenting over an image of a smiling Ditko holding a pencil and seated at a drawing table, an image of Spider-Man in one of the panels on the big piece of paper before him.

Okay...so Steve Ditko wasn't really like the rest of the artists at Marvel Comics, but the same could be said about his—yes, Steve's!—most famous creation: Spider-Man. 

The next two-page spread details the strangeness of Spider-Man, and how greatly he differed from the typical superhero, a strangeness accentuated by Gatlin's particularly thin, angular and, well, spidery version of Marvel's flagship hero which, despite adopting a variety of famous poses, looks more weird and alien than ever (Honestly? After reading this, I think Gatlin's is one of my favorite portrayals of the hero; it's easy to see how civilians would be creeped out by this Spider-Man, and how J. Jonah Jameson would viscerally recoil from the strange figure Gatlin draws here).

From there, we get a fairly linear version of Ditko's story, just as we did Lee's before. Ditko also grew up poor in the Great Depression, and he was also attracted to the fantastic, which, for him, meant comics. 

There's a great spread devoted to his work at Marvel and the difference between him and editor Stan Lee, and his reaction to a new character that Lee and Jack Kirby were cooking up (Gatlin draws a great Kirby; his sole appearance in this book looking somewhat bored as he works, a cigar clamped in his jaws). 

It wasn't strange when Stan and The King teamed up yet again for their new story: a boy, a magic ring, and a transformation into the grown-up hero named "Spiderman."

Ditko's job was to illustrated the new comic, but "Spiderman was just another repetitive brave and brawny hero!...Steve itched to break the mold in the best way he knew how—by making Spiderman strange."

We see just how wide the gulf in the two Spidermen was through Gatlin's drawing of Kirby's version, a large, muscular figure sporting a more classic costume and wielding a web gun, and Ditko's version, which we are now all familiar with (Even if the artists that followed Ditko, starting with John Romita Jr., pretty quickly transitioned the hero into a bigger, better-looking, more heroic and, well, less strange figure). 

In this book, Eriksen has Ditko do the heavy-lifting with the development of the character, not just coming up with the desigsn and elements of the secret identity, but creating the book himself: "Suddenly, Steve found himself writing and drawing Spider-Man—a comic book history first."

The book concludes with a passage in which we see Ditko retreating from his own fame, dodging young fans and, in one great illustration, questions, as Gatlin draws Ditko, a pencil behind his ear, in a leaping pose, while a half-dozen dialog balloons, each containing a single question mark, go flying and bouncing all around him. 

The final spread shows a happy Ditko at a drawing board, surrounded by a colorful collage, and a dramatically posing new but familiar character. "So he did what he did best: got to work," Eriksen writes, concluding of his latest work, "The comic was out of this world...and his most fitting work yet! Steve named him DOCTOR STRANGE."

Throughout the book—which gives a shorter, more streamlined version of Spidey that sidesteps some of the questions regarding contributions from Lee, Kirby and possible influences from past characters—Gatlin draws not only the aforementioned comics creators, but also Peter Parker, Spider-Man and some of the hero's foes (The Green Goblin, Doctor Octopus, Mysterio, The Sandman and The Scorpion) but, somewhat surprisingly, Captain Marvel and Batman (as well as obscure Simon and Kirby creation Captain 3-D, and Captain Battle, who I didn't recognize*). 

As with With Great Power, this book ends with a short prose section and bibliography.  Here, that section offers a more detailed biography of Ditko, including dates and reference to some of the controversies that wouldn't really fit in a picture book, including aspects of Spider-Man's creation and Ditko's departure from the comic. 

"Steve Ditko Would Hate This Book," reads a headline-like label to one part of this feature, which briefly notes his post-Marvel career (namedropping The Question and Mr. A) and just how media-shy he was, including how few photos there are of Ditko (which did make me curious as to how Gatlin went about developing his Steve, which must have been much harder than drawing Stan Lee, whose look has at this point become almost as iconic as that of some superheroes), his dislike of the "poison sandwich" biography Blake Bell wrote of him and the "rule" imposed by Ditko upon those meeting him: You don't talk about it.

Regardless of what Ditko might think of the book, though, I liked it, and I wouldn't mind reading similar biographies from this particular pair of Kirby, Simon or other famous and influential comics creators in the future.

*Thanks to Anthony Strand for identifying him on Bluesky for me!

DC Versus Marvel: The Amalgam Age Omnibus Pt. 3: Unlimited Access

In 1997 and early 1998, DC and Marvel published their second and final sequel to DC Versus Marvel, which was also the second and final miniseries starring the new character Axel Asher, aka Access, the jointly owned superhero with the power to create portals between the DC Universe and the Marvel Universe settings. 

This time, the script was the product of Karl Kesel, replacing DC/Marvel: All Access and DC Versus Marvel's Ron Marz. While this was Kesel's first time in the driver's seat for the Access character, he had been in the orbit of the publishers' crossover series before, having penned Amalgam one-shots Spider-Boy and Challengers of the Fantastic and co-written X-Patrol and Spider-Boy Team-Up. (I do wonder what Access co-creator Marz might have thought of Kesel's series, given the dramatic changes the latter made to Access' powers and origins; Marz doesn't say in his introduction included in the volume, only that he did have a pitch for a third Access series, in which the character visited the Amalgam Universe, but by then DC and Marvel cooperation was winding down.)

Kesel's partners on the book were pencil artist Patrick Olliffe and inker Al Williamson. Their art wasn't quite as stylistically distinct as that of Butch Guice in the previous series, although it did keep the general realistic-ish style, and the artists were capable of making the various characters all seem to fit in with one another, as if they belonged in the same story, despite how various their home comics were.

And, in this series, those home comics were more various than ever. Kesel has Access discover a few new powers, one of which is that not only can he travel between the two universes, he can also slide up and down their timelines, which gave the creators the opportunity to give us crossovers that the present-set DC Versus Marvel and All Access could not. 

And so we get to see the Two-Gun Kid draw on Jonah Hex, the/a Legion of Super-Heroes visit the world of "Days of Future Past" and, most excitingly, the original Avengers battling the original JLoA line-up (as it existed at the time, with Black Canary as a founder). 

Even more weird and fun crossovers are suggested in a pair of sequences, one involving Access ping-ponging through time and another in which he battles a future version of himself. In the first we see one-panel crossovers involving Devil Dinosaur and Anthro, The Phantom Eagle and Enemy Ace and The JSoA and The Invaders. In the second, we get particularly crazy amalgams in the background, like Spider-Man clones as Bizarros and a shiny Streaky the Supercat on the Silver Surfer's board.

Each issue is fairly stuffed with crossovers, as Access again finds characters in the wrong universes but, when attempting to fix things this time, he finds himself bouncing around the timestream/s. 

In the first, over-sized, 38-page issue Spider-Man and Wonder Woman take on evil New God Mantis and The Juggernaut (a particularly odd pair of villains to team-up and for those heroes to fight, but the why of this scene will be explained before the end of the series), and then Access finds a previous, "savage" version of The Hulk fighting a still alive (but gray at the temples) Green Lantern Hal Jordan.

From there the time-lost crossovers start, culminating in the Marvel Universe's New York City, about ten years or so ago. Darkseid and the forces of Apokolips have formed an uneasy alliance with Magneto and his Brotherhood of Evil Mutants, with the goal of conquering the world and subjugating humanity below homo superior, with Darkseid ruling over all.

Standing in their way are the early Avengers (sans Hulk, but plus Captain America) and the original five teenage X-Men in their matching black-and-yellow costumes, plus all the allies from the DC Universe Access can summon: The original Justice League line-up, the then electric, present-day Superman and the current crop of teenage superheroes (Robin, Superboy, Impulse, Wonder Girl and Captain Marvel, Jr...banded together here three months before the release of Young Justice: The Secret #1!).

While there were a lot of heroes therefore in the mix, Kesel kept the focus on Access, especially at the climax, with the character facing down god of evil Darkseid, the bad guy above all the other bad guys. Kesel even draws parallels between the two, with Darkseid noting both of them move other characters around like pawns on a chessboard to fight their battles for them, and ultimately framing this entire conflict as a struggle between himself and Access.

The final battle is fought using amalgamated heroes, with Access discovering that he has the ability to create amalgams himself, leading to a whole new crop of amalgams (most of 'em seen on the cover of the fourth issue) out of the raw material of the heroes present. Most of these amount to little more than fun names, like Green Goliath (Green Lantern + Giant Man) or Thor-El (Thor + Superman), although it's pretty fun and charming how each of them come with their own "continuity" that only really exists in their own minds, like Redwing (Robin + Angel), who insists he was trained by "Bat-X". 

By far the best of the bunch is Captain America Junior (Captain Marvel Jr. + Captain America) who, when he calls the name "Uncle Sam!" is gifted with such powers as the wisdom of Lincoln, the strategy of Eisenhower and the trickery of Nixon. 

Unlike the climax of All Access, this round of amalgamizing doesn't lead to a new suite of Amalgam Comics...perhaps because Access' new amalgams all exist within the Marvel Universe, rather than their own.

Or perhaps the publishers and the fans had by then begun to tire of the Amalgam Universe. Or sales on that second round of comics accompanying All Access weren't what the publishers had hoped for. 

Whatever the reason, without them, this particular crossover felt a little smaller in scale and importance than All Access and, obviously, DC Versus Marvel. And it would be the final appearance of the Access character, as well as the last series in which the universes crossed over at such a large scale, although there would still be a handful of one-shot crossovers left before the publishers ended their second era of collaboration: 1999's Superman/Fantastic Four (which namedrops Access) and Incredible Hulk vs. Superman, 2000's Batman/Daredevil: King of New York and, finally, a few years later, 2003's JLA/Avengers.

It doesn't seem like we can necessarily blame this particular series with the cessation of crossovers, though. Like All Access, it proved a lot of fun, giving much more room to the characters to interact that the original DC Versus Marvel series, and, with its focus on characters from different points in DC and Marvel history, it proved to be a fairly ambitious and imaginative work.