Is this every Zook and Cryll shared appearance from the past ten years...?

The other I mentioned Sholly Fisch, Rick Burchett and Dan Davis' latest issue of The All-New Batman: The Brave and The Bold, which featured a few uncredited cameos by old-school alien sidekicks Zook and Cryll, who used to pal around with Martian Manhunter and Space Ranger. Those are the panels above (I have a feeling some of those other aliens running about may also be "Easter Egg" style cameos, based on how specific their designs are and how strongly they vary from one another, but I didn't recognize any of them).

Would you like to see more of Zook and Cryll, in other DC Comics? I can't think of a better story to start with than "Without You, I'm Nothing," which was written by Evan Dorkin and drawn by Steven Weissman and appeared in 2001's hardcover anthology Bizarro Comics.

It begins with various obscure, semi-forgotten sidekicks standing around like day-laborers, waiting for someone to come along and take them on a superhero adventure. You can see Cryll and Zook front and center.

The sidekicks who don't get picked up retire to a bar to complain about their lot in life. After kicking things around for a while, Cryll suggests they do what other sidekicks before them have done: It doesn't work out all that well for them:After Evil Star hands them their asses, Cryll comes up with another idea: Some other stuff happens after that, but I don't want to spoil it, as it's a very sort story (Like all of those in the Bizarro Comics book, save the Stephen DeStefano-drawn Mxyzptlk/Bizarro team-up that bookends the contents).

I basically just wanted to share Weissman's takes on a lot of these weird characters (You can see his Tawky Tawny in that first panel; like Batman and The Scarecrow, he's a character I love seeing different artists draw for some reason). The story is a ton of fun, in large part because of all the rich little details Weissman works into each panel. For example, just in the four above, look at his Ace The Bat-Hound—he never talks, but is in almost every panel of the story and his silent mimicry of the talking characters' actions never fails to make me smile a bit.

Also, I love the panel where Evil Star is beating them up, and one of his little minions, The Starlings, is wearing Doiby Dickles' hat. Talk about kicking a guy when he's down...