Review: Phil Foglio, Hilary Barta and company's Plastic Man

Frank Miller and David Mazzuccheilli's "Batman: Year One". John Byrne's The Man of Steel. George Perez, Len Wein and company's Wonder Woman. All three late '80s comics, published after the 1985-1986 Crisis on Infinite Earths, updated and modernized the origins of the greatest DC Comics heroes, re-presenting their specifics and establishing themes and styles that were meant to influence future portrayals and, indeed, they would do just that...at least until DC decided it wanted another continuity-cleansing Crisis. 

Does the 1988 Plastic Man mini-series written by Phil Foglio, pencilled by Hilary Barta, inked by John Nyberg (and featuring some contributions from Kevin Nowlan and Doug Rice, to be discussed later), deserve to be mentioned among those same seminal comics?

Well, probably not. Heck, DC has never even collected it into a trade paperback, let alone kept it in print as an evergreen introduction to the character, along the lines of Miller and Mazzucchelli's Batman arc. 

But nevertheless, the series did mark Plastic Man's first real starring appearance after the events of Crisis*, it did introduce the character as if he were a brand-new one (ala Perez and company's Wonder Woman) and it did present a new, updated version of his origin and his status quo.

It also established something of a style and tone for the character going forward...that of a B-List hero with a wacky sense of humor, a character who may or may not actually be somewhat insane. (In my recent reading of all of the Plastic Man appearances I could find, only 1991's Action Comics #661 and 1996's Superman #110 and The Power of Shazam! #21 seemed to honor this miniseries' conceit of Plastic Man literally seeing the world in a cartoony way that deviated from reality.) 

It wouldn't be until later in the 1997-2006 JLA series that writers would attempt to tell more serious Plastic Man stories, with Mark Waid briefly exploring his criminal past when the Leaguers find their heroic and civilian identities split apart and Joe Kelly revealing that Plas has and estranged son. 

The 1988 Plastic Man was, again, written by cartoonist Phil Foglio, who would go on to create two more humor-focused miniseries for DC, 1991's Angel and The Ape and 1993's Stanley and his Monster revamps, both of which he would pencil himself. Today he's probably better known for his own series, Girl Genius. 

He was paired with the great Hilary Barta, who spent much of the 1980s as an inker, but was here handling the pencil art, and inked by John Nyberg. In addition to inking, Barta would go on to contribute to Marvel's What The--?!, Image's Stupid, DC's Paradox Press Big Book of... series and Bongo's Simpsons comics; I personally first encountered his work with Alan Moore on America's Best Comics, where he drew the not-entirely-unlike-Plastic Man feature "Splash Brannigan," one installment of which featured a stealth cameo by Plas, disguised as a red carpet.

The creative team also included Kevin Nowlan, who was credited with "Reality Checks", pages in each issue showing the "real world," as opposed to the world as seen by Plastic Man and Woozy Winks; Doug Rice, who the Grand Comics Database says was responsible for some layouts and gags (The fourth issue credits him as "Consultant); and colorist Rick Taylor and letterer Willie Schubert.

The very first page of the series is drawn by Nowlan, in that realistic style; it could not be further apart from that of Barta, which accounts for 21 pages of each issue. It is Nowlan who draws the essential origin story, in which Eel O'Brian and a gang of other criminals are attempting to rob a chemical plant when Eel is shot, some sort of acid gets into his wound and his co-conspirators all abandon him to his fate.

Rather than making it to a swamp, where he is discovered by a kindly holy man who conceals him from the police and tells him he believes there is good in him, as in creator Jack Cole's original, 1941 Plastic Man story (collected most recently in DC Finest: Plastic Man—The Origins of Plastic Man, which I wrote about him this post) Eel simply blacks out, the last panel of Nowlan's page being all-black. 

The next page opens with similarly black panels, filled only with colorful sound-effects (CLANK! rattle CLANK!), Eel's slowly opening eyes, and his own hesitant dialogue bubbles. He finally awakens, to find himself in a garbage can, an unhoused person trying to steal his tie, and everything, himself included, looking quite different, as Barta and Nyberg have now, of course, taken over art duties.

Barta's artwork, which you can see on the cover, is the work of a humor cartoonist more than that of a superhero comic book artist; sure, based on the cover alone, his Plas may seem a somewhat heroic figure, but look at his Woozy and all the other characters on it. That gives one a sense of the look of the book.

Every panel is filled with what Mad magazine's Will Elder used to call "chicken fat," extra, extraneous visual gags built atop visual gags that don't exactly move the plot but add flavor and texture to the proceedings. Most of Barta's panels deserve to be not only read, but paused at and pored over, allowing one to enjoy the detailed characters, caricatures and other funny business in the crowd scenes, backgrounds and foregrounds.

As for his suddenly transformed Eel, Barta's take on the character actually reminded me a bit of the art of Peter Bagge (although Bagge's best-known work, Hate, wasn't yet released at the time that this Plastic Man series was being created). Like a Bagge character, Barta's post-acid Eel was all face, with long, curving, looping, seemingly bone-less limbs; these stretched out of the sleeves and legs of Eel's suit, as he tried to make it out of the alley while being inconspicuous, people fleeing left and right as he walked down the street, screaming about a monster.

He's eventually rejected by his own gang, who also think he's a monster, and then chased by the police, and then the army, all of them shooting to kill. After a disgusting escape through a toilet bowel to the sewer (he emerges from a pipe spitting brown liquid with a "SPLURT" sound effect), he tries to drink his troubles away but is eventually tossed out of a bar on skid row.

Resolving to throw himself off a bridge—which we, of course, know wouldn't actually work—he meets Woozy Winks, who is carrying a fishing pole and asks if he happens to have a spare nightcrawler in his pocket. Eel is shocked that Woozy isn't shocked at his constantly changing appearance, but the newcomer explains that he sees weird stuff like Eel all the time, and that he's pleased to see that Eel is actually real. 

"Usually the really interesting things that I see aren't real!" Woozy says, before explaining that he was happily a resident of an asylum—a sign in front of the building in his flashback says "Arkham Asylum"—"Then something called Reganomics forced them to send me out into the world" and into the streets of New York.

Barta's Woozy is probably the best Woozy I've ever seen, outside of Cole's own hard-to-get-right, jowly version of the character. Barta gives him the green polka dot shirt and now old-timey hat, and the design seems like that of the later, perfected version that Cole used to draw: A big, somewhat pear-shaped head, big eyes, a bulbous nose that looks like it belongs to a Muppet rather than a man, a mouth full of big white cartoony teeth and a round, fat figure that is still capable of many energetic and dynamic poses.

Now under Woozy's wing, Plas tests out the limits of his powers, dons "some sort of circus outfit" (the only garment they treat with the plasticity-granting acid that doesn't dissolve) and decides whether he should use these new abilities for good or ill. 

Faced with this momentous decision, they decide to flip a coin—the very same manner in which the Woozy of the 1940s decided how he would use his own supernatural gift of protection by nature (As in the Cole story, we don't see how the coin flip turns out immediately).

The answer comes when Plastic Man captures his own old gang during an attempted bank heist, after which he's mobbed by the media, and has to pull Woozy away from the open bank vault, his sidekick shouting, "Two out of three! Two out of three!"

Though there are obviously liberties taken with Cole's original origin (and a topical gag about the Reagan administration that now dates the story even more so than the gangster stereotype Eel adhered to), the basic gist remains. Foglio, Barta and company benefited from the hindsight to know where Cole was going with his feature in a way that Cole—who was, of course, making it up as he went along—did not, so their Plastic Man arrives pretty much perfectly formed.  

It's therefore a farily perfect re-telling of Plastic Man's origins, and a comic book that is completely complete on its own (It would slide neatly into any sort of future "Best of" collection of Plastic Man stories). 

There are, of course, three more issues to go.

Each of these is similarly a done-in-one comic that reads just fine on its own, and doesn't require one to have read the previous issue, or have any idea at all what might be going on in the greater DC Universe (although the final issue does have an Invasion logo, and is labeled "Not an Invasion Aftermath Extra!").

In the second issue, Woozy and Plastic are roused by some city cops along with the other unhoused folks sleeping in the park (in their case, Woozy is on hammock made out of Plastic Man tied between two trees). 

They attempt to get a job as bank security guards, but the bank is robbed mid-interview. The thieves are known as The Ooze Brothers, a trio of cartoonish criminal types who have been mutated thanks to their diet of fish from the most polluted of waters. Now living up to their name, they are essentially living ooze in human form. (I would say we're lucky to not have the same environmental problems that America had in the 1980s, but, well, the Captain Planet villains in the Trump administration seem bent on making environmental degradation great again.)

Eventually our heroes succeed, in a way that actually even improves the lives of our villains, and, with the reward money they receive, they are able to secure a rundown office and open up a private detective agency. (There are a few allusions to let us know this book is indeed a DC comic, including mentions of Martian Manhunter, Belle Reeve and Batman in the dialogue; the final issue includes a mention of Booster Gold, a Superman cameo, and Superman rattling off a list of DC heroes who owe him a favor).

If the second issue presented us with a new status quo for Plastic Man and Woozy Winks, the third issue deviates from it. Feeling underappreciated, Woozy joins a cult—a bunch of beautiful women in robes asking him to do so seals the deal for him—and he takes off for California with all of his and Plas' money (which is, of course, in a sack with a dollar sign on it).

As toga-wearing guru Ramalama (whose name is always followed by a "ding dong" sound effect made by the ringing of a nearby bell) reveals his master plan, which involves getting thousands of followers to dance on the San Adreas fault line and thus break California off into the Pacific Ocean, Woozy snaps out of it. He joins Plastic Man and an eccentric old man who claims to be an Atlantean wizard named Arion (Arion VI, not the Arion you are probably thinking of, whom he doesn't the least bit resemble) to save the day. 

There are a lot of jokes about how weird California and Californians are, especially as opposed to the "normal" people of New York, including an in-story explanation for that weirdness. Having never been to California and only ever visited NYC, these jokes didn't really land with me, and I suppose your mileage may vary. They certainly seem old and tired in 2025, but then, this series is 37 years old now. 

The final issue of the series is the one that likely aged the poorest, as its plot revolves around the unhoused, who are referred to throughout variously as winos, bums, street people and bag people. Our heroes first realize something is amiss on the bus ride back to New York from California, as the bus seems completely full of "winos" (There's even a person in the overhead baggage area). 

When they return to the city, it too is filled with the unhoused, and the city mayor no sooner hires Plastic Man and Woozy to figure out what's going on than his honor is kidnapped by a robot. 

The plot that emerges sounds vaguely Douglas Adams-y. See, the Ooblort Space Confederation's welfare department has done such a good job of taking care of all the indigent in their jurisdiction that they've now run out of customers and, if they can't find more indigent to care for by the next budget meeting, they will be shut down.

And so they turned to earth, gathering the poor from all over the country and summoning them to New York City (via voices in their heads; see, they weren't talking to themselves all this time, but with the aliens). To keep the Earthlings in their "natural habitat," the aliens—who look an awful lot like SpongeBob's Patrick Star, although that cartoon was still 11 years in the future—plan to just take the whole island of Manhattan with them into space.

With Plastic Man busy fighting their robots, it's up to Woozy to rally the assembled masses to take on the aliens. While they are unmoved by Woozy's insistence that the disappearance of Manhattan will have deleterious effects on the world economy, when he tells them that the alien ship is full of old shoes, they spring into action, raiding the ship and tearing out everything they can, carrying away vital components in their shopping bags.

It's then that Superman—drawn quite off-model, in order to comport to Plastic Man and Woozy's view of the "real" world—arrives to lend a hand, as apparently when Manhattan is dropped back into place, it's facing the wrong way. (In addition to Superman's appearances, there are off-handed references throughout the series to Martian Manhunter, Batman, Belle Reeve and Booster Gold, letting readers know it's technically set in the DC Universe, although that setting doesn't come into play at all.)

All in all, it's a quite solid series with masterful work by Barta, and one that could really use a collection.

Maybe it will finally get one if James Gunn decides to do a Plastic Man movie in the near future...

*Between the time the last issue of COIE shipped and the first issue of this miniseries, Plastic Man appeared in an issue of DC Comics Presents (which seems to be set in pre-Crisis continuity, as it has Jimmy Olsen becoming Elastic-Lad during its proceedings) and issues of DC Challenge I've read but forgot the contents of (I think that series could use a collection, personally). He also had cameos in the Golden Age-set All-Star Squadron and Young All-Stars, as well as a cameo in Infinity Inc (although I'm not sure if that last one was a flashback to the Golden Age or set in modern times having, never read that one). 

So even the fact of whether he debuted in the new, post-Crisis DC Universe's Golden Age of the 1940s or, like Wonder Woman, was debuting for the first time in the late 1980s seems to be a point of confusion right off the bat for the then-new continuity.

History of the DC Universe, an illustrated prose book published in 1986 and meant to delineate the new, post-Crisis continuity only featured a cameo of Plastic Man, in which he appears in a crowd scene devoted to the All-Star Squadron, which would have meant he was a Golden Ager.  

DC would change that in the next official history of the DC Universe they offered, however, in the timeline that followed the story in Zero Crisis #0, recently collected in DC Finest: Zero Hour: Crisis in Time: Part Two. According to that, Plastic Man debuted "8 Years Ago", during the "New Heroic Age" ushered in by Superman's debut two years previously (Interestingly, according to this timeline, Elongated Man pre-dates Plas in the new continuity by one year).

That was the post-Crisis, pre-Infinite Crisis timeline, though. Who knows what continuity is supposed to be now. Perhaps we'll find out when DC publishes its upcoming New History of the DC Universe...

Another dent in my to-read pile

Agent 9 (Self-published; 2015) Unlike all the other books in this post, I did actually read this one shortly after it was originally released, but, rather than writing about it and/or filing it away somewhere, I set it on my much smaller to-write-about pile. That pile was very near the to-read pile in my old apartment, however, and as the years passed, the two grew closer and closer until the to-read pile eventually absorbed the to-write-about pile. 

Which is fine, I suppose, since it has been a decade since I first read this comic; obviously I would need to re-read it before attempting to write about it anyway.

As you may be able to tell by the cover alone, given how distinct her style is, Agent 9 is the work of the great Katie Skelly, whose works include Nurse Nurse, Operation Margarine and My Pretty Vampire. (If you're not familiar with Skelly's work, I'd highly recommend it. This is her website, and thus probably the best place to start). 

This particular book seems to be a self-published mini-comic (although at 8-and-a-half-by-11-inches, it's actually larger than your average, full-size comic), one containing a short, horny, 18-page story that was originally published on Slutist.com (A site that is no longer there. I suppose that happens when you wait a decade to review a comic, huh?)

It was a gift given to me by my friend Meredith, who had bought it at a past SPX. She even had Katie Skelly sign it for me:

The story stars a blue-haired model—that's her on the cover—whose shoot abruptly ends when a young man with '70s-looking clothes and a clipboard interrupts, telling her photographer that their booking ended two hours ago.

The model strips off her dress and retreats to her dressing room, where she proceeds to smoke a cigarette and masturbate, the guy from the studio watching her until she calls out that she can hear him in the hall.

Later, she sees him walking as she's driving by, so she picks him up and takes him to the beach with her. As they have sex there, she hears "The Girl from Ipanema" playing on a radio and follows the sound to a pair of bespectacled women in matching red and green who might be twins.

They lead her into a cave, where she's sucked into some sort of weird...rock...thing, within which she seems to have an orgasm. On the last page, she is again posing for the photographer, but now her hair is red and she's wearing a red and green striped minidress like those the women from the cave were wearing.

"Great look!" the photographer says, while the word "Ciao" appears on the right-hand side of the page, and a little "fin", a heart and Skelly's initials appear in the corner. 

It was nice to see Skelly's art so big and colored so brightly after her first few books, which were rather small and in black and white, and, if the story seems rather sleight, it is only 18 pages long. It was collected along with other "sex-positive comics created for SLUTIST between 2014-2017" by Fantagraphics under the title The Agency in 2018 and again in 2023. The former, a trade paperback, is currently out of print, but it looks like the latter, a hardcover, is still available. I'll discuss that book as a whole here in a couple of weeks or so.

Batman '66 Vol. 4 (DC Comics; 2016) The most noteworthy inclusion of this hardcover collection is the comic book that comes at its end, one a reader would be unlikely to expect here based on the cover. That would be Batman: The Lost Episode #1, a one-shot special that featured Len Wein and Jose Luis Garcia-Lopez's 30-page adaptation of an unproduced script for the original TV series by science fiction legend Harlan Ellison (You'll note his is the second name listed on the cover credits, right after that of Jeff Parker).

Ellison's episode, "The Two-Way Crimes of Two-Face!", would have introduced that particular villain to the show's rogues gallery (and thus to American pop culture at large). In addition to the adaptation itself, the special included all kinds of interesting material, including all 30 pages of Garcia-Lopez's un-inked, unencumbered pencil art, some preparatory sketches and Ellison's original script, all under a fully painted cover by Alex Ross. 

In this particular collection, that one-shot follows six issues of the regular Batman '66 title, from near the end of the book's three-year, 30-issue run. This volume was the penultimate one collecting the regular series, although were one looking to read the series today, the best bet might be the 2018 omnibus that collects the entire series as well as The Lost Episode or perhaps waiting a few months for August's Batman '66 Compendium.

That said, there were a lot of crossovers published as well, and those that didn't feature DC characters aren't in either collection, so if you want to see this version of Batman team-up with Archie, The Green Hornet, The Man From U.N.C.L.E. or The Avengers (as in Steed and Mrs. Peel, not Iron Man and Thor), you might want to try back-issue bins and the shelves of your local comic shop.

Anyway, these issues of the regular monthly series come from a variety of creators, including writers Parker, Mike W. Barr*, Tom Peyer and Rob Williams and artists Dave Bullock, Richard Case, Sandy Jarrell, Scott Kowalchuk, Michael Avon Oeming, Joe Prado, Ruben Procopio and Leonardo Romero (of recent Birds of Prey fame!). Each of the included issues has a cover from Michael Allred, who handled those for the entire series, and is perhaps the ideal Batman '66 artist, managing images that seem perfectly balanced between modern comics art, the pop art aesthetic of the television show and seemingly effortless likenesses of its stars.

While often times modern DC comics can be spoiled by having too many cooks in the kitchen, here it's quite a virtue, given that the series is essentially an anthology one, with different creators handling different stories each issue. While the designs are all obviously taken from the source material—as are the style, spirit and sense of humor of the plots—there's a fairly wide variety in art styles, as you can probably tell if you're familiar with very many of those artists mentioned in the previous paragraph. 

There's quite a wide spectrum between the more realistic represented by Romero and Procopio and the more cartoony by Bullock and Oeming, but the shifts certainly keep things from ever getting boring. (I think my favorite were probably those last two; Bullock has long been a favorite artist of mine, although I seem to see his work too infrequently, and it was just plain interesting to see what Oeming would do with the characters). 

Popular special guest-villains The Joker, Penguin and Catwoman all put in appearances, as do created-for-the-show villains The Archer, Bookworm, Professor Marmaduke Ffogg, Egghead and King Tut. Perhaps the most exciting villain in these half-dozen or so issues, however, is Lord Death Man, who here gets Batman '66-ized (Though originally appearing as the more prosaically named "Death Man" in 1966 issue of Batman, Chip Kidd's 2006 book Bat-Manga! introduced American readers to manga-ka Jiro Kuwata's 1960s adaptations of American Batman comics, which included the artist's version of the character. DC would later collect and publish a few volumes of Kuwata's manga). 

In fact, one of the many fun aspects of this series has always been seeing the creators similarly introduce villains from the comics into the particular, peculiar world of the TV show, including the likes of The Scarecrow, Clayface, Killer Croc, Poison Ivy and even Bane and Harley Quinn. 

That's at least part of what makes the "Two-Way Crimes of Two-Face!" at the back of the collection so exciting. The version of the character we're introduced to in the story seems to be lifted straight from the comics, with no significant change to his look, origin or modus operandi. Sure, he's a little more gentle than his comics counterpart (as are all the villains), simply engaging in simple thievery rather than rampant murder, and he talks in the same manner all of the characters on the show do, but he's a pretty darn accurate Two-Face (Garcia-Lopez does not engage in any sort of fan-casting here, it may be noted, at least, not any that I could detect; Two-Face looks like a comic book character, while Batman, Robin and some of the other players look like Garcia-Lopez's versions of the actors playing those characters).

Given its length and its origins, the story probably hews a little more closely to the format of the television show than many of the other stories in the regular series and is thus something of a jarring outlier when read along with the stories that precede it in one sitting. 

I do wonder if it might have been too elaborate to actually ever have been filmed, though; there are a couple of rather big set pieces that seem more like something from a movie than a network television show of fifty-some years ago (There's a scene set in a peculiarly constructed lunar observatory that I will speak more of in a moment, a scene of the Batcopter chasing a speed boat, a scene of Batman swimming underwater and a climax set on what appears to be an old, derelict pirate ship in a huge cavern). All of it is easy enough for Garcia-Lopez to imagine and render, though.

Well...almost. The scene at the lunar observatory didn't really make any sense to me when I read (and then, confused, re-read it and re-read it). The scene is clearly set at night, with a moon visible in the dark sky of an establishing shot and the various vehicles involved in a high-speed chase leading all having their headlights on. But when Two-Face is about to blast Batman with a shotgun, the Caped Crusader temporarily blinds him by reflecting sunlight off the reflective buckle of his utility belt.

I didn't figure it out until I read Ellison's script later, but apparently the room the scene is set in is supposed to be an unusual one, with half of the room darkened to represent nighttime and the other half lit by artificial "sunlight" to represent the daytime (And, of course, the duality of Two-Face and the separation between good and bad). 

The floor of the room is obviously bifurcated in Garcia-Lopez's depiction, with one half white and one half black, but it's' not clear from the art that one side of the room is actually dark and one is brightly-lit. I suppose the blame for this lies with Garcia-Lopez (and believe me, I feel bad finding any fault at all in such a master artist's work!), and maybe colorist Alex Sinclair. I think a bigger, better establishing shot of the interior of the room might have solved this confusion, but perhaps there was no room for one.

Is it also worth noting that Garcia-Lopez's art is, at times, perhaps a little too good...? While his Batman is clad in the TV show costume, and his facial features are those of Adam West, his figure is a good deal bigger, more powerful and more athletic than that of the actor, and certain panels can look somewhat strange, as if the comic book superhero is merely borrowing West's costumes (Note, for example, Batman crashing through the skylight of the observatory in a classic comic book moment, his cape spreading out like batwings, or, perhaps the bulging muscles of his back, chest and arm in the panel when Two-Face strikes him from behind with the boom of the ship). 

Still, what kind of madman would really complain about 30 pages of Garcia-Lopez art? And, taken in total, the story is, like the rest of the book it's a part of, a lot of fun. 

Elseworlds: Justice League Vol. 1 (DC; 2016) Despite the title, this collection of various Elseworlds comics originally published between 1997 and 1998 includes everything that didn't have either "Batman" or "Superman" in the title, rather than ones that were specifically branded as "Justice League" comics.

And so only two of them are truly Justice League comics, Justice Riders (the cover of which is repurposed for that of the collection) and League of Justice. Of the other inclusions, two are labeled "Elseworld's Finest" books, one is a Wonder Woman story and the other a Titans comic. 

This being an anthology, it is probably best to take each comic in turn. I'll do my best to be brief.

•Elseworld's Finest #1-#2 Written by John Francis Moore, pencilled by Kieron Dwyer and inked by Hilary Barta, this is neither a Batman solo comic nor a Superman solo comic, but a Batman and Superman comic, and that is, I suppose, enough of a distinction to qualify it for inclusion here (A pilot named Hal Jordan and an archaeologist named Dr. Carter Hall both make brief appearances though, and there's a passing mention of an Atlantean king who lost his hand in battle).

Moore sets his story in 1928, which I at first considered curious, as it was a good decade before Superman ushered in the age of comic book superheroes. Of course, that seems to be the whole point of the setting, allowing the narrative to be technically modern, but to take inspiration from and quite regularly reference the sorts of heroic fiction that pre-figured the superhero genre: Jules Verne and early science fiction writers, the pulps, newspaper comic strips and so on...I even wondered if there was a bit of Ernest Hemingway in there. (Today's readers will likely think of Indiana Jones, and perhaps the sort of pulp adventures that inspired the character's creation.)

The story is told via the diary entries of Lana Lang. Her professor father Thaddeus is in residence at a university in Metropolis when he is kidnapped by foreign agents with demon's head tattoos on their hands. They are apparently interested in his work translating directions to the lost city of Argos, which here has a double meaning that will be apparent to Superman fans. 

The only witness to the incident is 12-year-old paperboy Jimmy Olsen, who calls on the mysteriously strong Daily Planet reporter Clark Kent (who is not a superhero and, despite the cover, doesn't wear a costume yet; Lana tells us he's always been stronger and faster than the average Joe). 

After Lana arrives and reunites with her former Smallville sweetheart, they rush to Paris in search of the only man who could possibly help them find her father, freelance adventurer and soldier of fortune Bruce Wayne, who Moore writes as something of a rakish cad, and, in Dwyer's design, sports a thin moustache, day-old stubble and a prominent scar (Clark, by contrast, in both characterization and in design, is pretty much the same as ever). 

They manage to rescue Thaddeus from the clutches of desert bandit Ra's al Ghul (here drawn far sexier than usual), who wants to get his hands on the legendary society-destroying artifact said to be in Argos, although Wayne seems to give his life helping the others escape.

The Superman characters are then abducted by a big, red-bearded, Russian version of Lex Luthor, who seems modeled on Captain Nemo and who also wants the Argos artifact. He takes them with him to the Amazon jungle to find it. They do manage find the lost city of Argos...but not before Ra's and his men do. 

Before the artifact can fall into either madman's hands, however, Bruce Wayne arrives, now dressed in mystical bat-themed Egyptian armor he discovered in a cave while stumbling around dying, and the artifact springs to life, revealing itself to be from the planet Krypton, and, in the process, explaining Clark's true heritage, the secret of his great speed and strength and his Earth-conquering destiny. It also gives him a red, blue and gold costume.

Don't worry, everything works out.

Moore's globe-trotting script is obviously full of various tropes which, at this point, nearly a century after the story is set, might read like creaky cliches, but, well, cliches are cliches for a reason, and they are here satisfyingly compelling.  He also finds new and clever ways to insert the casts of both characters into this new old milieu, and mix them in unusual ways (Like, for example, having Ra's promise his daughter not to Bruce, but the obviously superior specimen of Clark).

In addition to the characters already mentioned, the creators also get in such members of the World's Finest's casts as Selina Kyle, Alfred, Perry White, a Kara and even Bibbo, as well as such unlikely cameos as The Newsboy Legion, Captain Marvel, Sugar and Spike and Fox and Crow. 

One could scarcely ask for a better art team to draw them all.

Read in 2025, I'm unsure of why this didn't become one of the more classic Elseworlds comics; my best guess is that perhaps it's hook wasn't as immediately apparent as, say, "Pirate Batman" or "Superman-as-Batman" (I was unsure of it myself until I was actually reading it). That, or its title and the fact that it was a Batman and Superman story rather than a Batman or Superman story meant it was relatively under-read compared to other such comics.

•Justice Riders #1 Look, I know no one wants to read the work of Clinton Cash: A Graphic Novel writer and Trump voter Chuck Dixon, especially not now that Trump is destroying the post-World War II world order that benefited the United States, decimating the federal government, actively trying to remake American society in his image, trying to deport lawful immigrants based solely on their expressing opinions he doesn't like, sending immigrants to a prison in a foreign country with no due process and even openly discussing doing the same to American citizens, one of the very things that lead the founders to rebelling against England in the first place, but, well, if one is going to read or re-read DC comics published in the '90s, dude is kind of hard to avoid; he was all over the place (If you don't want Dixon getting any royalties from a purchase you make, maybe look for this collection at your local library? And/or just skip it?)

Anyway, this is by Chuck Dixon and the art team of J.H. Williams III and Mick Grey. As Elseworlds go, this one is a pretty simple and straightforward one, with Dixon transferring various Justice League characters into an Old West setting and then telling a basic heroes versus villains story. While Williams redesigns each player to fit their new milieu, their personalities, relationships and, in some cases, even their superpowers are kept intact.

Sherriff's deputy Oberon has locked up the insane-sounding Faust in the Paradise town jail, the latter predicting some sort of terrible cataclysm. It comes to pass, and the town is completely obliterated, every resident killed in the process and Oberon surviving just long enough to whisper cryptically about what has occurred.

Paradise's Sherriff Diana Prince, who happened to be out of town at the time of the mysterious tragedy, reckons railroad tycoon Maxwell Lord is responsible. As she rides to Helldorado, the town that Lord has built for himself and stocked full of clockwork gunmen, she picks up various allies. These are cowboy-ized versions of The Flash, Hawkman, Booster Gold, Blue Beetle, Martian Manhunter and Guy Gardner. 

During the climactic gunfight with Lord and his mechanical army, a few other unexpected villains that will be familiar to DC Comics readers make appearances. There's also a cameo from dime novel writer named Colonel Clark Kent.

And that's it, really. Williams and Grey's art is, as one might expect, excellent, and the character designs are all quite solid, with that of Wonder Woman perhaps being the most striking. It's a relatively early and rare example of Wonder Woman wearing pants, and it works quite well. 

•League of Justice #1-#2 The cover for the first "stave" of this two-issue series suggests an obvious and straightforward premise, one that simply transfers the Justice League characters to a medieval fantasy setting (This would not be the last Elseworlds series to do so, either; 2001's Alan Grant-written Elseworlds book JLA: Riddle of the Beast would do the same). And, in a broad sense, that is what writer and penciller Ed Hannigan is up to here. 

What you can't tell from that cover, though, is that this is one of the crazier DC Comics published in my lifetime, a comic so bonkers that I'm actually kind of surprised that it saw print as is.

I suspect that part of the problem—and I do think it's a problem, given how incredibly hard to read certain passages are—is that Hannigan's story is just way too big for the space allotted it. 

Not only is the cast he's working with here fairly large, with some characters getting the room to be fleshed out (like Batmancer of the city of Goth), while others are named but barely explored (like The Atlantean, The Amazon Princess and characters Snappacaw and Hunkk'll, whom I just this very second realized are references to Snapper Carr and Ma Hunkel), but there is a lot of world-building to the book, so much so that it is conveyed in wordy info dumps and a few pages where the dialogue balloons fill as much or more of the panels than the drawings do. (There's a page in the first issue, wherein The Martian psychically imparts a creation story of the fantasy world to our protagonists where my first reaction was "You expect me to read all that?")

Hannigan, who is here inked by the great Dick Giordano, opens his story in Goth, with his Batmancer narrating. It's a pretty straight fantasy fiction version of Batman. He wears the skin of a giant bat as a costume, he tools around his big, crime-filled city in a chariot pulled by two giant bats, he works with "scientific detection, deductive ratiocination, dactylography" and such-like instead of sorcery to fight crime, he banters with his butler Alfred (here, a zombie) and he battles a sad version of The Joker named The Griever. He is the first of the book's many narrators. 

Four pages later, the scene shifts to Brattleboro, Vermont, in the present day, and the narrator changes to a young man named Neil, a camp counselor hanging out with two of his charges, Freddy and Alcy. When they see a long-haired junkie named Kenny who looks like he's trying to mug a not-entirely-present woman (she appears to be penciled and colored but not inked, giving her an illusory sense of presence), they intervene, and then the four modern Vermonters are all transported to a fantasy forest, where they are immediately rescued from bandits by a green-clad archer who talks funny ("Hummm! Tha must be from afar away indeed if tha doon't ken Longbow Greenarrow, keeper of Yuirth's Forest Lands...").

Yuirth is the world they have arrived in and, as the un-inked woman Bird Lady will explain to them shortly, it is under great threat from someone named "Sovereign", the book's Superman (who you can see on the cover of the second issue), "and the dark power behind him" (That power would be Luithorr, who discovered Sovereign as a baby and raised him into an obedient soldier/son).

The four people from Vermont are referred to by various characters as "Elseworlders" and "Unyetlings" (The latter because Yuirith is somewhere in Earth's distant past, many creations ago, meaning if it is destroyed our world won't come to be). Bird Lady, the book's version of Black Canary, assigns our Elseworlders a quest. 

They are given an indecipherable scroll which apparently names the various heroes they will need to gather together to defeat Sovereign; these are, in addition to the book's Green Arrow, versions of The Flash, The Atom, Martian Manhunter, Green Lantern John Stewart, Hawkman and Hawkgirl, Aquaman and Wonder Woman. Oh, and Bird Lady prophesies that, of the four of them, one of them isn't going to make it...or, as she puts it, "E'en should you prevail 'gainst Sovereign, one of your number shall not leave the world alive!"

After meeting the book's Atom, a wizard named "Atomus The Palmer", and then going through an unreadable two-page spread, our protagonists split up and begin encountering the various heroes, all of whom are individually endangered by Sovereign and Luithorr.

The two villains apparently dwell in Metropolis, a city atop a giant tower that moves through the land like a titanic chess piece, gouging a trail of destruction through the surface of the world as it does so. They also have a zombie horde. 

Not all of this world's League equivalents will survive, and four of them end up passing their powers to the Elseworlders by giving them some item or power of another. (Kenny, for example, is at first changed by whatever the hell happened when Atomus took them through the "realm Irrational!!", is then given the huge-headed Martian's cape. After donning it, he begins to lose his hair, turn green and transform into what looks like a bug-eyed, exposed-brain version of J'onn J'onnz...albeit wearing tiny denim shorts. You can see him here.)

The narration and dialogue heavy story seems to move faster and get more crowded as it goes on; I had the feeling that Hannigan had developed all of the superhero characters to the same extent he had Batmancer, but just didn't have room to devote to each as the story progressed and the page count dwindled. This really feels like it could have, should have been a 12-part maxi-series, or even an ongoing, rather than a two-issue miniseries. 

Also making it hard to read is the fact that almost every character has their own distinct speech style, just as the Green Arrow character used various archaic language, so some of the dialogue can be well, kind of irritating (Especially that of Atomus). 

Additionally, the narrator changes frequently, not just between Batmancer and Neil, but also Kenny and the kids, and it's not usually clear whose thoughts we're meant to be hearing when. Complicating things further, some of the narration boxes aren't narration boxes, but psychic messages sent between, say, Kenny-with-The Martian's-powers and his allies, or, later, Luithorr and Sovereign.

The art is nice, the designs mostly bonkers (here's the Hawkgirl character, for example), there's at least one really great deep cut (Luithorr commands a dragon that seems to be the one from the cover of 1961's Brave and The Bold #34) and Hannigan obviously has a big, ambitious epic he wants to tell, but, well, I'll be damned if it wasn't one of the hardest comics I've ever had to puzzle my way through that DC has published. 

(As an aside, the story features an Atlantis is at war with Amazonia, with this book's versions of Aquaman and Wonder Woman the last surviving members of each race, their battle interrupted by the arrival of our heroes. Is this the first time Aquaman and Wonder Woman's mythical homelands went to war against one another? Just wondering, as that is one of the plotlines that Geoff Johns used in his Flashpoint event series).

•Wonder Woman: Amazonia There apparently were never enough Wonder Woman Elseworlds comics produced to give her a collection of her own, so this tale by writer William Messner-Loebs and artist Phil Winslade telling a new, potent and fairly brutal version of the basic Wonder Woman story gets collected here instead. 

I would say it was set in an alternate history version of Victorian England, but Victoria is definitely not England's monarch in the book, so I'm not sure saying so would be accurate. The various markers of time that Messner-Loebs alludes to, though (it's after P.T. Barnum's circus, Jack the Ripper's killings and the publication of A Tale of Two Cities), would seem to place it in the late 19th century.

Colonel Steve Trevor puts his young wife Diana on the London stage, where her great strength (and, one imagines, her relatively skimpy costume) attracts great crowds, including, on the first pages of the story, King Jack and his son Prince Charles (Remember, this is an alternate history tale). When Diana saves the royals from a would-be assassin, she and her husband are invited to dine with them at Buckingham Palace.

Before that, though, our narrator will tell us a bit of the history that lead us to this point, not just of Diana's childhood in the Whitechapel slums nor of how Jack came to be king after a terrible fire wiped out the queen and almost all her family and how British society changed under the new king, becoming even more of a patriarchy and having even greater divisions between men and women than existed at the time in the real world (How different? Well, women all seem to wear "ceremonial" chains). 

We also learn of Trevor's discovery of Amazonia, where he washes ashore following an airship disaster over the Atlantic. Learning of a lost civilization of Bronze Age women warriors from Trevor, the British seek to attack and conquer it. They succeed. 

Whether Diana knows that she was smuggled from there or not is a little unclear; she tells her daughters a bedtime fairytale about a similar island she calls "Kera" before she must go to bed herself and submit to the sexual advances of Trevor (Who is here very much a bad guy; this scene is quite tastefully told, though, with a panel of Trevor closing the bedroom door followed by a series of panels depicting parts of their house, as if the "camera" filming the comic were retreating from the room, through the house and to the street).

When the Wonder Woman's great strength and strange abilities are put to use defending the poor women of London's slums, who seem to suddenly be disappearing at an alarming rate, Diana finds out just how bad a man her husband is...and how bad the king is.

Ultimately, she finds herself chained in an Amazonian arena, surrounded by the other women of her homeland, while Trevor and other men rush at them, pick axes and weapons brandished to kill them for sport. 

Trevor and these others have just recently taken the king's "distillate of masculinity", which he claims "eradicates all trace of the feminine within us." (And here it seems to work more like Bane's Venom than, say, testosterone, as when we see the men they all look like big, muscular, hulking brutes, their chests and arms spilling from their too-tight shirts.)

The battle of the sexes so starkly rendered, with the epitome of womanhood and her all-female race engaged in hand-to-hand combat against a murderous patriarchy that have chemically altered themselves into a savagely pure manhood, the climax will seemingly answer the question of women's place in society. A pair of men whom Diana has touched with her generosity and kindness (and power and beauty) make small but decisive acts to tip the scale in Diana and the Amazons' favor.

There's a happy ending, which one imagines William Moulton Marston himself might have approved of, with the sad, super-sexist state of the society we're presented with throughout the comic being radically reformed, in large part due to the act of a particular man submitting himself to a type of ritual bondage to a woman.

While Messner-Loebs does a pretty remarkable job of distilling some of the basics of the original Wonder Woman stories to their essence and transporting them to a half-invented setting that only accentuates their themes, I imagine it's Winslade's incredible artwork that really sold this book to readers in the late 90s.

Highly detailed and realistically rendered, the many lines on each figure and object evokes the illustrations from newspapers of the era, resulting in a comic that looks like it could conceivably have existed in this form in, say, 1895 or so. (Even letterer John Workman's occasional onomotopeiaic sound effects are old-timey in their fonts, the BAR-OOM! of an elephant gun firing or the TRUUK! of a pickaxe striking the earth looking wholly of a piece with the setting.)

While some passages are quite wordy, particularly those devoted to scene-setting, world-building and  history-telling, they remain evenly illustrated, the words never overwhelming the imagery. And every panel is a true work of art, richly detailed to the point that Winslade seems to draw every single face in every crowd, every brick in every building, and the shadow of each contour in a cloud of billowing smoke.

This one's a real masterpiece. Not bad for a mostly male endeavor. (Patricia Mulvihill handles the colors; these are mostly dark and dull, befitting the setting, the reserved tones broken by the bright red of Diana's Wonder Woman costume.) 

•Titans: Scissors, Paper, Stone One brilliant comic follows another, although the two could scarcely be more different from one another. This one is by the great Adam Warren, who writes, pencils and co-inks the 48-page one-shot. (Tom Simmons is his co-inker.) 

In its basic construction, the book looks fairly simple. In the far-flung future, a group of young adults with amazing powers battle "big, dumb, slavering monsters" that are imperiling their city, scenes of the battle being intercut with flashbacks in which the four heroes are introduced in turn, as their leader sets about recruiting them for this particular mission.

But Warren is engaged in something far deeper than that, the book filled with the sort of futuristic, scientific-sounding sci-fi elements associated with the now-disgraced Warren Ellis and practicing the sort of meta commentary on superhero comics usually associated with the works of Grant Morrison (Warren even prefigures the practical application of the "superheroes always win" trope into a superhero narrative that Morrison used a couple of times in his later JLA run).

It will be more than halfway through the book before it becomes apparent as to why this book is even branded a "Titans" comic, given that, unlike all of the other books in this collection, it does not transpose existing characters into a new or different setting. Rather, the heroes are all new, original ones of Warren's creation...although one, eventually assigned the name "Captain Thug", will be revealed to be kinda-sorta possessed by the downloaded personality of one of DC's greatest and most popular superheroes...who may or may not be fictional in the world of this story (It doesn't matter which, for the purposes of this comic).

The character driving the flashback action is Jamadagni Renuka, who will be assigned the name "Witchy-Poo" ("I've decided that we definitely need some muy absurd noms de guerre to be authentic superheroes...!" she tells her team once they have all been recruited and assembled). 

She is a "Nietzschean Genemage," which means she has the genetic ability to actualize any sort of magical ritual, no matter what it is and whether or not she believes in it. With an unspecified threat on the immediate horizon, she's attempting to use sympathetic magic, "recreating the mythic pattern of a particular team of superheroes", The Titans. 

She's the sorceress, and she's gathered "a tormented cyborg" (here a young woman whose brain was transferred into a full-body prosthetic, a super-advanced but decommissioned "bleeding-edge technology killing machine" she code-names "Prosthetic Lass") ,"a token alien" (the resurrected victim of an alien parasite capable of manipulating energy she dubs "Dead Prettyboy") and, in her boyfriend with a superhero personality downloaded into him, she gets a "Dick Grayson...a good-natured thug lacking super-powers, but well-armed with a positive attitude."

So just as Raven gathered Cyborg, Starfire and Robin to battle Trigon in the far-distant, now possibly fictional and "potentially commercial" mythic past (okay, and a few others, but this is only a 48-page comic), Jamadagni has her Titans ready to confront an impending "clysm" (Her term for "cataclysm" is one of the many bits of futuristic slang Warren peppers his characters' dialogue with; in addition to off-handed references to miraculous technological advances, they incorporate bits of foreign languages and at least one bit of profanity that is clearly a corrupted version of what people in our time exclaim, i.e. "Jeezus Rice!").

Her plan works, but with a side-effect she wasn't counting on, although the programmed superhero personality assures her it is actually a regular part of the superhero mythology, leading her to a last page exclamation that sounds like a sentiment that many comic readers would, in the coming years, most strongly associate with the sometimes cynical comics of Garth Ennis. 

So yeah, I've compared Warren's work here to that of Ellis, Morrison and Ennis, popular superstar writers that I don't think we tend to associate Warren with—perhaps because he's also an artist, perhaps because he often works in a comedic mode or perhaps because he doesn't seem to have ever had a hot direct-market hit like some of those writers' best-known works. But I think it's pretty clear he deserves to be thought of in the same breath as popular comics' better, most beloved writers. (This isn't a one-off, either; his Gen-13 work and his still-unfolding Empowered are pretty brilliant, too.)

Warren is often associated with his manga inspired style, and his character designs here are all, indeed, quite manga inspired (He seems to sneak in Kei and Yuri from Dirty Pair and Ryoko from Tenchi via one character's "vid shirt," which changes images in each panel in which it appears). The page layouts and thus the storytelling, however, are purely (and appropriately) Western style, although there are a couple of action sequences that are definitely more manga-like. 

This is distinct enough a work that it's easy to imagine it not having the word "Titans" in the title—Warren could have taken the name "Dick Grayson" and that of another superhero's identity out of the book entirely, excised the reference to the Titans and published this through pretty much any publisher quite easily. 

Oh, and as for the sub-title, it comes from the fact that Jamadagni says that, while explaining how her powers work, that she can use any system, even children's games like rock, paper, scissors. When fighting the monsters, she uses spells based on the Japanese version of the game, jan ken pon.

Given Warren's remarkably fleshed-out future and his riffing on the idea of ancient superhero culture inspiring future would-be heroes, I'm kind of surprised DC didn't ask him to pitch a Legion of Super-Heroes project after this (although I suppose it's possible they did, and it just came to naught), but then, I guess the LOSH is only a thousand years in the future, while this seems quite a bit further, more DC One Million than 30th Century. 

Anyway, as with Amazonia, this comic is reason enough to pick up this collection...if you can't find it in a back-issue bin, anyway.

•Elseworld's Finest: Supergirl & Batgirl Despite the similarity in titles, this last comic in this collection has nothing at all to do with the first one, aside from the fact, I suppose, that they are both about team-ups from the members of the Batman and Superman families.

Most of the better Elseworlds have simple, easy to understand premises that involve either a single, dramatic change in an existent story that leads to a drastically different version of a hero, or a new setting, or even a combination of two stories (Batman + Green Lantern = Batman: In Darkest Knight, for example, or Batman + Frankenstein = Batman: Castle of the Bat).  

This one, however, has a whole bunch of changes, many of which seem random and unrelated. I guess the basic idea is that, instead of Superman and Batman, as is usually the case, what if each of their respective family of characters was headed by Supergirl and Batgirl...? Maybe...?

What I found the most interesting aspect of this particular comic was its credits. Writer Barbara Kesel, penciller Matt Haley and inker Tom Simmons all share a "co-plotters" credit. That's not unusual for writers and pencillers, and it makes sense if they spent a lot of prep work on the story together before setting about their individual tasks or if they made the book using the "Marvel method," but it seems quite unusual to me that the inker was involved as well.

In this particular tale, Barbara Gordon was orphaned when her police commissioner father and mother intervened to save the Wayne family from mugger Joe Chill after a movie one night. The driven Barbara was adopted by the Waynes and became Batgirl. Using her all-seeing Oracle Security System to protect the walled-off city-state of Gotham from all "paranormal" heroes and threats, she's set up a police state that one member of the group of superheroes known as the Justice Society refers to as fascist.

Having discovered her secret identity, womanizing playboy Bruce Wayne uses his wealth and wits to aid her, essentially acting like her Alfred.

Meanwhile, the last survivor of Krypton, Kara, was received on Earth by Wonder Woman and the Justice Society and became Supergirl. Based in Metropolis, she's Platonic best friends with the city's benevolent industrialist Lex Luthor.

Supergirl, Luthor and about a dozen members of the Society visit Gotham to help Bruce and Babs announce a new LexCorp clean energy initiative—after the superheroes all pass through Batgirl's incredibly stringent security protocols. Tthings go very, very wrong when Luthor is kidnapped by The Joker, here transformed and empowered by a version of Kryptonite-infused Venom given to him by Emil Hamilton. 

Batgirl refuses the Justice Society's help but reluctantly accepts that of Supergirl after she flies into Gotham airspace without permission. Together the pair break into Lex's Metropolis headquarters and learn the dark secret behind his solar power innovations, as well as an atrocity he committed in the past (Here's a hint: I haven't mentioned the baby that was rocketed to Earth from Krypton before Supergirl arrived yet, have I?). 

Fans of these two characters may enjoy seeing them remixed thusly. For me, the greatest pleasure the book offered was seeing the redesigns of all the heroes on this Justice Society's apparently massive line-up, which included what appear to be brand-new characters (Vectron, Revenant, Interceptor, etc), some unlikely inclusions (Civilian Tim Drake, Barda, Blue Devil, Green Lantern Abin Sur, Ambush Bug in an armored suit) and a pair Black legacy characters (Captain Marvel and Black Canary; a flashback shows the white originals).

While Wonder Woman and the two title characters have rather radically redesigned new costumes, flashbacks show them wearing their original costumes from their first appearances and, for Wondy, an intermediary costume at one point. 

Jerry Siegel's The Syndicate of Crime (Rebellion; 2021) While attaching "Jerry Siegel's" to the title was probably a marketing move, I imagine there must be some legal reason that publisher released the book as The Syndicate of Crime as opposed to The Spider, given that the latter is both the name of the feature it collects and the character who starred in it.

Originally published in British weekly comics anthology Lion between 1965 and 1967, the short, black and white strips were the work of writer Ted Cowan and artist Reg Bunn. Jerry Siegel, the famed co-creator of Superman, would replace Cowan after the first two storylines, "The Spider" and "The Return of the Spider," which means his work shows up about 56 pages into this this 144-page collection. 

The feature's star was a brilliant master criminal known as The Spider. He was a peculiar-looking figure, a big, athletic man with elf-like pointy ears, a severe widow's peak and a prominent nose; he looked more than a little like Captain Marvel's old villain Black Adam. Dressed in a tight-fitting black costume laden with his mechanical apparatus, The Spider could cling to the sides of buildings, descend from great heights on silken threads a thousand times stronger than nylon, and entangle opponents with his web-gun.

He also possessed a variety of other gimmicks, although these were not necessarily spider-themed: Miniature jet rockets, smokescreens and a gun that fires a knock-out gas that was, as Cowan had him often repeat variations of, "harmless...but effective!"

The Spider's ambition was, as Cowan first put it, to "build an empire of crime...crime on a scale of which no man ever dreamed," and, in Siegel's later telling, to become "the uncrowned king of crime." To that end, the first serial finds The Spider recruiting his two henchmen, expert safecracker Ray Ordini, whom he rescues from a rooftop as the police are closing in on him, and crooked scientist "Professor" Pelham, who he frees from prison after orchestrating a complicated mass breakout.

The trio would emerge from The Spider's castle headquarters in a weird-looking "helicar" of Pelham's invention to commit audacious crimes, always escaping no matter how dire the circumstances may look for them, thanks to the Spider's cunning (and, in a few cases, Siegel offering him obvious help, as when The Spider turns out to be a robot duplicate of himself, or when a conveniently placed princess saves him and his team).

Opposing them are bland, characterization-free police detectives Bob Gilmore and Pete Trask ("the pals," as Siegel's narration would oddly refer to them), but, by the second story in the collection, The Spider would start to find himself matching wits with other master-criminals more often than the law.

The first of these is The Mirror Man, who beats the Spider and his gang to a robbery of ten million in gold bullion in "The Return of The Spider." A big, jolly, bearded man who Bunn draws as a sort of evil Santa Claus, the Mirror Man used mysterious technology to create life-like illusions to seize the ship carrying the bullion, fool The Spider and law enforcement and, at one point, bring a city to its knees by projecting an army of dinosaurs destroying it. 

Siegel would follow up with two rival criminals of his own. The first of these was Dr. Mysterioso, a rather generic mad scientist type with a variety of fantastic inventions (a robot duplicate, a specially bred giant spider, a chemical formula that temporarily gives him Plastic Man-like powers and so on). 

He was followed by the much more unusual Android Emperor, a huge, bearded Hercules of a figure who had made an army of androids, none of which looked much like robots, but rather had fantastical shapes given an unsettling degree of realism by Bunn's unparalleled art (A favorite of mine is the bemused-looking ape with large, plate-like rocket boosters under the soles of his feet and buzzsaws for hands). 

Being a serialized comic strip rather than a full comic book, The Spider feature doesn't necessarily collect into a trade paperback all that cleanly. Each new installment, which came every two pages at the outset, would contain a box with a paragraph explaining the strip's premise and recapping what had come before, which is obviously unnecessary if one is reading the strips back-to-back like this (I learned quickly to just ignore these, which made the reading much easier once I did so). Additionally, that meant the stories had to have a dramatic climax, turning point or danger for the character presented every two pages or so, making for a rather clipped reading experience. 

Luckily, the feature's page count expands before too long, which has the result of both bigger panels, giving readers a better look at Bunn's gorgeous linework, and making for a smoother read. 

While it's Siegel's name that Rebellion included in the title, it's Bunn's work that really makes this a book worth reading. It's head and shoulders above what most of his American peers were doing in comic books at the time, highly realistic without ever looking stiff or over-referenced. Composed of many fine lines and an amount of cross-hatching that hurts my hand just to look at, it is truly beautiful stuff, more akin to a Golden Age newspaper Sunday strip or the illustrations that used to run in newspapers in the days before photography was common (which I also said about Phil Winslade's art above, I realize). 

Paul Grist, who writes a short five-paragraph introduction to the book, said Bunn's drawings "look as if they had been freshly woven out of spider's webs."

The result of this style when applied to the book's more fantastic elements is to accentuate their sense of the surreal. The Mirror Man's illusions couldn't look more real, even when what they were depicting were obviously fantastic (giant, hypnotic eyes filling the sky, a huge hand pointing the way, a parade of prehistoric monsters), and then there's the matter of the androids, one of whom looks perfectly human until its limbs fly off like rockets trailing grasping tentacles, while others resemble medieval monsters come to life. 

Being of British origin, I'm not sure how easy this book might be found at this point—I just checked the two library systems I have access to, and none of the libraries in either seems to have a copy—but if you should find it or be able to order it through your local comic shop, it's well worth a read. 

It certainly makes me want to see other British comics from that era, if only to determine how extraordinary Bunn's work really was. That is, was that level of skill and that particular style the standard for British adventure comics of the 1960s, or was Bunn as much an outlier as he seems?

The Spider's adventures would apparently continue through 1969. Rebellion has since published two more collections, Jerry Siegel's The Syndicate of Crime Vs. The Crook from Space and Jerry Siegel's The Syndicate of Crime Vs. The Crime Genie, in 2023 and 2024, respectively. 

Looking at the Amazon listings, it looks like all three collections are also available under slightly different titles, with the words "The Spider's" replacing "Jerry Siegel's" on some editions, so maybe whatever legal or marketing factors were at play, it depended on whether the editions were meant for American versus British consumption...?

Star Wars Omnibus: A Long Time Ago... Vol. 5 (Dark Horse Books; 2012) When the release of Return of the Jedi in 1983 brought about another surge of interest in the franchise, young fans like me seemed hard-pressed if they wanted more Star Wars. 

As I recall, in the years immediately following Jedi, "more Star Wars" meant Saturday morning cartoons Ewoks and Droids (both released in 1985) and a pair of made-for-TV Ewoks movies (released in 1984 and 1985). Even though I was part of the target audience for these projects at the time, being six years old when Jedi was in theaters, I recognized them as being baby stuff, not as thrilling, mature or, well, as good as the three feature films. 

Back then, I had no idea that Marvel Comics was regularly producing a comic book series that continued the adventures of the heroes from the films (not just the Ewoks and droids), nor that it was more in keeping in the tone and spirit of the films than the kid-friendly projects I could find on my TV set. 

Of course, between the ages of six and eight, I probably wouldn't have been ready for Marvel's Star Wars comics, which, while technically an all-ages comic, still had an awful lot of words in them for young Caleb. (I wasn't the greatest of readers as a little kid. I was probably in fourth grade before I started tackling prose, and, as I've mentioned before, I didn't start reading comic books regularly until I was 14.)

Now, as an adult reading these comics for the first time in the 21st century, long after the establishment of a sprawling Star Wars "Extended Universe" buttressed by a trilogy of film trilogies and more novels, video games, comics and TV shows than I could ever consume devoted to filling in whatever blanks might remain in franchise's saga, I find these early Marvel comics particularly fascinating. 

That is, of course, because they were being made at a time when so many of those blanks had yet to be filled in, and there was so much open space in which the creators could play (This 2015 Tegan O'Neil history of Marvel Star Wars will likely be of interest; O'Neil does a good job of articulating exactly what made various points in the original Marvel ongoing book so compelling...especially when read now). 

As I mentioned in the previous post tackling my to-read pile, which included a review of A Long Time Ago... Vol. 4, I was particularly interested in the post-Jedi period of the comic, of which there were 27 issues spanning two years. 

After all, here Marvel and its creators were free to do pretty much whatever they wanted with the characters and concepts, as the "official" story of Star Wars was over, its main villain gone, its core rebels vs. Empire premise resolved and no real canonical future yet established in tie-in media like that of the novels.

That fourth omnibus included the first five post-Jedi issues of the series, in which Jo Duffy and a few other writers were apparently casting about for a new direction, and a couple of those issues feeling an awful lot like re-purposed inventory stories.  

This volume is, obviously, all post-Jedi. 

Duffy writes all but two of the issues; the two she didn't write are done-in-ones written by Archie Goodwin and then-editor Ann Nocenti. 

The series finds the former rebel alliance, now referred to as the Alliance of Free Planets or simply the Alliance, based on Endor, the heroes embarking on various diplomatic missions, attempting to recruit ambassadors from various planets to join them in organizing a democratic, post-Empire system of government for the galaxy. (Contrary to the post-Jedi stories told in the prose novels and later Dark Horse comics, Luke is here quite adamant about not training anyone else in the ways of the Jedi, and the Han/Leia romance is basically frozen in place.)

Imperial holdouts including stormtroopers and officers are occasionally encountered, sometimes seeking to hold on to power, other times working with various bad guys, and, intriguingly, Duffy introduces a pair of Vader replacements. 

One of these lasts but an issue. This is Flint, who we met in 1983's annual (collected in the previous omnibus), when he joined the Empire as a stormtrooper, seeking the power Vader had promised him. Here he is an apparent dark lord of the Sith, with a light saber, mastery of the Force and an incredibly cool, medieval-looking suit of black armor (designed by the issue's guest artist, Jan Duursema, who would go on to draw a lot of Star Wars for Dark Horse decades later). It's kind of a shame this issue is also the last we see of him. 

The second Vader replacement is Dark Lady Lumiya, who we first meet as a cyborg enforcer working with the aristocratic oligarchs on a planet Mon Mothma and Leia visit. She will later ally herself with the new threat to the galaxy that Duffy will gradually introduce in the coming issues.

These are the Nagai, a race of particularly cool-looking, white skinned, black haired space goths from a neighboring galaxy that seek to conquer this one, now that the empire has been vanquished (One of them looks an awful lot like a particular Vertigo character, who I assume we will all pretend never existed, thanks to the actions of the writer who created him).

After one of their number, named Knife, is introduced in an issue set on Kashyyk, where he is trying to reinstate the slave trade of Wookiees, the Nagai will come to the fore, dominating the last year or so's worth of the series. 

As the series winds down, Duffy will increasingly focus on some of her own creations that have been added to the expanded cast, including the red-skinned Zeltron Dani, the water-breathing Kiro and the psychic Hoojib Plif, plus new additions made in these issues, like the half-Corellian giant Bey, who apparently grew up with Han Solo, and a group of teenage Zeltron males, who are assigned as attendants to the Zeltron-adverse Leia, who has long loathed Dani.

These last issues will contain a greater bit of humor (Han Solo sighing "I hate being tortured..!" was a highlight, I thought). One entire issue, #94's "Small Wars", is purely comedy. The done-in-one story features the cute but savage Ewoks declaring war on the even-cuter comics-original race of small, fluffy, bunny-like Lahsbees, part of the machinations of the cartoon bug-like Hirog, whose race the Hiromi have ambitions of conquest. 

Other stories will contain comedic elements, like C-3P0 screwing up the packing of various missions, so that Leia's Zeltron aides will have to whip-up a gaudy half-dress, almost as revealing as her slave get-up, for her to wear at a diplomatic party.

As the series reaches its end, Duffy will pen an issue in which Leia and her aides meet a wounded Nagai soldier and begin to sympathize with them a bit, and she will introduce another new, even more evil alien race: the Tof, large, cruel soldiers who look like gamma-irradiated classic 17th century pirates. The Tof are invading the galaxy pursuit of their enemies the Nagai, who are apparently only here seeking to escape from the Tof.

After being teased int the Leia/Nagai soldier issue, the Tof are introduced in a fun couple of issues set on Zeltros, in which the Nagai, the Tof and the somewhat silly Hiromi all target the planet of fun-loving, perpetually horny red people for conquest at once, our heroes being caught in the middle.

All is resolved in a final issue, which seems to take place after a time-jump of unknown length (shirtless commander Luke Skywalker has much longer hair than usual, anyway, and the Nagai no longer seem like such a major threat). Our heroes have now allied themselves with both the Nagai and former Imperials in a final battle against the Tof, seeking to capture their monarch and force a peace.

It's a rather rushed but action-packed issue, ending with Luke declaring in the final panel that, "For the first time in a long, long time, all of us, as races and as individuals, have a fair chance at making peace. And I hope...no I know...we can do it!"

Much of the first half of the omnibus maintains the Tom Palmer finished and inked, realistic style of the previous volume, although Palmer is but one of the several artists involved: Bob McLeod, Ron Frenz, Al Williamson, Bret Blevins and the aforementioned Duursema (inked by her fellow Kubert School graduate and eventual husband Tom Mandrake) will all provide some art.

The majority of the second half of the book is drawn by Cynthia Martin, whose style is a such a sharp contrast to so much of what came before, especially just before, that it looks like a radical shift. 

Martin has a simpler, more angular, more expressive and more dynamic style than Palmer and the artists providing pencils or breakdowns for him. She seems to be drawing the characters, rather than the actors playing the characters, which is a subtle but important distinction when it comes to comics based on mass-media properties like this; that is, one doesn't necessarily see drawings of Harrison Ford on the pages, although Martin's Han still has a bit of Ford's expressions and attitudes to him.

She's also particularly adept at the humor that Duffy increasingly indulges in (It's particularly difficult to imagine, say, the cartoony Hiromi in a more realistic style, as they have a dashed-off quality to their visuals, and her design work is incredible. 

The Nagai are, as stated, pretty cool-looking characters, and each of Martin's Nagai looks distinct and individual, rather than looking monolithic in appearance as some races of Star Wars aliens tend to. 

Her Nagai ships are also amazing. 

There's a scene where their fleet arrives and fills the sky of a splash page (see the badly-scanned image above), and the ships look both cool and like nothing we've seen in Star Wars before. Most ships and vehicles in the comics have always been either based on the designs from the films, or more generic rockets and spaceships that could have come from any generic comic from the mid-twentieth century. These look completely original, and completely alien to Star Wars, as befits ships from beyond the galaxy. 

It's kind of a shame that the book was canceled when it was, as it would have been interesting to see Duffy's plans for the Nagai and Tof play out over months or years, rather than being hyper-compressed into three or four issues after so much build-up of the Nagai as a new and particularly pernicious threat, one completely divorced from the Empire. 

Just as it would have been fun to see how she would keep the heroes occupied in the long-term. And we certainly didn't get enough of Cynthia Martin's Star Wars. 

Reading these final issues of Marvel's first time around with the Star Wars license, I wondered why it was canceled at all, as quality certainly wasn't an issue (Although I could easily imagine Martin's art being such a departure that it might have chased away long-time fans). 

According to that O'Neil piece I linked to above, it was apparently low sales that lead to cancellation. As hard as it is to imagine now, I guess there really was a point where there wasn't enough interest in more Star Wars to justify one new issue of a comic book per month...

At any rate, beyond the "interesting" I expected for such an early, post-Jedi take on the franchise, the Duffy/Martin comics are truly great ones. 

While this particular omnibus is probably well out of print at this point, surely Marvel has recollected and republished these comics in some form or another since regaining the license; hopefully you have a helpful local comics shop that can help you navigate the confusing world of Star Wars comics collections to find these.

*As is far too common a story in comics today, Barr has had some pretty severe health problems of late, and if you would like to help him, you can do so here.

A Month of Wednesdays: April 2025

BOUGHT: 

Jimmy Olsen's SuperCyclopedia (DC Comics) While publishers will occasionally send me electronic review copies, the vast majority of the books I end up reviewing at Good Comics for Kids are ones that I borrow from the library when they are first released. 

That was certainly the case with this book, in which writer Gabe Soria and artist Sandy Jarrell tell a wild adventure in which Jimmy Olsen gets his hands on a sort of Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy-like super-book and then he and his friends try to stop a handful of mischievous villains, embedding within their tale entries from said book, making for something like a new-reader friendly Who's Who in the DC Universe? x Superman's Pal Jimmy Olsen.

However, I ended up liking the book so much that, after reading it, reviewing it and returning it to the library, I ended up buying a copy of it for myself, because I knew it was something I would want to return to in the future, and, well, it just seemed like the exact sort of comic book that I should have on my shelves.

If you read this feature regularly, you know how rarely I buy new books now. It's even more rare that I actually buy one I've already read. Anyway, I just wanted to note that here, as I think it functions as something of a review in and of itself. That is, how good is Jimmy Olsen's SuperCyclopedia? Good enough that I felt I needed to have a copy of my own. 

If you haven't read the book yet, I would highly recommend you do so. If you're a DC Comics fan, or are just curious about the publisher, it's a real love letter to the company, its creators and its universe, filled with appearances of many less-seen characters (Warlord, Captain Carrot and his Amazing Zoo Crew, Angel and The Ape) and intriguing reinventions of a handful of characters (Cain and Abel as TV horror hosts, Doc Magnus as a kid with action figure-sized Metal Men). There's also a reference to Captain Marvel as "Captain Marvel", which I'm pretty sure from the context was a typo, and a character/creature so rare I actually had to Google it (To be fair, it came from a 1965 Legion of Super-Heroes story, and I've never managed much interest in reading Legion comics). 

As I had said previously on Bluesky, I could talk about this book all day long. I considered doing a super-long blog post here "annotating" it, so as to point out the creators for responsible for all the characters that populate it, suggest some good comics where curious readers could find more of them and track some of the choices and changes Soria and Jarrell made, but after I hit a couple thousand words about the cover alone, I decided maybe no one actually wanted what was shaping up to be a book-length blog post...

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Adventures Compendium Vol. 1 (IDW Publishing) This massive, $100, 780-page volume collects the first 17 issues of Archie Comics' 1989 Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Adventures ongoing monthly series, as well as the three-issue mini-series that preceded it and eight short stories from various places. 

I would have around 13-years-old at the time most of these issues were originally released, and despite my interest in the TMNT sparked by the Palladium role-playing game and a trade-paperback collection of the first dozen or so issues of the Mirage Studios series I had, I turned my nose up at the Adventures book. 

The comic's use of the cartoon show's logo, the differently-colored bandanas on each turtle and the presence of characters like Krang, Rocksteady and Bebop suggested that this was a comic book for fans of the cartoon, not the "real" turtles.

The comic was, obviously, baby stuff, and not for a sophisticated teenage reader like myself. The fact that it was published by Archie only seemed to reinforce that fact.

That said, I did try a few issues when I was desperate for new comics. I remember buying 1990's #8, #9 and #11 off the rack, for example. Those last two were penciled by Mirage's Jim Lawson. In fact, though I didn't know it at the time, it was actually Mirage Studios that were making these things. They were written by Puma Blues writer Stephen Murphy (though he used the pseudonym "Dean Clarrain"), and other Mirage alum like Ryan Brown, Dan Berger and Steve Lavigne were heavily involved at the outset.

Heck, the first Archie Turtles comics, the 1988 mini-series, may have been adapted from episodes of the cartoon show, but it was penciled by Mirage's Michael Dooney and lettered by the regular TMNT comics' Lavigne, and bore cover art by Kevin Eastman and Peter Laird themselves.

It wasn't until much, much later that I would actually become interested in this series, though.

True enough, it did start as a tie-in to the original, 1987 TMNT cartoon, which, like many 1980s cartoons, was essentially of toy advertisements in the guise of a TV show. Like the miniseries, the first few issues were based on particular episodes, even.

But Murphy/Clarrain and his collaborators would diverge from the cartoon within the first few issues, presenting a series which was much weirder and wilder. Artist Ken Mitchroney, who penned an introduction to this new collection, described it as a hard right turn. (And just how weird was the book? Well, that first issue I bought, for example, saw the Turtles wearing gaudy new costumes and competing in intergalactic gladiatorial combat/professional wrestling; they traveled via a giant flying living cow head named Cudley the Cowlick that would lick them up into his mouth before departing for deep space).

Bebop and Rocksteady were rather quickly written out, many new mutant and alien characters were introduced (some based on characters from the toy line, some wholly original), and the book would very much do its own thing, including some interesting departures from the cartoon and toy line it was apparently supporting, like giving April O'Neil a sword and ninja training of her own. I didn't realize it at the time, but it was basically an all-ages version of those fill-in issues that dominated the main, Mirage Turtles comic from, oh, issues #22-#47 or so. 

Ultimately, Archie's TMNT Adventures book would run for 72 issues over five years (plus a handful of related mini-series and a short-lived Mighty Mutanimals ongoing). 

That was enough to make it the longest-running Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles comic book series, a record it would hold until IDW's 2011-launched ongoing hit its 73rd issue in 2017 (That iteration of the book is now the longest running Turtles comic ever. It eventually made it to 150 issues, plus more spin-off one-shots, mini-series and crossovers than I was able to keep track of, before relaunching with a new #1 last year. Interestingly, the IDW volume of TMNT ended up incorporating plenty of characters and concepts originally introduced in Archie's Adventures stories...even the weirdest ones, like Cudley).

By the time I became a grown-up with, like, a job and disposable income and everything, I was quite interested in this book, and although IDW did collect—in a series of 16 trade paperbacks published between 2012 and 2018—I passed on them as they were released, as I wasn't thrilled with the page count-to-cover price ratio (Although I do seem to have volume 3 on my bookshelf for some reason; I am assuming I got it on sale at a book store or comics convention...?). 

I guess the ratio on this collection isn't much better, but, having missed one chance, I didn't want to miss another, so I did drop a (little less than a) hundred bucks on this. I do hope IDW collects the rest of the series as well, which, if my calculations are to be trusted, should take another three, possibly four volumes. 

The book was released on April 29, so I'm not very far into reading it—I'm still on the first issue collected as I type this, actually. I guess I'll let you guys know in some future post if anything seems particularly worth mentioning...

BORROWED:

Absolute Power (DC Comics) Created by John Ostrander, Len Wein and John Byrne in 1986 to be the leader of Ostrander's new version of the Suicide Squad, Amanda Waller was always hard-nosed, abrasive and manipulative. But she was also always a good guy, albeit it a darker, more Machiavellian one than most of the publisher's most famous heroes, her willingness to do bad things for the greater good making her something of an anti-hero compared to the likes of Superman, Batman and their Justice League peers.

So DC making her an outright supervillain in the pages of event series Absolute Power—wherein she seeks not only to de-power and capture every superhero on Earth but, by book's end, to overthrow America, then take over the world and, finally, subject the multiverse itself to domination—has been hard to wrap my head around. 

I mean, within this series alone she goes from Lex Luthor territory (that is, not trusting superheroes because of their fantastical powers and resenting what their existence says about regular human beings) to Darkseid territory (the subjugation of all reality).

I want to say it's a little like Max Lord's heel turn in the pages of 2005's Countdown to Infinite Crisis, but then, it's not been as sudden as all that. Indeed, DC has playing Waller as increasingly villainous for years now (the last time I saw her, in the pages of 's Titans Vol. 2: The Dark-Winged Queen, she was quite literally taking a business meeting with a devil), and this is merely the end result of a long-term plan to remake her into a supervillain.

"Maybe it's just me," I thought to myself while reading Absolute Power, "and I've just been reading comics too long." After all, Ostrander's Suicide Squad series was a long time ago (it ran from 1987 to 1992).

But then, this is a comic book series written by Mark Waid, who has been writing comics even longer than I've been reading them. I mean, he makes a reference to a supporting character from the pages of DC's 1983 Thriller series here, and a pivotal role is played by a new version of Air Wave, a Golden Age hero first resurrected in the 1980s. 

I think Waid handles Waller as well as can be, given what little room the series has to explain her becoming a villain, but it never really feels right to me, and thus there's a degree of narrative friction that irritated the back of my mind the whole time I spent reading the series. 

The closest the series gets to justifying Waller's actions is a stray line from the Waid-written Absolute Power 2024 FCBD Special Edition, which kicks off the collection. Clock King, giving a tour of The Hall of Order and introducing Waller to new recruit Haywire (and thus the readers), mentions that Waller was "Widowed at a young age...Blames superheroes for reasons she's never talked about."

That, and Waller's motivations, are likely detailed in Absolute Powers: Origins, one of two Absolute Power-branded collections published in conjunction with the main series. That three issue series written by John Ridley (and collected under a pretty unappealing photo cover), purports to tell "the untold story of what lead Amanda Waller to form the Trinity of Evil in DC's Absolute Power blockbuster, and take down Earth's Super Heroes!"

I suppose now is as good as time as any to mention one problem with this collection. This big event series, like most of the most recent ones I've read from either DC or Marvel, is meant to be read serially, as it was published, with readers picking up additional tie-in comics that pique their interest. Ridley's Origins was one such tie-in, and it seems to offer necessary context on Waller's psychology. 

There was also Absolute Power: Task Force VII, following the aforementioned Trinity of Evil's league of Amazos. And then there are a couple of one-shots and tie-in issues from five ongoing series. I'm not sure where, or if, those will all be collected, but it seems the plan is to collect them by the series they appear in, rather than a dedicated, Absolute Power-branded collection (That is, the issues of Green Arrow that tie-in to the Absolute Power storyline will likely be collected in a future Green Arrow trade). 

Although the Absolute Power collection doesn't contain any asterisks or editorial notes pointing readers to other comics, it's pretty clear that the story plays out outside the confines of this trade. In addition to Waller going full supervillain, there are a few panels about the Task Force VII androids seemingly having picked up bits of conscience and virtue along with the superpowers they drained from the heroes that doesn't go anywhere here ("You're telling me goodness is a %$*& super-power?" a bug-eyed Waller screams at one point), and various heroes are shown being given various missions, and then returning from those missions successfully later, their adventures seeming to have occurred completely off-panel. (Oh, and there's no explanation for why, when Hal Jordan appears, he's shirtless.)

Now, is it fair to fault the book, or writer Mark Waid, or DC for the fact that some of Absolute Power thus reads rather wonkily, since we're all well aware that the story is meant to be read serially, rather than in this collection which, of course, only includes part of the story...? 

I don't know. I can excuse the book for seemingly leaving so much out because I understand the nature of such crossover event storylines but, at the same time, DC is packaging and selling the book in this particular format too, so I think it's fair to assess this particular collection as it's presented. And it is obviously somewhat wanting, not reading like a complete story, as it has so many dangling sub-plots that seem to go nowhere.

(By contrast, Tom Taylor's Beast World, a far more compact storyline with significantly less lead-in than Absolute Power, read perfectly well in its collected form, it's tie-ins not being particularly important to the plot, and thus all easily skipped...and collected together in a single companion volume that complimented rather than completed the main storyline, Beast World Tour. Although I don't know for certain that we can extrapolate from that fact that Taylor wrote his event storyline better than Waid did; as I said, Beast World was a smaller affair. Perhaps it's an argument for smaller events, though, or perhaps it's an argument for a bigger main series for events. That is, perhaps if Waid had six or eight issues for Absolute Power rather than four, he could have gotten everything significant into the book...?)

The collection begins with the previously mentioned FCBD story, a 12-pager written by Waid and drawn by Mikel Janin, which introduces readers to some of the main players. Not only Waller and her operation, but also robot Batman Failsafe (who Chip Zdarsky created for his Batman run; I didn't read that, but Waid efficiently defines him thusly: "Think Batman crossed with the Terminator"), reluctant Waller recruit Dreamer and Green Arrow Oliver Queen, who is apparently betraying his friends and allies to join Waller. 

That is followed immediately in the collection by Absolute Power: Ground Zero, a 30-page, three-story anthology that more thoroughly introduces three characters that will play important parts of the main series, which fills the rest of the book.

Each of these short stories is from a different creative team. "Stage One" is written by Nicole Maines and Waid and drawn by Skylar Partridge, and is a Dreamer story, devoted to her work for Waller's Suicide Squad, which here involves capturing her former friend (and Superman Jon Kent's boyfriend) Jay Nakamura...after others working for Waller apparently assassinated his mom. 

"Stage Two" is by Chip Zdarsky, Waid and V Ken Marion, and stars minor supervillain Time Commander, who is resurrected and put to work by Waller on her new super-robots. His role, though minor, will prove integral at the story's conclusion.

Finally, "Stage Three" by Joshua Williamson and Gleb Melnikov, details Waller's recovery of The Brainiac Queen (apparently from the goings-on in the Superman books), and the extremely elaborate way in which Waller gets her to become her devoted and willing ally.

All the prologue over, Absolute Power begins in earnest, with Waid joined by his World's Finest partner Dan Mora, who I personally think is one of the best artists currently regularly working on super-comics. 

After a pretty compelling scene in which Superman loses his powers while trying to apprehend some bad guys, getting shot and falling out of the sky, we flash backwards to see how we got there. Amanda Waller, using the super-robots Failsafe and the Brainiac Queen, has apparently hacked world media, broadcasting "Big Lie" inspired, AI-generated footage of various superheroes (Captain Marvel, Green Lantern Hal Jordan, Supergirl, Firestorm, etc.) going on mass casualty rampages, mowing down civilians. 

This is apparently enough to turn American sentiment completely against any and all superheroes. Five years ago, I might have said this seems unlikely, but, well, I've now lived through covid misinformation, Donald Trump and his allies' insistence that he actually won the 2020 election and that the January 6th riot wasn't that big a deal, and a dozen other efforts to shape public opinion by simply telling big obvious lies as often and as forcefully as possible. 

As Waller explains to her number two, Sarge Steel:

You don't need fear gas to shift public opinion. You don't need telepathic mind control. In a world run in a media echo chamber, no matter how many busloads of nuns Superman saves, you can make an uncomfortably large number of people doubt their own eyes and ears. 

All you have to do is refine your message into a memorable catchphrase...and repeat it fifty thousand times.

I wish that weren't true, but recent American history, and the daily news, seems to support it. 

Anyway, it seems successful enough that she's able to attack Superman and the others with her Task Force VII Amazo androids, which, along with Failsafe, make up a sort of robot Justice League, each of them modeled after and possessing the powers of one of the founding Justice Leaguers (Presumably Waller will rely on these the next time, say, aliens invade Earth, as seems to happen a few times a year in the DCU; it doesn't really make sense to do away with Superman and the Justice League otherwise, given how often they save the world. Unless one is completely nihilistic, anyway).

There's one major difference between these new Amazos and the previous models, though: When they steal a superhero's powers, they do so completely and permanently, regardless of the source of those powers. ("If you have superpowers, we will take them," Waller says in a broadcast appeal to the world's heroes to surrender. "If you utilize devices, we will drain them. If you use magic, you will no longer remember how to conjure it.")

While there might not be any real tension as to whether the Justice League and most of Earth's heroes losing their powers permanently is actually, you know, permanent—"I'm not going to insult you by pretending the heroes don't ultimately triumph," Waid writes in his introduction to the collection—there's an effective enough effort to make the proceedings suspenseful, with the how of the various heroes going back to normal at the end remaining an elusive mystery throughout (During the opening attack, the Amazos even render The Spectre helpless, as a sign of how effective the power draining efforts are).

Many of the heroes who are drained but not captured retreat to Superman's Fortress of Solitude, where, after a page of argument among several leaders as to who should take charge, Nightwing asserts himself as the leader of the world's superheroes, rallying them together and assigning various heroes their tasks in an effort to fight back...an effort that is that quickly frustrated when Jon Kent, covered in mechanical bits and pieces and apparently under the Brainiac Queen's control, attacks the fortress, causing the heroes to retreat to another Justice Leaguer's secret home base. 

It eventually comes down to a big battle at the disbanded Justice League's previous headquarters, now re-christened the Hall of Order, with an army of the powerless heroes attacking Waller's soldiers (who wear skull-shaped facemasks...not exactly a good guy look), while Flash Barry Allen and Green Lantern Hal Jordan try to stop an invasion by multiversal villains from a gateway in the basement and Oliver Queen reveals that he was really on the good guys' side all along (Obviously, although Waid has an interesting wrinkle to the mechanics of his playing double-agent).

Now that I've switched to trades, I'm far from up to date with the goings-on of the DC line of comics, but I thought Waid did a fairly impressive job herein of getting in a lot of heroes. Superman, Batman and Wonder Woman all play big roles, obviously, but so too do other Justice Leaguers. And there are an awful lot of cameos, including other teams like the Titans, JSA, the Doom Patrol and the Birds of Prey, and characters as diverse as, say, Animal Man, Red Tornado, Plastic Man, all the Wonder Girls, a Doctor Mid-Nite that sure sounds like he's meant to be the (dead?) original and even a handful I didn't recognize (There's a purple-ish character with a tail and a cat-like face who seems to be part of the current Doom Patrol, for example, and a pair of heroes named Cadejos and Rana Dorada...at least one of whom I think I might have seen in World's Finest Vol. 4....?).

I thought Aquaman was well represented, not only suggesting himself as the heroes' leader ("Deploying armies at a time of war, delegating resources...those are a king's duties"), but also offering comfort to Superman when it seems that Jon is lost and, later, checking in with and offering a heart-to-heart with the new Airwave. Oh, and leading the heroes into battle in a few cool panels.

Blue Beetle Ted Kord, first introduced in a panel battling a giant robot of some sort in London alongside Martian Manhunter, Booster Gold, Fire, Ice and an off-panel Elongated Man, plays an unexpectedly bigger role, working on tech stuff with Mister Terrific at one point (His is such a great costume design, and Mora draws the hell out of it).

Waid seems to write everyone well, as he should, given how long he's been working on DC Comics. I didn't really care for the bit where Big Barda argues with Nightwing over whether or not they should kill the mind-controlled Jon Kent, though. I know she's from Apokolips and all, but she seemed uncharacteristically bloodthirsty, so much so that at one point she seems prepared to go against Nightwing and shoot Jon with a chunk of Kryptonite she loads into an Amazonian rifle (Where did she get the kryptonite from? Is it the same chunk Wally West grabbed at the Fortress? And did it just so happen to be bullet-shaped and sized enough that it could be put in and fired from a long gun?). (Update: Collected Editions, which is obviously much more up to date with the goings-on of the DC Universe than EDILW is now, recently reviewed Absolute Power, and the review notes some inconsistencies between the characters' portrayals in the book versus their home books.)

Getting to see Mora draw so much of the current DC Universe is, obviously, a treat. Seeing him take on more and more characters from DC's past has been one of the great joys of World's Finest, and so it's fun to see him draw Batman and Dick Grayson in their modern costumes, as well as take on various legacy characters and the many other ones that just didn't yet exist during the vague past of World's Finest.  

The book, colored by Alejandro Sanchez, looks darker and busier than Mora's other work with Waid, although I assume that has something to do with the "darker", more serious nature of the modern DCU to the more idyllic, pre-tragedy past the creators explore in their previous collaboration, as well as the nature of the modern costumes of the characters, which feature an awful lor more black. 

My sole reservation about Mora's work here? I didn't care for his Robin Damian Wayne, who look both too old and way too tall, like his now artificially aged-up peer Jon Kent, rather than the diminutive 13-year-old he's usually drawn as. 

Despite quibbles like that, and the aforementioned friction about seeing Amanda Waller as a world-conquering supervillain (ultimately taken down in the same way so many bad guys in comics and TV have been taken down in the past, albeit with a probably guessable superhero twist here), this is a decent enough big, blockbuster style superhero crossover.

And while its unlikely to change the DC Universe forever, it does contain a few changes that look like they will take and be explored elsewhere, including Amanda Waller being taken off the board permanently (in a way that feels uncomfortably like a plot point from Identity Crisis, although I guess its perpetrated by Dreamer, rather than any of the heroes who now know better than to mind-wipe anyone), swapping Fire and Ice's powers, de-powering Barry Allen, shutting off access to the Multiverse (um, somehow) and, most obviously and prominently, setting up the Justice League Unlimited series, with the last pages devoted to Ollie and the Trinity discussing the need for a League and showing off the holographic design for a new satellite watchtower. 

Did any of your guys read any of the companion series, or tie-in issues from the ongoings? Anything worth making a point of tracking down and reading? 

Batman: Off-World (DC) The premise of this mini-series is a very dumb one, of the sort that if one thinks about it too long—say, a few seconds—it stops making sense. 

Fortunately, the particular nature of its dumbness is of the big and fun variety.

After some 20 pages of an in medias res opening featuring Batman in an extremely different milieu than we are most used to seeing him in, fighting bizarre alien soldiers and robots aboard a spaceship, writer Jason Aaron lays out the weird series' premise.

A year into his crimefighting career—and, presumably, well before he met Superman, Martian Manhunter or Hal Jordan, as the book falls apart if his work friends include aliens and a space cop—Batman encounters a big, strong alien working as an enforcer for a Gotham mob. He tries to beat the alien up but ends up getting his ass kicked.

Deciding that, in order to best protect Gotham, he needs to learn how to fight aliens as well as human beings, he spends $532 million on a "prototype long-range shuttle from S.T.A.R. Labs", flies it "eight megaparsecs" into the Slag Galaxy and gets himself abducted and imprisoned on an alien ship, where he can learn how to fight aliens.

This ship is the War Storm, which travels the Slag galaxy surrounded by an "artificially generated stellar hurricane" to capture various sentient beings, train them in the arts of hand-to-hand combat using "Punch Bot" robots and then sell them as a slave army to the Blackksun Mining Company, which has been decimating every inhabited planet they have set up shop on. (And yes, it's unfortunate that the bad guys share a name with a criminal organization from the Star Wars "Extended Universe";  Aaron or an editor should probably have googled "Black Sun" at some point before going to print. Maybe they did, and that accounts for the spelling.)

While tasked with menial labor—"Bat-Man" is deemed too small to be a worthy recruit—Batman secretly studies alien anatomy and the breaking of it under a rundown Punch Bot he was meant to discard, and he gradually befriends Ione, a Tamaranian* bounty hunter (There's also a Thanagarian bounty hunter who shows up a bit later, but other than those two, all of the aliens in the book seem to be original creations of Aaron and designs of pencil artist Doug Mahnke, rather than extant denizens of the DCU's outer space).

Batman eventually learns what he needs to know and return to Earth, but he then decides to liberate the War Storm from Captain Synn, a member of the same species as the alien he had fought back in Gotham. 

And then he decides to take on Blackksun and its super-powered leaders, which leads to a Batman-led planet-by-planet rebellion before a climactic showdown with the villains.

In other words, while it started out pretty big and dumb, it only gets bigger and dumber as it goes on, and the ending, in which Batman returns to Gotham to beat up the alien he failed to beat up before his journey began, sure seems to suggest that this whole epic adventure was just an insanely long, circuitous plan to win a single fight. (That, and there's a bit about the inspirational nature of Batman, and the creation of what I guess is retroactively the very first member of the Club of Heroes/Batman Inc.)

Although the delivery is always completely deadpan and the entire adventure played pretty straight, one imagines Aaron must know how silly the story he's telling actually is. One sees it in the goofy alien words that pepper the dialogue ("Close cell number Yrtteen!", for example, or "Frrg Alert, all Stormers to arms" and so on). And in Batman's often ridiculous narration ("Somewhere out there in the darkness, orphans are screaming. My fists scream with them").

Both in its often semi-sarcastic sci-fi and its portrayal of a single-minded, ultimate badass hero that is a a parody of himself, Off-World reminded me quite a bit of the Judge Dredd comics I've read. 

Mahnke's very busy, detailed, semi-realistic style means the adventure is presented as completely straight as well. A veteran artist who has been drawing comics about as long as I've been reading them, Mahnke has had plenty of experience drawing the Dark Knight, both during his JLA run and stints on the Batman and Detective monthlies. 

As mentioned above, he seems to be designing pretty much everything in the book, making his buxom Ione and the Thanagarian bounty hunter, named "The Thanagarian", quite distinct from, say, Starfire and Hawkman, with tattoos and accessories and various visual filigree. He also gives Batman an updated, action figure-ready space adventure suit later in the book, a cool-looking "razor wolf" sidekick and, of course, he fills the book with various weird and dangerous-looking aliens and robots. 

I'm sure there are plenty of other artists who could have drawn this book, but, having just finished reading it, it's hard to imagine anyone other than Mahnke drawing it. He's here inked by Jaime Mendoza, and colored by David Baron, the latter of whom does a pretty remarkable job of contrasting the outer space setting with that of Gotham City.

There's no Elseworlds or Black Label logo attached to the cover, but given just how big and weird this comic is (and how difficult it might be to reconcile with the events of Batman's early career), I can't imagine any future creators building on or referencing this series in anyway. 

Still, it's a fun standalone Batman adventure, one that seems to celebrate the character's attributes while simultaneously tweaking them and it is, of course, a tour de force from Mahnke. 

DC Finest: Batgirl—Nobody Dies Tonight (DC) The only reason this particular book is under "Borrowed" rather than "Bought" is because I already have almost all of the issues collected within it in their original single-issue format and in trade paperback format. (The only exceptions? Superboy #85, which I have the single issue of but was never included in the earlier Batgirl collections, and Supergirl #63, which is the sole issue in this 550-page collection that I had never actually read before).

Despite having read and re-read these comics before, I took the opportunity to re-read them yet again that this particular collection offered; I love these comics, and I am quite enamored with the new DC Finest format.

Admittedly, I puzzled over the curation of this particular volume quite a bit, given that it starts not with Batgirl #1, but with Batgirl #7, and collects the series up through #27 and, as alluded to above, includes an issue each of Superboy and Supergirl. 

I thought that, perhaps, DC started the collection as they did because they wanted to end at a particular point, the climactic battle with Lady Shiva that fills the oversized issue #25 and completed a long-term arc for the title character, resolving the death wish she had developed from the extreme guilt she carried about killing a man when she was only eight-years-old (An event that was particularly traumatic for her, given her ability to "read" her opponents, meaning that she experienced her victim's death along with him). 

But that's not the case, as the book extends two issues beyond that. Looking up what happened in those first six issues, I realized that those were the ones that were co-written by Kelly Puckett and Scott Peterson, and then I thought perhaps DC was taking some pains to not include Peterson's contributions to the title...but that can't be the case either, as one of those two post-#25 issues was guest-written by Peterson.

So, in the end, I can't even offer a good guess as to why the book is filled with the issues it is, especially once one factors in those issues of Superboy and Supergirl, which don't offer all that much to the ongoing narrative (The potential for a Superboy/Batgirl relationship, as extremely unlikely as that may seem, is eventually followed up on, in issue #41 by a different creative team, but I don't think there's ever any such follow-up to Batgirl's brief meeting with Supergirl). 

It wouldn't have hurt to start at least an issue or so earlier, as, when Batgirl #7 opens, Batgirl is reeling from having just lost her ability to predict people's movements, the result of a telepath rewiring her brain, and thus making her unable to continue her mission as Batgirl (Batman doesn't want to let her resume crimefighting until she can prove that she can adequately defend herself again).

She quickly regains this ability, of course, but in a less-than-ideal way. Having discovered that Shiva has the very same ability, she makes a deal with the world's greatest fighter: If Shiva teaches her to read people again, she will promise to fight her to death in one year's time, giving Batgirl the choice between, as Batgirl sees it, to be "mediocre...for a life time...or perfect...for a year." 

Batgirl chooses the latter, secretly telling herself that, since she has promised never to kill again, she will just let Shiva kill her during their eventual fight. Suicide by death duel, then.

There's actually probably an argument to be made for starting a collection of Batgirl Cassandra Cain's adventures even earlier than Batgirl #1, of course, given that she was introduced during the course of the big Batman event/temporary status quo "No Man's Land." (She first appeared in 1999's Batman #567, which was drawn by Damion Scott and written by Kelly Puckett, who would make up the official creative team for the first 37 issues of the ongoing series, although there were a handful of guest writers and guest artists during those issues, as we'll see). 

After Cassandra proved herself, she inherited the Batgirl costume that Helena Bertinelli wore briefly in the earlier issues of "No Man's Land," graduating to her own title in 2000, the very first Batgirl ongoing monthly series. 

She was a compelling character. Trained from birth by assassin David Cain before eventually running away from him (and becoming one of former Batgirl Barbara Gordon's agents), Cassandra possessed not only extensive martial arts knowledge, but an uncanny ability to predict the movements of others, which, when combined made her all but unstoppable, allowing her to dodge bullets, sneak past just about anyone and outfight anyone she ever came into contact with.

She also possessed some interesting weaknesses, however, including the fact that she couldn't read and, at this early point, was still just learning to talk. For much of the comics collected within this volume, she basically spoke only in one or two-word sentences or, when she had more to say, a little like Swamp Thing, with lots of ellipses. Even when Puckett revealed her inner thoughts to readers via narration boxes, these tended to be extremely terse. Cassandra Cain communicated primarily through actions, and her comic followed suit; re-reading these issues today, it's pretty remarkable how much Puckett and Scott worked by the maxim of showing rather than telling.

Her essential, character-defining conflicts—the guilt of once killing a man leading to her Batman-like insistence of never taking another life no matter what, her plan of letting Shiva kill her eventually—are here quickly established, and laid over a fun, if curious, status quo. 

A kinda sorta sidekick and protege to both Batman and then-Oracle Barbara Gordon, she's a bit like a kid the two are raising together, although the pair of veteran heroes rarely see eye to eye on what's best for Cassandra, with Batman wanting her to become a perfected version of himself and Barbara constantly pushing her toward adopting a real life beyond training all day and crimefighting all night.

While these conflicts simmer in the background, Puckett and Scott craft what is essentially an entire ongoing series of new-reader-friendly done-in-one stories. One could pick up just about any issue of Batgirl, certainly any of those in the book, and read and enjoy it all on its own, even if it was one's first exposure to the character.

This is all the more remarkable given how often outside events are honored by the book, be they smaller Batman line only events ("Officer Down", "In This Issue: Batman Dies!") or bigger ones ("Bruce Wayne: Murderer", "Bruce Wayne: Fugitive"), or DC Universe initiatives (like February 2002's month of Will Eisner-inspired covers) or crossover event stories ("Joker: Last Laugh").

While Puckett writes the majority of the Batgirl comics in this collection, there are two issues guest-written by Chuck Dixon and one by the aforementioned Peterson. Scott likewise pencils the majority of the Batgirl pages herein, inked by Robert Campanella, save for an issue by Dale Eaglesham, one by Phil Noto, one by the great Vince Giarrano (doing a passable impression of Scott and Campanella) and then there's a part of another issue by Coy Turnbull. The included Superboy and Supergirl issues are, of course, by the creative teams of those books. 

While Batgirl mostly interacts with Batman and Oracle (and, to a lesser extent, Shiva and Cain), it's interesting to see her earlier interactions with other young heroes. It's a Dixon-written issue that has her teaming up with Spoiler Stephanie Brown for the first time, as Cassandra turns to her for help reading a ransom note...and then reluctantly accepts her help closing the case, despite their vastly different skill levels (Repeatedly throughout the series, Batgirl will knock Stephanie out in order to keep her from getting hurt in a dangerous battle. One such instance leads to the pair bickering about this before an exhausted Oracle, pre-figuring the eventual Batgirls series that teamed the three of them together by decades). 

Steph will also appear when Batgirl takes on the super-powered (and Joker-ized) Shadow Thief in Batgirl's "Last Laugh" tie-in, be there when Batgirl digs up the murdered Vesper Fairchild's body to examine it for clues in the "Fugitive" tie-in and, when Cass is sleeping off the results of two back-to-back fights to the death against Shiva, Steph will step in to tackle a master martial artist who worships Shiva.

As for Robin, we first see him in the Superboy issue, answering Kon-El's question of whether or not the two years his elder Batgirl is hot with a sigh and "She's on fire", although Puckett, Scott and Campanella will also devote an issue to Batgirl and Robin finding themselves in a team-up together (They first meet unexpectedly when they pass one another during a big fight scene, and, before the issue is over, Tim confesses that he was weirded out by Cass' unusual background, and apologizes to her for treating her somewhat standoffishly). 

The two Super-book crossovers are both pretty inessential, although I'm glad they were collected here, if only because it meant the volume contained some material I either wasn't familiar with at all, or else less familiar with then the rest of the contents.

The Superboy issue is by Joe Kelly, Pascal Ferry and Keith Champagne (Why Kelly gets the second credit on the cover of this collection, given that he only scripts 22 pages of the book, I don't know; Dixon scripted twice as many). 

In it, Kon is in Gotham visiting his Young Justice teammate Robin because he needs someone to talk to, but after a brief fight scene against some kind of weird glowy zombies, he and Batgirl rush off together when Robin's not looking, the Boy Wonder having stepped away to call in Batman. 

The extremely chatty Superboy and the near silent Batgirl, who only answers his constant commentary with either one-world answers or simply saying "...", are of course polar opposites. They run afoul of what looks like an actual supervillain, a Dr. Sin (a rarity for Cassandra at the time, as Batman and Oracle were always trying to keep her away from metahumans) and the pair end up nearly dying in a death trap. 

When Batman threatens to punish Batgirl at the end, Superboy has words with the Dark Knight, and insists that he be given half of her punishment. Then the two take off to hang out, off-panel. Again, this particularly unusual World's Finest team would show up once more, much later in Batgirl.

The Supergirl issue is from the long-running Peter David**-written series and I could barely make heads-or-tails out of it, having never read a single issue of it.*** It was a "Last Laugh" tie-in, which at least helped a bit.

This Supergirl, dressed in the white ringer crop top and mini-skirt that her animated counterpart wore in Superman: The Animated Series, is facing off against a Bizarro Supergirl (here, an imperfect clone, rather than a visitor from Bizarro World), as well as a Joker-ized Two-Face and a Joker-ized guy named Buzz I didn't recognize, but was apparently a character from the ongoing series.

Batgirl, here drawn by pencil artist Leonard Kirk and inker Robin Riggs, saves Supergirl from Bizarro Supergirl, dodging the meta-human repeatedly and eventually using her momentum to toss her into some live wires, and then helps round-up Two-Face. 

The two heroes don't seem to share any real chemistry, and, unlike Spoiler, Robin and Superboy, I didn't really have any desire to see them spend any more time together in the future, but then, this single issue of Supergirl didn't really give me any sense of the main character, a character DC seems to have been rebooting regularly ever since John Byrne's Superman reboot first scrambled her origins and history. 

As for the title of the collection, it's taken from the title of issue #19's story. It's probably the strongest, and perhaps the most daring, story in the book, one that tackles a pretty tough subject for a Batman comic.

In it, Batgirl is introduced standing between a group of criminals looting an electronics store and a couple of policemen with their guns pointed at the thieves, and she declares "Nobody...dies...tonight."

How far will she go to keep her promise? Well, not only does she take down the thieves without killing them, but she also pulls on one of the cop's arms to keep him from shooting one of them. And then she sees an item on the TV news about how the first federal execution in twenty years is set to take place in Gotham tonight.

The killer is obviously guilty; in fact, the creators show him strangling a fast-food worker in the opening scene, and, throughout, scenes of Batgirl in action are intercut with scenes of him preparing to go to the gas chamber.

She will ultimately break into the prison, sneak into the sealed gas chamber itself, kick her way out of it, and try to escape with the murderer, although it's not entirely clear what she plans to do with him once she saves him.

"You...springing me?" he asks.

She answers: "No."

"Then...what?"

She attempts to answer by restating the title of the story, at which point they are interrupted by the mother of the murder victim, who tells Batgirl to return him. When she argues "Maybe... he.... changed," the woman answers "Maybe he did. But my little girl is still dead."

She thinks about the time she killed, which was apparently on this very day nine years ago, but she ultimately relents, and the last page of the book shows the murderer holding his breath, his eyes bulging, as gas fills the chamber.

It's a tough read, and, thinking about it now, one of the few vengeance/justice debates so popular in certain superhero comics that I've read to actually take into account whether or not we as a society believe in executing criminals like, say, The Punisher does, or not, as Batman and his allies always refrain from doing, no matter the circumstances.

I am fairly certain Scott's art won't be to everyone's taste (and it has only gotten weirder and more idiosyncratic over the last 25 years or so), but I really loved it here. He's clearly adept at telling a story through art, something Puckett's plots call on him to do constantly, and communicating Cassandra's feelings, beliefs and intentions through her body language and expressions, and he rises to and meets the challenge of the show-don't-tell nature of the book.

I don't think he designed this particular Batgirl costume, but he certainly perfected it; I've always thought of Scott's Batgirl as something of a cross between Batman's and Spider-Man's designs; in costume, his long-limbed, round-headed, sharp-edged Batgirl is somewhat disconcertingly weird and more than a little scary, abut also young, feminine and even dainty, her smallness always accentuated by the fact that she's constantly facing and fighting characters that tower above her.

Highly influenced by manga and, to an extent, kung fu movies, his layouts are all pure comics, and many of them would read quite intelligible enough if you stripped all of Puckett's or Dixon's narration or dialogue out of them...as they would have to, given the nature of the character, and Puckett's focus on her in each issue (While "Nobody Dies Tonight", for example, obviously isn't a silent story, it's very easy to see how it could be, given how much of it is told without any dialogue or narration).

It's also fascinating to watch Scott's art change over the course of these 20 issues. Heck, go to comics.org and just look at the covers, and you can see how he quickly he refines his style, his characters getting bolder as his rendering gets more and more cartoony. 

There's a reason why he was one of only a dozen artists given their own title of the short-lived artist showcase series Solo, I think. 

As for the rest of the artists in the book, they are all fine, for the most part. Giarrano, a distinct stylist whose work can be seen in several quite memorable Batman comics of the previous decade (as well as a short-lived Manhunter revamp), seems to temper his own style and ape Scott's work, as I said earlier (Only one of the characters he draws in his series really looks like his). Ferry does okay on the Superboy issue, his Batgirl looking incredibly thin and pointy. Kirk and Noto are real stylistic departures from Scott, but they are both technically fine, and Noto's facility with expressions leads to some fun moments when the girls take their masks off after their mission.

As I said the other day on Bluesky, I'm not sure if there is enough material for this particular take on this particular Batgirl for a second DC Finest collection of her adventures. There are only seven more issues by the Puckett/Scott/Campanella team, with a three-issue arc by Dixon and Scott that teamed Batgirl with Conner Hawke coming in the midst of it. Even if you cast about for other appearances to fill up the collection—the sole Batgirl annual, DC First: Batgirl/Joker #1, Scott's Batgirl material from his issue of Solo, maybe the Batman/Batgirl issue of Gotham Knights by Devin Grayson and company—one is still well short of another 500 pages of material.

Unless, of course, DC wanted to just go ahead and collect issues from the next two writers' runs on the 73-issue series, those from writer Dylan Horrocks and then Andersen Gabrych, but then, those comics aren't nearly as good as those in the Puckett/Scott/Campanella run, and, though they feature the same character, read like an entirely different book. (Those James Jean covers sure were gorgeous while they lasted though, weren't they?)

All told, this particular volume might not be the best way to read the best Cassandra Cain comics—the Silent Knight, To The Death and Point Blank trade paperbacks seem to collect the entire run by this creative team—but it's certainly now the easiest way to get your hands on some truly great Bat-Family comics, and certainly the best Batgirl comics of the last 25 years or so. 

Plastic Man No More! (DC) You guys all know how much I like Plastic Man, right? 

Given that, you may be wondering why this book is down here, with those I borrowed from the library, rather than up there, with those I decided to buy.

Well, I wasn't familiar with the creative team of Christopher Cantwell, Alex Lins and Jacob Edgar. And I didn't care for the cover at all. And I was pretty leery of the pitch of it as "body-horror Plastic Man noir." Even though Plastic Man's origins—1940s gangster caught in a chemical accident discovers his body is completely malleable—would certainly seem to justify such a take, I wasn't really interested in reading a grim and gritty Plastic Man comic.

As it turns out, I think both the words "body-horror" and "noir" are a bit of a, well, of a stretch when being applied to this book. The actual story doesn't really strike me as either; sure, Plas loses some control of his body, and it seems to turn against him, but it's more sad and tragic than horrifying. And while there are some crimes depicted within the proceedings, I wouldn't exactly call this a noir story.

This is a Black Label comic (see the Black Label label in the lower-righthand corner above?), which, as I understand it, means that the story is meant to be either continuity-lite, or completely non-canonical, akin to an Elseworlds story, depending on the comic in question.

That said, Cantwell's story is rather heavily dependent on the original, 1997 JLA series, during which Plas joined the Justice League for the first time, and, in particular, Joe Kelly, Doug Mahnke and Tom Nguyen's 2002 JLA #65. That was a done-in-one Batman/Plastic Man team-up that, while quite well made, I absolutely hated at the time, as it revealed superhero Plastic Man to be a deadbeat dad (The issue introduced Plastic Man's son Luke, who had inherited his powers, his former lover Angel and the idea of Plas as perpetually absent father, hiding his inadequacies through his shape-changing fueled humor, all of which are integral to this new book). (Also of note is probably Mark Waid and Frank Quitely's 1999's The Kingdom: Offspring, a future-set story starring a son of Plastic Man named Ernie. Luke and Ernie would eventually be collapsed into a single character during Geoff Johns' Teen Titans run, wherein Offspring joined the team around the time of the "One Year Later" time jump. Johns reconciled the different names by making "Ernie" Luke's middle name.)

One need not have read any of those stories to make sense of or enjoy Plastic Man No More!, but they certainly help provide context, given the roles that Luke, Angel and Plastic Man's relationships to them play into the new comic, which reads a bit like an extended extrapolation of JLA #65, and to function as something of a "last" Plastic Man story. 

Cantwell's Plastic Man is from Mammoth City, the name of the setting of the original Plastic Man comics that creator Jack Cole eventually settled on (after at least one reference apiece to Windy City and Capital City). 

We are introduced to Patrick "Eel" O'Bryan during his early criminal career. Here, he looks exactly like Plastic Man before the accident, is already friends with Woozy Winks (who is, in fact, his literal partner in crime), is already in a relationship with a woman named Angel and, in a rather significant departure from Cole's early stories, he's not a very good crook. He gets pinched during the jewelry store robbery we meet him and Woozy in the act of committing and then apparently spent a period of his life getting busted and getting parole repeatedly. 

Twenty years (and one chemical accident later), he's a member in good standing of the Justice League. This particular team line-up isn't one that ever really existed, though. In addition to long-time members like Superman, Batman and Wonder Woman, when they first appear, their numbers also include Green Lantern Hal Jordan, a Hawkman with a mace and Vixen, in her Justice League Unlimited cartoon design. We'll see plenty of other members throughout the series, including the likes of Metamorpho, Green Lantern John Stewart, Zatanna in her superhero costume and Detective Chimp, the last of whom will play a fairly large role in the story.

During a battle with villain Solaris, Plas expands his body to take a blast of a death ray meant for some orphans. He immediately jokes about how hurt he is, but the other characters laugh at his jokes, rather than note the information he's trying to relay to them (This will be a theme throughout the comic, with only Detective Chimp and, to a much lesser degree, Batman seeming to pay any attention to Plas at all beyond laughing at his jokes; in once scene, the Leaguers will literally talk over him, their dialogue balloons placed atop his). 

Plas returns to a dark, dingy, lonely apartment to sleep off the injury, but, when he awakens, he finds his right hand has fallen off his body like melting ice cream and leaked down the bathroom drain, leaving a trail of flesh-covered slime behind (Here's where we get the body-horror, I guess). Unable to regenerate his hand from the still-leaking stump, he ultimately thrusts it in a bag, which he will wear throughout the rest of the comic (and, on occasion, need to empty).

His League colleagues are almost no help at all—after a meeting in which he fails to convey the seriousness of his predicament to them, Detective Chimp approaches him and gives him a business card that Batman passed along. It's for a Wayne Industries petroleum chemist.

Her diagnosis is grim: "Patrick, you're depolymerizing. You're molecularly coming apart." She says this may be because of the death ray, but it may also just be the inevitable last stage of the sequence of events that had made him "a unique and singular organism." 

In other words, it's likely a death sentence. As sobering as that is for Plas, the worst part is that he's not entirely unique, as his estranged son Luke, here a young man and apparent Teen Titan, has the same powers and, if it could happen to Plas, it might also happen to Luke.

After a tense and not exactly fruitful meeting with Luke, Plas prevails on the chemist to come up with a theoretical, potential solution for his falling apart. It involves subjecting both Plastic Man and Luke to an atomic bomb explosion.

And so Plas enlists Woozy to help him procure enough uranium for the bomb, which here means kidnapping the Metal Men's long-lost brother Uranium, referred to alternately as a sociopath, a dickhead and an asshole (This is Black Label comic, remember. That basically just means superheroes can swear). 

The problem is, someone else has already kidnapped Uranium to use as raw material in a nuclear weapon, the villainous mad scientist Dr. No-Face (An extremely minor Batman villain from the Silver Age, whose deal was the destruction of images of faces).

And so Plas leads the Metal Men into action, a mission that results in all of them being destroyed (Which, while presented as a tragedy here, actually kinda happened all the time, and Magnus would just rebuild them, something that Cantwell has Plas refer to in passing).

Then it's just a matter of kidnapping his own son and coercing No-Face to blow them both up. Although Plastic Man's got a few other problems to deal with, like the fact that his own body is rapidly deteriorating (by the climax, he's wearing a jar over his head to keep his head from sliding off his body entirely) and that both Detective Chimp and Luke's teammate and friend Robin Tim Drake are investigating.

Does it work? Well, I don't want to spoil the ending, although it's worth pointing out that Plastic Man does indeed seem to be no more by the book's end...although there is an intriguing, darkly absurd series of panels near the end to suggest the world has not necessarily seen the last of Plastic Man.

Despite all the pathos, and Plas' characterization as a bad father, a loser who masks his insecurities with jokes and a clown the Justice League looks to solely as comic relief (None of which I cared for here anymore than I did in the Joe Kelly story that seems to have inspired the book), Plastic Man No More! is actually quite funny in several places. 

I particularly enjoyed Plas and Woozy's attempt to take down the Metal Men, and all of Uranium's scenes, which reinforce the fact that he is, indeed, an asshole, as he offers unsolicited psychoanalysis of pretty much whoever happens to be in front of him at the time.

That said, despite its reliance on previous continuity, this is a comic that couldn't have been told in the regular DC comics line, and not just because of the fact that so many characters seem to get killed (or the swearing). Rather, it's pretty dependent on a very particular version of Plastic Man, and not a particularly likeable or marketable one, even if he is a sympathetic character, and one who at least tries to do the right thing and is therefore, ultimately, a hero.

That, and it sure makes the Justice League look like a bunch of jerks.

Cantwell works with two different artists on the book: Alex Lins and Jacob Edgar. 

Edgar is responsible for the pages depicting Plas with the Justice League, and he draws in a somewhat abstracted style, with clean lines and more cartoony designs (these passages are also colored more brightly). The result is a more classic, "comic book-y" look for the League scenes, suggesting a normal state of affairs.

Lins, who drew the cover and handles the lion's share of the art, handles all of the scenes of Plastic Man away from the League, and thus his earlier life of crime, his wrestling with his diagnosis, his attempts to reach out to Luke and his ill-conceived attempts to save Luke from the fate currently befalling him. Lins' style is a bit more realistic and has a greater degree of grit to it. 

The idea seems to be to contrast Plastic Man's "public" life with the League and his personal life away from it as sharply as possible, and it works, although I don't know that it was necessarily necessary. I was personally more drawn to Edgar's style, and I think the book probably would have worked just fine had he drawn it tall, the emotional content of the story and dialogue contrasting with the art, but certainly Lins' increasingly drippy, even goopy Plas sells his deteriorating nature. (While Edgar draws all the League scenes, Lins does draw the few superheroes who interact with Plas outside of League meetings and missions, like Detective Chimp, Robin and the Metal Men.)

Despite my reservations, this turned out to be quite a good comic book. 

Maybe I should have bought it after all...

REVIEWED: 

The Cartoonists Club (Graphix/Scholastic) It's hard to overstate the magnitude of this particular pairing of creators. 

Scott McCloud and Raina Telgemeier are two of the most influential cartoonists of my lifetime, and their impact on the medium and the industry is hard to even get one's head around (and by "industry", I mean "publishers of comics," not "the direct market"). 

I noticed that in Brian Cronin's review for CBR, he opened by casting about for similarly "high profile comic book collaborations", and the only ones of the handful of suggestions he had that seemed convincing to me were Todd McFarlane's out-of-left-field run with writers Frank Miller, Alan Moore, Dave Sim and that other guy on Spawn in 1993. (No offense to the likes of, say, Jeph Loeb, Jim Lee, the late John Cassaday and the others mentioned, all of whom no doubt brought a lot of new readers into comics and have legions of fans, and all of whom have produced work I've enjoyed in the past, but they never influenced the way people thought, talked and taught comics like McCloud or helped convince traditional book publishers to invest in original graphic novels for kids like Telegemeier.) 

So anyway, this is a book you're going to want to read, if you haven't already. As one might expect, or, perhaps, hope, the book reads pretty much like an Understanding Comics for the Baby-Sitters Club graphic novels set, the lessons about comics (and, perhaps more fun, the making of them) all being embedded within a somewhat gently dramatic story of four very different young creators learning about the medium.  I wish I had this book when I was in middle school. My review is here. 

How To Talk to Your Succulent (Tundra) I see the children's books that artist Zoe Persico has illustrated pass through my hands at the library fairly regularly (I just saw one, Friends Are Not for Biting, last night, in fact), and I recently checked out one that looked kind of intriguing, Greta and The Giants, a Greta Thunberg-inspired story by Persico and writer and fellow Zoe, Zoe Tucker). I was therefore somewhat familiar with her style when I sat down with her debut graphic novel, but I was surprised at how accomplished the book itself was, given Persico's new-ness to the medium. A surprisingly emotional story about a young girl and her father mourning the loss of her mother with a fantastical element to its plot, it's as effective as it is distinct looking. Review here. 

Jimmy Olsen's SuperCyclopedia (DC Comics) What's that? This book? Again? 

Well, yeah. I both bought it and professionally reviewed it, so it appears under both "Bought" and "Reviewed" in this month's column.

For my formal review of it, click here. Spoiler alert: I liked it.

*That's how it's spelled in this book. I've always seen it spelled "Tamaranean," but, looking it up, the entry on dcfandom.com suggests both are acceptable. I question Aaron's use of a woman from Tarmaran in the book, especially given that most readers will be well aware of the role one of her race will play on Earth in the future...and, more specifically, in the life of a member of the Bat-Family. Given that Batman and Ione become lovers in this book, it seems, well, weird to have the first Earth man/Tamaranean woman coupling not be that of Dick Grayson and Koriand'r, but to instead involve Dick's own adoptive father. What are the chances?

**As you've probably heard, Peter David is experiencing some health issues, and being a comic book writer in America, that means he and his family are facing extreme financial hardship. If you're able to, you can help out by donating here. 

***Wait, that's not true. I read 1999's Supergirl #38, a Day of Judgement tie-in in which Supergirl teamed-up with Zauriel, a favorite character of mine. I don't remember anything at all about it. Based on the cover, I assume they fought the then host-less Spectre.