Some six months after the final issue of
DC Versus Marvel shipped, the publisher released the first issue of its sequel, a four-part mini-series with a much smaller scale, a much more manageable cast of characters to be featured, and a great deal less hype. Mostly because of those very differences,
DC/Marvel: All Access was a better comic, improving on its predecessor's weaknesses while offering a cleaner, smoother, more rewarding read.
This seems particularly clear reading the two back-to-back, almost 30 years after they were originally published (and thus far removed from the expectations they offered at the time), an experience made possible by their collection in the DC Versus Marvel: The Amalgam Age Omnibus.
Unlike DC Versus Marvel, All Access featured a single creative team, which obviously rectified the hiccups in tone, style and aesthetic that came with a pair of writers alternating on each issue's scripts, and two different (and quite different) art teams replacing one another every eight pages or so.
The All Access team consisted of writer Ron Marz, returning to the new character he had co-created in the previous series, and pencil artist Butch Guice, here inked by Joe Rubinstein. Marz was, obviously, a fine and even obvious choice, a writer doing decent work for both publishers at the time, as well as during the previous series (In addition to co-writing DC Versus Marvel with Peter David, Marz also scripted the Access-starring Amalgam Comics tie-in, Dr. Strangefate).
A prolific artist, Guice had likewise worked for both publishers in the years preceding his work here, most notably on the various Superman books of the first half of the '90s. While his style wasn't particularly expressive, dynamic or showy—and certainly not what one thinks of when one thinks of "'90s comics", particularly those of Marvel or Image—he was a solid draftsman with a highly realistic style, so much so that he managed to make all of the various characters that participated in this series seem to fit together and, more remarkably, look like his (Despite their varying origins and their looks in their own, home comics).
Honestly, I didn't care for the art much in late 1996 and early 1997, when I originally bought and read these comics, but I appreciate it a lot more now.
Aside from the creative team, the book's other benefit was its focus. Though both the DC and Marvel universe are technically imperiled again, this time that peril doesn't involve warring cosmic gods or 20+ heroes forced into combat against one another. The universes crossover again, but on a smaller scale and at a slower pace, about two heroes and one villain per issue (At least until the last issue, wherein two whole teams are involved).
Marz reintroduces us to Access, aka Axel Asher, who is a New York City college student (despite his rather unfortunate hairline, which makes him look far older). He's on a lunch date with his girlfriend Ming in their home universe, the Marvel Universe, and theirs is a fraught relationship that seems to suffer the traditional problems of those involving a superhero with a secret identity. Axel's always late, always acting weird, always cancelling dates, always rushing off and always offering lame, unbelievable excuses.
His is, remember, the job of keeping the DC Universe and the Marvel Universe separate from one another; if he doesn't, there's a risk of the Amalgam Universe being reinstated. As the series begins, a mental flash alerts him that he's needed. Apparently, Venom has jumped from this universe to the next, and is now in Metropolis, trading punches with Superman (who is still, at this point, rocking his longer-haired look).
The first issue, then, is a Superman/Spider-Man team-up, featuring the two flagship heroes truly teaming-up for the first time since 1981's
Marvel Treasury Edition #28 (and the creators give us a nice, poster-like two-page splash of the pair posed over the skyline together). Obviously, the two heroes are able to take down Venom...with a little help from Access.
Unlike the various team-ups and fights in DC Versus Marvel, though, Marz and Guice have the room to flesh out these events and allow the characters to interact, which is, after all, what readers really want to see when they get the relatively rare opportunity to see characters from different publishers crossing-over.
And so we see how exactly Superman might fare against Venom in a fight that involves more than the two or four moves that the various battles in the previous crossover series did, and Superman and Spider-Man actually get to talk to one another.
This includes exchanges in which Spider-Man can't even really explain basic aspects of his life—like his costuming, for example—in a simple, straightforward sentence or two.
"This Venom is a playmate of yours?" Superman asks Spidey, to which he replies, "Yeah, another old costume I had that was really an alien symbiote, and... ...Well, don't ask about that, either.".
Or another where Spidey makes a comment about newspaper reporters that elicits a dirty look from Superman.
There's barely a cliffhanger leading us to the next issue, which features a Robin/Jubilee crossover, their interaction being the most interesting part of DC Versus Marvel (Originally, I thought this was perhaps because I was, at the time, a teenager like them; now I realize it's because they were the only characters who had much interaction at all, aside from Ben Reilly/Peter Parker and Clark Kent and Lois Lane. Most of the other heroes' interactions were limited to noting that they regret having to fight one another during the process of fighting one another).
Essentially, Jubilee runs into Axel and Ming during another of the couple's attempted dates, with the young mutant heroine eventually prevailing on Axel to take her to the other universe so she can say goodbye to Robin properly. They get to it eventually, with Tim Drake confessing that he actually already has a girlfriend and the pair kissing goodbye, but this being a superhero comic book, first they have to deal with Two-Face.
Batman shows up at the end...as does, rather randomly, Spider-Man villain The Scorpion. At that point, Access realizes that something's wrong if Marvel villains are going to keep showing up in DC cities, and he recruits Batman to help him figure out what's going on, taking the Dark Knight with him to Doctor Strange's Sanctum Sanctorum. This unlikely duo are the official stars of the third issue (as seen on Guice's
pretty cool, moody cover), although they basically just talk a little, and there's not much in the way of either fighting or teaming up between them.
But more superheroes quickly appear, in the form of Jubilee and what looked to me at the time (and still looks to me now) like a rather random assortment of X-Men: Cyclops, Jean Grey, Iceman, Storm, Bishop and Cannonball. (That wasn't actually the, or a, X-Men line-up in 1996/1997, was it...?).
Batman wants to take Strange back to his home universe for a good mental probing from Martian Manhunter—Access suspects Dr. Strangefate may be trying to reassert himself through Dr. Strange and, ultimately, reinstate the Amalgam Universe—but the X-Men aren't on board with that plan.
This leads to a skirmish, and in a pretty dumb move essentially made because the story demands it, Access retreats to the DC Universe to get Batman some allies to defend him against the X-Men, returning with the rest of the JLA (Or, at least, the original seven members of the Morrison/Porter/Dell team).
And that leads to the fourth issue: The X-Men vs. The JLA!
Now, I was, in 1997, a regular, avid and enthusiastic reader of JLA, and the fact that the X-Men (especially these X-Men) could hold their own against this iteration of the JLA didn't seem too terribly convincing to me.
I mean Superman could take out all of these guys himself at super-speed in a second or two, with Jean probably the only one with the power to fight back. Ditto The Flash. And Martian Manhunter. And Wonder Woman (although I guess DC Versus Marvel established that Storm could K-O her with lightning...?). Maybe Green Lantern Kyle Rayner..? (Although Marz rarely wrote him as all that particularly powerful, certainly not as powerful as Morrison did).
I mean, Batman wasn't doing too badly against all of the X-Men by himself before the rest of his team, the ones with all the superpowers, showed up.
Marz keeps the fight going for a while though, far longer than the splash-page it would take for most of the members of the JLA to solo the X-Men, with Cannonball trading punches with Aquaman for what seems like forever, even attempting to strangle the super-strong King of Atlantis with the line of his own hook at one point, and J'onn J'onnz somehow taking even longer to takedown Bishop than Batman had.
In the midst of the chaos, Dr. Strangefate does indeed hijack the unconscious Strange's body, and he re-amalgamates Wonder Woman and Storm into the Amalgam Universe's Wonder Woman (who is here called "Amazon," unlike in the pages of John Byrne's Amazon #1). He then amalgamates the other heroes standing against him, although we don't get the names of these characters, who include such unlikely amalgams as Batman + Jubilee and Iceman + Aquaman. That accomplished, the Amalgam Universe slowly begins to return around them.
It will be up to a last-ditch effort by Access to locate Doctor Strange's consciousness and pull Dr. Strangefate asunder again, re-separating the universe back into two separate universes. Surely you know just how that goes, the twist here being that, thanks to Dr. Strange's powers, the Amalgam Universe is established as its own distinct reality, encased in a little orb that he gives to Access, charging him with keeping it safe.
And that is, really, probably the entire reason this comic was published.
Yes, it allowed DC and Marvel to flesh-out Access and provide for some fun crossovers that might not have been able to carry their own one-shots like Spider-Man and Batman or Superman and the Fantastic Four could, but, perhaps more importantly, it provided an excuse to revisit Amalgam Comics...and provide a rationale for future Amalgam Comics, what with the Amalgam Universe now established as separate, stable universe of its own.
Although, as it turns out, this would be the last hurrah for Amalgam.
Since those comics are technically part of All Access, seemingly set between pages of the fourth issue, I suppose we should discuss them in this post.
Here, let's take them one at a time...
•
Generation Hex #1 by Peter Milligan, Adam Pollina and Mark Morales This book seems to have started life with its title, combining that of X-Men spin-off
Generation X (starring Jubilee and a new crop of teenage mutants) with DC's deformed Old West (and/or futuristic) bounty hunter Jonah Hex. Here Hex and the mutant Chamber are combined into the "malform" outlaw Jono Hex, who leads a team of characters that seem to similarly mix Marvel mutants with old DC Western characters (Neither being a pool of characters I'm very familiar with, I didn't necessarily "get" the components of each amalgam). Milligan has them being hunted by a trio of mechanical "Razormen", the late-19th century version of Sentinels, and he has an exceedingly clever riff on
The Magnificent Seven that has the opposite effect on a town, with our hero essentially tricking the bad guys into massacring everyone there. Pollina and Morales do a decent Chris Bachalo-esque style, the book thus looking to be somewhere in the ballpark of that artist's distinctive work on
Generation X.
•Super Soldier: Man of War #1 by Dave Gibbons, Mark Waid and Jimmy Palmiotti Super Soldier is one of several characters or concepts to return from the previous round of Amalgam Comics, although each would return in a new title, presumably so they could have a "#1" on the cover. Super Soldier is the only book to retain its original creative team, though, as Gibbons and Waid co-plotted the first comic, while Gibbons handled the art and Waid the script (Here, Palmiotti inks Gibbons, though). Set during World War II, this adventure is notable for—aside from its predictably great art—introducing some Golden Age amalgams like The Human Lantern, as well as war-time heroes Sgt. Rock and his Howling Commandos.
•Exciting X-Patrol #1 by Barbra Kesel, Bryan Hitch and Paul Neary Like Super Soldier, this amalgamation of the Doom Patrol and the X-Men also returned for a second comic, this time with Kesel handling the writing solo and Hitch on pencils. I didn't care for this as much as the original X-Patrol outing, largely because I preferred the work of original artist Roger Cruz over Hitch and Neary's busier, more realistic style, although I must admit I didn't necessarily find the concept strong enough for a second go-round either. New characters here include the villain Brother Brood (Brother Blood + The Brood) and the mysterious "Jericho", who looks like a gray-skinned Thing, but is secretly a version of Marvel's X-Man, I think...?
•Dark Claw Adventures #1 by Ty Templeton and Rick Burchett Wolverine/Batman mash-up Dark Claw returns, this time in an "animated" style adventure, with pencil artist Templeton and inker Burchett working in the Bruce Timm-esque style of Batman: The Animated Series. (Templeton rather drastically redesigns Dark Claw's mask, making it less ornate, and more similar to a pure fusion of Batman and Wolverine's respective cowls.) The gag is essentially spelled out in the title and Templeton's artwork, the plot involving a Talia al Ghul/Lady Deathstrike amalgam battling Dark Claw to avenge the death of her father, Ra's-A-Pocalypse. The giant Candian nickel and the red, Devil Dinosaur-looking T-Rex in Dark Claw's cave headquarters were nice touches.
•Bat-Thing #1 by Larry Hama, Rodolfo Damaggio and Bill Sienkiewicz This is another one where the title alone does the heavy-lifting, and it's such a compelling title that one wonders how DC never ended up using it for a character themselves before this. An amalgam of Man-Bat and Man-Thing, Bat-Thing is a green-hued humanoid bat with Manny's empty red eyes, dangling face bits and burning touch. He/it has recently killed, and an amalgam of Harvey Bullock and a name I didn't recognize is on the case. It's a perfectly serviceable done-in-one horror style story, starring a speechless creature that is maybe a little more bat than swamp monster.
•JLX Unleashed #1 by Priest, Oscar Jimenez and Hanibal Rodriguez I didn't care for this mash-up of the Justice League and the X-Men, neither when I originally read it in 1997, nor when I reread it earlier this year. Many of the characters seem to have been introduced in the previous year's Amalgam trading card line, where they were drawn by Howard Porter (Those cards are all, by the way, collected in the pages of the omnibus). Here they are a broken and imprisoned team of "metamutants" (an odd term to use, as just plain "mutant" is used throughout the rest of the Amalgam line), eventually sprung from their prison by Wonder Woman/Amazon to defeat Fin Fang Flame, a giant, sarcastic burning dragon that is an amalgamation of Fin Fang Foom and...I don't know who or what, maybe Brimestone...? They are led by a "Mr. X", who seems to be over-amalgamated, essentially being Charles Xavier (who was already amalgamated elsewhere) and Martian Manhunter...but he's also a Skrull instead of a Martian, and has an M-shaped eye tattoo like Bishop...? It's a pretty straightforward fight comic, and I wasn't overly impressed by either the designs or the art. It's especially dissappointing, given how great so many of the other comics written by Priest have been over the years.
•Magnetic Men featuring Magneto #1 by Tom Peyer, Barry Kitson and Dan Panosian This is basically What if...Magneto Created the Metal Men?, with the heroic Erik Magnus creating a new and distinct crop of robots powered by "magnetometric computers" to combat his evil brother Will Magnus' mutant-hunting Sentinels, not wanting to spend mutant lives in the struggle. One of the Magnetic Men shares a name (and metal) with one of the original DC Metal Men, Iron, while the others are new (Nickel, Cobalt, Antimony and Bismuth). They fight some evil robots, and there's a too-brief visit to "Krakoa, The Living Dinosaur Island". Kitson's art here looks very...un-Kitson-y to me, perhaps because he is intentionally working in a more Jim Lee-derived, '90s X-Men appropriate style...? At any rate, were it not for the credits, I wouldn't have guessed Kitson drew this, his linework and posing only recognizable here and there. The tag at the end is promising, although there was, of course, never an issue #2: "Next: Detective Dinosaur."
•Spider-Boy Team-Up #1 by "R.K. Sternsel", Ladronn and Juan Vlasco Returning Spider-Boy writer Karl Kesel amalgamated himself with Roger Stern to become R.K. Sternsel, writing in his introduction to the omnibus that he needed Stern's deep knowledge of comics and characters to help him with The Legion of Galactic Guardians 2099, the Legion of Super-Heroes/Guardians of the Galaxy mash-ups that Spider-Boy would be teaming up with in the year 2099. This included not one, but two different line-ups of the Legion—one 22 heroes strong, another consisting of 17 different heroes—their number, names and costumes changing between roll calls based on the time-travel shenanigans of the story. I liked this book a lot better this time around than when I had first read it all those years ago, mainly because, at the time, I had missed Ringo's work so much. Ladronn's style is obviously quite different, but here he seems to be working in a rather deliberate Kirby pastiche, perhaps inspired by such elements as The Yancy Legion or The Silver Racer.
•Challengers of The Fantastic #1 by Karl Kesel, Tom Grummett and Al Vey This is an amalgam so obvious that it's almost a wonder that it didn't get published with the original round of Amalgam Comics, although I suppose it's worth noting that Kesel did introduce these characters among the many scientists staffing Project Cadmus in the original Spider-Boy comic. Basically, Kesel and company amalgamate Jack Kirby and Stan Lee's Fantastic Four with the earlier team of adventurers they were seemingly based on, Kirby's own The Challengers of the Unknown. Here we get their origin (a mash-up of that of the FF and the Challs), and see them face one of their greatest challenges, the space-faring giant named Galactiac. There are also appearances by Uatu the Guardian, The Silver Racer, Dr. Doomsday and Bronze Tiger, the king of Wakanda. Great art by Tom Grummett grounds the proceedings, which is mostly a very inside baseball game of mixing and matching.
•Iron Lantern #1 by Kurt Busiek, Paul Smith, Al Williamson and others Hal Jordan made a cameo in the pages of Speed Demon, as the last living member of the "Starbrand Corps." But All Access' new, second creation of the Amalgam Universe seems to excuse such changes, and so Green Lantern Hal Jordan and Iron Man Tony Stark (who also appeared previously, as a weapons maker in Bruce Wayne: Agent of SHIELD) are here in a new, composite form: Iron Lantern Hal Stark. This is mostly an impressively thorough blending of the two concepts, heavily leaning on their earlier 1960s takes, elevated by pencil artist Paul Smith's smooth, elegant artwork. He is inked by no less than seven different inkers, although one can't tell from the results. This is probably the best-looking of all of this round of Amalgam Comics, and with competition that includes Dave Gibbons, that's really saying something.
•Thorion of The New Asgods #1 by Keith Giffen and John Romita Jr As with Challengers of the Fantastic, this seems to be another case of the creators combining Kirby creations together to make a new whole. John Ostrander toyed with Kirby's Fourth World characters in Bullets and Bracelets, introducing Thanoseid, but here Giffen and JRJR go far further, fusing Kirby's Thor run with his New Gods. The war that killed the old gods is Ragnarok, and their "third" world was apparently Asgard, now part of remade. bifurcated planet that is half New Asgard and half Apokalypse. The former's champion is, of course, Thorion the Hunter, who looks like Thor in an Orion-inspired outfit and who channels the Astro-Force through his hammer. Aside from the origin and a cosmic battle against his brother L'Ok D'Saad, the book is fairly uneventful, mainly a showcase for JRJR's take on refashioned Kirby characters and concepts, with lots of splashes (including multiple double-splashes) and four-panel pages. It's big, bombastic and a fast, fun read.
•Lobo The Duck #1 by Alan Grant, Val Semeiks and Ray Kryssing I suppose it made sense to someone to amalgamate each publisher's primary parodic character, leading to this Lobo and Howard the Duck mash-up (Lobo didn't really start out as a parodic character, of course, but he pretty quickly grew into one, appearing both is usually serious-ish stories as well as his own comics by writers like Grant that were essentially cartoonishly violent comedies). There isn't really much to this book, really, which is essentially just a Lobo comic in which the Main Man happens to be in the body of a cartoon duck (with one really big, buff, Lobo-style arm, for some reason). I guess seeing a Disney-style duck with stubble on its beak is kind of unusual. Lobo meets some other amalgams of Howard and Lobo characters, some of which I couldn't completely determine the origins of (One exception? Doctor Bongface, an amalgam of Howard's Doctor Bong and Grant's own Batman villain, Scarface). Nice enough art, but to no real purpose.
Next: 1997's Unlimited Access
