Catching up with Katie Skelly: The Agency and Maids

The Agency (Fantagraphics; 2018) I mentioned this book in passing the other week, when discussing a mini-comic version of one of its chapters acquired from a convention. It's a collection of all of Skelly's short, playful sex comics originally created for and published online at Slutist.com, a now-defunct sex-positive feminist website founded by Kristen J. Sollee that was active between 2013-2019. 

That venue may have influenced both the content and the format of the strips, which can be as short as a page, or as long as 10, with some of the longer stories being broken up into shorter episodes.

Though Skelly's character design and rendering doesn't vary much from story to story, everything else about them may, from the use of color, the style with which it is applied and the layouts. And though the content may vary widely from a sort of Barbarella-esque space vixen engaged in space exploration to the cryptic antics of a fashion model in a Lynchian adventure to a story of a strange cult to a tale of spies, they all star sexy young women who often find themselves engaged in various sex acts.

The stories are all light and fun, a few having a sense of the weird or mysterious about them while others are more outright humorous.

The conceit is never explicitly explained within the book, but each heroine is apparently a different "agent" and designated by a number.

The first of these is Agent 8, the aforementioned space girl. When we first meet her, she is staring at the stars, and asks, "Is there more life out there?" In the next panel, an animated skeleton character is incredulous: "What? You know that there is! We met on Jupiter?!" (In perhaps Skelly's funniest strip, a black-and-white one-pager, she and the skeleton, who named Hamilton, have apparently just landed and started exploring a new planet. He mentions the interesting plant life, which is vaguely phallic, only to turn and find that 8 has already stripped naked, laid down and apparently put one inside herself.)

Among Agent 8's longer stories, she meets a fan of hers at a "weird party" (there is a deer in the foreground) who is also a seamstress, and offers to make her a custom dress, and they end up having sex. And then there's one where she meets Spider-Man, of all people. (Or, at least, someone wearing a Spider-Man costume.) Definitely the web-slinger's most unexpected guest appearance in a comic book.

Then there's Agent 9, whose story I discussed previously in the previously linked-to column. It's the brightest colored of all the stories within, and one that is fully colored (Many of the Agent 8 stories, by contrast, have limited palettes of a color or two).

Agent 10 stars in a more complex story. Snippets of news reports suggest she is a famous actress in a high-profile but dissolving marriage, who has fallen in with a cult run by a mysterious woman in a wheelchair. They talk of a ritual, in which 10 is stripped and hung from shackles while an octopus slithers from its pot and crawls all over her, after which she is apparently granted visions. She then has a heart to heart (and sex) with a beautiful transgirl wearing a leather jacket in a pool.

Finally, there's Agent 73, who stars in another longer and more complex story, this one written by Sarah Horrocks (It's the only story in the book that's not written as well as drawn by Skelly). 

Somewhere in a jungle compound, a blond woman who looks like some kind of spy movie villain (eye patch and cape, an injured leg in a wire contraption and a cane) seems to be giving dictation to another woman. This is Dr. Paracletus, and she is the target of Agent 73, who appears with a beret on her head and a gun in her hand. The two have history, and though there's plenty of exposition, it is cryptic; it would seem that 73's ex-lover Bertrand had transitioned into a woman named Rosalind, and the doctor has used her surgical skills to give Rosalind Agent 73's own face...?

I referred to the late David Lynch a couple of paragraphs ago, and, indeed, the back half of the book does have that sort of never-explained, just-suggested sense of something bigger, more mysterious and darker just under the surface that permeates some of the filmmaker's best-known works, as he would use the feelings of certain types of genre films to give his own work a tone, without similarly importing plot points or other genre signifiers. (The result? His fans liked the ways his films felt to them, while those who didn't care for his work might often dismiss it as weird or confusing).

I suppose a better point of reference might be the work of the late Richard Sala (particularly given Skelly's publisher here), who, similar to Lynch, would take notes from different genre works to imbue his comics with a sense of the mysterious or suggestions of conspiracies that are never entirely delineated. (And, of course, Sala was, like Skelly, able to create highly charged sexual characters, despite how far his particular style was from what we might call "realistic").

That's only really true for about half of the stories in The Agency, though, the ones starring Agents 9, 10 and 73. As for Agent 8, her adventures are more straightforward (One is a simple, silent three-pager in which she lolls about naked in a field of phallic mushrooms, licking them before pulling the caps off of a pair of them, riding one while fellating another, until she's apparently sexually satisfied and thoroughly tripping). 

Though obviously not as narratively satisfying as some of Skelly's longer previous works, The Agency is an excellent showcase for her art, it offers a compelling example of her engaging with various subjects and it manages to be erotic without being exploitative, sexy and sexual while wholly hers. 

To use a musical metaphor, it's more jazz than concept album. To use one from prose, it's a collection of short stories rather than a literary novel. For fans of Skelly's, it's a must-read, and for those looking for a place to start with her body of work, it's an easy entry point. 

As I mentioned before, this 2018 paperback version is now out-of-print (though it's still available electronically; I read it on Hoopla). Fantagraphics released a more recent hardcover version, which is also bigger in size and page count, apparently including a new story that wasn't available in this version. 

Maids (Fantagraphics; 2020) The sensational, brutal murders of a wealthy woman and her daughter by their two live-in maids in 1933 France is probably relatively little-known in 21st century America, even as true crime obsessed as our post-podcast culture seems to have become. But it was apparently influential to 20th century French intellectuals (including Jean-Paul Sarte), who saw it as symbolic of class struggle, and it has inspired various plays, films, books, songs, artwork and even an opera.

And, of course, an original graphic novel by the great Katie Skelly.

Skelly's short, fleetly moving book isn't a rigorous, detail-by-detail recounting of the crime and what lead up to it, but rather a more impressionistic telling of the story, stringing scenes of potent imagery together like rosary beads as it moves to the shocking conclusion those familiar with the story will be anticipating. 

Although one need not know of the case and its long afterlife in culture—I surely didn't—to follow Skelly's telling, or to experience a sense of expectant dread over its inevitable violence while reading. The book opens, after all, with a panel of a bloody eyeball, which a woman in a maid's uniform walks towards and picks up off the floor, holds in her hand, and then points towards with a finger, as if she's about to poke it...before the scene transitions to that same finger pushing a doorbell.

The woman in the scene is Lea, the younger sister of Christine, who has been employed by Madame Lancelin as a maid for several years. Christine has prevailed upon Madame Lancelin to take in and employ her sister as well. 

Their life as maids, which spans a few years before the climax, is hard, as they work very long hours cleaning a big house and preparing meals. Madame isn't the kindest boss, either, as she slaps Christine in one panel, and is demanding of the sisters—especially so after Lea is hired, since, as she explains, if she's paying for two maids, she wants twice the work done, rather than paying for Christine to simply have a companion while she works.

The girls' life wasn't particularly easy before either, though. Flashbacks imply that the girls grew up with an alcoholic, presumably abusive mother, and later served in a convent. After Christine left the convent, Lea apparently had a hard time, refusing to do her chores or pray, and there's a scene where she is kicked out of the convent (Whether or not this has to do with her cutting the head off of a pet songbird with a pair of scissors isn't made explicit; luckily, Skelly doesn't draw the act itself, just the moment before and then, later, the result. It's still pretty flinchy).

While Christine copes with the pressures of her maid job by smoking and stealing little items from the family—which Madame seems to be aware of, and to reluctantly tolerate—the more sensitive Lea eventually has a breakdown of sorts, running out to the woods to vomit after feeling sick. 

Things come to a head one night after Lea's red right hand starts talking to her, in a reddish pink dialogue balloon full of comforting words. After they accidentally blow a fuse and Madame yells at them, threatening to throw them both out, Christine puts Madame's eyes out, and then attacks her with an iron. At this point, the sisters both talk in pink-colored dialogue balloons, saying the same things simultaneously, like "She's next" (referring to Madame's daughter) and "I knew you could do it." 

What's going on isn't made explicit, and Skelly's version of the girls' story isn't as sympathetic as it could have been (From what little I've read between finishing Skelly's Maids and writing this post, Madame was apparently much more abusive of the girls than the single slap depicted in this book suggests and she apparently had some mental problems of her own). 

There's at least a suggestion of the supernatural, or that the sisters are somewhat insane, acting out not because of the fact that they had been pushed too far or in retaliation for abuse and exploitation, but more so because they were, well, murderers. (As with the bird earlier in the narrative, the violence of the murders is staged fairly tastefully, with the actual acts left to the imagination, so that we see, say, Christine raising the iron over her head, and then the action cuts to the daughter reacting to her mother's scream from another room entirely, the iron actually striking the victim off-panel).

Given my own unfamiliarity with the case, I'm not the best person to comment on how Skelly portrays its specifics here, though. There are implications throughout the book, but Skelly's telling is one of impressions and feelings, with elements of the story left purposefully cryptic and mysterious, so the readers can interpret it as they wish.

All of the swirling dark content and violent actions of the climax are somewhat in contrast with Skelly's own simple, intimate art style, which, as with the sex in The Agency discussed above, keeps the work from feeling exploitative.

Weird, engaging, scary and provocative, Maids is thoughtfully made, a true crime graphic novel in which the "true" aspects are ghost-like in their insubstantiality. 

Checking Fantagraphics' website, the book is currently listed as out of stock, although I looked at two big online book retailers, and both have it in stock, so I don't think the book is out of print just yet. As with all graphic novels, though, you should probably check with your local comics shop about it first. 

Review: Fortune & Glory: The Musical

This is a very belated sequel to Brian Michael Bendis' Fortune and Glory, which was originally published as a three-part miniseries from Oni Press in 1999, before being collected into a trade by first Oni, then Dark Horse and, most recently, DC.

It was a comedic memoir about the then still up-and-coming comics writer's attempts to pitch his early Caliber and Image crime comics like AKA Goldfish, Jinx and Torso in Hollywood as works ripe for adaptation. It was then and remains now a real outlier in Bendis' bibliography. 

For one, it was written and drawn by Bendis, who trained as an artist and drew all of his own early work, before transitioning to writing superhero comics. Despite the thousands of pages he's written for Marvel over the past 25 years and his long ago reaching the point where he could seemingly do whatever he wanted for the publisher, he's never drawn anything for them, not even as a one-off or a gag,  a short story or cover or pin-up, or just something to allow him to say he's drawn for Marvel, which I always found a little perplexing (Honestly, while it's been a long, long time since I've read anything he's drawn, I don't think his art is that much worse than that of some of his frequent collaborators over the years). 

While I had read Bendis' original Fortune and Glory via the Oni trade around 2000 or so, now, 25 years later, I remember almost nothing about its specifics, only that 1) it was drawn in Bendis' loose, more cartoony style that I wasn't necessarily a fan of (I grew up in Ashtabula, Ohio, about 60 miles from Bendis' hometown of Cleveland, and my family subscribed to the Plain Dealer, so I knew his name and work from his early 1990s attempts to get comics content into the paper), 2) I liked it and 3) it included a dirty joke reference to Marc Andreyko on a faux comics cover that was the first time I saw that particular name, and which I still think of whenever I hear Andreyko's name, which I suppose neither Andreyko nor Bendis would want to be the case. 

After reading Fortune & Glory: The Musical, I did check out the original from the library (this one the 2023 Dark Horse version), thinking maybe I should re-read it before writing about the new one. I flipped through it, though, saw all those weird, intrusive, slightly mechanical-looking, branching "trees" of dialogue balloons that I had become familiar with from Bendis' later Avengers writing, and told myself "I'm not reading all that." (Though quite wordy, which Bendis himself notes in an aside, The Musical seems less so than the original Fortune and Glory; flipping through both now, it seems the original was much more dialogue heavy, while a lot of The Musical's verbiage comes in narration boxes. Both seem good examples of something that seems true of much of Bendis' body of work—that he might be more comfortable writing these particular stories in either prose or film, rather than comics.)

Although the cover of The Musical seems quite similar to that of the collection of the original, complete with Bendis' own comics avatar on it (an avatar which seems quite thinner than the real Bendis; note that tiny neck supporting the round head, giving his bust the look of a Dum-Dum sucker), the interior is fairly different.

Most obviously, The Musical is not drawn by Bendis himself, perhaps because, so much busier and more successful as a writer this decade than in the late '90s, he just didn't have time to draw an original graphic memoir. Or perhaps because drawing comics is really, really hard work, and he was long past the point in his career where he needed to do that (In a kind of crushing, even heart-breaking scene in The Musical, we see Bendis taking a call from Joe Quesada, who clarifies that he wants Bendis to write a Daredevil fill-in for him, rather than draw anything for Marvel; "I, uh, thought your art was just in service of your writing," Quesada's voice says from the phone, "You know your artwork is not that good, right?").

Instead, The Musical is drawn by Bill Walko, a cartoonist who, according to the Grand Comics Database, has some indie comics to his name, as well as some covers for Archie and a short collaboration with Bendis that appeared in the writer's Pearl #5 (You can see a ton of Walko's art and more closely scrutinize his credits here). 

Walko's style is quite different from that of Bendis. He has a cleaner, smoother line, and the work looks a bit more finished and professional, if somewhat less personal. The format of the two Fortune books is pretty similar though, which makes me wonder if Bendis wrote in thumbnails, or laid the book out in his script. 

In a flip-through, the books look fairly similar, although, as I said, while both are extremely wordy, to the detriment of their flow, The Musical looks less tediously so. (Though Bendis is obviously the star and the draw here, it seems unfortunate to me how little Walko's name is on the cover of The Musical;  appearing a small fraction of the size of Bendis' own name and running in a strip beneath it along with those of the colorist and letterer.)

The sub-title of The Musical, appearing in a dialogue balloon being "spoken" by the Bendis avatar, is "A True Spider-Man Broadway Musical Debacle," and that seems to be the hook of the book, letting readers in on what went on behind-the-scenes of Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark, the notorious 2011 stage adaptation by Julie Taymor with music by U2's Bono and The Edge and elaborate stage stunts that became infamous for injuring performers.

Though that is the book's hook, if one really wants to read more about the production, they might be better off with Glen Berger's Song of Spider-Man: The Inside Story of the Most Controversial Musical in Broadway History (Simon and Schuster; 2013), which Bendis recommends near the end of his graphic memoir. Berger, a playwright, is one of the three people credited with the final play's "book", along with Taymor herself and Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa, who seems to have ended up being the involved "comics" person (Aguirre-Sacasa had a background in both theater and comics, and was probably therefore a better fit for the project than Bendis ever was, which I think Bendis himself would probably agree with, given the disinterest in musicals he admits to in this book). 

That is because it turns out Bendis' own involvement in Turn Off the Dark was quite limited. 

He was apparently the second writer brought on to help develop the project (circa 2004, a few years into his career-making stint on Ultimate Spider-Man), and his involvement was limited to a single face-to-face meeting with Taymor in LA and a couple of phone calls...one of which went badly enough from Bendis' perspective that he quit during it.

During that call, Taymor yelled at him as he was pitching his story, as it ignored a controversial change to the bitten-by-a-radioactive-spider origin she wanted to make, a change that may have inadvertently been inspired by a scene Bendis wrote in Ultimate Spider-Man. He responded by insulting her, replying to a few panels of shouted No!'s, profanity and a "I don't even know what you're about!!" with, "Well, maybe it's because you haven't' stopped talking at me since we met."

That said, he says he did quite a lot of work for the project, researching Taymor and musicals enough to appear conversant (In one scene, he buys a thousand dollars' worth of Broadway musicals at a Portland Barnes & Noble) and putting together his pitch. The latter doesn't necessarily translate into much in terms of the page-count of the book, as, well, the act of writing doesn't exactly lend itself to dramatization in a comic book.

So, given how little of Bendis working on Turn Off The Dark is in The Musical, what is in it? 

Well, the book is more of a biography of Bendis than it is a show business tell-all, with the working on the play aspect simply used as a framing device. The book opens one morning afternoon when Bendis awakes to suspiciously numerous and urgent phone calls, emails and instant messages telling him to call Avi Arad, and it ends with Bendis, Matt Fraction and other Marvel creators seeing the final show, a surprise that Marvel had arranged for them all after a conference in New York City (A neat, three-panel sequence on a double-page splash shows Bendis and a handful of Marvel editors and creators, all white dudes, in what looks like a small workplace break room, and then expanding to bigger, more diverse crowds in increasingly bigger and nicer looking rooms, each punctuated by a pitch for a different big Marvel event that will be familiar to readers).

The actual story of The Musical is a sort of creative biography of Bendis, starting with a young boy in Cleveland obsessed with superhero comics, deciding to become a person who makes comic books*, embarking on a life-long quest to teach himself how to draw comics (a much more difficult quest in the 1980s and '90s than it would have been a few decades later!), attending the Cleveland Institute of Art, hustling to make ends meet as an artist while pitching comics, getting published with Caliber, starting his career in indie crime comics, befriending artist David Mack and, ultimately, eventually, breaking into Marvel, where he became about as big a star as direct market super-comics produces. 

Some of it is fairly inside baseball for superhero comics readers and industry watchers (It's certainly a lot of fun seeing a very young Bendis encounter John Totleben, Walt Simonson and Gil Kane, the latter of whom has a fun, funny reaction when someone asks him what he thinks of Frank Miller's Ronin), and later meeting and working with the celebrities of the comics world, like Quesada and the previously mentioned Fraction (Some of whom aren't named, but you can try to match Walko's drawings of them at meetings to pictures you've seen). 

But much of it will be compelling to anyone interested in comics at all, especially the passages devoted to Bendis' "secret origin", which reveals just how damn hard he worked before becoming successful, essentially learning everything to know about comics, including how to draw, make, publish and sell the damn things before becoming an indie success, and then, later, a mainstream success. 

And, briefly, almost a potential Broadway success. 

Honestly, the biographical aspects are interesting enough that the book could have worked without the Turn Off the Dark connection. Sure, that stuff is all interesting, but these scenes seem here somewhat unnecessary, and they might have made for a chapter in Bendis' overall biography, rather than the foundation upon which he built it here (If Fortune and Glory were an ongoing series, for example, the Turn Off The Dark stuff might have made a single issue, or, given the way Bendis writes, perhaps a story arc). 

As is so often the case with Bendis' comics writing, especially that of the last 20 years or so, I wondered while reading this if it wouldn't have been better served as a prose book than a comic book. If you asked me what makes for the very best comics, I would tell you they are stories that could only be told in comics, and, by that measure, for all of the comics Bendis has created in his long, successful career, a great deal of which I've read and many of which I've quite liked, I don't think he's ever produced any comics that quite meet that particular criteria.**

I don't know if he'll ever achieve the sort of breakthrough, mainstream, non-comics pop culture success that the two Fortune and Glory books have been devoted to his attempts at (either on Broadway or much, more likely, in Hollywood), but, having conquered the comic book industry and lived and experienced it from so many angles now, I think these books prove that his biography is a compelling one, full of fun and funny stories. He therefore must have a hell of a (prose) book in him, whenever he's ready to write it. 

After all, he happened to work for Marvel from the period in which they seemed to be at their nadir to the heights of their Marvel Cinematic Universe-fueled cultural relevance, and that's a bigger, better, grabbier hook than making a pitch for an infamous Broadway musical.

I just hope that, when he sits down to write that particular story, he does it in prose, and produces an honest-to-God autobiography, rather than another graphic memoir (or two, or six). 

After all, how much harder can writing a prose autobiography be than writing the book for a Broadway musical...?

*At age six, he announces to his family, "I just wanted to let you all know that I will be artist of Spider-Man"; this is why I find it kinda crazy that Quesada or whoever never had Bendis draw a pin-up or gag strip in the back of an oversized Spider-Man anniversary issue, actualizing the man's childhood dreams.

**That said, it's been a rather long while since I've followed Bendis' career super-closely. I think Batman Universe was the last thing of his that I really liked, and, if you've been reading EDILW for very long, you know the site is littered with posts expressing disappointment and frustration with Bendis-written comics that I don't think really worked, like Age of Ultron and Siege and Event Leviathan. If you have suggestions of great Bendis-written comics that meet that could-have-only-been-a-comic criteria, do let me know. 

How good a writer was Peter David? Well, he made Aquaman cool.

I obviously can't speak to the early decades of the character, but certainly by the time I was growing up, Aquaman had become something of an easy joke, especially compared to his more powerful and popular peers in the various Super Friends cartoons. 

But then Peter David got a hold of him.

He wrote the character and fleshed out his fantastical setting over the course of some eight years between 1990 and 1998, writing not only an almost 50-issue run on an Aquaman monthly series, but also the miniseries Aquaman: Time and Tide and the underwater fantasy The Atlantis Chronicles. 

He fleshed the character out, immediately making drastic, provocative changes, like the beard and longhair, having him lose his left hand in battle and replacing with a harpoon, and trading in the familiar orange shirt for a gladiator-style harness. And me made the character feel moody and dangerous. 

I think Grant Morrison gets a lot of credit for writing a cool Aquaman in the pages of his 1997-2000 JLA run, depicting the character in such a way as to make him seem worthy of standing shoulder to shoulder with the likes of Superman and Batman, but, well, that was Peter David's Aquaman that Morrison included in his line-up (And the Aquaman of artists Martin Egeland and Jim Calafiore). Even when later creators would take the character on, rejecting David's aesthetic changes and hewing closer to the classic version of the character, like Alex Ross and Geoff Johns did, their work seemed to build on David's interpretation of the character as a badass. 

Though they obviously owe a lot to Johns' work on the character, I don't think we get two Aquaman feature films and the character in the 2017 Justice League movie without David's refurbishing of the character in the '90s. We certainly wouldn't have had Jason Momoa playing him. 

David's Aquaman was my first introduction to the writer's work. When I was still getting into comics and being increasingly drawn into the DC Universe setting in the '90s, I would regularly check the back issue bins at Books Galore in Erie, Pennsylvania and pick up copies of that Aquaman series, more or less at random, generally guided by what unlikely guest star might appear on the cover (Swamp Thing, Animal Man, Martian Manhunter). 

David's frequent use of guest stars and the wider DC Universe made even random issues easy to get into, but they were all well-written enough that each one was complete and enjoyable by itself, rather than being a piece of a story that didn't make sense on its own. I eventually read the whole thing, getting new issues monthly and reading the back issues in order, and I was sorely disappointed when David eventually left the title (A title, it's worth noting, didn't survive too much longer without him).

While that was my introduction to the writing of Peter David, it was hardly the work he is best known for (Nor the work of his that lead most obviously and directly to a big Hollywood production; that would instead by his co-creation of Miguel O'Hara in 1992's Spider-Man 2099, a character who played a major role in 2023's animated blockbuster Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse). 

Rather, I imagine he's best known for his long, influential run on Marvel's The Incredible Hulk, during which time he made multiple innovations to the character and introduced versions of him that have been reverberating throughout the Marvel Universe ever since (Sometimes written by David himself, sometimes by other creators who followed him). That run too seems to have influenced screenwriters and directors, notably so in Ang Lee's 2003 Hulk. 

David also wrote a lot of Spider-Man comics for the publisher, a previous version of the Captain Marvel character, and an extremely well-regarded run on X-Men spin-off X-Factor. 

Having not gotten into Marvel before the turn of the century, I missed all of these comics (although I did read his 2005 Madrox miniseries, and the first arc of the 2006 X-Factor revival it led to). But I knew his original X-Factor run must have been something special, because I read about it in a newspaper article in the Cleveland Plain Dealer (probably written by Mike Sangiacomo) in the '90s, long before it was common for editors to deem comics worthy of coverage in newspapers. 

David also wrote a long-ish run on DC's Supergirl, created Spyboy for Dark Horse (with artist Pop Mhan) and Fallen Angel for first DC and then IDW (with artist David Lopez), co-wrote the big 1996 DC Vs. Marvel crossover event series and wrote scores of other comics over the course of the last 45 years. 

In addition to Aquaman, I am most familiar with his work from the 1998-2003 Young Justice, which he wrote for its entire five-year run, working with pencil artist Todd Nauck. A team comic featuring the then most current crop of superhero sidekicks, it was notable for foregoing the soap opera-ish melodrama and teen angst that permeated the previous decade's most popular comics featuring young heroes, like the X-Men and New TeenTitans books, and instead embracing comedy, making for a particularly light-hearted superhero comic that could be in sharp contrast to the often overly serious super-comics of the era. (It also inspired a popular television cartoon series of the same name that began airing in 2010, a series that David also worked on.)

That's a career that any comics writer would be happy to have, but then, David was so prolific that comics only accounted for part of his resume. He also wrote what must be in the neighborhood of some 100 novels, including lots of licensed work on the Star Trek franchise, various Babylon 5 books, movie novelizations (many of them of films based on comics, of course) and plenty of original science-fiction, fantasy and other books. 

And then there's his short stories, his non-fiction, his essays and his writing for television. 

Despite all of that work, David and his family found themselves in rather dire financial straits of late, with a GoFundMe campaign set up on their behalf a few months ago. 

It is a failing of both the comics industry (and the major corporations that make astronomical profits based on work like David's) and of the United States of America that anyone's medical problems should lead to such devastating amounts of debt. 

Put simply, David and his family should not need to resort to crowdfunding, certainly not in a country as rich as ours, and certainly not considering how much money David's characters and stories have helped make other people. 

As David's fans and the industry as a whole spend the week noting his loss and offering their condolences to his friends and family, I hope we can all also use this opportunity to do two things.

First, to recommit ourselves to reforming both the industry's treatment of its creators and the country's healthcare (which, unfortunately, seems to be getting worse, as Republicans are in the process of shrinking Medicare coverage; I don't think it's exactly controversial to note that, had David been a Canadian or a British writer, he and his family would have been in far better shape).

 And, second, to celebrate our favorite comic book writers and artists and to let them know just how much they mean to us while they are still alive to hear it. 

That time Rex the Wonder Dog almost helped found the Justice League (On 1977's Justice League of America #144)

Justice League of America #144 is particularly interesting for two reasons.

First, it addresses the passage of time in a way that, at least here in the 21st century, seems unusual for a superhero comic book.

Second, it is premised on the never before revealed story of the true creation of the Justice League, long concealed from the world and, indeed, even some of its own members. A literal secret origin, then.

The 33-page story, "The Origin of the Justice League--Minus One!", is written by Steve Englehart, pencilled by Dick Dillin and inked by Frank McLaughlin. In its framing sequence, Green Arrow is on the League's satellite headquarters, reading through a thick book labeled "Journal of the Justice League," as one does. 

Apparently upset by what he has just read, he storms off to angrily confront Superman and Green Lantern Hal Jordan, who are playing cards, as Justice Leaguers do. How upset is GA? Well, Dillin draws an explosion of energy emanating from his head, which colorist Anthony Tollin has colored red. 

What's got him so worked up? Well, he says that Hal has always maintained that he became a Green Lantern in September of 1959 (a date, an editorial box points out, that was chosen because that was the cover date of Hal's first appearance, in Showcase #22). And Green Arrow was told that the League was founded, "with you a large part of it", in February of 1959, which is seven months before Hal was even a superhero.

So what gives? Well, Superman and Hal solemntly lead Ollie to "the communications quadrant" of the satellite, seat him before a giant monitor (Green Arrow sits down while wearing his quivers on his back? Seems uncomfortable), and play him a tape of Martian Manhunter, who will tell the story that will dominate the rest of the book's 30 pages, when the heroes who would become the Justice League all met one another for the first time and decided to form a team...but to postpone doing so for six months or so.

"It wasn't you we feared-- It was the times!" J'onn says, addressing the camera. 

But let's linger on those dates that Green Arrow rattled off, shall we? 

This issue was released in 1977, and, presumably, the framing sequence is meant to be set in 1977 as well. If Hal became a GL in 1959, that means he has, at the point this story takes place, been superhero-ing for 18 years now (and the League has been around for that long as well...meaning the rest of its members are all at least 18 years into their careers already).

If we imagine that Hal was as young as, say, 20 when he became a Green Lantern, then that would mean he is 38 in this story...and, as we know, this was relatively early in Hal's career. It would be another decade or so before Crisis On Infinite Earths altered the timestream/DC continuity for the first time. 

While those numbers work out for the purposes of this story as regards Hal and his Justice League peers, it's worth noting that Robin Dick Grayson appears in the flashback story, which, again, is set 18 years ago, in 1959. He was a teenager then. And, in 1977, he was still Robin and, apparently, still a teenager (He went away to college in 1969, though, at which point he must have been 18 or thereabouts.)

So, um, obviously that doesn't work.

That same editorial note that mentions how they came up with the month of Hal's Green Lantern origin, credited to "Julie" (who would, of course, be editor Julius Schwartz), also contains something of a disclaimer about the passage of time: "Remember-- We're dealing here with comic mag time! And comic heroes have their own ways to stop the clock and avoid aging!"

Dick Grayson especially, I guess.

As for the story, it is, for its first half or so, primarily a Martian Manhunter one. It begins with his origin, being brought to Earth by a device created by scientist Dr. Erdel, who almost immediately has a heart attack and dies, stranding J'onn.

He takes on the identity of John Jones, and becomes a police detective in Middletown, doing superhero work on the sly while trying to figure out Erdel's device in order to get back home. His life is upended with the arrival of a General Blanx and a gang of other White Martians (Who Green Arrow, and I suppose readers at the time, knew from the pages of JLoA #71).

J'onn, resuming his more familiar form of a half-naked green muscle man, is in the middle of battling the White Martians when The Flash arrives. J'onn tries to explain to Barry Allen that there's a difference between good Martians and bad Martians, but upon seeing the aliens, the locals all start to freak out. 

The Flash tries to calm down the spreading mass hysteria, telling the gathering crowd that he will get someone everyone knows and trusts to head up the investigation: Superman. 

He's never, at this point, actually met Superman though. Nevertheless, he runs to Metropolis and finds the Man of Steel, who is at present in the company of Batman and Robin. The four heroes return to Middletown, where they promptly meet Roy Raymond, TV detective.

"If we alert the nation, this story should generate a lot of help for you!" Raymond tells the heroes.

And it does. A turn of the page reveals a pretty spectacular splash, filled with the 30 heroes promised on the cover: Wonder Woman, Aquaman, The Blackhawks, The Challengers of the Unknown, The Vigilante Greg Saunders, the original Robotman Robert Crane, Congo Bill "with the amazing Congorilla", Plastic Man and Rex the Wonder Dog. (Do dogs watch TV...? How did Rex know what was going on, and how did he get himself to Middletown...? Well, I he is a wonder dog, I guess). 

Oh, and also Lois Lane and Jimmy Olsen, introduced as if they too were superheroes.

Now, even after all these years, I still haven't integrated a deep enough knowledge of DC Comics/DCU history to know this for certain, but I suspect this particular gathering is meant to represent all of—or at least most of—the DC Comics heroes who had their own books or regular features in early 1959, or perhaps those that could have conceivably been around then...excluding the various heroes who were already established as occupying other Earths in the DC multiverse, like the Justice Society and other Golden Age characters of Earth-Two, or the Fawcett characters like Captain Marvel and company, assigned to Earth-S. (A pair of other heroes from that time will turn up in the course of the story; just wait.)

That said, the inclusion of Plastic Man and the Blackhawks is curious. 

They all came from Quality Comics, the Golden Age adventures of which were apparently set on a theoretical "Earth-Quality" and, in 1973's Len Wein-written JLoA #107, a Nazi-ruled Earth-X occupied by the various Quality heroes (Plas and the Blackhawks appear in that issue, but only in flashback). 

I haven't similarly tracked the Blackhawks, but DC launched an ongoing Plastic Man comic in 1966, which was presumably set on Earth-One with the majority of the DC Comics line (although I have read that the series, like several other comedic DC comics, was set on an Earth-Twelve...?). And then there are Plas' various Brave and The Bold appearances, of which there were three prior to this issue of JLoA, to deal with. 

I guess there are, therefore, at least three, possibly four Plastic Mean in the DC Multiverse, then...? (The original of Earth-Quality, an alternate one from Earth-X, that of Earth-One and possibly an Earth-Twelve Plas.)

One can see why DC felt a multiverse streamlining crisis was needed about a decade later. 

Anyway, this massive assemblage of heroes broke up into three smaller teams. Plastic Man, The Blackhawks and Jimmy Olsen followed one lead, which lead them to almost encounter Rip Hunter. Robotman, Vigilante, The Challs, Lois Lane and Congo Bill and Congorilla followed another, which lead them to almost encounter Adam Strange. And, finally, the heroes who would eventually form the Justice League, along with Raymond, Robin and Rex, followed another, which lead them to Ferris Air test pilot Hal Jordan, and the Martians.

After a brief battle, the heroes defeat the White Martians, rescue the green one and plan future public relations. J'onn decides to stay on Earth, which he has come to love, and which he believes, in his words, needs a Manhunter from Mars. 

Given the anti-Martian hysteria of the previous pages, though, Aquaman suggests J'onn allow for a six-month cool-off period before coming out, and Wonder Woman adds that, when he does, "it could be with the backing of all of us".

"You know, we ought to form a club, or society...!" Superman suggests. While Batman says he's not much of a joiner, Flash argues the point: "But Batman-- A league against evil! Our purpose would be to uphold justice against whatever threatens it!"

And so it's decided that these heroes would form a league to uphold justice in six months' time...Hal Jordan and Roy Raymond, who were present for the discussion, both swearing secrecy. 

The eventual line-up of the Justice League, this story suggests, seems to have been determined by who just so happened to be on the team that followed one of the three leads in this adventure. Had the team's divided up slightly differently, Plastic Man or Robotman or Congorilla or Vigilante could have ended up on the team. (Of course, Plastic Man would eventually join the team, in 1997's JLA #5, and Congorilla would join around 2010's Justice League of America #41 or so, after appearing in the troubled 2009 miniseries Justice League: Cry for Justice. As for Vig, he never made it into a comics League, but he was an unlikely inclusion on 2004-2006's cartoon Justice League Unlimited's massive line-up).

Of course, the book doesn't explain why Robin wouldn't be offered membership, or, for that matter, Rex, who found the Martians in the first place...

I guess the Justice League must have put a "No Dogs Allowed" sign in front of their Happy Harbor headquarters...?

(If you would like to read the issue for yourself, it looks like it's been collected twice before, in 2018's Justice League of America: The Bronze Age Omnibus Vol. 2 and in 2020's Justice League of America: A Celebration of 60 Years, the latter of which is where I read it. I'm hopeful DC will collect the issue, and most of the Satellite Era, in future volumes of their DC Finest series, though...)

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.