Briefly on Stane Lee and Julie Schwartz's introductions to 2008's JLA/Aveengers trade

When I wrote about Kurt Busiek and George Perez's JLA/Avengers a few months ago, there was one interesting aspect of the trade collection I read that I couldn't quite find a way to fit into the post, so I've decided to return to it now in a separate post. The particular 2008 trade paperback collection I used for my re-read included a pair of introductions from comics veterans who were integral in the creation of both of the title teams (as well as so much else that went on at Marvel and DC over the course of decades), Stan Lee and Julie Schwartz.

Everyone, of course, knows Lee. Even if this is your first visit to a comics blog, and if you somehow arrived here and started reading this post by accident, you probably know who Stan Lee is, as he's perhaps the only true household name that the medium has ever produced. The legendary editor, writer and promoter of Marvel comics not only co-created the super-team The Avengers (along with his frequent collaborator Jack Kirby) and not only served as The Avengers' first writer, he also co-created all five of the team's founding members (again, along with Kirby, and a couple of others like Ernie Hart, Don Heck and Larry Lieber).

As for Schwartz, he spent over 40 years as an editor with DC Comics, and was pivotal in the publisher's recommitment to superheroes in the latter half of the 1950s, working with writers and artists to reintroduce new, second-generation versions of The Flash, The Green Lantern and others, helping usher in waht became known as the Silver Age of superhero comics (and, indirectly, as we'll see, inspiring Lee and company's creation of the Marvel Universe). It was Schwartz who decided to also update the Justice Society of America team, and thus the Justice League of America debuted in 1960.

In 2008, the year these introductions were published in this collection, Schwartz had already been dead for several years, having died in 2004 at the age of 88 (This may explain why his introduction says "By Julie Schwartz, As told to Robert Greenberger"). And as for Lee, he was 86, and about to start the last decade of his life (He would die in 2018, at the age of 95). 

The introductions are set side-by-side in two parallel columns, not unlike those that were printed on the inside front cover of the first DC/Marvel superhero crossover, 1976's Superman vs. The Amazing Spider-Man #1, although in that case they were penned by Lee and his then DC equivalent, Carmine Infantino. 

Amusingly, the Stan Lee introduction is much longer than the Schwartz one, continuing for another six paragraphs after Schwartz's had ended. More amusingly still, neither man gives much in the way of an indication that he's actually read the comic they are supposedly introducing (Not that I blame either man, given their age at the point they must have been writing these). 

Schwartz, at least, proves he's well aware of who the creative team is, the fact that there are a ton of characters involved, and that the story will involve the first fighting and then teaming up. His intro ends thusly:

It may seem like a tired old plot, but in the hands of true professionals they make it entertaining. Kurt and Georg have my admiration for taking the time and care to fit in so many heroes, villains and other familiar beings. I'm just glad I'm not the one who has to proofread it all!

As for Lee, he eventually gets around to saying "There are countless thrills and chills on the action-packed pages ahead," but then, that's the same thing he would say about any Marvel comic (or any comic he himself had anything to do with). 

So if not the comic collected within the trade, what do they talk about? 

The history of the two teams, or at least the origins of the team each man is involved with, although, in Lee's case, it takes a bit to get to it, and he also talks about himself (and, charmingly, Schwartz) quite a bit too.

Lee's introduction is perhaps predictably jokey and jocular, as well as somewhat self-deprecatingn and often about the very writing he's in the act of doing. It's very Stan Lee.

He talks about the legendary 1960s golf game between National/DC Comics publisher Jack Liebowitz and Atlas/Marvel publisher Martin Goodman, in which Liebowitz said his new comic Justice League of America "was selling like there's no tomorrow."  

Writes Lee:

Well, might Marty didn't need a house to fall on him. As soon as the golf game was over he raced to a phone and called yours truly.

"Stan," he bellowed, "National's Justice League is a hot seller. I want us to get on the bandwagon too. Cook me up a book which stars a whole team of heroes — and to it yesterday!"

This, Lee says, is "comicdom's worst-kept secret," and the call that inspired not the Avengers, but instead the Fantastic Four. (As Lee puts it, it was "the reason I dreamed up the good ol' Fantastic Four, which I modestly called 'The World's Greatest Comic.'" Oh, did Lee dream them up? Well, that's one way of putting it; at least he mentions Jack Kirby in the next sentence, with "Aided by the artwork of the titanically talented Jack Kirby"...).

In Stan's telling, DC's JLoA and Marvel's FF were in " a no-holds-barred, neck-and-neck race," and, while that was going on, "we" (by which he means, but doesn't say, he and Kirby, Steve Ditko, Bill Everett and a handful of other collaborators) created  "a brand-new batch of additional super-heroes," those of the first generation of what was becoming the Marvel Universe.

He names them all, of course, and it's only after a few such years that Marvel actually has enough of its own superheroes with their own books to band together into a Justice League-like team, which is how Iron Man, Thor, The Hulk, Ant-Man and The Wasp ended up facing off against Loki in 1963's The Avengers #1. 

He spends several paragraphs talking about writing a team like the Avengers, and then spends a paragraph on Schwartz:

But I cannot come to the end of this candid little confessional without saying a few words about my co-Introduction writer, Julius Schwartz. I'm both pleased and honored to have the opportunity to appear with this legendary comic-book great in a watershed collection such as this. In all the years that I've known and admired him, we've never actually worked together or appeared in the same magazine before. It's taken half a century for this to happen. But y'know something? Considering the respect and admiration I have for the countless accomplishments of Julie Schwartz, it was well worth the wait.

Well that was sweet, I thought. 

While Lee's introduction appeared in blue ink on the lefthand side of the first two pages, Schwartz's was in red ink, and on the righthand side of the pages. 

Schwartz jumps right in:

The revivals of super-heroes were going so well that my schedule was getting crowded. But when we came up with the next logical step — combining these heroes into a team — no one else would touch it but me! Obviously, we modeled the new team after the Justice Society of America, but as I've said for years, I've never liked the name Society. It sounded too upscale. I preferred something like League, since, after all, everyone followed the baseball leagues.

He goes on to explain that "Every super-hero who had a feature was going to be in the new team," which is why they numbered at seven, and why characters like Martian Manhunter and Aquaman ended up on the team, despite the fact that those two didn't, at that point, have the sorts of resumes  or track records of the other five (if we allow The Flash and Green Lantern to list their forebears' accomplishments as their own,, of course). 

And as for Green Arrow, Schwartz says he couldn't remember exactly why he wasn't there at the beginning, but he had enough heroes for 24 pages anyway (And it's not like GA would never join the team; he would sign up within a year of the League's Brave and The Bold debut, in the fourth issue of their own book).

Schwartz goes on to write a bit about the original creative team—Gardner Fox, who had also written the old JSA stories, and Mike Sekowsky, "the only artist I worked with who could uniquely fit all these characters on each page"—and how the early issues came together, how they were received, and how the team expanded ("Well, we relented and finally let Green Arrow in. I was then sticking to my guns, and waited for heroes to have their own title before they could join, like the Atom and Hawkman.")

And then, how he and Fox introduced the parallel world of Earth-2, and the JLoA met the JSoA, the sales of which were incredible enough to keep the two teams meeting regularly for decades.

"But I never imagined they would ever cross paths with the Avengers," Schwartz writes. "When DC and Marvel first tried to have the teams meet, I was just an innocent bystander, curious to see what would happen."

Nothing, as it turned out. But that was in the 1980s.

"But as the house ad said when we first gave the JLA their own title, Just Imagine!," he writes. "Just imagine seeing the best and brightest from two entirely different companies combatting one another and then working together."

Obviously, neither piece says all that much about the amazing story that follows, the ultimate DC/Marvel crossover, but it was interesting hearing about the origins of the two teams from men present at (and integral to) their creation and, particularly in Lee's case, I found it somewhat revealing of the men themselves to hear what they had to say and how they said it. 

On the creation of superheroes as gradual development versus instantaneous inspiration

I've been thinking a lot about where exactly new superheroes come from over the course of the last few months, thanks largely to some of the books I've been reading: Annie Hunter Eriksen and Lee Gatlin's picture book biographies of Stan Lee and Steve Ditko, Douglas Wolk's All Of The Marvels and the late Lou Mougin's Secondary Superheroes of Golden Age Comics. I've also been thinking about the subject because of what I've been blogging about lately, like the Thunderbolts* movie, with its cast of characters created by almost 25 writers and artists over the course of some seven decades, and, of course, the related issue of who, exactly, created The Sentry and how.

Mougin's book, an exhaustive survey of Golden Age super-comics, rounds up the scores of characters created by over a dozen different publishers in the years following the first appearances of Joel Siegel and Joe Shuster's Superman comics (and some of the more distinct characters to follow in his immediate wake, like Batman, Wonder Woman, The Human Torch and Captain America).

Given the pace at which this army of superheroes appeared and then disappeared from the pages of the comic books of the time, one imagines that most were created on-the-fly by the guys who wrote and/or drew them. 

When a modern reader thinks of how someone might have got the idea for a Cat-Man or a Crimebuster, a Wizard or a Boy King, a Daredevil or a Black Hood, a Mother Hubbard or The Face, it's easy to imagine that sort of out-of-the-blue, lightning bolt-style of inspiration, a deadline-driven act of creation that rushed from an image in someone's head to the drawing board to the printed page (For the more unique characters, anyway; a lot of these heroes seemed to come from artists doing their own riffs on a Superman, or trying a different animal theme for a Batman, or rearranging the stars and stripes on a costume to get their own Captain America).

As for the heroes of later generations, though? 

Well, they had these Golden Agers (and their peers from the pulps and radio and film serials and comic strips) as a vast reservoir of inspiration. Not only could later creators find various templates among the biggest  successes of those early years who are still starring in their own comic books today (Superman, Batman, Captain America, etc), but also the heroes I would consider the true second stringers (the characters who ended up on the JSA, for example, and those of publishers Fawcett, Quality and maybe MLJ). And then the more random-sounding also-rans that fill Mougin's book, like White Streak or The Conqueror or The Blue Bolt or Magno or the guys named The Reckoner, of whom there was more than one. 

Many of the later heroes of the late 1950s and 1960s created for DC and Marvel and Charlton and others could be traced back to Golden Age ancestors, and contemplating such second-generation heroes now, it's actually kind of hard to think of a character whose name, power or gimmick doesn't have Golden Age antecedents of some sort. (Seriously, try it!) 

But still, there are some. Jack Kirby and Stan Lee's The Thing, for example, seems to be born more of monster comics than old superhero comics, and wow, where did the idea for the Silver Surfer come from exactly, you know? 

Anyway, some bits of Wolk's book that I found particularly interesting were the examples he gives when discussing the creation of certain characters. 

In the weeks since I read All of the Marvels, these examples seemed to only become more resonant, as I thought about Lee's work with Kirby and Ditko on the first wave of Marvel heroes while reading those picture books and then later reading of the avalanche of superheroes of the 1940s in Mougin's book. 

Very early in Wolk's book—page 5, actually—he mentions that the "Marvel's narrative," the focus of his book, "has a peculiar relationship with his authorship": 

Legally, it's "maker" is a corporation, one that's gotten bigger over time as its body of intellectual property has changed hands. In practice, it was made by a specific group of people whose names we (mostly) know, and whose particular hands are (usually) unmistakable on any given page. But it's also almost always been created collaboratively: if you think any one person is the sole creator of a particular image or plot point, you're probably wrong, which is why it's a mistake to think of any one person who's worked on a Marvel comic book as it's "author."

This passage then leads to an extensive footnote, during which he notes the difficulties involved in untangling who created what.

This can obviously be a contentious subject that fans and sometimes the creators themselves have argued about over the decades, be it how much (or even if) Stan Lee might have contributed to those early Marvel heroes with his collaborators Kirby and Ditko, or the later disagreements regarding the creation of Wolverine and Ghost Rider (the latter of which went to court), or the current issues with The Sentry. 

Wolk writes:

Even the question of who created Marvel's best-known characters is also often more complicated than it looks. It's easy enough to assess who came up with Marvel's first superheroes of the 1960s, the Fantastic Four: Jack Kirby and Stan Lee. (Except that the Human Torch's name and basic design had been created by Carl Burgos back in 1939).

He goes on to cite a few other relatively easier ones, like Captain America (Kirby and Joe Simon) and Doctor Strange (Ditko), before showing how quickly it can get rather convoluted.

Iron Man? That's a little trickier. Lee plotted his first story, but Larry Lieber wrote its dialogue; Kirby drew the first cover and designed the character's initial costume (which barely resembles the familiar rend-and-gold one, designed by Ditko a bit later); Don Heck drew the initial story and invented what its protagonists Tony Stark and Pepper Potts look like.

So the Marvel Universe hadn't even been around a year yet, and there was already a character who seemed to have at least four primary creators, whom Wikipedia lists under "created by" in its article on Iron Man. (As for Ditko, who Wikipedia does not cite as a creator of the character, where does he fit in? Is a redesign considered an act of creation? If it comes some time after a character's debut, is it seen as somehow less important? Does it matter if that redesign becomes the primary, default one?)

The next example is more complicated still. Writes Wolk;

Daredevil? Well, now you're running into trouble. Lee wrote the first story, and Bill Everett drew it, but the cover was drawn by Kirby, who might have designed Daredevil's original costume, too, although the much more familiar red costume was first drawn by Wally Wood starting in the seventh issue. When you talk about the now-familir look and feel and mythology of "Daredevil," though—the tormented Catholic romantic who leaps around the shadows of Hell's Kitchen and fights ninjas and Wilson Fisk—you're mostly talking about what Frank Miller added to the character in the '80s, along with his artistic collaborators Klaus Janson and David Mazzucchelli. (Except that Wilson Fisk had been created by Lee and John Romita Sr. fifteen years earlier.) And so on. 

Wolk doesn't mention it at all here (this is just a footnote, long as it is, of course, and this is outside the purview of his book), but it's worth noting that Marvel's Daredevil, who debuted in 1964, was preceded by another comic book hero named Daredevil from an entirely different publisher. 

The two-toned, boomerang-wielding Daredevil of Lev Gleason Publications, whose creation is credited to Jack Binder and Don Rico, debuted in a 1941 issue of Silver Streak and his own title ran 134 issues, not being canceled until 1956. (This is the character who, long since lapsed into the public domain, one might have seen more recently in the pages of Savage Dragon as "The Dynamic Daredevil" or in various Dynamite Comics as "The Death-Defying 'Devil".)

Mougin does mention the possible relationship between Lev Gleason's Daredevil and Marvel's Daredevil in his book:

The legend goes that publisher Martin Goodman wanted Stan Lee to do a comic based on [longtime Daredevil writer Charles] Biro's hero, in 1964. Since Lee admired Biro's work, that may not be unfounded. But, instead, Lee, Bill Everett, and Steve Ditko created a new Daredevil, switching the original DD's muteness for blindness and subbing a billy club for a boomerang. 

Does that not sound plausible to you? If not, well, Mougin did say "legend", didn't he? (I am curious about his mention of Ditko here, as Wolk doesn't mention Ditko at all when he discusses the creation of Marvel's Daredevil.)

The sense I got while reading this very early bit of Wolk's book was that rather than being created by a single artist or a single writer or even a single writer/artists team, sometimes it's more of a group effort, a creation by committee. That certainly seems to been the case with Iron Man, for example.

As for the Daredevil example, it shows not only that sometimes it's a team or a staff (or, in Marvel's case, a bullpen) that might create a superhero character, but sometimes it can take multiple creative teams and multiple years—hell, here some 20 years!—before a corporate character like Marvel's Daredevil reaches what will ultimately be considered his essential, perfected form.

Far later in the book, in a chapter entitled "Good is a Thing You Do" that is devoted to the debut and early issues of the current Ms. Marvel Kamala Khan and to Ryan North, Erica Henderson, Derek Charm and company's Unbeatable Squirrel Girl (the latter of which was built around a 1991 character designed and originally drawn by Ditko), Wolk gives an even better example of a character being developed into creation, I think. He does so while also illustrating how newer Marvel characters are dependent on older ones, and how even their earliest antecedents can be traced back to still earlier, pre-Marvel ancestors.

"Kamala Khan is yet another of Marvel's collective creations, her real-world origin too complicated to be attributed to a single originator," Wolk writes.

She emerged from conversations between editors Sana Amanat and Stephen Wacker about Amanat's experience growing up as a South Asian Muslim in New Jersey, as well as writer G. Willow Wilson's interest in creating a teenage Muslim superhero ("Sana and I initially had very modest expectations for this book," Wilson wrote five years later. "Our goal was to get to ten issues.") Artist Adrian Alphona came up with the images of Kamala and her supporting cast, although her costume was designed by Jamie McKelvie. 

Wolk also cites the particular creative choices made by colorist Ian Herring and letterer Joe Carmagna as distinct and important, each further defining and differentiating the initial Ms. Marvel comic book series from others in Marvel's line.

We could also note that while McKelvie designed Kamala's costume, a significant component of it, the lightning bolt-shaped symbol, was taken from Dave Cockrum's redesigned costume for the previous Ms. Marvel Carol Danvers dating back to the '70s.

And, of course, the superhero codename "Ms. Marvel" also came from Danvers, who was created, as Danvers, by Roy Thomas and Gene Colan in 1968, but made into the superhero Ms. Marvel by Gerry Conway and John Buscema in 1977.

And, just to make this into a game of superhero telephone, the original Ms. Marvel was a distaff version of the male hero Captain Marvel (created by Stan Lee and Gene Colan in 1967). He took his name from the Golden Age Fawcett Comics character Captain Marvel (created by Bill Parker and C.C. Beck in 1942), and that Captain Marvel was based on Siegel and Shuster's Superman...or at least, the company then known as Detective Comics was sure enough that he was that they took Fawcett to court, accusing them of copyright infringement (The case was eventually settled in 1953, in large part because, in Fawcett's estimation, superhero comics had by then ceased being profitable enough to fight over).

And thus we get from 2014's Ms. Marvel Kamala Khan all the way back to the very first superhero in 1938. 

Anyway, both Wolk and Mougin's books are very interesting reads, and ones that should be of interest to anyone who reads superhero comics. I'll be formally reviewing them in the future, but I wanted to touch on this idea of superhero creation as a process of development in a post of its own. 

On 1994's Wolverine: Evilution by Ann Nocenti, Mark Texeira, John Royle and others

A long time ago, I somewhat facetiously titled a blog post "Ultimates 3: The worst comic book ever?" I was likely being far too hasty, as there were, at the time as well as now, just so many bad comics I had never even read. 

I was reminded of that fact recently when I read 1994 over-sized one-shot Wolverine: Evilultion—the subtitle of which I swear is real, and not a typo on my part. Not because Evilution is that bad, of course, although it is a very badly made comic. 

No, rather because it's simply an X-Men comic from the mid-nineties, making it one of the many, many comics that I had never read, and thus, as far as I know, it is simply the tip of the iceberg of what might be some truly terrible comics (I generally don't read comics that I'm pretty sure I won't like, which is why I've only read a handful of comics featuring Wolverine from that era). 

For the record, I don't think this is worse or even as bad as Ultimates 3, but it did remind me of just how many really bad comics are probably out there (And Evilution is from Marvel, one of the premiere superhero publishers, rather than, say, Image, or any of the other many small publishers that tried their hand at the genre during the '90s boom years!).

Anyway, this is a pretty bad comic book, and it's bad in a particular sort of way that I think it could probably be used in some sort of How To Make Comics class as a textbook, the professor pointing to various aspects of it and passages from it as negative examples, of what not to do when trying to tell a story in comics. 

It's written by Ann Nocenti, which, based on her reputation and the relatively few comics of hers I've read, sure sounded promising to me. As for the art team, the first credited artist is Mark Texeira, who handled the layouts. The book was penciled by John Royle and inked by Philip Moy and Andrew Pepoy. 

If I had to diagnose what exactly went wrong with the creation of this book, some 30 years after it was first published, I would guess that it was created using the "Marvel method" and that the point at which it fell apart was when Texeira was laying it out, as what now seem like the most egregious mistakes have to do with what is being shown when (Although maybe the most blame should be reserved for the editors, three of whom are listed: regular editor Suzanne Gaffney, group editor Bob Harras and editor-in-chief Tom DeFalco...?)

Essentially, whatever one might think of the plot or characters or conflict, it's the storytelling that seems most obviously, glaringly wrong to my eyes in 2025. 

The book is all but devoid of establishing shots, and, when they do occur, they sometimes do so after a character has already arrived at a particular location, so the reader is never really introduced to the settings. Curiously, where establishing shots might be used, we instead often see tight close-ups of Wolverine's head. 

We get these also in place of panels that would now more commonly be used for a character's narration and, oddest of all, during early scenes wherein Wolverine is apparently traveling to the small New York town that most of the action is set in. 

From my experience with the X-Men cartoon from around this time, I imagine that he hopped on his motorcycle to get there, but we never see him doing so, just tight, background-less panels of his face as he travels. Imagine a scene in a film where the director frames a scene of a character riding a motorcycle such that all you saw was his face, and never the motorcycle. 

That would be weird, right...? 

Also, we'll get images of Wolverine, sometimes in action, sometimes just standing around, interjected at random in the narrative, at the pace of about once a page.

I imagine the artists really, really wanted to draw Wolverine, and getting the popular star on the book on every page makes sense, but they do so at the expense of the storytelling. There are also several instances where a character is having a conversation with Wolverine, but he's the only one in the panel, the other character's dialogue coming in balloons whose tails point off-panel.

Finally, Texeira and/or Royle show little diversity in their character design. The book is filled with blonde, white young people, and some of them look so much alike that it sometimes took me a moment (or, in one case, the entire book) to tell if, say, this blonde teenage girl is supposed to be the same blonde teenage girl as the one who co-stars in the book.

These are deeper concerns than the style of Royle's art in the book, which was not to my personal taste, either. I mean, we expect certain things from mid-90s books, and certainly Marvel's X-Men seems emblematic of what one thinks of when they think of "'90s comics," but there isn't really any of the expected excesses.

There are a few panels in which Royle's big, body builder-looking Wolvie has humorously dainty feet, for example, but I think that is more a matter of style than any sign of deficiency. Typical of the era, though, we rarely see his feet; in several scenes they are obscured by a curious cloud of ground fog. (There's only one real example of really wonky anatomy, on page 10, when we get a full body shot of Wolverine, and his torso looks too long and his legs too short....Oh wait, there's also a bit in the climactic action scene, but I'll mention that when the time comes.)

The script itself feels somewhat Vertigo-esque, with its focus on religious concerns, the supernatural and the environment; Nocenti had, of course, just been working for DC's mature readers imprint, attempting a Kid Eternity revival with Sean Phillips that lasted 16 issues between 1993 and 1994. But it's Vertigo-esque paired with what otherwise feels like an episode of the X-Men cartoon, the two aesthtetics wedded to one another with the violence of a car accident. 

The original comic book had a cardstock cover and glossy interior pages and sold for $5.95 at a time when the Wolverine monthly was just $1.95, apparently denoting that it was meant to be something special. 

There's a little poem on the inside front cover discussing the pollution of the environment and ends with the line, "We are going the wrong way." (At the bottom of the page, it notes that this story takes place before X-Men #25, published a year previous, whatever happened there...Oh, wait, I just looked it up, and that appears to be the issue that Magneto pulled the adamantium out of Wolverine's body. So that note is probably there to explain why this issue's Wolverine has his normal metallic claws, rather than gnarly bone ones.)

The first page is a splash, revealing a young blonde boy holding aloft a severed head pouring blood from its neck, while a huge Wolverine face emanating action lines is seen in profile in the background, and a big blue "Stan Lee Presents EVILUTION" is super-imposed over one of Wolvie's mask wings.

A younger little girl opens a door, calling for Jimmy, and understandably freaks out when she sees him with the bloody head; his ranting probably does little to calm her: "I met a man in the woods-- --with the face of God! Wanna meet him?" As she starts to cry, he reveals that it is a fake head and stage blood, and that he was "just funnin'."

Meanwhile, at the bottom of this second page, pink narration boxes over the bust of Wolverine tell us that he's in a waking dream. 

In the dream, he is gigantic, looming over the cooling towers of a nuclear power plant with his claws out and his thighs disappearing beneath the horizon. He's wearing a strange necklace (And his blue shoulder pads, by the way, look bigger, thicker and pointier than those worn by football players; one might reasonably ask why a guy with a healing factor needs such armor, but then that's like asking why Wolverine wears a cowl shaped like his hair. The answer is because someone—the artists, the audience or perhaps Wolverine himself—must think they look cool). A missile heads straight for his chest.

He rears up with sweat on his brows, in a bed in a darkened room (Where isn't clear; I assume the X-Mansion in Westchester). One of those weird, super-tight close-ups shows a sliver of his figure in full costume, as he narrates: "I don't believe in all that psychic garbage about visionary dreams...But...well...what the heck. It can't hurt to visit the town with the twin towers."

Cut to "Some faraway garbage dump at the edge of a rural shantytown," where a pair of young boys (Is one of them the boy from the first scene, given that their faces are the same? No, as it will eventually turn out) find a cannister that looks like the one that blinded Daredevil and created the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, open it up, and play with the sickly-looking green glop found within.

Back to a background-less close-up of Wolverine's face in profile and then, in the panel below that, a rare establishing shot, showing what looks like a downtown street, tiny buildings in the background dwarfed by impossibly huge cooling towers. The perspective of the panel is pretty screwy; if one ignores the buildings in the background, it looks as if the town is built right up against the towers. If one takes those buildings into account, the towers look too big, something on the scale of the Death Star or similar sci-fi construct. 

This is Prescott, which Nocenti's narration tells us is "a seven-mall, three-church, ten-saloon kinda town..." (Seven malls! That is so many malls!) A town that is "Complete with bored, restless, frustrated teenagers."

Suddenly we are inside some sort of teen hangout with a juke box and kids dancing in the background. In the foreground, two busty girls are talking, one of them a blonde with a huge pair of opaque pink sunglasses who the other girl refers to as "Boom Boom." 

This is our introduction to the other character on the cover, a more minor X-Men character whom I have heard of, but who I don't remember appearing in any of the X-Men movies or cartoons I've seen and I don't think I have ever actually read anything in which she appeared. (UPDATE: Wait, she was in Nextwave, a series that must now be memory holed due to the malfeasance of its writer. Does that count as the real Boom Boom, though...? After all, the whole cast were basically just written as standard Warren Ellis characters... Anyway, I read that.)

Based on what I see in this comic, though, it's hard to tell what, exactly, differentiates her from Jubilee. Both are teenage mutants with big pink glasses and whose super-powers seem to be explosive light shows; Boom Boom's powers are repeatedly referred to as "fireworks" in this comic, too, which I was sure was Jubilee's deal. Checking her Wikipedia entry later—and asking about what differentiates her from Jubilee on Bluesky—it would seem to be that her energy powers are more akin to time bombs than fireworks, as there is sometimes a delay in the explosions she creates...?

We won't see a full body shot of her until the page after she's introduced, but in addition to the big glasses and a pair of high heels, she's dressed in a tight-fitting mini dress, with cut-outs exposing her abdomen, hips and cleavage. (Wait, she is a teenager, right?)

She's trying to ignore her friend, and listen in on the conversation of Jimmy, the boy with the bloody head from the opening scene. He's holding a primitive-looking idol and ranting to two other kids about modern progress, and how, "Ultimately, we'll die by machine."

"That's why we're the Devos," he says. "Our gang is for devolution! We gotta drag the human race back to before cars and computers and iron lungs and missiles..."

I'm not sure what's playing on the juke box Jimmy is leaning over, but I wouldn't be surprised if it's a particular new wave band from Akron, of which he must be a fan. 

The scene in interrupted by another close up of Wolverine's bust, his thought cloud telling us that he's asked Professor X for some time off to visit Prescott, "the town in my dreams," and that Xavier told him that X-Force's Boom Boom has "been known to hang out there."

Scan appropriated from The Real Gentlemen of Leisure's much shorter and punchier blog post on the book.

Boom Boom approaches Jimmy, whom she calls by name (Does she know him? Or did she just overhear the other kids call him that?), and he stammers when he sees her (Because she interrupted him? Or because of her revealing dress?). She seems to roofie his drink, then asks about the idol, before walking away. His drink mysteriously splashes soda all over his face (After learning a bit more about Boom Boom online later, I guess the little white round object she dropped in his drink wasn't a pill, but an energy time bomb).

Then there's a page I couldn't make sense of. 

The narration boxes talk about Silvo, who was a little boy when the Wright Brothers first flew, and an old man when America landed on the moon, although he didn't believe the reports of it on the TV and then the nature of television. There are four panels of art running alongside the narration. The first shows a shack, the second shows three boys faces; one looks delighted, another is terribly distressed. The third shows the boys silhouettes in the foreground, a bright TV screen emanating light in the background. In the fourth, the distressed boy collapses backwards. And the fifth is yet another close-up of Wolverine's head with no background, thinking to himself, "Humph...looks like a normal, peaceful American town like any other." (The comic won't show us what Wolvie's seeing until the next page, though.)

(After finishing the book and re-reading the parts I didn't understand, I think Silvo is supposed to be the dead man who figures prominently later on, and the collapsing boy is one of those from the earlier scene who found the environmental waste and smeared it on his face; here he is in the process of dying from it, as will be made explicit later in the book.)

Wearing a little backpack, Wolverine stands upon a hill overlooking the power plant and thinks about how he heard something about a threat to close it down, while popping one set of claws (This is the panel with the wonky anatomy mentioned previously, by the way). These he suddenly whirls to drive into the trunk of a tree directly behind him, narrowly missing the head of an older, white-haired Native American man, who apparently snuck up behind him, then sat down cross-legged at the base of the three.

The man tells Wolverine he had a vision about his arrival, and then the scene jumps to Jimmy again, somewhere outdoors, and talking to a disembodied voice that appears in tail-less thought clouds. The voice instructs him to dig, and he does so, until an extremely buff ghost appears, telling him to "Get a woman."

Instead, Jimmy keeps digging, until his shovel makes a "KEK" sound and he says, "A coffin!"

Halfway through the page, the scene shifts to Germany (!), where a little blonde boy that looks just like Jimmy is in some kind of museum as someone off-panel talks about "the tip of a metal spear that pierced the side of Christ...And so called the Spear of Destiny... ...It was stolen by Charlemagne and then by Hitler... ...Each man who possessed it believed that he rode the crest of fate itself."

The boy steals the spear, which is really just a small spearhead attached to a bit of shaft. It will take a few more pages to explain, but apparently the boy is at the museum with his father, a Mason who brought him to attend the meeting to learn about Mason stuff.

Meanwhile, the narrative checks in on the other players. The old man talks to Wolverine about their dreams ("'Dream' is a white world...what you call dreams we call reality"), and how the government is threatening to shut down the plant, and an idol that was stolen from a local museum and something old and evil awakening in the forest. Boom Boom, now dressed in the costume seen on the cover (which also has a cleavage cutout), sees a newspaper article about the stolen idol, which is the one that she saw Jimmy with at the teen hangout. And Jimmy stops digging up the coffin long enough to read the newspaper, in which he sees an article about how the green goo from earlier in the book killed one of the kids who found it.

We're then introduced to a new character, a mustachioed man in a suit at a podium, giving a speech to a crowd about the economic importance of Gycon's power plant to their town of Prescott. He says the plant is apparently being shut down because of "one old man", referring to the Native American man hanging out with Wolvie, whose name is actually Red Water Fall. It's a threatening-sounding, vaguely racist, or at least impolitic, speech:

The old man doesn't understand... Just as his people did not understand a hundred years ago. It is now as it was then--when two cultures clash, one must relinquish. 

There is a natural progression, an inevitably to change. People must adapt to our ways-- --or perish.

In a classroom at Prescott High School, the students are dissecting frogs. A blonde girl who looks so much like Boom Boom that I'm unsure if it is meant to be her or not (Does she live in Prescott? Or just hang out there...for some reason...?), stands up from her table, saying "EEEEK! Forget it...I'm not going to do it."

Meanwhile, that little psychopath Jimmy has perfectly removed his frog's tiny heart, and it's still beating, which his teacher lauds him for (Are frogs dissected while still alive in high school biology...? That's not dissection, it's vivisection, isn't it? We only did some kind of big worm at my school...)

Friday night in the woods, some teens dance around a big red pentagram painted on the ground, chanting "We're the Devo's! [sic]" and "We're the chumps!" One of them says "We can't wake up no corpse" mid dance move. A coffin containing a body wrapped up like a mummy is leaned up against a tree (and partially covered by the narration box reading "Friday night, the woods"), and chickens hang by their necks from ropes in the foreground. Jimmy tells his gang to shut up, and then one of them notices the body has disappeared, as there is now only wisp of smoke in the coffin/crate where the wrapped-up body was.

Boom Boom, in costume, sneaks into Jimmy's house, looking for the stolen statue, and uses a "light bomb" on Wolverine, who has snuck up on her. After an argument over whether or not she's a little kid in over her head, Wolvie drags her out to the woods, showing her another red pentagram, this one surrounded by various dead animals, all wrapped up in phone cords and dripping blood.

Boom Boom finally agrees with Wolverine to leave whatever's going on up to him, and says she'll leave town—"Okay... I'm gone... I'm history..."—but she actually returns to Jimmy's house, this time finding him in the dark, surrounded by a halo of light, his eyes glowing and a grin of bright teeth on his darkened face.

He addresses her as Boom Boom, so either they do know each other, or perhaps the heroes of X-Factor were more well-known to the civilian population of the Marvel Universe in 1994 than they were to 17-year-old Caleb, and he tells her that the stuff with the statue and the animals? Well, "It's a boys' club. For boys only. Wanna join?"

She agrees, and the next panel is the most superfluous image of Wolverine in the entire book. It's an image of half of his head, just randomly juxtaposed between two panels. He's not doing anything, or saying anything, or thinking anything. There's just an image of Wolverine's face on the page there for some reason.

When the scene finally does return to Wolverine, he is being instructed by Red Water Fall, who tells him that he's going to go inside Wolverine's vision to look for clues and asks Wolverine to protect his body as he does so. He then drops onto his back and closes his eyes.

Are we nearing the climax? God, I hope so...

Jimmy takes Boom Boom to the nuclear power plant to meet the other Devos and to discuss her initiation. Ground fog envelopes Wolverine's feet at the ankles, and menacing silhouettes come out of the trees, Wolverine picking up the scents of "nine, ten--a dozen men!"

Before the other boys and the muscular ghost, who has appeared and addressed Boom Boom and the Devos, Jimmy uses a scalpel to take a wild slash at a chicken, eliciting a long, arcing gush of blood, the panel juxtaposed with Wolverine doing something similar with his blades to one of the attacking men. 

During the few panels of violence, Red Water Fall, whose name seems to have changed to the simplified "Red Fall" in the narration, has a vision in which he sees a huge spear flying towards a figure tied to a huge cross in the distance, the cross perched atop a cooling tower. A few panels later, we get a close up of the figure on the cross, and it's not Christ, but a seemingly nude Boom Boom, the border of the panel terminating just before where her nipples might be, keeping this book all-ages, I guess.

When the real, non-visionary Boom Boom makes a big pink explosion to free the other animals that the Devos had gathered for sacrifice, Jimmy pronounces his disappointment in her: "She is weak, weak and forever a girl!"

Then things get weird. Jimmy goes home, his thought clouds telling us that they made Boom Boom surrender between panels. He eats some chocolate chip cookies with his mom before an image of TV set on the table, half-melted as if it were made of ice cream. He notes that he has bloody feathers on his bomber jacket, but it's drawn and colored as a green liquid. His dad confronts him: "Come on son, who melted the television set?"

They argue. Apparently, Jimmy's dad is the head of the nuclear power plant, the mustachioed guy we saw giving a speech about the old Native American man earlier, and he wants his son to inherit and run the plant someday. He doesn't seem to be aware of Jimmy's anti-progress Devos beliefs.

Back at the plant, we see that Boom Boom is tied up to pipes that form a cross, mirroring the crucifix-like pose of Red Fall's vision, but here she has all her clothes on (She has lost her big, dumb glasses though). 

Finally, the next morning, it seems that whatever Jimmy and the Devos have been up to, it's starting to have some effect on the modern world, beyond resurrecting the buff dead guy. A man in a phone booth notes that the phone in melting. At Jimmy's house, just as the other blonde boy presents the tip of the Spear of Destiny to Jimmy, the engine in Jimmy's dad's car starts to melt. 

Father and son repeat their argument from the previous night, at greater length and at greater intensity, and they end up exchanging blows before Jimmy runs off, returning with his gang to the plant, where Boom Boom is still captive, awaiting being sacrificed.

Nocenti than engages in one of those passages that seemed not uncommon in the '90s, wherein the writer rattles off a list of phenomena related to some supernatural goings on, the art team not quite keeping up as they attempt to provide visual images to match her verbal imagery.

And in the natural world...

A flock rises, and heads south months too early...

A few towns away electricity shoots out of a socket... ...looking for appliances to power...

Call it unholy, call it unnatural-- --it's impossible to name but somehow things are just wrong.

This goes on for a few pages, with technology melting and people and animals acting weird, the panels interrupted only to check in with the captive Boom Boom and the ranting Jimmy, preparing to sacrifice her using the Spear before the body in the crate, and images of Wolverine posing (as, indeed, every page of the book seems interrupted by an image of Wolverine).

After hearing Boom Boom's "EEEEEEK", Wolverine prepares to go into the plant, tarrying a bit to have an argument with Red Water Fall/Red Fall about whether or how badly to stab the Devos and some stuff about tests and culture clashes (most of this plays out in a splash page, in which we get a rare full body image of Wolverine, one of those that reveals his dainty little feet).

He ultimately enters the power plant straight through one of its walls (!) and then he retracts his claws to punch and kick the kids around with a "THAK" a "KRUP" a "SPAK" and so on. With the Devos down and Boom Boom freed, things finally seem to be winding down—but there's till the ghost to deal with! Now boasting a size and musculature like that of The Incredible Hulk in the '90s, he engages with Wolverine. 

"Can't kill the dead, wild man," the ghost says, grabbing Wolvie in a bear hug from behind. In the weirdest-looking bit of anatomical drawing in the whole book, Wolverine seems to fold like a lawn chair at the shoulders and thighs, allowing him to kick his attacker in the head. "Then I guess I'll die tryin'!" he retorts.

As it turns out, he does not, in fact, die tryin'. Red Fall knows the Spear can kill the dead man, and after some wrestling, Boom Boom finally gets it into Wolverine's hands, and he proceeds to stab it into his undead opponent's side, and he dissolves into mist, promising to be back. ("Wow! He's gone," Boom Boom says. "Too bad his stink ain't," Wolverine grimaces.) 

On the final page, Jimmy starts to apologize, but Wolverine dismisses the Devos over his shoulder as he walks away with Boom Boom and Red Fall, apparently leaving the Spear of Destiny behind (or maybe it dissolved with the dead hulk?). A church bell starts to ring, and we see an image of the power plant in the distance, a sign noting that it's closed and condemned in the foreground. Red Fall tends his garden. Wolverine regards a church in the distance, disgusted that the same men who he saved the sleeping Red Fall from and the Devos were attending Sunday church, "like nothin' happened."  "Sometimes I can't stand the human race," Wolverine says over his cigar. "Maybe that's why nature created mutants!" Boom Boom grins and shrugs, and one of them laughs in big block letters as they walk off into the sunset...er, maybe it is sunrise, since it's Sunday morning. Fin. 

Woof. 

So that was rough, but I survived. If you refuse to take my word for how badly made this book really was, or think that perhaps I was exaggerating at all, it has been collected, in the pages of 2023's Wolverine Epic Collection Vol. 7: To the Bone. I was unable to find a copy in either of the local library systems I have access to, but I did find it on Hoopla, and Evilution itself is, of course, available on Amazon's Comixology, if you don't mind supporting a Jeff Bezos venture. 

(And, because I read it electronically, I was unable to scan any images to illustrate this review, which is too bad, as so much of it needs to be seen to be believed. I did try my best to seek out images of the interiors online, but found relatively few, and only used the one showing off Boom Boom's dress and apparent roofie-ing of Jimmy. I don't think there are very many images of the story online in the first place, but also my search was frustrated, as Google, for example, kept assuming I was looking for Wolverine + Evolution, not Evilution.)

Anyway, I think I'm going to go read the latest collection of Ernie Bushmiller's Nancy to help me recover from this...

A Month of Wednesdays: May 2025

 BOUGHT: 

DC Finest: Zero Hour: Crisis in Time: Part Two (DC Comics) This 1994 event featured a five-issue main miniseries entitled Zero Hour, the issues of which were published countdown-style, starting with issue #4 and concluding with #0. The rest of the publisher's superhero line tied-in, each of the involved issues featuring a story having something to do with the premise of time going crazy (and, ultimately, all of time and space fading into the white nothingness of a blank comic page, as reality was unmade at the climax of the miniseries). Each of these had a "Zero Hour" logo atop its cover, featuring two arrows pointed in either direction, and a splintering zero for the first "O".

The heroes succeeded in defeating the villains and recreating all of time and space by initiating a new Big Bang , resulting in a handful of continuity tweaks (Or, as time-travelling hero Waverider explains it to a crowd of heroes who weren't present for the climactic event, "Time naturally fell into the pattern we remember...with subtle differences.")  

Following the events of the miniseries, each DC comic interrupted their usual numbering with a special #0 issue, featuring silver ink on the cover's "#0" and the logo, and a banner reading "The Beginning of Tomorrow!" 

Several new series launched with those #0 issues, some of which lasted quite a while and achieved great acclaim (like James Robinson and Tony Harris' Starman), and others that...didn't (like Steven Grant and Vince Giarrano's Manhunter). Oh, and I see now that there was one I have absolutely no memory of ever having existed at all (Xenobrood...?).

All of these new zero issues were designed to be done-in-one stories and jumping-on points for new readers, presenting new line-ups for existing teams or teasing upcoming storylines.

This particular 500-ish page volume collects the second half of the event, which means the last three issues of Zero Hour proper by Dan Jurgens and Jerry Ordway, plus 13 tie-in issues and, somewhat surprisingly, four #0 issues from  after the event...plus some 25 pages of backmatter, consisting of DC's promotional "Zero Month" sampler, a short 2019-written prose piece with a bit of behind-the-scenes info prominently featuring late editor KC Carlson and a black-and-white "ashcan" of the climax of the final issue that obscured the identity of the villain with blacked-out art and redacted mentions of his name, originally produced for a long-ago San Diego Comic Con.

You guys all know who that is by this point, right...? Hal Jordan, now calling himself "Parallax" and powered-up by absorbing anomalous energies left over from Crisis on Infinite Earths, anomalies that are depicted as balls of blank-page whiteness. 

Using the energy he has gathered throughout the series, he creates waves of entropy at the beginning and the end of time, eating it away from both directions in order to unmake reality and, then, restart it, with himself as its intelligent designer, so that he can make a perfect universe free of such tragedies as the destruction of Coast City...and his own reckless and violent actions that followed it, of course.

I liked this portrayal of Hal, and thought his actions had a logic to them, and that he had enough of an in-story justification to propel him on this path (He didn't necessarily enjoy killing Hawkman, for example, but since he now had the power to resurrect him in the near future, he didn't mind doing so either if it got him out of his way). 

These issues of Zero Hour mostly involve some running around and some status quo changing (like revealing which members of the JSA survived Extant's attack and what they might do following the restoration of their old ages, for example) on the way to the big revelation that Hal is behind it all, when he makes his entrance decking Superman, and then a final battle in which the various allies Waverider gathers outside of time at Vanishing Point are confronted with Extant and a handful of heroes who are swayed, at least temporarily, by Hal's "perfect universe" pitch. 

All that action was followed by what to a young letter hack and future blogger was really exciting: A four-page illustrated timeline of the DC Universe, beginning 15 billion years ago with the creation of the universe and ending with "Today" (plus a tease of "The Future", which includes Professor Zoom, Booster Gold and the Legion of Super-Heroes). 

While there are a few dates given, associated with the World War II era Golden Age heroes for example, this is basically a formal sliding timeline. It doesn't get into the specifics of continuity, but it does establish who debuted when in relation to one another, keeping straight things like which heroes founded the Justice League (Black Canary, not Wonder Woman), for example, whether Plastic Man was a Golden Age or Modern Age hero (the latter), when Wonder Woman arrived in Man's World (recently) and so on.

(Having studied this so rigorously in 1994, one of the things that would later annoy me following future continuity fussings-with like Infinite Crisis, Flashpoint and so on was that DC never deigned to let readers know what's what in a similar fashion...often to the detriment of stories that relied on DCU history, as individual editors and creators often didn't seem to know themselves when or if particular events happened or not.)

As for the tie-ins, they are fairly all over the place. 

Some, like Guy Gardner: Warrior, are tied pretty closely to the events of the miniseries, with Guy, Steel, Supergirl and a Batgirl from an alternate timeline bouncing around time, only to be deposited directly into the action of Zero Hour #1. 

Some, like Robin and Catwoman, are standalone "time goes crazy" stories, in which Robin Tim Drake works a case with Robin Dick Grayson and Catwoman and a handsome caveman chase a saber-toothed cat. 

And some seem to have almost nothing at all to do with Zero Hour, other than the action fading into whiteness at the end, like Anima. 

The four #0 issues are sort of curious inclusions, I think.

Two make rather perfect sense, as they deal with plotlines left dangling from Zero Hour #0. Of these, one is Green Lantern #0 by Ron Marz, Darryl Banks and Romeo Tanghal, which lets us know what happened to Hal and Kyle Rayner after they were lost during the new Big Bang and, after some teasing, resolves who will be Green Lantern going forward. It's Kyle, obviously (Marz has him narrate on the last page something along the lines of the fact that Hal's gone, he's the Green Lantern going forward, and he'll try his best.) 

And the other is The Flash #0 by Mark Waid, Mike Wieringo and Jose Marzan Jr, which lets us know that Wally West did not, in fact, die during Zero Hour, but was merely temporarily lost, phantom-like, in the timestream. 

The others are more-or-less random ones and could have seemingly been substituted by any of the post-Zero Hour #0 issues, I think. These are Damage #0 and Superman: The Man of Steel #0. The latter at least devotes its first few pages to Superman returning home after the event series and checking in with Lois Lane about what has or hasn't changed, as he tries to communicate to her what happens as he understands it, but it soon changes focus to setting up the next Superman storyline.

The most interesting comics in this collection? 

I really rather liked Green Arrow #90 by Kevin Dooley, Eduardo Barreto and Buzz Setzer, a mostly silent issue that splits into two similar but slightly alternate timelines on the second page, one running along the top of the pages, the other on the bottom. In one Green Arrow survives, in the other he is shot to death and, as the timelines rejoins one another, he finds himself regarding his own corpse. Batman arrives, puts his hand on his shoulder, and speaks the issues only line: "We need you." 

It's a time goes crazy issue, then, but a thoughtfully made one, and one which plays with a comics narrative in an unusual way.

The aforementioned Robin issue by Chuck Dixon, Tom Grummett and Ray Kryssing comparing and contrasting the two Robins is a lot of fun. So too is an 11-page short from Showcase '94, in which writer Mike McAvennie and artists Jason Armstrong and Stan Woch have a group of time-themed supervillains (Chronos, Clock King, Time Commander and Calendar Man) all team up for a heist, only to be frustrated by various time disturbances, like having to repeat actions over and over, or being interrupted by their future selves. 

And, surprisingly, I kind of enjoyed the Warrior issue (I don't like Gardner as a protagonist, nor did I much care for this run of his solo comics), in large part thanks to the art, which featured pencils by Mitch Byrd, Phil Jimenez, Howard Porter and Mike Parobeck over layouts by Jackson Guice. That's a lot of cooks in the kitchen, of course, but writer Beau Smith's plot basically consists of the characters being shunted from one time period to another, the art changing each time they arrive at a different location, so it works (Jimenez's dynamic but highly detailed, rather realistic section is the Old West, wherein we get cameos from a bunch of DC-owned Western characters, while Parobeck's simple style comes into play in a sequence set during the early years of Hal Jordan's Green Lantern career).

Also of interest is the three-part storyline that ran through the Justice League titles, the Christopher Priest-written "Return of the Hero", which introduced Triumph. The powerful hero apparently helped found the Justice League, gathering Superman, Martian Manhunter, Aquaman, Flash Barry Allen, Green Lantern Hal Jordan and Black Canary to all aid him in combatting an alien threat, but, at the end of the mission, he and the aliens get knocked out of timestream and accordingly forgotten. 

Triumph tells this story to what's left of the Justice League in the wake of the just-concluded "Judgement Day" story arc, which here means Elongated Man, Fire, (a) Crimson Fox, Tasmanian Devil and L-Ron-in-Trigon's body. He tries to rally this motley crew (which, of course, he is not impressed with) to help him fight the aliens, who, he assumes, must have also been released from the timestream along with him. He does this by fighting the heroes, which probably isn't the best strategy. 

By the final chapter, Martian Manhunter joins them all, and ancient Atlantean sorcerer Arion makes an unexpected appearance. 

Different artists draw each chapter in their vastly differing styles; I, obviously, liked the final chapter, drawn by Jimenez, the best, although Greg Larocque's pencils on the second chapter were interesting too. Howard Porter drew the cover of the first installment, featuring Triumph standing among the League founders, which made me wonder, was this the future JLA artist's first time drawing a Justice League...?

Priest would go on to write Justice League Task Force, featuring a new, stable line-up that included Triumph and ran for 20 issues. (It could use a trade collection, maybe a DC Finest one; so far DC has only collected the first handful of issues of the Task Force series, but that was in 2018). There was also a Priest-written Triumph miniseries in 1995, but I never read that. 

While writing about Part One of the DC Finest collection of Zero Hour (in this column), I noted that one of the things that most excited me about it was that I had never before read a superhero crossover event series in its entirety, so I was curious about what that experience might be like.

Having now done so, I don't know that I would recommend it.

I'm not entirely sure of the logic employed in putting this collection together, if it was done so in the order of the books' release or if the editors were going for some sort of readability. But, if you were to approach me today saying you had never read Zero Hour and wanted to know the best way to do so, I think I would recommend reading Zero Hour #4-0 first and then going back to read the tie-ins that interest you most, based on either the characters or creators. 

It won't hurt to read them all, of course, but reading them as presented in these two collections means a lot of starting and stopping of the main story's momentum, and a lot of detours, many of which have little if anything to do with Zero Hour. (And if you're interests are piqued by what you read in the pages of the Anima book, for example, well, good luck tracking the series down now!)

That said, I had fun with the reading experience, revisiting the event in general, and, especially, reading the handful of tie-ins that I had actually never read before, either in single issues from when they were released, fished out of long boxes from conventions, or in the previous Zero Hour collections. 

And while so far the only events DC has collected in this format have been Zero Hour and the oft-collected Crisis on Infinite Earths, I'm hopeful the publisher will eventually turn its attention to its many other events, particularly those that ran in the annuals like Eclipso Unleashed and the Bloodlines books, which, due to their pages counts, are just far too big for individual trade collections, but might work in series of big collections like this.

REVIEWED: 

Band Nerd (HarperAlley) The cover of this book is probably a bit deceptive. The title and image suggest a book about a young girl devoted to the school band, and while the story is that, it's actually more about her trying to cope with one of her parents' alcoholism, which she does by channeling all her time, energy and focus into earning first chair in band. Written by Sarah Clawson Willis and drawn by Emma Cormarie, it's well-made enough, and has a very distinct visual style which took me a bit of getting used to. More here. 

Carousel Summer (HarperAlley) This coming-of-age story of a middle-schooler's summer-long journey learning to be herself and, even harder, coming out to her friends and family as her genuine self—while also helping her small town decide something about its own identity—is charming and effective, at turns funny and potently dramatic. It's by Kathleen Gros, who may be best known for previous queer readings and retellings of works of classic literature featuring strong female protagonists in her 2020 Jo: An Adaptation of Little Women (Sort Of) and 2022 Anne: An Adaptation of Anne of Green Gables (Sort Of). I suppose it's technically what one might refer to as a "gay" book, but the protagonist's conflicts involving growing up, changing, a first relationship and all the stuff with her family and the town itself should be relatable to anyone who is a middle-schooler or has ever been one, gay, straight or other. More here. 

Ghost Town (Abrams) I thought this original graphic novel from Eric Colossal, the cartoonist responsible for Rutabaga the Adventure Chef, was a blast. Another story chronicling the last summer of a young woman before starting middle school, it features a group of kids trying to save their town from the plague of ghosts haunting it, their ghost-busting leading to a mysterious plot spanning generations and, unexpectedly, a great metaphor for the human need to move on, no matter how scary one might find change and how badly one might wish to stick with what they know. More here. 

It's Jeff!: Jeff-Verse (Marvel Entertainment) Did you miss any of writer (and co-creator) Kelly Thompson and art team Gurihiru's comics starring Jeff, the puppy-like land shark? I know I did. In fact, I missed all of them after the first one, 2023's It's Jeff! Well, fear not. They are now all available in a single trade paperback. If you need to know more, I reviewed it here, but, given that this is Kelly Thompson and Gurihiru, I can't imagine anyone needing more information than that to be excited about picking this book up. I'm a huge fan of the Gurihiru team's superhero art, and Thompson gives them the opportunity to draw a wide swathe of the modern Marvel Universe here, including a story set during a pool party, which is like a Marvel Swimsuit Special embedded within a chapter of It's Jeff!...

Credit where credit is due: Who created who in Thunderbolts*

•Bucky Barnes, Captain America's sidekick, was created by Joe Simon and Jack Kirby in 1941's Captain America Comics #1. His Winter Soldier look, identity and backstory as a brainwashed assassin with a robot arm were the creations of Ed Brubaker and Steve Epting. Barnes first appeared as the Winter Soldier in 2005's Captain America #6.

•La Contessa Valentina Allegra de Fontaine, an agent of the espionage team SHIELD, was created by Jim Steranko in 1967's Strange Tales #159.  

•Red Guardian Alexei Shostakov, the Soviet Union's answer to Captain America, was created by Roy Thomas and John Buscema in 1967's Avengers #43. 

•Taskmaster, a mercenary and combat instructor with "photographic reflexes" that allow him to mimic the moves of his opponents, was created by David Michelinie and George Perez in 1980's Avengers #196.

•John Walker, a one-time Captain America antagonist, was created by Mark Gruenwald and Paul Neary, appearing for the first time in 1986's Captain America #323, wherein he used the name "Super Patriot." He later became the new (and temporary) Captain America, before finally settling on the name USAgent in 1989's Captain America #354. I'm afraid I'm not sure which artist deserves credit for the black, white and red variation of the original Simon and Kirby Captain America costume that Walker eventually adopted as his USAgent get-up. (Tom Morgan seems to have penciled its first appearances). If you know, please tell us in the comments and I'll update this post. 

•The Ghost, an Iron Man villain with a power suit that allows him and objects in his possession to become invisible or intangible, was created by David Michelinie and Bob Layton in 1987's Iron Man #219. 

•The Thunderbolts, a group of long-time Marvel supervillains who secretly adopt new codenames and costumes to pose as a superhero team, were created by Kurt Busiek and Mark Bagley for the 1997 Thunderbolts series (Although they first appeared in The Incredible Hulk #449 by Peter David and Mike Deodato Jr.).  

•Yelena Belova, the second Black Widow, has some rather convoluted creation credits. She first appeared as a sketch by artist J.G. Jones in 1998's Marvel Knights Wave 2: Sketchbook #1, made her first in-story appearance in a 1999 issue of Paul Jenkins and Jae Lee's miniseries Inhumans and then starred in a 1999 Black Widow miniseries by Devin K. Grayson and Jones, who are usually credited as her creators. (Wikipedia lists Grayson, Jones, Jenkins and Lee all as her creators, though). She is, obviously, a legacy version of Black Widow Natasha Romanoff, who was created by Stan Lee, Don Rico and Don Heck for the Iron Man feature in 1964's Tales of Suspense #52. She has since adopted the name White Widow.

•The Sentry, a Superman analogue with mental health problems that manifest as the alternate identity The Void, was created by Paul Jenkins, Jae Lee and Rick Veitch for 2000's The Sentry #1. 

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Speaking of who created The Sentry... You'll note that I credited Paul Jenkins, Jae Lee and Rick Veitch above. As you've probably noticed, I was going by Wikipedia's credits for all of those I didn't already know. A few months ago, I would have told you that Jenkins and Lee created The Sentry, but then, that was before I stumbled upon this interview with Veitch at the website Popverse, which includes various sketches of the character in the style of different artists apparently created to support a pitch. It's a fascinating (if rather sad) interview, and paired with this follow-up story, it seems like Veitch and Jenkins are currently in rather strong disagreement about whether or not Veitch contributed to the character's development at all.

I don't really have to use the asterisk, do I...? (Eleven random-ish thoughts on the movie Thunderbolts*)

1.) Once again, I failed to see this movie on opening weekend, which is when the studios would prefer we go see their movies. Hopefully the fact that I am about to talk about it so many weeks after its original release means that any of you who were interested in seeing it have already done so, and I can therefore talk freely about its content and its couple of big surprises. If not, well, consider this a spoiler warning for the movie (and for a 28-year-old comic book!) for the rest of the post.

2.) As I feel like I have noted many times before (including just a few months ago), Marvel Studios has long since perfected their formula for producing quite decent, wholly unobjectionable superhero movies. They generally all share a very similar aesthetic, the actors are all usually pleasant ones a viewer enjoys spending some time with, the action choreography is competent if never thrilling and they tend to have a healthy sense of humor, with quippy dialogue and a degree of self-deprecation about their content. For the most part, they've become perfectly mediocre...which means they usually don't offer much in the way of surprise anymore, but that little "Marvel Studios" logo is a sort of stamp of "good enough" quality. 

Thunderbolts* is different. Much of what I said above holds true, of course, but I was quite pleasantly surprised to find that this film is actually about something in a way that many of their previous films I've seen haven't been (and not just IP management or advancing the now rather confused Marvel Cinematic Universe mega-plot). 

Rather, the film tackles mental illness and trauma by presenting us with about a half-dozen thoroughly broken people, and it does so in a way that makes it feel universal. Early in the film, new Black Widow Yelena Belova (Florence Pugh) mentions "the void" (lowercase "v", one assumes) and a bit later, discusses it with the mysterious Bob (Lewis Pullman). The way they talk about the void, it sounds like it can be something serious from the DSM-V, or it can be the low-level anxiety or depression that so many of us live with, or it could simply be the feeling of a lack of purpose, or a sense of emptiness or loneliness.

In other words, "the void" is something everyone can relate to, and amid all the superhero business, the film both explores this, and offers the solution to it: Human connection.

In this sense, it's the best kind of superhero narrative, especially of the classic Marvel superhero sort, in which basic elements of universal human nature are exploded into big, broad metaphors that take the shape of monsters and villains for our heroes to struggle against (Here, of course, it is The Void, with a capital "V"...I suspect his/its presence in the film was meant to be a surprise of sorts, but I feel like I knew The Sentry was going to be in this movie ever since it was first announced; it's hard to be too surprised by such big, well-covered movies in the age of the Internet). 

The more I think about it, the more impressed I am with what Thunderbolts* does. I guess director Jake Schreier and writers Eric Pearson and Joanna Calo know what they're doing.  

3.) Has anyone said the name "USAgent" out loud yet...? I didn't hear it during the course of this movie at all (just "dime-store Captain America" once), but then, I didn't watch The Falcon and the Winter Soldier.

4.) I thought Wyatt Russell was pretty perfectly cast as John Walker. He's very handsome, but, at the same time, there's something...punchable about his face? Like, not just in the film. Looking at the credits on IMDb and seeing his headshot, I have two simultaneous visceral reactions: "Say, that's a handsome guy" and "That guy looks like such an asshole."  (Sorry Mr. Russell! Nothing personal!). 

With USAgent in Thunderbolts* and Guy Gardner in the upcoming Superman, it's a great summer for fans of a-hole legacy characters from the '80s...!

5.) Giving The Sentry telekinesis seemed a bit much. I mean, he's already Superman with some vague extra energy powers, does he really need another superpower?  I suspect it was included just so they could have a scene of Valentina Allegra de Fontaine (Julia Louis-Dreyfus) training him and the pair of them realizing that he has great powers he can control, but, in the fight scene where he takes on the Thunderbolts in Avengers Tower, it felt a bit like overkill, as the filmmakers seemed to hurry through a checklist of The Sentry's various powers (And why block bullets in mid-air with telekinesis if they just bounce off your body anyway? Why use it to throw someone across the wall when a slap would do the same?)

6.) I thought they did a great job of making The Void version of The Sentry and Bob scary as hell; I think it was the tiny little white dots of eyes staring blankly out of the all-black figures that did it. 

7.) I thought the use of Taskmaster (Olga Kurylenko) in the film was an incredible waste. It was a little surprising that she was killed off so quickly, given her prominent placement in the marketing (see the poster above, for example), to the extent that I thought she might not really be dead at first. 

I guess, if I'm being charitable, the reason they included her at all was as an example of something Yelena articulates about the grim arc of such characters' lives, that they lead lonely existences in which they kill people over and over until someday someone kills them. 

But given how cool the character's powers and look are, it was sort of a shame to put her in the movie just to kill her off; more than most of the others, she could have used a redemptive arc, and her character some spotlight and a found family echoing the one that it was suggested she had found at the end of Black Widow. (There wasn't really room in the movie for another character, I understand—The Ghost Hannah John-Kamen gets hardly anything to do relative to the other characters as is—but I think it would have been better not to include Taskmaster at all than to use her as they did.)

8.) I thought the joke about where the name "Thunderbolts" came from in the film was effective, especially given the several callbacks to it throughout, like those involving the argument over which local business had sponsored Yelena's childhood soccer team.

That said, I thought it somewhat emblematic of the lingering embarrassment of the source material still evident in Marvel Studios movies. That is, someone somewhere along the line thought that a superhero team named "The Thunderbolts" was kinda silly and thus needed a more realistic in-story explanation, and if it could also turn on a joke, well, all the better. (You can sense this embarrassment in how time the characters spend out of their masks and costumes—although part of that is likely also due to wanting to get the stars' good-looking faces on the screen as often as possible—and the toned-down designs of the costumes. For example, while I think movie Taskmaster looks cool and scary, the design certainly leans into realism, and away from a billowing cape, pirate boots and a face that looks exactly like a human skull, for instance. Oh, and also in their reluctance to use codenames, with Walker always being referred to as "Walker" and Yelena as "Yelena", for example).

I think the filmmakers could have just as easily come to the name another way, with Red Guardian (David Harbour) excitingly, spontaneously declaring the team assembled before him "The mighty Thunderbolts, delivering justice like lightning...!" or suchlike. 

Sure, they would have lost a running gang, but I'm sure they could have found a half-dozen or so other little jokes to take the place of those about the soccer team.

(And yes, I understand that they're not really the Thunderbolts anyway, hence the asterisk, and that they ultimately get a completely different—and more marketable!—team name, which is reserved for a late in the film surprise.)

9.) It's kind of too bad that Marvel Studios couldn't have attempted something along the lines of a filmic equivalent to the big twist at the end of Kurt Busiek, Mark Bagley and company's original Thunderbolts, wherein the reader has already bought and read most of an issue before they realize that what at first seemed to be a team of brand-new heroes are actually a bunch of familiar villains attempting an ambitious new scheme). 

There are, of course, plenty of reasons why they couldn't. Of the original Thunderbolts line-up, I think only Zemo actually already exists in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Therefore, they would have needed to round up a team worth of other villains to use in the line-up (and, with Ghost, Taskmaster and Walker, they kind of did a bit of that here, although they don't seem to have actually been villain-villains) but, of course, the Marvel Cinematic Universe is awfully light on actual supervillains, given how they are generally killed off at the end of the movies in which they appear and are never really heard from again (Tom Hiddleston's Loki being the example that proves the rule). 

And even if they did assemble a handful of pre-existent supervillains from throughout the MCU to take on new superhero roles in a Thunderbolts movie, keeping them under wraps in a big Hollywood film like this is a lot harder than, say, Screaming Mimi reinventing herself as Songbird in a comic book; surely if word got out that, say, Michael Keaton was cast in a new Thunderbolts movie, one would suspect he would be reprising his role as The Vulture, wouldn't they...?

Finally, I don't think Marvel Studios could currently sell a team of five or six brand-new heroes with no immediately apparent ties to the previous films at this time. Maybe they could have years back, when the Marvel brand was enough to get a Guardians of the Galaxy film off the ground (surely no one who didn't already read Marvel comics knew who the hell they were) or sell an Ant-Man movie. But if they tried to pitch seemingly brand-new characters now? I don't think it would work, as some of the popularity has rubbed off the MCU (I have an idea why this might be the case, besides, of course, simple exhaustion, but there's no sense in getting into all that here).

10.) I don't like Walker's little beret.

11.) I hope all of the comics writers and artists responsible for creating (and/or, in Winter Soldier's case, recreating) the various characters used in the movie were well compensated. Looking at a list I made of the 23 writers and artists involved in producing these characters (which I'll post tomorrow), it looks like 17 of them are still alive; I feel like that isn't always the case with the characters in the earlier Marvel movies, given that so many of the primary Marvel characters were created by Jack Kirby, Stan Lee, Steve Ditko and the men of their generation. 

And by "compensated" I mean not just that they have their names listed under "Special Thanks" or whatever near the end of the credits, but that they got some movie money. Being comics creators, I assume some of them can really use it.