DC Versus Marvel: JLA/Avengers

It's perfectly appropriate that the final DC/Marvel crossover was 2003's JLA/Avengers, as that makes it the ultimate DC/Marvel crossover in both senses of the words. Writer Kurt Busiek and artist George Perez, the latter of whom was attached to the project when it was first in development back in the early '80s, produced the biggest and best of the 20 such comics that were published previously. 

And it's big in every way. Originally published as a four-issue mini-series, with each issue numbering 48 pages, it was nearly 200 pages along. The page count is similar to that of 1996's DC Versus Marvel, but, thanks to Perez's panel-packed pages and intricate, detailed artwork, the full series reads much denser than its closest relation in the sub-genre, more like a graphic novel than a comic book miniseries. 

The stakes are, naturally, also big: The fate of both the DC and Marvel Universes...which, of course, were also imperiled in DC Versus Marvel, but here that threat feels more immediate and visceral, more akin to Crisis on Infinite Earths than DC Versus Marvel. Indeed, the epic opens with a four-page prologue in which two alternate universes are destroyed, that of Marvel's Arkon the Magnificent and DC's Qward, which was in the process of being visited by the Crime Syndicate of Amerika. 

And the cast? Mind-boggling big. Not only does it feature both of the then-current title teams, it also features their various reserves and former members called in to help out with the crisis...as well various past, dead members temporarily resurrected by the cosmic goings-on...and characters from throughout both teams' history when their universes are temporarily fused...but, by the final issue's climactic battle, the series will feature every single hero who has ever been a member of either the Justice League or the Avengers.

Oh, and there are also plenty of characters from both universes that play small roles or make cameos, from The Spectre, Lobo, The Phantom Stranger and various Titans to The Watcher, The Thing, Spider-Man and The Defenders. It's a massive cast of characters and one that, frankly, it's hard to imagine any artist other than George Perez even attempting, let alone drawing so well. 

So it's an incredibly satisfying read, one that I have to imagine was welcomed not just by the fans of either or both title teams, but by anyone who had ever been a fan of either team...maybe (hopefully!) even those who were looking forward to the originally proposed, 1980s crossover, fans who ended up having to wait over 20 years to see Perez drawing all those heroes (Because of various time travel elements, the '80s teams do meet—in fact, I'm pretty sure Perez's original art for the original, proposed meeting was repurposed in a big panel here—and versions of the characters that existed then, like Flash Barry Allen and Green Lantern Hal Jordan, end up playing substantial roles in the proceedings). 

How do the creators manage to get all this fan service in, and still tell a compelling, let alone coherent, story? 

Well, again, much of that is due to Perez's artwork, and his ability to fit so much in each panel and on each page, while Busiek comes up with an exceedingly clever, three-stage story, one that reads a bit like several different crossovers in one. And he leaves a lot of room to explore the universes, comparing and contrasting the ways they differ in terms of, say, geography, or the way they treat their heroes or even the way their various physics work.

The story opens with Krona, a cosmic villain introduced in Green Lantern in the 1960s, whose deal was that he was seeking to unlock the secrets of creation. Here, his inquests result in the destruction of universes. After the aforementioned destruction of two alternate universes, he arrives in the Marvel Universe and meets the Grandmaster, a Marvel Universe mainstay that was first introduced in an Avengers comic from the late '60s. 

The Grandmaster negotiates with Krona, and is in possession of some pretty valuable information, as he does actually know a being who witnessed the/a universe-creating Big Bang (that would be Galactus, of course). As is his wont, The Grandmaster proposes to Krona that the two of them play a game; if Krona wins, he will give him Galactus, while if Grandmaster wins, he won't. The specific rules of the game will be explained to our heroes a bit later in the story.

Meanwhile, Busiek and Perez introduce the then-current title teams, each in a spectacular two-page spread as they face a major threat from the opposite universe, followed by a several-page sequence where they triumph, introducing readers to each team's members, powers and dynamic in the process. 

The JLA comes first, and they are in a pitched battle against the giant Terminus (Never heard of 'em; not in 2003, and not 22 years later, either. This is the relatively rare comic that could actually use an annotated edition).

The League is that which existed when Mark Waid took over JLA after Grant Morrison's departure and excised the bigger roster Morrison had gradually built up to deal with his climactic "World War III" arc. That means we're looking at the Big Seven that founded this iteration of the team, plus Plastic Man (And if you need an even more specific marker of where we are in League history, Green Lantern Kyle Rayner, who Perez does a great job of drawing much younger than the other heroes, is wearing his unfortunate, Jim Lee-designed costume...although Perez will draw him in his original costume in one panel at the book's climax). 

And in the Marvel Universe, the Avengers are dealing with Starro, referred to as "The Star Conqueror." If the splash page is accurate, this team, which Busiek was actually writing for Marvel around that time, consisted of Iron Man, Jack of Hearts, Quicksilver, Warbird, She-Hulk, Yellowjacket, Thor, The Vision, Triathlon, The Wasp, Captain America and The Scarlet Witch. (I say seemingly because this book, when I originally read it in 2003, was my very first exposure to The Avengers, unless you count Mark Millar and Bryan Hitch's version that existed in The Ultimates. I wouldn't buy my first Avengers comic until a few years later, when Brian Michael Bendis launched New Avengers).

As both teams begin to investigate the extradimensional visitors—with Flash Wally West using his powers to enter the Marvel Universe, where he discovers mutants, that world's hatred of mutants, and the fact that the Speed Force doesn't seem to exist there—each team gets a cosmic visitor, there to explain the basic parameters of the Krona/Grandmaster game to them.

The Grandmaster himself visits the JLA Watchtower, telling the League they must race against a team from the other world to assemble 12 items of great power from across the worlds, including the likes of The Spear of Destiny, The Cosmic Cube, Green Lantern's power battery, The Infinity Gems, The Orb of Ra, the Ultimate Nullifier, and so on. Joined by The Atom, who is there to replace The Flash, who is powerless there, they visit the Marvel Universe. After some exploration and giant monster fighting, they are repelled by The Avengers (who are joined by Hawkeye, who will play a pretty prominent role throughout the series).

The Avengers are then visited by Metron of the New Gods, who gives them a similar spiel, about a team of others and a dozen power objects, and gifts Iron Man with a Mother Box, capable of opening Boom Tubes to the DC Universe, which seven of the Avengers take there.

That's pretty much the first issue, which ends with the Avengers being confronted by the JLA, and Thor throwing his hammer at Superman.

The second issue thus opens with what one might expect as the first stage of a typical superhero crossover ritual: The fight. It's a good one, far better than any of the many fights in DC Versus Marvel, including a great splash in which the 15 heroes do battle with one another, before we get various passages of break out fights, like Flash vs. Hawkeye ("They're not so tough, Thor," Hawkeye says, "They're just Squadron Supreme Lite") and Captain America versus Batman (After an exploratory page or so of strikes and counterstrikes to test one another, the pair agree they are just pawns in a larger game, and leave the battle to work on the case together).

Much of the rest of the second issue/chapter are devoted to the teams, their rosters expanded and fortified by reserve members, playing the game. And so the JLA and Avengers break into smaller teams to pursue the items in various locales throughout the two universes, giving us scenes like Hawkman, Black Canary and Blue Beetle vs. Scarlet Witch and Quicksilver in The Flash Museum and Wonder Woman and Aquaman vs. Hercules and She-Hulk in Asgard.

This all culminates in a huge 30 hero battle in the Savage Land for the final item, the Cosmic Cube. There we get such conflicts as a Hawkeye vs. Green Arrow archer off and a fairly long Superman vs. Thor battle, which Superman eventually wins ("Sorry to...disappoint..." Superman struggles to say, holding off Mjolnir with his left hand, before delivering a knockout punch with his right, "But in...my world, it looks like...the dials... ...go up to eleven!").

When Quicksilver finally secures the cube, the game seems to end in a tie...until Captain America knocks the cube from the speedster's hands, and into those of his new ally Batman, the final score being 7-5 in the Justice League's favor. Thus Krona, who had chosen the Avengers as his champions, has lost. The Marvel Universe is saved! 

Or is it? 

Krona, being a sore loser, attacks The Grandmaster, pulls the name of Galactus from his mind, and then summons the giant planet-eater, who he then attacks. The heroes get involved, and the seemingly dying Grandmaster uses the various gathered objects of power to...do something. 

What exactly will remain mysterious for much of the third issue/chapter, which is devoted to an exploration of a new, weird, but rather neat status quo. Here, it seems that the Justice League of America and The Avengers are long-time allies, getting together for annual, cross-dimensional get-togethers in the same manner that the JLoA and the JSoA used to (Iron Man and Green Lantern Hal Jordan seem to have a friendly argument over which world is Earth-One and which is Earth-Two).

This leads to long-ish sequence that opens with what I am assuming are the Bronze Age versions of the team, with the Satellite Era Justice League meeting with an Avengers team that includes Beast, and then we get a series of cameo-filled get-togethers between various incarnations of the two teams, giving us such moments as Snapper Car and Rick Jones talking barbecuing with Jarvis, Moondragon psychically fending off Guy Gardner's would-be sexual harassment and a Wonder Woman and Wonder Man arm-wrestling match.

Throughout the sequence, both Captain America and Superman, both of whom have been acting off throughout the series, sense something is wrong with what they're experiencing, and eventually things break down, the scene shifting to snow-covered ruins of a pair of cities, New York and Metropolis, with various heroes trying to make sense of the apocalyptic cityscapes, where civilians seem to randomly shift between worlds and mind-controlled villains prowl.

Apparently, the two Earths have been smooshed together, but they are too different to be stable and are thus tearing themselves apart. Teams of Avengers and Leaguers eventually convene, and their members seem mostly composed of past versions of the characters, based on their costumes, like those worn by The Wasp, Scarlet Witch and Hank Pym, who is here a Giant Man, rather than Yellowjacket. 

Oh, and The Flash is now Barry Allen, while the Green Lantern is now Hal Jordan. 

After some intervention from The Phantom Stranger, who shows these 13 characters their futures, which involves a lot of bad for some of them, like Hal going mad and becoming Parallax and Scarlet Witch and Vision losing their children, the heroes nevertheless decide to work together to take on Krona and save their worlds and futures,. This will involve building a special ship and invading the villain's extra-dimensional base, which is built of the corpse of Galactus.

There they encounter various villains in Krona's thrall, who at first are just assorted goons from the two universes (AIM, Kobra, Moleoids, two different versions of Parademons, etc.), but will eventually include dozens of villains who have fought either team throughout their history.

After a weird bolt of black and red lightning splits a panel and Aquaman and Scarlet Witch disappear to be replaced by Quicksilver and Green Arrow (and Hank Pym switches from a Giant Man costume to a Yellowjacket one), Pym theorizes that "chronal instability" is responsible, and this will be the vehicle through which we get all of the Leaguers and Avengers (and, in some cases, many of their various costumes and designs over the decades) to show up in a huge, sprawling fight scene that sees the various heroes fight their way through a gauntlet of villains to get to Krona. 

And so we get panels featuring The Falcon in a sky full of DC's winged heroes (Zauriel, Black Condor and various Hawkpeople), of "Batroc, Ze Leapair!" challenging Batman, of Prometheus threatening Captain America, Aquaman vs. Attuma, Superman wielding Cap's shield and Thor's hammer, and an incredibly fun game of cameo-spotting.

(On my first, original read-through of the single-issues published in 2003 and then again during my re-read of a trade collection a few weeks ago, I was trying to figure out if Busiek and Perez actually managed to get everybody in, which meant lingering on each page, scanning panels for the likes of lesser Leaguers like The Yazz, L-Ron-in-Trigon's body, Justice League Antartica and Tomorrow Woman, that last of whom was only on the team for the space of a single issue, JLA #5...although she was later also featured in 1998's JLA: Tomorrow Woman one-shot. They are, indeed, all there. Hell, I saw that Moon Maiden is on the cover of issue #3, and her single appearance was in 2000's JLA 80-Page Giant #3, an excellent novel-length story in which she was a member of the League from a forgotten timeline.  I didn't have the knowledge to do the same with The Avengers, obviously. When I posted about this after my re-read on Bluesky, Busiek himself responded to confirm that they did indeed get everyone in, working from official lists provided by DC and Marvel, and they did so because Perez wanted to draw them all.)

Our heroes are, obviously, successful in the end, the two universes  are saved and Krona is defeated...but in such a particular way that he will get what he wants, to see the birth of a universe. Eventually. 

While I had originally bought and read all of these issues, for the purposes of rereading it and writing about it as part of the series on DC/Marvel crossovers I ended up doing on Every Day Is Like Wednesday, I turned to a copy of the trade collection that I was able to get from the library system I work at. 

I felt lucky to find a copy, and to find one in such good shape, considering that it was published in 2008 (There was a tear on one-page, but that was the only injury to the 17-year-old book).

And that was the last time the book was published, other than, of course, a special, limited-run edition that the Hero Initiative published in 2022 to help fundraise for the ailing Perez. 

It seems fairly insane that this particular book has not been in print since it was originally released, especially now that the Avengers brand is so much more valuable than it was then, and so much better and widely known than it was in those pre-Marvel Cinematic Universe days. 

One imagines the publishers could sell a lot of copies of it, were it to be reprinted today. With the relatively recent release of the two omnibus collections collecting the other 19 DC/Marvel crossovers, one hopes a new JLA/Avengers collection will be along before too long. 

Like I said, I have the original issues, but I'd happily buy a new collection. It would be worth it just to have the covers unencumbered by the logos and text, as are presented in the back of this collection. Not only is that of issue #3 worth spending long minutes studying, but issue #2, depicting almost 40 different heroes all actively engaged in battle with one another, is something of a masterpiece of superhero combat. 

Editors from DC and Marvel have quite recently teased a future collaboration, and, honestly, I don't envy whoever the creators who get that particular assignment might be. One imagines their work will be much smaller in scale than JLA/Avengers was (how could it not be?), but, even still, with this the last of the crossovers, it's also the one any future crossover will have to try and top and, honestly, I don't see how anyone can hope to top this comic.  

On Annie Hunter Eriksen and Lee Gatlin's marvelous comic creator biographies With Great Power and Along Came a Radioactive Spider

In 2021 and 2023, writer Annie Hunter Eriksen and artist Lee Gatlin released a pair of children's picture books through Page Street Kids, both unauthorized biographies of two of the three primary comics professionals who created what we now think of as the Marvel Universe, Stan Lee and Steve Ditko (the third, Jack Kirby, appears in both men's stories, but doesn't didn't get his own book...at least not yet).

Attracted both by Gatlin's highly idiosyncratic, cartoonistly work, which I was familiar with from his posting on social media (where he posts great drawings of The Thing and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles), as well as curiosity about how a writer might go about reducing such men's complex careers into something short and simple enough for a picture book, I recently brought them both home from the library. 

As a grown-up and a long-time comics reader, I liked them both well enough, and I would certainly recommend them to anyone in that same demographic. As far as the intended audience of children goes, well, I'm afraid I can't really imagine how these would go over, as it's hard to imagine anyone young enough to be read to really being too terribly interested in Stan Lee or Steve Ditko. They do seem to be serviceable first biographies on the men, though.

The first, With Great Power: The Marvelous Stan Lee, tackles the most famous figure American comics history has ever produced, whether rightly or wrongly. With just 30 pages to work with, most of which could only support a sentence or two in addition to the images that will dominate them, Eriksen would zero in on Lee's career as a would-be novelist who stumbled into the writings of comics and then hit the big time when he wrote some heroes who were extremely popular in the 1960s, heroes who would eventually become movie stars in the 21st century.

In fact, there's a jump in time from mid-1960s to the turn in century, with an image depicting Lee walking down a red carpet, leading Spider-Man and the Avengers characters, most of whom are drawn wearing sunglasses (Except for Black Panther, whose all-black garb  wouldn't look right with them, and a tiny, too-small-for-them Ant-Man, shown running to keep up with the long strides of the regularly-sized heroes). 

The focus is mostly on Stan Lee as a youngster (appropriately enough, given the target audience), and his time working for Timely/Atlas/Marvel, until he co-created The Fantastic Four and Spider-Man, at which point Stan Lee really becomes the Stan Lee we now imagine when we think of him (For a significant portion of the book, he will be balding, his face looking naked without his signature glasses and mustache).

It's not a bad way to frame Lee's career, really, and certainly focuses on what is perhaps most significant to the broader, mainstream world beyond the comics shop.

The opening, thesis-like two-page spread is pretty great. Eriksen writes:

Stan Lee didn't have hulking strength.

Or fantastic flexibility.

Or catlike reflexes.

His superpower was creating heroes who did.

Each of these sentences is illustrated by an image of Lee as we usually imagine him now, with the shaded glasses, mustache and full head of gray hair, exhibiting one of these powers. 

So there's an image of a huge Stan Lee holding a coffee mug pinched between the fingers of a massive hand, the other one pinching the knob of a door that he's accidentally torn from its hinges. And then one of his left arm stretching into loops before returning to write on the yellow pad of paper he held in his other hand, as Mister Fantastic might be able to. And then one of him dressed in Black Panther's costume, complete with cute cat ears, the cowl open to reveal his familiar, grandfatherly face. And, finally, an image of him with his feet up on a desk, a lightbulb appearing over his head, while he raises a finger in a "Eureka!" like pose.

From there, Eriksen rewinds to his childhood: "But back when he was Stanley Lieber, a kid growing up in New York City, he didn't feel super." After a few pages on his childhood, the young protagonist lands a job in publishing: 

Luckily, a magazine called Timely Comics was hiring. With this gig Stanley could get his foot in the door in the world of writing. But for now, he would be Stanley Lieber: Errand Boy!

Eriksen doesn't mention a fact that tempers that "Luckily"; Lee's cousin was married to publisher Martin Goodman, a relationship which likely had something to do not only with his hiring as an errand boy, but also with his becoming an editor while still a teenager, after the famed comic book team Joe Simon and Jack Kirby quit Timely. 

She does detail Lee's work on that team's most famous creation, Captain America, which is when Stanley first became "Stan Lee," writing a filler story for the superhero under the pseudonym, wanting to save "Stanley Lieber" for his future great American novel. (Unfortunately, the story isn't clear that Captain America was Simon and Kirby's creation; the character just sort of exists here and is a steppingstone in Lee's transition from errand boy to writer.)

Gatlin's illustrations for the momentous occasion are pretty cool, though, with one page showing a cartoonish Captain America—none of the many Marvel heroes depicted within the book have the big, muscular, dynamic figures one would expect to see in an actual Marvel comic book—standing before a Hollywood-like chair labeled "Cap" and holding a script, saying, "Line? Line?...This is blank" in comic book dialogue balloons.

On the facing page, we see Cap and Bucky in action, battling the Red Skull and his men, while a young Stanley picks at a typewriter in the foreground.

That's soon followed by a scene in which Stan's wife Joan suggests he "finally sneak in a story he'd always wanted to tell," resulting in his "teaming up with Jack Kirby" and creating the Fantastic Four.  And then, "Stan furiously drafted while artist 'Sturdy' Steve Ditko drew the perfect design until a new face peered back at them: Peter Parker... The Amazing Spider-Man!"

After that second hit, his publisher's ask Stan, "What other superheroes do you have up your sleeves?" 

And this then leads to an image of a smug-looking Stan pulling at one of his sleeves, from which emanates a gusher of colorful stars, lightning, and Marvel ephemera (Mjolnir, pumpkin bombs, ants, Doctor Strange's cloak and so on). It's followed by a two-page spread featuring The Hulk, Thor, Silver Surfer, Iron Man and Doctor Strange. 

The contributions of Kirby and Ditko (and Don Heck and Larry Lieber) aren't mentioned here.

It's a certainty a version of the creation of Marvel's most famous characters and the creation of the Marvel Universe that Stan Lee himself would have like! 

Granted, the creation and development of these characters has been something that the men who made them and the fans who loved them have contested and debated endlessly over the years and have long since been the source of high-stakes controversy. While Eriksen and Gatlin obviously include Kirby and Ditko as collaborators (at least on the FF and Spidey), reading this book, it does seem to suggest that Lee did the heavy lifting in the process. 

I don't think this is necessarily a sin on the part of the book's creators. I mean, how nuanced can we expect a book intended for a pre-literate audience to be, after all? And how much controversy should there be in a book serving as a first introduction to Lee's career? Still, adult readers (like me), are sure to notice these aspects, and to raise an eyebrow here and there. 

After the story ends—not with Lee's sad last years, nor his death, but with him standing in a crowd of cosplaying fans and declaring "'NUFF SAID!"—there's a two-page spread of mostly prose, followed by a bibiliography of sources (Not included? Jordan Raphael and Tom Spurgeon's 2003 Stan Lee and The Rise and Fall of the American Comic Book from Chicago Review Press, which I'd personally recommend over some of those cited instead). 

There are three short sections across this spread, one on Stan Lee's cameos in Marvel movies, another on his collaborations with other creators and one on his "Stan's Soapbox" column. That second section, which appears under the heading "Friendly Neighborhood Bullpen", does mention Kirby, Ditko, Heck, Lieber and Bill Everet ("Like any good hero, Stan teamed up," Eriksen writes). 

This section also briefly details "The Marvel Method" of making comics (as opposed to the assembly line way they were mostly created previously), which allowed for greater collaboration between writer and artist...but, as an unfortunate side effect, likely contributed to the historical disagreements over who deserves credit for what (As I've understood it, artists working in "The Marvel Method" like Kirby and Ditko did with Lee are more properly understood as co-writers and artists, not just artists). 

Eriksen and Gatlin's next book, the wonderfully titled Along Came a Radioactive Spider: Strange Steve Ditko and the Creation of Spider-Man, seems to have been born, at least in part, by Eriksen's own dissatisfaction in the limited role Lee's collaborators played in the first book.

In fact, her bio on the back cover flap, begins with the fact that she 

realized while writing With Great Power: The Marvelous Stan Lee...that she, like most people, was overlooking Steve Ditko's role in the Spidey origin story, which inspired her to create the biography he deserves (even if he would totally hate the attention).

It's true that Ditko doesn't get the credit Stan Lee does for creating Spider-Man, but then, much of that is likely due to the two men's very natures. Stan Lee craved the spotlight and spent much of his career in pursuing it and then nurturing the fame his comics work brought him (I think it's safe to say that the various producers and directors didn't have to twist Stan's arm too hard to do all those movie cameos he's now so well known for). 

Ditko, on the other hand, was Lee's polar opposite. He eschewed the fame his creation brought him (as Eriksen's bio alludes to) and eventually gained a reputation for being something of a recluse.

So yeah, the late Ditko likely wouldn't have wanted to see this biography about him, as flattering as it is. That said, it's a good one, and I enjoyed it more than the Stan Lee one that it followed, probably because, unlike Lee, I've never read an actual biography of Ditko, and, in fact, couldn't tell you anything about him other than maybe rattling off a list of comics characters he created, and what I've seen of his work.

The word the Eriksen and Gatlin team attach to Ditko is the one in the sub-title, "strange," and which, given the name of his second most famous Marvel hero, naturally has something of a double meaning. 

"There was absolutely nothing strange about comic book artists Steve Ditko," Eriksen writes in the book's opening, the format of which is an identical, four-part two-page spread to that which opened With Great Power. "His life was an open book!" 

This ironic statement comes above Gatlin's drawing of an annoyed looking Ditko shouting "No comment!" and trying to close his front door while a grinning, generic-looking reporter leers around it, and various arms holding cameras, microphones and notepads are seen on the other side. 

This continues into two more similar situations, in which the prose narration contrasts with Gatlin's cartoon-like illustrations (It's worth noting that this book is a much funnier one than the first), culminating in Eriksen relenting over an image of a smiling Ditko holding a pencil and seated at a drawing table, an image of Spider-Man in one of the panels on the big piece of paper before him.

Okay...so Steve Ditko wasn't really like the rest of the artists at Marvel Comics, but the same could be said about his—yes, Steve's!—most famous creation: Spider-Man. 

The next two-page spread details the strangeness of Spider-Man, and how greatly he differed from the typical superhero, a strangeness accentuated by Gatlin's particularly thin, angular and, well, spidery version of Marvel's flagship hero which, despite adopting a variety of famous poses, looks more weird and alien than ever (Honestly? After reading this, I think Gatlin's is one of my favorite portrayals of the hero; it's easy to see how civilians would be creeped out by this Spider-Man, and how J. Jonah Jameson would viscerally recoil from the strange figure Gatlin draws here).

From there, we get a fairly linear version of Ditko's story, just as we did Lee's before. Ditko also grew up poor in the Great Depression, and he was also attracted to the fantastic, which, for him, meant comics. 

There's a great spread devoted to his work at Marvel and the difference between him and editor Stan Lee, and his reaction to a new character that Lee and Jack Kirby were cooking up (Gatlin draws a great Kirby; his sole appearance in this book looking somewhat bored as he works, a cigar clamped in his jaws). 

It wasn't strange when Stan and The King teamed up yet again for their new story: a boy, a magic ring, and a transformation into the grown-up hero named "Spiderman."

Ditko's job was to illustrated the new comic, but "Spiderman was just another repetitive brave and brawny hero!...Steve itched to break the mold in the best way he knew how—by making Spiderman strange."

We see just how wide the gulf in the two Spidermen was through Gatlin's drawing of Kirby's version, a large, muscular figure sporting a more classic costume and wielding a web gun, and Ditko's version, which we are now all familiar with (Even if the artists that followed Ditko, starting with John Romita Jr., pretty quickly transitioned the hero into a bigger, better-looking, more heroic and, well, less strange figure). 

In this book, Eriksen has Ditko do the heavy-lifting with the development of the character, not just coming up with the desigsn and elements of the secret identity, but creating the book himself: "Suddenly, Steve found himself writing and drawing Spider-Man—a comic book history first."

The book concludes with a passage in which we see Ditko retreating from his own fame, dodging young fans and, in one great illustration, questions, as Gatlin draws Ditko, a pencil behind his ear, in a leaping pose, while a half-dozen dialog balloons, each containing a single question mark, go flying and bouncing all around him. 

The final spread shows a happy Ditko at a drawing board, surrounded by a colorful collage, and a dramatically posing new but familiar character. "So he did what he did best: got to work," Eriksen writes, concluding of his latest work, "The comic was out of this world...and his most fitting work yet! Steve named him DOCTOR STRANGE."

Throughout the book—which gives a shorter, more streamlined version of Spidey that sidesteps some of the questions regarding contributions from Lee, Kirby and possible influences from past characters—Gatlin draws not only the aforementioned comics creators, but also Peter Parker, Spider-Man and some of the hero's foes (The Green Goblin, Doctor Octopus, Mysterio, The Sandman and The Scorpion) but, somewhat surprisingly, Captain Marvel and Batman (as well as obscure Simon and Kirby creation Captain 3-D, and Captain Battle, who I didn't recognize*). 

As with With Great Power, this book ends with a short prose section and bibliography.  Here, that section offers a more detailed biography of Ditko, including dates and reference to some of the controversies that wouldn't really fit in a picture book, including aspects of Spider-Man's creation and Ditko's departure from the comic. 

"Steve Ditko Would Hate This Book," reads a headline-like label to one part of this feature, which briefly notes his post-Marvel career (namedropping The Question and Mr. A) and just how media-shy he was, including how few photos there are of Ditko (which did make me curious as to how Gatlin went about developing his Steve, which must have been much harder than drawing Stan Lee, whose look has at this point become almost as iconic as that of some superheroes), his dislike of the "poison sandwich" biography Blake Bell wrote of him and the "rule" imposed by Ditko upon those meeting him: You don't talk about it.

Regardless of what Ditko might think of the book, though, I liked it, and I wouldn't mind reading similar biographies from this particular pair of Kirby, Simon or other famous and influential comics creators in the future.

*Thanks to Anthony Strand for identifying him on Bluesky for me!

DC Versus Marvel: The Amalgam Age Omnibus Pt. 3: Unlimited Access

In 1997 and early 1998, DC and Marvel published their second and final sequel to DC Versus Marvel, which was also the second and final miniseries starring the new character Axel Asher, aka Access, the jointly owned superhero with the power to create portals between the DC Universe and the Marvel Universe settings. 

This time, the script was the product of Karl Kesel, replacing DC/Marvel: All Access and DC Versus Marvel's Ron Marz. While this was Kesel's first time in the driver's seat for the Access character, he had been in the orbit of the publishers' crossover series before, having penned Amalgam one-shots Spider-Boy and Challengers of the Fantastic and co-written X-Patrol and Spider-Boy Team-Up. (I do wonder what Access co-creator Marz might have thought of Kesel's series, given the dramatic changes the latter made to Access' powers and origins; Marz doesn't say in his introduction included in the volume, only that he did have a pitch for a third Access series, in which the character visited the Amalgam Universe, but by then DC and Marvel cooperation was winding down.)

Kesel's partners on the book were pencil artist Patrick Olliffe and inker Al Williamson. Their art wasn't quite as stylistically distinct as that of Butch Guice in the previous series, although it did keep the general realistic-ish style, and the artists were capable of making the various characters all seem to fit in with one another, as if they belonged in the same story, despite how various their home comics were.

And, in this series, those home comics were more various than ever. Kesel has Access discover a few new powers, one of which is that not only can he travel between the two universes, he can also slide up and down their timelines, which gave the creators the opportunity to give us crossovers that the present-set DC Versus Marvel and All Access could not. 

And so we get to see the Two-Gun Kid draw on Jonah Hex, the/a Legion of Super-Heroes visit the world of "Days of Future Past" and, most excitingly, the original Avengers battling the original JLoA line-up (as it existed at the time, with Black Canary as a founder). 

Even more weird and fun crossovers are suggested in a pair of sequences, one involving Access ping-ponging through time and another in which he battles a future version of himself. In the first we see one-panel crossovers involving Devil Dinosaur and Anthro, The Phantom Eagle and Enemy Ace and The JSoA and The Invaders. In the second, we get particularly crazy amalgams in the background, like Spider-Man clones as Bizarros and a shiny Streaky the Supercat on the Silver Surfer's board.

Each issue is fairly stuffed with crossovers, as Access again finds characters in the wrong universes but, when attempting to fix things this time, he finds himself bouncing around the timestream/s. 

In the first, over-sized, 38-page issue Spider-Man and Wonder Woman take on evil New God Mantis and The Juggernaut (a particularly odd pair of villains to team-up and for those heroes to fight, but the why of this scene will be explained before the end of the series), and then Access finds a previous, "savage" version of The Hulk fighting a still alive (but gray at the temples) Green Lantern Hal Jordan.

From there the time-lost crossovers start, culminating in the Marvel Universe's New York City, about ten years or so ago. Darkseid and the forces of Apokolips have formed an uneasy alliance with Magneto and his Brotherhood of Evil Mutants, with the goal of conquering the world and subjugating humanity below homo superior, with Darkseid ruling over all.

Standing in their way are the early Avengers (sans Hulk, but plus Captain America) and the original five teenage X-Men in their matching black-and-yellow costumes, plus all the allies from the DC Universe Access can summon: The original Justice League line-up, the then electric, present-day Superman and the current crop of teenage superheroes (Robin, Superboy, Impulse, Wonder Girl and Captain Marvel, Jr...banded together here three months before the release of Young Justice: The Secret #1!).

While there were a lot of heroes therefore in the mix, Kesel kept the focus on Access, especially at the climax, with the character facing down god of evil Darkseid, the bad guy above all the other bad guys. Kesel even draws parallels between the two, with Darkseid noting both of them move other characters around like pawns on a chessboard to fight their battles for them, and ultimately framing this entire conflict as a struggle between himself and Access.

The final battle is fought using amalgamated heroes, with Access discovering that he has the ability to create amalgams himself, leading to a whole new crop of amalgams (most of 'em seen on the cover of the fourth issue) out of the raw material of the heroes present. Most of these amount to little more than fun names, like Green Goliath (Green Lantern + Giant Man) or Thor-El (Thor + Superman), although it's pretty fun and charming how each of them come with their own "continuity" that only really exists in their own minds, like Redwing (Robin + Angel), who insists he was trained by "Bat-X". 

By far the best of the bunch is Captain America Junior (Captain Marvel Jr. + Captain America) who, when he calls the name "Uncle Sam!" is gifted with such powers as the wisdom of Lincoln, the strategy of Eisenhower and the trickery of Nixon. 

Unlike the climax of All Access, this round of amalgamizing doesn't lead to a new suite of Amalgam Comics...perhaps because Access' new amalgams all exist within the Marvel Universe, rather than their own.

Or perhaps the publishers and the fans had by then begun to tire of the Amalgam Universe. Or sales on that second round of comics accompanying All Access weren't what the publishers had hoped for. 

Whatever the reason, without them, this particular crossover felt a little smaller in scale and importance than All Access and, obviously, DC Versus Marvel. And it would be the final appearance of the Access character, as well as the last series in which the universes crossed over at such a large scale, although there would still be a handful of one-shot crossovers left before the publishers ended their second era of collaboration: 1999's Superman/Fantastic Four (which namedrops Access) and Incredible Hulk vs. Superman, 2000's Batman/Daredevil: King of New York and, finally, a few years later, 2003's JLA/Avengers.

It doesn't seem like we can necessarily blame this particular series with the cessation of crossovers, though. Like All Access, it proved a lot of fun, giving much more room to the characters to interact that the original DC Versus Marvel series, and, with its focus on characters from different points in DC and Marvel history, it proved to be a fairly ambitious and imaginative work. 

DC Versus Marvel: The Amalgam Age Omnibus Pt. 2: DC/Marvel: All Access and the second round of Amalgam Comics

Some six months after the final issue of DC Versus Marvel shipped, the publisher released the first issue of its sequel, a four-part mini-series with a much smaller scale, a much more manageable cast of characters to be featured, and a great deal less hype. Mostly because of those very differences, DC/Marvel: All Access was a better comic, improving on its predecessor's weaknesses while offering a cleaner, smoother, more rewarding read. 

This seems particularly clear reading the two back-to-back, almost 30 years after they were originally published (and thus far removed from the expectations they offered at the time), an experience made possible by their collection in the DC Versus Marvel: The Amalgam Age Omnibus. 

Unlike DC Versus Marvel, All Access featured a single creative team, which obviously rectified the hiccups in tone, style and aesthetic that came with a pair of writers alternating on each issue's scripts, and two different (and quite different) art teams replacing one another every eight pages or so.

The All Access team consisted of writer Ron Marz, returning to the new character he had co-created in the previous series, and pencil artist Butch Guice, here inked by Joe Rubinstein. Marz was, obviously, a fine and even obvious choice, a writer doing decent work for both publishers at the time, as well as during the previous series (In addition to co-writing DC Versus Marvel with Peter David, Marz also scripted the Access-starring Amalgam Comics tie-in, Dr. Strangefate). 

A prolific artist, Guice had likewise worked for both publishers in the years preceding his work here, most notably on the various Superman books of the first half of the '90s. While his style wasn't particularly expressive, dynamic or showy—and certainly not what one thinks of when one thinks of "'90s comics", particularly those of Marvel or Image—he was a solid draftsman with a highly realistic style, so much so that he managed to make all of the various characters that participated in this series seem to fit together and, more remarkably, look like his (Despite their varying origins and their looks in their own, home comics).

Honestly, I didn't care for the art much in late 1996 and early 1997, when I originally bought and read these comics, but I appreciate it a lot more now. 

Aside from the creative team, the book's other benefit was its focus. Though both the DC and Marvel universe are technically imperiled again, this time that peril doesn't involve warring cosmic gods or 20+ heroes forced into combat against one another. The universes crossover again, but on a smaller scale and at a slower pace, about two heroes and one villain per issue (At least until the last issue, wherein two whole teams are involved).

Marz reintroduces us to Access, aka Axel Asher, who is a New York City college student (despite his rather unfortunate hairline, which makes him look far older). He's on a lunch date with his girlfriend Ming in their home universe, the Marvel Universe, and theirs is a fraught relationship that seems to suffer the traditional problems of those involving a superhero with a secret identity. Axel's always late, always acting weird, always cancelling dates, always rushing off and always offering lame, unbelievable excuses.

His is, remember, the job of keeping the DC Universe and the Marvel Universe separate from one another; if he doesn't, there's a risk of the Amalgam Universe being reinstated. As the series begins, a mental flash alerts him that he's needed. Apparently, Venom has jumped from this universe to the next, and is now in Metropolis, trading punches with Superman (who is still, at this point, rocking his longer-haired look). 

The first issue, then, is a Superman/Spider-Man team-up, featuring the two flagship heroes truly teaming-up for the first time since 1981's Marvel Treasury Edition #28 (and the creators give us a nice, poster-like two-page splash of the pair posed over the skyline together). Obviously, the two heroes are able to take down Venom...with a little help from Access. 

Unlike the various team-ups and fights in DC Versus Marvel, though, Marz and Guice have the room to flesh out these events and allow the characters to interact, which is, after all, what readers really want to see when they get the relatively rare opportunity to see characters from different publishers crossing-over.

And so we see how exactly Superman might fare against Venom in a fight that involves more than the two or four moves that the various battles in the previous crossover series did, and Superman and Spider-Man actually get to talk to one another.

This includes exchanges in which Spider-Man can't even really explain basic aspects of his life—like his costuming, for example—in a simple, straightforward sentence or two.

"This Venom is a playmate of yours?" Superman asks Spidey, to which he replies, "Yeah, another old costume I had that was really an alien symbiote, and... ...Well, don't ask about that, either.". 

Or another where Spidey makes a comment about newspaper reporters that elicits a dirty look from Superman.

There's barely a cliffhanger leading us to the next issue, which features a Robin/Jubilee crossover, their interaction being the most interesting part of DC Versus Marvel (Originally, I thought this was perhaps because I was, at the time, a teenager like them; now I realize it's because they were the only characters who had much interaction at all, aside from Ben Reilly/Peter Parker and Clark Kent and Lois Lane. Most of the other heroes' interactions were limited to noting that they regret having to fight one another during the process of fighting one another). 

Essentially, Jubilee runs into Axel and Ming during another of the couple's attempted dates, with the young mutant heroine eventually prevailing on Axel to take her to the other universe so she can say goodbye to Robin properly. They get to it eventually, with Tim Drake confessing that he actually already has a girlfriend and the pair kissing goodbye, but this being a superhero comic book, first they have to deal with Two-Face.

Batman shows up at the end...as does, rather randomly, Spider-Man villain The Scorpion. At that point, Access realizes that something's wrong if Marvel villains are going to keep showing up in DC cities, and he recruits Batman to help him figure out what's going on, taking the Dark Knight with him to Doctor Strange's Sanctum Sanctorum. This unlikely duo are the official stars of the third issue (as seen on Guice's pretty cool, moody cover), although they basically just talk a little, and there's not much in the way of either fighting or teaming up between them. 

But more superheroes quickly appear, in the form of Jubilee and what looked to me at the time (and still looks to me now) like a rather random assortment of X-Men: Cyclops, Jean Grey, Iceman, Storm, Bishop and Cannonball. (That wasn't actually the, or a, X-Men line-up in 1996/1997, was it...?). 

Batman wants to take Strange back to his home universe for a good mental probing from Martian Manhunter—Access suspects Dr. Strangefate may be trying to reassert himself through Dr. Strange and, ultimately, reinstate the Amalgam Universe—but the X-Men aren't on board with that plan.

This leads to a skirmish, and in a pretty dumb move essentially made because the story demands it, Access retreats to the DC Universe to get Batman some allies to defend him against the X-Men, returning with the rest of the JLA (Or, at least, the original seven members of the Morrison/Porter/Dell team). 

And that leads to the fourth issue: The X-Men vs. The JLA! 

Now, I was, in 1997, a regular, avid and enthusiastic reader of JLA, and the fact that the X-Men (especially these X-Men) could hold their own against this iteration of the JLA didn't seem too terribly convincing to me. 

I mean Superman could take out all of these guys himself at super-speed in a second or two, with Jean probably the only one with the power to fight back. Ditto The Flash. And Martian Manhunter. And Wonder Woman (although I guess DC Versus Marvel established that Storm could K-O her with lightning...?). Maybe Green Lantern Kyle Rayner..? (Although Marz rarely wrote him as all that particularly powerful, certainly not as powerful as Morrison did). 

I mean, Batman wasn't doing too badly against all of the X-Men by himself before the rest of his team, the ones with all the superpowers, showed up. 

Marz keeps the fight going for a while though, far longer than the splash-page it would take for most of the members of the JLA to solo the X-Men, with Cannonball trading punches with Aquaman for what seems like forever, even attempting to strangle the super-strong King of Atlantis with the line of his own hook at one point, and J'onn J'onnz somehow taking even longer to takedown Bishop than Batman had.

In the midst of the chaos, Dr. Strangefate does indeed hijack the unconscious Strange's body, and he re-amalgamates Wonder Woman and Storm into the Amalgam Universe's Wonder Woman (who is here called "Amazon," unlike in the pages of John Byrne's Amazon #1). He then amalgamates the other heroes standing against him, although we don't get the names of these characters, who include such unlikely amalgams as Batman + Jubilee and Iceman + Aquaman. That accomplished, the Amalgam Universe slowly begins to return around them.

It will be up to a last-ditch effort by Access to locate Doctor Strange's consciousness and pull Dr. Strangefate asunder again, re-separating the universe back into two separate universes. Surely you know just how that goes, the twist here being that, thanks to Dr. Strange's powers, the Amalgam Universe is established as its own distinct reality, encased in a little orb that he gives to Access, charging him with keeping it safe.

And that is, really, probably the entire reason this comic was published. 

Yes, it allowed DC and Marvel to flesh-out Access and provide for some fun crossovers that might not have been able to carry their own one-shots like Spider-Man and Batman or Superman and the Fantastic Four could, but, perhaps more importantly, it provided an excuse to revisit Amalgam Comics...and provide a rationale for future Amalgam Comics, what with the Amalgam Universe now established as separate, stable universe of its own. 

Although, as it turns out, this would be the last hurrah for Amalgam.

Since those comics are technically part of All Access, seemingly set between pages of the fourth issue, I suppose we should discuss them in this post. 

Here, let's take them one at a time...

•Generation Hex #1 by Peter Milligan, Adam Pollina and Mark Morales This book seems to have started life with its title, combining that of X-Men spin-off Generation X (starring Jubilee and a new crop of teenage mutants) with DC's deformed Old West (and/or futuristic) bounty hunter Jonah Hex. Here Hex and the mutant Chamber are combined into the "malform" outlaw Jono Hex, who leads a team of characters that seem to similarly mix Marvel mutants with old DC Western characters (Neither being a pool of characters I'm very familiar with, I didn't necessarily "get" the components of each amalgam). Milligan has them being hunted by a trio of mechanical "Razormen", the late-19th century version of Sentinels, and he has an exceedingly clever riff on The Magnificent Seven that has the opposite effect on a town, with our hero essentially tricking the bad guys into massacring everyone there. Pollina and Morales do a decent Chris Bachalo-esque style, the book thus looking to be somewhere in the ballpark of that artist's distinctive work on Generation X. 

•Super Soldier: Man of War #1 by Dave Gibbons, Mark Waid and Jimmy Palmiotti Super Soldier is one of several characters or concepts to return from the previous round of Amalgam Comics, although each would return in a new title, presumably so they could have a "#1" on the cover. Super Soldier is the only book to retain its original creative team, though, as Gibbons and Waid co-plotted the first comic, while Gibbons handled the art and Waid the script (Here, Palmiotti inks Gibbons, though). Set during World War II, this adventure is notable for—aside from its predictably great art—introducing some Golden Age amalgams like The Human Lantern, as well as war-time heroes Sgt. Rock and his Howling Commandos.

•Exciting X-Patrol #1 by Barbra Kesel, Bryan Hitch and Paul Neary Like Super Soldier, this amalgamation of the Doom Patrol and the X-Men also returned for a second comic, this time with Kesel handling the writing solo and Hitch on pencils. I didn't care for this as much as the original X-Patrol outing, largely because I preferred the work of original artist Roger Cruz over Hitch and Neary's busier, more realistic style, although I must admit I didn't necessarily find the concept strong enough for a second go-round either. New characters here include the villain Brother Brood (Brother Blood + The Brood) and the mysterious "Jericho", who looks like a gray-skinned Thing, but is secretly a version of Marvel's X-Man, I think...?

•Dark Claw Adventures #1 by Ty Templeton and Rick Burchett Wolverine/Batman mash-up Dark Claw returns, this time in an "animated" style adventure, with pencil artist Templeton and inker Burchett working in the Bruce Timm-esque style of Batman: The Animated Series. (Templeton rather drastically redesigns Dark Claw's mask, making it less ornate, and more similar to a pure fusion of Batman and Wolverine's respective cowls.) The gag is essentially spelled out in the title and Templeton's artwork, the plot involving a Talia al Ghul/Lady Deathstrike amalgam battling Dark Claw to avenge the death of her father, Ra's-A-Pocalypse. The giant Candian nickel and the red, Devil Dinosaur-looking T-Rex in Dark Claw's cave headquarters were nice touches.

•Bat-Thing #1 by Larry Hama, Rodolfo Damaggio and Bill Sienkiewicz This is another one where the title alone does the heavy-lifting, and it's such a compelling title that one wonders how DC never ended up using it for a character themselves before this. An amalgam of Man-Bat and Man-Thing, Bat-Thing is a green-hued humanoid bat with Manny's empty red eyes, dangling face bits and burning touch. He/it has recently killed, and an amalgam of Harvey Bullock and a name I didn't recognize is on the case. It's a perfectly serviceable done-in-one horror style story, starring a speechless creature that is maybe a little more bat than swamp monster.

•JLX Unleashed #1 by Priest, Oscar Jimenez and Hanibal Rodriguez I didn't care for this mash-up of the Justice League and the X-Men, neither when I originally read it in 1997, nor when I reread it earlier this year. Many of the characters seem to have been introduced in the previous year's Amalgam trading card line, where they were drawn by Howard Porter (Those cards are all, by the way, collected in the pages of the omnibus). Here they are a broken and imprisoned team of "metamutants" (an odd term to use, as just plain "mutant" is used throughout the rest of the Amalgam line), eventually sprung from their prison by Wonder Woman/Amazon to defeat Fin Fang Flame, a giant, sarcastic burning dragon that is an amalgamation of Fin Fang Foom and...I don't know who or what, maybe Brimestone...? They are led by a "Mr. X", who seems to be over-amalgamated, essentially being Charles Xavier (who was already amalgamated elsewhere) and Martian Manhunter...but he's also a Skrull instead of a Martian, and has an M-shaped eye tattoo like Bishop...? It's a pretty straightforward fight comic, and I wasn't overly impressed by either the designs or the art. It's especially dissappointing, given how great so many of the other comics written by Priest have been over the years.

•Magnetic Men featuring Magneto #1 by Tom Peyer, Barry Kitson and Dan Panosian This is basically What if...Magneto Created the Metal Men?, with the heroic Erik Magnus creating a new and distinct crop of robots powered by "magnetometric computers" to combat his evil brother Will Magnus' mutant-hunting Sentinels, not wanting to spend mutant lives in the struggle. One of the Magnetic Men shares a name (and metal) with one of the original DC Metal Men, Iron, while the others are new (Nickel, Cobalt, Antimony and Bismuth). They fight some evil robots, and there's a too-brief visit to "Krakoa, The Living Dinosaur Island". Kitson's art here looks very...un-Kitson-y to me, perhaps because he is intentionally working in a more Jim Lee-derived, '90s X-Men appropriate style...? At any rate, were it not for the credits, I wouldn't have guessed Kitson drew this, his linework and posing only recognizable here and there. The tag at the end is promising, although there was, of course, never an issue #2: "Next: Detective Dinosaur."

•Spider-Boy Team-Up #1 by "R.K. Sternsel", Ladronn and Juan Vlasco Returning Spider-Boy writer Karl Kesel amalgamated himself with Roger Stern to become R.K. Sternsel, writing in his introduction to the omnibus that he needed Stern's deep knowledge of comics and characters to help him with The Legion of Galactic Guardians 2099, the Legion of Super-Heroes/Guardians of the Galaxy mash-ups that Spider-Boy would be teaming up with in the year 2099. This included not one, but two different line-ups of the Legion—one 22 heroes strong, another consisting of 17 different heroes—their number, names and costumes changing between roll calls based on the time-travel shenanigans of the story. I liked this book a lot better this time around than when I had first read it all those years ago, mainly because, at the time, I had missed Ringo's work so much. Ladronn's style is obviously quite different, but here he seems to be working in a rather deliberate Kirby pastiche, perhaps inspired by such elements as The Yancy Legion or The Silver Racer.

•Challengers of The Fantastic #1 by Karl Kesel, Tom Grummett and Al Vey This is an amalgam so obvious that it's almost a wonder that it didn't get published with the original round of Amalgam Comics, although I suppose it's worth noting that Kesel did introduce these characters among the many scientists staffing Project Cadmus in the original Spider-Boy comic. Basically, Kesel and company amalgamate Jack Kirby and Stan Lee's Fantastic Four with the earlier team of adventurers they were seemingly based on, Kirby's own The Challengers of the Unknown. Here we get their origin (a mash-up of that of the FF and the Challs), and see them face one of their greatest challenges, the space-faring giant named Galactiac. There are also appearances by Uatu the Guardian, The Silver Racer, Dr. Doomsday and Bronze Tiger, the king of Wakanda. Great art by Tom Grummett grounds the proceedings, which is mostly a very inside baseball game of mixing and matching. 

•Iron Lantern #1 by Kurt Busiek, Paul Smith, Al Williamson and others Hal Jordan made a cameo in the pages of Speed Demon, as the last living member of the "Starbrand Corps." But All Access' new, second creation of the Amalgam Universe seems to excuse such changes, and so Green Lantern Hal Jordan and Iron Man Tony Stark (who also appeared previously, as a weapons maker in Bruce Wayne: Agent of SHIELD) are here in a new, composite form: Iron Lantern Hal Stark. This is mostly an impressively thorough blending of the two concepts, heavily leaning on their earlier 1960s takes, elevated by pencil artist Paul Smith's smooth, elegant artwork. He is inked by no less than seven different inkers, although one can't tell from the results. This is probably the best-looking of all of this round of Amalgam Comics, and with competition that includes Dave Gibbons, that's really saying something. 

•Thorion of The New Asgods #1 by Keith Giffen and John Romita Jr As with Challengers of the Fantastic, this seems to be another case of the creators combining Kirby creations together to make a new whole. John Ostrander toyed with Kirby's Fourth World characters in Bullets and Bracelets, introducing Thanoseid, but here Giffen and JRJR go far further, fusing Kirby's Thor run with his New Gods. The war that killed the old gods is Ragnarok, and their "third" world was apparently Asgard, now part of remade. bifurcated planet that is half New Asgard and half Apokalypse. The former's champion is, of course, Thorion the Hunter, who looks like Thor in an Orion-inspired outfit and who channels the Astro-Force through his hammer. Aside from the origin and a cosmic battle against his brother L'Ok D'Saad, the book is fairly uneventful, mainly a showcase for JRJR's take on refashioned Kirby characters and concepts, with lots of splashes (including multiple double-splashes) and four-panel pages. It's big, bombastic and a fast, fun read. 

•Lobo The Duck #1 by Alan Grant, Val Semeiks and Ray Kryssing I suppose it made sense to someone to amalgamate each publisher's primary parodic character, leading to this Lobo and Howard the Duck mash-up (Lobo didn't really start out as a parodic character, of course, but he pretty quickly grew into one, appearing both is usually serious-ish stories as well as his own comics by writers like Grant that were essentially cartoonishly violent comedies). There isn't really much to this book, really, which is essentially just a Lobo comic in which the Main Man happens to be in the body of a cartoon duck (with one really big, buff, Lobo-style arm, for some reason). I guess seeing a Disney-style duck with stubble on its beak is kind of unusual. Lobo meets some other amalgams of Howard and Lobo characters, some of which I couldn't completely determine the origins of (One exception? Doctor Bongface, an amalgam of Howard's Doctor Bong and Grant's own Batman villain, Scarface). Nice enough art, but to no real purpose.

Next: 1997's Unlimited Access

A Month of Wednesdays: March 2025

 BOUGHT:

DC Finest: Plastic Man: The Origin of Plastic Man (DC Comics) I've been waiting a long time for this book. And I don't just mean since DC first announced their new DC Finest format, or the particular comics they would be collecting in them. No, I've been waiting for this book—a big, thorough, affordable collection of Jack Cole's Golden Age masterpiece—since 1999 or so, when I first encountered Cole's Plastic Man in the pages of DC's Archive Editions, $50 hardcovers that collected restored Golden Age comics. 

DC ended up publishing eight volumes of Plastic Man comics in the Archive Edition format and, for the longest time, those volumes were really the only way to read Cole's Plastic Man comics (Ditto for Golden Age Captain Marvel comics, which I'm hopeful will appear in a future DC Finest collection). 

This 580-page collection includes the first three years' worth of the character's appearances, from Quality Comics' Police Comics #1-#36 and Plastic Man #1 and #2 (That, of course, leaves a lot still uncollected; the Archives Editions collected comics from the character's first seven years or so, making it all the way to 1948. Meanwhile Police Comics ran with Plas material on its covers through 1950's issue #102, while Plastic Man continued until 1956's issue #64... although it's worth noting that while Cole was credited with all of those books, ghosts became increasingly involved as time wore on). 

You can see the character's rapidly increasing popularity play out within this DC Finest collection itself. 

On the cover of Police #1, Plastic Man is just one of four characters whose head and name floats along the lefthand side of the image (along with The Human Bomb, The Phantom Lady and someone named The Mouthpiece), while the cover is dominated by the pink and red clad Firebrand, shown fighting a pair of soldiers trying to operate an artillery piece (If you know Firebrand at all today, it's likely because of his inclusion in 1980s series All-Star Squadron, where his sister took on his name and heroic role...that, or you read one of DC's various attempts to reboot the character, like a 1996 nine-issue series or as part of various Freedom Fighters line-ups). 

By the fifth issue, Plastic Man had taken over the covers, and they would be his until the book switched focus to crime stories in in 1950, save for a handful of ones he shared with Will Eisner's The Spirit, which, perhaps curiously, are  here altered to remove The Spirit (According to the fine print on the table of contents, "Some covers have been altered from their original versions due to copyright reasons, or to remove material that may be deemed offensive to modern audiences").

Additionally, while the first Plastic Man stories are just six pages, they will soon expand to nine pages and then 15 pages.

As for that first Plastic Man story, it's fascinating in how relatively simple and, well, regular it appears, at least compared to what would soon follow. 

Its short six pages are all packed with as many as ten panels each, mostly uniform rectangles, with the occasional circle to break up the monotony. The images are mostly medium shots, and, aside from a few panels of Plas first discovering his new stretching powers or a panel that uses foreshortening to depict his long elastic reach, there's little in the way of visual interest; the character designs of all the characters who aren't Plastic Man are remarkably straight and realistic. There's actually relatively little to distinguish it from any of the other Golden Age super-comics I've read before (Most recently, a few hundred pages of All Star Comics in DC Finest: Justice Society of America: For America and Democracy).

What it does have is a striking character design for its hero, an intriguing name for its new character, interesting if not unique super-powers and a compelling hook—this new superhero's secret identity was that of a crook.

After a chemical accident, betrayal by his own gang, and an act of mercy from a holy man, notorious gangster Eel O'Brian turns over a new leaf, deciding to use his strange new powers to become a crimefighter. Rather than simply switching sides, however, he retains his Eel identity to continue to get information from other criminals that he can then use against them as Plastic Man, an identity he adopts by rearranging his face like putty into a new appearance and donning a red rubber suit and goggles.

As this collection evinces, the feature would rather quickly evolve. 

Plastic Man would soon get a job with the local police department. He would encounter magic for the first time in Police #6 (when he must foil a pair of disembodied hands, empowered by a curse on their former owner by an Indian prince to be proficient thieves), a mad scientist in #8 (this one has invented a titanic eight ball which destroys everything in its path, while also functioning as a super-magnet that attracts gold and silver), an Axis sympathizer in #9 and a super-powered villain in #11 (the undying brain of a 19th century scientist, which, through unlikely circumstances, ends up transplanted into the skull of a modern man, who then uses a formula to grow into a giant).

Such parameters set so early, a Plastic Man adventure could entail pretty much anything that Cole could come up with, although, for the most part, he would stick to pitting Plastic Man against gangsters and other real-world style criminals, even if these would increasingly take on silly-sounding names and their designs would get gradually more exaggerated and cartoony (just as Cole's comics would get increasingly more inventive in lay-out and rendering, and Plastic Man's powers would be stretched to new and inventive limits). 

The earlier stories are notably violent in a cartoonishly grand guignol kind of way, and some of the villains are quite garish in design, particularly "Hairy Arms", an unseen criminal mastermind who is ultimately revealed to be all arms, legs and head attached to a tiny, barely-there body.

After what looks like a few sidekick try-outs—a chubby cop named Plotz who helps Plast take on Hairy Arms and an army of robots, a goofy-looking Western Union employee named Omar who helps our hero break up an Axis slave labor racket—Woozy Winks is introduced in Police #13 (about 100 pages into this collection), and he would stick around for all future Plastic Man stories.

Woozy rescues a drowning man, who introduces himself as "Zambi ze soothzayer." In thanks for saving his life, Zambi blesses Woozy with his magic: "I hereby bestow upon you the protection of nature!! From this day forth, no harm you!!" 

Woozy tests this out by banging his head with a hammer and then throwing himself off a cliff. Realizing the power is legit, he flips a coin to see if he should use it for good or evil and then immediately embarks upon a criminal enterprise: Helping an art collector increase the value of his holdings by destroying the sculptures of a particular artist.

This attracts the attention of Plastic Man, who, in his Eel identity, teams up with Woozy, but try as he might, our hero is unable to lay hands on Woozy, nature continually protecting him by, for example, sending a lightning bolt, giant hail stones or a full-grown tree sprouting from the earth to thwart Plas.

Eventually, Plastic Man guilts Woozy into turning himself in, but it turns out that, thanks to his supernatural protection, no jail can hold him, and so Plastic Man takes him on as his crime-fighting partner (At first, Woozy allies himself with Plas because he wants to get even with Eel, who Plas is inconveniently assigned to bring in, but apparently Woozy enjoys crime-fighting, as he sticks around after that story). 

Woozy's powers would seemingly come and go as time went on, something the characters themselves would occasionally comment on, as apparently the blessing of Zambi would gradually wear off. Woozy's criminality would also fade, with the character only occasionally picking a pocket here or there.

Plas eventually joins the FBI in Police Comics #18, by order of the President of the United States, who wants him working on domestic crime-fighting rather than joining the army to fight overseas as he originally intends to do. Woozy comes along as his unofficial partner, and, at that point, the feature would settle into a status quo that would remain for the rest of the comics collected herein. 

Plastic Man would abandon his Eel O'Brian identity completely and become Plastic Man full-time, Eel only being brought up once more, when FBI Chief Branner discovers Plastic's past, and makes a deal with him: If he solves the three most challenging bureau cases, he'll keep him on and keep his secret.

In modern imagination, Plastic Man is primarily thought of as a comedic character, and so it's interesting to read or re-read these earliest adventures, where that's very much not the case. Plastic is a pretty straightforward and serious superhero character (even more so than those Justice Society guys, who were more prone to jokes and quips), what comedy there is in the series coming from the funny-looking, id-driven Woozy, who plays comic relief against Plas as straight man, and, perhaps, the criminals themselves, who, as stated above, Cole depicts as more outlandish as time goes on (and many of their schemes would become more silly in set-up and presentation). 

(Where did the idea of Plas as a comedic comic character originate then, I wonder? Is it from Cole's own, later Plastic Man stories, which I haven't yet read? His stories even here are certainly at least trending increasingly comedic. There are at least two stories in this collection that are pretty pure comedy stories. In the first, from Police # 20, Woozy teams up with Jack Cole himself, who Cole portrays as a badly stuttering cartoon character, while Plas is sidelined, though it turns out to all be a dream. In the other, from Plastic Man #2, Plas and Woozy investigate Coroner's Corners, a town where everyone is insane. Was it the 1960s series from DC? The 1979 cartoon show? The 1988 Phil Foglio mini-series? At any rate, by the character's late-'90s resurgence in the pages of JLA, Plastic Man had essentially become a Looney Tunes character of a superhero, and the wacky comedy relief on the team.)

It should as ever be noted that for all his brilliance as a cartoonist, Jack Cole's work at the time was not exactly racially enlightened, and his depictions of non-white characters can read particularly cringy today.*

There are only three Black faces in all of the book's many pages; two are male railway employees, the other is a female servant to a rich white lady. All are colored dark, almost inky black, and have big red lips. The only one with any speaking lines is one of the railway employees in a story about a haunted train. He speaks with an accent and is depicted as being terrified of the faux ghosts.

There's one story involving Native Americans, in which Plast uses grease paint to disguise himself as one of their number, part of an investigation into Chief Great Warrior, who urges his tribe to revolt against the United States while they are distracted by the war in Europe. Woozy refers to them as "red skins."

Another, very early story features Plas as Eel infiltrating a drug-smuggling racket, part of which involves him beating up some Chinese characters in an opium den. They speak in broken English and, in one case, a fake Chinese character in a word balloon, and Plas calls them "yellow dogs."

As if often the case for such war time comics, though, the worst portrayal seems reserved for the Japanese characters. In a story from Plastic Man #1, Japanese spies are after an American inventor's miraculous new camouflage, which renders anything it's sprayed on completely invisible, and they end up capturing Plas and taking him back to Japan.

Plastic Man refers to the Japanese agent Amisaki Komiwabi as a "Jap" a "Nip" and "Horse-teeth," and there are more instances of made-up characters in word balloons to denote an Asian language. While the various Japanese characters all look like unfortunate caricatures in this story, I suppose it's worth noting that, by this point in the character's comics, all of the characters look like caricatures, regardless of race, with really only Plas himself and some of the female characters drawn in a straighter, more realistic style. 

At least the fact that the Police Comics covers featuring The Spirit were all altered mean we're spared a couple of appearances by Spirit's sidekick Ebony White on a few of them. 

At any rate, that handful of uncomfortable scenes or stories aside, these remain some of the best superhero comics produced during the Golden Age superhero boom, one's well worth reading for modern fans of the character and of great cartooning in general. 

Given how much Plastic Man material is yet available, I'm hopeful that we'll get another DC Finest collection (or five) featuring Cole's Plastic Man comics. 

BORROWED: 

Batman/Superman: World's Finest Vol. 5: Secret Origin (DC Comics) This collection of Mark Waid's series of the earlier adventures of Batman and Superman is a lot less consistent a work than the four previous ones, each of which were more or less devoted to a single arc. But then, I suppose that will happen when a comic book writer doesn't write for the trade.

And so here we get seven distinct stories from four different issues—World's Finest #18, #19 and #25, plus World's Finest 2004 Annual #1—some of which do not even feature the title characters. (If you're wondering what happened to issues #20-#24, we already read those; they were the Kingdom Come story collected in the fourth volume, which I reviewed in this column). 

They are, as follows...

•"Phantom Riddles" by Waid and artist Travis Moore presents another new first meeting between the title characters (Magpie, who was the villain of John Byrne's 1986 story of the pair's first meeting, makes an appearance). This one is set "Years Ago," somewhere near the beginning of Batman's second year on the job ("I've done a lot of good this past year," Bruce Wayne tells Alfred of his vigilante career in one panel). Superman looks the same as he does in the regular World's Finest setting, but Batman's cowl here a little different, and he's yet to adopt the "new look" yellow shield around his bat-symbol.

The Riddler has reared his head again, this time leaving his riddles in "Kryptonese," which means he must be in league with someone from Krypton, which brings Superman to Gotham. Batman teams with him, revealing his secret identity in the process...but only after he reveals to Superman that he's figured out his secret identity.

Filling issues #18 and #19 of the series, it's a decent enough story, though it doesn't seem like the instant classic one would hope a story devoted to telling of such a momentous occasion to be. I liked Superman's line about his dog. I suspect this story has bearing on one that Waid was working on for the Superman titles, given an unresolved dangling plot thread.

•"The Ties That Bind" by writer Dennis Culver and artist Travis Mercer is a ten-page Metamorpho solo story, the first story from the pages of the annual, which was an anthology of such shorts. Batman and Superman (and Robin) only appear in the background of the first panel, an asterisk in an editorial box informing us that this story is set "directly after Batman/Superman: World's Finest #17 page 23 panel 5."

As Metamorpho appeared in the series previously, then (in the third volume, Elementary), he apparently earns a solo story in the annual. There's not much to it. Simon Stagg sends Rex to collect a treasure, where our hero finds himself face to face with his own estranged father, an Indiana Jones homage/parody named "Montana Mason."

•"Sting Like a Bee" by writer Stephanie Williams and artist Rosi Kampe seems like a bit of a stretch for inclusion, as I don't believe its star, future Bumblebee Karen Beecher, appeared in the Batman/Superman title at all, but was instead part of the team in World's Finest: Teen Titans (an editorial box in the first panel uses that comics' logo).

Set when she was still a little kid, the story follows Karen as she uses her various inventions—including a brand-new set of wings—to infiltrate the headquarters of a nefarious superstore that seems to be victimizing her community, not completely unlike the way real-life superstores often do.

•"Time Check" by Christopher Cantwell and Jorge Fornes is a Challengers of the Unknown story. I didn't recall the Challs actually being in World's Finest at all, but upon flipping through Elementary again, I saw they did indeed make a brief appearance, which is apparently good enough to make it into the annual. The story is very weird and jumps back and forth between their origin and a new, perilous adventure; I found it a little hard to parse, and not terribly rewarding, although I do like Fornes' art a lot, and am always happy to get more of it. •"Joker-Luthor: World's Vilest" by Waid and artist Steve Pugh is taken from issue #25 and is something of a companion to the earlier "Phantom Riddles," here purporting to detail the first meeting between Lex Luthor and The Joker.

Luthor apparently has gotten possession of a cursed manuscript leading to a magical treasure, but every expert who tries to translate it for him is driven insane in the process. So he figures he will have someone who is already insane try to translate it for him, and thus breaks The Joker out of Arkham, fits him with a bomb collar to make him compliant and then the pair set out for the treasure, a magical maguffin that grants whoever holds it their greatest wish. Its location? The Rock of Eternity. Pugh's art is as solid as always, and Waid writes the characters well, although I'm personally not so fond of the Joker/Luthor alliance being quite as adversarial as this. I've always thought of them more as...well, if not friends, per se, then genuine allies and kindred spirits, bonded by the fact that the other is the only other person on Earth who knows exactly what it's like to be the archenemy of one of the World's Finest. That's just me, though. •"IMPeriled" by Waid and co-writer Cullen Bunn and artist Edwin Galmon, which actually appeared in the annual but is shifted back a bit in the collection for clarity's sake, finds Mr. Mxyzptlk and Bat-Mite at a meeting of "The Just-Us League", which consists of various mite versions of Justice Leaguers, like Wonder Woman, Hawkman, The Flash, Metamorpho and so on (As was suggested in Alan Grant and Kevin O'Neill's 1992 Legends of the Dark Knight #38, the idea seems to be that every DC hero has a mite equivalent of their own).

The various mites all fight over whose respective hero is the best, with "Green-Mite" simultaneously championing both Green Lantern Hal Jordan and Green Arrow Olliver Queen ("Why choose?" he tells a scolding Flash-Mite, "They're both so awesome!"). I won't weigh into the mites' argument, which leads to violence and spans a few too many pages, other than to note that Green-Mite is obviously wrong, as Hal Jordan is demonstrably the worst.

The mite-on-mite violence gets much more serious when a bunch of mites of various villains show up, the Sinestro-Mite seemingly killing Green-Mite. Mxy and Bat-Mite escape as a large, hooded figure with its own unusual dialogue balloons—red type on black ovals—makes the scene, talking smack and apparently leading the bad mites on.

•Finally, the collection ends with "Impossible: Prologue," an eight-pager by the original World's Finest team of Waid and artist Dan Mora that originally appeared in issue #25. Chaos breaks out in the heroes' headquarters—like, for example, a giant, copper Abe Lincoln stepping out of Batman's giant penny to fight the suddenly alive dinosaur statue in the Batcave—and the expected mischief-makers eventually come forward. But the chaos magic wasn't their doing, Mxyzptlk explains, and Bat-Mite appears cradling the dead Green-Mite, saying they're being hunted and that Earth could be next.

It's a heck of a cliffhanger, which one imagines will be picked up on "Impossible," the series' next four-issue arc, and will therefore likely account for most of the sixth trade paperback collection. I'm not quite sure how I feel about Mora's particularly elfin, big-headed imps just yet, but I suppose I'll get a better sense of them in "Impossible" proper.

None of these are bad stories, of course, and there is certainly a lot to enjoy in this collection, but due to its fractious nature, it's the least satisfying read in the series so far.

Bowling With Corpses & Other Strange Tales from Lands Unknown (Dark Horse Books) When people talk about this book, they will understandably refer to it as Bowling With Corpses, leaving off the second half of the title, as one inevitably does with a long book title. But the second half of the title may ultimately prove to be the more important half, as the Lands Unknown seem to be the true focus of this compelling anthology of eight, interconnected fantasy stories by Mike Mignola (and colorist Dave Stewart and letterer Clem Robins).

The title story is an adaptation of an old Italian folktale, and here Mignola proves that comics is perhaps the perfect medium in which to tell these sorts of stories, stories that readers are most likely to have encountered in collections from the likes of the Brothers Grimm or Andrew Lang. The matter-of-fact statements of the magical or fantastic in such stories are doubly effective in comics, where each beat comes with a new image and in a discrete unit of time, so what might seem a little like a storytelling non sequitur in prose will here feel perfectly natural.

So, for example, in a narration box, Mignola can write, "His whole life he lived in a wooden tub in a kitchen. Then, one day--" and we see an image of the boy under discussion, seemingly interrupting the narration to directly address the reader with his announcement-like bit of dialogue, "It's time for me to go out into the world to seek my fortune."

Or, for another, the prose narration may simply state, "And that very night he was set upon by a gang of corpses," while the image shows just that, a question mark in a dialogue balloon above the boy, and some conversation between the corpses giving parallel bits of storytelling information.

In that title story, the boy Yeb is asked to go bowling with a group of undead, who challenge him: If he wins three rounds of the sport, here played with a skull for a ball and upright bones as pins, he shall have their fortune, and if he loses, well, this question is simply answered by a silent panel depicting a close-up smile of one of the corpse's.

He wins all three rounds, being awarded a handful of gold coins, then some buttons and teeth, and finally the right arm plucked off the mummified corpse of what seems to be a saint or holy man. This comes in handy when he journeys to the tower home of a group of shape-changing warlocks, who attack him in the form of giant bats (They seem to be vampires, although that word is never used in the book). Striking them with the fist of the dead holy man transforms them into piles of broken human bones.

That story is followed immediately by a creation story told by the skull-faced "Library Ghost of Castle Yarg." Then another, shorter creation story told by a talking bird (Animals talk frequently in this book, sometimes just making asides, like some birds in the title story). Then there's another folk-tale inspired adventure, this time featuring a holy man who investigates a haunted house in a far-off, exotic-looking land. 

The second half of the book consists of a story involving the quest for immortality and its terrible results, an old soldier's story of his adventures with the king of a fairy-like species (which also feels like it was inspired by a folk tale or fairy story), a longer story involving a young woman who does a deal with the devil and turns into an apparent vampire and, finally, a story entitled "Lands Unknown", in which the narrators of the creation stories talk to one another, giving readers a sort of world tour of the strange and fascinating places in this new setting Mignola is building, including ruined kingdoms that prehistoric monsters patrol and a land with giant pack animals that resemble bipedal elephants with no trunks.

The connectivity of the stories is sometimes somewhat subtle, that from the title story and those that follow it seemingly limited to the staff that a religious figure in it bears to the dragon of the creation stories, for example. 

Mignola writes of the origins of the setting of these tales in an afterword, in which he explains that this book came out of his retirement, when he was free to draw or paint whatever he wanted "just for fun," but realized "I love drawing comics so I'll just keep drawing comics."

He notes that he decided to "make up a whole other world" where he would set the "Bowling With Corpses" story, the exact opposite of what he normally tells people to go about world-building ("[S]tart with a character, I always say. The world will grow up around them.")

This book, then, isn't the last we'll see of these Lands Unknown, which, I suppose, will gradually become less and less unknown as Mignola tells more comics stories in the setting. 

The book should particularly delight long-time fans of the creator, as it tells the sort of supernatural-tinged stories and re-told classic stories that so informed his Hellboy and other work, although here without being at all dependent on the structure of that series' ongoing internal saga. 

His art is here more stripped-down and abstracted than ever before, which often works quite well with his animal, old man and supernatural characters, but doesn't fit quite so well with a few of the protagonists, like the bowling boy Yeb or the young woman who becomes a sort of vampire after dealings with the devil in "Una and The Devil." Their eyeballs ever in shadow in their sockets, the characters look even more abstract than the more lovingly detailed skulls of the corpses, ghosts and skeletons that fill the book, which often have detailed teeth and cracks in addition to their big, empty eye sockets. 

After the afterword, the book includes a ten-page sketchbook section with notes from Mignola, in which we see some of the kitchens, castles, ships and bits of nature that Mignola used as settings and backgrounds throughout the preceding stories, offering some insight into how he creates and how he works. 

Bowling With Corpses should obviously appeal to the many readers who are already ardent fans of Mignola's peculiar art style and storytelling impulses and interests, but, because of its standalone nature and new world, it is also a perfect book for those curious about the artist's work too. 

Komi Can't Communicate Vol. 33 (Viz Media) The latest volume of Tomohito Oda's high school comedy is dominated by an almost 70-page passage devoted to Itan High School's Sports Festival, which gathers all of the characters from Komi and Tadano's class with students from other classes, as well as introducing a few new weird characters. There are also some chapters detailing the festival's aftermath, and a story tangentially connected to it, in which Komi gradually befriends an old lady in the neighborhood over the course of years.

Near volume's end, we're introduced to "an ordinary high school girl" named Maruko Tadano (no relation to our Tadano, apparently), who has to participate in a group discussion as part of her application to college. Her group seems like a nightmare one, as Komi is the most normal one in the group; there are also a group of triplets who function as a single entity (and were admitted into the group as one person), and a girl who appears to be an ancient Egyptian, and who only speaks by saying some random Egypt-related word, such as "King Khufu" or "Obelisk." (That's her on the cover; we'll get her origin story by the end of the book and, as always, her cartoonishly bizarre behavior is an overreaction to more mundane circumstances that nevertheless impacted her school life.)

I can't shake the feeling this book has to be winding down sooner or later—perhaps when its characters finally graduate high school and head to college—but I'm quite happy to keep reading it as long as Oda keeps making it.  

True Weird Vol. 1 (Dark Horse) This book's cover sold me on it immediately, featuring as it does a Michael Avon Oeming drawing of what appears to be one a Hopkinsville goblins peering into a window. The book contains the five back-ups from Oeming and writer James Tynion IV's 2023 miniseries Blue Book, which seems to have been a comics re-telling of the Betty and Barney Hill abduction case, widely thought of as the first modern alien abduction story**, as well as seven other stories, the providence of which I am unsure of (The fine print on one of the early pages says the book "collects True Weird stories 1-10 and 12-13", suggesting they appeared somewhere else previously. Perhaps online...?)

These are all short black-and-white comics, ranging from 10-14 pages, by different creative teams. Despite Tynion's name below the logo on the cover, and a "created by" credit on the title page, he only writes the first story, "Coney Island." Oeming writes and draws the second story, "The Green Children" (which is the only story that isn't purely black and white, adding green to the limited palette). Other creators a reader is likely to be familiar with include writer Steve Orlando and artists Klaus Janson, John McCrea and Ming Doyle.

The stories, which sadly do not include a telling of the Hopkinsville incident depicted on the cover, are, as the title suggests, on some aspect of the maybe true-ish variety of weird story. Many of them are quite famous stories likely to already be familiar to anyone with an interest in Forteana: The aforementioned legend of the green children, the Count of St. Germain, spontaneous human combustion, India's Monkey Man and the hoax of the Piltdown Man. Perhaps less well-known stories detail a woman who investigated spiritualists, an insatiable man from revolutionary France, a campfire-like story of an undead killer and an 18th century English woman executed as a witch. 

The approach of the stories differ from entry to entry. Some are fairly straight recountings of relevant facts, reading a bit like illustrated encyclopedia Wikipedia entries with a bit of sequential art inserted for dramatization, like the McCrea-drawn spontaneous human combustion story, which centers on "Cinder Woman" Mary Hardy Reeser (This one reminded me a bit of what little I remember of the DC's old Paradox Press Big Book Of... series, like The Big Book of the Unexplained, The Big Book of Urban Legends, and so on). 

Others take on various narrative structures. The Orlando-written, Levi Hastings-drawn story on Piltdown Man, for example, has a character telling the story directly to the reader, apparently trying to entice them into paying to see the statue for themselves, while Chris Condon and Jacob Phillips' "Come Along...To Clinton Road!" has a carful of New Jersey teenagers sharing a joint and telling one another various local urban legends before seemingly experiencing one for themselves.

While there's nothing particularly revolutionary or revelatory in True Weird, many of the stories have proved of perennial interest, and are thus likely to pique that of many readers, whether they've heard prose versions of these stories (or those like them) before or are here hearing of them for the first time. 

And there is naturally some nice art in the collection. I expected to like seeing that of Janson, Oeming and McCrea, of course, but that of Jack T. Cole, who draws the Josh Trujillo-written story of the Count of St. Germain, was surprisingly great, and made me want to see more from him. Same with Flavia Biondi, who drew the story of Mary Bateman, an accomplished con woman executed as a witch. 

REVIEWED: 

Halfway To Somewhere (Random House Graphic) Cartoonist Jose Pimienta's latest graphic novel stars Ave, a non-binary middle-schooler who has moved with half her family (her mother and little brother) to Kansas, while the other half (her father and older sister) stayed behind in Mexico. 

Ave thinks their parents' separation is only temporary, which might be helping to fuel their reluctance to try to fit in and be happy in their new home (That, and a fear of assimilating, which they fear will sacrifice their Mexican identity). 

As Ave struggles with this new life, Pimienta explores the dynamics of immigrant identity and the tensions that exist when one's "home" is actually two entirely different places, each on a different side of a border. While not addressing the current fears and anxieties that must be permeating immigrant communities—the book was obviously written and drawn before the start of the second Trump administration—it still makes for a rather compelling read. More here. 

How to Draw a Secret (Allida/HarperCollins) Cindy Chang, a children's book author and illustrator making her comics debut here, presents a fictionalized memoir about dramatic events from her own childhood. At 12-years-old, Cindy had long since gotten used to keeping her family's secret—that her parents had separated, and her father had moved back to Taiwan—even if she didn't really understand why it was such a secret. What she didn't know was the secret behind the secret, which she will discover when she, her sisters and her mother all travel to Taiwan for a family funeral. More here. 

Mixed-Up (First Second) EDILW favorite Brittney Williams teams with YA author-turned-comics writer Kami Garcia for the story of fifth-grader Stella, whose troubles with reading get bad enough to start impacting not only her schoolwork, but also her friendships. Stella eventually discovers that she's actually dyslexic and needs some special help to get back on track, which she does before book's end. This good comic for kids is more of a kids' comic than an all-ages one, but even the most jaded adult comics reader should at least enjoy Williams' always bright, expressive artwork. More here. 

*As with the previously mentioned DC Finest: Justice Society of America collection, there's a note in the fine print on the book's table-of-contents reading, "The comics reprinted in this volume were produced at a time when racism played a larger role in society and popular culture both consciously and unconsciously. They are presented here without alteration for historical reference."

**I of course tried reading Blue Book in its collected form, as Oeming illustrating a famous chapter of UFO history seemed irresistible. I made it about one issue/chapter into the trade, but Oeming's drawings of the aliens, which he depicts as being of the standard "grey" alien type, started to disturb my sleep, and I quit reading the book to spare myself further such disturbance. As some of you may know, I have something of a phobia about alien abduction, as I wrote about in one of my failed mini-comics, The Ghost in the Bathroom. I did note that the aliens in Blue Book were nose-less, as grey aliens are usually depicted, rather than having the prominent noses that Betty Hill described.