Okay, so I read as much of Marvel's King In Black comics as I could stand.

King In Black is very much a Venom story guest-starring a bunch of other Marvel characters, as is of course appropriate, given that it is the culmination of writer Donny Cates and artist Ryan Stegman's years-long work on the character. I say that even though Venom Eddie Brock himself spends the middle section of the book unconscious on his deathbed; even while he's temporarily K.O.-ed, the story follows the rest of the heroes' attempts to deal with his villain and protect his son Dylan.

Despite all of the build-up in previous comics, and occasional references to events within them, the five-issue series is remarkably straightforward. Brock, through Venom, can feel the arrival of Knull, the titular King In Black, an evil space god responsible for the creation of the symbiote aliens like Venom and his ilk, and his giant army of black, slimy, Venom-like dragons. Venom calls Captain America, who calls the Avengers and a bunch of other heroes, and they prepare to fight Knull.

That's...basically the entirety of the story. Knull rains black goo on the Earth, covering all of New York City in whatever material Venom is made out of and, in short order, he encases the entire Earth in it, completely blotting out the sun. He takes over Captain America and a mess of other heroes with said symbiote stuff, temporarily turning them all evil. The familiar Marvel event series beats are all played; Captain America and Black Panther talk battle plans with the various leaders and brains. Iron Man and Mister Fantastic work on weapons and high-tech solutions. Thor acts divinely.* In a straight repeat of  one of the weirder event series, Siege, The Sentry is re-killed, apparently torn in half as he had previously torn Ares in half. (Knull accomplishes this early in the series to establish his Big Bad bona fides but, oddly, is unable to repeat the trick when he gets his claws on Thor; presumably Sentry is uniquely vulnerable to him because of The Void within him...?).

Despite all this, Cates manages to keep the focus on Knull, Brock and his son Dylan, who has a special power over the black goo and is of special interest to Knull. The resolution to the conflict is ultimately a stray bit of Marvel trivia that Cates incorporates into the mythology of Knull, something that sounds a bit out of left-field when just laid out, but makes a degree of sense when one considers its host/symbiote aspects and how it compares to the basic idea of Venom (Sorry if I'm sounding vague; I'm trying not to completely spoil the series). 

Structurally, it all works quite well, and is an extremely, even refreshingly complete story, with very little in here that suggests one even need to read any tie-ins at all, just two pages in the second issue suggesting that various plans are all going to be attempted to stop Knull (and likely play out in other comics). 

Having little to no interest in Venom, and having not followed anything leading up to it, I wasn't particularly interested in King In Black until I started reading it, but I ended up finding it a fairly satisfying read, providing the expected pleasures of a Marvel crossover series—that is, a whole bunch of Marvel characters in the same story, including a few that don't normally get much spotlight in these sorts of stories, like X-Men who aren't Wolverine and The Silver Surfer—and without any glaringly stupid or nonsensical moments, like, um, some crossovers I could name. 

I'm not a particular fan of Stegman's art style, but he draws it well, and the storytelling in this book is easy enough to read and get lost in. I imagine it was a blast for fans of his, especially those who have been following the Venom goings-on for so long now, getting to see him draw so much of the Marvel Universe. 

I was quite impressed with one double-page splash, pages 10 and 11 of the collection, in which the Fantasticar and two Quinjets speed towards New York City over the black sea, the dark sky filled with dragons pointed like arrows down at the city. It's an apocalyptic image, and a nice use of the space to present the reader with arresting communication of what's going on.

I have no idea what the Hulk is doing on the cover. I don't think he appears in the story at all. 

King In Black: Atlantis Attacks could hardly have less to do with the overall King In Black storyline. In fact, it's main connection seems to be its title and the "King In Black" logo in the upper left corner of the cover. Literally only two if it's 100 pages has anything like a mention or allusion to the events of the series it's titled after. On the very last pages of the five-issue series, Jimmy Woo is shown looking up at some holographic projections of the weird Venom dragons that serve as foot soldiers for Knull, and he says to his gathered allies, "Agents of Atlas...it's time to help a king..." and, then, on the facing page, which scans more like an ad than a part of the comic proper, his sentences concludes in a narration box, "...fight the King In Black." and we see Woo and his allies fighting shoulder to shoulder with Namor against the slobbery dragons.

And that's it, making this perhaps the most shameless "red sky"-style tie-in to an event crossover story I've ever seen. I can only imagine how disappointed and irritated anyone who picked up this series specifically because it was labeled as a King In Black tie-in must have been. 

In reality, it is actually an Agents of Atlas comic, and it seemingly follows plotlines not merely from 2019's War of The Realms: New Agents of Atlas, which I did read, but also from that same year's later miniseries Agents of Atlas and several issues of Sword-Master and Aero, all of which I did not. 

That said, writer Greg Pak's plot is easy enough to make sense of, even without the two paragraph of prose on the title page summarizing the set-up. The new Agents, which is composed entirely of heroes of Asian descent and who were more or less commissioned by Jimmy Woo in the War of The Realms tie-in series, are the protectors of the high-concept setting of "the portal city of Pan," an independent city-state with semi-magical portals that open up into various Asian cities and communities and was founded and lead by a shady tech billionaire type.

The city runs on dragon power, and has an Atlantean dragon chained up against its will, its constant ARRROOOO-ing tickling Agents leader Amadeus Cho and the other heroes consciences...and eventually summoning Namor there to start throwing punches and leveling threats. Atlantis wants its dragon back, so Pan better figure out how to run on something other than captive dragon within 24 hours, or the cover of the trade paperback is going to happen. (Say, wait a minute. Namor wears black now, and he's a king....is he the "King In Black" mentioned in the title? No, that wouldn't explain the use of Knull's logo in the corner...)

To help Cho's team, Woo shows up with his team, the original Agents of Atlas (the team loosely based on 1978's What If? #9, the one that writer Jeff Parker and Leonard Kirk introduced in 2006). Contrary to the laws of superhero team team-ups, they don't do battle—Gorilla-Man does mention the possibility, though—although there is a distinct lack of trust between the two teams.

There's also another faction of underwater people, the Sirenas, who want to attack Atlantis, preferably with the help of some of the Agents of Atlas.

Writer Greg Pak juggles something like a dozen and a half superheroes, most of whom prove pretty unnecessary to the plot, only a half-dozen or so characters getting any substantial lines or panel-time. Still, he does an admirable job with such a huge cast (this is the sort of comic which labels each new character upon each appearance each chapter, and which does so necessarily), and with such a confused narrative, which seems to be the second half of an Agents of Atlas limited series that was instead advertised as a King In Black crossover, which, as stated, it most assuredly is  not. 

Ario Anindito and Robert Gill provide the artwork, and it is all fine and readable, but unremarkable, with a somewhat disappointing lack of distinction between the two groups of Agents, one of which is weird and dated, the other of which is exotic, slick and of the moment. 

I ultimately liked the comic okay, but man, what an instance of the label not matching the contents...

King In Black: Avengers collects a half-dozen different one-shots that tie in to King In Black. The word  "Avengers" is here seemingly used as a stand-in for Marvel heroes, as only three of the heroes whose names are in the titles of the one-shots are technically current Avengers (Black Panther, Captain America and Iron Man), while a generous reading of the word might include The Hulk, who was a founding Avenger, and Hulkling and Wiccan, former Young Avengers who were on a New Avengers line-up before their current status quo. Also featured is Ghost Rider, but not the Robbie Reyes version who is currently on the Avengers; instead, it's the original Ghost Rider, Johnny Blaze. 

The best of the stories is probably writer Al Ewing and artist Aaron Kuder's King In Black: Immortal  Hulk, and, perhaps coincidentally, it is the furthest removed from the goings-on of the title event. A three-paragraph summary of the Hulk's status quo that prefaces the comic—each story has a similar paragraph or so explaining either the events of King In Black as they relate to the characters or the characters' status quos—explains that the Hulk's many historical personalities and forms have been whittled down to two, the child-like Savage Hulk and Joe Fixit, "the former gray Hulk who now manifests in Banner's body."

That's about all one needs to know to follow the story, which is completely wordless. On the snowy streets of an otherwise ordinary New York City (which differs sharply from the black goo-covered hellscape of the other stories set at the time), the Hulk, here drawn so that he is oddly tall, thin and elongated, encounters a symbiote-infected creature, distracting him from his interest in Christmas with horror. He then encounters policemen, who are infected by the creature, and they give chase to him.

As with the Immortal Hulk title, it's an effective bit of body horror, and the symbiote menace that is such a part of the King In Black storyline fits in quite nicely, as it involves ordinary people turning into horrifying monsters. Kuder's art is incredible, not only at rendering the wince-inducing transformations—the Hulk basically turns himself inside out when changing forms these days—but in the storytelling. As he would have to be here, or the story wouldn't work otherwise. It works, and does so quite well.

Of course, I said that those three paragraphs are all one really needs to know to follow the story, which is so far removed from the goings-on of King In Black that the reason there is a human-infecting black gooey creature isn't even relevant to the story, but that's not quite true; I mean, you'd still have to know a bit about Joe Fixit and the Hulk's multiple identities and so on, wouldn't you? 

In that respect, none of the stories in this collection are completely self-contained, or written for brand-new readers (Not that there's much danger of a brand-new reader picking up this collection anyway, no matter what Stan Lee supposedly said about every comic being someone's first). They're all in media res, with most continuing from wherever the character was left off in some point of the overarching crossover: Captain America is still trying to shake off having been possessed by Knull and not letting his partners/replacements Falcon and Winter Soldier down; Black Panther is once again defending his unconquerable nation of Wakanda from an alien invasion set on conquering it; Iron Man has built a new armor out of a symbiote and his Extremis armor and is feeling sad about Eddie Brock, who he feels he let die.

Oddly, the remaining stories also begin in media res, picking up from ongoing storylines, but not from King In Black, and thus can be fairly disorienting, if you haven't been following the characters (and I haven't). 

King In Black: Ghost Rider opens with the title character dragging Mephisto from the back of his bike—Mephisto, who I last saw in the pages of Avengers, where he was the bad guy behind all of the various sub-plots—and basically has him getting distracted from his mission of rounding up escaped demons from hell by the events of the crossover. The second Ghost Rider, Danny Ketch, shows up in a weird new costume that looks like a medieval Daredevil costume and asks to be called "Death Rider"; he speaks in hard-to-read white-on-brown dialogue bubbles. A handful of other name characters are with him; this seems to follow on the heels of whatever miniseries the characters last appeared in, although it is mostly confusing here (Surprisingly, a fairly big development occurs, as Blaze relinquishes the crown of hell to Mephisto.) 

King In Black: Wiccan and Hulkling finds the characters where Empyre left them (and I did read that one!), as the kings of the new combined Skrull/Kree Empire. They try to go on a honeymoon, but it is rather immediately interrupted by a swarm of the giant Venom dragons and a few Venomized astronauts. Oddly, this is the final story in the collection, although, sequentially, it would have had to be the first to happen, as the dragon swarm was on its way to Earth when it invades their honeymoon planet.

All of the stories in the collection are competently written and drawn, the only real weakness evident being that a reader needs to have a pretty good idea what's going on in the Marvel Universe, or at least with the characters concerned, to make sense of them. This is a problem with Big Two super-comics in general, though. 

Beyond the Immortal Hulk special, my favorite were probably King In Black: Iron Man/Doctor Doom and the Wiccan and Hulkling special. The former is written by Christopher Cantwell and drawn by Salvador Larroca, the latter by Tini Howard and Luciana Vecchio. The Iron Man special quite randomly has the two armored characters confronted by a symbiote-possessed Santa Claus and eight oily reindeer. Those are fun characters anyway, and while I think Cantwell dropped the ball on a line or three of Doom's, he more than makes up for it with this delightful bit of comic book-iness:

As for Wiccan and Hulkling, I've never been terribly fond of either character, but Howard writes them both well as down-to-earth, sincere young people in love and with intact senses of humor, somewhat overwhelmed by their current stations. There are lots of fairly effective jokes riffing on an invention of their fellow former New Avenger Roberto Da Costa's, and superior superhero art by Vecchio, whose style is my favorite of the half-dozen who contribute to this book, even if Kuder's is, perhaps, technically the best-told story in the book. 

King In Black: Planet of the Symbiotes collects the three-issue anthology series by that name, plus King In Black: Black Knight #1, because it had to be collected somewhere, and King In Black: Avengers was already all full. Each issue of Planet was split in half, telling two ten-page stories of what one of several extremely minor characters were up to during the events of the crossover series, with some of them seeming to set in motion events that seem like they must be important elsewhere. 

The characters featured are Scream, (some of those associated with) Ravencroft Institute For the Criminally Insane, American Kaiju**, Hornet, Cloak and Dagger and Toxin. 

Of these half-dozen short stories, the most personally appealing was probably the American Kaiju story by writer Marc Bernardin and artist Kyle Hotz. Bernardin admirably lays narration over the events in an attempt to make the story about something other than a extremely-spikey Godzilla variant screaming "YEWWWW- ESSSSS- AYYYY!" in red, white and blue font over and over while killing Venom dragons—about how U.S. foreign policy is like a clumsy giant monster trying to do good but doing lots of bad in the process— but I don't think he succeeds; it's hard to counter-program against such monster-on-monster violence, particularly when drawn with the gusto Hotz approaches the subject matter with.

Other than that, I'm afraid nothing in these short stories really spoke to me. I suppose artist Guiu Vilanova managed a horrifying variant of the symbiotes in the Scream story, after four symbiotes—Riot, Agony, Lasher and Phage***—Voltron into one big, vagina-mouthed composite symbiote, and the Ravencroft story is interesting in that I guess astronaut-turned-werewolf-turned star god John Jameson is in charge of Marvel's Arkham Asylum for some reason ("What do ya think of Jameson?" one guard asks, to which his fellow replies, "I dunno. He seems like a decent enough guy...werewolf stuff aside.")

The Black Knight special seems to be the most potentially important story in this collection by far. Written by Simon Spurrier and drawn by Jesus Saiz, it features the on-again, off-again Avengers character—referred to as an "Avengers adjacent" hero by the characters in the story itself—battling against a Venom dragon, which should be right up his alley, then losing his Ebony Blade somewhere in Shanghai (I'm not sure how fast those dragons are supposed to fly, but this one gets the Black Knight from the skies above England to Shanghai in the space of about two pages). 

There he meets newer heroes Aero and Sword-Master, who kinda sorta attempt to help him retrieve his blade, while he reels with a revelation about it and his bloodline that Knull offers him in his head. Spurrier does a pretty good job of making the character interesting while simultaneously making him appear like a crazy person. 

I reviewed King In Black: Thunderbolts in this post, before I read King In Black proper, but I thought I should at least include a link to it here for the sake of completeness. If you don't click over to read or re-read it, jus let me say here that it is excellent, and stands on its own without having to read King In Black.

*Captain Marvel, oddly enough, is all but MIA. She appears in a few panels, but just standing by the other Avengers. She doesn't get any lines, and doesn't seem to take any sort of leadership position the way that many of her fellow Avengers, including Blade, do. 

**Who I just realized didn't have an entry in Marvel Monsters: Creatures of the Marvel Universe Explored. 

***They all sound like high school metal bands, don't they?

A Month of Wednesdays: October 2021

BOUGHT:

Avengers Mech Strike (Marvel Entertainment) This five-issue miniseries by writer Jed MacKay and artist Carlos Magno was  apparently commissioned and created to tie-in to Hasbro's Avengers Mech Strike toyline, so one might expect it to be a rare kids-friendly Marvel comic book produced by Marvel Comics. 

One would be wrong, though. The trade paperback collection is rated T+, for readers 13 and up. As for the toys—I just checked—and they're recommended for kids ages four and up. As for 5-12-year-olds, I don't know. Go check on IDW's Marvel Action line, I guess? (That actually might have been a better place for this series to be produced, come to think of it).

MacKay seems to blend the current line-up of the ongoing Avengers comic with  a few more popular, more-likely-to-be-in-movies Avengers to come up with an eight-hero roster: Captain America, Iron Man, Black Panther, Thor, Captain Marvel, Black Widow, The Hulk and Spider-Man. They go into action against some kind of giant, weird, maybe too-scary monster they decide on calling a "Biomechanoid" (and which Spidey refers to as "Cronenberg Godzilla"; you know kids today, they go wild for the films of David Cronenberg!)

The Biomechanoid is in the process of attacking the city of Cleveland—hey, that's my neighborhood!—when the Avengers intervene. Nothing they throw at it seems to work, it just keeps consuming everything in sight and growing larger and more powerful by doing so, until Black Panther jumps into its jaws to test a hypothesis.

He's spit out of the destroyed creature being proven right: It can't digest vibranium. When it becomes clear that there are more such creatures on the horizon, Iron Man builds the Avengers all "Biomechanoid Response Units...each customized to interface with your individual power sets and clad in vibranium plating, which should keep the biomechanoids from eating them."

And as to what those look like, well, just look at the cover; the vibranium weakness is essentially an excuse to get all of the Avengers, even The Hulk, into Avengers-themed mechs, which have robotic-like versions of all their weapons and powers. So, for example, The Captain America one has a giant shield, the Thor one has a giant hammer for a hand, the Spider-Man one shoots steel-cable webs from its wrists and so on.

That seems to be the main thing MacKay takes from the toy line...well that and the presence of Thanos, who also gets a mech suit when he teams up with the Avengers against the series' even bigger bad, which I will now spoil for you, because this series came out a while ago anyway: It's Kang The Conqueror. The Biomechanoids were part of his plot to do the sort of thing he's always doing, which here involves taking over Avengers Mountain and using its Celestial tech to help him conquer all of time at once. 

It's up to the Avengers, their new toy-inspired mech suits and, somewhat briefly, Thanos to stop Kang and save the day.

I found MacKay's approach to the material sort of fascinating, particularly the pains that seemed to be taken to keep it in continuity, or something awfully close to Avengers continuity (MIA teammates Ghost Rider, Blade and She-Hulk aren't ever mentioned, and it's hard to see the Immortal Hulk's Hulk in this version of the big, green guy, but it wouldn't be too hard for an imaginative kid to square the proceedings with what they might be reading in the pages of Jason Aaron and company's Avengers series, which is advertised on the inside front and back covers).

If kids will read this, well, I don't know. It was a little less sharp than Aaron's Avengers, and the broader strokes were of course dictated by the needs of the toy tie-ins, but it was basically of apiece with the regular series, and I could enjoy it as something that might occur between the collections of that.

Carlos Magno's art is hyper-detailed and particularly realistic, even, ironically, far more so than that which usually appears in the regular, for-adults Avengers comics. He does a fine job, but, stylistically, he might not have been the best choice for a book that little kids might conceivably have been intended to maybe read somehow, given how scary some of the art is (Not just the Biomechanoids; near the climax, Kang pulls nightmarish, monstrous Avengers from alternate timelines to fight their normal counter-parts, and most of these are scary as heck, including  humanoid spider versions of Spider-Man and Black Widow, an axe-wielding Hulk with multiple faces all over his body and a faceless Iron Man). 

As to why it's rated T+ rather than T or—can you even imagine?—All Ages, I would guess it's because of the monster content. That, or maybe the death. Black Panther appears to be disintegrated, turning into a broken skeleton after being hit by an energy blast, early in the series, and later Thanos is similarly killed by Kang, but, other than those elements, I'm not sure why, say, a 12-year-old might have trouble with the book.

I am genuinely surprised that it wasn't written and drawn for an all-ages audience in the first place, though. It really makes me want to revisit 2005's Marvel Mega Morphs series, which was a similarly based-on-a-toy line comic that put various Avengers in giant robot battle suits, although the cast included Ghost Rider, Wolverine and, I think, Doctor Doom. 

Are You Afraid of Darkseid? #1 (DC Comics) DC's 2021 Halloween special is premised around campfire stories. Writer Elliott Kalan and artist Mike Norton's framing story has the Teen Titans on a team-bonding camping trip, at Red Arrow's instigation passing a flashlight around the circle, taking turns telling scary stories to one another. Each of the stories they tell are one of the seven stories that make-up the rest of the anthology, each featuring different DC characters in some sort of vaguely horror-themed story, mostly of the urban legend-like variety. 

These include Harley Quinn in an unlikely team-up with the title character to take down the mirror-dwelling Bloody Mary (here a former Female Fury), Batman, Green Lantern John Stewart, The Phantom Stranger, Aquaman and Aqualad, Wonder Woman and Vixen and Superman and Lois Lane. 

It's a good premise, and the various creative teams mostly make creative use of it, although none of the stories really struck me as buy-the-book-for must-reads. 

I thought writer Calvin Kalsulke and Rob Guillory's Batman story made good use of a couple of urban legend staples, while also presenting some pretty great Batman/Alfred banter (the lead-in, in which Norton draws Crush making a great "UGH" face at the thought of Damian telling a story about his dad Batman, is pretty great too). 

I liked that Ed Brisson and Christopher Mitten's Aquaman and -lad story featured a "real" monster in Ogopogo, the Canadian lake monster that may or may not (and probably doesn't) actually exist; there just isn't enough intersection of the worlds of superheroes and cryptozoology for my tastes. (I still want to read a Batman vs. Batsquatch story, for example.)

Terry Blas and Garry Brown's Wonder Woman and Vixen story is pretty strong, even if the pairing is pretty random and randomly accomplished, as is Jeremy Haun, Tony Akins and Moritat's Superman and Lois story, although I feel like it could have used a panel or two's explanation as to the mechanics of the threat.  

Runaways by Rainbow Rowell Vol. 6: Come Away With Me (Marvel) Did you know that writer Rainbow Rowell's Runaways is the last ongoing Marvel series that I'm both buying and reading? It's true! So imagine my dismay when I learned that the book has actually been cancelled, and this particular volume collects the last of Rowell's Runaways comics.  Dismay, as well as surprise, but perhaps I shouldn't be that surprised, if they canceled everything else I liked enough to buy and have on my bookshelf (I'm still reading Avengers, but I stopped buying that series after the third volume).

They must have decided to pull the plug pretty quickly, and without giving Rowell much of a warning, as this sixth volume of her run could have been spent on wrapping things up and providing an ending of sorts, the fifth volume's rather traumatic arc certainly could have served as a climax to the run. Instead, after an issue or two of taking a narrative breath over those events, Rowell plunged ahead, continuing long-simmering sub-plots and introducing some unexpected, dramatic new twists, like, for example, the one teased on the cover: The Gert from the future coming back in time and trying to whisk Chase away from the others, something he's reluctant to do (but he is fine with secretly dating Future Gert).

The final issue in the collection, #38, was technically the 100th issue of Runaways ever published, if you added up the various volumes of the series, and in addition to the appearance of guest artists like Kris Anka and Runaways co-creator Adrian Alphona, it introduced even more cliffhangers, like Karolina deciding to go off with some of her own people, Alex deciding to revive the "J-Team" for his own mysterious purposes and the unexpected return of Xavin. 

Whoever is tasked with writing the next Runaways revival is going to have a lot to work out, unless Marvel gives Rowell a future miniseries or something to resolve all her ongoing plot lines.

Wonder Woman 80th Anniversary 100-Page Super Spectacular #1 (DC) I could have sworn I already bought and read this some time ago, but it turns out I was thinking of last year's similarly-sized, priced and formatted anniversary issues, Wonder Woman #750.

The $9.99 prestige format collection includes nine short stories set in various eras and continuities, plus nine pin-ups. 

The lead story seems to be the one set in the current, most relevant DC continuity, and is the work of regular Wonder Woman writers Becky Cloonan and Michael Conrad with artists Jim Cheung. Wonder Woman is presumed dead at the moment, and her mourning ex Steve Trevor has made a documentary film about her, which he shows to Etta; the story thus takes the form of his film, offering a sort of overview of the character. 

My favorite story by far was writer/artist Amy Reeder and colorist Marissa Louises' "Fresh Catch," which is set in the 1940s continuity, and features Etta Candy and the Holiday Girls rescuing Wonder Woman from some villainous fishermen. 

I was also rather fond of Mark Waid, Jose Luis Garcia-Lopez and Joe Prado's "Dear Diana...", detailing her role as the go-to person to talk to your problems about in the Satellite Era Justice League, which is full of fun hero interactions and, of course, predictably gorgeous Garcia-Lopez art of DC's biggest heroes.

I was also somewhat surprised by how much I enjoyed writer Tom King's collaboration with artist Evan "Doc" Shaner, "Dated," set in 1969 and featuring a blind date between Clark Kent and Lois Lane. Light on super-heroics and heavy on the awkward juxtaposition of late sixties Wonder Woman (during her brief, powerless, "mod" era) and Superman, it is a lot of fun, but then, most of King's most fun writing has been when he puts superheroes like Superman into awkward social settings for the length of an issue or so. 

None of the other contributions are bad, per se—although the timeline of Steve Orlando's story about an "annual" threat Artemis and Hippolyta faced as Wonder Woman but Diana hasn't doesn't make a lick of sense—but those were my favorites.

Overall it's a pretty fine examination of the various aspects of the character and different eras and interpretations, many of which can still be explored through DC's backlist of graphic novels and trade paperbacks (and, indeed, the book is heavy on house ads detailing where to go if you, for example, are particularly interested in, say, Jordie Bellaire and Paulina Ganucheau's take on Young Diana, or just other, different takes on the character and franchise). 

There were eight different covers available. The one I ended up with was the "Bronze Age Variant Cover" by Travis Moore and Adriano Lucas that pays tribute to George Perez's run on the character...although they seem to have somewhat disconcertingly used the likenesses of Chris Pine and Lucy Davis for models for Steve Trevor and Etta Candy, rather than sticking to Perez's designs. 

Yotsuba&! Vol. 15 (Yen Press) There are few pleasures in comics like a new volume of Kiyohiko Azuma's Yotsuba&!. In this volume, Yotsuba and her dad put out the Kotatsu and they take the neighbor girls hunting for good rocks. Yanda convinces them to buy a blender, and makes banana juice for Yotsuba. She also get a set of paints, makes her own story books, learns about cramming for school and buys her first back pack. Okay, none of that sounds all that exciting, but then, that's the beauty of the manga; the absolutely mundane becomes thrilling when filtered through  Yotsuba's little kid point-of-view. 

BORROWED:

Batman Vol. 4: The Cowardly Lot (DC Comics) DC Comics seems to be in a pretty weird place at the moment. Their scrapped, line-wide "5G" plans that ended up becoming the "Future State" event seem to be informing a lot of what is going on in the main titles at present, as if the writers are recycling the 5G material and making the best use of it they can within the parameters of the current continuity.

I think. I didn't read any of the "Future State" comics, but I recall them all mentioning something called "The Magistrate" and a near-future Gotham City where vigilantes were illegal—well, illegal-er, I guess, since vigilantism is, by definition, illegal—and the latest volume of James Tynion IV's Batman features the implementation of tech billionaire Simon Saint's Magistrate program, consisting of a group of Robocops to replace Batmen, something he's help selling to Gotham City's new, anti-vigilante mayor with the help of The Scarecrow, who is, as ever, stoking fears. 

The core of the plot is, of course, ridiculously, Saint's argument is to basically replace the old Batman system of extraordinary law enforcement with a new Batman system with different branding, these new Batman replacements having guns and armor and explosives and being part-cyborg, as if no one in this comic book has ever seen a movie before.

That said, Tynion's plotting around that basically dumb idea is quite solid and effective. 

This story arc picks up directly after the events of Infinite Frontier #0, and, somewhat awkwardly, it actually contains the relevant portions of that one-shot special. However, because that comic was premised on Wonder Woman, ascended to a state of advanced godhood and discussing the events of the entire DCU with another cosmic being, there are a few lines of dialogue that appear over the Batman action that make no sense in the context of this book, if you aren't re-reading it, of course. They don't render the proceedings incomprehensible, of course, but they do stick out as odd, record-scratching inclusions, and one wonders if it wouldn't have been worth it for DC to remove the occasional  box of text from Wonder Woman or The Spectre. 

The major event in that one-shot, at least as far as Gotham City was concerned, was that The Joker attacked Arkham—off-panel—with a gas attack, seemingly killing Bane and a whole bunch of other people, and making something of a hero of an Arkham guard, who will go on to become one of Saint's Peacekeepers before this volume is over.

Because there was just seemingly a major Joker attack, right on the heels of the events of "The Joker War", the city is on edge, and, interestingly, The Scarecrow is able to further terrorize the city using all-natural, low-fi methods...like simply breaking into places he shouldn't be able to get into and erecting a simple, old-fashioned scarecrow. In other words, just by making his presence known, he implies a big, terrorist attack is coming, and he's able to wring terror out of that fact alone, without actually having to deploy any gas or anything.

It's an interesting riff on the character's M.O., and a reflection of our own, post-9/11, paranoid times, when we, as a society, can scare ourselves silly over the possibility of an attack, whether or not one ever actually materializes. 

Artist Jorge Jimenez has rather radically redesigned The Scarecrow for this story, and while his design includes elements borrowed from the recent-ish Arkham videogames that I am personally not a fan of—a gas mask, finger-mounted syringes—it's an overall cool design, one that looks almost nothing like any Scarecrow costume that's come before, from the large-brimmed, Asian-style straw hat and Jonathan Crane's long, flowing black hair to patch-filled poncho and rope-wrapped boots he wears. 

It's an incredibly impractical design, as his "claws" should make it impossible to do pretty  much everything he does in this volume, like climbing around on buildings, but it's nevertheless striking and, as I said, different from all the others. That's one of the reasons that The Scarecrow remains one of my favorite superhero comic characters—almost every artist feels free to reinvent him in a way that makes him their own, and all of those designs somehow work, in the same way that all the different designs of Batman tend to work as Batman, no matter the small or huge differences in the way artists draw him. 

The Scarecrow is technically the villain of this arc—or, at least, one of the villains—but Tynion keeps him mostly in the corners and out-of-sight. Each issue begins at some point in the future, wherein The Scarecrow has captured Batman, and then flashes back to the events leading up to that point, as we learn about something called The Unsanity Collective, Saint's Magistrate program and the various symptoms of the city being on edge...more so than usual, of course. 

Batman: The World (DC) This hardcover anthology collection of Batman shorts by international artists starts with a perhaps unnecessary 10-pager by the Joker and Luthor team of Brian Azzarello and Lee Bermejo, which functions both as the U.S. contribution to the proceedings (um, not that there's any shortage of U.S.-produced Batman comics) and to set up the premise. Azzarello's narration, which begins with an overwrought revisiting of the Batman's parents' murders for the millionth time, talks about how Batman is metaphorically married to Gotham City, but sometimes he cheats on her with other cities, and it's frankly pretty weird. The point is just to say that the rest of the book will involve Batman in other cities, though.

I'm not a huge fan of Bermejo's art, and I particularly dislike his version of the Batman costume, which is basically a jumpsuit with a cape and cowl, but this is a nice showcase for his art. After the eye-rolling first page, in which an image of the earth transforms into one of the pearls from Batman's mom's necklace, it's basically a series of pin-ups of Batman fighting his various rogues (I liked the robot penguin fighting alongside The Penguin).

From there, we see Batman's dalliances with other cities in other countries, each of the 13 stories produced by a different creative team from a different country, none of whom I had ever heard of before, which was actually quite exciting.

Anthology rules apply, of course, and so the stories vary in tone and style quite a bit and even, unfortunately, in quality, although not radically so (none of the stories are terrible, for example, and I only had trouble making it through one of them).

Interestingly, there are a lot of new villains introduced: Italy's creepy Ianus, Turkey's Dawn and Dusk and South Korea's Saba being among the most notable and supervillain-ous ones, characters it's not hard to imagine turning up in other Batman comics in the future. Of Batman's regular rogues, only Catwoman and The Joker turn up; the former appears in a pretty great entry in the Batman-and-Catwoman-are-secretly-in-love body of stories by Mathieu Gabella and Thierry Martin (the French story), the latter in a thought-provoking story by Benjamin von Eckartsberg and Thomas von Kummant (the German story).

I would have a hard time picking a favorite. There's a lot of fantastic art throughout, including from the previously mentioned Martin and Von Kummant, but also from Paco Roca, Michal Suchanek, Jaekwang Park and Junggi Kim, and Okadaya Yuichi. 

I found Paco Roca's of Spain's "Closed For The Holidays" story particularly fun, as it depicts a Bruce Wayne on holiday, struggling to enjoy himself across a series of 12-panel-grid pages until he ultimately gives in to the temptation to suit up. 

Kirill Kutuzov, Egor Prutov and Natalia Zaidova of Russia's "My Bat-Man" is a lot of fun too. Told from the perspective of an artist who grew up with the idea of Batman, starting from a pen he was given with the 1960s Batman atop it, and then following the Dark Knight on the news from afar, as he changed and evolved over the years. I particularly love the section where the protagonist relates what his various childhood friends though Batman must be like:

Zaidova

I...I think I could read a whole series of Batman as a veterinarian in Australia.

Yuichi of Japan's "Batman Unchained"" is interesting too. Not only does it look like manga, but it is set...damn, I don't remember the name of the period. Let's say the 1930s, back when kamishibai/paper theater was a thing, and an artist gets in trouble with the law for his fantastical drawings of the outlaw hero Batman...and eventually meets Batman. 

Yuichi

It's one of several stories in which Batman appears in country-specific garb, the other being "Batman and Panda Girl" from Xu Xiaodong and Lu Xiaotong of China, where where he dons Chinese armor for their team-up. 

Suchanek

It's an all-around pretty great Batman comic book, and I hope DC sees fit to publish future collections featuring Batman or perhaps other heroes like Superman. I also sure as hell wouldn't mind seeing some of these creators working on the regular Batman comics (Michal Suchanek in particular looks like his work could fill the pages of Batman or Detective at any time). 

Chainsaw Man Vols. 2-7 (Viz Media) I obviously liked that first volume of Chainsaw Man I read to check out the next one, and ended up going until I was all caught up with what's been published so far. After a somewhat slow start in the first volume, Tatsuki Fujimoto rather quickly and efficiently world-builds a strange society where humanity lives in a tense balance with various "devils." Specialized law enforcement pursues, imprisons or exterminates them, but they do so using gifts from other devils gained from deals with them, and, of course, by employing powerful "fiends" and other entities, like the title character, which is what our protagonist Denji transforms into whenever he pulls the string protruding from his chest. 

Denji is an interesting by in many ways familiar protagonist for a manga like this, his desires and motivations being all completely base. At first all he wants is a bed to sleep in and food given to him on a regular basis, a drastic change from what he experienced growing up in crippling poverty, but eventually he gets other motivations, like the desire to touch a woman's breasts and, after that, to have sex with a woman.

His efforts are unfortunately rather tragic, as terrible things happen the two times he kisses a woman in these volumes, the results being gross, once in a nauseating way, the other time in a gory kind of way. Deeper, more noble motivations are given to other supporting characters, some of whom are swirled with a sense of mystery, but our hero is an open book, and not one with much writing in it.

His alter-ego is seemingly unstoppable, even when put up against some spectacularly insidious devils, like one that traps him and his team in an insidious time loop, or a female equivalent to himself, but he takes the odds are generally presented as insurmountable before he somehow finds a way to surmount them, making for a palpable sense of tension in the series' many action scenes. 

Filled with sometimes scary imagery and the sort of violence you might expect from a comic whose hero turns himself into a human/chainsaw hybrid, it's definitely not for everybody, but it does have a lot to offer super-comic fans (The latest volume, for example, had one of the most amazing and unique depictions of super-speed, spread across many pages, that I've ever seen before).

Injustice: Gods Among Us: Year Zero (DC) Artists Roge Antonio and Cian Tormey join writer Tom Taylor in an unexpected (and unnecessary) prequel to his long-running video game adaptation/extrapolation, Injustice: Gods Among Us with Year Zero, set in the time when the alternate DC Universe of Injustice was still pretty much normal, and the thing that would cause Superman to snap, and the nature of this DCU to diverge so sharply from that of the "real" one (i.e. Lois and their unborn child being killed) had yet to occur.

In truth, Taylor only includes a few seeds of what will follow here, as it involves Joker (and sometimes Harley Quinn) versus The Justice League, with some attention paid to Lois and Superman trying to decide if they can even safely have kids (which Dr. Mid-Nite Charles McNider assures them they can, after he performs vague, off-panel tests one can only guess at) and The Joker deciding to consider the fact that Superman is incorruptible as a challenge to explore in the future. (On, and Taylor re-riffs on his joke about the genius of the boxing glove arrow.)

The rest of the book is basically a JLA/JSA team-up, with Taylor's slightly different version of the JLA interacting with a similarly slightly different version of the JSA.

This JSA is a version of the original, Golden Age team, and it is still active and operating alongside the JLA, and Taylor stretches to make a much more diverse roster than any version of the team not heavily dependent on legacy characters; he does this in part by plucking some characters from the old All-Star Squadron and making them Society members. 

So in addition to all the expected straight, white dudes, Taylor includes multiple women (Hawkgirl, Black Canary, Liberty Belle, a Wonder Woman* and Inza Nelson as Dr. Fate), a person of color in Roy Thomas and Jerry Ordway's retroactive Golden Age character Amazing-Man (a nice, smart addition I'd love to see future takes on the JSA follow) and here Green Lantern Alan Scott isn't just gay, but completely sure of himself and out, with a spouse in the form of a man named Jimmy, presented as the equivalent of Jay Garrick's Joan or Superman's Lois (Jimmy and Lois get a nice scene together near the end where they compare notes of being with a caped superhero).

The two teams are hanging out together on the Justice League satellite when the Joker and Harley break an old, dying prisoner out of Blackgate Penitentiary. The prisoner had promised god-like power to anyone who could free him, and that power eventually lands in The Joker's hands: An ancient amulet once discovered by the archaeologists Carter and Shiera Hall that contained a Lord of Chaos, and gave whoever wore it the ability to control the minds of others.

Discovering almost by chance how much the JLA members look up to the JSA members—and, specifically, the look in Batman's eye when he regards his one-time mentor Wildcat—The Joker decides to use the JSA to destroy the JLA. He does this first by possessing Alan Scott, and, as the story progresses, he ends up "driving" several different JSA members before the climactic battle at the Hall of Justice, wherein The Joker has the full powers of the chaos lord at his command. 

Having not read much of Injustice—just the first volume and an issue here and there—I'm ill-suited to speak to how well this functions as a prequel. The first page seems set in the time when Superman had become a dictator, and has Batman ruminating on whether or not this all would have happened "If they were still here", referring to the JSA. And, to get the JSA out of the way, The Joker sends a handful of them "away" with his chaos powers, and the rest of the surviving JSA members join The Spectre in searching various dimensions for the lost heroes (there's potential, then, for a sequel of sorts to this, or at least a story to branch out from it, chronicling that multiversal quest; I'd read it). 

In the last panels, Alan Scott turns to Superman and Batman, and says over his shoulder, "No pressure, but loo after the world for us while we're gone," to which Superman responds, "We will," all of which seems much more dramatic with the knowledge of what will follow. 

As a DC superhero comic, this is quite good. While I didn't care for the plot of the earlier Injustice series, Taylor is very good at writing the various heroes and villains as characters, and there are some great passages in what I did read of Injustice, even if the overall milieu is a deeply dark, cynical, anti-heroic one. (It's a particularly bleak portrait of Superman, but then, Elseworlds featuring the character so often are.)

His skill is quite evident here as well. There aren't really any characters he doesn't write well, and there are lots of fun moments throughout. I really rather liked his version of the JSA and how he wrote them all. 

When DC eventually revives the JSA for a title of their own again, they could do a lot worse than  having Taylor helm the series.

...

That said, I didn't care for Injustice Wildcat's costume, which had a more simple, less dopey-looking cat mask. I think the sheer ridiculous of Wildcat's mask is part of what make the character so damn endearing, personally. 

My Love Mix-Up! Vol. 1 (Viz) Okay, this is a little confusing, but stick with me. Aoki has a crush on Hashimoto, the girl who sits right next to him in class. One day he forgot his eraser, she lends him one of hers. On that eraser she has written the name Ida with a heart, because that's a thing school girls do in Japan (at least according to the manga I've read), write the names of their crushes on their erasers. Ida sits in front of Aoki, and happens to notice him holding an eraser with his name on it and a heart, and naturally thinks its Aoki's eraser. Because Aoki promised Hashimoto to keep her crush secret, he can't tell Ida the truth, and just pretends that he does have a crush on him, despite the fact that he's not even actually gay.

That's the first chapter of writer Wataru Hinekure and artist Aruko's My Love Mix-Up. The tension ramps up because it turns out that Ida is such a nice guy, so kind and considerate, that he feels bad for turning Aoki down—again, because he's not gay either—and insists that he wants to be Aoki's friend and get to know him better, even though Aoki is fine letting the matter drop.

As things progress, however, Aoki finds that Ida actually seems to be winning him over, and that maybe he actually is falling for Ida who, after all, possesses the very same qualities that attracted Aoki to Hashimoto. Though Aoki tells Hashimoto he's rooting for her, it gradually dons on him that they may actually be becoming rivals—at least until the shocking twist ending, that upends everything.

I have no idea where the story is going, which makes it awfully fun. I'm quite eager for volume two, just to find out what happens next. 

REVEIWS:

Spider-Man's Very Strange Day and Who Guards My Sleep? (Marvel Press) These are a pair of picture books (that is, not comics) that are kinda sorta based on Marvel movies, but loosely enough that one need not have seen the movies to make sense of the books. Which is a good thing since the former, Spider-Man's Very Strange Day, is related to Spider-Man: No Way Home, which isn't even in theaters until December. More here.  

Thor & Loki: Double Trouble (Marvel Entertainment) The Spider-Man & Venom: Double Trouble team of Mariko Tamaki and Gurihiru re-team for another similar all-ages romp, this time starring the bickering brothers of Asgard. More here. 

Wonderful Women of the World (DC Comics) Despite the lady on the cover, this isn't a Wonder Woman comic, although it loosely takes its inspiration from an feature in Golden Age Wonder Woman comics. Rather, it's a Laurie Halse Anderson-edited anthology of short biographies of real women by a rather amazing line-up of female comics writers and artists working in a variety of styles. More here.

INTERVIEW:

Mayor Good Boy (Random House Graphic) I spoke to Dave Scheidt and Miranda Harmon, the creative team behind Mayor Good Boy, the first book in a planned trilogy following a talking dog who was elected mayor. You can read it here. 

*It's not entirely clear if the Wonder Woman of the JSA is the same one or a different one than the one in the JLA; it appears to be the former, from the one context clue I could find. Maybe I'd already know the answer to this if I had read more of Injustice, though. 

Review: JLA: Act of God #1-3

This Doug Moench-written three-issue Elseworlds series* has a fairly strong premise, one strong enough that it's not hard to imagine it occurring in the mainline DCU continuity, and, in the year's previous to its 2001 release, maybe even being a summer annual crossover event.** In a sudden, unexplained phenomenon, everyone on Earth with superpowers loses them.

The mechanics of this are a little fuzzy, as it involves characters who gained their powers through accidents and circumstances, like The Flash, The Atom and Plastic Man, as well as those whose powers are natural abilities to their alien species, like Starfire, Martian Manhunter and Superman. With the world's greatest heroes sidelined, it's up to second- and third-stringers with technologically-based "powers" like Steel, Blue Beetle and Booster Gold to help fill the void, although some technologically-based powers did fail, like Kyle Rayner's Green Lantern ring.

Best not to dwell too much on the specifics of event, as Moench doesn't, and certain questions are addressed only in passing ("What about the supernatural geeks? Spectre, Dr. Fate, Zauriel..." Guy Gardner asks in a splash page, and The Atom answers "All among the missing-- Or at least no one's heard from them." And that is that for the magical heroes, although I guess it's worth noting Captain Marvel and Wonder Woman are also left powerless). At any rate, it's never explained—beyond the title—and its "rules" are only evident in what occurs on the pages.

The tagline for Elseworlds is that "In Elseworlds, heroes are taken from their usual settings and put into strange times and places—some that have existed, or might have existed, and others that can't, couldn't or shouldn't exist."  This is very much a shouldn't exist kind of story, as it shows some of DC's greatest heroes in spectacularly bad lights.

Before we get to that, though, I should note that this story is very much my particular jam, and few things in comics excite me as much as the sort that occurs on the story's 19th page, in which we see the JLA Watchtower crowded with some 30 heroes in a single splash page. Many of these heroes are just making one of several cameos in the story, some of them won't appear again at all, but man, I just like seeing, say, Red Tornado and the android Hourman standing shoulder to shoulder and imagining what they're talking about, or just getting a little reminder that Damage exists, you know? 

Pencil artist Dave Ross, here inked by George Freeman, has a great style that is quite well-suited to this kind of extremely sincere, often melodramatic (or, perhaps, soap operatic) superhero story, the characters all looking like themselves and seemingly perfectly captured when in action, but also showing a great deal of emotion and "acting" when they struggling with negative feelings or baring their souls to one another, which they do a lot of in this (There were certain panels where the Ross/Freeman team evoked the work of Rags Morales, a favorite artist  of mine, if that helps you place the style).

The other fun thing about the story is that it foregrounds several then lesser-seen characters, like those mentioned previously, as well as Guy Gardner and Supergirl (Moench splits the attention between the core JLA members reacting to their lost posers and the tech-based heroes who must replace them, rather than focusing too much on the heroes who never had any powers or super-tools to help them like, say, Green Arrow or Arsenal or Black Canary; they mostly just appear in a handful of cameos). 

As for the "shouldn't" I mentioned before, well, it doesn't exactly flatter some of the Justice Leaguers. Superman, for example, is so traumatized by his failure to save a town form a breaking dam, which he was attempting to do when he lost his powers, that he gives up even trying to be a hero...and gives up on his life as Clark Kent too, drifting into a relationship with Wonder Woman (Lois Lane dumps him because she can't stand his mopey, I-used-to-be-Superman routine) and, ultimately, hitting rock bottom,  drinking in an alley until a priest mistakes him for a hobo and invites him into a homeless shelter.

Wonder Woman is similarly distressed and gives up trying to be a hero, instead getting a job on Wall Street. She turns to (Christian!) religion and, sometime after her break-up with Superman, even considers suicide.

Kyle Rayner, who gets beat up by Sonar II, spends the entirety of the story ranting and raving and throwing his ring around, never consulting with the other Leaguers, and he eventually works a heavy-bag until he feels he's ready to beat up Sonar II with his bare, ring-less hands. 

This being an Elseworlds, I guess it's acceptable that Moench chose to highlight the darkest, bleakest futures for some of these heroes, but, well, they don't come off as all that heroic. 

It's not hard to imagine any of the three either finding fulfillment in their normal lives—I mean, as a journalist, husband and son, Clark Kent has a lot going on whether or not he's secretly Superman or not—or continuing to fight crime without their powers. They might not all be martial artists and gymnasts on Batman's level, but all of them, especially Wonder Woman and Superman, have been fighting people on a daily basis for years. It's not hard to imagine Superman taking up a jetpack and a ray gun and continuing to protect Metropolis, or Wonder Woman grabbing a spear and shield and fighting crime the same way Black Canary does, you know?

These heroes are contrasted with "The Phoenix Group," made up of Flash Wally West, Supergirl Linda Danvers, J'onn J'onnz and Aquaman, who all decide to train under Batman and Robin before adopting new heroic identities under which they can fight crime using fighting abilities and gadgets. They become, respectively, Red Devil, Justice, The Green Man and (sigh) The Hand.

Ultimately they save the day from Lex Luthor, who seeks to take advantage of the new, power-less world by mass-producing super-suits like Steels and trying to jumpstart super-powers through genetic research.

It's a fun enough story, despite the bleak portrayals of some of the characters as they spiral downward—don't worry Superman and Wonder Woman get their lives back together, and Kyle does eventually beat up Sonar II, but at the cost of his own life—and some extremely, funnily purple prose from Moench, which reaches its most overblown when Superman describes to Lois how he felt during his initial power loss. 

I certainly had fun discovering a "lost" story from a point I was perhaps most engaged with the DC Universe as a setting full of characters I genuinely liked. 

As with Created Equal (collected in Elseworlds: Justice League Vol. 3, which I recently wrote about) wherein the DC Universe lost all it's male heroes, but still had dozens of female heroes, it's perhaps worth noting that if DC did lose all its super-powered heroes, well, there would still be more than enough heroes to  publish an entire line of DC Comics (many of the most popular ones can be seen on the cover above). When one considers DC's current output, which is completely dominated by comics featuring Batman and his superpower-less supporting cast, they're almost there now; if they simply replaced the handful of Superman and Wonder Woman books with books starring, I don't know, Steel, Green Arrow, The Birds of Prey characters and Booster Gold and Blue Beetle, they'd be publishing about as many books.

Despite the struggles the fictional DC Universe had in the wake of the event here, the real world DC Comics would probably be pretty much a-okay without any super-powered heroes...although I bet they'd give Superman a jetpack and some super-weapons to continue his never-ending battle, powers or no powers.

*Which was collected along with the infamous 1999  Elseworlds 80-Page Giant and Randy and Jean-Marc Lofficier and Ted McKeever trilogy of German expressionist film-making inspired books Superman's Metropolis, Batman: Nosferatu and Wonder Woman: The Blue Amazon in 2017'a  Elseworlds: Justice League Vol. 2, which is where I read it. 

**In fact, the premise is somewhat similar to that of John Byrne and Ron Wagner's 1997 Genesis, in which a receding "Godwave" removes the meta-human abilities from many heroes and leads to a weird "crisis of faith" among ordinary heroes who have no superpowers. It was pretty terrible, though, and my very least favorite of any DC crossover event ever. 

Extreme Justice and more: On a short stack of '90s DC comics

Extreme Justice #0-4 (1995) "It's not really that bad if you can look past the art" is a heck of a thing to say about a comic book, given the visual nature of the medium and the fact that the art is supposed to be doing the bulk of the storytelling, but it's perhaps more true of the early issues of Extreme Justice than any other comics I can recall reading at the moment. 

The title seems born of the tensions at the publisher to just keep on doing what they've been doing and a need to try to appeal to the readers of Marvel's various X-books and the blockbuster (but generally terrible) comics that upstart Image Comics produced in its earliest years.

And so the team line-up includes several stalwarts from the late 1980s/early 1990s Giffen/DeMatteis Justice League comics (Blue Beetle, Booster Gold, Captain Atom) paired with newcomers Maxima (from Dan Jurgens' run on Justice League America, rather recently repackaged and republished in trade as Superman and Justice League America) and Amazing-Man, a new legacy version of All-Star Squadron character introduced in 1983. 

It spins pretty directly out of the pages of the "Judgement Day" crossover (collected in Wonder Woman and Justice League America), with the Justice League splintered into three different teams, each appearing in a different title (Wonder Woman's team would occupy Justice League America, Martian Manhunter's Justice League Task Force and Captain Atom's the poorly-named Extreme Justice). 

And yet there was that silly title, one that didn't really reflect the raison d'etre of the superhero team that writer Dan Vado had Captain Atom articulating; rather than being an in-your-face, proactive super-team as is so often attempted by the super-comics publishers, Atom wanted to return to the days of the pre-Satellite Era Justice League, when the team didn't require so much bureaucracy (although even the original Justice League and their precursors the JSA were never short of meetings and organization). It's perhaps worth noting that the name "Extreme Justice" never appears anywhere in the first five issues of the title, other than on the covers; if the heroes ever refer to their team, they use the name "Justice League."

And there's the artwork of pencil artist Marc Campos and inker Ken Branch, in which a reader can find any of the stereotypical sins attributed to 1990s super-comics artwork, from there only being two body types ("superhero" and "superheroine"); questionable anatomy; questionable point-of-view; backgrounds consisting of either empty space, rubble or explosions; screaming mouths filled with saliva; and, every once in a while, a panel like this, where even the questionable anatomy seems to have completely broken down in such a way it seems peculiar that DC Comics would have even published the image.

I mean, for as much as they might have been striving to imitate the work of a Rob Liefeld at Image Comics, they were still DC Comics and not Image, you know?

As much temptation as there is to make fun of Campos' art, and as much as it might seem to deserve it, I have to keep reminding myself that DC was very clearly asking for this sort of style with the book, so if anyone deserves the blame for the way the book looks, it's as mucyeditors Brian Augustyn and Ruben Diaz, who were "proudly present"-ing it, and it was Campos for drawing it.

Anyway, as bad as the book looks, Dan Vado's script isn't actually that bad. I've definitely read worse Justice League stories with less excuses for being as bad as they were.

The series, which launches in a zero issue because of course it does, has Captain Atom leading his mini-League against a rogue U.S. general who wants to start World War III by preemptively attacking the Soviet Union...or was it Russia at the time...? I wasn't very up-to-speed with geopolitics that years, as I was only 17.

Deciding they need a new base to hang out in, the time-lost Captain Atom suggests they squat in Mount Thunder, a giant underground base built for parts of the U.S. military to ride out a nuclear war in the '60s but then abandoned. Unfortunately, someone else is already squatting there, another rogue U.S. general, one who leads up a conspiracy called "Freedom Rings" that wants to destroy what he feels is another, more sinister conspiracy within the U.S. government, one apparently involving "President French Fry" (Clinton, I guess, if it's 1995). 

Rather than, like, vacating when the armed forces come to kick them out, or telling anyone else that there's a team of killer cyborgs living in the secret base, Captain Atom and the gang remain there until they've blown up all the cyborgs and the bad guy kills himself in an explosion. I guess then they get to live there...? I don't know how U.S. military bases work, I guess. 

Meanwhile, the superpower-less Ron Raymond has developed leukemia and has a pretty dire diagnosis. Skeets and Oberon find him at what used to be the Justice League base in New York City and follow him back to Pittsburgh, where his powers suddenly return and he loses control of them. That's the cliffhanger ending of the fourth issue, in which Professor Stein telepathically tells Ronnie he's going to return to Earth, as he's out in space being a fire elemental or whatever he was doing at that point, exactly. 

The fourth issue has fill-in art by pencil artist Mozart Cuoto, and it's much better looking than Campos'. The book is infinitely more readable this issue.

All in all, it's a pretty odd book. I like the Amazing-Man character quite a bit though, and found myself eager to see how he would develop in the book's remaining 15 or so issues (Amazing-Man II Will Everett would be on my theoretical Justice League line-up, if I were the boss of who should be on the Justice League, by the way). And I've built up an affection for Booster Gold and Blue Beetle over the years, even if neither of them is particularly well-written or given any real characterization in these pages (Blue Beetle doesn't want to be relegated to the tech guy, and Booster is worried that Captain Atom will kick him off the team if he realizes how weak his heart is and....that's about it for these guys in these issues).

So yeah, it feels weird and wrong to say, but it's honestly not really that bad if you can look past the art.

Now I've gotta find somewhere to buy the rest of the series, as this was all the shop I got these from  had...

Showcase '95 #1 (1995) This is the first issue of DC's mid-nineties resurrection of their old Showcase series to star a Superman supporting character in the lead slot. For the first two years, Showcase '93 and Showcase '94, Batman supporting characters anchored the series; for the last two years, Showcase '95 and Showcase '96, Superman characters would. 

The reason I picked this up now—in addition to being mildly curious about the entire series, which I just read extremely sporadically back when it was being released, of course—was that this particular issue featured an Alan Scott back-up, and one of some significance. While Alan  had previously been de-aged and given a new costume, and he had previously given up his ring and Green Lantern name, this story features the return of his powers and the first time he decided on his new superhero name: Sentinel.

In a theoretical Green Lantern: Sentinel trade collection that doesn't exist but I kinda wish did, this would appear somewhere between the Green Lantern Corps stories and 1998's Green Lantern/Sentinel: Heart of Darkness. 

The story, written by R.A. Jones and drawn by Gene Gonzales and Wade Von Grawbadger, finds Alan, in full costume, and his wife Molly at a cemetery, presumably lingering long after the funeral for some of the original Justice Society members killed during Zero Hour: Dr. Mid-Nite, Hourman and The Atom. Alan tells Molly he's going to stay behind to brood a while longer, and once she leaves the dead heroes come to life and attempt to kill Alan, punishing him for being a coward and giving up superhero-ing while they went down fighting.

His power returns, he reburies them and questions whether it was a combination of his power and his own feelings of guilt that resurrected them, and then declares, "I'm starting a new life--reborn by the fires of The Starheart-- --and I will become its-- SENTINEL!", and that last word is all big and green and on fire, like a logo. 

It ends with a three-panel sequence in which a sorcerer apparently named Torquemada talks to himself about how he conjured the JSA zombies and how he will need Alan's help against the evil one, and instead of "The End" it ends with "So it begins!" 

I...have no idea where. Next issue doesn't feature an Alan Scott story, nor do I think he returns the rest of the year. If you know where it picks up, if it ever does, do be sure to let me know. 

The lead Supergirl story is perhaps most notable for its artwork, by one Stuart Immonen, inked by Wade Von Grawbadger. Written by Charles Moore, it features a fairly generic sentient robot alien conqueror type coming to earth to get some rare minerals and stumbling upon Supergirl, whose body he would like to take over as his own. That is because this is one of the confusing Supergirls, the post-Byrne one who is like actually made of protoplasm and has a variety of powers that differ from Superman's (another confusing Supergirl, which is actually maybe the same one with some extra layers of confusing continuity added, appears in Superman 80-Page Giant #2, below). 

Rounding out the issue is a short story starring Argus, one of the "New Bloods" heroes introduced during 1993' Bloodlines event (and created by Mark Waid and pencil artist Phil Hester). Here he is written by Mark Wheatley and Allan Gross, penciled by Hester and inked by Wayne Faucher. 

It's an odd little story in which the hero encounters a boy who has a ray gun that dissolves clothing; he attacked a charity fashion show in order to see the models naked and, when Argus intervenes, he evaporates his costume, leaving the hero running away naked on the TV news. From there, he needs to find a new costume, which proves difficult to heroes who aren't secretly billionaires with costume-designing butlers, I guess.

I'm not really familiar with Argus, having never read the Flash Annual that introduced him—but I'd like to! I'd like to read al the Bloodlines annuals! Collect 'em for me, DC!—but I thoroughly enjoyed seeing Hester's art work here, a much earlier point than I had seen it for the first time previously (his run on Green Arrow). I'm a fan. 

Steel Annual #1 (1994) The first of the two Steel annuals was released during the year in which the theme was simply "Elseworlds", so each of the year's 23 annuals featured and alternate reality tale featuring the comic's regular star or stars (I've read hardly any of these, I think just the Detective Comics annual, which introduced "Captain Leatherwing," the pirate Batman, and Shadow of The Bat; if DC wants to go ahead and collect all of these into a couple of trades, I'd happily buy them. Much easier than finding them one at a time in back-issue bins).

Co-written by Steel co-creator Jon Bogdanove and a Judith Kurzer Bogdanove, who I am assuming is his wife, and entitled "Crucible of Freedom," the premise is a perhaps interesting but awfully tricky one to tackle: What if John Henry Irons became steel not in modern day Metropolis, but in the American South in the 1860s? What if he was born a slave on cotton plantation?

It certainly makes for a satisfyingly melodramatic arc, as we see the protagonist and generations of his family subjected to the most terrible evil for pages and pages before Irons eventually dons his armor and liberates the plantation through force, now protected not only from whips but even bullets and cannon balls.

But it also makes for a rather rough read. This is certainly the first time—and perhaps the only time?—I've seen the N-word appear in a DC Comic. And then, of course, there's an awful lot of beatings, whippings and talk of the same, although in comics form they aren't quite as tough to watch as they might be in, say, a film, where you can hear the snap of a whip over and over. 

Some of the harshest elements occur off-panel and in the reader's imagination—the villain blinds a black man with a sword for daring to meet his eyes, the evil overseer is murdered with a pitchfork, a wagon full of infants is drowned in a sudden downpour—but it's still awfully rough-going for a mainstream comic book.

In the Bogdanoves' story, John Henry is nursed alongside Arthur Forrest, the scion of the plantation. The two grow up playing as best friends, with Arthur sneaking books to John Henry and teaching him to read, but, as they grow older, they grow apart. Eventually Arthur blames John Henry for his being sent away to a school, and vows revenge; being spurned by a lady who then goes on to have sex with a slave doesn't help dispel his race hatred in the least.

Meanwhile, John Henry grows up to be not only smart, but huge and noble, willing to take the beatings meant for other, weaker slaves regularly. He's also the plantation's blacksmith, and, when the Civil War breaks out, Arthur, who has a life-long interest in tales of medieval chivalry, demands John Henry build him a suit of armor with which he can do battle.

John Henry reluctantly sets to work, coming up with a 19th century version of the familiar Steel armor, complete with a wrist-mounted Gatling gun, but it's sized to fit him, not Arthur. When the slaves rise up, he dons the armor, picks up his hammer and helps fend off the Confederate troops training on the plantation and ultimately confronts Arthur who, in true melodramatic villain fashion, ultimately kills himself while trying to destroy the hero who, of course, is too noble to take his life.

It's all rather compelling, although I was somewhat surprised to see the pencil artist who was given the assignment: Humberto Ramos, a manga-influenced artist who would soon become best-known for his work on Impulse. While the art, inked by seven different artists, is highly readable and flows perfectly fine, Ramos doesn't really imbue it with the gritty, realistic feel the story seems to call for, and his style is often at odds with the subject matter. 

The climax, however, the part where the comic becomes a superhero comic again, is handled quite well.

In a neat bit of symmetry, the Bogdanoves link this version of John Henry Irons to the folk hero who inspired the "real" version of the character's name. The story ends with a splash page full of prose text, which includes the lines, "Still others believe...that it was he who, at the age of 65, challenged and beat the infamous 'inky-doo' spike-driving machine that threatened to replace human labor with machinery...striking a fabled last blow for human rights before he died!" 

It is one of several possible futures that the text lays out, and, indeed, several of them are interesting enough to at least be suggestive of sequels that never came; would Steel join the forces of the Union in his remarkable armor, or supply them with weapons, and help topple the Confederacy? 

I'm personally not crazy about the design of his armor, which, for some reason seems to be more golden than iron or steel. Perhaps it's meant to be made of copper, but the subtlety of metal variations was apparently too much for the coloring of 1994, and thus it looks yellow, which translates too easily to gold in a reader's mind. On the other hand, I suppose the color does contrast sharply with the armor of the normal, non-Elseworlds version of Steel's armor, making it immediately apparent with a glance at the cover that this is meant to be a different version of Steel. 

Superman 80-Page Giant #2 (1999) The second  of the late 1990s Superman 80-Page Giants came in the wake of the "Superman: King of the World" storyline. While it's not terribly important to have read or to remember that story arc from the Superman books of the time in order to follow the stories in this anthology—I only read a few key parts of it and some crossovers—it entailed Superman gradually becoming more and more zealous in his protection of the world, to the point that he begins taking it over with an army of his robot duplicates. The Superman bent on making himself king of the world ends up not being Superman at all, but villain Dominus disguised as Superman. So each of the seven short stories here has Superman meeting with or interacting with one supporting character or another, generally apologizing or trying to get them to forgive and trust him again.

The best story of them all may actually be the first one, starring Superman himself, by Mike Friedman and Peter Doherty. In it, Superman swoops in and rescues a man who was trying to commit suicide, and then decides to have a cup of coffee with him and talk things over. Emergencies keep arising though, and since Superman can't leave the man alone, he takes him with him, the man ultimately helping to deliver a baby while Superman deals with another emergency.

It's a pretty great, evergreen Superman story, and while it's prompted by the "King of the World" story, in which it shows how the "real" Superman deals with the fear of things spiraling out of his control, it also shows how he accepts it (that is, without actually having to control the entire world and having  a Superman robot on every corner).

The other half-dozen stories star Steel, Wonder Woman, Jimmy Olsen, Supergirl (here in her angel phase), Lex Luthor and Lois Lane. My favorite of these were probably the Steel and Wonder Woman stories, by Chuck Dixon, Scott Beatty, Eric Canete and Shawn Martinbrough and Eric Luke, Brian Denham and Andy Lanning, respectively, because they're both fairly strong just-two-heroes-hanging-out stories. The Steel one is set during the time when both heroes were on the Justice League, and Martian Manhunter makes a brief cameo (along with his cookies); the Wonder Woman one reads a little weirdly today, if only because it involves her feelings for Superman and the fact that she's sort of bummed that they're just friends and that he's in love with his wife.

Among the perhaps unexpected creators involved are Mike Oeming (no Avon, just Oeming) and Mark Millar.

Oeming draws the Jimmy Olsen story, in which Superman's pal must endure his friends' ribbing and his own distrust of Superman, while he's ultimately involved in a rather Jimmy Oslen-ish sceneario (this one's written by Joe Casey).

Millar writes—well, overwrites, really—the Lois Lane story, in which she talks about how and why she loves him, and while he might not care how others think of him, she does. This ones drawn by Sean Phillips, and, I don't know, it's downright weird encountering pre-Authority Mark Millar these days. I don't know if it was the tight leash of corporate super-comics editors or what, but the early Millar seemed like a much stronger, sharper, more incisive writer than the later, high-concepts for media adaptation Millar. 

It's far from Millar's best Superman writing—that actually would be his issues of Superman Adventures—but it's head and shoulders above much of his  post-Big Two superhero writing.