Every Day Is Like Wednesday

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.  

Okay, serious question for those who were reading Marvel comics at the time: Was the Silver Surfer a really popular character in the mid-90's...? 

Here's something I've been wondering about off and on over the course of the last month or so, ever since I saw the above credit at the beginning of Nightwing Vol. 2: Night of the Owls, which makes it pretty clear that Nightwing was created by Marv Wolfman and George Perez.

Now, please don't misunderstand me. I am not going to argue with the credit, and I'm happy those two men—both of whom are very talented men, whose work has certainly given me hours and hours of entertainment in my life—are recognized for their contribution to the character and I assume (or, perhaps I should say, hope) that such credits bring with them some sort of financial remuneration.

I am simply curious as to why some DC Comics heroes, for example, always have the names of their creators cited in comics they appear in, why some characters never have the names of their creators cited, and why some sometimes do and sometimes don't. There's probably a degree of legal reasons (There certainly is for the current way the credits for Superman's creators appear in Superman comics now, as not only are Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster credited, but there's also a "By Special Arrangement with the Jerry Seigel Family" following it these days).

Nightwing seems like a particularly murky character for anyone to be assigned credit for creating, though.

The character Dick Grayson, the secret identity of the original Robin, who would grow up to abandon that identity and take on the new one of Nightwing, was created in 1940 by Bob Kane and Jerry Robinson and Bill Finger.

The superhero codename "Nightwing" was created by Edmond Hamilton and Curt Swan in a 1963 issue of Superman; it's the name that a disguised Superman takes on while fighting crime in The Bottle City of Kandor, where he has no superpowers, but operates as a sort of Kyrptonian version of Batman (with Jimmy Olsen in the sidekick role as Flamebird). That version of Nightwing was returned to repeatedly in the Silver Age (as in the story under the above cover).

And then in a 1984 issue of Tales of the Teen Titansm (not the one above, but that's the nicest cover image of the original costume I could find), Grayson finally sheds his Robin identity in favor of the codename Nightwing, complete a new costume.

That comic was written by Marv Wolfman and drawn by George Perez, so they get the creation credit. But they didn't create the character or the codename, merely assigned the latter to the former, and Perez created a new costume for him, although that's been changed repeatedly over the years, and, obviously, bears no real resemblance to what Nightwing is currently wearing (I'm not sure who designed his New 52 costume, but whether it was Jim Lee, who was originally credited as redesigning the whole universe, or one of the many other artists who helped him, it's worth noting that it is essentially a refinement of his previous costume, which was itself a refinement of the costume before that, and so on back to Perez's original, I suppose).

It seems then that more accurate credits would be something along these lines:

Dick Grayson created by Bob Kane, Jerry Robinson and Bill Finger

Nightwing created by Edmond Hamilton and Curt Swan

Dick Grayson-as-Nightwing created by Marv Wolfman and George Perez

Nightwing's current costume designed by Jim Lee or Whoever

This particular character seems like one of the trickier and murkier when it comes to assigning aspects of creation, as there's over 40 years difference between the introduction of the character "Dick Grayson" and the introduction of his Nightwing identity and costume.

But Nightwing is hardly alone and having a knotty creation story. For example, how to deal with all of those Golden Age superheroes re-created as new versions in The Silver Age under Julius Schwartz's direction? You know, The Flash, The Green Lantern, The Atom, Hawkman?

Gardner Fox and Harry Lampert created a super-fast character named The Flash who wore a lightning bolt symbol over a red shirt in 1940, but Robert Kanighter, John Broome and Carmine Infantino created a whole new character with a different costume, keeping just the name, powers and the lightning bolt and red top.

Or, more dramatically, Martin Nodell and Bill Finger created their Green Lantern, a character who had the power to manipulate green energy channeled through magic ring he charged with a magic lantern the same year the original Flash debuted. But in the '60s, John Broome and Gil Kane gave a new character that name and some of the same powers, but with a vastly different back-story. And man, what about a character like Green Lantern Kyle Rayner, another new character with the codename of the original, but who spins out of the elaborate back-story that spun out of the second Lantern...?

I guess it just goes to show how collaborative these sorts of shared-universe, corporate super-comics can be.

I'm all for giving credit where credit's due, and money to creators whose creations are making money (Either because doing so is a contractual obligation or simply because there's so much money to throw around it wouldn't kill a movie studio to give the guys who forge their golden geese a coupla extra bucks here and there).

I'm just glad I'm not the guy who has to determine who created how much of what, and how to assign the credit.

The look on her pegasus' face on the cover.

Don't get me wrong, the contents that I've read so far—the preview from Legion of Super-Heroes and the first two issues—have been pretty great, with the black and white format really flattering artist Ernie Colon's line-work and design (even if draining the art of color makes some of the more detailed panels less textured and harder to read thanks to all the statuary and incidental animals and anthropomorphic fauna crowding some of them).

But I haven't encountered anything quite as funny as the contrasting expressions of the happy, excited Amethyst gesturing proudly at her own logo and the embarrassed, slightly mortified look of her poor steed, who can't believe she's making him wear all that bling and go out in public with a braided tail and fake unicorn horn on.

This trade paperback collects the final five issues of the relatively short-lived Justice Society of America monthly, which relaunched as such in 2007, replacing the canceled JSA (which lasted 87 issues, from 1999 to 2006).

It was a Geoff Johns/Alex Ross joint, but once they left the book, it rather rapidly fell apart. Perhaps because DC was spreading the franchise too thin, splitting the cast between two JSA books, JSoA and JSA All-Stars, when the JSA aren’t really an X-Men or Avengers-like franchise. Perhaps it was because Johns and Ross are more popular than the JSA. Perhaps it was because once Ross and Jerry Ordway left, the book lacked a consistent, strong, appealing visual identity. Or perhaps because by that point, it was, like most of the DC’s line, dead in the water, a lame duck book awaiting cancellation and relaunch as part of the “New 52” initiative.

At any rate, these five issues are complete fucking mess; confused, inchoate and unpleasant to spend any sustained amount of time around. It’s kind of a shame; I feel bad for writer Marc Guggenheim, who must have inherited something of a mess, and clearly had a unique direction he wanted to go in...and never got the chance to go in (Several sub-plots are simply abandoned in the last issue, when he clearly had to wrap up his run, and all of post-COIE continuity, and a character rather randomly killed off, because, who cares, DC Comics was, at that point, over anyway).

And there are some talented folks involved. Darwyn Cooke delivers a few fine covers, covers which add to the visual cacophony, given how they look nothing at all like any of the art around them.
George Perez and Jerry Ordway provide some fine art, but it clashes horribly with the style of Tom Derenick, who draws a big chunk of the comics in this trade.

And while I generally liked Derenick’s pencils in the past, his art is downright repulsive here; seemingly inked and colored via airbrush. I found it pretty nauseauting, and for the life of me I can’t imagine why series editor Joey Cavalieri thought it would work on different chapters of a story that Ordway was drawing the rest of…unless he too succumbed to the “Aw, fuck it” attitude that clearly infected everyone working for or with the publisher as the “New 52” appeared on the horizon.
(Above: Derenick and Ordway draw JSA members)

I missed the first two-thirds or so of Guggenheim’s run, so I was a little lost at the beginning of things, trying to make sense of the fairly changed status quo.

The cast is still pretty large, and includes Kingdom Come import Lightning, whip-wielding Mr. America, the Kate Spencer version of Manhunter, Bule Devil (?) and completely new-to-me characters The Red Beetle (a woman wearing a red version of Blue Beetle II’s costume); buxom, white-clad healer Ri and Darknight, who looks like Batman without little bat-ears on his cowl.

They’re now based in a fictional city of Monument Point, where The Flash Jay Garrick is the mayor (and usually wearing a suit and tie with a lightning bolt pin on his lapel, without which he would be completely unrecognizable, because hair color and costumes are all any artists do to distinguish super-characters from one another).

And Green Lantern Alan Scott is now wearing a fairly crazy new get-up, which makes him actually resemble a big green lantern.
It took me a bit, but I think I actually kind of love it now.

The book’s fiftieth issue was an oversized anniversary celebration type of issue, divided into different “episodes” for some reason (that seem extra out of place in a trade collection like this, as one of the chapters is further divided into sub-chapters, while the others aren’t), each by a different artist.
The opening one is by Perez, and is a nice distillation of the post-Crisis conception of the Justice Society as the first generation of superheroes, the ones who ultimately inspired the “real” heroes of the DC Universe, the Silver-to-Bronze Age versions of Superman, Batman and their various Justice League peers.

It’s only ten pages long, but it feels longer with Perez’s panel-packed pages, and opens with bits of Superman, Batman and The Flash Barry Allen’s origins, and how they looked to various Society members for an understanding of what a superhero is, exactly, and more and more legacy heroes are introduced throughout the course of the super-short story, from a few pages of a young Hal Jordan fretting over becoming a member of the GLC until he joins Alan Scott on an adventures, to Aquaman climbing out of the ocean for the first time, to a panel of Ronnie Raymond and Courtney Whitmore.
I can see why the existence of a World War II era generation of superheroes preexisting in a fictional world before Superman, Batman and Wonder Woman could be perceived as problematic by some of the higher-ups at DC—it does seem somewhat artificial to give primacy to the also-rans; if Superman is the first superhero in the real world, why can’t he also be the first superhero in the DC Universe?—but it’s impossible to have the Big Three and the more “iconic” (i.e. the ones from Superfriends) versions of Flash and Green Lantern be eternally young and modern and pre-date their Golden Age counterparts without doing something as silly as having multiple versions of the characters on multiple Earths.

But if the choice is between Superman coming along a generation or two after Green Lantern Alan Scott and Starman or being a 90-year-old himself or banishing a bunch of the DCU’s best characters to a sub-universe, I think the pre-“New 52” way of having generations of superheroes works best. It gives the fictional DCU a longer, deeper, more detailed and exciting fictional history to go along with its fictional locales, and it allows for more characters for writers and artists to play with.

With the “New 52,” the decision seems to have been to wipe out all of the legacy characters (except the Robins, for some reason) and the existence of pretty much any character that might have existed prior to 2007 (Exceptions are seemingly limited to Etrigan The Demon and whoever’s in Demon Knights, and Jonah Hex and a few of the cowboy heroes). The result is DC lost not only a lot of history, but a lot of characters, with most of the JSA ones being recreated as “Ultimate” versions of themselves in an alternate universe (In this book alone, it looks like we’ve lost Cyclone, Courtney “Stargirl” Whitmore, Mr. Terrific II, Dr. Mid-Nite III, Jade, Obsidian, Silver Scarab, Red Beetle, Ri, Darknight, Lightning, Mr. America, Jesse Quick, Manhunter, Atomsmasher, Judomaster II and Citizen Steel. That’s an awful lot of characters, and while many of the original JSA members will likely be recreated in Earth 2—your Spectres and Wildcats and Dr. Fates so on—that seems like an awful lot of characters to lose just so Superman can claim “First!” on the cape and tights look in your fictional universe. I find that aspect of the "New 52" reboot pretty perplexing, as DC and Marvel seem to be transitioning into an IP farm business model, so de-creating a bunch of IPs seems...like something the publisher would seek to avoid, rather than leap into).

(Jeez, where was I…? Oh!)

“Episode 2” of issue #50 is drawn by by Freddie Williams II and follows time-traveling villain Per Degaton as he encounters a bigger, badder future version of himself, who repeatedly re-absorbs him from various points in his past adventures, allowing us to see brief appearances by Infnity Inc, the original version of The Crime Syndicate, the villains PD teamed up with in the early bits of All-Star Squadron and so on. That’s followed by a segment drawn by Howard Chaykin, recounting the time the House Un-American Activities Commission called the JSA in during the 1950s to bust their chops, and pretty much force them into early retirement. And for the fourth and final “episode,” Derenick and his new style arrive to bring us up to speed on the new, weird status quo of the JSoA.

The remainder of the book is devoted to the story arc “The Secret History of Monument Point,” in which Mayor Garrick learns there is a big, weird door deep beneath the city, which leads to a big, weird ancient city, which the Society and the Challengers of the Unknown team up to explore, and accidentally unleash a Kirby-esque giant monster god that seems a little too close to Gog, the Kirby-esque giant monster god that Johns and Ross and company pitted the team against in the opening arc of this volume of the title.

Meanwhile, some other villain has made Mr. Terrific dumb, a plotline Mr. T spends a significant amount of time dealing with, until it is simply resolved off-panel in the last issue, because the book was apparently canceled a lot faster than Guggenheim expected (Also going nowhere is a potential romantic arc between Dr. Fate and Lightning, which came on the heels of his rescuing of her from a weird Dr. Fate dimension in the 50th issue).

Derenick draws the first half of “Secret History,” while Jerry Ordway draws the second. Their styles couldn’t be less compatible; I vastly preferred Ordways', which was cleaner, crisper, flatter and more “comic book-y,” and thus vastly more appropriate for the old school heroes of the JSA (Even the newer characters like Stargirl and Terrific have some fairly old-school looking costumes compared to, say, anything Jim Lee has ever designed).
The monster god guy is ultimately only defeated when one of the Society’s most powerful members (Spoiler! It’s Alan!) sacrafices his life to destroy it. That would probably have been a big, dramatic deal…if DC didn’t reboot their universe the following month. Looking at the characters who are in attendance at Alan’s funeral, it appears that Terrific is the only one that still exists at all in the DC Universe—although Jay Garrick and the late Alan Scott have been recreated in a parallel universe within the New 52-iverse’s multiverse.

As for what became of these particular creators, Perez was heavily involved in the New 52, although not used very well—he wrote and provided lay-outs for the rebooted Superman, which didn’t work out so well, and he inked a few issues of the rebooted Green Arrow. He’s now drawing parts of World’s Finest.

Guggenheim and Derenick both seem to be MIA. And Ordway was responsible for helping Dan DiDio introduce a new version of the Challengers of the Unknown in the pages of the new DC Universe Presents title.

It seems somehow wrong to say that I kind of like Alex Ross out loud or in public like this, as if admitting I like and appreciate a lot of his work may compromise my reputation as a cranky, cynical, hard-to-please critic who hates everything. Additionally, liking Alex Ross seems kind of un-cool, or—what's the word the kids use these days?—square.

Mostly because Ross not only promotes backwards-looking nostalgia for things that weren't very good the first time around (and he does so quite persuasively), but also because he embodies such nostalgia.

Ross is like a living, breathing avatar of the veneration of one's childhood experiences with superheroes. A lot of us imprint on the first superheroes we encountered as kids, and follow them like baby ducks from that point on. So Barry Allen is the best Flash and Hal Jordan is the best Green Lantern only because they were Ross' firsts; the satellite League is champagne and what followed was shit because the former was his first Justice League and the latter wasn't. (Not that Ross has said any of this in interviews or anything; I'm just assigning these sentiments to him, as he symbolically represents them).

I certainly understand why dissing Ross is therefore pretty commonplace among critics, fans and people with access to the Internet, but that doesn't mean I feel compelled to dis him too.

I like the fact that he likes Captain Marvel and Plastic Man, and considers them at least as important as all the other DC superheroes he considers icons and treats like saints in his work. I like the fact that he dresses up friends, relatives and whoever he can convince to wear a cape and lay on a coffee table in a flying pose to play dress-up for him (I would probably be able to bring myself to buy Greg Land comics if each issue of his work included photos of people dressed in X-Men costumes making silent movie actor-broad facial expressions). I like the fact that he knows enough about human anatomy to remember that men have genitals, and draws them under their pants. I think he's a pretty fantastic superhero costume designer (see Kingdom Come and Astro City for particularly good examples). And I even enjoyed some of his recent comics collaborations, like Avengers/Invaders and Justice (his JSoA arc, on the other hand, was pretty tedious, and I remain shocked at how boring the Ross spear-headed Project: Super Powers work has been).

But there's no denying he has his weaknesses as an artist, and the greatest of these seems to be a relative lack of imagination. He's been doing a great deal of cover work these last few years, much of it for DC super-comics, and a great deal of that work is, well, just plain boring.

If Ross' strengths are his nearly photo-realistic portrayal of characters, and the iconic aspects of them that he draws out from them by drawing them in certain poses, the power of those strengths erodes the more he paints the same subjects. This makes him a pretty rotten cover artist for an ongoing series, as he's been on Batman, Superman and Justice Society of America for a while now.

There's only so many different ways in which to paint Batman looking stately and slightly perturbed on a rooftop. Looking down at the reader, in profile, in the rain, from behind, holding a batarang, etc. I think this might have been one of his most dynamic and imaginative Batman covers,

and what's going on in it, exactly? A low-angle on Batman, here yelling instead of glowering, while some crazy lights fill the background? Considering what's actually going on inside the comic book—which, you may recall, involved Batman being shot up with drugs while his back-up personality, an alien Batman from a different world, took over his mind and made him dress in a homemade rainbow-colored costume while he took a baseball bat to his foes, while getting advice from Bat-Mite who was also half alien insect for some reason—well, it's pretty prosaic, isn't it?

I was thinking about how Ross is at once a great comic book cover artist (the painting makes books look important, and he's good at the single pin-up image that's in style these days) and what a miserable comic book cover artist he is (the images are almost always boring and infinitely less entertaining than whatever they're actually covering), when I saw the cover for the new printing of the History of the DC Universe trade, which collects a Marv Wolfman/George Perez effort from 1986. (I talked a bit about why re-publishing the book now seems a somewhat strange publishing decision in this week's 'Twas column at Blog@, if you're at all interested).

I haven't read it, as I wouldn't get interested in comics until I became a teenager almost a decade after it was published, but apparently it's a sort of definitive, here's-what's-in-and-what's-out story of the DC universe's entire fictional history during the post-Crisis years. Or, as the solicit says, it features "virtually every character in the DC Universe, this tale takes us from the dawn of creation to the end of recorded history."

Wow, that sounds like pretty exciting stuff, right? Every character ever? Every adventure ever, over the course of billions of years? What kind of cover image might Alex Ross come up with for that?

Seriously? That's the best he could think of? The history of the DC Universe can essentially be boiled down to the fact that Krypton exploded, Bruce Wayne saw his parents killed and was then dive-bombed by giant bats, Captain Marvel screamed in Egypt this one time and the trinity all have different good sides they like to be photographed from? Oh, and there was a blue space man with funny hair.

I mean murder, the destruction of a planet and creepy blue space men are pretty dramatic things, but they aren't terribly representative of billions of years worth of events involving gods, aliens, humans and superhumans; it's more like Superman's Tuesday lunch hour.

Here are the original covers for the series:


I'm not terribly excited by these covers, nor am I sure I understand why the images repeat with only some small alterations between issues as if it were an example of one of those can-you-spot-the-differences picture puzzles, but it at least gives some idea of the scope of the project. You know it involves superheroes and an evil god and cowboys and wars and Uncle Sam and gorillas.

Here's a cover to what I assume is one of the first collections, although I don't know who the artist is:

In some ways I think it is the weakest of the three, but, one advantage it has over the Ross version is that it's an active image—there's a character doing something on it—and it gives some sense of the scope. The red mess of characters might not be all that well chosen—does Vigilante really deserve such a prominent spot?—but again you see that the history involves a World War I flying ace and World War II sergeant, little blue space men and giant ghosts of god, Batman and Darkseid, Wonder Woman and hawkpeople.

I'll probably try to pick this up—despite the fact that I imagine most if not all of the information within is completely irrelevant—the next time I have an extra $13 to waste at the comic shop, but I wouldn't mind it having a less lame cover.


*******************

I wonder why DC hasn't done a new version of this series yet? I know they had Dan Jurgens draw one about the post-Infinite Crisis "New Universe" in the opening issues of 52, but 52 ended with another reboot, and then was followed by Darkseid-falling continuity hiccups/disorientations and another re-ordering of the multiverse and recration of the DC Universe in Final Crisis. When the dust has finally settled—after they've figured out where they're going with the Legion of Super-Heroes, the Multiverse and maybe this "Blackest Night" business, Paul Levitz, Dan DiDio, Geoff Johns and Grant Morrison should all sit down and figure out the definite past, present and future of the DCU, at least in the broadest of strokes and do a new series in this splash page-and-prose format.

Fans would appreciate it, it would be helpful to creators and editors, and, after hammering out what "counts" and what doesn't, it should be pretty easy to produce—just have Geoff Johns polish his notes from the meeting for the prose, and have Perez provide a bunch of new splash pages and Bam! comic book hit. I know DiDio has spoken in past interviews about not wanting to nail history down so much that it limits DC's abilities to tell stories but a) that's stupid, since it's not like there weren't a ton of great DC Comics between the years 1986 and 2005 (actually, come to think of it, aren't most of DC's very best efforts from those years?) and b) it can be down in general enough terms it doesn't limit the ability for future writers to tell good stories (For example, knowing whether Wonder Woman started her career five months after Superman started his or five years afterward, and whether she co-founded the Justice League or joined eight years later doesn't exactly take any stories off the table).

But be sure to get a better cover for that version, guys.

Hey gang. Sorry for the delay in posting this week’s new super-comics reviews; the Friday release day put this week’s haul smack dab in the middle of the non-comics blogging portion of my week. Thanks for your patience.

On the subject of what-gets-posted-when, look for two days’ worth of updates on Sunday, and the best of 2007 feature on Monday. Next week’s “Weekly Haul” will also be later than usual, due to the holiday and new comics not being released until freaking Friday, but should go up Friday evening rather than Saturday night.




Action Comics #860 (DC Comics) Superman, powerless under Earth’s red sun, runs around the year 3008, while we continue to meet Legionnaires. I think we’re up to 450 at this point. Plus, torture. I suppose this half-over “Superman and the Legion of Super-Heroes” arc by Geoff Johns and Gary Frank will make for a decent trade collection some day, but for now, the only thing keeping me awake while reading is scrutinizing the costume designs. Night Girl’s is almost awesome, but the cleavage diamond window ruins the cute cat head effect. Shadow Lass has neat boots. Polar Boy looks too cool, considering the fact that he is Polar Boy.




(Note: There were two covers for this issue. I went for the one featuring the devil wearing a cape, boots and no pants. That's evil!)

Amazing Spider-Man #545 (Marvel Comics) As much as I hated the first two issues of this four-issue storyline, I had to come back for the final installment, just to see if Joe Quesada really would do what he’s been threatening all along, or if it’s all been a misinformation campaign. And, well, he does do it.

Here’s a plot summary: Mary Jane makes a rational, reasonable argument about the fact that old people tend to die, Peter Parker makes a selfish argument about how he doesn’t much mind his aged aunt dying so long as it’s not his fault, the devil shows up, Mary Jane negotiates a better deal (Throw in a secret identity reboot and you got yourself a deal!), there’s a Lost In Translation gag where she whispers something in the devil’s ear the readers can’t make out, and BAM! the franchise is right back where it was when John Romita Sr. was drawing it.

I know I’ve expressed admiration for Quesada’s insistence at undoing the Spider-marriage despite the fact that he’s the only person in the whole world who seems to think it’s the right course of action before, but the amount of wiggle room he and co-writer J. Michael Straczynski leave for a future de-re-boot kind of takes away from that (Yeah, co-writer. They share a “story” credit, and no one gets a script credit. Interesting).

The end result is that it somehow manages to make this terribly written, poorly illustrated, over-priced and delayed story even more insulting, since the highly controversial, permanent can rather easily be unchanged at the drop of a hat (And that’s the problem with this sort of cosmic storytelling; it’s like a loose thread on a sweater, as the state of the DC Universe after a few reboots too many now so readily attests).

Even more galling? Nothing really happens, except that thing that you thought was going to happen all along. How does this work? Mephisto won’t tell Peter because it’s not important. Okay, but can someone let us in on the secret? How does this change the course of recent Marvel history? I mean, the past few years were kind of important, and Spider-Man played major roles in things like Civil War—if he didn’t unmask during it anymore, then did he switch sides? And does Tony Stark even know his secret identity? Did he fight on the Pro- side at all? Did he wear his black costume? Did he beat up Kingpin and cry a lot? What?

There’s an epilogue showing us the post “One More Day”status quo, and apparently Peter lives with his aunt again, she has her old hairstyle back, he rides a bike, and he hangs out with all his old high school friends (all this to undo a marriage, but nobody could reboot Harry Osborn’s hair?) and everyone looks much more stiff and heavily photo-referenced than they did in the front of the book.

That’s the first 31 pages. What else do you get for that extra dollar, besides nine extra story pages? Three pages of Aunt May’s Official Handbook to the Marvel Universe entry (Surprisingly, she ranks a 1 in strength, speed, durability, energy projection and fighting skills, and only a 2 in intelligence; you sold your marriage for that, Spidey?), six pages reprinting the marriage of Peter and MJ, and a page of Marvel freelancers and employees (and Harlan Ellison) kissing JMS’ ass.

Brian Michael Bendis said, “I do believe this will be remembered as one of the great runs, not only of Spider-Man, but of all comics.” Yes, Will Eisner’s Spirit. Stan Lee and Jack Kirby’s Fantastic Four. Dave Sim and Gerhard’s Cerebus. JMS’ ASM. It’s particularly funny in that Bendis’ straight-faced crazy-ass compliment comes after a list of JMS’ accomplishments on the titles, many of which the preceding 33-pages just undid.

Kevin Feige, who is apparently the producer/president of Marvel Studios draws attention to the storyline in which Aunt May discovered Peter’s secret identity, just as Bendis did, which this story un-writes.

My favorite though is Mark Millar’s. He points out that JMS doubled sales on ASM (John Romita Jr. says he tripled them; which Marvel employee to believe?!), but even more amusingly, this: “Joe picking up the writing duties on Amazing Spider-Man was a seismic moment in modern comics. He, together with Daredevil writer Kevin Smith, showed Hollywood that far from slumming it in comic books.”

You know, I liked a lot of Kevin Smith’s movies; I think he’s a great writer of dialogue and I usually find something to like in everything he’s done, but c’mon, in Hollywood, he’s an extreme lightweight. His movies don’t make any serious money, he’s not a terribly talented or even skilled director, and he’s tried to make exactly one movie that doesn’t revolve around his Clerks cast, and it was his biggest failure, one which drove him to make more Clerks spin-offs.

And before he started work on ASM, JMS was a TV writer who’s greatest achievement* was Babylon fucking 5. All apologies to any Babylonians in the reading audiences, but that’s hardly a show representative of “Hollywood.” I have a hard time believing anyone in Hollywood picked up their copy of Comic Shop News one morning and spit cappuccino all over it, eyes bugging out of their head as they exclaimed to their maid, “Straczynski’s writing a funny book? But—but—he could be writing science-fiction television shows! Why would he give all that up just to write Spider-Man? Has he gone mad?”

I actually feel kind of bad for JMS at this point. I really enjoyed a lot of his run on the title, particularly at the beginning when he was working with JRJR. The addition of Aunt May into Peter’s confederacy, his job as a public school science teacher, that 9/11 issue, new villains…there was a lot to like (I didn’t read “Sins Past,” so I can’t hate on it properly, I’m afraid). From “The Other” on, however, the Spider-Man franchise has been in a nosedive in quality, and JMS goes out on the most sour note imaginable.




Avengers: The Initiative #8 (Marvel) Taskmaster replaces Gauntlet as Camp Hammond’s drill sergeant; Irredeemable Ant-Man Eric O’ Grady, fresh from his own cancelled title, joins the initiative and gets in a giant brawl with Yellowjacket and Stature; the 616 Geldoff is introduced** and Dan Slott and his new co-writer Christos N. Gage rewind things for a behind the scenes look at how Tony Stark, Mr. Fantastic and Hank Pym brought about the Initiative from the pages of Civil War. And it's good. I mean, geez, where else are you going to see Triathalon, Dragon Man, War Machine and Stature in the same comic book? Confidential to Reed and Tony: Me, I like the name “G.I. Ant-Man.” I mean, it’s a lot better than “Yellowjacket.” Yellowjackets are small, but Pym grows giant—what’s up with that?




Batman #672 (DC) So, you like this cover, in which Batman hangs a left on his Bat-Cycle? Well, I sure hope you didn’t buy this issue for all the motorcycle action, because there are no motorcycles in this comic at all. Instead, Bruce Wayne and his girlfriend Jezebel Jet parachute out of hot air balloon, that Bane-looking Batman who put a footprint on Batman’s back shows up, another Batman with a napalm gun sets police men on fire, and Bat-Mite has a dramatic entrance. A lot of potentially cool stuff to compose a cover image around, really. But Tony S. Daniel decided to go with generic image of Batman on a motorcycle, probably form his portfolio.

With that Ra’s al Ghul nonsense behind him, writer Grant Morrison gets back to the Batman versus different versions of Batman plot he’s been working on for most of his run, and he brings a lot of the Morrison-brand craziness. Hints of some kind of psychological experiment that is never more than alluded to, magic words, strange exclamations (“UDD!” “KKAA!!”) and Bat-Mite. Did I mention Bat-Mite?

It would all be terribly exciting if Daniel knew the first thing about drawing a comic book, but Morrison goes to print with the artist he has, not the artist he might have liked. So scenes which should be incredibly exciting just seem awkward, and I sit with the comic open in my lap, in stunned disbelief that the very best artist DC could find to work with Grant freaking Morrison is the guy who drew page seven, in which the placement of the dialogue bubbles and layout-suggest Wayne Manor’s kitchen is so big that the entire city of Gotham is actually inside it, and in which we also see Bruce Wayne lose about four inches of height between panels two and five.

I did like Daniel’s Bat-Mite on page 22, one the four one page splashes (There’s also a two-page splash with two smaller inset panels). It has so few panels per page it’s paced almost like manga. Or at least manga drawn by someone who’s never read any of it. Or any comic books. Or a fucking comic strip.

Still, Bat-Mite. You can’t go wrong when Bat-Mite’s involved, can you? Oh, right.

Blue Beetle (DC) This issue seems a bit worrying. The title of the story is "End Game." The story involves Blue Beetle finally getting to the bottom of The Reach's insidious plans for earth, in a one-page drawing room scene where he explains it to Danni Garrett (and the reader), and both BB and The Reach deciding it's time to finish their conflict. Is this writer John Rogers bringing the series-long conflict to a climax because it's time to move on to another big storyline, the next phase of his plans for the title? Or because it's time to finally cancel it, and DC's letting him finish up the story? (It's solicited at least through March, with the next few issues continuing what sounds like a climactic battle between Jamie and The Reach).

I found this particular issue to be a little weaker than the best Blue Beetles I've read, as it's less self-contained, but it is still solidly crafted, with a balance of drama, humor and action that is exactly what should be the gold standard for superhero comics. And damn, Jaime's parents are awesome.




The Brave and The Bold #9 (DC) Remember the first issue of this series, in which Mark Waid and George Perez told an absolutely perfect Batman/Green Lantern team-up? Or the last issue, wherein they did the same with The Flash family and The Doom Patrol? Well, this is a lot like that, save that it features not one, not two, but three team-ups, each pairing consisting of characters and teams that, if they were the only team-up in the issue, probably wouldn't have moved very many copies (There's a reason the original Brave and The Bold quickly became a Batman team-up title). So while The Challengers of The Unknown contend with the Book of Destiny as a framing device, we get the pre-52 Metal Men and Robby "Dial H For Hero” Reed, The Boy Commandos and Blackhawk during World War II (Attention Birds of Prey fans!), and the momentous*** meeting of Hawkman and the All-New Atom, Ryan Choi.

I can't think of anything new to say about how good Perez is, so I'm not going to bother. He draws about 100 characters in these 22 pages, and they all look great. I marvel at the fact that DC even lets Perez draw one of their books; it makes much of their line seem merely mediocre, and the sub-par stuff (this week, Daniel's Batman, for example) look like garbage.

It's Waid who really impressed the hell out of me this issue, though. Not only does he cram four different narratives into a single 22-page issue, but each of the done-in-1/3rd stories are complete unto themselves, with a beginning, middle and end, often with at least a bit of a twist or punchline (Tin and Robby share a secret, Brooklyn appreciates the Blackhawks after all, Hawkman creeps out The Atom). Waid also tells each of the tales in the manner befitting the times in which they originate. So the two stories featuring past properties are told without narration, but with the reader observing them from the outside. The Hawkman/Atom story, set in the modern DCU, is written with Choi narrating, as if it were from an issue of his regular series. Waid nails Choi's personality as his creator Gail Simone established it, although he actually does a much better job writing Choi than Simone's ever managed—Waid even works in Simone's insistence on using quotes at random, but without mis-using asterisks.




Fantastic Four: Isla De La Muerte (Marvel) It doesn't take much to get me to look at a Fantastic Four comic. Usually something as simple as an allusion to The Thing vs. Chupacabras, for example, or an image of Benjamin J. Grimm in kicky vacation gear, or even a creator not generally known for superheroes like, oh, say, Tom Beland, tackling the franchise. This over-sized one-shot has all that and more, so I was expecting it to at the very least be pretty interesting but, good God was I surprised at how good it actually was. This was probably the best book I read this new comic day, edging out even the technically amazing Brave and The Bold.

The story? Three days a year, The Thing disappears on a top-secret vacation, which his fellow Fantastic Four members know nothing about. The curiosity, of course, kills them, and Johnny persuades Sue to persuadet Reed to track him. They find him on a Puerto Rican island, where he gets an annual party in his honor due to his resemblance to a rocky orange fort that's long protected the island. When the other 3/4ths of the team track him and discover a weird energy signal, Ben gets to make like the fortress and protect the island, this time from an invading army of Chupacabras.

Beland gets the voices of the Four and their relationships to each other absolutely perfectly (well, Sue using slang threw me on two occasions...but otherwise!), digging genuinely deeply at a few points, like when Sue and Ben have a heart to heart, or at the emotionally mature and affecting ending. He also makes inventive, fun uses of their powers, in action, everyday and gag situations (I liked Sue's super-powered mute button on her little brother). It's really everything you could possibly want from an FF story, while managing to even slip a little education into the mix (Hell, I learned some history, science and Spanish—and I hate learning on New Comic Day!).

While I'd love to see what a Beland-illustrated FF comic would look like, this one is drawn by Juan Doe, which sounds an awful lot like an alias, but I’ll take his word for it. Doe's style is hard to describe, but it reminded me of Kyle Baker's in its ability to straddle cartooniness and serious within the same image...sometimes even the same character. Actually, I thought of Baker, Kaare Andrews and Tom Williams at different points while reading it.

It's just a really all-around gorgeous book. Paired with Beland's really well written story, it makes for great super-comics done right. I'd like to see more Marvel work from both of these guys. Pronto.

You can see several pages from the book here. And you can see some more of Doe's art here. That guy is great. Here's the cover for the Spanish version, which has one sweet logo:





Green Lantern #26 (DC) Guest-artist Mike McKone joins Geoff Johns for a cool-down arc after the "Sinestro Corps" event story. Based on his work on JSA, it seems Johns often does some of his best work in terms of character development in these between-big-story stories, and he does seem to be treating GL as a JSA-style team book, checking in with plenty of players here. Sinestro, apparently given back his pants for good behavior, has a heart to heart with Hal; John Stewart contemplates Cosmic Odyssey and helps rebuild Coast City, The City Without Fear; The Guardians carve up some Lanterns and shove power batteries into 'em and do their cryptic dialogue thing; there's some business with "The Lost Lanterns" which hardcore GL fans probably get a lot more out of then I do; and Hal abuses his power ring to make out with Cowgirl and make one wonder how dude even has a secret identity at this point. It's pretty much Johns' normal mixture of inspired DCU space opera oddity, ham-fisted stupidity and deep, intimate knowledge of his principal characters and their fictional histories.

McKone is a welcome fill-in for poor Ivan Reis, who spent the last few months drawing several million aliens into the backgrounds of his panels. I liked his work here quite a bit (although his Tomar-Tu, son of that Silver Age orange chicken lizard man Tomar-Re, looked a bit weird from the front), and would like to see him take on a DC monthly soon. Maybe something that's currently drawn terribly, like JLoA or Batman?




Hulk Vs. Fin Fang Foom #1 (Marvel) Oh Marvel, why do you have to play me like this? This sounds like it has the makings of a perfect comic book. As the title alludes, it's a fight comic featuring The Hulk and the old Kirby-created, Godzilla-sized Eastern Dragon in short pants Fin Fang Foom—guy's name is fun to read. And who's writing it? Why, Peter David, a guy who knows how to pound out a fun comic script, and knows a thing or two about writing good Hulk stories. The solicitation promises a "double-sized" one-shot, and the cover price of $3.99, a buck more than your average 22-page Marvel comic, practically guarantees it.

But in fact, all we get is 22 pages of Hulk vs. Fin Fang Foom. The rest of the book has some stats and character history on one page, and a reprint of the first Fin Fang Foom story, which Marvel just sold me last year as part of their Marvel monster month. I felt like I got ripped off after reading this (or rather, reading the parts I haven't already read), and the fact that it came out on the same day as Amazing Spider-Man, which pulled the same trick (to a lesser extent; at least that was 31 pages of new content for $4), only made it worse. Hmm, reading the solicitation again, I see not only does it say the book is "double-sized," it also neglects to mention any artists beyond cover artist Jim Cheung (like, seeing the name "Jack Kirby" there might have tipped me off I was paying for a reprint), and promises "classic slugfests from the past." That's slugfests, plural, but I got one classic, singular. The line between hyperbole and lying? Crossed.

As for the pages worth paying for, David opens with a neat boxing opening, recapping the characters' histories, which was pretty funny (“In the left corner—with the lime green skin…In the right corner, in a more avocado-green hue…Both Fighters will be wearing purple trunks. We apologize for the confusion.”). From there, we find The Hulk, back when his head was kinda square and his speech pattern was kinda brutish but not all caveman-like (I like it a little more caveman-like, to be honest), is wandering around the Arctic or the Antarctic (depending on the page in question). Reverting to Banner, he's found by some scientists, and brought into their lab. Meanwhile, one of their fellow scientists discover what they think is a new dinosaur, but we know (because we saw the cover) that it's actually Fin Fang Foom. A little The Thing homage-ing later (The story is entitled "The Fin From Outer Space”), the green goliaths fight. A little. Like, for five pages. And that's it. Not much of a conflict for a one-shot. Or $4.

Oh, and since Marvel won't tell you who the artist is, I guess I should. It's Jorge Lucas on pencils, and Robert Campanella on inks. Lucas captures the Kirby designs of the title characters perfectly well, while embedding them in a world that is populated with characters of his own design (He's not trying to draw like Kirby, beyond retaining the monsters' essential Kirby-osity). And there's one really great panel in which we see Fin Fang Foom's gigantic arms emerging from the ice, so big they seem to bend at the tips due to the tiny scientist's perspective. It's a neat trick.

But not worth $4 to see. I don't know; download it if you understand how to do that. Or read it in the store. Or pray to your heathen gods that Marvel releases a Best of Fin Fang Foom trade some day soon, and include this story in it.




Ultimate Spider-Man (Marvel) A major character dies in a story that gives the death and reaction to it shockingly short shrift. Especially when you consider this is a Brian Michael Bendis comic. That dude invented decompression! The big, two-Goblin fight, with Spidey and SHIELD getting between them, is handled well by both Bendis and Stuart "Will Be Consdered New For The Next Three Years" Immonen, and they do a fine job on the mourning pages of the issue too, but it seemed rather rushed through for what should be one of the series' biggest moments so far.



*Actually, I think The Real Ghost Busters andShe-Ra: Princess of Power were far superior to Babylon 5.

**As far as I know. Has anyone else made fun of Bendis’ Geldoff in the Marvel Universe proper like this before?

***Momentous for Atom and Hawkman fans, anyway. All 47 or ‘em.

"There, there Superman. Tell your friend Wonder Woman what's bothering you."

"It's just-- it's just that today's Wednesday, the day new comic books usually come out and I get to spend time with all my fans. And this week, there are no new comics today. Sniff!"

"It's okay, Superman, it's okay. It's just for the holiday. The people who work in the warehouses that store the comics and the shipping companies that get comics to shops every week deserve a day off to spend Christmas with their families too, right? And besides, it's only one day. There will be new comics on Thursday, just like on all the other holiday weeks throughout the year..."

"No! Not this time. This week, new comics don't come out until Friday! Sob!"



"R-really? A two-day delay? W-well at least it's only this one week, right? Right?"

(Above: Or you could just read this, which features extensive back-up features written and illustrated by Phil Jimenez which condenses all of Wonder Woman's post-Crisis history into a few nice looking pages. Most of the character images near the end of the post are Jimenez's.)

Yesterday Newsarama.com ran a version of my Complete History of the Amazon Peoples (post-Crisis on Infinite Earths, post-Infinite Crisis/52). But in the off-chance that it just wasn’t wordy and/or nerdy enough for you, I’ve decide to present a previous, longer, more detailed version here, complete with some additional thoughts that just occurred to me in the last day or so, for the most masochistic among you. (Plus, it’s Wonder Woman Wednesday here at EDILW, so Amazon history seems especially apropos). Enjoy!

A Complete History of the Amazon Peoples

The history of the Amazons began over 30,000 years ago, but don’t worry, I’ll be sticking to the highlights only here. Not much happened those first 27,000 years of interest anyway.

The Amazons’ story begins with a pregnant woman killed by her mate. Gaea, goddess of the Earth, took pity on the slain woman, and placed the victim’s soul in a well, known as the Well of Souls. Because it was a well in which souls were kept, you see. Over the millennia, Gaea would place the souls of all women unjustly killed by men into the well.

In 1200 B.C., the Olympian goddesses Artemis, Athena, Aphrodite, Demeter and Hestia pooled their powers to create the Amazons, their very own, all-female race of human beings, each reincarnated from one of the souls from Gaea’s well.

Three thousand women strong, the Amazons founded the city-state Themyscria in Asia Minor, and looked to sister-queens Hippolyta and Antiope for leadership. The Olympian war god Ares sent Heracles and an army of men to Themyscria, where he proceeded to seduce Hippolyta, and, in short order, ransack the city and enslave it’s populace.

The defeat split the Amazons into two factions. Antiope lead the Amazons bent on vengeance into Greece after Heracles, while Hippolyta and her followers fled across the Atlantic, rebuilding Themyscira on an island in the Bermuda Triangle that was concealed by storm clouds. (It was a pretty nice place, and would later gain the nickname “Paradise Island”).

There, hidden form the rest of the outside world, Hippolyta’s Amazons were granted immortality by the goddesses and were charged with the sacred task of guarding “Doom’s Doorway,” which lead to Pandora’s Box, buried beneath the island. The Amazons took to wearing bracelets, symbols of their defeat and enslavement at the hands of men, and spent centuries in seclusion, with no man setting foot on the island.

Antiope’s faction, meanwhile, settled in Egypt, founding their own city-state of Bana-Mighdall, hidden from the outside world by sandstorms. They remained mortal, and devoted themselves to the arts of war and killing, renting themselves out as assassins and mercenaries.

A few millennia later, the Amazons started getting occasional visitors, perhaps the most notable one being U.S. pilot Diana Trevor, who crash-landed there, and joining the community, eventually giving her life in a battle against monsters from the island’s box. In honor of her, her uniform and medals were turned into a coat-of-arms (And that’s why Wonder Woman’s costume looks like the U.S. flag, got it?).




World relations took a giant leap forward when Ares launched a plot to destroy the world. Hippolyta decreed a contest to choose the single greatest warrior to send to so-called “Patriarch’s World” to challenge Ares. Her own daughter Diana, magically created out of clay and gifted by the goddesses and the god Mercury with life and super-powers, entered the contest in disguise and won.

She became known as “Wonder Woman,” fighting against Ares, joining the Justice League of America, and gradually becoming not only a superhero, but also an ambassador of the Amazonian way of life and, eventually, a political diplomat representing Themyscria in the United Nations. (For more on the contest, struggle against Ares and Diana’s debut in the U.S., see trade paperbacks Wonder Woman: Gods and Mortals and Wonder Woman: Challenge of the Gods by George Perez and various; and keep in mind Infinite Crisis knocked large swathes of these stories, out of continuity, and we’re not supposed to mentally rewrite them while rereading so that they’re set about a decade earlier than they are in the actual books. Or something).

Gradually the shores of Themyscira were opened up to the outside world, and Hippolyta and other Amazons journeyed into the United States, and the goddess Circe started causing no end of trouble, initiating a “War of the Gods,” reuniting the Antiope’s descendants with the Themysciran Amazons (which leads to a civil war), and sending the whole island into another dimension for a time—ten years for those in the dimension, about one year time for those not in that dimension).

She wasn’t the only evil divinity to cause problems on Paradise Island. Apokoliptian dictator and self-proclaimed dark god Darkseid invaded Themyscira with his armies, killing over a thousand Amazons (To witness the conflict firsthand, check out Wonder Woman: Second Genesis by John Byrne).

Not long after, the Amazons went to war again, this time in another civil war between the Bana-Midghdall faction and those who have lived on the island for centuries. The conflict was settled only when Hippolyta and Diana decided to end the monarchy, renouncing their queenship and princessship (um, is that even a word?) for a more demoractic form of government. Hippolyta’s longtime friend and confidant Phillipus becomes the island’s leader, under the title of Chancellor (This round of Amazonian strife can be read about in Wonder Woman: Paradise Lost and Wonder Woman: Paradise Found by Phil Jimenez and various others).

But wait, there’s more war yet to come! The Amazons joined force with the unlikely alliance of President Lex Luthor’s United States, Superman and heroes of earth, and Darkseid’s Apokolips in a battle against Imperiex in a sort of war of the worlds (That’s Our Worlds at War to us readers here on Earth-Prime; recently re-collected from two fat trades into one giant, fat Complete Edition). Many of them lost their lives, including Hippolyta.

Afterwards, Themyscria was once again transformed, this time into a sort of university devoted to cultural exchange and learning, open to men, women and intelligent creatures from all of existence. The architecture remained Greco-Roman, but had a bit of a sci-fi twist, accentuated by the fact that the island included an archipelago of smaller islands which floated in the air. Now rather than a single Wonder Woman attempting to spread peace and Amazon ideals throughout the world, the world could come to Themyscira, and the Amazons could promote peace through open engagement, their most open engagement since they’d left Europe millennia before.

This didn’t last long either. The floating islands were destroyed in a fight between Hera and Zeus, and the Amazons again began to draw inward, just as the U.S.A. was parking battleships nearby and contemplating invasion. They were beat to it by the armies of OMAC cyborgs, lead by the hidden, artificially intelligent Brother Eye, which sent them to Themyscira to destroy Wonder Woman, revenge for her killing of Brother Eye’s boss, Maxwell Lord who (Superboy punch!) it turns out was actually an evil scumbag bent on the eradication of metahumans and world domination by his own Checkmate organization all along, and not the slick but noble leader who legitimized the Justice League as a world power with official status years ago (These stories are collected in trade, but I can’t in good conscience recommend anything past the point in which Diana regains her eyesight because, come on? OMACs? Max is a villain? Pfft).

While the Amazons fought back against the OMACs with machine guns, swords and their own ultimate weapon, the Purple Death Ray, Wonder Woman brought an end to hostilities when she realized there were innocent people trapped inside the OMACs. She left the island, while Themyscria (and everyone on it) disappeared for over a year, a year in which Wonder Woman herself would be little seen.




Some Amazon heroines of note include:



HIPPOLYTA: Queen of the Amazons, mother of Diana and, in a time travel paradox the likes of which could only occur in the DCU, she became both her daughter’s successor and predecessor in the role of Wonder Woman. When Diana temporarily died and ascended to Olympus to become the Goddess of Truth, a death Hippolyta sought to avoid by stripping Diana of the title of Wonder Woman, Hippolyta donned a star-spangled skirt and golden eagle bustier to become the second Wonder Woman, serving a brief stint with the Justice League. She also traveled back in time to the year 1942, retroactively becoming the first heroine to go by the name Wonder Woman, when she helped the Justice Society of America in their battles against the Axis Powers. Known as “Polly” to her friends like Wildcat, Jay Garrick and Alan Scott, she fought battles against Stalker in the ‘40s (The Justice Society Returns! by David S. Goyer, James Robinson, Geoff Johns and about 40 other writers and artists), and fifth-dimensional invaders in the present (JLA: Justice For All by Grant Morrison, Mark Waid, et al).

When the JSA reformed at Sand Hawkins’ urging, Polly became a reserve member, helping out in their first battle against the dark lord Mordru (JSA: Justice Be Done). She died while leading the Amazons into the battle during the Imperiex War. She was next spotted in Jodi Picoult’s unreadable Wonder Woman and Amazons Attack, apparently brought back to life by Circe, totally insane and once again the queen of the Amazons.



ARTEMIS: A member of the mortal, Bana-Mighdall Amazons descended from Antiope, Artemis participated in wars against Hippolyta’s Amazons before her people settled their own part of Themyscria. When Hippolyta conceived of a second contest to see if Diana was still fit to be Wonder Woman (part of her plan to avoid Diana’s death in battle, which was prophesied to her), Artemis claimed the prize, and she journeyed to America to serve as the new Wonder Woman (Yes, this was about the time Kyle Rayner became Green Lantern, Connor Hawke became Green Arrow, John-Paul Valley became Batman and four dudes became Superman, why do you ask?), while Diana changed into a weird biker shorts, bra and jacket combo to lead her faction of the then-splintered Justice League, going as just plain old “Diana.”

Artemis, who lacked Diana’s super-powers and possessed a hot head and thirst for violence that no previous Wonder Woman was saddled with, died in a battle against the White Magician (Much of this era’s important stories are collected in Wonder Woman: The Contest by William Messner-Loebs and Mike Deodato). She was later rescued from Hades and returned to life. Since then she served as her people’s representative in Amazon government and as Themyscira’s Minister of Defense. She disappeared with Themyscira during the last crisis with a capital C, and has recently been seen in Amazons Attack, exchanging glances with Phillipus behind Hippolyte’s back and presumably, holding her finger to her ear and making the coo-coo sign whenever her queen wasn’t looking).



DONNA TROY: You know what, I don’t have any idea. And I don’t think anyone else does either, which has become a plot point in Countdown. Donna Troy’s existence was originally forced because Wonder Girl was appearing in Teen Titans along with sidekicks like Robin and Aqualad (Showcase Presents: Teen Titans Vol. 1, although Wonder Girl wasn’t actually Wonder Woman’s sidekick; rather, she was like the pre-Crisis Superboy, the star of Wonder Woman stories from when she was a girl. Oops. It’s a mistake DC has been fixing and re-fixing pretty much ever since, the last attempt being the Infinite Crisis lead-in DC Presents: The Return of Donna Troy (although, again, Countdown implies that wasn’t the last we’ve heard of Donna’s origins, perhaps for reasons discussed below)

At any rate, I think she’s still a magical twin of Diana, created to be her playmate, but captured by Dark Angel (recently seen in Supergirl) and forced to live a series of alternate lives, each full of tragedy. She was rescued by the Titans of Myth, who gave her powers and training before returning her to Earth, where she founded the Teen Titans as Wonder Girl, changed her codename and costume repeatedly (From Wonder Girl to Troia to Darkstar back to Troia to Wonder Woman for about a week and then back to Troia again), married, had a child, divorced, lost her son and ex-husband in a car crash, rejoined the Titans, was murdered by a Superman Robot, came back to life in deep space thinking herself one of the Titans of myth, lead a group of heroes to fight Alexander Luthor’s giant fingers in the middle of the universe, hung out in her swanky new space-faring base New Cronus talking to the late Harbinger’s continuity ball, took the name Wonder Woman for a few weeks around the time Black Adam was killing civilians by the millions, and she was last seen in the company of Jason Todd in Washington D.C. (New Teen Titans: Who Is Donna Troy?, Teen Titans/Outsiders: The Death and Return of Donna Troy and Infinite Crisis contain most of the pertinent parts of that complicated history, or at least readable recaps).

The interesting thing about poor Donna's origin is that, aside from needing to think up an origin to explain her existence in the first place, all of her complications as a character stemmed from Crisis on Infinite Earths, which reset Wonder Woman's timeline, so that she didn't appear until several years after the new "heroic age" had begun (that is, several years after Superman and Batman started their careers, and the Justice League was about to move into it's JLI incarnation). All the magical twin, abducted by Titans business was in reaction to the fact that Wonder Girl predated Wonder Woman (to solve all that, DC could have just rebooted Donna and the Titans alongside Wonder Woman back in the aftermath of COIE. One of the many rejiggerings of Infinite Crisis was that Wonder Woman was now a founder of the Justice League again, which meant she arrived in Man's World around the time Superman and Batman were debuting now. I didn't think much of it at the time, being so confused as to why DC was bumping all of their post-Crisis Wonder Woman/JLA stories out of continuity to replace them with all their older, worse stuff (I don't care how much anyone likes the Satellite Era, you can't honestly tell me the stories were better written than those of the JLI or Watchtower Eras). But if Wonder Woman was active during the first year or so of DC's second "heroic age," then that means she does indeed predate Donna Troy's Wonder Girl again, and we don't need any of that Titans of Myth/Dark Angel stuff anymore. DC can just revert back to their original origin for her. But...they haven't, have they? Or, if they have, nobody's mentioned it or did a story for it. In fact, the last Donna Troy origin story was the miniseries preceding Infinite Crisis, the awkwardly titled DC Presents: The Return of Donna Troy, but Phil Jiminez, Jose Garcia-Lopez and George freaking Perez, released just months before the continuity within it was going to maybe be altered, knocking it out of canon. Why on earth would you hire those three titanic talents to craft an excellent series (um, by Donna Troy standars, anyway), and then knock it out of canon immediately afteward? If it is out of canon. Like I said, there's been no indication that Donna's reverted to her pre-Crisis(On Infinite Earths) origin know that Wonder Woman's arrival was shunted backwards down the DC timeline, but it doesn't make a lot of sense to have Donna become Wonder Girl and not be inspired by Diana now that Diana was around as Wonder Woman at the same time she became Wonder Girl does it?



FURY: Helena Kosmatos’s father was killed during the Italian invasion of Greece during World War II, and seeking vengeance, she became possessed of the power of the mythological furies. Taking the name Fury, she donned a suit of golden mail to fight against fascism and the Nazis as part of the Young All-Stars, the probationary, youth faction of the war-time All-Star Squadron. Helena had super strength and the ability to fly thanks to the spirit of the Fury Tisiphone. The downside? The spirit would occasionally transform her, turning Helena into a winged, hooved monster. That big gray, bat-winged monster you see in Amazon battle scenes now and then? That’s Helena. While not an Amazon by birth, she's been living on the island for quite a while now. (None of these stories are available in trade because there is no God; that’s the only explanation for why All-Star Squadron is not available in trade that I can think of).





WONDER GIRL: Cassandra Sandsmark, daughter of Gateway City-based archaeologist Helena Sandsmark, assumed the role of Wonder Girl after swiping the Sandals of Hermes and Gauntlet of Atlas to help Diana take on a clone of Doomsday (Wonder Woman: Lifelines). Upon meeting Zeus in person, she asked for powers of her own, a request the god complied with, giving her superstrength and the ability to fly. After years of wondering who her real father was, it was eventually revealed why Zeus was so generous with the powers—he’s her father.

A former leader of the now-defunct group Young Justice, Cassie is currently a member of the Teen Titans. Though technically an American citizen and a demigod (an Olympian-American?), Wonder Girl was trained by Artemis and given the blessing to use the “Wonder” name by both Diana and Donna, making her something of an honorary Amazon.