DC Versus Marvel: The Amalgam Age Omnibus Pt. 1: DC Versus Marvel/Amalgam Comics

After resuming inter-company crossovers in 1994 and publishing a handful of 48-page specials, DC and Marvel initiated the big one in 1996: A big "crisis"-style crossover that would imperil both universes and star both publishers' line-ups of characters (or, at least, the most popular ones), with 11 champions from each publisher battling one another to decide which universe would live and which would die. 

In other words, it would essentially be an official version of a sort of game comic fans were forever playing, who would win in a fight between so-and-so and whoever.

The comic would play out across four over-sized issues in a special mini-series, plus a suite of 12 special tie-in one-shots. To encourage fan interest and engagement, the publishers would even have five of those 11 fights decided by popular vote.

I can't tell you how DC Versus Marvel (every other issue of which was technically entitled Marvel Versus DC) went over for the comics shops at the time, as I was only about 17 at the time, but it definitely worked on me. A teenager still new-ish to comics, I bought the main series and a handful of the tie-ins, despite my then complete ignorance of and disinterest in Marvel Comics. (At the time, my experience with Marvel characters was basically limited to what I had seen on the X-Men cartoon and childhood memories of a pair of Spider-Man cartoons.)

In assembling the creators, the co-editors—Marvel's Mark Gruenwald and DC's Mike Carlin—chose writers and artists from each publisher's talent pool, so there would be a pair of writers switching off on each issue, and two different art teams, with these changing every eight pages.

The DC writer was Green Lantern's Ron Marz (although he had written for both publishers, including runs on Thor and Silver Surfer for Marvel), and the Marvel writer was long-time Incredible Hulk writer Peter David (who was, at the time, also writing DC's Aquaman). 

Both seem to have done a fine job, although there doesn't seem to have been too much room in the overall plot's construction to matter overmuch who was actually writing the comics; the broad mechanics of the story seem to have already been determined by the editors, and then there was, of course, the fact that fans would be determining the winners of many of the battles, leaving the writers to only come up with the hows for those bouts with fan-picked endings.

Which isn't to suggest that the writers' jobs must have particularly easy on this obviously big assignment, of course. In addition to moving the story from plot beat to plot beat, Marz and David also had to write all the characters so that they felt and sounded like themselves and stick to the continuity of the time while simultaneously being as welcoming to new readers as possible. 

In this, both Marz and David seem to have succeeded...although I suspect the book might have been better served by having a single writer rather than two, if only for a slightly more consistent tone. (Re-reading it today, David's tendency to insert humor in his stories is definitely more noticeable in his sections of the series, with the various characters all cracking wise. It is perhaps most notable in his scenes featuring a particularly chatty, quippy Aquaman, who sounds more like Spider-Man than his usually grumpy himself (Odd, really, since, again, David was writing Aquaman at the time).

As for the artists, according to Marz's introduction in the DC Versus Marvel Comics: The Amalgam Omnibus, which of course collects the series, the first choices were Jose Luis Garcia-Lopez and John Romita Jr., "both understandably seen as emblematic of each publishing house." 

That...that would have been awesome. 

That pair of artists do indeed represent the characters of each universe well in their particular styles, but, beyond that, both were (and are) phenomenal artists. Their styles are so different that I don't think they could have overcome the main problem with the two-art team approach to the book, though, which was the distracting visual inconsistency...one that was only emphasized by how often the pencil artists handed the baton back and forth. But still, Garcia-Lopez and JRJR on DC Versus Marvel would certainly have been a book to see...!

For whatever reason though, Marz said both had declined. (Garcia-Lopez would contribute pencil art to the Marz-written Amalgam Comics tie-in, Dr. Strangefate, which gives us an idea of how his DC Versus Marvel pages might have looked, at least). Thus the publisher sought out different options (No mention of whether or not George Perez, who was, at the time, the ideal artist for the assignment, was considered or approached). 

Ultimately, it was decided that Dan Jurgens would be the DC artist and Italy's Claudio Castellini would be Marvel's artist.

Jurgens was, of course, a solid choice. His work on the Superman titles and its various "event" stories like "Panic in the Sky!" and the "Death of Superman" cycle (not to mention his early '90s Justice League America run and 1994's Zero Hour) meant that he had drawn pretty much the entirety of the DC Universe at that point...many of the characters repeatedly. I don't know that I would say that the DC Comics of 1996 had much in the way of a house style, but a glance at Jurgens' art sure looked like DC Comics, especially at that time. 

Castellini was more of an unknown quantity, his only American work at the time seemingly being a 1996 one-shot with Marz, Silver Surfer: Dangerous Artifacts, as well as some Marvel covers. 

One thing is certain though: Their styles did not match up well at all, and were, in fact, so different it was actually quite jarring to see every time they would trade off on art duties, which was, of course, quite often. 

Jurgens, inked by Josef Rubinstein, created solid figures with more realistic shapes and builds, usually grounding them in recognizable backgrounds (Having so recently re-read parts of Zero Hour in the new DC Finest collection, in which Jurgens was inked by Jerry Ordway, I think I prefer his work under Ordway's pens far more than I did here). 

Castellini's art looked much more of the moment than Jurgens', which is to say it was more '90s...a fact that many readers might now consider a drawback more than a virtue. It was definitely more dynamic, though, his characters always seeming poised and ready to move, if not already engaged in some act of running, punching, jumping or flying.  

They were also all incredibly muscular and statuesque in build, which could actually often make them look "off", especially when compared to Jurgens' versions of the same characters (Castellini's Superboy and Spider-Man, for example, were towering bodybuilders, rather than, say, a typical if well-muscled teenager and a slimmer, acrobatic type).

Castellini also had a tendency for cheesecake, his female heroes all having the sort of '90s default "babe" proportions of a Jim Balent figure, sometimes paired with huge size and musculature, as in his Wonder Woman. 

Where it is most noticeable, however, is in his drawings of Lois Lane. While Jurgens would draw her in business attire, Castellini would give her short, skin-tight dresses that look more appropriate for the club than the office. In one odd sequence (Page 18 and 19 of issues #2), the blazer she's wearing over her dress even disappears between panels. 

Castellini, who also had a much thinner line than Jurgens and tended to eschew backgrounds altogether in many instances, was inked throughout by Paul Neary. Castellini is obviously a good artist, and I thought he handled both publisher's diverse array of characters well enough; in 1996, teenage Caleb would have even told you he was the better of the two artists. 

But the vast gulf in styles made the book something of a mess visually, and hard to ever really lose oneself in. The obvious solution would have been to find a single artist equally adept at the look and feel of both superhero publishers'' lines (which is why I thought of George Perez); I think either Jurgens or Castellini would have been a fine choice to pencil the series, but both of them? Not so much. 

The first issue, which was written by Marz, begins with a Jurgens-drawn splash page of Spider-Man (or a Spider-Man, I guess), swinging through a rainy big city. He's not in his classic suit, but one he was apparently wearing in 1996. Marz writes in his introduction that there was some consideration given to whether or not the creators should use the original, classic (and thus more recognizable) versions of the characters, or keep their portrayals consistent with the comics being published at the time. They had decided on the latter, as the whole idea was to interest new and lapsed readers into picking up other comics from DC's and Marvel's respective publishing lines.

For the DC characters featured, I don't think that matters all that much; they were in 1996, for the most part, as they always were and would mostly always be, with a few minor tweaks. Superman's hair was still being worn long, for example, and Batman was in an all-black costume akin to that of his movie. But Captain Marvel, for example, was wearing what he had been wearing since the 1940s. In all, I think only the bearded, hook-handed Aquaman and the presence of then-new Green Lantern Kyle Rayner really stand out as particularly 1996 versions of themselves.

With the Marvel characters, though, Thor seems to be costumed particularly egregiously, The Hulk is in one of his "smart Hulk" phases, and then there's Spider-Man. I didn't really pick up on this back in 1996, but it felt far more glaring re-reading the series today: I had no idea what was going on with Spider-Man, and whether this was a Spider-Man or the "real" Spider-Man. 

Not only is the costume a different one than that of the original cartoon or Spider-Man and His Amazing Friends that I knew Spidey from, but, when he introduces himself to Clark Kent and Lois Lane, he does so thusly: "It's really Ben Reilly, but my professional name is Peter Parker, so I guess that's what you can call me." 

And in the little character profiles in the back of the first issue, Spider-Man's lists his "Real Name" as "Peter Parker" and, under "Other Current Aliases" it says "Ben Reilly." (Under "Hair" it says "Brown (dyed blonde)", but colorist Gregory Wright has it as brown throughout the book.) 

So I honestly had no idea if this was really the real Peter Parker, or if it was Ben Reilly...and if the Spidey used throughout the series was a clone or not. Turning to Bluesky for help after just rereading the series in the new omnibus collection, I got an answer, I think: This was Ben Reilly, the clone of Peter Parker, although at the time he thought he was the real person, and the real Peter Parker was the clone...? Is that right...? (I just looked up "Clone Saga" on Wikipedia but had to stop reading the synopsis in order to preserve my sanity.)

Anyway, whoever he really is, Spider-Man soon meets The Joker on a rooftop, and the Clown Prince of Crime recognizes him as Spider-Man, presumably because they had recently-ish met in the pages of 1995's Spider-Man and Batman. (Which, um, shouldn't be possible, as that story would have been non-canonical, if the very premise of this series, which is that the DC and Marvel Universe are two separate and inviolable universes within the multiverse, is to be believed.) 

From there, much of this first issue is devoted to page-long sequences that introduce the various characters shown on the cover and then have them disappear in bursts of light. Eventually, there's the beginnings of various crossovers, like Bullseye holding Robin hostage in the Batcave and J. Jonah Jameson and Ben Reilly/Peter Parker showing up as new employees at The Daily Planet. (Which, while fun, doesn't make a lick of sense; Spider-Man, and apparently Jameson, find themselves transported to an entirely different universe than their own, and the first thing they do is...apply for new jobs in their field...?)

There are also a rather rapid-succession of mini, one-panel team-ups and battles—Daredevil vs. The Riddler, Batman vs. Venom, The Punisher vs. Deathstroke, Etrigan vs. Ghost Rider—that won't be expanded upon in any future scenes (In a relative rarity, a panel showing Bane punching Captain America's shield will get explored in a future issue, though). 

The gist of it all is that characters from the two universes are bleeding into one another's realities, an event that a strange old man in an alley with a glowing cardboard box seems to be trying to prevent. So too are The Spectre and The Living Tribunal. 

In the second issue, written by David, we see more of the characters interacting with one another—Wolverine fighting Killer Croc and then joining Gambit to steal the Batmobile, for example, or Marvel and DC's villains both named The Scarecrow teaming up to kidnap Lois—before the premise of the series gets explicitly spelled out for the characters and the readers. 

Each universe is represented by a god-like cosmic entity, one of two "brothers" that look a little like Jack Kirby-inspired space knights, one red and one blue. The pair have apparently just become aware of one another and are coming into conflict. They will combat one another by choosing 11 heroes from each universe to participate in fights for the sake of their home universe. When one opponent is defeated, which can be as simple as "pinning" them immobile for a few seconds, the match ends. Whichever brother/universe/publisher loses, their universe will cease to exist entirely.

The chosen combatants are, for the most part, the very ones readers and fans have long debated and argued about, regarding who is stronger, smarter, faster, a better fighter, etc. Again, it's basically who would win in a fight between so-and-so and whoever. 

And so speedsters The Flash and Quicksilver will face off, as will power-houses Superman and The Hulk, and water-going Kings of Atlantis Aquaman and Namor. Some of the matchups are fairly odd, though, and seem to exist mainly to give a popular character from one publisher a reason to be featured. 

Wolverine, for example, is paired with Lobo, despite the fact that the Dc character vastly overpowers him, and is more in Superman's weight-class than that of the mutant scrapper's. ("Who is meaner?" the back cover of the first issue asked of this particular pairing, their attitudes apparently accounting for their being chosen to fight one another...?)

Or, for another, in order to get Robin involved, the writers needed the Marvel equivalent of a premiere sidekick...of which the then sidekick-less Marvel had none, and so they went with teenage X-Man Jubilee, who, during the decade, was sometimes portrayed as something of Wolverine's sidekick.

And then there's Wonder Woman. While I would have chosen Marvel's Hercules or Thor (who is actually pitted against DC's Captain Marvel) to pit against her, or maybe Wonder Man, Ms. Marvel, Rogue or She-Hulk, Marvel apparently went with its most prominent original female character at the time, resulting in the X-Men's Storm facing her.

The fights, which then occupy most of the second and third issues, are all short, lasting between two and four pages and, I should note, fairly predictable. 

In the six whose outcomes were chosen by the writers, there's usually a clear winner on paper (Like, The Flash being much faster than Quicksilver, for example, naturally leads to his victory), or an easily plausible way for the ultimate victor to win (Thor's storm powers disrupting Captain Marvel's magic lightning, for example). 

The one that felt wrong or off to me in 1996 (and again in 2025) was Aquaman's defeat of Namor; I was obviously a DC partisan, and liked Aquaman more than Namor, but with the latter's superhuman strength and ability to fly, it seemed like he would easily best Aquaman. Not so, as Aquaman writer Peter David had the hero use his ability to communicate with sea life to summon a whale to jump on Namor and pin him. But it was just a killer whale; surely Namor could have lifted that off himself easily, right? 

As for the five fights chosen by fans, well, in most cases the more popular character was also either the more powerful and/or more experienced hero, and so who would really question Superman out-punching The Hulk, for example, or a Spider-Man besting the new Superboy, who had only been around about three years at the time?

The two that felt most forced to me were, of course, the Lobo/Wolverine and Storm/Wonder Woman fight. In both instances, the X-Men characters won. 

As I said, Wolverine, as unkillable as his healing factor might make him, shouldn't have had the strength to go too many rounds against a guy who could uppercut him into orbit. Marz, who had to write the scene, seems to have been aware of the fact it would be hard to write a Wolverine victory in such a way that would please fans, and so the characters' extremely brief fight happens off-panel, the pair tumbling behind a bar for two panels before a hand reaches up, grabs a cigar and takes a puff. 

In the published book, it was, of course, Wolverine who did so (Marvel heroes were still allowed to smoke in the '90s). The omnibus does contain alternate art that would have been used had the fights gone the other way, though, and so there is, later in the collection, a page in which it's Lobo who takes up the cigar. (There are similar pages showing alternate results for each of the voted-upon fights.)

And as for Storm, as powerful as her weather powers are, they just don't seem a match for Wonder Woman's various goddess-given strengths. In their fight, Wondy is essentially just zapped with lightning and crumbles. (In the alternate scene revealed in the unused art, where Wondy wins, she does so by blocking the lightning bolts with her bracelets and then punching Storm out.) 

In his intro, Marz writes that the Wonder Woman/Storm fight was the only one of the voted-upon matchups that they weren't really sure of how it would play out and, as it turns out, it actually ended up being the closest vote. (He also says in passing that fans should get over the Lobo/Wolverine fight ending as it did.)

Anyway, the results of the fights are 6-5 in Marvel's favor, and so that would seem to spell doom for the DC Universe...were it not for the actions of that old man in the alley, an apparent guardian who keeps the worlds separate from one another, and the newly deputized Axel Asher, who gets a snazzy red and blue costume and the superhero codename Access (along with some various super-powers, the most notable of which would ultimately be the ability to travel between the DC and Marvel Universes).

Because of Access' efforts—not to mention those of the old man, The Spectre and The Living Tribunal—there's a very unexpected, last-ditch effort to save both universes. This is, of course, by creating a third, shared universe that would combine the DC and Marvel universes into a single new universe. 

The result? Amalgam Comics, a new line of comics presented as if they had always existed (and DC and Marvel Comics never had), featuring amalgams of various DC and Marvel characters. 

So, for example, there was no longer a Captain America or Superman, but there was a Super Soldier, who was a combination of them both. Just as Logan never became Wolverine, but instead the dark, caped guardian of Gotham City, whose adventures played out in the pages of Legends of the Dark Claw. 

There were a dozen of these special one-shots produced, all of which featured a "#1" on the cover, but all of which also presumed an imaginary past and future, editorial boxes referring to events in comics never published, next issue boxes hinting at futures that would never be and even letter colums in the back of each book.

It was, as I have said, weird, wild and, at least for me in those days, completely unexpected, maybe the last thing one would expect DC and Marvel to do if they had 12 22-page tie-in comics to produce as part of the DC Versus Marvel event series. 

I think, for me at least, this idea really seemed to redeem the whole event, which was otherwise pretty predictable and not all that fun or engaging, with many of the attendant crossovers and interactions between the different groups of characters limited to either single panel suggestions of stories, or short, often unsatisfyingly executed fight scenes. 

(The main exception? The unexpected but fun star-crossed romance between Robin and Jubilee that played out throughout DC Versus Marvel; not only were they forced to fight when they would rather be making out, they came from two entirely different universes...! I always regretted we didn't get a full Romeo and Juliet-inspired Batman/X-Men crossover exploring their doomed attraction, although Marz would prominently feature the pair in DC Versus Marvel's first sequel series, DC/Marvel: All Access.) 

From what Marz and co-editor Mike Carlin wrote in their introductions to the omnibus, it seems to be editor Mark Guenwald who came up with the Amalgam concept, including some of the specific amalgams.

Now, in 1996, back before I had an actual job and thus money to waste on things as frivolous as comics, I had only read a pair of these: Karl Kesel, Mike Wieringo and Gary Martin's Spider-Boy (featuring an amalgamation of the '90sSuperboy and Spider-Man) and Larry Hama, Jim Balent and Ray McCarthy's previously Legends of the Dark Claw. 

(Remember what I said about never having read an entire crossover event series in its entirety before, in discussing the opportunity that the DC Finest: Zero Hour collections offered?  Well, I guess this omnibus does present the same opportunity, on a much more manageable scale, as there are far fewer Amalgam issues than Zero Hour tie-ins).

Something of a feat of editing and coordination, the new, temporary Amalgam Universe necessitated a degree of world-building to make for a cohesive whole and keep the writers from re-using different characters in different amalgams (I noticed a few mistakes, here, though. There are two Huntresses, one named Barbara who appears in Bruce Wayne: Agent of SHIELD and another named Carol Danvers who appears in Dark Claw. Catwoman seems to have been a component in both Bruce Wayne's Selina Luthor and Assassins' Catsai. And while Jimmy Olsen is the editor of the Daily Planet in the pages of Super Soldier, there's a red-headed, freckled reporter named Jimmy Urich in Assassins).

While some simply mashed two characters together (Or, in the case of the title characters of Speed Demon and Dr. Strangefate, three characters), some had bigger, weirder takes. 

Chief among these is Karl and Barbara Kesel, Roger Cruz and Jon Holdredge's X-Patrol, which combined the X-Men and the Doom Patrol (which, at their start, anyway, were both about men in wheelchairs assembling teams of outsiders to serve as heroes), and was full of weird composites that actually kinda sorta worked, like Beastling (Beast + Changeling), Dial H for H.U.S.K. ("Dial H for Hero" + Husk) and Shatterstarfire (Shatterstar + Starfire). With Cruz drawing them in a high-90's X-Men style, it was delightfully weird. 

And then there was John Ostrander, Gary Frank and Cam Smith's Bullets and Bracelets, starring Amazon Princess Diana, in her short-lived biker-shorts and bra look, and The Punisher Trevor Castle fighting The Hand and the forces of Thanoseid's Apokolips to save their kidnapped son. 

I actually rather enjoyed most of this suite of comics, with Mark Waid and Dave Gibbons' Super Soldier (Confession: I didn't actually know who either of those men were in 1996, or I probably wouldn't have skipped it) and Spider-Boy being particular standouts. 

There were two I was a little iffy on during this reading via the omnibus, though.

The first of these was Chuck Dixon, Cary Nord and Mark Pennington's Bruce Wayne: Agent of S.H.I.E.L.D., which had a fantastic logo, but didn't really sell me on the idea of a Batman-ized S.H.I.E.L.D. or do too much with the concept beyond the requisite action scenes. 

And then there was John Byrne and Terry Austin' Amazon, which starred a new version of Wonder Woman, who is literally, unimaginatively named "Wonder Woman" (which seems counter to the whole Amalgam narrative, doesn't it?). This is basically just Storm in a Wonder Woman-ized version of her own costume. Here, she's a young girl who was lost at sea and rescued by Hippolyta, who raised her alongside her own daughter, who would of course end up growing up to be the Diana from Bullets and Bracelets. The story is an extremely wordy affair that weaves Storm-as-Wonder Woman's origins into a conflict with the god Poseidon. It was honestly something of a chore to get through.

With the 11 fights between DC and Marvel characters all fought and the Amalgam books published, there's relatively little for David and the artists to do in the fourth and final issue, aside from the process of putting the toys back in their respective boxes and returning things to the status quo (Unlike DC and Marvel's individual crossover event series, there's little pretense here that this story will change either universe forever; indeed, the only real lasting change seems to have been the creation of Access, who could potentially provide an ongoing rationale for future DC/Marvel crossovers...although, as we've seen from the crossovers collected in the first DC Versus Marvel Omnibus, those comics mostly ignored him...and the two separate universes premise in general). 

David and the artists do use the space in this issue to offer up scenes of the heroes who were forced to combat one another now cooperating and taking on various villains, with Elektra and Catwoman facing The Abomination, Flash and Quicksilver getting stuck in Venom's goo, and a whole mess of heroes tackling Thanos and Darkseid. 

Ultimately the universes are separated again through the efforts of Access and his new powers, with the help of Batman and Captain America, who seem to have impressed the universe brothers with their personal resumes enough that the cosmic giants call off their conflict and shake hands. 

And then everything returns to normal. 

The ending seems a bit of a let-down after the fights and the Amalgam Universe, and, rather curiously, the conflict is ultimately resolved with fairly minimal participation from the DC and Marvel heroes (Batman and Cap excluded, of course). 

While many of the heroes do make mention of the fact that they should be working together to solve the problem instead of fighting like pawns throughout the series, they never actually do all band together to save their universes. Instead, they basically spend the entirety of the crossover engaged in small scale fights, unknowingly leaving the issue of the warring universes to Access and the old man to fix for them.

Access, a character jointly owned by DC and Marvel, was, of course, the biggest new thing to ultimately come out of this story, and he would reappear almost immediately in the same-year sequel, DC/Marvel: All Access, a series that was smaller in scale, but did manage to explore more interesting character interactions than DC Versus Marvel, and bring with it another round of Amalgam comics. 

But that will be the subject of the next post.

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A few other things of note...

•I sort of mentioned this in passing when I included the DC Versus Marvel: The Amalgam Age Omnibus in January's "A Month of Wednesdays" column, but it was quite striking just how white, male and straight both the DC and Marvel Universes come across in this series today. Certainly compared to what the shared settings look like right now, or would have looked like ten years ago, or even 20 years ago.

The participating heroes are overwhelming male. Of the 22 heroes participating in the 11 matches, there are five women: Wonder Woman, Catwoman, Elektra, Storm and Jubilee. And, as discussed above, those last two X-Men seem to be there mainly because there weren't any better choices for Marvel characters to throw at their chosen opponents, Wonder Woman and Robin.

Few other female characters even appear throughout the pages of the series, though. Supergirl and She-Hulk both share a single panel, Jean Grey and Psylocke both appear once apiece in panels featuring other X-Men, a blonde X-Men member I didn't recognize appears alongside Jubilee in one panel (this was Husk, according to Bluesky), and that's about it for female heroes in the main DC Versus Marvel series. 

Superhero girlfriends Betty Ross and Tanya Moon briefly appear alongside The Hulk and Superboy, but the female character who is most prominent throughout the entire series was Lois Lane. 

She gets the most panel time and the most dialogue of any other woman, by far. Her portrayal isn't necessarily all that flattering, though, as she needs to be rescued from the Scarecrows by Ben Reilly/Peter Parker.

And Ben/Peter will later, erroneously think to himself, "Jeez...I think she wants me!" He'll eventually even ask her out and get shot down, when she flashes him her ring and tells him she's engaged, at which point a giant Clark Kent appears to loom over Ben/Peter. 

As for characters of color, there are hardly any, and they are mostly limited to the X-Men Storm and Jubilee again. They are the only heroes of color among the 22 in the multiversal matchups, and about the only ones who so much as cameo.

Steel appears briefly, seen fighting The Absorbing Man in two panels and then flying alongside Iron Man in a massive, character-filled two-page spread. That same spread also features a tiny image of then-Green Arrow Connor Hawke, who is of mixed race (including Black and Korean ancestry), although he is there colored pretty white.

And that's it, really. No Black Panther (which seems crazy in 2025), no Luke Cage, no Blade, no Falcon and no War Machine. Not even Bishop, in this X-Men heavy tale. On the DC side, we don't see any of their more prominent black characters either, like Cyborg, Black Lightning, Vixen, Bumblebee or John Stewart. 

Finally, as for gay characters, I don't think either publisher had terribly deep benches in the mid-90s, with Marvel's Northstar and DC's Obsidian being the most high-profile gay characters at the time. Neither even cameos in the story, though. (Wait, was Obsidian officially out in 1996? Now that I think of it, he may not have been...)

•Rereading it in 2025, it was rather weird to see who wasn't in this crossover, which really demonstrates how much the Ultimates-inspired Marvel Cinematic Universe did in raising the profile of the Avengers characters in the years since the late '90s.

Completely absent from the main series are the previously mentioned Black Panther, as well as Scarlet Witch and The Wasp. Black Widow, The Vision and Ant-Man only appear in one panel apiece. Hawkeye and Iron Man appear in two panels each. 

Dr. Strange—who, like Black Panther and Iron Man is now a staple of Marvel's line-wide event stories—is also mostly absent, only appearing in a single panel. Also MIA, somewhat surprisingly, were Mister Fantastic Reed Richards (no battle against Plastic Man...or even The Elongated Man?) and Invisible Woman Sue Richards. (The other half of the Fantastic Four, The Human Torch and The Thing, only appear in a single panel, facing off against Firestorm and Martian Manhunter.)

And then there's Carol Danvers, who would of course be promoted to Captain Marvel in the 21st Century. She doesn't so much as cameo either. 

Granted, I have no idea which Marvel characters were retired, dead, in comas or in alternate universes at the time, so maybe all of the above had very good excuses for not being featured or even making cameos. But after having read so many line-wide Marvel event series in the last 25 years or so, it was striking how greatly the players differed in the '90s. 

•So if DC Versus Marvel were published today, who do you think the main "champions" from each universe forced to fight one another would be, aside from the absolute certainty of a Harley Quinn vs. Deadpool matchup? 

I thought about this off and on while reading, as it is certainly the case that Lobo and Superboy would not be participating were the event held in 2025...or at any point in the 21st century, probably. 

On Marvel's side, it's fairly certain Storm wouldn't be involved; she mainly seems to have been chosen to give Wonder Woman a similarly high-profile woman to fight and, in 1996, that's probably the closest Marvel had to a Wonder Woman of its own (Today, I'm sure they would pit Wondy against Captain Marvel Carol Danvers). 

And, as I said, I think Jubilee was mainly involved because Robin needed an opponent.

Otherwise, of the five main fights that readers could vote on, I think the other participants are mostly as popular today, and/or seen as the preeminent in their respective universes, as they were in the late '90s: Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman, Captain America, Spider-Man, The Hulk and Wolverine. (Maybe they would have replaced Hulk with Thor in a fight against Superman, were one held today, though? I'm not sure what sales or fan esteem for Thor and Hulk are at the moment, of course, but I've obviously seen much more of Thor in various Marvel events and team books than I have The Hulk in the 21st Century).

As for the six undercards, I think we'd definitely see some of those same matches repeating, like speedsters Flash vs. Quicksilver and Atlantean monarchs Aquaman vs. Namor. Others I'm not so sure about. 

If we saw a Robin today, it wouldn't be Tim Drake, but Damian Wayne, and I would therefore be surprised if Jubilee showed up at all. I think DC and Marvel would now be more likely to pit a Green Lantern against a Nova (instead of the Silver Surfer). And with both universes filled with more female characters, I don't know that a Catwoman vs. Elektra fight would even be included. 

With Green Arrow Oliver Queen now alive and well and Hawkeye more prominent, I imagine we would get an archer showdown, just as I assume Black Canary and Black Widow would be pitted against one another.

At any rate, I have to assume were the crossover published today, Marvel's participants would be tilted more toward the Avengers than the X-Men than this one was. 

Next: 1997's DC/Marvel: All-Access/Amalgam Comics

DC Versus Marvel Omnibus Pt. 17: Batman/Daredevil: King of New York #1

DC and Marvel might not have gotten to every conceivable crossover of interest. But between all of the one-shot crossovers in the pages of DC Versus Marvel Omnibus and the various event miniseries collected in DC Versus Marvel: The Amalgam Age Omnibus, I think it's safe to say that, by the end of the '90s, the two publishers had released comic books featuring many of the configurations of characters that their audiences were likely to be most interested in (Save, of course, for the failed Justice League/Avengers crossover, which they would eventually get around to in 2003). 

In fact, by the time the decade ended, DC and Marvel were even repeating particular pairings, publishing a second meeting between Batman and Spider-Man and, of course, a second Batman/Daredevil pairing, which would end up being the last DC/Marvel crossover...with the exception of that JLA/Avengers one a few years later.

While 1997's Daredevil and Batman was created by a previous Daredevil team, that of D.G. Chichester and Scott McDaniel, this time it's a DC team at the helm: Alan Grant, who wrote various Batman titles throughout the '90s, and Eduardo Barreto, an incredibly gifted artist who had worked steadily for DC throughout the '80s and '90s, working on several Batman specials in the latter decade.

His art is always welcome, and it's a special treat in this particular collection, where his contribution is one of the best drawn in the entire tome (up there alongside Jose Luis Garcia-Lopez and Dick Giordano's DC Special Series #27 and Steve Rude and Al Milgrom's The Incredible Hulk Vs. Superman). 

As was the case with the Titans/X-Men crossover that immediately preceded the last cessation of DC/Marvel crossovers, the quality of this particular one doesn't seem to be to blame for the temporary end to the cooperation. It's just about as good as the best of any of the 18 earlier DC/Marvel crossover, and far better than a few. 

Rather, if the blame isn't the changes in leadership at the two publishers, as various prose pieces in the collection seem to suggest, it may just be as simple as fan and market exhaustion of the crossovers, which had been coming at a pretty steady clip since they resumed with Batman/Punisher in 1994. 

While that's just a guess, I have to imagine that, at the very least, the DC/Marvel crossovers had lost that feeling of being rare or special during the course of those six years or so, given how many of them were published in such a relatively short span of time.

But anyway, back to this crossover. 

Grant seems to have constructed the entire thing around one particular meeting of two characters...and not those whose names are in the title. Rather, Grant seemed to want to pit Daredevil, who is nicknamed "The Man Without Fear", against Batman villain The Scarecrow, the self-proclaimed master of fear, whose entire modus operandi is to attack his victims by scaring them ("Modus operandi", by the way, is a term I first learned from reading another Alan Grant-written inter-company crossover that also featured The Scarecrow as its villain) . 

That scene plays out in a short, five-page sequence at the climax of the book. The Scarecrow sprays Daredevil directly in the face with an aerosol bottle containing his fear gas, exposure to which subjects a victim to his or her greatest fear.

"Taste fear, my friend!" The Scarecrow grins, the border of his dialogue balloon wavy and jagged to suggest his spooky voice.  

And in the next panel Daredevil covers his eyes and wheels backward. 

A big panel that dominates the bottom two-thirds of the page is then devoted to Daredevil with his eyes and mouth wide open, various fears apparently running through his mind, Barreto's art depicting five different DD villains, one of whom I didn't recognize, while Grant's melodramatic narration notes just how powerful the gas is ("Another man-- any other man--would crack beneath that onslaught of pure, untainted fear--").

A turn of the page finds Daredevil apparently angrily laughing at the dark sky above, while the narration box reads, "But Daredevil is the Man Without Fear. Defiantly, he throws back his head and laughs in its face!"

"Taste fear yourself, creep!" Daredevil then quips, kicking The Scarecrow over the railing of the torch on the Statue of Liberty, where the four-way battle at the end of the book plays out. 

Of course, Daredevil has his own rogue—or rogues plural, I guess, as he's become a legacy character—who use fear gas as a weapon, the simply named Mister Fear (The first of whom appeared in 1965, well after The Scarecrow debuted).

I wonder, then, if such a scene has previously occurred in Daredevil history, just as I wonder why Grant didn't use any of the various versions of Mister Fear (provided any of them were alive at that point in 2000) to pair with The Scarecrow. Instead, Grant resorted to DD's archenemy, The Kingpin (Who, as we saw, already appeared in a pretty good DC/Marvel crossover, one that also featured Batman). 

(Other decent Batman/Daredevil rogue combinations that would remain unexplored? The Joker and The Jester, and The Penguin and The Owl.)

In this particular story Batman oddly, even counter-factually describes The Scarecrow as a villain who "dabbles in organized crime when the mood takes him" (I've read all of The Scarecrow's appearances throughout the decade of the '90s, most of which were written by Grant himself, and he never once showed any real interest in organized crime beyond hiring thugs to do manual labor or protect him). The conflict driving the book basically rests on that description, though, as this is a story in which Gotham City mad scientist-turned-terrorist The Scarecrow attempts to muscle in on Kingpin's New York City turf, using his prowess with mind-altering chemicals to essentially mind-control criminals into following him. 

The story opens with Daredevil on the trail of Catwoman, the latter of whom Barreto draws a particularly svelte and sexy version of, as she essentially resembles a nude female form that happens to be colored the purple and black of her then-costume. She has apparently stolen a particularly important thing from the Manhattan safe of New York law firm Shane, Murdock and Nelson: Their files on Kingpin of Crime Wilson Fisk's operations. That means, in Daredevil's words, 

Details of meets, associates, businesses owned. Suspicions concerning his activities. Everything a lawyer would need if he were putting a brief together!

Why would anyone want that? Well, that's precisely why Daredevil has followed Catwoman back to Gotham. He's about to bust up her rooftop meet with a pair of criminals, when his senses pick up on Batman about to foil it, so he intercepts the Dark Knight mid-air. Batman naturally fights back and the pair of vigilantes—as well as the head of a stone gargoyle—crash to the rooftop. 

Catwoman gets away with the case as Batman and Daredevil beat up the remaining bad guys. The criminals refuse to talk, but they give up a clue that Batman's Batcave computers manage to decipher anyway: They were apparently subjected to the The Scarecrow's fear gas. And, indeed, readers see Catwoman meet up with Scarecrow on another roof top after losing the vigilantes. 

(If, like me, you have a particular interest in how different artists depict The Scarecrow, I suppose I should here note that his design here is basically that which was seen in the 1993 Shadow of The Bat arc "The God of Fear" drawn by Bret Blevins, only with straw "hair" reminiscent of the Tim Sale design. Or, perhaps even more closely, Barreto's own take on the Batman: The Animated Series design...that of Scarecrow's second appearance in the series, but well before the redesign with the hat noose around his neck.) 

Despite their rough meeting at the beginning of this one-shot, the two heroes decide to work together again, while both the narration and their dialogue will refer back a few times to their initial meeting, in 1997's Daredevil and Batman #1. (Is it worth noting again that their previous crossover bore an "Elseworlds" logo, while this one does not...?).

They follow what clues they can find to a trap set by The Scarecrow, who has apparently been shipping guns to New York...guns covered with a version of his fear chemicals that allows him to instantaneously hypnotize almost anyone who comes into contact with it. In this manner, he takes over Kingpin's operation. 

"Scarecrow's the King of New York now!" as an underling reports to Kingpin about the Gotham criminal having taken over his opeartion...just before Kingpin throws said underling out a window.

Daredevil and Batman soon come calling, trying to urge Kingpin to cooperate, as they've found evidence that Scarecrow has brought cannisters of fear gas with him, and thus has his sights set on something other than becoming New York's new Kingpin of Crime. He wants to attack the city with his fear gas.

Kingpin doesn't just refuse to cooperate with the heroes, but he apparently climbs into an attack helicopter off-panel and then tries to gun them down on a rooftop, before piloting it towards the high point where he assumes The Scarecrow will go to release his gas on the city: The Statue of Liberty.

Scarecrow shoots his chopper down, but the huge Kingpin forces his way through the tiny windows in the statue's crown...just as Batman and Daredevil arrive via speedboat, making awfully good time, considering Kingpin's head start and his, you know, being in a helicopter.

This leads to the climactic battle, in which the two heroes take on one another's villains, leading to the scene between Daredevil and Scarecrow detailed above, which occurs as Batman goes hand-to-hand against Kingpin (As the two didn't come to blows in the earlier Batman & Spider-Man, I suppose this gives readers a chance to see the two fight one another, although the fight is inconclusive, with Kingpin simply deciding to stop fighting after he learns DD has taken out Scarecrow).

In the end, as is ever the case with such books, the status quo for all of the characters essentially resets itself, with The Scarecrow being captured and apparently being taken back to Arkham Asylum (Daredevil of course caught him with his billy club-on-a-wire thingee after kicking him over the railing), and Kingpin walking, as the masked vigilantes can't really accuse him of any wrong-doing without unmasking and personally testifying against him. 

And as the two heroes pointed their boat towards the New York City horizon, the era of DC/Marvel crossovers drew to a close...

Well, almost. 

There was still the aforementioned JLA/Avengers yet to go. That wouldn't ship for another three years (although I wouldn't be surprised to learn that it was at least being discussed and maybe even developed at the time that this crossover was published), and it would differ in some key ways from the other, previous DC/Marvel crossovers collected in this omnibus, the most obvious of which being that it was given an entire four-issue miniseries, rather than occurring in a single, oversized one-shot, making it more similar to the three crossovers collected in the other, second DC/Marvel omnibus, DC Versus Marvel: The Amalgam Age Omnibus. 

I'll be circling back to review its contents in three future posts, detailing 1996's DC Versus Marvel (every other issue of which was called Marvel Versus DC) and its attendant Amalgam Comics tie-ins, 1996-1997's DC/Marvel: All Access (and its Amalgam tie-ins) and, finally, 1997-1998's Unlimited Access. 

Next: 1996's DC Versus Marvel

Review: Blue and Gold

A comic book series teaming Booster Gold and Blue Beetle is something that I've heard fans asking for since about the time I started reading comics. For some reason, DC finally decided to pull the trigger on it in 2021, launching Blue and Gold by writer (and Booster Gold creator) Dan Jurgens and artist Ryan Sook.

It apparently proved to be the wrong time, as the book lasted only eight issues. (By way of contrast, Jurgens' last Booster Gold series, which launched in 2007, lasted 47 issues, until it was canceled as part of the New 52 initiative.) That means DC must have decided to axe Blue and Gold around the time the first issue or two were being released.  

This makes the last issue particularly interesting. The two characters are sitting around talking to their friend and partner Terri Collins (Originally Trixie, from the first, 1986 Booster Gold series). The subject is the new endeavor that they've been trying to get off the ground, a crowd-funded personal superhero service for people who need help but can't get Superman or Batman's attention, but it sounds pretty clear they're talking about something else. 

"They believe in your mission and contributed," Terri tells Beetle of all their fans. "But to sustain an expensive operation like this, we need the kind of money they don't have."

"A great idea like ours should have worldwide support!" Booster laments. "So where is it?"

"Sometimes, great ideas die because they're ahead of their time or people don't understand how to manage them," Beetle says. "We gave it our best shot, Booster."

So, what went wrong? Honestly, having just read the book's entire run in a surprisingly hard to find trade paperback (more on that later), I don't really have any good theories. 

Jurgens' plotting isn't exactly original, and I personally found at least one aspect of it pretty irritating, but he obviously gets the characters just fine, indulges in the expected nostalgia service to fans and presents a perfectly decent superhero comic, of the very same sort he did with the previously mentioned 21st century Booster Gold comic. 

While Ryan Sook's art isn't necessarily to my liking (its sense of realism gives off uncanny valley vibes to me), he's a talented and well-liked artist. He doesn't draw all of the book, of course (He handles five issues, and parts of a sixth), but all of the guest artists are great ones (Cully Hamner, Phil Hester, Paul Pelletier and a strategically deployed Kevin Maguire plus Jurgens himself). 

And it plays nice enough with the DCU, featuring an appearance by the then-current Justice League in the first issue (That would be the Brian Michael Bendis one, which I never read any of; maybe a League prominently featuring Naomi and Black Adam isn't the sales-booster that other Leagues have been?), appearances by Batman and Guy Gardner (both in the present as well as in flashback), guest-star Jamie Reyes (in an issue with a nice cover) and connectivity to ongoing continuity. (Although I must confess I have no idea how it is that Blue Beetle came back to life after his death in 2005's Countdown to Infinite Crisis; was he resurrected via time travel shenanigans in the pages of Booster Gold and I simply forgot about it, or just rebooted back to the land of the living through DC's series of continuity reboots between the New 52 and Dark Nights: Death Metal...?)

So, I guess I'm just going to assume it was a matter of timing, and that the market and the fans just weren't ready for a nostalgia-driven, comedy-infused superhero book featuring a pair of characters best known for a decades-old run on the Justice League franchise. At least, not on an ongoing basis. 

Jurgens kicks the book off with a Justice League adjacent story, which is more than appropriate given the fact that most readers most associate the leads with their time on the League...as well as the fact that a Justice League appearance is usually a pretty good way to ensure a certain number of eyeballs (It certainly got me to check out 1997's Resurrection Man #1!).

The League has been defeated and are currently being held captive aboard a huge alien spaceship, which is about to leave Earth orbit with them. A live-streaming Booster Gold  intervenes (seen by viewers on "Instaslam Live," one of the many, many mentions of off-brand, DCU answers to real-world social media that pepper the book), but his suit's powers prove no match for the ship's defenses.

With Booster on the ropes, Skeets recruits Ted Kord to help, and before long his beetle-shaped ship makes the scene. Together, the heroes are able to infiltrate the ship, and Skeets and Beetle manage to hack its computers, saving the League.

Afterwards, Booster is confident the League will offer them membership (Not a crazy assumption, given this line-up has Hippolyta, Naomi and Black Adam), but when Booster is out of earshot, they instead offer membership to Beetle only, not accepting the pair as a package deal. Beetle declines, later telling Booster they didn't want either of them. 

As for that actively irritating bit, Jurgens includes little narration boxes in many of the panels featuring Booster's social media followers commenting on the action, adding another, very busy narrative thread to that of the art and dialogue for readers, and it makes for panels so dense that I honestly stopped reading these at some point, as they come and go throughout the book. 

(To make them somewhat more interesting, two of the commenters appear to be Bibbo Bibbowski, whose handle is "b-bo" and who spells Superman the same way he pronounces it for some reason, and Guy Gardner, whose handles is "gg." Two other frequent commenters, each a young, female superfan of one of the leads, will appear in person later in the book.)

After a bit of status quo readjusting—Ted is fired from Kord Industries, cutting off his access to their tech and, more importantly, their funding—the pair turn to crowd-funding for their new venture. This is a social media-driven, store-front superhero business they call "Blue and Gold Restoration" (which really sounds like they fix houses), one that promises easy access to their customers and help in areas often overlooked by League-level heroes, from rescuing cats from trees to investigating haunted houses to dealing with alien abduction.

This may sound a bit familiar, as it's not too far removed from their venture with other JLI alum in Formerly Known as The Justice League and "I Can't Believe It's Not The Justice League", and reminiscent both of Marvel's original Heroes for Hire concept (which Jurgens has a reporter at a press conference mention) or even what Fire and Ice were up to in their recent miniseries, which actually followed the cancellation of Blue and Gold). 

If that concept seems intriguing to you, don't get too excited. It's mostly confined to the background of the goings-on, a goal our heroes work towards as they are constantly interrupted by fallout from their defeat of the alien ship in the first issue. An alien princess named Omnizon has come to Earth to claim it as a possession of her home planet, as they planted the high-tech equivalent of a "flag" on it and claimed it as their own 70,000 years ago, well before any modern governments had formed or there were any superheroes around to oppose them.

This conflict will fill most of the first six-issues, which, honestly, wouldn't have been a bad miniseries, setting up a new status quo for the two heroes, and giving them a point from which Jurgens and other creators could launch further miniseries or anthology shorts, or have them guest-star in other books. 

Joining our heroes are a Kord-invented, female-voiced floating robot personal assistant named "Buggles" that gives him his own Skeets (and gives Skeets someone else to talk to), and Rip Hunter, who Jurgens established an important, if secret, connection to Booster during the character's second ongoing. (In fact, Rip basically saves the title characters from Omnizon and her people, rather undercutting their efficacy as superheroes.)

Probably the highlight of these half-dozen coulda-been-a-miniseries issues is issue #4, "Spllittin' Image," which provides the most direct shot of nostalgia. Sook handles the "present day" art, depicting Booster and Beetle during a live televison interview about Blue and Gold Restoration. 

When the subject rolls around to how they first became friends, they each tell their own version of the same story, in which they battle Blackguard shortly after Booster joined the Justice League. Kevin Maguire, the artist most associated with what we now refer to as the JLI era, draws the seven pages or so that depict Beetle's version of the story (which also includes Guy, Batman and a group shot of the team), while Jurgens himself draws those devoted to Booster's version (with the same guest-stars).

Ultimately, Guy Gardner crashes the interview ("Time to set the record STRAIGHT", the social media account belonging to "gg" says just before Guy appears), and tells the real version, in which Batman sends him in to rescue Blue Beetle and Booster both from Blackguard (Maguire and Jurgens split the art duties on Guy's version of the story). 

As for the last two issues, these read more-or-less like Jurgens starting a new arc and then wrapping it up more quickly than expected, establishing the characters' new status quo in a way that is more sustainable than their trouble securing funding from their fans and/or having DC continue to publish their book would suggest. 

Guest artists Pelletier and Hester split art duties on issue #7, while Sook pencils the entirety of #8. New Blue Beetle Jamie Reyes (the Blue Beetle with the most recent solo titles and a live-action movie) comes to visit Blue and Gold and is attacked off-panel by a mystery villain who turns out to be The Black Beetle, a time-travelling villain from Jurgens' most-recent Booster Gold series with a mysterious connection to our heroes. That connection is revealed as he's defeated and, after some hang-out time, the title characters meet with Terry and discuss their failure.

At the last minute, the DC hero with the biggest back account swoops in to save Blue and Gold Restoration with a pretty massive donation, allowing our heroes' free superhero services to apparently carry on beyond the pages of this book ("Definitely Not... ...The END!" a last-panel tag reads, although I don't know that we've seen the heroes since, have we...? As with a similar tag in the last panel of Gail Simone and Adriana Melo's Plastic Man, that seems to have been an aspirational promise of future adventures, rather than a promise from the publisher).

Of course, in the real world, there was no benevolent billionaire to continue to fund Jurgens, Sook and company's work, and thus Blue and Gold didn't last beyond that issue. 

As to why I am reading this trade in 2025, after having passed on both the serially-published comics and the trade's initial release (So, um, as a fan of the characters who didn't buy any of their comics, I suppose I'm part of the reason the book didn't make it), well, I was reminded of its existence after reading Fire & Ice: Welcome to Smallville last October.

I was surprised to find out that the consortium of libraries that the library I work at shares materials with (which is based in Cleveland and is comprised of over 40 library systems all over northeast Ohio) didn't have any copies of the trade at all. 

So instead, I turned to my hometown library. They didn't have a copy either, but the consortium they belong to had a single copy, at Way Public Library in Perrysburg, about two hours away. I reserved it last fall, and it just now became available.

So Blue and Gold apparently didn't prove too terribly popular with Ohio libraries either, I guess...

Review: Plastic Man by Gail Simone and Adriana Melo

I'm sorry to say that this turned out to be about as bad as I feared.

Checking Amazon a few weeks ago for the release date of the then still upcoming DC Finest: Plastic Man: The Origin of Plastic Man, I saw the above cover by Aaron Lopresti (who Comicsgate claims as one of its own) and a listing for a 2019 trade paperback by Gail Simone and Adriana Melo, and I tilted my head at the computer screen like a cocker spaniel: How is it there was a Plastic Man comics that I had absolutely no memory of?

Consulting The Grand Comics Database, I recognized a few of the covers from the miniseries, those by Bilquis Evely and Alex Ross, probably from my old close reading of DC's solicits every month. I guess DC had not only published a six-issue Plastic Man miniseries I had decided to pass on in 2018, and again when it was collected in 2019, but I had also apparently completely purged its existence from my memory.

Since my local library system happened to have a volume available for borrowing, I figured it wouldn't hurt to check it out now, when all it would cost me was the time I would spend reading it. 

How bad could it be, after all? I mean, it was written by Gail Simone, whose long runs on Birds of Prey and Secret Six I had enjoyed, and being a writer capable of satisfying straightforward superheroics and a degree of humor, it's not like she was a bad choice for the character, who has mostly been used as a comedy relief character in Justice League comics since the late-90s or so. 

Reading it in 2025 though, between installments of Jack Cole's original Plastic Man stories collected in the aforementioned DC Finest book I was by then in the process of working my way through, it was easy to see why I had probably not read it as it was originally released, and why I had never even thought about it since.

Let's set aside Simone's work on the series, which is far from her best, for a moment.

First, the series was drawn by Adriana Melo, whose name was only familiar to me at this point because Melo had seemingly hurriedly drawn some of the parts in Ed Benes' arc of the 2010-2011 Birds of Prey that Benes himself couldn't get to before deadline. 

She wasn't really of the caliber of some of the book's cover artists, like Amanda Conner, or the previously mentioned Evely and Ross. (The back cover text refers to Melo as Simone's Birds of Prey collaborator, as she had worked on the original iteration of the book as well as the 2010 one, even if I don't remember his contributions to it, and it also cites her credits as Female Furies and Harley & Ivy Meet Betty & Veronica...I've read all of those, so I guess I had read plenty of Melo's work in the past as well, though I didn't recognize her name. I guess it didn't make much of an impression, then). 

Plastic Man is really a character for artists, and his best post-Crisis appearances have all been in stories where the artist is a really, truly great one, adept at staging and rendering as well as able to produce compelling, imaginative work. Melo is fine here, of course. The work is competent and easy to read, but, I don't know, her art just doesn't really sing the way that of, say, Jack Cole or Alex Ross or Frank Quitely or Ty Templeton or Frank Miller or Kyle Baker does, to mention some artists whose work I think of when I think of Plastic Man (And yes, I realize that's some rarified company to be in).

I can't think of a single transformation or use of his powers in this book that is particularly noteworthy, most of them falling along the lines of the visual punchlines and pop culture references the JLA era Plas indulged in so much, nor can I think of a single image of the book that stays with me, even after having so recently set it down.

Second, this was the first comic book the character had headlined since Baker's Plastic Man ongoing ended in 2006 (Unless you count the two-issue 2015 series Convergence: Plastic Man and the Freedom Fighters, in which an Earth-X version of the character shared top billing with a group of other characters formerly owned and published by Quality Comics). 

And that means it was the character's first time in the spotlight after the hard reboot of "the New 52" in 2011, and the somewhat softer, mushier de-reboot of DC's 2016 "Rebirth" initiative, which seems to have restored much of the pre-New 52 continuity...while also allowing writers and artists to keep whatever they might have considered "the good stuff" from the New 52  as canonical (During those five years between the New 52 and Rebirth, the DCU version of Plas was mostly confined to a few cameos as far as the official DC continuity went). 

With this series, then, Melo and Simone would not only be featuring Plastic Man in his own book for the first time in a dozen or so years, they would also be providing him with a new origin story, his first since the post-Crisis Phil Foglio Plastic Man miniseries of 1988. (Although Baker did also adjust the original origin story in his series as well, adding some Fantastic Four references to the episode where the character meets a kindly monk.)

Simone's new origin, like that of Foglio (and that of Baker), is in keeping with the broad outlines of the one that Cole produced for the character upon his first appearance in 1941: During a robbery of a chemical factory gone wrong, hardened criminal Eel O'Brian is exposed to a mysterious chemical that endows him with amazing shape-changing abilities, and he uses them to turn over a new leaf, becoming a costumed crimefighter.

The details differ in each, of course, and this time around it is a lot darker, a lot more violent and a good deal sleazier. The creators also do some serious work embedding the narrative within the greater DC Universe, with a fair amount of guest-starring villains, visual nods and references to popular superheroes and mentions of organizations or alien races from other comics...all without seemingly having anything to do with any previous continuity (This Plastic Man doesn't seem to have ever been on the Justice League, for example, or even to have ever met any other superheroes). 

So it's kind of a standalone Plastic Man story...that is nevertheless laying down continuity markers...without being canonical...?  

It is, therefore, pretty skippable, and I don't think it has any bearing on any comics that have been published since (The last panel ends with a box that reads, "PLASTIC MAN WILL RETURN!", and then refers to a villain-in-the-making who is introduced in the series, but never actually confronts Plas in the proceedings).  

Simone and Melo's series is set in Cole City, which is a nice enough nod to Plas' creator, and it was nice to see the credits page explicitly state "Plastic Man created by Jack Cole." 

In the opening pages, Eel O'Brian, who here looks just like Plastic Man sans goggles, is being beaten in an alley by the former friends he had pulled the chemical factory job with. They are apparently mad that he seemingly came from back from the dead and/or want him to keep his mouth shut about their activities. It's not entirely clear, actually.

"You breathe a word about that factory heist?" their boss Sammy "The Suitcase" Mizzola says after breaking Eel's leg with a baseball bat, "We come back and break what's left." Then, in the next panel, Sammy tells the other goons, "Man comes back from the dead, he deserves a hidin'."

Left injured and shaking on the pavement, Eel meets an 11-year-old street urchin who introduces himself as "Suave Pado Swakatoon, Prince of Pine Street" (What, you thought the name Woozy Winks was over-the-top...?). This character was apparently born a girl named Margaret but is now leaning towards maybe being a boy (Plas is very supportive of the kid making their own choices throughout but does refer to him as a girl in the last issue). 

Pado will end up figuring throughout the series, eventually being kinda sorta adopted by Plastic Man, who DC seems intent to play as a father figure in their comics (Even if different iterations seem to have different kids). Pado also introduces the word "wang" into the book, and Simone will have Plas use it throughout the series...a lot. 

Anyway, as soon as he's alone, Eel's broken leg fixes itself with a "Pop" and he assumes the familiar form of Plastic Man, albeit with one alteration to his costume: Rather than the red one-piece bodysuit he has primarily worn throughout his long history, the character here has a pair of black biker shorts on. 

The story seems to suggest, then, that Plas can turn his powers off and on...? How else does one actually manage to break one of his bones, after all? (Later, Man-Bat, who Plas mistakes for Batman, scratches the hero's back, and he'll narrate "I didn't even know I could bleed anymore!" This, despite the fact that during the savage beating he takes in the opening scene, black-colored blood pours liberally from his nose and mouth.)

Plas pursues one of his former associates, one of the guys who was holding him down while his old boss was hitting him with the baseball bat, and he tries to scare some information out of him: Who shot and killed the security guard the night of chemical plant robbery? 

Plas is shocked to find out it was he himself who did so (The incident plays out in a dream of Plas'; here he's in the getaway car with his fellow criminals after he is splashed with the chemical, but they throw him out the car door when it looks like he's starting to melt. No monk is mentioned.)

After that, Eel returns to his new day job...which takes place at night. He is the night manager (later he will say bouncer) at Superiors Gentlemans' Club, a superhero-themed strip club (I feel like I've seen Simone characters visit this place in other comics, though this is the first I've heard of Cole City; maybe it's a franchise?). He's greeted at the door by a blonde woman named Doris, who is dressed as Bombshell Supergirl.

The next morning, he's recruited by a mysterious woman in a black bodysuit. She introduces herself as Obscura, an agent of Spyral. She says a powerful group of supervillains have formed a team known as The Cabal, and they have tentacles everywhere, including on super-teams like The Justice League (This is apparently where the collection's cover tag "A Traitor in the Justice League?" comes from).

Oh, and then the former friend Plas had interrogated is brutally murdered, witnesses seeing Plastic Man do it, and the victim scrawling the letters "JLA" in his own blood on the wall (Wait, if Plast isn't a member of the League, why would the victim point to them?)

Throughout the rest of the series, Plastic Man will investigate The Cabal, try to solve the murder being pinned on him (with help from Doris and another woman who works at the club with him) and first find, then rescue and ultimately try to raise Pado Swakatoon.

By the fourth issue, we'll see Plas tangle with a couple of super-villains, three members of Simone's old Secret Six (with Catman wearing the lamer costume from the pages of the shorter-lived 2015 reboot of the series), and learn of The Cabal's actual line-up: Per Degaton, Queen Bee, Amazo, Hugo Strange, Dr. Psycho...and a mind-controlled Durlan the last of these was using to pose as Plas (And, admittedly, Plastic Man vs. a Durlan is a pretty good idea on Simone's part!).

Not all of the dangling plotlines will be resolved here. Gangster Sammy "The Suitcase" has a girlfriend he tries to give Plastic Man powers by exposing her to the same chemical, but who ends up getting different powers and blaming Plastic Man for her disfigurement, though she never actually crosses paths with him by the last issue, for example. 

But our hero does defeat The Cabal in hand-to-hand combat and strike some sort of weird deal with Strange that involves several seemingly contradictory threats, one of which is that he will make the villains look foolish...presumably by telling people he beat them...I guess..? 

Also, he seems to form some sort of family unit with Pado Swakatoon.

I'm not sure if any of this is ever mentioned anywhere again. Plas would next show up in the pages of the Fantastic Four-inspired 2018-2020 series The Terriffics, which I also never read (An appearance by Alan "Please Stop Using My Characters, DC" Moore and Chris Sprouse's Tom Strong in the first issue turning me off immediately), but I understand his son Luke appeared in that title, so I am assuming his other son Pado Swakatoon did not. 

So I guess I didn't miss much my skipping this in 2018 or 2019, nor do I now regret not having read it previously. I assume I will rather shortly re-forget its very existence.

If you, like me, are also a Plastic Man fan, but, like the Caleb of a few days ago, had never read this particular outing of the pliable hero, I'd recommend skipping it and instead buying or borrowing The Origin of Plastic Man, which collects the first 575 pages worth of Jack Cole's Plastic Man comics. More than eighty years later, they are still the best Plastic Man comics. 

DC Versus Marvel Omnibus Pt. 16: The Incredible Hulk Vs. Superman #1

This was actually the first and only of the many DC/Marvel crossovers contained in this collection that bought off the shelf and read when it was originally released. 

My interest was piqued by artist Steve Rude's dynamic painted cover, which seemed to feature not the regular comic book version of Superman, but, instead, the "real" Superman, the figure that directly inspired other interpretations, like the Fleischer cartoons, the 1950's TV show from Nick at Nite, the cartoons of my youth and even the '90s comic books I had read. 

Rather than just another drawing of Superman, it looked like the Platonic ideal of Superman on that cover, smashing boulders being heaved by what looked like the original, Jack Kirby-designed version of the Hulk. 

A quick flip-through of the slim, 48-page volume, offering panel after panel and page after page of Rude's sleek, beautiful pencil art inked by Al Milgrom sold me: This was a comic book that a comic book reader needed to have standing on his bookshelf, even one as young, inexperienced and as Marvel ambivalent as me (At the time, DC Versus Marvel and All-Access were among the only Marvel-related comics I had ever bought*).

Re-reading it about 25 years later near the very end of the DC Versus Marvel Omnibus, I was pleased to find that it still held up quite well, and I'm as happy to recommend it to anyone now as I would have been back when I was still in college. 

Much of that is due to the work of Rude, whose work I've seen far too little of in the years since, but, along with a handful of other artists, I've always considered to be an ideal superhero artist. Like, when I close my eyes and imagine a comic book superhero, I'm quite likely to see a figure as drawn by Rude. 

Rude's lay-outs for the book consist of many six-panel pages, with regular breaks from the format to keep it from becoming monotonous, but nothing too radical. There's a stately, classic look and feel to the pages of the book.

I've used the word "ideal" more than once to describe his work already, but that's really what his Superman looked like to me—and continues to look like, even if now I can see more specific influences in it. 

While Rude is very much working in his own particular style here, he, more than any other artist in this collection, also seems to be inspired and influenced by the work of the two characters' creators and, in Superman's case, later artists (and non-comics portrayals), to give us classic, original takes on the characters, characters that were, like all superhero comics characters, in constant flux and which, by the end of the '90s, didn't really resemble their original iterations all that strongly. 

The script, by Roger Stern, rather cleverly anchors the book in the modern day of 1999, while setting the majority of the story in some nebulous past, which I guess would probably be somewhere in the early 1960s or so, based on the looks of the fashions, cars and settings...and on the particular statuses of the featured characters.

Stern builds in a framing sequence that is set in the apparent "now" (or the now of 1999, anyway), with Lois Lane sitting on a couch watching a documentary about "Doctor Robert Bruce Banner-- --and the curse of the Incredible Hulk."

"Hi, Honey! I'm home..." Superman calls and, after entering through the window, the pair kiss and chat briefly, before the Man of Steel notices what she's watching. 

This leads to a bit of reflection, as Superman notes that both he and Banner have lead double lives ("Double Lives" is actually the title of the story) and he briefly re-tells their origins mostly for the benefit of the readers.

He then says, "I can't begin to imagine what life must have been like for Banner..." as a series of three panels zooms closer and closer to the Hulk's face, and, in the last panel in the sequence it looms large over the silhouette of a sleeping figure, crying "No! No!!" The words "...ALL THOSE YEARS AGO", apparently the end of Superman's sentence, run like a bridge beneath the panels and draw the reader into the story that will fill most of the book's pages.

At the end of that story, we return to Lois and Clark's living room in the present, where they reflect on the "ending" of Bruce's story, with his marriage to Betty Ross, his identity becoming public, and her death. They note how troubled Banner and Betty's life was, and how lucky they themselves are, and then, when Superman wonders where Bruce is now, the scene shifts to a row of television sets in storefront window, with Banner's reflection watching the final scenes of the documentary about his life, before turning and walking off, an image of the Hulk in the sky above his tiny figure. 

In between? Well, in that vague past that Stern sets his crossover in, Banner awakens from a nightmare—he was the sleeping figure in the abovementioned sequence, of course—in a hidden lab, and transforms into The Hulk, to the surprise of his friend and confidante, Rick Jones. 

Hulk storms off, eventually landing at a barbeque in Arizona, where the hungry brute avails himself of the chicken.

Meanwhile, reporter Clark Kent is at a midwestern college, interviewing a Professor Carson about his new breakthrough, a "triangulating seismograph" capable of predicting earthquakes. It's this machine that alerts Kent of something happening in Arizona, resulting in a big panel occupying two-thirds of a page, in which Superman stands atop a rock ledge, hands on his hips, to confront The Hulk, who is busily stuffing chicken into his mouth with his bare hands.

"So you're the big shot from back East, huh?" The Hulk says, as Superman floats down to him. "Well, I wouldn't say that--!" Superman replies. "Neither would I!" The Hulk says, throwing the first punch. Sick burn, Hulk!

After a brief scuffle, The Hulk throws Superman into space and, by the time the Man of Steel returns, The Hulk has moved on (I suppose it's worth noting that, in this story, the pair are much more evenly matched in terms of strength, as opposed to the first time they came to blows, way back in 1981's Marvel Treasury Edition #28). 

Back at the Daily Planet office (where the computers seem to suggest this is actually taking place sometime in the earlier '90s, as retro as so much of the rest of the book may look), Lois sees that Clark is researching The Hulk, and worried he's going to get another superhero scoop on her after his breaking the Superman story, she beats him to editor Perry White, asking him to assign her a story on The Hulk.

Clark, now needing a new assignment to cover his investigation of The Hulk as Superman, pitches a profile on Dr. Bruce Banner. At the time, the fact that Banner actually is The Hulk isn't common knowledge, but Banner is associated with The Hulk and seems to be in the general vicinity of him most of the time. 

They're not the only citizens of Metropolis heading to the American southwest, though. After Rick manages to track down The Hulk and toss some special tranquilizers down his mouth, Banner returns to the army base to meet with a corporate VIP that General Thaddeaus "Thunderbolt" Ross is hosting: Lex Luthor, who Rude draws as middle-aged, a little on the heavy side, and with notable red eyebrows and a fringe of red hair around the side and back of his bald head.

Luthor, a major army contractor, wants to recruit Banner for Lexcorp, which he is fairly obvious about, and, less so, The Hulk to battle Superman, and he has therefore come on something of a charm offensive...coupled with some espionage. 

Luthor's plotting ultimately involves a robot duplicate of The Hulk, which naturally leads to the real Hulk and Superman coming to blows again, this time for a longer, more drawn-out fight than their earlier skirmish. And before the two can manage to make nice, as battling superheroes inevitably do, Luthor turns Banner's massive Gamma Gun on them both.

Stern spends plenty of real estate on getting the two casts together in various configurations throughout, not just the title characters fighting, but their secret identities chatting, their love interests sharing a car ride and being imperiled together, Luthor and Ross talking about The Hulk and military might, and so on (Like Lois, using the sex appeal Rude gives her to try to get Rick's attention for an interview about the Hulk, for example).

While I'm certainly not as familiar with The Hulk as I am Superman (particularly this earlier, original iteration of the character), I have to imagine that with Stern and Rude doing so right by the characters, they also did right by their respective fans. 

This was, of course, one of the last few crossovers DC and Marvel would manage before they quit cooperating on stories again, so I'm glad that their collaboration lasted long enough to give it to us this particular crossover. 

Next: 2000's Batman/Daredevil: King of New York #1

*Oh, and The Ren & Stimpy Show #1 and #6.

Another dent in my to-read pile

The Complete Peanuts 1993-1994 (Fantagraphics Books; 2014) This is one of those books that has no need of any sort of review or reaction from me. After all, what can I say about Charles Schulz's fifty-year long masterpiece of a comic strip that hasn't been said before, perhaps even in this very series' introductions? 

This is, after all, the 22nd volume of Fantagraphics' beautiful collection of the strip, which means they have at this point had 22 different people write introductions to the books, each doing a pretty good job at getting at what makes Schulz's work on the strip so special. 

In this volume, that introduction comes from journalist and TV host Jake Tapper, who does a fine job with the 20 or so paragraphs he's allotted, despite Tapper not exactly being what we might consider a "comics" guy. I'm not sure I have much to add.

The strips collected herein are, as the years on the cover indicate, from relatively late in Peanuts' lifetime. I was in high school at the time they original ran, and an avid newspaper reader...at least of the comics pages and film and music reviews. 

These strips are therefore in the style and on the subject matter that I tend to think of when I think of Peanuts, with the character designs all so fully formed and perfected that they are as familiar as the letters of the alphabet, and Schulz's linework approaching maximum squiggliness, each strip looking almost effortless dashed-off in the manner of a signature.

In that regard, this collection isn't the sort of revelation that the earliest volumes of the series were, wherein we see that the big-headed kids and the first iteration of Snoopy are downright cute in design, with more solid linework, and that the characters hadn't yet evolved into their more popularly recognized forms, with Linus and Sally, for example, still being babies.

As Tapper points out, there is here, as in so much of Schulz's Peanuts, a sort of timelessness, so that even though these strips are now over 30 years old, for the most part they read just as relevant today as they would have in the '90s...just as a reader in the '90s could read the strips of the '60s and still find the humor and even the few cultural touchstones ever mentioned relevant. 

(Tapper does point out a few strips that will seem dated, as they make somewhat rare references to current events or pop culture. These include a couple of strips that mention Sandra Day O'Connor and Senator Joe Biden, in reference to Snoopy, wearing a bowler hat and carrying a brief case as the "world famous attorney," perhaps seeking to fill a vacancy in the Supreme Court. The other is what I assume is the only appearance of Snoopy as "Joe Grunge". Hey, I laughed.)

During its 50-year lifespan then, Peanuts managed to be remarkably consistent with its timelessness, focusing on the core aspects of childhood that never change much, rather than the more transient, surface level aspects. 

I do wonder if the advent and omnipresence of the smart phone marked a change that upsets Peanuts' ability to feel like it is set in an eternal now. After all, I was somewhat surprised to see how many strips in this collection involved the characters talking on the phone to one another, the adult-sized receivers looking huge in their little hands, with a big, coily cord reaching off panel. Surely that's something today's kids can't relate too, and the change in telephone technology seems to be one drastic enough that it confines many Peanuts strips to a twentieth rather than twenty-first century setting (I've tried, but I can't really imagine Charlie Brown or even Snoopy holding a smart phone; I suppose most of the characters are too young to have their own anyway, and Snoopy is, of course, a dog.)

These collections do point out one of the more remarkable aspects of the strip. All cartoonists working in the field tend to have a handful of running gags that they (or their successors, in the case of so many of the legacy strips filling up what's left of the newspaper comics page) return to over and over for new riffs. Think Dagwood and his sandwiches, running into the mailman or getting interrupted in the bathtub, or Garfield and his love of lasagna, hatred of Mondays or disinterest in chasing mice.

Schulz obviously had wells he returned to over and over again over the decades, and you probably unconsciously think of some of them when you think of Peanuts, like Lucy pulling away the football or Snoopy vs. The Red Baron or the kite-eating tree and so on. 

What's different with Peanuts though is that Schulz had developed so many running gags, in such a wide variety and rich depth, that readers would come to see many of them as ongoing struggles in the lives of the characters (especially in the case of Charlie Brown), or indicators of their personalities and inner lives (in the case of Snoopy, for example). 

How many such subjects did Schulz have to return to for inspiration? Well, the book contains an index. It contains entries on different characters and cultural references (mostly of classical music and literature), but also types of gags, like "bed time existentialism" (on 11 pages), "blanket" (22), "mailbox" (12), "suppertime" (15) and so on. 

This isn't to imply that Schulz was or could produce the strip on autopilot—indeed, it may actually be harder in some cases to come up with new gags based on decades-old set-ups like Peppermint Patty vs. her teacher or Lucy resting her head on Schroder's toy piano as he plays—but it certainly shows how rich and varied the strip could be. It also demonstrates, I think, how the strip evolved, as there are entries in the index here that wouldn't have been in previous volumes, like that of new character "Royanne (great-granddaughter of Roy Hobbs)", appearing on nine pages of the collection. 

Two strips herein really struck me, both because they seemed to break, or at least press up against, long established "rules" of the strip. Both are Sunday strips. 

In one, a three-panel strip with one caption reading "June 6,1944, 'To Remember'" (That's the date of the Normandy invasion), the bulk of the strip consists of a huge horizontal panel in which we see Snoopy in a soldier's helmet and backpack, crawling ashore while big, x-shaped, "hedgehog" obstacles are in the background, and troop carriers are along the horizon. The second panel features a half-dozen soldiers, seen above and from behind, so all the reader can see is the backs of their helmets and their shoulders. Still, it seems to be a rare instance of an adult human appearing in a Peanuts strip.

In the other, we see Snoopy chasing and fetching a variety of thrown objects—a ball, a frisbee and then a stick—while an off-panel voice encourages him with "Get it, boy!" and "Get it, pal!" in each panel. The last panel features Linus, Charlie Brown and a frazzled looking Snoopy all leaning against a tree trunk. Linus asks, "What did you do for your dad on Father's Day, Charlie Brown?" and he replies, "I let him play with my dog," seemingly indicating that the off-panel voice in each of those preceding panels was that of his dad. This would, of course, be a very rare instance in which we saw actual dialogue from an adult in a word balloon, rather than just having their dialogue implied by the reactions of the kid characters.

...

Huh. I guess I did have some stuff to say about this collection after all. Now, whether or not I had anything of value to say, well I suppose that's an entirely different question...

Disney Donald Duck Visits Japan! (Tokyopop; 2022) Manga-ka Meru Okano sends Disney comics' easy-to-anger everyman Donald Duck to Japan for a short, accessible culture clash comedy, one in which Donald is charged with unlocking the secrets of the Japanese concept of "Omotenashi." 

What that is, exactly, is never defined in Okano's book. When Donald asks a Japanese waitress, "Hey, so, what is omotenashi exactly?", she merely replies, "The 'O' is a polite way of saying 'Motenashi'," which, obviously, doesn't do him much good. (I ultimately looked it up online and discovered it is a Japanese term referring to hospitality and mindfulness, which tracks with the book's proceedings.)

Donald does not go on this journey alone. Rather than his usual comics traveling companions of Huey, Dewey, Louie and sometimes Uncle Scrooge, he's joined by his fellow "Caballeros", Jose Carioca and Panchito Pistoles, who co-starred with Donald in the 1944 film The Three Caballeros (and would, like most Disney characters, occasionally pop up in various iterations over the years, including in a pair of 21st century Don Rosa comics and, most recently, in a 2018 episode of the rebooted Duck Tales cartoon.)

Though it was something of a surprise to see them show up in a Donald Duck manga, the pair's presence actually makes a lot of sense here, given that they were each originally created to serve as cultural ambassadors (for Brazil and Mexico, respectively), and their original teaming with Donald was in what was essentially a propaganda film, exhibiting goodwill to Latin America. 

Who better, then, to join Donald Duck in a narrative that serves as a sort of crash course in Japanese customs and culture for young, Western readers...?

Here Donald, who Okano draws far simpler, cuter and more duck-like in build than he is usually depicted, has a monotonous office job with the Duck Furniture manufacturing company, with his friends Jose and Panchito working under him. After one too many screw-ups—most likely the time they took the company president's car for a joy ride—they are banished to the newly-created Asia Relations Department. 

The only catch? Duck Furniture has no business in Asia, so Donald spends his days playing solitaire on the computer, his employees performing similar time-wasting activities. Then suddenly one day the phone rings, and the president summons them to his office. He finally has an assignment for the trio: He's going to send them to Japan for a year, where he expects them to learn about omotenashi first-hand, research the company will then translate into new furniture designs. (And, secretly, he hopes the experience will whip them into shape, making them decent employees.)

Their research takes an unexpected form, as they are given entry-level menial jobs at a traditional Japanese Inn, where they work under the watchful eye of a scary and tyrannical Madam Wolf (who, despite her name, is actually an anthropomorphic cat, as are seemingly all the employees at the inn and, indeed, all the Japanese characters). 

Donald and friends are tasked with folding 500 origami cranes, cleaning the long hallways with only brooms and wash cloths, washing dishes and so on, gradually learning more about customer service and the benefits of the inn's traditional ways of doing business. 

Along the way, they also get to go sight-seeing, adjust to Japanese culture and food, learn about Japanese ghost stories and Donald is even given a chance to try his hand at making sushi....which he is terrible at.

I think the book meets its goals effectively, although honestly the most fun part of the book for me was seeing Okano's drastically different take on the classic Donald Duck design and the way his attitude and emotions get translated into and then depicted in manga rather than Western-style comics.

Sasquatch Detective Special #1 (DC Comics; 2019) One of the oddest DC Comics releases in recent memory, this $7.99, 64-page one-shot features Tonya Lightfoot, a Los Angeles police detective who also happens to be a sasquatch. The character is the original creation of stand-up comedian, storyteller and comedy writer for television (and other media) Brandee Stilwell. 

It is, of course, a comedy, a kinda sorta parody of cop show tropes...once it actually gets going, anyway.

It should go without saying that it is very much not the sort of thing that DC Comics usually publishes, especially these days, as the publisher's output continues to contract more and more to their core model of telling stories either featuring their long-lived superheroes and other IP or set in the shared-universe/continuity or, preferably, both.  (The publisher's last remaining imprint Vertigo, which would occasionally still publish creator-owned and non-superhero fare in its waning days, shut down in 2020...although last I heard, DC was hoping to revive it.)

Sasquatch Detective seems like the sort of comic that might we have seen from a smaller, more diverse, more adventurous publisher, one that specializes in lighter-hearted fare and comedic comic books. So how did it end up at DC anyway?

Well, Stilwell pens a brief five-paragraph introduction to this special, which is comprised of both new material and previously published shorts. The character was originally conceived of on an improv stage, she writes, becoming a "go to character...on stages all over town, eventually anchoring a grad show at Second City Hollywood." (As to where the idea for the character came from, Stilwell writes that her inspiration was essentially Charlie's Angels + a yeti.)

Apparently, several DC Comics employees saw Stilwell preforming the character on stage (DC moved to California in 2015, remember), and the publisher eventually invited her to transform the Sasquatch Detective bit into a series of short comics. Drawn by Gustavo Vazquez, these appeared as a back-up strip in Mark Russell, Mike Feehan, Mark Morales and company's 2018 six-issue series Exit Stage Left: The Snagglepuss Chronicles. 

Back-up strips can be awkward in 21st century serial comics publishing, now that just about everything that gets published as a comic book series ends up getting collected and re-published as a trade paperback later. Often such strips don't quite fit in with the feature stories of the title they were originally published in and thus don't always end up in the same trades. (I never flipped-through the Snagglepuss collection, so I don't know with certainty that Sasquatch Detective wasn't collected at the back of it, but it doesn't appear that it was, from what I see online.)

So what was DC to do with Stillwell and Vazquez's comics after Snagglepuss finished its run? They apparently decided to attach the 30-ish or so pages worth of shorts to a brand-new 30-page origin story and publish them as a big, fat, expensive special which is, of course, what we're looking at here. It seems like a somewhat half-hearted strategy. 

If they just wanted to collect the back-ups they already had, after all, they could have released a 32-page comic. If they wanted new material, they could have commissioned a Sasquatch Detective mini-series...or perhaps moved the strip into another book to serve as its back-up. This just seems like something of an odd compromise of strategies, and a publishing decision all but guaranteed not to succeed, at least not from DC, which doesn't have the best track record of books that don't feature their heroes or other IP in some form. (Stilwell does seem to make a few attempts to situate her character in the DCU proper in the shorts; Wonder Woman appears in a few panels in one of them, while Catwoman and Alfred make unlikely cameos in another.)

Now, if you read EDILW religiously, then you know I did not read Snagglepuss (or else you already would have read my review of it), and thus this was my first exposure to Stilwell's character and the resultant comic. I, naturally, read the comic straight-through, from beginning to end, as it was published, although I'm not sure that order necessarily served the material best, as we get a very long origin story, five times longer than each of the original strips, before we get to the re-presentation of those strips, which actually seem to work better not knowing Tonya's origin. 

After all, the very absurdism of the concept, spelled out in the title, is the strongest joke on display here. There just randomly being a detective who is also a sasquatch works better without knowing where Tonya's interest in police work came from or what her life as a regular, jobless sasquatch was like. (The central joke is especially effective since Tonya's police career seems to involve a lot of undercover work, despite the fact that she's eight-feet tall and covered in hair.)

Fourteen years ago, a caption tells us, Tonya and her family were hanging outside a forest ranger station, watching the likes of Law & Order, Reno 911! and CSI through the window. The sasquatch family, who can all talk and all wear bits and pieces of people clothes, then head to a nearby country club where they meet up with other forest animals (all of whom also talk and wear people clothes) and they all play tennis and golf together.

It's a pretty peaceful, idyllic life, despite the occasional interactions with humans, like the campers Tonya's dad scares off in one scene (he seems to ditch his pants and sweater vest before doing so, of course), or the hunters who capture her dad and briefly hold him captive in the back of their pickup truck until Tonya, her mother and her brother rescue him.

Then one day 14 years later, Tonya and her pigeon friend (who can talk, but doesn't wear clothes) catch the news on the ranger station TV, and a Los Angeles policeman says the following: "I want the best of the best for my Los Angeles police force. The best men, the best women. Hell, I'd even take a sasquatch. I don't care as long as they're the best!"

Tonya takes this unusual statement as a sign to apply and, lo and behold, she gets the job, striding confidently (and naked) into the Los Angeles police academy.

Thus ends the origin story, entitled "Origin Story" and drawn by Ron Randall rather than Vazquez. From there, the second half of the book picks up a year later, with Tonya and partner Detective Berkass already on the job and reminiscing about their many adventures. 

Tonya solves a cold case and has terrible bowel distress after eating a two-day-old egg salad sandwich. She attempts to interview a witness but runs afoul of a Fish and Wildlife rep. She goes undercover, first at a spa, and then as a magician's assistant.

The main character was apparently designed by artist Ben Caldwell—the book ends with a four-page section labeled "Concept Art and Sketches by Ben Caldwell"—who also contributes the cover to the special. His sasquatch is much slimmer than the sort one generally sees sasquatches depicted as in various media, and original artist Vazquez follows through with those design choices, giving us a sasquatch who is very tall and hairy, but not too terribly squatchy. She's particularly lithe, sports four clawed digits on her hands and (regularly sized) feet, and has a full head of long hair, in addition to the fur all over her body.

Randall, drawing Tonya and her family in the opening origin story, gives us a quartet of sasquatches that are similarly tall and thin, with long hair atop their heads, and they look a little like big-eyed lion people with almost fox-like limbs.

Overall, I like the design quite a bit for how different it is, and Vazquez seems to have fun cramming it into the generic LA cop settings and stories in the back-half of the book, drawing Tonya nearly folded in half as she squeezes into the passenger seat of her partner's car, dwarfing her regular-human peers when she stands at full-height, or barely changing her look when she goes undercover, donning a blonde wig or floppy sun hat and heels.

Whatever DC's plans for the character and the material might have originally been, they seem to have stopped with this special, as there has been no reappearance by Tonya in the last six years. Perhaps she lives on as a character in Stilwell's stage work...? 

Star Wars Omnibus: A Long Time Ago... Vol. 4 (Dark Horse Books; 2011) It has been many years since I left off reading Marvel's original 1977-1986 Star Wars series, which I was doing via Dark Horse's 6-by-9-inch omnibus collections of it (And which I had hurriedly bought all of when it was announced Marvel was going to be getting the license back, as I was afraid the material might not be collected, or at least not collected in a format I liked once Marvel became its steward again). 

Luckily, it was easy enough to pick it right back up, largely because the first issues collected in this particular volume fall somewhere between The Empire Strikes Back and The Return of the Jedi. In fact, the first issue, #68, reads like it might have been set immediately after the end of Empire, with Luke, Leia, Chewbacca, Lando and the droids divvying up leads on various bounty hunters to start their search for the lost Han Solo. 

And because of the nature of the comics (and other media, really) set in between the installments of the original trilogy, there's only so much narrative progress the creators could really make; readers like me know, of course, that they're not actually going to succeed in finding and freeing Han in any of these issues. Instead, the comics writers would simply be giving them issue after issue of busy work and side quests to keep the comic going during the three-year wait until Jedi. 

It's David Micheline who writes that first issue, as well as the next, a two-parter which sends Leia on a mission to Mandalore (And, as always, it's interesting to how these earlier Star Wars adaptations deal with aspects of the lore that will not yet have been solidified in the ways they later would be, meaning these Mandalorians don't act all that much like those we'll get to know decades later in things like, say, The Mandalorian show). 

After that, Jo Duffy, credited as Mary Jo Duffy in the credits for issue #70, takes over, and she will script the majority of this collection's 500 or so remaining pages. Most of these pages will be drawn by Tom Palmer, credited with either finishes or inks and mostly working over breakdowns by Ron Frenz. 

Other familiar names pop up in the credits, too. Klaus Janson draws and colors Star Wars King Size Annual #3, a complete Duffy-written story about two adventurous young locals who ultimately take two completely different paths after the war between the Empire and the rebels comes to their home planet. David Mazzucchelli pencils one issue (which Palmer inks), though I can't say his work was particularly recognizable as his, and Tom Mandrake shares a "finishes" credit with Palmer on one issue, and his style did seem a little more recognizable to my eye, although that might just be because I'm more familiar with his work. 

For the most part, Duffy's plots are split between the main characters looking for Han and running various missions for the alliance, many of these involving tracking down a lost rebel with important information. One is an extended flashback, featuring Han along with the rest of the characters.

In these, she introduces several original characters who would recur throughout her run, including a three-person crew of rogues, a water-breathing character from an ocean world, and an old enemy of Lando's named Drebbel, whose presence and enmity with Lando would lead to a pretty great pay off in the final issue in this collection. 

Duffy does a fine job of keeping the series going and the characters convincingly engaged in other adventures despite the fact that we all know these comics are essentially just killing time, waiting for Jedi. Palmer's art is consistently great, as he's able to achieve pretty remarkable likenesses of the actors playing the stars without them ever seeming overly stiff, unnatural or not of a piece with the art they are part of. 

It's also fun in the way these early Star Wars comics so often are; with so few adaptations extant at that point, creators had a lot more freedom to invent whatever kinds of aliens, ships, droids, planets and technology they wanted, meaning this version of Star Wars can look and feel delightfully off or, if you prefer, new or original (Though not quite so much as the earlier comics, like some of those discussed below). 

This collection includes Marvel's official four-issue comics adaptation of Return of the Jedi, adapted not by the regulalr comic's creative team, but by Archie Goodwin and artists Al Williamson and Carlos Garzon. I had actually read this in a magazine format as a very young child—I would have been six when it came out in 1983, so it was probably among the earliest comics I had ever read. It's...not very interesting, and I ended up skimming through it here. It's obviously quite faithful to the movie, but the action's condensed, and the artists don't do anything particularly cool or fun with the material, instead presenting it as straight as possible (Which, one imagines, was what they were supposed to do). 

After Jedi, the series continued, of course, and here is where I think the comic should prove particularly fascinating again. With no new films on the horizon, and George Lucas apparently done with them (and relatively few novels establishing what might happen next), Marvel seemingly had pretty free reign to do whatever they wanted with the characters and established lore, this series presenting some of the earliest "more Star Wars", unencumbered by the need to wait for plotlines to be resolved.

There are only five post-Jedi issues collected in this volume, though, and they seem rather all over the place, as Marvel and Duffy seemed to still be casting about for a new direction. 

The first issue following the Jedi adaptation hews pretty closely to following up on the events of the film. The rebels are still based on Endor, and Han Solo and Leia travel to Tatooine to try to unfreeze Han's bank account, which was suspended when he was in suspended animation. There, we learn that Boba Fett was spit out from the Sarlacc pit, found and collected by Jawas who think his armor means he's a droid and, by issue's end, winds up back in the Sarlacc pit. 

Two other stories read like they might have been inventory stories. One is a solo Lando story (by writer Linda Grant and McLeod) that, based on the designs and nature of the story, could have been a Flash Gordon or Buck Rogers story, the other (by writer Roy Richardson, Mazzucchelli and Palmer) features Han Solo hunting for treasure; this a rather fun story as it involves him exploring an ancient temple, calling to mind Han Solo-as-Indiana Jones. 

The other two involve the various characters taking on missions throughout the galaxy, their new goal being inviting planets to attend a big meeting to form some kind of new, post-Empire galactic government. In these, Duffy brings back characters introduced earlier in the series and gives us a couple of payoffs.

There's one more volume left in the A Long Time Ago... series, which will collect the remaining 21 issues of the original series. I'm really looking forward to that, as its contents will be entirely made up of these post-Jedi stories. 

Hopefully it won't take me a decade or so to get to reading it...

Star Wars Omnibus: Wild Space Vol. 1 (Dark Horse; 2013) This collection hails from the too-brief period in which Dark Horse was re-packaging and re-publishing swathes of their licensed material in slightly smaller, 6-by-9-inch, white-covered omnibuses, including, obviously, a bunch of the thousands of pages of Star Wars comics they had published by that point.  

The organizing principle for this particular omnibus seems to be stuff that didn't fit in thematically with any of their other Star Wars collections, leading to a, well, wild selection of comics, most of which hadn't originated with or been previously collected by Dark Horse. 

That means there's a great deal of original material from Marvel UK's Star Wars Weekly, Star Wars Monthly and Empire Strikes Back Monthly, circa 1979-1982, as well as comics from the pages of Marvel's Pizzazz and Scholastic's Star Wars Kids magazine (from the late '70s and late '90s, respectively), plus three issues of the not-very-good Star Wars 3-D from publisher Blackthorne Publishing, a handful of mini-comics that appear to have been pack-ins with a '90s toy line and even a four-panel comic strip that ran on a box of Kellogg's cereal. 

What had originally attracted me to this collection wasn't that I was a Star Wars comics completist or anything. (This was the only Star Wars Omnibus I had purchased aside from the various A Long Time Ago... collections of the original Marvel comics). Rather, it was the name Alan Moore on the back cover. His was perhaps the most prominent of several rather famous names listed there and, given both his reputation and the quality of just about every comic of his I had managed to read, I was more than a little curious to see what he might have done with the Star Wars characters. 

As for the other creators involved with the comics in this collection, it's a real who's who of comics talent, including Mike W. Barr, Howard Chaykin, Chris Claremont, Dave Cockrum, Alan Davis, Tony DeZuniga, Gary Erskine, Archie Goodwin, Carmine Infantino, Klaus Janson, Steve Moore, Ron Randall, Walt Simonson, Ken Steacy, John Stokes, Roy Thomas and Len Wein. 

If you are a fan of any of the gentleman listed above, particularly of the artists, please be advised that, for the most part, this is work from pretty early in their careers with Marvel, so while the promise of a Howard Chaykin or Walt Simonson Star Wars comic is exciting, they aren't necessarily working at the height of their powers here, and their rather brief contributions to the book don't find them at their Howard Chaykin-est or Walt Simonson-est. (Carmine Infantino is an outlier here; he contributes hundreds of pages, and they are both amazing and recognizably his, rather than mundane work for hire bound by drawing celebrity likenesses and studio-approved vehicles and settings).

As for the Moore material, which is perhaps among the best written here, it is, obviously, not exactly the Star Wars equivalent of he and Dave Gibbons' Watchmen...and not just because he wasn't working with Gibbons. 

Rather his stories—three drawn by John Stokes, one by Alan Davis and one by Adolfo Buylla—are all mostly quite short, four of the five ranging from five to six pages each.

As such, there is not entirely too much to these, and they amount to usually clever strips with either quite a bit of writerly narration or, in one case, quite a bit of dialogue, much of it approaching the purple (In this volume, it's instructive to compare Moore's work with that of Chris Claremont, as they share some similarities, although I don't think many ever find occasion to group those two writers together). 

They are also relatively light on Star Wars content, although they star Darth Vader, Luke Skywalker, Princess Leia and C-3PO and R2-D2. The characterization involved is generally one of types, for example, presenting Vader as the blackest, most unconscionable sort of villain, or focusing on Luke's nature as a prototypical hero figure. The one featuring Leia and some Storm Troopers running across some space gods is only incidentally a Star Wars story; almost any characters could have been used in their place. 

For the most part, these shorts—which Dark Horse had actually colorized and reprinted along with Moore's single, longer story in 1996 under the title Classic Star Wars: Devilworlds #1 and #2—basically read like some of Moore's earlier works for British anthology comics or, perhaps more directly, the various DC Comics shorter works most recently collected in 2015 as DC Universe by Alan Moore. (One story even prefigures Moore and Gibbons' famous Green Lantern short "Mogo Doesn't Socialize", featuring as it does a sentient planet coming to life to defend itself from hostile invaders.)

As for that longer story, it is the 15-page "The Pandora Effect," in which Leia, Han Solo and Chewbacca find themselves captive on a strange, extra-dimensional ship crewed by evil-worshipping occultists who intend to torture and kill them, until Chewbacca releases a prehistoric otherworldly demonic entity that the bad guys had imprisoned. It's notably mature for a Star Wars story of this era, but, again, it's not so much a Star Wars story as a rather generic sci-fi story in which the Star Wars characters are dropped in. 

Another particularly strong story in the collection is from another Moore, Steven Moore. This is "Death-Masque," in which the Empire releases an incredible, terrifying weapon upon Luke, a small creature that looks like a monkey with a skull for a head, lights glowing from its empty sockets. The creature, which is kept hooded like a hawk, is basically an alien answer to folklore surrounding sleep paralysis, as it squats on the chest of its victim, projecting nightmares into the victim's head. Here, that means Luke wandering around a Stokes-drawn planet filled with skulls of various sizes and bone trees while watching his friends die and ultimately dueling against a skull-faced Darth Vader.

Again, it's not too terribly Star Wars-y a story...but then, that is a large part of the fun of the earliest years of Star Wars comics. With what we now think of as the established lore of that fictional universe then so scant and pre-formed—limited, as it was, to just what was in that first movie—the writers and artists had no real choice but to make up things as they went along. Planets, aliens, droids, ships, costumes, even the characters' histories and inter-personal relationships...at that point, it was all still up for grabs, and so the creators had to more-or-less treat the characters as types, and send them into the sorts of space and fantasy adventures of old Flash Gordon and Buck Rogers serials, the very things George Lucas had taken his own inspiration from (The serial nature of comics, of course, proved the most perfect vehicle for such stories, even if the emerging Star Wars novels offered better, more rewarding reading). 

I take great pleasure in these wild, untamed Star Wars comics, especially now that the fictional setting has been so rigorously chronicled, standardized and mapped out, seemingly every conceivable empty space or opening filled in (And, after the third trilogy scrambled so much of what was previously regarded as canon, re-filled in). 

We find such stories aplenty here, mostly in the form of what I guess must have been strips original to Marvel UK's titles, written first by Goodwin and then, later, by Claremont, all drawn by Infantino in his own slightly strange style, with off-kilter action, blocky figures and seeming complete disregard for likenesses or the film's design (Infantino's Chewbacca especially, like almost everybody's at the time, is often quite off-model. The only way to really guess his Luke is Luke is his answering to the name and occasionally wielding a light saber, and Infantino's extremely curvy version of Leia is mostly identifiable by her signature hair style, taken from the original film and worn almost religiously throughout the comics he draws here).

These are even more fun when Goodwin does attempt to address the continuity of the film, as in one story set immediately after the destruction of the Death Star, in which the "toasts" came "often and exuberantly" and "there may have been moments when the partying threatened to get completely out of hand..." 

That last bit of narration comes in a panel of Leia kissing Han, followed immediately by a panel in which she kisses Luke, who of course Goodwin and company didn't know (and Lucas himself probably didn't know at that point either) would end up being brother and sister (That's not the only time they kiss in these comics either).

Oh, and Leia also gives Chewbacca his medal after the kissing; so there's that curious loose end from the film tied-up, all the way back in 1979!

Goodwin and Infantino also tell us of the Kessel Run and just how Leia got to be such a crack shot with a blaster (given that she was a princess/senator from a pacifist planet), before Claremont replaces Goodwin and comes aboard for a rather epic story that adds a Black female rebel to Luke, Leia and the droids' small crew and then sends them all to a volcano planet where they are forced to ally themselves with an contingent of Imperial commandos. 

Once we hit the late '80s and the pages give over to American comics that now have a whole, completed trilogy (and its various mass media tie-ins) to work with as source material, the comics tend to get a little less crazy...and less fun.

The three-issue 3-D series written by Len Wein, and here presented in black and white, features stories in which Luke returns to Tatooine to find someone new to run the family moisture farm; Luke, Han, Chewbacca and the droids scout out Hoth for a possible rebel base; and Luke being seduced to the power of the Dark Side by Vader from afar.

Here we see not only an adherence to plotlines from the films, but even the types of aliens have settled into the now-familiar races, with a group of bandits on Hoth all made-up of various races introduced in Return of the Jedi. 

And by the time we get to the Star Wars Kids comics, everything seems to be produced to fit into a by then tightly regulated canon. 

Seen as a supplement to A Long Time Ago... (and a chance to see Infantino's Star Wars art in glorious black and white, where you can appreciate the linework of the artist and his partners like Gene Day and Steve Mitchell more), or a chance to see what Alan Moore might have done with the storied franchise or simply as a collection of some of the most oddball Star Wars comics that one can't find anywhere else, it's a particularly rewarding collection.

Um, too bad it's now been out of print so long now (Maybe I should have read and reviewed it sooner than a dozen years after it was published, I guess). 

I'm not sure if Marvel has republished any of this material since they reacquired the Star Wars license, and, if so, where, but it looks like this omnibus may still be available via Kindle, if you don't mind supporting Amazon in these trying times of ours.