The Spectre in the DC Universe Pt. 1

As previously mentioned, the Spectre by John Ostrander and Tom Mandrake Omnibus contains commentary on each issue by Ostrander. In discussing issue #21, he addresses something that I had often thought about, back in 1992 when I first read an issue of the series, and again last month while reading through the first half of the series in the omnibus.

Ostrander:

I've sometimes been asked why The Specte wasn't part of Vertigo, which was an imprint of DC known mostly for its supernatural/mystical titles and its blue-ribbon creators. The answer, if memory serves, is because we preceded it. Karen Berger, the line's senior editor, was not our editor. We were in a different editorial group. Sometimes it's that simple. 

Ostrander's memory does indeed serve. Vertigo launched in January of 1993, the month that Spectre #4 hit stands. Of course, it's the different editor thing that probably actually kept Spectre from getting a Vertigo logo on its cover, as the mature readers imprint's initial offerings—Animal Man, Doom Patrol, Hellblazer, Sandman, Shade, The Changing Man and Swamp Thing*—were all in-progress series. The oldest of these was Swamp Thing, with #129 being the first Vertigo-branded issue, and the youngest was Shade, which was already on issue #33 the month Vertigo launched. 

Even as a teenager, I thought The Spectre to be an awfully Vertigo-ish book, one that sort of straddled the border between that line of comics and DC's main superhero line. Certainly, Ostrander and Mandrake's book was written and drawn as well as anything Berger was editing back then, the storytelling was as sophisticated and the subject matter as mature as what one might have found in Animal Man or Swamp Thing at the time. And, of course, the book's basic premise felt very Vertiginous, if that's the right word to use for it (It's not). 

That is, it was a comic starring an old DC-owned character being reinvented, specifically as a horror comic involving the occult, mysticism and quasi-religious content (Indeed, as we'll see, The Spectre shared multiple characters and settings that appeared in those half-dozen Berger books, and some later Vertigo books). 

Thinking about it now, I'm not sure how much different Ostrander and Mandrake's Spectre might have been if it was a Vertigo book. 

I guess the characters would probably swear (One of them, police lieutenant Nate Kane, has a charming habit of saying "Balzac!" like a swear word). 

And Mandrake would be able to draw nipples on the various topless ladies who appear in these stories (Madame Xanadu, for example, performs a ritual stripped to the waist at one point. One demon is drawn as a naked woman from the waist up and a snake from the waist down. And when we see human souls, they are always naked. Mandrake uses tricks of light and posing to make sure that a strand of hair falls just so over a woman's breast, for example, or that shadows fall over them to offer a degree of concealment).

Oh, and maybe we would be less likely to see Superman playing a substantial role in one of the stories, I guess...?

Maybe the characters gathered at the funeral that Jim Corrigan/The Spectre threw for himself in 1998's The Spectre #62, the last issue of the series wouldn't have included electric Superman, hook-handed Aquaman and the Martian Manhunter. (The image above is from that issue, by the way, and is thus not actually included in the first omnibus, but it seemed like a good one to use for this post, given all the DCU characters in it). 

Swearing and nudity aside, I think The Spectre actually benefits from being set in the mainstream DCU. Given the character's long history—he debuted in 1940, was a founding member of comics' first super-team the Justice Society of America in the pages of All-Star Comics, and starred in a pair of ongoing series, one in the 1960s and another in the1980s—he's entwined in the history of the DC Universe in a way that, say, Animal Man and Swamp Thing aren't. And it's not like Jack Kirby's 1970's Sandman was on the Justice League, or Steve Ditko's Shade was wrestling the Anti-Monitor in Crisis on Infinite Earths. 

Of course, being a Vertigo book didn't necessarily preclude the appearances of superhero characters from throughout the broader DC line of comics. The wall around the imprint was also rather porous and, of course, the original Vertigo books all started out as ones presumably set in the DCU (Which can be disconcerting to later readers, who might pick up a Vertigo-branded collection and find Dream of The Endless visiting JLI headquarters and meeting Martian Manhunter, or Richard Case drawing Booster Gold and Blue Beetle in the pages of Doom Patrol). 

I wanted to explore the book as a book within the DC line, specifically how it interacted with the wider DC Universe setting, how it pulled guest-stars and supporting cast members from DC comics history and even featured some of what we now think of Vertigo characters...and reflecting aspects of the Vertigo books back into the DCU.

MADAME XANADU

In The Spectre #2, "Crimes of Passion", Siegel-Baley General Hospitals' staff social worker Amy Beitermann is trying to learn more about Jim Corrigan, who she briefly met at the hospital—and then witnessed him getting repeatedly shot in a drive-by shooting, the bullets all passing harmlessly through him. 

Her policeman friend Nate Kane tells her that Corrigan was a detective "who went goofy some time back...left the force and became a private detective--psychic or psycho investigator--or some such." When she looks for Corrigan at his old office, we see an exterior of a building, its sign reading "Corrigan Detective Agency 5th Floor, Madame Xandadu 1st Floor."

While Corrigan isn't there, and his dusty office seemingly abandoned, Amy has a brief encounter with Madame Xanadu, who will be something of an off-and-on supporting character in the book for a while.

She was originally created by David Michelinie and Michael William Kaluta in 1978 for Doorway to Nightmare...and was based on a nameless "host" character that Kaluta had previously drawn in Forbidden Tales of Dark Mansion. She was a beautiful, mysterious woman who ran a magic shop where she would give tarot readings...and inevitably get mixed up in an occult adventure in each story. Her exact origins and powers were never delineated.

Writer Doug Moench would make extensive use of her as a supporting character in the pages of the second Spectre ongoing (the 1987-1989 series), where she served as something of a spiritual advisor to Corrigan...and the lover of The Spectre.

Ostrander refers to this period in his stories involving her, and she plays a curious role here, not quite a villain, in the traditional comic book sense, but certainly an adversary. At one point, she will strip Corrigan of The Spectre powers and take them as her own, hoping to change the world for the better, but finding her goal frustrated by The Spectre-Force's need to avenge the murdered dead and punish the guilty. 

She will later predict the inevitable violent death of Amy but take steps to try to avert it. She will also join others in an attempt to free The Spectre from the influence of Eclipso when the villain possesses him and, as the omnibus nears its conclusion, join The Spectre and his allies in Hell, where they fight against Azmodus (More on both Eclipso and Azmodus in a bit).

While her original comics appearances might have been vague on the matter, Ostrander details Xanadu's long—immortally long—life, her origins and the full extent of her considerable sorcerous powers. I'm not sure how these map to Moench's version of the character, as his 31-issue volume of The Spectre hasn't been collected (But seems a decent candidate for a couple of DC Finest volumes, DC!)

DEADMAN

In The Spectre #5, "A Rage in Hell," a carful of kidnappers are caught in a deadly car crash, which spells doom for their victim: They have secreted a little boy in a grave with an air tube until their ransom was met, although a rainstorm is now threatening to drown him. The only people who could reveal his location are now all dead. 

Amy has recently met and befriended Corrigan, however, learning that he is actually The Spectre. She and Kane prevail on Corrigan to get the information needed to save the boy's life, by entering one of the kidnappers' bodies and interrogating his soul in the afterlife.

The Spectre first visits "the land of the recently departed," which Mandrake draws as a sort of desolate wasteland punctuated by large rock outcroppings, through which a massive crowd of people are walking toward the reader. Sitting atop one of those outcroppings in the foreground, we see Deadman sitting cross-legged, his head resting in his hand as if he's bored. 

While the character is far enough away that it's hard to see any details, Mandrake seems to draw a version of the character that hues to his original Carmine Infantino design, rather than the rotting corpse look that Kelley Jones gave him in 1989's Deadman: Love After Death miniseries. If there's a big "D" on his red costume, it's obscured.

The Spectre doesn't acknowledge Boston Brand, whose presence is completely unremarked upon. It's apparently just a little cameo for the readers.

SHATHAN

In that same issue, The Spectre leaves "the land of the recently departed" for Hell, where he calls forth the "LORD OF LIES!" and is answered by a huge, red, horned figure: "Who so calls upon Shathan The Eternal?" 

Now, "Shathan" sounds like an overly careful, rather comic book-y way to use the devil in a comic book story without actually saying the name "Satan", similar to Marvel re-naming their Satan "Mephisto" or DC pitting Superman against a "Lord Satanus", but don't blame Ostrander for adding a couple of H's to "Satan"—the character was actually the creation of Gardner Fox and Murphy Anderson in 1966's Showcase #61.

That Shatan looked like a pretty generic, if a little stout and somewhat under-dressed, devil figure (You can see him bonking The Spectre on the head with the planet earth of the issue's cover). In Fox's story, Shathan comes from the alternate dimension of Dis, where everything is composed as "psycho-matter", the same stuff that The Spectre was made of.

Fox avoided using the word "Hell", but given how obviously the character's design was inspired by a traditional, cartoony conception of the devil, and that "Dis" is the name that Dante gave a city in The Inferno's Hell, it doesn't take much of a leap of the imagination to reorient Shathan into a devil from Hell (The DC Universe's version of Hell, which had emerged by that point in the early '90s, was a plane of existence ruled by a sort of high court of various warring and scheming chieftains, each of these devils vying to be Hell's ultimate ruler; this vision accounts nicely for the fact that books as various as, say, Superman, The Demon and The Sandman might have different takes on Hell, or use different stand-ins for Satan/The Devil. Ostrande and Mandrake will show us a sort of council of devils before this volume ends).

Ostrander even accounts for Mandrake's rather radical redesign of the character, which sports a massive, more animalistic pair of horns, a face full of fangs and gnarled limbs terminating in long claws: "We have fought before and since then I have been able to reconstitute only this miserable form."

If you want to read of that fight, and The Spectre's first fight with Shathan's servant Azmodus from Showcase #60 (Azmodus is our next entry on this list), they have been collected in September's DC Finest: The Spectre: The Wrath of The Spectre and 2020's The Spectre: The Wrath of The Spectre Omnibus and, if you can still find it, 2012's Showcase Presents: The Spectre.

Here, The Spectre and Shathan fight in Hell, a brutal battle involving size-changing and shape-changing but ultimately ends with The Spectre plunging his fist into Shathan's chest and pulling out his "heart", the soul of the recently dead kidnapper that The Spectre had descended to Hell in search of in the first place.

AZMODUS

In The Spectre #8, Shathan is being tortured by much smaller, lesser devils, and reflects on "the cycle" he is subject to: "You are great, you are brought low. You rule, you are ruled." But, in the next panel, he mentions that his "familiar" Azmodus had escaped from Hell when The Spectre last departed, and that "He will grow strong, create misery, feed me."

This is kinda sorta the role that Azmodus played in those old Showcase issue. Introduced as an evil opposite of The Spectre, he too rather resembled a sort of cartoon devil, oddly dressed in yellow (You can see him on this cover).

In Showcase #61, the issue after the one in which The Spectre defeated Azmodus, we see Shathan growing strong by making deals with various mortals, exchanging favors for their shadows.

In Ostrander and Mandrake's Spectre, Azmodus will be the one buying shadows from mortals. He too has a rather radical redesign, losing the yellow suit, boots and cape, but still appearing to keep the spirit of the design, being somewhat generically diabolical. 

Mandrake's take looks mostly human, albeit with pointy ears and pointy teeth. He's dressed head-to-toe in red, wears a cape and has big, billowing, rather theatrical-looking sleeves. 

He will play a major role in this half of the series, fighting The Spectre on another plane not unlike the battle he had with him in that long ago Showcase story (This he does to keep The Spectre busy while Amy is imperiled in the real world by a human killer). Later, we will learn of Azmodus' origins and relationship to The Spectre, and, as this collection nears its final pages, The Spectre has a climactic battle with Azmodus in Hell. 

FATHER RICHARD CRAEMER 

After the serial killer called The Reaver attacks and then impersonates the priest at the Church of the Holy Sepulcher in order to commit his latest murders, the church receives a new priest in The Spectre #13, "Righteousness": Father Richard Cramer. 

I actually didn't recognize him upon his first introduction, not even when, in the next issue, "Wrath of God", he recognizes The Phantom Stranger, the most mysterious of DC's heroes, explaining to him that, "My previous assignment was as chaplain at Belle Reve prison, where they incarcerate a number of criminal metahumans...They also keep extensive files on the subject."

Though Ostrander pretty much spells it out in that dialogue, it wasn't until I was reading his notes later that I realized this priest is the same one who appeared in Ostrander's 1987-1992 Suicide Squad, one of the handful of civilian support staff that filled out the books large and ever-changing cast. 

In this title, Craemer first meets Corrigan when the latter comes to church for confession, during which Craemer brings up a civil war in the fictional Balkan country of Vlatava as an example that no human being can realistically expect to avenge "the blood of the innocent slain", given just how much innocent blood is so regularly spilled around the world.

Unfortunately, Corrigan seems to take that as a challenge and flies off to judge all of Vlatava. 

Craemer will later talk Corrigan/The Spectre down when he seems poised to erase all of humanity from the face of the Earth, after which point he becomes Corrigan's spiritual advisor and friend. 

Craemer appears as a close ally and confidant of the title character throughout the rest of the series. 

COUNT VERTIGO

Did Vlatava sound familiar to you? There's good reason. That's the country that the supervillain Count Vertigo hails from, and, as a member of its royal lineage, sometimes rules or fights to rule. Originally created by Gerry Conway, Trevor Von Eeden and Vince Colletta, he played a significant role in Ostrander's previously mentioned Suicide Squad and is now primarily known as a Green Arrow villain. 

In "Righteousness", we will learn that he leads one side of a brutal civil war against Muslim opposition, a conflict seemingly somewhat inspired by the then-ongoing Bosnian war. The Spectre, currently suffering from a devastating grief, visits the country to avenge its dead.

He and Vertigo briefly fight, but Vertigo's powers to disorient and unbalance his foes has little effect on The Spectre ("I know good from evil," he says, grabbing Vertigo by the throat, "That is enough.) 

Ultimately, The Spectre judges the entire nation guilty of a centuries-long conflict that has killed countless innocents, and he inflicts his vengeance upon it, killing, as will be made clear in later dialogue, every man, woman and child in Vlatava, sparing only two people: Count Vertigo and the general leading the opposition forces.

"You both wanted this land," The Spectre says, "It is now yours. That is your punishment."

THE PHANTOM STRANGER

DC's ever mysterious figure, whose origins and roles seem to regularly shift, even on the rare occasions where a writer seeks to define them, appears before Craemer in issue #14, "Wrath of God." 

As is often the case, The Stranger seems to know more than any mortal should about what is going on, speaking of The Spectre's state of mind and future intentions, but just where he gets his information and who exactly he is doesn't get discussed at all—not in the issues collected in this omnibus volume, anyway, despite Ostrander's work of building a consistent mythology of various DC supernatural characters from decades' worth of disparate stories within the book.

This issue, by the way, is one of the handful that the prolific Mandrake did not pencil and ink himself. Instead, guest-artist Joe Phillips draws it. 

Phillips' version of The Stranger seems a bit closer to that of the Vertigo Stranger, which had then just recently appeared in 1993's Vertigo Visions: The Phantom Stranger #1, by Alisa Kwitney and Guy Davis. Rather than a cape, fancy suit and medallion, he merely wears a big blue trenchcoat that completely obscures whatever he might be wearing underneath in shadow. He also wears white gloves and the familiar hat, shading his eyes, which appear blank and white beneath it.

Most notably, there's a glare of white light that emanates from his upper chest.

His role in the series is to, first, explain some of the history and nature of The Spectre to Craemer, whose mention of Vlatava seems to have set The Spectre on his current path of contemplating the judgement of nations and even the world, and then gather a handful of magic-users to try to confront The Spectre in order to save the world.

ECLIPSO

When The Phantom Stranger tells Craemer of the history of The Spectre, he starts with this: "There are many sides to the almighty--many names by which God is called...Even his wrath has a name and, in the beginning, it was what became known as Eclipso!"

Four panels, including one splash page, are devoted to Eclipso's role as God's spirit of wrath. In that splash, Phillips draws a giant Eclipso standing knee-deep in stormy, wave-filled waters, a huge wooden boat looking tiny next to his form in the lower righthand corner.

It was Eclipso, The Stranger says, who, "in the name of God," flooded the Earth during the time of Noah. (I am here reminded of a footnote in Douglas Wolk's All of The Marvels, made in reference to Loki escaping where he was when the Norse myths left off to enter into the greater Marvel Comics story.  "As we soon learn, every body of mythology is literally true within the Marvel Universe," Wolk writes. "The traditional stories told in our world about immortal gods, especially those who take human form, are simply how somebody on Earth-616 has documented interesting events." The same seems to be true of the DC Universe.)

Eclipso "overreached himself" though, and would not forgive as God did, so he was ultimately "banished into a prison, one that should have lasted for all time, save for the perfidy of man."

It's been a while since I read 1992's Keith Giffen and Robert Loren Fleming-written Eclipso: The Darkness Within (another good candidate for DC Finest collections!), and I've only read a few issues of the 1992-1994 ongoing Eclipso title that followed it (a trade of which I would also totally buy and read), but I believe it was there that the minor Silver Age villain was promoted to a dangerous, demonic entity.

I think Ostrander was the one who integrated the character into The Spectre's history though, making Eclipso his precursor as an avatar of divine vengeance. Please correct me if I'm wrong, though.

NABU

The Stranger's history of The Spectre continues through the Old Testament, and soon another familiar DC comics character appears.

"Not all of the pharaoh's court were ill-disposed to the descendants of Joseph and his brothers," The Stranger narrates. "One who counseled prudence was the court magician Nabu."

Nabu was originally created by Garner Fox and Howard Sherman as the magician mentor who gifted Kent Nelson the various magical items that made up his Doctor Fate costume. He was later revealed to be a cosmic Lord of Order, and, over the years, he was gradually integrated into the ancient history of the evolving DC Universe setting.

Here, Phillips draws him as a quite buff Caucasian-looking man with white hair and a white beard. He battles the then host-less Spectre-Force when it comes to claim the life of the pharaoh, avenging his culling of the Hebrews. Phillips draws this hostl-less Spectre-Force as a sort of Grim Reaper figure in a green cloak, with an emaciated, bony body, and a skull for a head.

Afterwards, Nabu becomes advisor to the new pharaoh, the one from the Book of Exodus and, indeed, he's on hand when Moses and Aaron do their staff-to-snake trick (Nabu is one of the magicians who similarly transforms a staff into a snake, although Moses' snake devours his). 

At the climax of the story of the plagues—"a battle of wonders--of terrors"—it is The Spectre-Force that moves among Egypt like a mist, claiming the lives of every first-born son. Nabu again challenges it, this time wearing the helm of Fate, and he is again defeated, as "the force the Spectre represented was the force that created the Lords of Order".

SUICIDE SQUAD'S AMBAN AND THE HAYOTH 

In The Spectre #15, "Old Blood", the title character visits the Middle East, intent on claiming the life of Kemal Saad, "Head of the Legion of Palestine," who is in Cairo for peace talks with Israel, despite being considered a terrorist by the Israeli government for his past actions. 

At the behest of Israel, Saad has super-powered security watching over him: The Hayoth, an Israeli super-team that Ostrander had created in 1990 as part of his Suicide Squad run. They are led by Ramban, a Kabbalistic combat magician, and their number here includes Golem and Judith. 

The Spectre makes short work of Golem but has considerably more trouble with Ramban. ("I am a student of The Kabbalah, and the power I invoke is the power that created you," he tells The Spectre at one point).

Ramban will continue to play a supporting role throughout the series. In fact, he's one of the characters pictured in that crowd scene from the final issue at the top of the post.

DOCTOR FATE

The Stranger begins to gather allies to oppose The Spectre, should the latter decide to really go through with doing to the rest of the world what he had already done to Vlatava. The first of these is Doctor Fate who, in 1993, was still Inza Nelson, not her husband Kent.

"The Spectre has gone mad," The Stranger tells the Nelsons. "He is trying to decide if he will destroy the world for its wickedness. I am recruiting beings of power to oppose him if we must."

Inza transforms, saying "Then Doctor Fate will join you," in the character's particular dialogue bubble style, and she then asks who else The Stranger will recruit as they leave Fate's door-less tower in Salem, Massachusetts.

"A drunkard, a demon, a sorceress, and a woman who does not die," he replies, rattling off a list of suggestive possibilities that will be realized in the next few issues.

JOHN CONSTANTINE

By the month that this issue was published, Constantine's home book Hellblazer was on issue #73, and had borne a Vertigo logo on its cover for 11 issues. I was more than a little surprised to see what was by then a Vertigo character in a DCU book.

He's not here long, however, only appearing in four panels. We see him lying in a pool of some sickly-colored liquid—Alcohol? Vomit? Piss?—in New York City.

Fate squats next to the prone figure, asking incredulously, "This is Constantine?"

"He's worse off than I thought--and totally useless for our purposes," The Stranger says. "We'll have to do without him." 

They leave without Constantine seeming to have ever been aware that the were there; in the last panel to feature him, the pool of liquid is colored red, and now looks to be blood. (For what it's worth, Constantine was, at this point, in the "Damnation's Flame" arc of his own book, by writer Garth Ennis and artist Steve Dillon.)

ETRIGAN, THE DEMON

If Constantine proved to be "the drunkard" on The Phantom Stranger's list of recruits, you've probably already guessed who "the demon" was.

The Stranger and Fate find Jason Blood in Gotham City, and The Stranger can barely say hello before Blood cuts him off. 

"You never need me," he says. "You need him."

A short spell later, and a smoking, leering Etrigan crouches before the pair, leveling a lascivious threat at the Doctor while licking his lips: 

And so I walk the world again, a Stranger greets me fair.

With a Fate so sweet that I intend...

...to strip the Doctor bare!

Mandrake draws an amusingly worried reaction on Fate's helmed "face", but the Stranger changes the subject immediately.

"Actually, we've come to settle a question," he tells Etrigan. "Who is stronger, The Demon or...The Spectre?"

Though well aware that The Stranger is attempting to manipulate him into aiding him against The Spectre, appealing to Etrigan's pride, the Demon aggrees to join their ad hoc super-team: "I'll come; I'll come. It sounds like fun!"

Let's here pause a moment to praise Mandrake's version of Etrigan. 

One of the many appealing aspects of this series is seeing Mandrake draw so many different DC characters, and his Etrigan is a particularly great one. He's a hulking brute of a figure, muscled to the point that it approaches deformity in some panels, The Demon seemingly hunching under the weight of his own triceps muscles. Mandrake also gives him a bestial face that suggests a compromise between Jack Kirby's original design and that given to him by Stephen Bissette in the pages of Swamp Thing. 

His expressions, meanwhile, are mostly a series of leers and grins, exposing his fangs and tongue, suggesting writer Alan Grant's "mad" version of the character.

Mandrake draws him in a few issues here, and will briefly return to the character when he guest-stars in an issue of he and Ostrander's later Martian Manhunter ongoing (Which I hope DC gets around to collecting after a second omnibus collecting the rest of their Spectre; I have every issue in singles, but I wouldn't mind a more readable collection or three on my bookshelves). 

Based on how good Mandrake's Etrigan is, I hope that DC will eventually commission a story of some length starring the character in the future, perhaps with Ostrander writing.

If you're wondering what The Demon was up to at the time this issue hit the shelves, writer Garth Ennis and artist John McCrea (who draws another of my favorite versions of Etrigan) were four issues into their short run on The Demon (Specifically, "Hell's Hitman" part two, guest-starring Tommy Monaghan).

ZATANNA

And "the sorceress"...? That would be on-again, off-again Justice Leaguer Zatanna. Here The Phantom Stranger and team meet her in The Spectre #16, "Call For Blood," the issue in which the incredibly intersting art team of penciller Jim Aparo and inker Kelley Jones spell Mandrake.

She's in a San Francisco office, wearing a pink business suit. The Stranger tells her "You have recently come to a full understanding of your heritage and power", asking her, "Will you join that power with ours?"

She takes a wand from her desk drawer and holds it aloft, saying "Excuse me while I change." 

Then she stands before them, wearing tight blue pants and boots, a blue vest with a very long collar, and various bits of jewelry, including a big, golden-colored "Z" for a belt buckle. 

This is the costume she wore in the then just recently completed four-issue Zatanna mini-series by writer Lee Marrs and artist Esteban Maroto. I never read it, but quite clearly remember seeing house ads for it, given Maroto's gorgeous artwork. 

She briefly summarizes the changes of that story to Fate, and Etrigan is not a fan: "No backwards spells? No fishnet hose?! I hate it when a tradition goes!"

Not to worry, Etrigan. This particular phase of Zatanna's career would prove short-lived, and she'd be back in fishnets and speaking her spells backwards before too long.

I was amused by the pair's exchanges here, though. When Zatanna calls out his "doggerel", Etrigan replies:

True, my verse is barren, but the reason I will tell.

Shakespeare went to Heaven; critics go to Hell.

Bad news, fellow comics critics!

NAIAD

This extremely powerful water elemental is an original creation of John Ostrander and Tom Mandrake's...but not for this book. Rather, they had created her near the end of their Firestorm run. 

A Japanese protestor who was set afire by men working for an oil company, she was reborn by Gaia, the spirit of Earth, as a being composed of water and who was able to control water. 

Here she awakens on a mission of vengeance not too far removed from that of The Spectre's, ultimately targeting Japan. 

The Spectre, who has just recently been talked from using his powers in pursuit of a vengeance that would incur millions of lives, opposes her...as does another DCU guest-star we'll get to in a moment.

She is eventually convinced to relent.

THE JUSTICE SOCIETY OF AMERICA 

Though The Phantom Stranger and his team, and Father Craemer, Rambala and Madame Xanadu, were eventually able to purge The Spectre of Eclipso's influence and talk Corrigan/The Spectre out of judging the entirety of the world's population, the danger The Spectre poses has convinced the United States government to seek some sort of anti-Spectre countermeasure. 

Then-president Bill Clinton enlists the aid of one of his old professors, Nicodemus Hazzard, to research the issue.

Hazzard first turns to The Spectre's old allies in the JSA. 

The series' twentieth issue, entitled "Strange Friends", follows Hazzard as he meets the aged members of the JSA in the present, their stories of their relationship with The Spectre during the 1940s composing flashbacks where they often appear in costume.

Over the course of these 22 pages, all drawn by guest artist John Ridgway, Hazzard meets with and interviews Johnny Thunder, The Flash Jay Garrick, Wildcat Ted Grant, Hawkman and Hawkwoman Carter and Shiera Hall and Sandman Wesley Dodds. 

They all appear young and in costume in the flashbacks, as do a handful of other heroes, who only have brief cameos (Green Lantern Alan Scott, Doctor Fate, Starman, The Atom, Liberty Belle, Johnny Quick, and Johnny Thunder's Thunderbolt).

It is Hazzard's talk with Dodds, about the Spear of Destiny and dreams, that leads to Hazzard consulting another familiar character, one I was even more surprised to see here than Constantine. He appears in the last few panels of this particular issue.

LUCIEN THE LIBRARIAN

Unable to learn more about the spear from any books or databases on Earth, Hazzard turns to a search of "non-ordinary reality."

To do so, he falls asleep, albeit a more guided sort of sleep than most of us experience each night. His goal is to reach The Dreaming, the realm of Dream/Morpheus/The Sandman from Gaiman's Sandman. Specifically, he's looking for Dream's library, stocked with an infinite number of books that only exist there, each tome one an author has only dreamt of actually writing.

Hazzard ends up finding a book on the history of the Spear of Destiny that he himself wrote, albeit in his dreams, rather than reality, and this provides him with the information he needs.

As I said, I was quite surprised to see a character from The Sandman in the pages of The Spectre...but then I learned from Ostrander's notes on the issue that Gaiman didn't actually create Lucien for The Sandman. Rather, Lucien was one of several relatively obscure "host" characters from 1970s DC Comics that Gaiman had repurposed (like Cain, Able and Eve).

In fact, Lucien hosted the short-lived1975 horror series Tales of Ghost Castle, where he lived in an abandoned Transylvanian castle with a substantial library. I'm not sure who created the character, but looking at the credits for the first issue, writer Paul Levitz and artists Nestor Redondo seem to be responsible for his first appearance and would thus be the most likely to be responsible for creating him.

KOBRA, NIGHTSHADE, SARGE STEEL

According to Hazzard's research, after the end of World War II, the Spear of Destiny passed from the hands of Adolf Hitler to a Soviet collector for decades.

Sometime in the 1980s, the cult of Kobra found it, and their leader planned to use it as Hitler had, to "neutralize or control the metahumans in a bid to take over the world." The Spectre confronted the colorful, snake-themed supervillain/cult leader/terrorist, who wounded him with the spear during their confrontation. 

Nightshade, a portal-generating superheroine and "an American intelligence agent", arrived on scene to snag the Spear, which she delivered to Sarge Steel. 

Kobra, by the way, was originally created by Jack Kirby and Steve Sherman in the late 1970s, and then drastically reconfigured by Martin Pasko and Pablo Marcos before the first issue of the short-lived Kobra was released. The character has been a sort of all-purpose villain ever since, fighting various heroes, including Batman and the Outsiders, The Flash, the Suicide Squad and JSA.

Nightshade was originally created by David Kaler and Steve Ditko for Charlton Comics, and she was therefore acquired with the rest of the publisher's characters and integrated into the DCU. Ostrander used her in his Suicide Squad. 

Similarly, Sarge Steel began as a Chalton character, created by Pat Masulli, and upon being imported into the DCU he played a role in Ostrander's Suicide Squad and has been a government and/or intelligence official in one capacity or another ever since.

SUPERMAN

When Hazzard finally finds the spear, which had been languishing in a government warehouse in Washington, D.C. (Maybe the same one that the Ark of the Covenant ended up in at the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark...?), he and President Clinton put it in Superman's hands and point him at Japan, where The Spectre is fighting Naiad (The government thinks the two entities might be allies in attempting to destroy the country, though).

Superman promises to do "whatever is necessary" and seems to use it to kill The Spectre and Naiad...before embarking on a campaign to take over the world, fighting and/or killing many of his former allies. 

This heel turn is the influence of a curse upon the spear, which it apparently acquired while in the hands of Hitler, whose evil was so potent that it permanently altered the spear. 

In reality, Superman's short, one-issue campaign to make himself King of the World is all a vision of a possible future that The Spectre shows him, during the course of which Superman is eventually able to renounce the spear. He is thus able to give up the spear before taking any lives (The Spectre ultimately summons debris to encase the spear in an orb of rock with the face of a skull and hurl it into orbit, where it would remain until 1999's Day of Judgment). 

BATMAN AND COMPANY

In Superman's vision, during which he sees what might happen if he fell to the Spear of Destiny's influence, Mandrake fills various panels with Superman battling his fellow heroes. Thus Spectre #22, "Spear of Destiny: Conclusion" is fairly full of DCU cameos.

In four consecutive panels, Superman fights and defeats Captain Atom, Wonder Woman, Bloodwynd and Metamorpho (while Lois and Jonathan and Martha Kent are in various states of shock and mourning alongside the righthand side of the page).

On the next page, we hear a newscast say, "The last of the metahumans opposing Superman have fallen in a savage battle", and we see Superman standing with the Spear held aloft over his head in the background, the foreground littered with a prone Power Girl and Doctor Fate, while Robin Tim Drake holds his head and Martian Manhunter is on his hands and knees.

Rushing at Superman are The Flash and the then all-black clad Hawkman (A character whom Ted Grant had earlier referred to as "this punk in Chicago", as opposed to the real Hawkman). 

Finally, Superman is confronted by the only "masked hero still unaccounted for."

This is, of course, Batman. Ostrander doesn't give the Dark Knight any lines. He simply appears behind Superman. 

As Mandrake draws him here, his left arm is bare, a bandage around his bicep. He's wearing some sort of targeting monocle of the sort Deadshot wore over one eye, he's got a bandolier slung across his chest and he's pointing a long gun at Superman, which Superman surmises contains the kryptonite he had previously given Batman, in case he had ever lost control like this and needed to be taken down.

It is at this point, with his friend there to execute him, that Superman instructs Batman to shoot him—"I deserve it"—and throws down the spear. 

LUCIFER AND COMPANY

Finally, The Spectre #25 opens, the captions on the first page tell us, in Hell, circa 150 A.D. A group of devil figures are gathered around a table, and in the background is a humanoid shape half-wrapped in a pair of enormous, bat-like wings. 

"Behold the enemy!" he says, showing the assembled an image of the then Spectre, the first time in which the Spectre-Force had been bonded to the human soul. That human is named Caraka, and his version of The Spectre is distinguishable from that of Corrigan's by having a neat little mustache and four arms.

This speaker, it is revealed, is Lucifer, who appears as an exceptionally handsome angel, only with wings that resemble those of a bat rather than those of a bird. While obviously a long-lived literary character, DC Comics had developed their own version of him and their own history of him.

This version of Lucifer seems to be that which Gaiman and various artists had used in The Sandman. After ruling over Hell since creation, in the 1990s he decides to retire to Earth, closing up shop and handing the key to Hell over to Dream of The Endless (In the 1990-1991 story arc "Season of Mists"). From there, he went on to star in his own ongoing series by Mike Carey and Peter Gross, which ran 75 issues between 2000-2006, and, a decade later, a second series that only lasted 19 issues). 

In attendance at his meeting? 

First, there's Beelzebub, who, like Lucifer, exists in the real world, or at least does so in classic demonology and literature. The DC Comics version is always depicted as a fly, usually a huge one, as Mandrake draws him here. He was part of the triumvirate with Lucifer that ruled Hell in Sandman, and he has had various appearances in comics, both from Vertigo and the DCU: Hellblazer, Kid Eternity, Swamp Thing, The Demon, even Supergirl (during Peter David's run, which involved angels and devils) and Batman (in a Doug Moench/Kelley Jones issue wherein The Joker summons Etrigan from Hell, and the Clown Prince of Crime eats the archfiend, who appears as a regularly-sized fly).

Then there's Shathan, who we are already familiar with, as he has come and gone throughout the series so far (By the way, he's the only of these characters aside from Lucifer to have any lines during the short, two-page meeting).

Then we see Blaze, the demon daughter of the Wizard Shazam introduced into the Superman books by Roger Stern and Bob McLeod in 1990. 

And, finally, there's Belial, who, like Beelzebub is a "real" demon, and thus has apparently appeared in various comics over the years, but the version here is that which appeared in The Demon comics, first in Matt Wagner's 1987 mini-series and then much more extensively in the 1990-1995 ongoing series launched and primarily written by Alan Grant. Mandrake draws him as he appeared in The Demon, looking much like his son Etrigan, only with far longer, straighter horns and somewhat bigger ears. 

It's only a rather brief scene in which these fiends appear, but it is a welcome orientation of this story in the DC Universe, honoring the emergent mythology of the decade, and suggesting that books as various as Action Comics, The Sandman, The Demon and The Spectre all take place in the same shared setting and are part of some massive, never-ending storyline. 

Next: We wait for The Spectre by John Ostrander and Tom Mandrake Omnibus Vol. 2, I guess. 

*Looking at that first class of Vertigo books, I'm struck by how they are mostly reimaginings of relatively obscure superhero IP. There's Arnold Drake, Bob Haney and Bruno Permiani's 1963 Doom Patrol, Dave Wood and Camine Infantino's 1965 Animal Man, Len Wein and Berine Wrightson's 1971 Swamp Thing, Joe Simon and Jack Kirby's 1974 The Sandman (itself a radical reinvention of the Golden Age character created by Gardner Fox and Bert Christman) and Steve Ditko's 1977 Shade, The Changing Man. The only new-ish character to star in one of those books was Alan Moore, Stephen Bissette and John Totleben's John Constantine, who spun out of their Swamp Thing to star in the Jamie DeLano-written Hellblazer.

Bookshelf #12

This week's bookshelf has the last few of my smuttiest manga on it, those that I couldn't fit onto the previous shelf: Dragon's Crown, an Udon book about a D&D-esque adventure party featuring a scantily clad warrior woman and a ridiculously over-endowed magic user (double-checking online now, I don't think it ever even made it to a second volume); Unicorns Aren't Horny, a silly two-volume Seven Seas series about a unicorn who lives with an adult virgin whose virginity he is obsessed with (highly abstract art and mostly gentle sex comedy, although I did not see the weird-ass ending coming, as perhaps I should have); and the first volume of Uzaki-Chan Wants to Hang Out, another Seven Seas series, this one about a buxom college student's platonic relationship with her senpai (This is the series with a cover gimmick so weird I was surprised no one tried it in the '90s; the cover is embossed where the star's breasts are...I reviewed it in this 2020 post).

As for the rest of the shelf? Well, there are the latest six volumes of Kiyohiko Azuma's Yotsuba&!, which is maybe the best manga I've ever read, or at least my favorite manga. As for the previous nine volumes, they are upstairs, on a completely different shelf (The books on these shelves are all ones I acquired while living in Mentor, so between 2012 and 2024 or so; I've yet to try to reorganize everything into a system that makes more sense).  

And then there are the first three volumes of How Heavy are the Dumbbells You Lift?, which perhaps belongs with the hornier manga, given all the fan service in it, mostly around the pin-ups demonstrating particular exercises. While a weird amalgam of comedy, fan service and work out demos and advice, I thought the book was fun enough, although it got so repetitive so fast I didn't stick with it.

And there are a couple of volumes of Drawn and Quarterly's collection of Shigeru Mizuki's Kitaro and  the first two volumes of the yuri series Days of Love at Seagull Inn (I just now noticed that the first two volumes are on this shelf, while the third was on the shelf above this one).

The rest of the shelf consists of first volumes of a bunch of series I either had tried out or that I had every intention of following but immediately fell behind on. There's are books from a few manga masters here, like Rumiko Takahashi's (latest?) time-travel fantasy series Mao and Hiromu Arakawa's extremely unlikely follow-up to Full Metal Alchemist, Silver Spoon, about a newcomer at agricultural high school. That's not a subject I'm particularly interested in—and, as a vegetarian, I'm actually pretty conflicted about some aspects of it—but I'll be damned if it wasn't a really great first volume.

Scanning this shelf of pretty random fist volumes, that's definitely one I'd like to check out again and see where the series goes from there, along with Aho Girl and Nichijou, and maybe My Neighbor Seki and Kuma Miko.

This, by the way, is the last of the manga I have downstairs at my house, save for maybe two volumes or so of Star Wars manga I shelved with the few Star Wars trades I own, so it will be quite a few more weeks before I discuss any more manga in this series of posts. 

A Month of Wednesdays: December 2025

BOUGHT:

Batman and Robin: Year One (DC Comics) I think my only real problem with this book is it's "Year One" subtitle. That particular phrase of course entered DC's lexicon with Frank Miller and David Mazzucchelli's 1987 Batman story arc, offering a new and updated origin for the Dark Knight and chronicling the first year of his career. It has since become a commonplace sub-title for various DC origin stories. 

When this 12-issue maxi-series was first announced, I was a little taken aback, as the title suggests it will be the story of Batman and Robin's first year together. Of course, that particular year has already been covered in 1989 Batman arc "Batman: Year Three", 1995's Robin Annual #4 (the theme for that year's annuals was "Year One" origin stories) and 2000's Robin: Year One. (Dick Grayson's first year with Bruce Wayne was also part of 1999's quasi-canonical Batman: Dark Victory, although Dick doesn't actually become Robin until the end of that series, and I'm sure there are other comics that have told this story that I haven't personally read, like 2022's Robin & Batman).

That said, of course, you'll notice that those comics specifically devoted to Robin's fist year are all at least 25 years old now, and there have been a handful of continuity reboots since then, so perhaps enough time has elapsed that it is worth retelling such an oft told story (On the other hand, thanks to the longevity of collections, most of those comics are still readily available for readers interested in that story, so I don't know).

The "Year One" is really just branding here though, which makes me wish DC would have simply come up with a different title for the book (World's Finest: Batman and Robin seems like the obvious one, huh? Maybe something with "Dynamic Duo" in the title?). Unlike Miller and Mazzucchelli's "Batman: Year One", this doesn't seem to cover an entire year, although some significant amount of time does pass, the plot of the book apparently occurring between other early Batman and Robin adventures, some of which are alluded to in montage. 

Still, it's branding that would have led to me skipping the book entirely or at least borrowing it from the library rather than buying it, were it not for the presence of Chris Samnee. I mean, I obviously like the work of writer Mark Waid, as I have read and continue to read a lot of it, but art by Samnee sealed the deal. He's a fantastic artist, adept at every aspect of comic book art, and the perfect choice for a story like this, which involves equal amounts of superhero action, character work and drama featuring the leads out of costume, as well as plenty of non-costumed characters.

Simply put, visually, this is probably the best superhero comic I've read in recent memory, and one of the best-drawn Batman comics I've ever read. 

So, we've talked a little bit about what the book isn't, so what is it...? 

Well, Waid doesn't cover the events that past writers like Marv Wolfman ("Year Three") or Chuck Dixon (Robin Annual #4, Robin: Year One with co-writer Scott Beatty) did, so this can be read as somewhat as a companion to previous Robin origins than a replacement for them. So, we don't see Dick's parents fall to their deaths in front of Dick, we don't see his meeting with Bruce, we don't see how Dick learns Bruce's secret and we don't see Dick becoming Robin for the first time and working with Batman to catch the man responsible for his parents' murder (Although these events are alluded to in dialogue and the occasional flashback panel.) (One thing that originally felt off and wrong to me was the fact that Batman was wearing black rather than blue here, something Waid surely would have known wasn't historically accurate—he is writing an ongoing series set in the late 1970s wherein Batman is still in blue, after all—but that was, as I would find, an intentional choice, and the eventual change in cape colors is addressed over the course of the story.)

Instead, the plot involves a new criminal in town, a former general turned mob boss usually just referred to as "The General" (and yeah, there is already a Batman villain by that name, although I doubt anyone would confuse the two) who is attempting to take over the Gotham underworld by setting the ruling "Five Families" against one another.

While he's not a super-villain, he does have one in his employ, and his ultimate plot is a somewhat sci-fi sounding one, which I won't spoil here. He also seems to be dabbling in mad science, perhaps working with an unnamed Hugo Strange (who is clearly visible in at least one panel) to make "monster men", a term that will sound familiar to plenty of Batman readers (These appeared in 1940's Batman #1, and Matt Wagner later extrapolated that short story into his miniseries Batman and The Monster Men).

And Two-Face, who is sometimes the General's ally and sometimes his enemy, is also rather prominently featured.

That's the superhero business, though. While the new Dynamic Duo are trying to figure out what exactly is going on and bring down the General, Waid and Samnee also spend a lot of time on Bruce and Dick's home life, and dramatize Batman's difficulty in taking on the role of mentor and partner, while Bruce struggles with becoming a good father (Alfred, of course, helps quite a bit in that regard).

Mostly what Waid seems to change in the basic, essential Batman and Robin story is a degree of emphasis. For one thing, he repeatedly underscores the fact that while Dick Grayson might still be a little kid, and thus seemingly far, far too young for crime fighting—as multiple characters, including James Gordon, point out—his unique circus acrobat background means he has been doing serious, almost super-human training ever since he was able to walk. He might not have trained quite as long as Batman had before he donned a cape and mask, but he's quite experienced when it comes to some of the stuff Robin does every night, and far more so than most grown men. (That said, I wish Waid wouldn't have assigned Dick a particular age here—he's said to be 10-years-old—and just left that more vague.)

Waid also, somewhat interestingly, addresses the traditional "ward" vs. adopted son issue. I don't know the original rationale for making Dick Bruce's ward rather than son, nor do I know enough about such legal matters to know if wards are still a thing in real life some 80 years after Robin was introduced, but here it seems that Bruce was in the process of applying to adopt Dick when some of the villain-induced difficulties affected him, and Dick was temporarily taken away. When he is later returned, it seems to be a sort of special case, the court not yet willing to let Bruce officially adopt him. 

I do have one nitpick, which is more of a something-that-nagged-at-me-personally-while-reading thing, than an actual problem with the narrative. The super-villain in The General's employ that I mentioned above? It is—spoiler warning!—Clayface II, Matt Hagen.

A reader could probably guess that when The General starts employing his master of disguise to sow distrust and stoke a gang war, as there's a very early scene where the mysterious figure changes "costume", and it's an instantaneous change, one that also changes his clothes. Further, the cover for issue #5 features Clayface as he appeared in Batman: The Animated Series and, unfortunately, appears in this collection before the master of disguise is revealed to be Clayface, so, in that regard, the comic spoils itself.

Now, Samnee has a great design for Clayface, giving him an extremely creepy featureless mask he wears when he's not impersonating someone else, and the in-comic reveal of his identity is both something of a surprise—as much as it can be, after seeing that cover, anyway—and an effective bit of horror, as Batman accidentally cuts him nearly in half on a cable during their fight, and then is nearly suffocated as Clayface pours himself into Batman's face.

This might actually be the best Matt Hagen comic I've ever read...although it feels wrong to me that he's in it. That's simply because Hagen was introduced in 1961, while Robin was introduced in 1940. In other words, Dick had been Robin for a long, long time before he and Batman encountered Hagen, and while obviously Robin's 80-year career needs to be hyper-compressed in-universe, it feels a bit off to have events so far apart overlap.

Of course, as I said earlier, there have been plenty of canon-altering crises since Hagen's original debut, so perhaps I shouldn't get stuck on Waid's use of the character here; perhaps he's just changing up Hagen's origin and introduction. 

All in all, then, a really great Batman comic, and one I enjoyed immensely. 

(Oh, and as I noted on Bluesky while reading, it's an elegant reminder how much better Batman comics are when Alfred is alive and well and them and not, you know, dead, as he apparently still is in the comics set in the current DC Universe.)

BORROWED:

Disney Epic Mickey: The Comics Collection (Fantagraphics Books) You've probably heard the story of Oswald The Lucky Rabbit, the cartoon character created in 1927 by Ub Iwerks and Walt Disney for Universal Studios. The character now seems like a sort of first draft for Mickey Mouse—the original iterations of both characters looked remarkably similar—and, when Universal exerted its control of the character, Disney went on to create his mouse in 1928 (And, apparently, vowed never to work for anyone else ever again). Though Oswald kept appearing in Golden Age cartoons for a while, Mickey quickly eclipsed him and went on to become one of the most iconic characters in pop culture over the last century. 

In 2010, Oswald finally met Mickey in a story heavily reliant on their meta-fictional relationship, the "Lucky" rabbit naturally envious and embittered about essentially being forgotten after a brief stint in the spotlight, while his younger brother went on to unparalleled fame. 

For reasons beyond me, this epic meeting and potent story, with over 80 years of history behind it, occurred not in the medium Disney is best known for, animation, or that which they are probably secondarily known for around the world, comics, but in a video game—2010's Epic Mickey. 

You might not recognize the name Yen Sid, but you will likely recognize his face. He's the sorcerer that Mickey was the apprentice to in Fantastia's "Sorcerer's Apprentice" passage. In Epic Mickey, he has created a place called Wasteland with magical paint on his table top, a place modeled as a sshadow version of Disney Land, and peopled by forgotten cartoon characters like Horace Horsecollar, Clarabelle Cow, The Mad Doctor (from a 1933 Mickey short), Gus and the Gremlins (from a never-made film that later appeared in a Roald Dahl picture book and some Disney comics) and several different versions of Peg Leg Pete/Black Pete. (You'll probably notice that some of these characters have subsequently become un-forgotten, and you may actually be pretty familiar with some of them, especially if you've been reading old Mickey comics like those Fanta has published in their Floyd Gottfredson Library.) And, of course, Oswald himself, and his love interest, a cat who is here given Ortensia name, as she lacked a consistent one in her various cartoon short appearances. 

After Mickey travels to the other side of a mirror, ala his Golden Age short "Thru the Mirror", the mischievous mouse finds himself in the wizard's workshop, and fools around with the paints, accidentally unleashing a paint monster in Wasteland. Sometime—perhaps years?—later, Mickey is captured by that paint monster, referred to as a Blot, a name with some resonance in Mickey adventures, and pulled into the Wasteland.

There, he battles the Blot and its minions using a magic paintbrush that can emit both paint and thinner, potent weapons in a world of cartoons, he engages in a quest to gather pieces of a rocket ship from various locales (which, I assume, accounts for the game's gameplay and objective) and, of course, he meets Oswald, a character he knows nothing of, but who has resentfully followed Mickey's career for decades.

That's all interesting enough, I suppose, but as someone who hasn't played a video game since the NES became obsolete, Epic Mickey wasn't on my radar until Fantagraphics released Disney Epic Mickey: The Comics Collection, a complete, hardcover collecting all of the comics associated with the game, most of which were being published on paper and in the U.S. for the first time here, despite the fact that they were all written by a pretty famous and well-liked American comics writer, the late Peter David.

I have no idea how someone familiar with the video game—or games, I guess I should say, as Epic Mickey was followed in 2012 by Epic Mickey 2: The Power of 2, and it too has a graphic novel adaptation in here—might approach this book. Like other comics based on video games I never played, like some Batman: Arkham comics, the Injustice series and some Kingdom Hearts manga, these comics seem to expand on the story of the games and elide the gameplay, making them something akin to extrapolations rather than straight adaptations.

For someone in my shoes then, a comics reader encountering the Epic Mickey world and story for the first time here, I would recommend approaching this as a curated collection rather than a complete story, as the most dramatic encounter in here—that between Oswald and Mickey atop a mountain of Mickey memorabilia—is of course somewhat blunted and spoiled by the "Tales of Wasteland" short comics that precede it in the collection.

The book also includes a lot of welcome prose features interspersed between the comics, providing context for where the game came from, who the relatively minor and/or forgotten characters in the games are and where they came from and how the comics fit into the story of the game. These features include a foreword by editor David Gerstein, an introduction by game director Warren Spector (and, later, an interview with Spector) and "The Disney Epic Mickey Cast" features by Luc Boschi. 

As for the comics, they include three distinct sections. 

First, there's the "Tales from Wasteland" prequels, a half-dozen eight-pagers by David and artist Claudio Sciarrone starring Oswald and featuring appearances by Horace, Clarabelle, Pete and Ortensia...and what look like cyborg versions of Goofy and Donald Duck, which they kinda are (In actuality, these are animatronic versions of Mickey's friends, which Oswald built himself in order to imitate Mickey's adventures, I guess; while they appear to be in a state of disrepair and are somewhat scary-looking, seeming to thus suggest the characters I've seen in Five Nights at Freddy's books and games and such, they act just like the real Goofy and Donald).

These stories recall older Disney shorts, as Oswald and his Donald and Goofy attempt to, say, clean a huge clock or act as kinda sorta ghostbusters. I didn't find any of them to be particularly strong comics narratives, and they all look and read slightly off. I think it has something to do with the lettering, as the dialogue balloons have weirdly-shaped tails that seem sort of amateurish, and they don't always line-up and interact with one another quite right. I assume this has something to do with the fact that these comics were all originally produced for digital rather than paper release. 

I think the strongest gag that occurs in these is a visual one, from "Oswald The Lucky Duck", in which the Mad Doctor presents our hero with a new invention, a movie camera that can "remake" him for the Silver Screen. At one point, Oswald says how the few people who remember him at all do so as "an out-of-date version of, you know...him."

In the next panel, we see Oswald as Ortensia does at that moment. Standing directly in front of the camera, his long ears laying down and the two big film reels appearing on either side of his head he does indeed resemble...you know...him. 

(Do note the dialogue balloon that I cut off in that image, and how close it is to the dialogue balloon associated with that image.)

That's followed by Epic Mickey: The Graphic Novel, a 64-page story drawn by Fabio Celoni and Massimo Rocca. If I had to guess, I would assume that much of this involves a re-telling of the "story" parts of the game, as it involves Mickey coming to Wasteland, becoming a captive of the Mad Doctor, meeting Gus the Gremlin and learning to use the paint brush as a weapon and then finally meeting Oswald—who had been shadowing him through the earlier scenes—atop the mountain where they have their heart to heart.

Mickey's mission to find the missing rocket parts is discussed, but mostly happens off-panel, and, ultimately, Oswald, Gus and Mickey use the rocket to take on the world-threatening Blot and there's a pretty intense scene involving the final temptation of Oswald.

The story concludes with the pair becoming, "friends, and perhaps more...Perhaps even... ....brothers." 

The art in this comic is much deeper, richer and more detailed than in the "Wasteland" shorts, and the word balloons look and read far better here than they did in the prequel stories.

Finally, there's Epic Mickey 2: The Power of Two: The Graphic Novel, drawn by Fabrizio Petrossi (who drew the recent-ish Scrooge McDuck: The Dragon of Glasgow) and is based by David on the videogame script which is credited to a Brian Freyermuth and a name familiar to most comics readers, Marv Wolfman.

Here, Mickey is summoned back to Wasteland by his new friend/brother Oswald, and the two are now staunchly allies, which admittedly takes a lot of the drama away from their pairing. In this 48-page story, our co-leads and Gus must deal with a gremlin gone bad and the machinations of the Mad Doctor, who has seemingly also gone bad as a result of too many animatronic parts (And, for some reason, all of his dialogue is now presented in song, which seems random; is this how Etrigan fans felt when the demon started rhyming in the '80s?). 

I'm not sure what the gameplay in The Power of Two might have entailed, nor the specifics of the quest, but Mickey is again armed with a big paint brush and Oswald wields a remote control that seems to impact various robot/animatronic enemies they face off with in various locales. Gus again plays a big role, and there are several different Petes presented as foes. 

In fact, on the last page, after the narrator concludes that everything is safe once again, and that Mickey and Oswald could deal with any future challenges that might arise, a handful of Petes gather at the statue of Walt Disney and Oswald on Mean Street and seem to threaten to become a threat in the future.

"Don't listen to that know-it-all narrator," one Pete says. "By the time we're done..." another starts, while a third finishes the thought, "They ain't never gonna know what hit 'em."

I don't know that I would consider any of these great comics or anything, but, for a certain kind of person, the historic meeting of Mickey and Oswald is a pretty big deal, and I'm thankful that Disney saw fit to present it in comics as well as video games, so those of us who don't play videogames could see some version of it for ourselves.

I do think this book is another testament to just what a consummate writer Peter David was. While you and I likely know him best from the hundreds of issues of comic books he wrote during his career, as Spector notes in his introduction, in addition to writing "all the big books" of the comics world, David also did a bunch of Star Trek novels and comics, worked on Babylon 5 and wrote original novels. 

"I loved his work," Spector wrote, "but didn't know how he'd fare with funny animals."

Spector, of course, said he fared quite well, being funny as hell, very fast, and receptive to feedback...even feedback coming from a guy like him, "with no comics experience whatsoever."

Spector is biased, though, so you might be tempted not to take his word for it. But you can take mine; David does a fine job with the characters, and, in the adaptations at least, translating a story meant for one very particular medium into something that still makes sense and is even occasionally compelling when presented in an entirely different medium.

If you're a fan of David's writing, I can't say this is the most representative of his work, but you can definitely hear David in the dialogue, particularly in the jokes which, like a lot of David's, can be somewhat strained groaners, dad jokes delivered here by characters who are older than your grandfathers. 

Here's one I did like though, from a "Tales of Wasteland" short:

Animatronic Donald: No exit! You know what this means?!

Animatronic Goofy: The architect was Jean-Paul Sarte?

Oswald: Woah. That's a pretty intellectual joke, Goofy.

Animatronic Goofy: Well, just 'cause I'm goofy, don't mean I'm ignant.

Animatronic Donald: Ignorant.

Animatronic Goofy: Not that neither. A-hyuck!

 

Masters of the Universe/Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Turtles of Grayskull (Dark Horse Books) My grandmother bought me my first Masters of the Universe action figures for Christmas in 1982, the first Christmas I can remember. For the next few years, I would play with the toys, read the comics that came packaged with them, watch the cartoon, be baffled by the live-action film and even sleep in a bed with sheets and pillowcases depicting He-Man. 

I first heard of Kevin Eastman and Peter Laird's Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles comic book characters in 1987, when the cartoon series and the toy line debuted. Within a few years, a neighborhood friend and I started playing the Palladium role-playing game, which led me to checking out the Mirage comic books, which I quickly became a fan and regular reader of.

In 2024, after I had spent over 30 years of reading comics (and about as many writing about comics), the two multi-media franchises had a comic book crossover.

I was, of course, interested, but braced for disappointment. This particular crossover isn't one that I had previously daydreamed about for years, the way I had Batman meeting the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles or Godzilla fighting the Justice League, but I had been intensely interested in these two groups of characters and their stories at various points in my childhood, and had essentially lived with them somewhere in the recesses of my imagination for my entire life. 

In other words, I was always probably going to be too interested and thus disappointed. (Barring something out-of-left field, something extremely awesome but totally unexpected, something like Tom Scioli's 2014-2016 Transformers vs. G.I. Joe series, a comic about the meeting of two other toy-line buttressed multi-media franchises from my childhood.)

And so I was disappointed, but don't let that discourage you from checking out the trade collection of the four-issue miniseries. 

If, like me, you have some nostalgic affection for both of these franchises, then you'll definitely want to see what writer Tim Seeley and artist Freddie E. Williams II did with them, and how they went about trying to tie such wildly different groups of characters into a cohesive story.

Now while there is no mention of this in the comic itself, it is actually based on a 2024 toy line from Mattel, blending the two toy lines. The result? He-Man-ized Turtles characters, new versions of some He-Man guys and some weird mash-ups, like Mouse-Jaw (Trap-Jaw with Mouser parts) and the two-headed 2-Bopsteady (Bebop and Rocksteady ala Two Bad). 

In that regard, most of the designs the creators are working with here are based on the toys, and Seeley has the somewhat interesting job of integrating them all into a new story. 

Is there a story associated with the toy line itself, explaining the admixture? Probably. According to that link above, the toys were packaged with mini comics—also dawn by Williams, although there's no mention there of the writer—and you can find synopses of them there. One, "By The Power of PIZZA!", seems to set-up how the Turtles and company came to Eternia. 

This comic seems to be rather different though, even if it has the same characters and designs. (I kind of wish Dark Horse would have included the mini-comics stories in the back of this trade though, if only because I'm curious how the stories might compare and contrast, and I'm sure as hell not going to be buying any action figures just to get my hands on some comics.)

Seeley, perhaps following the lead of the toy line, focuses in on the one character that offers the best bridge between the two franchises, Masters of the Universe's "Evil Warrior" Ninjor. Apparently, he was one of the final action figures released in the original MOTU line, which is perhaps why I have no personal experience with him, as I would have stopped playing with He-Man guys by that point (and Ninjor, by the way, never appeared on the original cartoon show; not sure about the later ones).

Still, like most MOTU characters, you can get a pretty good idea of his whole deal by his name alone and, if that doesn't do it, a glance at the character should. He's a ninja, basically. Here, he uses a newfound ability to travel through time and space—more on that in a bit—to travel to Japan and study ninjitsu with Foot Clan founders Oroku Saki and Hamato Yoshi before their falling out.

As to how the two franchises might mix, Seeley makes heavy use of apprentice time mistress Renet Tilley, a Mirage era character who was created for Kevin Eastman, Peter Laird and company's 1986 TMNT #8 (the Cerebus crossover issue), and appeared off and on throughout "Volume 1". She would later appear in a couple of the 21st century cartoons and IDW's "Volume 5".

The book opens with Splinter and April anxiously awaiting contact with the Turtles, who "call" them from Eternia via a magical portal opened by Orko (Don't worry; Orko's actually hardly in the comic at all). Michelangelo then explains in the course of a very text-heavy, show-don't-tell page how they got to Eternia—Basically, Skeletor was buying mutagen from Krang and The Shredder in some kind of weird cross-dimensional deal—and what they have been doing since. 

There are, unfortunately, rather a lot of such talky, info dump-y pages in this relatively short, four-issue story.

After this and the first of the Michelangelo-with-a-He-Man-wig jokes (Not entirely Seeley's fault, I guess, as the action figure appears to have that hair), we get a sequence of the redesigned Turtles teaming up with the MOTU good guys to battle Skeletor, Krang and the mutated Evil Warriors, a sequence that ultimately ends with a big, purple, Hulk-like He-Man joining the fray. Apparently mutated by the Skeletor-magic infused mutagen, he's a berserker behemoth, and kills everyone in a rage. 

The end? No, that's only page 15 of the first issue. 

The sequence does give Williams a chance to cram in a lot of the toy designs though, and cameos from many MOTU characters. The available cast is gigantic, and there's not room for everyone to get much panel-time, not even characters who have toys in the Turtles of Grayskull line, like Leatherhead, or a muted Mer-Man, or "Sla'ker" (a mash-up of TMNT character Slash and MOTU character Fake). 

So, if you're a Snout Spout fan, well, there's good news and bad news. Good news? Your boy does appear in at least three panel. Bad news? He doesn't get any lines, and Shredder chops off his nose in one panel.

Here's where Renet enters the picture. Discovering a "knot" in space time involving the He-Man and Turtle timelines that seems to cause the disaster, she has to try to untangle it, which means keeping He-Man and the Turtles as far apart as possible. 

This proves challenging though, as they seem destined to meet. At one point, she tries to solve the problem by sending the Turtles to Eternia, where they team-up with Man-At-Arms and Teela to infiltrate Snake Mountain, and He-Man to Earth, where he studies ninjitsu with Splinter and then teams with him, Casey Jones and April to take on Shredder and company. 

Complicating matters is Ninjor, who had previously stolen Renet's scepter. At the climax, everyone ends up on Eternia, Ninjor mutates himself into a humanoid dragon (this is another cue taken from the toy line, it seems) and the big, purple mutant He-Man again makes the scene. 

Will our heroes suffer the same fate they did in the first issue, or will they be able to restore He-Man to normal, defeat Ninjor and get everyone back to their home world...? You probably don't need to read the comic book to know the answer to that, although there are certainly pleasures to be had in doing so.

Seeley seems to be attempting to draw a parallel between the Turtles and Prince Adam as regular teenagers who should be able to live normal lives but are, instead, thrust into the roles of protectors and heroes, the fates of their worlds resting on their shoulders. Theirs is a fate that has a hint of tragedy, and causes regret in their respective father figures, Splinter and Man-At-Arms. 

Does it work? Eh, I don't know. It's honestly hard to see Prince Adam as a teenager given that, as per the original cartoon show, he looks exactly the same as the "adult" He-Man, the only thing changing here when he transforms being his clothes (On the original cartoon, He-Man also had a deep tan to distinguish him a bit from  the more fair-skinned Prince Adam, but color artist Andrew Dalhouse gives Adam and He-Man the same complexion). (In this regard, among many others, I thought the 2002 He-Man and The Masters of the Universe cartoon was superior to the original, as its Adam was notably younger, smaller and skinnier than the He-Man he transformed into.)

Still, it's nice that Seeley tried to make this toy box comic about something, rather than just drawing lines between the existing dots. 

The part of the book that produced the most friction for me was, unfortunately, a rather foundational aspect. While the He-Man and the Masters of the Universe characters all seem to pretty consistently be those from the original '80s cartoon and toy line, deferring to the former over the latter in terms of characterization, I honestly couldn't tell you which version of the Turtles Seeley and Williams were using for this crossover. 

In some aspects, it seems to be the version from the original cartoon series and toy line, which is a fair choice, as the fact that they are characters with an old cartoon and toy line is what they have in common with He-Man and company. 

And so the Turtles are color-coded (although they don't wear their initials on their belts, as in the cartoon and toys), April wears a yellow jumpsuit and is a TV reporter for Channel 6 news, there's a panel featuring the Turtle's "Party Wagon" van parked in the sewer, Shredder is costumed as in the cartoon and is working with Krang and the version of Leatherhead we glimpse is that from the cartoon. Oh, and there's also a cameo by the Neutrinos. 

Other cues suggest that these are meant to be the original Mirage comics Turtles, though. Not only is Renet there, but Casey Jones seems to be a close ally of the Turtles (as I recall, he was barely in the original cartoon) and the seems to have at least some affection for April ("You got some competition for my heart here, O'Neil" he says upon hearing Teela threaten Skeletor in the final issue). Most tellingly, here Splinter was a pet rat kept by Yoshi who mutated into human/rat hybrid (as in the comics), rather than Yoshi himself (as in the cartoon).

And then there's this whole strange sequence from the second issue, which is an extended riff on the events of 1986's Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles #6, wherein the Turtles were captured by Triceratons and forced to fight in televised gladiatorial games.

The creators obviously spent some rereading that issue to recreate its events here. The establishing shots of the space base are the same, the Turtles wear the same little breathing devices, the four members of the Triceraton "All-Star Team" wield the exact same weapons...hell, Seeley even has the same ad for the same sponsor, "Space Jooz", "the swill of champions" (It looks like Seeley even attempted to use the same Triceraton announcer offering color commentary on the fight, although forgot a letter; in TMNT #6, he was "Zed Lakin", whereas here he's "Zed Larkin").

The sequence was, obviously, a lot of fun for me personally, as I could pull my yellowed, crumbling copy of 1990's The Collected Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Vol. 1 off the shelf and spend a bit comparing and contrasting, but it certainly confused the issue of which Turtles are supposed to be participating in the crossover (And this wasn't just an extended homage, as its explicitly stated that this is a rematch between the Turtles and the All-Stars—even though I was pretty sure Leonardo killed one of 'em during their first match). 

Seely kinda sorta attempts to address this all at one point, with Renet narrating about the Turtles:

We've literally traveled to the past and the future and across the universe. Like, multiple times! In multiple universes!

I know the world around them is fluid and thin. It's permeable to high strangeness. They cross over other paths all the time.

It's a decent attempt, but I don't think it quite works. 

Still, I had some fun with the book. And it's well crafted. Is it good, though? Well, not really, but sometimes being fun is enough for a comic like this.

The Question: All Along the Watchtower (DC Comics) Writer Greg Rucka didn't create the character Renee Montoya—the Gotham City policewoman was created for Batman: The Animated Series—although he's the writer who did the most and best work on the character, first in his Detective Comics run, then in Gotham Central and then in 52. Over the course of that last series she became The Question, replacing the dying original, Vic Sage. 

Alex Segura seems like a good writer to take her up as, like Rucka, he is mystery novelist who also writes comics. 

His miniseries The Question: All Along the Watchtower (not a fan of that jokey sub-title) expands on the character's current status quo, mentioned briefly in Justice League Unlimited: She is the head of security on the League's new sprawling satellite base, the headquarters of a super-team so big it seemingly includes every superhero in the DC Universe. (As a police officer and a superhero, she's a good fit for the gig, the only other hero with that same background I can think of being the Golden Age hero The Guardian Jim Harper, whose clone served the head of security role for Cadmus in the 1970s and '90s). 

As such, she is essentially the lone sheriff of a sci-fi city full of superheroes. How big is her beat? Well, at one point Wonder Woman refers to the League as consisting of "hundreds, if not thousands" of superheroes, which seems like a pretty high estimate to me. I mean, the various encyclopedias of DC heroes that are occasionally published aren't that long. I'd guess more like dozens, if not scores of superheroes.

In this series, we learn a little bit about how Montoya came to get to this job. (As to how she lost her previous gig, as Gotham's police commissioner, it's mentioned in passing, but not to such a degree that I can tell you much about it.) Apparently, Batman attempted to recruit her, but it was Superman who sealed the deal. Then, when she arrives on the Watchtower, it's Wonder Woman who briefs her and introduces her to her support team: Blue Beetle, the other Blue Beetle, Animal Man and Batwoman. 

In addition to a place that big just needing some kind of security or police presence, the Trinity are apparently all worried about some threat to and within the Watchtower, something that none of them seems to be able to figure out, and that they think Renee's unique mind is best suited to get to the bottom of. The bulk of this series, then, is about Renee trying to figure out this mystery.

Perhaps disappointingly given Segura's background as a writer of mysteries, this book doesn't really function as a mystery. That is, despite Renee saying that the clues were there in front of her the whole time, it's not something that, say, a reader might be able to solve themselves before the reveal (Which I fully intend to spoil in a bit, so fair warning). 

That's because Segura doesn't really play fair here, the supervillain behind the infiltration of the Watchtower exhibiting brand-new super-powers never before associated with him. 

Montoya is presented with a strange, attempted murder in her apartment aboard the satellite: A Challenger of the Unknown is found mauled near to death by some kind of space lynx, security footage showing Batwoman having led the animal to the room and let it in. Batwoman of course professes no knowledge of her actions, and readers will of course be inclined to believe her; it soon becomes apparent that the villain is able to mind-control Leaguers.

And who is this villain? 

Why, it's Cyborg Superman, of course!

This mind-control ability is sort of hand-waved past. Apparently, he's been in the Phantom Zone—the JLU has been using the Phantom Zone to imprison villains—but he has discovered some way to manifest outside the zone, some way that I think has something to do with a device on the back of his neck? This manifestation and/or the zone seem to be killing him, though? And it also mutated him, giving him the new mind-control power? Oh, and also the zone is leaking...? 

Before he dies from however he's dying, the Cyborg Superman wants to take the League and the Watchtower out with him. Having taken over the minds of Montoya's above-mentioned support staff—and League bartender Nightshade and armory stock manager The Bulleteer—The Question is more or less on her own against Cyborg Superman and his henchman The Eradicator. (The cyborg's mind-control comes and goes, so sometimes her allies are with her, and sometimes they are against her; there are other heroes on the satellite, but they are mostly disabled either by the mind-control or the cyborg's control of the satellite itself, its walls stretching out as if made from liquid metal to entrap them).

The Question is, somewhat unfortunately for a reader like me, rather continuity heavy. Segura does a fine job handling the main character and presenting her new life, but I couldn't tell you with 100% certainty the last time I saw either Cyborg Superman or The Eradicator—it would have been at least two reboots ago in the case of the former—nor did I have any idea where they might have been left before Segura picked them up to use here. 

I was pretty shocked to see the original Question, Vic Sage, show up in the fifth issue of the mini-series/chapter of the trade, as, last I knew, he was dead...which was the whole reason Renee was The Question now at all (I looked it up to see how Sage came back to life, and, at least according to Wikipedia, he just appeared hale and hearty in the pages of 2019's Event Leviathan—which I did read, and reviewed in this column, but I apparently I forgot about his appearance there...? The two Questions both appeared in an issue of Rucka's Lois Lane limited series; maybe his resurrection was explained there?)

Oh, and at the climax, Renee takes confronts Cyborg Superman head-on, saying in one panel focusing on some kind of Green Lantern ring on her finger that she's "always prepared." 

Where did she get a Green Lantern ring, and why does it look so...off? (Rather than the regular GL symbol composed of a circle between two horizontal lines, it bears an image of a lantern, akin to that on Alan Scott's chest, and in which shape his ring was made.) The ring is mentioned in passing earlier on in the story—Chekov's power ring?—when The Eradicator asks Bulleteer for "the ring once belonging to the fool Malvolio." 

I had to look that guy up, too. He apparently appeared in a Hal Jordan story from Action Comics Weekly in 1988...and has never appeared again. 

As a rule, if I have to consult the Internet more than once while reading a DC trade paperback to figure out what's going on, I think the script could probably have used another draft before proceeding to the art stage.

A few other nitpicks:

•In retrospect, I'm not entirely sure why Cyborg Superman didn't mind-control The Eradicator but instead seemed to have made a deal with him in order to forge an alliance. I wondered this especially given how often The Eradicator questioned him, and how often he resorted to threats and violence against his ally. There is some mention of the mind-control being hard to maintain in certain states, but then, at the climax, Cyborg Superman's Plan B is to hijack the minds of the entire League and sic them on the Earth, so I don't know.

•Related, why didn't Cyborg Superman also just take over Montoya's mind...? I mean, we obviously wouldn't have a story if he did, but the question nagged at me because, as the series progresses, he seems to take over everyone but Montoya.

•Can Animal Man now control animals, in the way that Aquaman can control sea creatures...? That seems to be the only power he exhibits in the series. It was always my understanding that his power was to adopt the abilities of animals, as Vixen does, but, again, I'm a few reboots behind when it comes to Animal Man's status quo. Anyway, here he is shown as managing the JLU's menagerie of alien animals—assisted by Tawky Tawny, in a lab coat—but rather than mimicking some weird, fantastical abilities by some weird, fantastical space animal, he simply leads them in a stampede at one point.

•Is Pantha alive now, too? She cameos in one panel and is one of the several quite unexpected background heroes I noticed, as I didn't think she was around anymore (The other was what appeared to be the original version of The Shining Knight). Did a bunch of dead heroes just get un-killed during one of the continuity-altering events, like Geoff Johns' goofy-looking Watchmen comic or Dark Nights: Death Metal or Dark Crisis on Infinite Earths or something...?

All that said, I think Segura handles Renee Montoya well enough, and if this isn't a story I particularly liked, it's not hard to imagine him telling a better one at some point in the future. (One aspect I did like, which is inherent to the JLU concept, is the use of relatively minor, book-less characters, and cameos from more-or-less forgotten heroes, like here Mark Waid and Phil Hester's New Blood hero Argus and Keith Giffen's The Heckler, the latter of whom appears in not one but two different panels!).

The art, by Cian Tormey, is quite good, and if Tormey's Watchtower looks a bit under populated compared to Dan Mora's in the first arc of Justice League Unlimited, it's not the always dark, abandoned-looking ghost satellite that Mike Perkins drew (If "drew" is the right word for his reference-heavy, photo collage-looking art) in Justice League: The Atom Project. 

In fact, for all my questions and nitpicks, The Question: All Along the Watchtower is unquestionably—ha!—better than The Atom Project, as far as limited series emanating from JLU go. (If you want to read a shorter and more concise review of All Along the Watchtower, written by someone who, unlike me, seems to be totally up to date on the goings-on of the DC Universe, I would recommend, as always, you check out Collected Editions, which reviewed the trade here). 

Walt Disney's Donald Duck: This Looks Like a Job for Duck Avenger! (Fantagraphics) I regret to report that I didn't much care for this book from Fantagraphics' "Disney Originals" line, a French import from writer Nicolas Pothier and artist Luc "Battem" Collin. I also regret that I'm not entirely confident that I can articulate why, exactly. I wonder if I just have a hard time connecting with comics featuring Donald Duck's superheroic alter ego, Duck Avenger, as the 2019 Duck Avenger Strikes Again similarly left me cold. 

The book is certainly a handsome production, as are all of Fanta's Disney books. It's only 56-pages long, but it's an oversized hardcover, 9.6-inches wide and 12.6-inches long, making for a beautiful presentation of Batem's artwork.

And that artwork is pretty great. Batem's style strays fairly far from what one likely sees in their head when they imagine Disney art. He sticks to the classic designs obviously, but his style is quite loose, with a thin line and a remarkable degree of movement in panels, movement accentuated by lots of action lines. 

The book reads like a collection of a comic book miniseries, which, based on the covers in a little gallery in the back, it seems to be. There's an overarching plot that runs through the entirety of the book, but it's made up of short, discrete stories with their own conflicts.

As for that overarching plot, it is this. Uncle Scrooge is in danger of losing Flaunt It magazine's annual prize for the country's top earner to his rival rich duck, John D. Rockerduck. In order to put himself over the top, Scrooge decides to start charging his nephew Donald Duck rent and if he can't, well, Scrooge will just have to kick him out.

This would in itself be a big problem in most Donald Duck narratives, but here there's an additional wrinkle, as in this storyline Donald is also the Duck Avenger, and his Avenger Lair headquarters full of all his gadgets, weapons and crime-fighting whatnot is beneath his house. If Scrooge repossesses his house, then his secret identity will no longer be secret, and his career as a superhero over.

The only way to save himself is to get a job. Now, Donald getting new jobs seems to be a pretty evergreen Donald Duck story, based on how many times I've seen comics about just that in Fantas' other Donald Duck comics, so the superhero angle here doesn't seem entirely necessary, although I suppose it gives it a bit more urgency. (If Donald's superhero career is new to you, don't worry; the inside front cover presents "The Duck Avenger Backstory" in six panels and accompanying sentences explaining it.)

In the first chapter, Donald fails at a series of jobs, until he decides to confront Rockerduck as the Duck Avenger and convince him to make a donation to a "charity" that is actually Scrooge, saving his uncle's Flaunt It prize. Unfortunately, Scrooge has decided he likes the idea of rent, and so Donald has to keep looking for work for the rest of the book.

In the second chapter, Donald, wearing his Duck Avenger costume and pretending to just be Donald Duck-in-a-borrowed-Duck Avenger-costume and not the real Duck Avenger whose secret identity is Donald Duck, competes in a weird butter delivery challenge in order to get a job with a butter company.

In the third, he gets a job as a night watchman at an art museum, only to have to don his costume when the Beagle Boys break-in.

And, in the fourth and final (and weirdest) issue, there's a heat wave in Duckburg and a strain of frozen zombies on the street, which seems to have something to do with an unlikely alliance between Scrooge and Rockerduck...but things aren't exactly what they seem. On the last page, Donald finally lands a day job he's quite well-suited for. 

Much of the humor in the proceedings seems to be of the wordplay sort, with lots of alliteration, acronyms and, in one curious instance, the owner of a fan company who accentuates the "air" sound in his dialogue ("Life is unfair!", "I think I need to see my doctair!" and so on). Given that I am assuming this was originally published in French, I am curious about just how much work went into the translation—credited to Jonathan H. Gray—to make such wordplay work in English.

Anyway, it's not a bad comic by any stretch of the imagination. I don't think one can really go wrong with any Disney comics from Fantagraphics, or from anything Fantagraphics publishes at this point in general. I just didn't love this one like I have a lot of their other Disney comics (Granted, the ones I've read the most of are from their Carl Barks Library and thus are among the best American comics ever produced). 

If I had to guess, I think it might have something to do with the fact that because I've come to associate Donald Duck as an everyman character, it's a bit too much of a jump for me to see him as a superhero. That, or because of the dated nature of his brand of superheroics and the era of Batmania and super-spies it seems to be riffing on (the Duck Avenger persona first appeared in 1969, after all). Or because I just read so many goddam superhero comics already (gestures at my blog in general) that seeing the genre intrude on one of the non-superhero comics I read feels wrong to me.

Spider-Man: Kizuna Vol. 2 (Viz Media) The first volume of Spider-Man: Kizuna had almost immediately followed into such a strict, repetitive format that I wasn't sure I needed to keep reading in it. After a chapter explaining how Spider-Man met imaginative young manga artist Yu, how Spidey became a ghost or spirit, how the two could now fuse into Spider-Man Kizuna and how they could use Spidey's webbing like a 3D printer, each of the chapters that followed involved the Green Goblin giving a "villain badge" to one of Yu's classmates that turned them into a little kid version of a classic Spider-Man villain, Spidey and Yu stopping them, and then Yu befriending the kid once he or she had returned to normal.

Still, I was a bit curious where the creators might have been going with this, so I decided to stick around for at least one more volume. I'm glad I did, as this second volume breaks the pattern of the first immediately, and never falls back into it; I guess that was just to establish a cast of supporting characters for Yu. 

In the first two chapters, we meet Ginta Takoya, a super-genius who is technically in Yu's class, but is so smart he no longer needs school, and is busy in his lab all day. His bowl cut and the mechanical tentacles that emerge from his backpack (you can see one on the cover above), mark him as a kid version of Doctor Octopus. Indeed, he does adopt the persona of "Kid Ock," but not through a villain badge from the Goblin; rather, he constructs his own, artificial badge as part of an experiment, but the results are the same: Conflict with Spider-Man Kizuna, defeat, ultimately friendship with Yu. 

That's followed by a chapter in which Yu wants to start training to be a better hero himself, not just when he's fused with Spidey, and ends up encountering The Wrecking Crew (These don't seem to be kids empowered by villain badges, but just regular old adult villains; given that artist Hachi Mizuno draws every character pretty much the same size, regardless of whether they or kids or adults, it can sometimes be hard to tell the age of characters). 

And then one in which we return to the classmate-becomes-villain-becomes friend formula, when Yu's fiends accompany spooky girl Rororu Kirisaki on a ghost hunt, and she is transformed into Tiny Mysterio (Keep an eye out in the crowd scenes of ghosts for cameos by Man-Thing and Jeff, The Landshark...and, now that I'm looking more closely, I see ghosts suggestive of Doop, Mojo, Orrgo, H.E.R.B.I.E. and M.O.D.O.K. too...and a tiny little confused-looking Ant-Man in the bottom of one of those panels).

Finally, the Goblin unleashes a pair of giant dragons on the city, slightly goopy looking ones whose designs suggest Venom (definitely) and Carnage (maybe). The Goblin refers to the first of them, the Venom-esque one, as "Orochi", referring to the legendary dragon Yamata no Orochi. (Interestingly, in the recent manga Spider-Man: Shadow Warrior, that's the name applied to a symbiote derived from Venom.)

While these last chapters seem to be a climax of sorts, with the Goblin even offering an explanation of his plan thus far and suggesting to its all lead up to the release of the dragons, there's still some significant stuff yet to resolve...like, for example, that Spider-Man is a still a ghost. I assume they will have to bring him back to life at some point before the series ends, right? 

The series' third volume is scheduled for release in April. 

REVIEWED:

Cabin Head and Tree Head (Tundra Books) When I first came across this book, I was struck by a wave of deja vu, as I was certain I had read a Scott Campbell comic featuring weird guys named after the things sitting atop their heads before, but I couldn't recall wear. Was it a mini-comic purchased at a convention? A small-press graphic novel? Ultimately, I found it, in 2007 anthology Flight Vol. 4. 

I re-read that original 14-page story, entitled "Igloo Head and Tree Head", and it made for some interesting comparing and contrasting. The art is quite different, despite being recognizably Campbell's in both instances, and the some of the same story beats and even bits of dialogue from the original showed up in the first story in Cabin Head, which is an anthology of several short stories featuring the various "head" characters. 

The most obvious difference is, of course, that Igloo Head has become Cabin Head. I wonder why. In the original story, the fact that the thing on Igloo Head's head is made of ice is a plot point. Tree Head has his tree cut down by a tiny little lumberjack, and the pair go to town in search of a hat shop, so Tree Head can find something to cover up his now embarrassing head (He doesn't want to be referred to as "Stump Head"). During the trip, they get a little too close to a house head whose house is on fire, and Igloo Head's head igloo melts.

I am curious if Igloo Head becoming Cabin Head in the new version has something to do with ethnic sensitivity...? After all, "igloo" is a far funnier word than "cabin", so it would seem preferrable (Not to tell Campbell how to do his business, which he is quite good at, but I would have suggested "Bungalow Head" over "Cabin Head"; both are domiciles for people, but "bungalow" is a funnier word than "cabin" too, isn't it?).

Perhaps Campbell didn't want to use a type of structure so associated with a particular group of native people...? (Two of whom appear at one point, fleeing the melting igloo). I don't know; that's just a guess. 

Another change I noticed was the appearance of Canoe Head, who appears in both stories. In the original, his head looks like the sort of canoe one might see Native Americans using in an old Western and, indeed, there are two little Native American characters with naked chests and headbands seated in it, paddling (Canoe Head's only dialogue is clipped in a way that might suggest broken English, or might be meant to suggest that he is in a big hurry, which he is). In Cabin Head, Canoe Head's canoe is now a more modern-looking one, and it contains a single little white man, who is dressed like a camper.

Anyway, I reviewed Cabin Head and Tree Head here. And, if you happen to have a copy of Flight Vol. 4 sitting on your shelf, I found it an interesting exercise to flip through it, and see just how many of its contributors have gone on to produce kids' comics and/or picture books of varying degrees of popularity since, including Graham Annable, Vera Brosgol, Jon Klassen, Lark Pien, Dave Roman, Raina Telgemeier, Joey Weiser and contributor/editor Kazu Kibuishi.

Star Wars: Path of the Lightsaber Vol. 1 (Viz Media) Okay, so perhaps another Star Wars comic series is the last thing anyone needs, but at least Kenny Ruiz's manga, set between The Last Jedi and The Rise of Skywalker, has a unique focus. As telegraphed by the title, the book seems to focus on the iconic Star Wars weapon, as series heroine Nioka discovers an ancient one aboard a High Republic-era ship and decides to keep it and learn to use it, despite not being a Jedi or being able to use The Force. While there are definitely some generic characters, like the villain cast in the Darth Vader mold, I enjoyed a few of the supporting characters, like the villain's hench...object, an Imperial probe droid that keeps initiating its own self-destruct sequence every time it fears it disappoints its master, and Noika's old-timer partner, who seems to be an Endor truther ("'Furballs against Imperial troops'," he says at one point, "Nobody buys that."), which are two words I never thought I would type in that particular order.  More here.