Bookshelf #6

This week's shelf is my Marvel shelf, containing various Marvel trades (and one hardcover) I had acquired between 2012 and 2024 or so. This is around the time that I started buying fewer and fewer serially published single issues and then stopped altogether. 

It's probably harder to tell exactly what exactly is on this shelf compared to some of the past posts of this sort, given how Marvel often has all of their trade spines look alike, no matter what book it is, hence all those all-white spines with the red Marvel logo at the top facing you here. 

On this shelf you will find the entirety of Ryan North, Erica Henderson, Derek Charm and company's Unbeatable Squirrel Girl (a dozen trades plus an original graphic novel), Rainbow Rowell and company's Runaways, the first five volumes of Ms. Marvel, five Secret Wars tie-ins and some various Avengers books (two volumes from Mark Waid's All-New... run, the first three volumes of Jason Aaron's run, the first volume of Kelly Thompson's West Coast Avengers and something called Avengers Mech Strike, which I think I bought specifically to review at Good Comics for Kids...well that, and because it was the Avenges piloting giant robots).

The rest of the books are more-or-less random ones, purchased either because I liked the characters, or the creators or, ideally, both. 

You'll note that despite the relative uniformity of Marvel's trades here (only The Unbeatable Squirrel Girl Beats Up the Marvel Universe juts up a bit), there are also some smaller, digest-sized books on the far right. 

These are more kid-friendly comics that Marvel published during that time: Marvel Rising (Squirrel Girl! Ms. Marvel! Ryan North! Devin Grayson! G. Willow Wilson! A Gurihiru cover!), Spidey: Freshman Year, The Unstoppable Wasp: G.I.R.L. Power (so good, and with superior art by the great Elsa Charretier)...and one that is actually an IDW book, Marvel Action: Spider-Man: A New Beginning, from that weird time in which Marvel was farming out their kid-friendly comics to a different publisher for some reason. 

As for that stack of books on the far right that are laying down on their backs, those are Image trades purchased during that time. But, because I ran out of good bookends, I didn't have a way to stand them up spine out. 

I'll temporarily do so just so you can seem 'em though:

It's a particularly random assortment, all purchased because I liked the artist (some of my all-time favorite artists are represented here, including John McCrea) or because someone recommended them to me (as in the case of Maneater and those Rat Queens volumes). 

Seeing Chynna Clugston Flores' Blue Monday there reminds me that I never bought the rest of the collections of it (looks like there are four total). I have all of her Blue Monday comics in singles, of course, but I like the book enough that I wouldn't mind having a more easily accessible version of it too. (Oh, and writing this post also reminded me that I never bought the future volumes of The Black Panther by Christopher Priest: The Complete Collection, having stopped after acquiring the first. Maybe I shouldn't be doing these posts at all, doing so is only adding to my to-buy list...)

Review: 1997's Batman #540-541

It's been a while since I revisited any comics from the 1995-1998 Batman run by Doug Moench, Kelley Jones and John Beatty, but my recent reading inspired me to do so. First, I've been reading a lot of Kelley Jones comics, thanks to that huge collection of all of his Swamp Thing comics from October and this month's Dracula Book Two: The Brides. Secondly, The Spectre has been on my mind a lot, thanks to the Spectre by John Ostrander and Tom Mandrake Omnibus Vol. 1, which collects the first half of their 1992-1998 series.

Jones drew the Spectre in both Swamp Thing and The Spectre collections, albeit it briefly in both. 

All that got me thinking of the first time I had seen Kelley Jones' Spectre...as well as curious to see how Doug Moench might have handled a conflict between Ostrander's vengeful, killer ghost and the never-take-a-life Batman. 

The Spectre appeared in a two-part story in 1997's Batman #540 and #541, and DC made a little event out of it at the time. Just as The Spectre was appearing in the pages of Batman, Batman was appearing in the pages of The Spectre; though being published simultaneously, they were two distinct stories (If I recall correctly, the Spectre issue had the two heroes in conflict over whether or not to kill The Joker, and the villain ultimately, temporarily gaining control of the Spectre's powers). 

To re-read these issues of Batman, I turned to an electronic copy of Batman by Doug Moench and Kelley Jones Vol. 2, available through my library (I hate trying to find particular old comics in the 20-ish long boxes I have upstairs now). 

I was a little surprised to find that, while these issues were indeed a Batman/Spectre story, with the latter appearing on both covers (the second one, unencumbered by the logo and text, is above) and his name even appearing along the top of the covers so that they read "The Spectre & Batman", there's actually a lot of Bruce Wayne content in these issues.

So much so, in fact, that there's a bifurcated plot running through the issues.

One half of that plot deals with Batman and The Spectre's intersecting criminal investigations that lead to their collision and, given their differences on how to deal with criminals, conflict. The other deals with Bruce Wayne romancing his then new love interest, late night radio host Vesper Fairchild (Who, like so many of Batman's girlfriends over the years, would eventually meet a bad end; here they seem to be meeting for the first time and having their first few dates, though). 

The former plot, obviously, plays to Jones strengths more than the latter. To dispense with the Bruce Wayne plot first, it features various listeners around Gotham City hearing Vesper's show, on which she announces Bruce will be an upcoming guest; Batman is one of those listeners and has to hurry to change and get there in time.

Apparently, Alfred had booked the interview, trying to get Bruce to dust off the rich playboy/Gotham philanthropist persona after a relatively long absence. Things get out of hand when Bruce seems genuinely interested in Vesper, though—Jones draws an image in which Alfred, hearing Bruce hit on Vesper over the air, is sweating as profusely as a stool pigeon Jim Corrigan/The Spectre was working previously—and they have a couple of dates, which Alfred isn't all that thrilled about ("But sir, if you'll recall what happened the last time with Shondra Kinsolving..." he says at one point, bringing up another Batman girlfriend who met a bad end).

Anyway, Bruce Wayne does an interview with Vesper Fairchild, they go to a diner after, and then set up a lunch date for the following day, which requires Bruce to visit his office for the first time in about a year-and-a-half, and lets Moench write the faux-fop version of the character we don't see all that often. 

The scenes between Bruce and Vesper are almost all banter, with the pair lobbing lines back and forth like they were playing tennis. Like much of Moench's Batman writing at the time, it feels somewhat stagey and unrealistic, but it suits the melodramatic tone of Moench and Jones' vision of the book (The Spectre and Batman will banter rather similarly, although obviously less flirtatiously).

As for the portions of the story involving muscular guys in capes, Jim Corrigan—who here seems like he might actually be a police officer again?—and Spectre supporting character Nate Kane are at the scene of a deadly arson, which they believe to be the work of Tony "Sparks" Weal. In an interrogation room, Corrigan uses the Spectre to scare info of Weal's whereabout out of an informant: Weal has apparently gone to Gotham City, to meet with the lieutenant of the Black Mask Gang.

Batman, meanwhile, is busy busting that same lieutenant, one Damon Shugrue, which he does during a pretty great fight in a pool hall (Jones' Shugrue, by the way, is an amazing design, looking like the sort of stereotypical criminal that Jack Cole might have drawn; a big, hulking guy with beady little eyes and an almost Frankenstein-shaped head).

Because Batman showed up at the meet instead of Weal, Shugrue thinks Weal must have tipped off the Dark Knight, and so he sends three of his soldiers to kill Weal. Just before they gun him down, one of them says, "Relax, Sparks--we just came to deliver a Gotham welcome... and three more kisses from the Batman."

Okay, it's a bit purple—Moench's writing in this title so often is—and it is perhaps a strained way to make Weal think Batman has something to do with his killing but, well, Moench needed something to send The Spectre after Batman, right? 

The spirit of vengeance finds Weal in Gotham, but not until after he had died. And so, he enters his corpse through the eyes, and visits his soul in Hell, where it is secured to an x-shaped cross amid flames. During questioning, Weal says it was Batman who had him killed, and so the Spectre turns his hands into a big green bellows to fan the flames and then makes for Wayne Manor.

There's a whole series of great images of The Spectre in Gotham. As a semi-transparent giant creeping around the corner of the morgue, dissolving into a cloud to enter and exit Weal's body, streaking out of the morgue like a comet, descending from high above the manor with an impossibly long cape trailing behind him and, ultimately, appearing as a giant face pushing through the stalactites to accuse Batman in the Batcave. 

I kind of love how cool, calm and collected Batman remains when a giant, screaming ghost face emerges from his ceiling, but then, I guess this is just, like, another Tuesday for Batman (Well, another Wednesday, I guess, this being comics). 

Satisfied by Batman's denials, The Spectre leaves and the two conduct separate, parallel investigations, ending at an abandoned night club where the three men who gunned down Weal are in hiding, protected by other Black Mask gang soldiers.

Batman has to fight his way in, giving The Spectre, who just magically appears before the killers, time to kill them all. He appears with his hands in the form of giant Swiss army knives with which he impales one, he turns his hand into a chainsaw to cut down another, and, in the most spectacular killing, he calls them cowards for wearing masks and says "And so it is time to face-- --the wrath behind my mask!"

Here The Spectre pulls apart his own face and out slithers a snake-like projection that is all teeth, gums and spine, looking vaguely Giger-esque (and resembling elements of the bizarre alien creatures Jones drew in 1990's Swamp Thing #94, collected in that Swamp Thing by Len Wein and Kelley Jones book mentioned earlier). Do note the evocatively specific sound effects Moench came up with, and letterer Todd Klein brings to gorgeous life. 

The bad guys thus either colorfully exterminated by The Spectre or beaten up by Batman, the two heoes have a brief, banter-y argument. It is noteworthy, I thought, for Batman talking, ever so briefly, of elements of his own beliefs and faith, something that doesn't come up too often in Batman comics, but which Batman fans seems to have a lot of opinions about.

Their argument, which spans a couple of pages, goes about just as one might expect given the particular vocations and crimefighting practices of the characters. The Spectre ultimate leaves, telling Batman that he reminds him of his friend Amy (This is Amy Beitermann, Corrigan/The Spectre's kinda sorta love interest in the early issues of The Spectre; she gets killed off surprisingly early...but given how much the book deals with aspects of the afterlife, she still shows up in various capacities for a while). 

My favorite part here is how the relatively tiny Batman's ears go back as he points at The Spectre. One of the many, many things I have always loved about Jones' Batman is the way he draws Batman's ears as if they are a literal part of his body, and they thus sometimes move as if to reflect his feelings.

The most interesting part of the entire story is what happens next, though. 

As you can see on the bottom of that page, Batman calls for The Spectre to wait as he's in the process of leaving, seemingly jumping backwards through the ceiling.

Noting that The Spectre said he spoke to Weals in Hell, Batman then asks if that means there's really a Heaven too, and Spec is equivocal in his answer: "I have seen such a place...but whether in reality or illusion, I know not."

Batman says that, while he himself doesn't need, as The Spectre puts it, "the crutch of such a promise" of Heaven in order to live his life well and do good, there were two people that he cared about who were murdered, and Spectre then guesses what it is Batman wants to ask him.

"And you wish to know if they are at peace in Heaven," Spectre says. He then cuts Batman off before he can name them, but readers will know that he is of course talking about his parents:

Preserve your mind and soul where they belong, mortal--in the misted struggle between doubt and faith.

...

What I know is not yours to know. 

Besides, I am far more familiar with the denizens of Hell...than the geography of Heaven.

The Spectre then takes his leave on this, the penultimate page. I found the conversation sort of fascinating, as it's one of the relatively few instances in comics where I can recall Batman's encounters with various spiritual or magical entities or brushes with the afterlife including the obvious, his questioning of what he sees or learns might mean for the souls of his parents.

Another tack Moench might have taken here is questioning if The Spectre had avenged the death of the Waynes or, perhaps, if he has such vast powers, why he doesn't prevent murders, but instead only avenges them after the fact. (Questions, by the way, that John Ostrander deals within the pages of The Spectre, but, of course, Batman doesn't know that). 

I also find this exchange kind of interesting because surely this isn't the first, second, third, fourth or fifth time that Batman has crossed paths with The Spectre, and so surely he has had previous opportunities to chat with him about the afterlife during, say, one of those social gatherings between the annual JLA and JSA (although perhaps many of those were no longer meant to be canonical post-Crisis...?) or during some other team-up (although, again, The Spectre's meeting with Batman in the pages of The Brave and The Bold would have predated Crisis On Infinite Earths).

But perhaps Batman wasn't previously convinced that The Spectre was who he said he was, or perhaps he didn't necessarily know that The Spectre could visit the afterlife...?

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

The other comics featuring The Spectre that I've read in the last year or so were in the DC Finest collections of the Golden Age All-Star Comics, DC Finest: Justice Society of America: For America and Democracy and DC Finest: Justice Society of America: Plunder of the Psycho-Pirate. 

In those stories, it's clear that The Spectre is the ghost of a dead man and, like his fellow Society member Doctor Fate, his powers seem more or less unlimited, as he's able to do completely crazy things like, for example, deposit a criminal on the surface of Pluto (Although, more often than not, The Spectre, like Doctor Fate, takes on criminals using only his fists). 

The idea of The Spectre transforming his body into outlandish shapes or using his powers to sentence evildoers to harsh, ironic punishments doesn't seem to have been part of the character's depiction yet back in the 1940s. 

One element of these stories I found particular surprising though, and the reason I bring them up in a post about Batman and The Spectre at all, is that the writer Gardner Fox repeatedly referred to The Spectre by the nickname of "The Dark Knight"...which, these days, we associate with Batman, rather than The Spectre. 

Review: Justice League of America: The Rise of Eclipso

The 2012 Justice League of America: The Rise of Eclipso trade paperback collection is a complete mess, which probably shouldn't be surprising. After all, the entire 2006-2011 volume of JLoA was a bit of a mess, especially after its initial writer, Brad Meltzer, left. "Rise of Eclipso" was the final story arc in the series, followed by a sort of one-issue epilogue—"Adjourned"—after which the series was cancelled. 

Not, it's worth stressing, because the series was a mess, of course, nor because its last few arcs were any worse than its first few, but because DC cancelled all of its books at the time, closing out their post-Crisis continuity for their biggest, hardest reboot ever, September of 2011's The New 52 initiative. 

This trade, then, represents not just the end of the JLoA series, but the end of the 25-year post-Crisis Justice League saga. 

It is, I am disappointed to say, not very good, and the sort of historical nature of the story makes it more disappointing still. Were 25 years of stories all leading up to this? No, this was just a placeholder story, something to keep a Justice League comic on the shelves while DC worked on a new, New 52 version of their flagship team title, one that would prove to be a sales hit (and, if you ask me, creative flop).

But let's stay on topic.

The comics collected herein are all written by James Robinson, and drawn by pencil artists Brett Booth, Daniel Sempere, Jesus Merino and Miguel Sepulveda and inked by Sepulveda and three other artists. That may seem like a lot of artists, but Booth draws most of the book, including all but one chapter of the title story, with Sampere and Sepulveda penciling the one issue he does not. 

Booth's presence, by the way, is why I had never before read these comics. I was not (and am still not, I find) a fan of Booth's style, so this is the point at which I finally dropped JLoA, after faithfully reading JLA and JLoA month in and month out since 1997. 

Therefore, I opened the cover—a featuring a fairly nice image by Ivan Reis that originally ran on the cover of the final issue of the series, JLoA #60—somewhat tensed, expecting the worst. Even so, I was sort of surprised to find, on the second page of the trade, the words, "A Dark Things Epilogue." The book starts with an epilogue to a different story...?

Indeed. Even odder, the issue doesn't feature any members of the current Justice League. Instead, it is one long scene in which Green Lantern Alan Scott and his son Obsidian talk to one another on the moon, the rest of their team, the Justice Society of America finally showing up on the last page. The only Justice League of America characters that show up during the course of this particular issue, do so in crowd scenes filling its many splash pages, depicting possible futures. 

I would discover the why of this later. This particular issue isn't even an issue of JLoA, rather it is JSoA #43. The "Dark Things" story arc was a crossover involving both of the Justice...of America titles. My guess is that this ended up in a JLoA trade because DC probably published "Dark Things" under the more popular JLoA title in trade. That, or maybe DC didn't collect the last issues of JSoA into trade at all, and thus there was nowhere else to stick this. It does have some bearing on "Rise of Eclipso," introducing readers who might have skipped "Dark Things" (or, like me, read it like 15 years ago and forgotten it), to The Emerald City.

This is a massive city on the moon, built by the Starheart, the magical source of Alan Scott's Green Lantern ring and its magical powers. I'm not sure when exactly the Starheart entered DC lore, but it's been around since at least the '90s. It was a way to incorporate Alan into the greater Green Lantern mythology, from which he was originally had nothing to do with when Hal Jordan and the Green Lantern Corpse were created in the Silver Age.

Anyway, whatever happened during the course of "Dark Things," the Starheart's power has now created a massive city composed of Green Lantern construct buildings, and various magical creatures from Earth have been "called" there and have made it their home. Alan is sort of its sheriff and administrator. He gives his son a tour of the place, and they angst about a current bit of drama involving their family: Obsidian and his sister Jade can no longer come within a half mile of one another, or risk combining into some weird composite form that will bring about the end of the world.

Alan says that he and Dr. Fate ran through every conceivable scenario to fix things, but all they found were alternate futures in which, say, Earth's vampire and fairy populations go to war and superheroes get caught in the middle or all of the superheroes with Earth powers will go insane.

The issue is notable for two reasons. First, despite Merino providing the best pencil art of the whole trade, this issue looks like it must have been thrown together in a hurry: Of its 22 pages, six are spent on double-page splashes and three on single-page splashes. (There are also a couple of pages with only two panels apiece, which are practically splashes.)

Some of those double-page splashes do have a lot of figures in them, like the one depicting the aforementioned war, but man, 2011 Caleb would have been so pissed if he spent three bucks on a comic that was, like, half splash pages...

The other notable thing is just to what degree Robinson seems to be treating the endeavor as a "toybox" comic. He's always set his work deeply into the DC Universe setting, of course, often finding and using lesser-known characters in interesting new ways and keeping an admirable fidelity to DC continuity. Here, though, that aspect of his work seems turned up to 11 (and it will stay so throughout the trade). Aside from various JSoA character, Mordu, Nightmaster, Gemworld, Monolith, Zara, Andrew Bennet, Geomancer and Tara II are either namedropped or make cameos of sorts and, of course, that spread with depicting the war is full of various superheroes, at least one of whom I couldn't even identify.

That out of the way, "Rise" begins in earnest and it, too, gets off to a bad start.

Take a look:

The very first page of "Rise" consists of two panels. The first has narration, white type in black boxes (just like Obsidian's dialogue in the previous chapter, although this is not Obsidian talking). It reads:

At a time of grave crisis, the world's greatest heroes banded together to combat evil.

The name of this team...

...The Justice League of America.

The image in this first panel shows the original (pre-Crisis, post-Infinite Crisis) Justice League founders, the seven heroes from 1960's The Brave and the Bold #28, but, in the background, we see the Hall of Justice...which wasn't actually the headquarters of any Justice League in the comics until Brad Meltzer imported it from the Super Friends cartoons in the early issues of this particular volume of JLoA, so circa 2006 or so. 

The second panel, accounting for the bottom half of the page, has narration reading:

Other heroes joined this group...other champions. The roll call changing year by year. 

Here Booth draws a mostly random assortment of later Leaguers, stretching from the likes of Green Arrow and Hawkman to Red Arrow and Black Lightning. 

Between these two panels, but more on the bottom than the top, is...a mysterious object, a colorful box with what looks like a "7" on it (It's on the right edge of the page above). I could not for the life of me figure out what the hell this was supposed to be, especially since it seemed to be reaching onto the page from somewhere off page. I flipped to the next page to see if this was a mistake of layout, and maybe something on the next page explained it, but no.

Eventually I decided it must be a TV news microphone, from a Channel 7, perhaps being pointed at the JLoA founders, as if they were giving a press conference (If you look closely, there's the tip of another tiny microphone in the bottom right corner of the first panel, near Batman's crotch). 

I'm not sure why Booth drew it, but I am sure he should not have. 

And then onto the second page of the issue, a full-page splash featuring the current line-up fighting what, upon close inspection, turn out to be green hard-light constructs of Alan Scott, presumably generated by Jade during "Dark Things." 

Here the narration tells us the team has changed again, and that this version of the team came together during the events of "Dark Things." The line-up during this volume of JLoA seemed to shift each story arc, something I have to assume was not Robinson's doing, nor to his liking (His predecessor on the title, the late Dwayne McDuffie, complained about editorial taking characters he was using or planning to use out of circulation on a regular basis. If you've read much of Robinson's run, you'll find the "official" line-up more fluid still). 

I did appreciate this page, as it tries to contextualize this team as a Justice League, and make the constant changes in team make-up seem like part of the overall Justice League story. That, and it told me who was actually supposed to be on the team at this point: Jade, Supergirl, Congorilla, Donna Troy, Jesse Quick, Batman Dick Grayson and Starman Mikaal Tomas.

So, notably, it's a couple of fun, unlikely characters (Congorilla and Starman), and a bunch of legacy characters plucked from the extended "families" of founding Leaguers (everyone else), some of whom might not have been the second, third, or even fourth choice to fill those roles (Green Lantern-like Jade and speedster Jesse Quick, for example).

Still, it's a noteworthy line-up in just how many women are on it. In fact, I think this may be the first and only time the number of women outnumbered the number of men on the team...?

From here, the scene shifts from the battle scene on the moon to Earth, where Bruce Gordon takes over the narration, and, ultimately, somehow transforms into Eclipso, despite there not being an eclipse. From here on out, the book will mostly be narrated by a conversation between Eclipso and Gordon, the latter of whom is reduced to a voice in the former's head.

Gordon's words appear in very light gray, almost white narration boxes. Eclispo's appear in purple boxes. There is occasionally omniscient narration too, with this in white boxes, which can easily be confused as Gordon's thoughts. And there is at least one instance where Eclipso's dialogue appears in a light gray box, as if it were Gordon's. Again, it's remarkably slipshod for a DC comic, I thought, and I was kinda surprised that mistakes like this made it into the trade, as surely someone would have noticed it the first time the book was published, and then fixed it before it was published a second time, no? 

This first chapter of "Rise" is, aside from that splash page introducing them, devoid of the Justice League, instead following Eclipso as he goes around gathering allies with various shadow-based powers and "eclipsing" them: The Shade, Nightshade, Acrata and Shadow Thief, plus two more I had never heard of, Dark-Crow and Bete-Noir (this Bete-Noir character being a skull-faced gorilla who speaks French, not to be confused with Martian Manhunter villain Bette Noir). (Oh, I guess there's a good reason I never heard of these two; they are new characters appearing here for the first time. Neat.)

Oh, and Eclipso also awakens a slumbering elder god for his team, an off-brand Cthulhu, named Syththunu.

As for what Eclipso is up to this time, well, it's a very complicated plan, and it is revealed only gradually throughout the story arc, but essentially he plans to kill God by destroying the Earth, Robinson proposing a rather interesting idea that, in the DC Universe, Earth is a sort of conduit between God and the universe, transferring energy back and forth (I'm not entirely sure if this is all Robinson's idea, though, as the events of Brightest Day are referenced in relation to this, specifically the White Lanterns and that weird White Lantern entity). 

On the last pages of this chapter, we see Alan Scott in the Emerald City. He is now bald and emaciated, laying in a bed with an IV. What happened to him between the first issue collected in this trade and the second? No clue. 

(Oddly, when events from other books are reflected in the issues, there are no asterisks and editorial boxes letting a reader know where they might have occurred...but there are a few editorial boxes referring back to very old stories, like one reading "Way back in Brave & The Bold #115", which was the 1974 issue in which The Atom entered a braindead Batman's brain and hopped around, "piloting" it).

The next issue is a good example of just how messy this series is. Though it's entitled "Eclipso Rising Part Two: Mayhem", it's actually also a tie-in to a Superman event (The original cover, which you can see here on comics.org, includes a "Reign of Doomsday" banner along the top). 

Supergirl, wearing a black and white costume, is floating around the wreckage of New Krypton, when Batman shows up in a spaceship. And so does cyborg "Alpha Lantern" Boodikka. And then Doomsday, who can now fly...? And then Starman and Blue Lantern Saint Walker (Though not officially a Leaguer, Walker is in this book more than Supergirl and, in the final issue, Dick mentions him as a potential future Leaguer).

They fight. 

The last page of this issue features two reveals. On the moon, Eclipso has eclipsed Jade, and the Cyborg-Superman pops out of Boodikka on the team's satellite base. 

Whatever is happening with the latter, it's not addressed in this book at all. Cyborg-Superman doesn't reappear at all, so apparently that unfolds in the Superman books, where one assumes "Reign of Doomsday" must be playing out. Those events seem to take Supergirl out of the story as well, as she won't reappear until the final pages of the JLoA #59, the concluding chapter of "Rise". (When she does, she's in red and blue again, and, when Congorilla asks where she was, she simply replies, "Long story, Bill...").

On the moon, Eclipso starts eclipsing all the elves and fairies and other magical residents of the Emerald City. The reserves are called in (which, I was surprised to see, included The Bulleteer, who I don't think was ever actually on any incarnation of the League...?), but they too get eclipsed.

Caleb-favorite character Zauriel is among the reserves, and, rather than eclipsing him, Eclipso sword-fights him, captures him, and forces him to send out some kind of weird divine distress signal, which summons The Spectre. Eclipso kills The Spectre (!), cutting him in half vertically with his giant black sword on a double-page splash printed sideways, and Eclipso thus absorbs his power. (I'm not sure who The Spectre's host is at this point, or if this is a host-less Spectre-Force. The story doesn't address that at all; at any rate, this Spectre doesn't have a goatee, so it doesn't look like the Crispus Allen version, although I would have thought Allen was still The Spectre at this point...)

Things seem very bad, but eventually the League rallies and, with the help of Obsidian, a healthy-again Alan Scott and The Atom Ray Palmer, they defeat Eclipso and save the world...and, I guess, the universe and God himself. (As for The Spectre, is he dead-dead? Unclear, but since the universe is rebooted immediately after all this anyway, I guess it doesn't matter. Corrigan is The Spectre again when introduced into New 52 continuity). 

And then we get issue #60, the final issue. In it, all seven official members of the League take turns telling the rest of the team why they are deciding to quit at this particular juncture. Sure, it strains credulity—all seven decide they need to step away simultaneously?—but then, Robinson was writing these characters off for the final time here, and I don't know the best way to close out the series in these particular circumstances might have been. (Me, I think I would have had them stay together, maybe rushing off into their next adventure on the last page, at least implying that this version of the team, and of the DC Universe, might still go on, if only in the readers' imaginations...)

Between the various team members telling one another what they plan to do next, there are splash pages devoted to adventures that they apparently had in the weeks between the end of "Rise" and this particular meeting: A Construct-led robot uprising, "The Saturn-Thanagar War" and "The Battle for Gemworld". 

At first, I assumed this was Robinson using up his ideas for future JLoA stories, a way of getting them into the book before he left it, but the more I thought about it, the more I began to doubt that a writer would "waste" such ideas in such a way, and so perhaps these were just plots he thought up while writing this particular issue, random off-panel adventures that he considered the basic outlines of without really having fleshed them out, or intended to use anywhere else.

The most interesting bit, I thought, was on the last page, when Dick Grayson and Donna Troy are about to teleport back down to Earth, as the rest of the team already did. They have a short exchange about their version of the Justice League, which really sounds like Robinson talking about his run more than anything else.

"Do you think they'll remember us?" Donna asks Dick and, when he replies, "Who? Bill and the others?" she answers in such a way that it seems as if she's talking about the readers:

No, dummy, the people. The world. Think they'll remember this version of the J.L.A. and all that we did?

To which Dick responds:

Who can say? We did what we could with what we were given and I'm proud. I'll remember. Other people? Honestly who cares, it's not why I'm in this anyway.

Well, I hope that's how Robinson felt...and still feels. Because, despite the fact that I'm reading this story arc and writing about it 15 years later, I feel like Robinson's run has been somewhat forgotten, as has been most of the final stories of DC's books immediately preceding The New 52. 

Though DC has since de-rebooted The New 52, restoring pre-Flashpoint continuity...while keeping some of the The New 52 developments that didn't contradict the previous continuity too badly...I think the Justice League continuity is more screwed-up than that of other characters and concepts within the DCU. 

I'm trade-waiting Mark Waid and company's New History of the DC Universe; perhaps that will reveal if this Justice League is still canon or if it was over-written by all the various cosmic timeline altering events of the last decade or so. 

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

Among all of the things that were wrong with this trade paperback, the wrongest thing is something I didn't yet mention. 

I don't know why this is the case, or if it was the case with all of the copies of the trade that were published, or just the one I happened to borrow from the library, but there was apparently some kind of printing mess up.

For some reason, all of the narration boxes and dialogue balloons that were on the far side of the pages were cut off throughout. Here's an example; note Jesse's dialogue in the first panel:

In all cases, there is enough of the cut-off words to guess what they are supposed to be, but it's really weird, isn't it?

**********************|

Oh, and if you're wondering why on Earth I'm writing about this particular book at this particular time, well, I'll tell you.

As I mentioned a while back, after reading the last half-dozen or so JLA arcs, I had considered re-reading the book that followed the end of JLA, Justice League of America. I ultimately decided not to because a) I didn't care for it the first time around and b) my library system didn't have every volume of it available in trade (They do have them all available electronically, but I'm not a fan of reading comics on my laptop or phone).

So, the idea of revisiting JLoA was already in the back of my mind.

And then I read The Spectre by John Ostrander and Tom Mandrake Omnibus Vol. 1, which made me curious about more recent Spectre comics that followed their series..specifically, the character's storyline after Hal Jordan stopped being the host of The Spectre. Also, during the events of Ostrander and Mandrake's Spectre, the title character seems to rather definitively defeat Eclipso, smashing him to ashes, and I found myself wondering how he came back from that, so I was a bit curious about later Eclipso stories too.

When looking for later Spectre comics, then, I saw that "Rise of Eclipso" featured both Eclipso and the Spectre and, given when it was published, these would have been the last appearances of each character in the Crisis to Flashpoint timeline, so that was two reasons to check this story arc out. 

I plan on writing a few more Spectre-related posts in the near future too, so I hope that's something you guys are interested in reading about...

Bookshelf #5

Continuing with our tour of my bookshelves, we now move into the master bedroom, where I have three big shelving units from Ikea (two of which I inherited when a friend moved, one of which I bought—and assembled all by myself!—to match the other two). All of the books on these shelves would have been acquired when I lived in Mentor, so between 2011 and 2024 or so.

Atop the top shelf of the first of these units, you'll see a handful of prose books which, like the few prose books I actually own, are just kinda stuck wherever I can find room for 'em. This being a comics blog, I won't linger on those, but they give you a decent idea of some of my interests aside from comics: Giant monster movies, the Marx Brothers and certain elements of Christianity (The one fiction book up there is Pete Beatty's Cuyahoga, which I would highly recommend...especially to any of you who may be in or around Cleveland). 

As for this week's featured shelf, it is, due to its size, devoted to books of smaller dimensions. 

On the left are DC comics for kids (Shadow of the Batgirl, Superman Smashes the Klan, etc.) and DC manga (Batmanga Vol. 1, Batman and the Justice League Vols. 1-3, Superman vs. Meshi Vol. 1). Randomly stuck in there are a pair of Disney comics from Dark Horse, simply because of their size (Disney Dracula Starring Mickey Mouse and Disney Frankenstein Starring Donald Duck). 

On the right are manga related to two of the earliest anime I series I watched, Dragon Ball Z and Neon Genesis Evangelion. Representing the former, there's the first volume of Dragon Ball Super (a series I immediately lost track of and am now so behind on I will probably never actually read it), Akira Toriyama's Jaco the Galactic Patrolman and the ratherr weird Dragon Ball: That Time I Got Reincarnated as Yamcha. Representing the latter, there's all six volumes of the lighter, brighter Neon Genesis Evangelion: Angelic Days series, the Neon Genesis Evangelion: Comic Tribute anthology and Insufficient Direction, a manga about Evangelion creator Hideaki Anno by his wife, Moyoco Anno.

I think just about everything on this shelf is pretty good, and I would likely recommend it to anyone, depending on their tastes (Kami Garcia and Gabriel Picolo's Teen Titans: Raven probably necessitates one being okay with YA fiction, for example, and those Disney books I thought were more interesting than great. Oh, and obviously the entire right half of the shelf will likely do nothing for you if you're not already a Dragon Ball or Evangelion fan).

Three out of four Spider-Man manga homage Amazing Fantasy #15's cover

This is the cover of 1962's Amazing Fantasy #15, penciled by Jack Kirby and inked by Steve Ditko, based on the latter's design for the new character Spider-Man. As perhaps the first image anyone outside of the Marvel bullpen had seen of the Spider-Man, it is one of the most famous poses of the character, and one frequently homaged and riffed upon.

Even overseas, as I've noticed recently.

In Yusuke Osawa's 2023 Spider-Man: Fake Red, Silk sneaks into protagonist Yu Onomae's apartment and looks around, her eye landing on a framed photo of Spider-Man in his Amazing Fantasy cover pose hanging on Yu's wall. The picture appears a few more times in the scene, with Silk placing her hand dramatically upon it at one point, and the pair of heroes shaking hands in front of it.

In Setta Kobayashi and Hachi Mizuno's 2025 Spider-Man Kizuna, Spider-Man strikes the iconic pose when he rescue's the books protagonist Yu Yamato.

And in Shogo Aoki's 2025 Spider-Man: Shadow Warrior, protagonist Hyo Hachizuka, who is possessed and empowered by a piece of the Venom symbiote, rescues a pair of civilians like so.

In fact, the only Spider-Man manga I've read in the last few years that didn't contain an homage to that pose was Spider-Man: Octo-Girl. That series is still ongoing, though, so maybe its creators will fit one in during the next volume...

Review: Spider-Man: Octo-Girl Vol 2

Just as reading and reviewing the Spider-Man: Shadow Warrior manga led to my seeking out Spider-Man Kizuna, it also reminded me of the manga series Spider-Man: Octo-Girl. The work of the My Hero Academica: Vigilantes creative team of Hideyuki Furuhashi and Betten Court, the series launched in the states in the fall of last year (I reviewed the first volume here), and this second installment was released back in May. It looks like the third volume was just released last week, so I suppose it's past time I got caught up.

For an original manga, the series is remarkable in how closely tied into Marvel comics continuity it is. In his afterword in the first volume, writer Furuhashi explain how he became enamored with "one of Spider-Man's more antiquated and obsolete villains", Doctor Octopus.

Essentially, he read a Japanese translation of The Superior Spider-Man (the Dan Slott-written series wherein Otto Octavius swapped his consciousness with that of Peter Parker and thus becomes Spider-Man for over a year). His excitement of that particular storyline led him to read about a decade's worth of Spider-Man comics, those published between 2009 and 2019, made him see the villain in a new light, and, ultimately, to create this manga, in which he could introduce readers to "a new perspective on the appeal of Doctor Octopus." 

Charmingly, he also wrote that his ultimate goal was to someday have one of  the "western comics" include a cutaway gag referring to the events of Octo-Girl, which has a premise that might sound pretty bonkers in its description, but is really not that big of a leap from what Slott and Marvel were doing with the characters during their storylines.

If you haven't read Spider-Man: Octo-Girl Vol. 1 (and I would certainly recommend you do so!) or even my review of it (you do read every single thing I wrote, don't you?), that premise is this: After backing himself into a corner during a fight with Spider-Man, Doctor Octopus attempts to transfer his consciousness from his current, seemingly-about-to-die body to a pre-prepared clone one, but due to various circumstances, his mind accidentally ends up in the body of a Japanese school girl who was in a coma.

She soon "wakes up", though, and so the mind of Doctor Octopus is now "sharing" a body with middle-schooler Otoha Okutamiya. After acquiring a spare set of metal arms from a Japanese safe house of his, cutting Otoha's unruly long hair into his signature bowl cut and trying to violently assert his dominance over her misfit school "chums", Otto and Otoha reach a sort of arrangement.

Using a high-tech device disguised as a cute octopus hairclip, the two can switch control of Otoha's body back and forth, and the person not currently in control can still communicate with the outside world. That communication is often accompanied by a hologram of one of them, being projected from one of the wondrous metal arms (And thus readers get to see plenty of Otto, even though his body, which Spidey actually saved from splattering on a New York City street, is stuck in a hospital bed in America, seemingly in a coma).

In the first volume, the pair agreed to work together to try to get Otto back in the right body, which meant stealing a particular brain scanner of his invention that was then being used at a Japanese hospital (the scanner's earlier usage on the injured Otoha was part of the circumstances that landed Otto's mind in her body). 

There were, of course, complications. 

First, there was the appearance of Sakura Spider, a multiversal Spider-Man variant that ended up in our world (Apparently introduced in the Deadpool: Samurai manga, according to Furuhashi's occasional behind-the-scenes info provided between chapters, as well as a page of flashbacks involving Deadpool). Then there was the fact that Otoha's classmate and estranged childhood friend seemed to be working on something high-tech and possibly nefarious in a warehouse. And some drama involving the weirdest of Otoha's classmates. And, in the first volume's cliffhanger ending, there was the appearance of another Marvel character: The Superior Octopus, which is Doctor Octopus' body in a clone composite of Peter Parker and Otto Octavius. ("It's kinda like... ..if you and Spider-Man had a kid together?" Otoha says of the clone, to which Otto replies, "Silence! Such phrasing is unseemly! Rather, I have improved upon my archrival's power.")

I haven't previously encountered this particular version of a Doctor Octopus-in-Spider-Man's-body character before personally. As you can see on the cover of this second volume, he looks a bit like a Spider-Man with Doc Ock's arms and with a white, black and green-highlighted costume. (This character, it is explained, is apparently a "past" version of Otto's consciousness, which must have been uploaded into a clone body when his system kept trying to do so after the original mix-up that led to Otto and Otoha sharing her body).

In this second volume, Furuhashi and Court give us a backstory of another of Otoha's classmates who is in on the secret, rounding out the character in the same way they did with a girl in the first volume. This also adds another player to Otto's growing Japanese girl gang.

In this volume, our heroes—or perhaps I should say "protagonists", given Doc Ock's insistence that he's not a hero—spend the better part of the book's page count in conflict with Superior Octopus. 

Discovering the truth about Otto/Otoha, he captures her and takes her back to his warehouse HQ, where he plans to delete the villainous Otto consciousness (the original and up-to-date version) from Otoha, freeing her and permanently disposing of a supervillain (Superior Octopus is still in a trying-to-be-a-superior-superhero phase, which the original Otto has since gone through and gotten over). 

It's up to said girl gang to help Otto get back in control of Otoha's body (and the octopus arms) so he can defeat the Superior Octopus; this he ultimately does by using Otoha's hijacked body as a sort of human shield. That is, he can beat the hell out of Superior Octopus with his metal arms, while S.O. refuses to land a blow on an innocent little girl.

The conflict ends in a draw. Though Otto is perfectly willing to kill off the Superior Octopus, he's saved by the appearance of Otoha's childhood friend, now wearing a high-tech, bird-themed super-suit that she has invented, making her look a bit like a new version of a Vulture. 

The rest of the volume tells us more about Otoha and her friend's childhood, the tragedies they experienced, and their falling out. Takoyaki, the Japanese snack made from octopus tentacles, is involved, as I suppose was inevitable in a manga featuring octopus-themed superhero characters. The friend now wants to use her super-suit to gain vengeance against a corporation she holds responsible for the death of her father. 

Spider-Man also appears, albeit in a single, brief scene set in New York, wherein he fights and defeats the streaming super-villain Screwball. This seems to suggest that we haven't yet seen the last of Spidey in this series, and that he will eventually interact with our protagonists again.

The pleasures of the series first encountered in the first volume remain the same here in the second. A megalomaniac and genius who thinks he knows better than everyone, Otto Octavius is a fun character, and it's especially fun to see him dealing with problems he himself finds trivial, like those faced by a middle-schooler, problems he can't help himself from trying to solve, even while protesting how ultimately unimportant they are to a man of his stature.

And Court's depiction of the lead is great, as her expressions and demeanor so drastically shift, depending on whether Otoha or Otto are in the driver's seat of her diminutive body. 

Court is also great at the action, of which there is a great deal, choreographing the often-inventive uses of the various characters' metal tentacles. (As spectacular as the various fights are, and as dramatic as the scenes of the Octopuses looming menacingly on a pair of their arms might be, I think my favorite images in this volume are those of Superior Octopus in "disguise", in which he wears a wide-brimmed hat and trenchcoat over his extremely conspicuous-looking costume. I find it especially funny as, earlier in the book, we see him out-of-costume on the streets of Japan, where it is of course easy enough for him to blend in.)

The situation obviously lends itself towards humor, of which there is also a lot, but the story sort of covers similar ground to the Slott and Marvel stories it is inspired by. That is, Doctor Octopus repeatedly sliding into regular acts of heroism. Even this version of the character, who has already attempted to be a superhero and found that it brought him nothing but suffering and that has thus re-embraced villainy, seems to have an innately heroic side that can be coaxed out in the right circumstances. 

This volume ends with Superior Octopus and the Vulture-like girl going to storm a corporate headquarters together, Otoha declaring that she will eventually make-up with her friend, even if it seems like the next step will be to have Doc Ock fight to stop her. 

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

Interestingly, this volume includes and eight-page "mini-comic" at the end, which was a tie-in to the 2023 movie The Marvels. Furuhashi introduces it by saying it was meant to be less of an ad and more of a primer on the characters and, amusingly (at least to me), he writes, "Doing the necessary research took quite a bit of time"...

Yeah, I imagine tracking Marvel's "Marvel" characters over the course of some 55 years of characters changing codenames and costumes took a while, let alone then trying to reduce, say, the history of Carol Danvers into a single splash page and some 25 words of text.

Sure, it's fun to see Betten Court drawing Carol, Monica Rambeau, Kamala Khan, Movie Nick Fury and, on the opening page, seemingly all of the Captains Marvels ever. But, as someone who has written so much about super-comics continuity over the years, here on my comics blog as well as in articles intended for "civilian" readers, I found some of Furuhashi's statements fun to read.

For example, here is the first of two pages devoted to Captain Marvel Carol Danvers:

This is Carol Danvers.

Formerly Ms. Marvel...

...Now Captain Marvel.

After a complicated sequence of events...she inherited the title... ...and the weighty responsibility that comes with it.

Yes, "a complicated sequence of events" is a nice simplification of the typically byzantine history of a superhero, and can be applied to like, just about any of 'em at this point. 

I also liked the page devoted to Monica's history:

And this is Monica Rambeau. She's gone by a number of code names... ...which is plenty common for heroes with long careers.

Again, true. And it is certainly a gentle way of saying that writers, editors and publishers often flail about with what to do with some characters, especially one-time legacy characters that aren't successful enough to hold that legacy name forever, but are popular enough to keep around, so the publisher has to keep trying to find something that works for them...

Bookshelf #4

Finally, we come to the bottom shelf of the first of my bookshelves. 

To the left are various Top Shelf books, all acquired during my time in Mentor (so, about 2011-2024 or so). Though all from the same publisher, there's quite a variety of genres represented. 

First, there's Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell's From Hell, a hardcover I acquired when it was being weeded from the library, and the various Nemo books that spun out of Moore and the late Kevin O'Neill's League of Extraordinary Gentleman  bboks (I also stuck in Moore's Neonomicon with Jacen Burrows in there, which is actually from Avatar, but I guess was thinking it was a Moore book, and thus belonged with the others). There's also George Takei and company's They Called Us Enemy, Paul Tobin and Colleen Hoover's Gingerbread Girl, some James Kochalka, one of Sam Henderson's always hilarious books and Jeffrey Brown's Incredible Change-Bots (which I used to think was the best Transformers comic ever made, but that was before Tom Scioli had made Transformers vs. G.I. Joe and Go-Bots).

On the right is a completely random assortment of books, grouped together there simply because I didn't seem to have enough books from those publishers to give them their own shelf. And so this motley corner includes Roar's Dinosaucers and The Scarecrow Princess, Scholastic/Graphix's The Dumbest Idea Ever and Sparks, a pair of Jane Mai books, Bryan Lee O'Malley's Scott Pilgrim follow-up Seconds, Nimona, Ahoy Comics' Jesus sitcom Second Coming, the seemingly-made-just-for-Caleb Giraffes on Horseback Salad, Street Fighter vs. Darkstalkers (Hey, I loved the Darkstalkers arcade game, and have always been a fan of those character designs, even if none of their comics are ever very good; I even bought the Viz mini-series back in 1998, when Viz was still publishing manga in single-issue comics format). Oh, and something called Sharkasaurus, which I 100% bought just because of the title and the cover (But which must not have been very good, as I don't remember anything at all). 

Considering the right half of the shelf now, I realize that it consists mostly of books I had either gotten review copies of or had bought specifically so that I could review them, as I wrote about almost all of these, with few exceptions (like Bian Chippendale's weird-ass Maggots from PictureBox).

I'd highly recommend just about everything on this shelf (Save for Sharkasaurus and Street Fighter vs. Darkstalkers...and maybe Dinosaucers, depending on whether or not you watched the cartoon as a kid).
 

Review: Swamp Thing by Len Wein and Kelley Jones: The Deluxe Edition

I actually bought this 430-ish page hardcover collection when it was released last month, but I didn't get a chance to read it before November, which is why I didn't include it in the last A Month of Wednesdays column. So now it gets a standalone review of its own.

The organizing principle seems to be all of the Swamp Thing comics that writer (and Swamp Thing co-creator) Len Wein did with artist Kelley Jones, which consists of some nine issues between 2015 and 2018. But also included are all of Jones' other Swamp Thing work, which means 1990's Swamp Thing #94 and Swamp Thing #100 and 1995's Batman #521-522. Plus Jones covers for other book's featuring Swamp Thing, like a couple that he did for Justice League Dark and that for 2018's Young Monsters in Love anthology, depicting Swampy stealing Frankenstein's girl. 

Also included are some interesting looking Wein/Jones Swamp Thing collaborations that could have been, like notes for an ongoing continuing from their six-issue 2016 series and, more intriguingly still, what was to be a 1989 three-issue, fully-painted, prestige format series by Swamp Thing creators Wein and Bernie Wrightson. (In that particular case, Wein had written it and Wrightson did rough pencil layouts for some of it, but the latter eventually left the project. Wein apparently suggested Jones draw it, but DC decided to cancel it; so here we to see what the late Wrightston had managed to complete.)

Having become an ardent and devoted Kelley Jones fan during the artist's nineties run on Batman, I have already read most of the stories contained in this collection (and own them in singles). In fact, I had bought and read everything in here except the two 1990 issues of Swamp Thing, so...11 out of the 13 issues within...? 

Despite my relative miserliness, I went ahead and dropped $50 on this anyway though, as it is of course nice to have so much Kelley Jones art so easily accessible in one place. 

Let's look at the features in order, shall we? 

Foreword by M. Christina Valada

M. Christina Valada, her bio says, is a photographer, lawyer, writer and podcaster, although she writes this substantial foreword as Len Wein's wife. As such, she played a substantial role in finding the materials that are presented in this book, as she has looked through his computer and office for much of what ends up in the back matter.

She shares Wein's medical difficulties over the course of the last few years of his life, which included heart surgery and being on dialysis, a toe amputation, neck surgery and more. In fact, Valada said that, in the last 13 months of his life, Wein was in constant pain, and "had more surgeries in the last year than I can actually count." 

Nevertheless, he kept working, mostly on Swamp Thing comics and other projects and, from what Valada said, made some truly heroic efforts to attend conventions.

The piece is also full of touching personal anecdotes, and even some advice that Wein shared with Kelley Jones about making comics...and, I suppose, is here being shared with everyone: "Remember, this is supposed to be fun."

Introduction by Kelley Jones

Kelley Jones' piece is far shorter than Valada's and begins with a fun anecdote: Upon first reading Len Wein and Bernie Wrightson's Swamp Thing as an 11-year-old child in 1972, Jones hated it. 

It was issue #2.

From cover to last panel, it was just disturbing and creepy and sad. It featured a mad doctor/sorcerer named Arcane and his awful creations, the Un-Men, and Swamp Thing...who was supposed to be the hero of the book and a monster! "Monsters can't be heroes!" my still-unrotted brain screamed. Remember, I was 11.

And, when I was done, like I said, I hated. it.

But it stayed with me. I thought about it and turned it over and over in my mind. As with all things taboo. I had to look into the abyss that was Swamp Thing again.

And then I loved it. I mean, really, really loved it.

In just two hours, I went from disgust to joy.

As many of you know, Jones is one of my all-time favorite comics artists, and it was an unparalleled delight to hear so much so directly from him here. 

This is hardly the point of his introduction, but in recounting his history with the Swamp Thing character, he of course mentions his Batman two-parter with Dough Moench (which we'll get to in more detail below). This was, of course, part of the pair's1995-1998, 40-ish issue run, and he notes that Moench "would always ask me who I wanted to draw." That certainly explains something about that run.

Like a lot of modern Batman runs, this one covered a fair amount of Batman's rogues gallery, including some of the bigger characters: The Joker, The Penguin, Two-Face, The Scarecrow, Man-Bat, Clayface, Killer Croc, Mister Freeze, even Black Mask (a Moench creation) and  Black Spider (In addition to several original creations, although none that caught on). But the run also included a bunch of guest-stars, which was then a bit more unusual, and those guest-stars seemed specifically chosen for the fact that it would be cool to see Kelley Jones draw them. And so Batman found himself either teaming-up or at odds with Deadman, The Spectre, Etrigan, Ragman and, of course, Swamp Thing. 

From what Jones said here, using a character from the Vertigo line in a Batman comic then required permission from both Batman group editor Denny O'Neil and Vertigo editor Karen Berger, but both gave their blessing on Swamp Thing appearing in Batman at the time.

Which is how we got one of my favorite Batman comics ever, I guess...!

Convergence: Swamp Thing #1-2

DC's Convergence event series was long on page count, with some 80 issues of tie-in issues published, but short in terms of how long it went on for, the entire thing running between April and May of 2015. The main Convergence mini-series ran for nine weekly issues, and was written by Dan Jurgens, Jeff F. King and Scott Lobdell and drawn by a bunch of different artists. There were 40 (That's right, 40!) two-issue tie-in miniseries, but most of these were pretty inconsequential to the event, which meant readers could basically just pick up those featuring characters and/or creators they like, and ignore the others.

The premise involved cosmic being Telos (who I think was a version of Brainiac, maybe?) collecting cities from throughout various DC timelines in impenetrable domes, kinda like how classic Brainiac had collected cities like Kandor in bottles. During the events of the series, the domes came down, and Telos ordered the heroes of various cities to fight one another. 

In the miniseries, this basically translated into an issue spent establishing the cast and setting, and then a second issue pitting them against antagonists from entirely different world or timeline. (The one I remember best, for example, was the John McCrea-drawn Plastic Man and The Freedom Fighters, which featured Plas and other old Quality Comics heroes fighting robots from The New 52: Futures End.) 

Having only read the main series that once 10 years ago, I don't remember it too terribly well at this point. I think it's main lingering effect was the birth of Jonathan Kent to a Superman and Lois from within one of the domed cities—delivered, if I recall correctly, by Batman Thomas Wayne from the world of Flashpoint—and the child somehow made it into the pages of the Superman books going forward. 

I think there was also a cosmic reboot of continuity of sorts, but, coming between 2011's New 52 reboot and 2017's Dark Nights: Metal, I'll be damned if I know what it changed. At the time, I just read it as another example of random, unenumerated changes to continuity, which future writers would make up as they went along anyway. (Oh, and the logo, which you can see on the cover I grabbed from comics.org above, has stuck with me, as I always thought it looked like a coffee ring from someone using a comic as a coaster.)

You won't find any of this background in the pages of Convergence: Swamp Thing; this trade collection refers to the storyline as "Blood Moon" and then gives a title for each of the two chapters, the actual name of the comic these stories occurred in appearing below those. And, because the Jones-drawn covers are presented sans logos and credits, they're not labeled as Convergence tie-ins. (A page featuring a paragraph of text explaining the basics of the event might have been a helpful inclusion in the collection.)

This sure made me wonder what a reader encountering this story for the first time here would make of it. Divorced from the event it ties into, it's not very good, as Len Wein doesn't attempt to explain the premise of Convergence to readers (And, to be fair, anyone reading it off the racks when these issues were originally published  wouldn't have needed him to), and, if that premise is left unexplained, then the events feel rather random and unmoored from anything else.

I also wasn't sure the when and where of the Swamp Thing and Abby that star in the book; the big event of Alan Moore's run is mentioned (That is, that Swamp Thing is actually a new and unique plant being that thought it was Alec Holland, rather than Holland himself transformed), and there is talk of The Green and  Swampy's Moore-era powers), so I assume they were trapped by Telos maybe sometime after that...? Although the pair are also just friends, rather than lovers or husband and wife, so maybe it's from sometime during the Moore run...? I don't know; I suppose we could ask Mike Sterling; he surely knows.

At any rate, during the first issue/chapter of the story, the Swampy and Abby notice that the skies have turned red, and, seeking to find out what might be going on, Swamp Thing decides to visit Gotham City and ask Batman what's up. He's about to dive into the dirt to travel there by growing a new body there and transferring his consciousness, when Abby says she wants to go along, and so the pair arrive there via bus, Swamp Thing wearing a trenchcoat and wide-brimmed hat as a disguise.

They go to the park, but, Wein's narration tells us, "And that was the moment when the dome came down-- --completely sealing off Gotham City from the rest of the world." 

Kelley Jones' art, meanwhile, doesn't show us anything about a dome coming down, only Swamp Thing "AARRGGHH!!"-ing in pain as he is severed from The Green. He's unable to leave his body to travel outside the dome either, and so the pair are now trapped, Swampy more than Abby, as he is stuck in the park, slowly dying, with her occasional gifts of plant food and fertilizer just enough to keep him alive. 

This is the state of affairs for a year; the most exciting thing that happens during that time being Batgirl Barbara Gordon chasing Poison Ivy through the park (The fact that Barbara is in-costume then would mean this Swamp Thing and Abby come from somewhere in time between Moore's "The Anatomy Lesson" and Moore's Batman: The Killing Joke, huh?).

The plot finally gets some foreword movement again around page 19, when the hexagonal pattern of the dome is visible in the sky for the first time, and a disembodied voice announces itself as Telos and explains that champions from each city must fight one another to save their respective cities.

And then our heroes are set upon by a horde of vampires. The champion Swampy will have to face won't be introduced until the next issue, then, but it's a perfect character from a particular DC reality for Jones to draw: The vampire Batman of Jones' own Batman & Dracula: Red Rain, Batman: Bloodstorm and Batman: Crimson Mist trilogy with writer Doug Moench. 

The second issue is then devoted to vampire-fighting. Contrary to Telos' expressed wishes, Swamp Thing and Vampire Batman don't fight one another, though. First they fight off the vampires menacing Swampy and Abby, and then this Batman tells Swampy his Gotham isn't really worth fighting to save, since it's overrun with vampires. Instead, he asks the muck-encrusted mockery of a man to help him fight vampires with whatever time they might have left, and he does. In the end, they kill the main vampire, resulting in those she has turned becoming human again.

Vampire Batman, who was of course turned by Dracula himself, does not, and he voluntarily watches the sunrise with Swampy and Abby, sacrificing himself. I guess Swamp Thing's version of Gotham thus "wins", but I don't recall what that means for the state of either city/world, as I don't recall much about Convergence. 

So, this 44-page story is basically just half set-up, half fight. Wein does make the bloodless Swampy into a formidable vampire-slayer, though, turning his fingers into oaken stakes that he can shoot along vines into their hearts and, later, emitting a cloud of raw garlic spray that dissolves his foes. 

All of this obviously gives Jones lots to work with, as the two monster lead characters kill vampires in often spectacularly over-the-top images, as in a panel where a trio of vampire women melt into piles of collapsing bones. 

I particularly like the sequence in which Swamp Thing kills his first wave of vampires though, Jones drawing skull encased in clouds in mid-air around a crouching, lumbering Swamp Thing, who explains to Abby the vampires were already dead, and he had "merely sent them...to their final rest...!"

I'm not 100% clear if these skulls are what remained of the vampires after Swamp Thing staked them, and they were in the process of falling to the ground, or if they are meant to represent the vampires' souls escaping their slain bodies, but it looks cool (In the panel immediately preceding this one, a spirit leaving a small pile of bones and viscera that was a vampire). 

The second-to-last panel features a big, stylized "RRRUMMMBBBLLL" sound effect, and Swamp Thing remarking upon an earthquake, which seems pretty random, but was likely meant to be an acknowledgement of something that happened in the pages of the main Convergence series. 

It is perhaps noting here how much Jones' Swamp Thing here resembles that from the original, 1970s comics, as designed and drawn by Bernie Wrightson. He's a big, hulking, lumbering brute of a humanoid figure, and is a fairly solid, uniform green most of the time, vines only appearing on his figure here and there.

It's a sharp contrast to the Swamp Thing Jones had drawn in Batman, and the more god-like version of the '80s and '90s Swamp Thing series, where the character increasingly transformed and borrowed elements from other plant-life to incorporate into his own appearance (Readers can see this contrast for themselves as they make their way through the book, Wein and Jones' 21st century Swamp Thing stories eventually giving way to '90s depictions of the character).

Swamp Thing #1-6 (2016)

While many of the virtues of the Convergence miniseries were likely only enjoyed by Swamp Thing fans who happened to be reading DC comics in the spring of 2015 (and/or Len Wein fans and/or Kelley Jones fans), the two-issue series lead to at least one positive development: It was successful enough that Wein and Jones got a six-issue mini-series out of it.

The collection lists this as "The Dead Don't Sleep", which is the title Wein gave the story of the first issue (And, when the mini was collected, that was the subtitle of the trade paperback doing so). It's a rather unusual mini-series, as, rather than one, complete story, it tells two different, distinct stories, as if these were the first few issues of an ongoing (I just double-checked the original comics covers though, and #1 has a big "1 of 6" in the upper righthand corner, as you can see above). 

It seems to pick up...wherever Swamp Thing was left off in whatever comic preceded this, not necessarily the Convergence issues (Abby's MIA here, for example). 

The first two issues tell one story, the last four are devoted to a different arc, and there's little in the way to connect them; The Phantom Stranger appears to Swampy in the first issue to give him cryptic warnings that, in retrospect, refer to the events of #3-6, but that's about all that ties the stories together. (Jones' Stranger, by the way, is obviously pretty cool. His coat and cape billow dramatically, of course, and while the top half of his face is usually in shadow, his eyes are two inscrutable white dots staring from out of that shadow; it looks an awful lot like how the filmmakers depicted the eyes of The Void in the Thunderbolts* movie.)

Oh, and a new local sheriff is introduced: Darcy Fox from Gotham City, the niece of Lucius Fox. She appears throughout the series. (If it seems like the Fox family is growing rather large, well, if anyone is entitled to invent a new relative for Lucius Fox, it's the character's co-creator, Len Wein.)

These first two issues are essentially Swamp Thing versus a zombie...not of the now common Night of The Living Dead sort, but here an undead guy who is incredibly strong (not only does he hold his own against Swamp Thing in their fights, but he rips him in half vertically at one point) and who also has rudimentary intelligence, enough to talk (although, like Swampy, he does so with lots of ellipses in his dialogue). 

In this story, a couple with the unlikely surname of Wormwood come to the swamp seeking our hero's help. They tell him that their son was killed in an experiment at the unlikely named Cowley College that abuts the swamp (and thus makes it Swamp Thing's business...?)...and he then apparently came back from the dead to murder those he holds responsible for his death, in grisly fashion. ("Next morning, the custodial staff found the mutilated remains of Professor Crisp in the chemistry lab... ...and the gymnasium... ...and the bio lab... ...and the... Well, anyway, you get the point.")

Swamp Thing ultimately triumphs, thanks to some advice on re-killing zombies from Shade, one of the many spooky and/or magical characters to appear in this miniseries (He only appears in about a half-dozen panels though, and he spends those mostly in an armchair, so we don't see how Jones might have depicted his powers, or done much more with the character rather than treat him as a talking head...although the angles and shading are quite dramatic, given that this is Kelley Jones we're talking about.)

The last panel of issue #2 features a man giving his name standing before a window, with a rainstorm raging outside, a lightning bolt splitting the sky in half. 

"The names Cable," he says, "Matt Cable."

Yeah, him! And if you're thinking hey, didn't Matt Cable die (He did! In 1989's Swamp Thing #84!) and then get resurrected as a raven in Morpheus' The Dreaming (Uh-huh, in the pages of The Sandman)....? Well, I can't explain what he's doing here. Both his death and en-ravening happened in those comics before they were labeled Vertigo comics, so the fact that the line was separated from the DCU at one point doesn't seem to explain it. 

Of course, since 1989 DC had hard continuity reboots in Infinite Crisis and Flashpoint/The New 52, among other rejiggerings, so perhaps DC continuity was altered in such a way that Cable never died...? 

Anyway, his presence is kind of important for the second story of the series. In it, Cable explains to Swamp Thing that he had retired from the FBI and devoted himself to searching the world for a "cure" to Swampy's condition, one that could return him to human being Alec Holland (The actually-a-plant-that-thought-it-was-Holland-who-is-actually-totally-dead doesn't come up here; if I recall correctly, I think Geoff Johns might have changed that during the climax of Brightest Day...?). 

Anyway, he's here because he found it, in Deadman's Nanda Parbat: The Hand of Fatima (Again, an unlikely name, given Nanda Parbat's Himalayan setting and history as a fantastical exotic location, whereas the name "Fatima" is associated with Islam and a Portuguese Marian apparition). All they need is a powerful sorcerer to cast the spell to grant Cable's wish. 

They find one in a scantily clad Zatanna (who actually literally disrobes in one scene, albeit off-panel), and the spell produces a result that surprises Swamp Thing: He is turned into Alec Holland, as promised, but, to his surprise, Cable has now become Swamp Thing. (He's distinguished from the Holland Swamp Thing by differently colored dialogue balloons, with fewer ellipses, as well as redder eyes, and more prominent, woody-looking spinal projections.)

Despite regaining his humanity, Alec faithfully hangs around, training Cable on how to use Swamp Thing's powers, but it quickly becomes apparent that this new Swamp Thing isn't going to be such a good guy, as seen when he uses his powers to cause roots to draw and quarter* a lippy poacher, a brutal, gory act that Alec seems a little too quick to forgive when Matt says, "I...I'm sorry, Alec...I guess I didn't know my own strength."

Eventually, the new Swamp Thing captures Alec, builds a huge throne in nearby Houma and tells the world via TV news camera they have to surrender to him or be destroyed. With the Justice League and Titans conveniently off-world, according to SHIELD's ARGUS' Steve Trevor and Etta Candy, it's decided to simply nuke Houma to take out Swamp Thing...unless Alec can gather sufficient spooky allies and formulate a plan to regain his powers from the bad Swamp Thing (There's a bit of a twist here regarding Cable's heel turn, which I won't spoil here). 

He does so, giving us a chance to see Jones draw not only The Phantom Stranger and Zatanna (now in fishnets and top hat), but also The Spectre, who he did a pretty phenomenal version of (See 1997's Batman #540 and #541). There's a particularly great panel here in which a fiercely grinning Spectre says, "Yes...I know" when the bad Swamp Thing mentions something necessitating an "act of God."

The story also includes brief appearances by Etrigan The Demon and Deadman. The latter is notable in that Jones doesn't depict him in the corpse-like designs he gave him during his 1989 and 1992 miniseries devoted to the character, but as more ghostly, with a gauzy white ghost-like head, with black-rimmed bright white eyes in it and, in one panel, a black-rimmed set of teeth.

In addition to these characters, Mister E, Felix Faust and The Enchantress all make one-panel cameos, but aren't really around long enough that we get a feel of what Jones might have done with them, similar to the brief appearance of Shade. 

This second story, and the miniseries, ends happily enough, restoring the status quo: Alec is Swamp Thing again...while Cable is in  a coma in the hospital, and Abby makes a surprise, three-panel appearance.

Swamp Thing Winter Special #1 (2018)

Like the Convergence miniseries, the six-issue one seems to have done well enough that DC was going to have Len Wein and Kelley Jones keep going with the character, with the next story in the collection, "Spring Awakening!" 

Editor Rebecca Taylor refers to this story as "a continuation of" Wein's "Dead Don't Sleep" miniseries in an "Editor's Note" that originally ran in 2018's Swamp Thing Winter Special. The table of contents for this collection refers to it as Swamp Thing #7. I wonder, was the mini going to keep it's numbering and turn into an ongoing, or would DC have relaunched the title with a new #1 when it became an ongoing...? 

It's not entirely clear...but it's moot, as Wein died while working on this very issue. He had written the plot script for the issue, which is what Jones would draw his art based on, but not the "lettering script", so the exact words Wein wanted the characters to say were never written.

In what turned out to be a poignant move, Taylor and DC decided to print the story as it was, unlettered. The result? A silent issue, as if Swamp Thing's creator and writer was now "silenced", and readers get to see his last work...albeit without Wein's most obvious presence included, underscoring his absence.

Remarkably, Wein was a good enough comics plotter and Jones a good enough comics artist that the story reads as fairly complete just as it is, almost as if it were always intended to be a silent issue. Even without narration or dialogue, you can make sense of the story and the intent of the conversations between characters (There was only one point I couldn't quite intuit, involving a bunch of rags on a train box car in the air; consulting Wein's plot script, which follows the story, I see this is meant to be a bundle of rags forming into Solomon Grundy, which wasn't a power of his I knew he had; perhaps it was even a new one...? The script also makes clear that, in the scene in which Cable meets with Sheriff Fox and her deputy, he is telling them he plans to stick around and set up a private investigator's business in Houma).

The story involves Solomon Grundy kidnapping a baby, the awakened Cable meeting with Swamp Thing and then the sheriff, a spectacularly awesome scene involving Swamp Thing water-skiing on a lily pad as he pursues bad guys with rifles riding on a pair of airboats, and an equally spectacular entrance by Batman, who defeats the bad guys and blows up their boats using well-aimed batagrangs before we seem him on-panel, crouched in the bough of a tree to confront Swamp Thing. 

(The Special the story originally ran in also included a Tom King and Jason Fabok story, as well as a text article about Wein, some images by his fellow Swamp Thing creator Bernie Wrightson and a pin-up by Jose Luis Garcia-Lopez, none of which are reproduced here).

Swamp Thing #94 (1990)

The next section of the book is labeled "Other Tales by Kelley Jones", and begins with a 2024 prose piece by Swamp Thing writer Doug Wheeler, in which he describes how Jones' work first came to his attention, how he advocated to DC to hire Jones to work with him, and how that went (Intriguingly, it was at Archie Comics' booth at a New York City comics convention, where they were showing off a Kelley-Jones drawn horror comic entitled The Hangman which, Wheeler writes, Archie "later chickened out of and never published." Does Archie Comics still have those pages in a drawer somewhere?! They should totally publish them! I can't imagine that anything Jones had drawn back then could be too scary, gory or offensive for the post-Afterlife With Archie version of Archie Comics to publish!)

Anyway, this issue is a done-in-one horror story written by Wheeler, with Jones credited as guest artist. 

It's fairly gory, to the extent that Wheeler said he was told by some of those who saw the first pages early that the pair had "gotten away" with a panel featuring a serial killer's victim, chopped up into six pieces and strewn about a field, her bloody head resting atop a stump, an axe still embedded in it (As is often the case, the gore Jones draws is somewhat softened by his exaggerated style; here, there's something almost cartoonish about the chopped-up body, keeping it from looking like anything approaching real.)

Though fairly straight horror, the issue shows just how weird and trippy the post-Alan Moore Swamp Thing had gotten. The hero's first appearance in the story, for example, is as an alien-looking tree with some dozen eyes on its branching stalks (John Totleben's cover, above, shows this; notably, his eye-filled tree looks more realistic and less crazy than Jones' drawing within does). 

This tree sees the result of an ax murder, and Swamp Thing investigates. The story involves an ax murderer who kills victims at the behest of an otherworldly entity and then loans the blood-stained ax to musicians as a percussion instrument.

The whys of the plot become clear during the story, which eventually involves a plot that is more fantasy or sci-fi than horror (or monster...or superhero), and Jones' depiction of that otherworldly entity elevates it into the truly insane. 

We throw the word "Lovecraftian" around a lot these days, often to describe any weird monster with tentacles, but here Jones draws one of those horror and wonders that H.P. Lovecraft was always hinting around, calling them indescribable. 

The creature, revealed in a huge, horizontal panel stretching across the top half of a two-page spread, is an elongated purple mass, it's head (?) a long, snake-like projection with no features save for a gigantic mouth, its gums and teeth stretching beyond its lips (?) as if trying to escape. It has a pair of big bat-like wings, too small to propel it, bizarre spines that look like jutting bones, a mass of writhing jellyfish-like tentacles, another mass of writhing tentacles that look like smaller version of its head, these nested in what look it might be human brain matter or might be intestines, probing black spikes that look a little like claws and a little like the fibrous "legs" of some insect-like creature or perhaps a microscopic organism. 

I kind of wish Wheeler's script was included after this story, as I wonder to what degree he described the creature, or if he just wrote "draw the craziest, most upsetting looking monster you can imagine." Certainly some elements of this entity are familiar from other Jones monsters and supernatural horrors we've seen since. 

Naturally, Abby, Swamp Thing and their still-new baby Tefe are involved in the goings-on, but, ultimately, the malefactors all receive punishment for their actions. 

It's a great story, and one that reads perfectly well in isolation from whatever else might have been going on in the title at the time. 

This was still a few years before the Vertigo imprint, but the book's cover did have a "Suggested For Mature Readers" tag above the familiar DC bullet; given American weirdness about nudity vs violence and gore, one wonders what the publisher thought was the mature part...I am guessing the scene of a nude (but usually covered) Abby was of more concern than the chopped-up corpse.

Swamp Thing #100 (1990)

This over-sized anniversary issue is written by Wheeler, and features art by two distinct art teams. One is, of course, Kelley Jones, here inking himself again, while the other is pencil artist Pat Broderick and inker Alfredo Alcala. The credits list page numbers for who drew what, but they styles are different enough that it is instantly obvious who drew what.

Unlike the previous Wheeler/Jones collaboration, this one isn't a standalone tale, but picks up on an ongoing storyline—baby Tefe has accidentally destroyed her body and plunged into The Green, and Swamp Thing doesn't know how to safely get her back, since he can't explain the process to a baby—and it involves the Parliament of Trees, and events like Swampy's past travels through space and time that seem to be references to events from Alan Moore's and Rick Veitch's runs on the book. 

Essentially, a shaman gives Swamp Thing a quest he must complete to save his daughter: Seek out "a fountain whose waters allow the drinker to communicate with all living beings," which, the Parliament informs him, can be found in the Garden of Eden, which is now located in Antarctica, not an easy place for to grow a plant body, on top of being surrounded by a great wall and defended by angels.

While Broderick/Alcala draw the sections of Swampy with Abby, the shaman and ghost Tefe, as well as some flashbacks and his visits with the Parliament, Jones draws the journey to Eden. Given how little plant matter there is for Swampy to work with, the body grows there is emaciated and skeletal, Jones giving him skull-like visage with extremely sunken eyes and half-finished back from which juts a protruding spine.

There's a turn of a page that leads to a splash page that reveals an angel, an awesome (as in, inspiring awe) and terrifying creature that is partially Biblically accurate, partially Jones-ian flourishes and partially insane-looking. It's a tower of a creatures with multiple animal heads, a "torso" consisting of a coral-like network covered with eyeballs, with strange tentacles that seem as much plant as animal, one of which grips a flaming sword, this structure resing upon a burning fire, which emanates from a chaotic pink-black cloud of geometric shapes, which stands upon a single talon.

This is one angel, and the one Swamp Thing attempts to fight, before two of its fellows join it—one a golden, winged giant humanoid that looks like the "traditional" view of an angel, another a strange pink alien being that is mostly fangs or spikes and wings, more akin to an alien Neon Genesis Evangelion angel than what one might find in Christian art. By the time they join the fight, Swamp Thing must change strategies.

The Broderick-penciled passages involve a lot of conversation and a bit of continuity (and cameos by Etrigan and Abin Sur), but my major takeaway from reading this issue was just how strange a narrative Swamp Thing had become, and how far it had travelled from Wein and Bernie Wrightson's original conception of a monster playing hero in a milieu that would seesaw between a horror comic and a "universe" super-comic. 

By 1990, it's...kind of a fantasy epic of sorts, and one that's sometimes far removed from the world of humans (this issue is, certainly), with the shaman the only human character with a speaking part in this tale full of bizarre entities. In fact, Swamp Thing has, by this point, essentially become its own unique mythology.

Batman #521-#522 (1995)

This two-issue story arc comes from fairly early in Doug Moench, Kelley Jones and John Beatty's run on Batman, which has always been neck-in-neck with the Alan Grant/Norm Breyfogle runs as my favorite chunk of Batman comics. (Whether Breyfogle or Jones is my favorite Batman artist can change by the day, and by whose work I had most recently read; in general, I usually say that I think Breyfogle was the best Batman artist, while Jones is my favorite Batman artist). 

I am actually probably more familiar with these comics than just about any others. Like some of the earliest issues of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, teenage Caleb spent a lot of time studying these, re-drawing various panels and elements, trying to figure out and replicate the way that Jones and/or Beatty drew reptile scales, tree bark, a tree line along the horizon, the moon, ripples on the surface of the water and so on. 

The second issue, #522, is a particular issue of a comic book that I think it's fairly safe to say that I was, for a few months at least, obsessed with (And, for long afterwards, I would draw Jones-style snakes and trees in the margins of my notebooks in college). 

Given that, I probably didn't need to re-read these two issues, but I did so anyway. 

It makes for a pretty great "last" Killer Croc story (the second such "last" Killer Croc story published that decade, following Grant and Breyfogle's Batman #471). Swamp Thing is barely in the first issue; in fact, we simply see a part of him in a few panels. 

In the new Arkham Asylum, an increasingly bestial Killer Croc is raging for his dinner. Unseen by the cooks, a vine has drown up out of the sink drain and shot—"SHLOOB"—some sort of spore onto his dinner plate. When he ingests it, Croc starts tripping balls, the words "the wet dark" and "home" repeating themselves in his mind.

He breaks out of his cell, fights his way outside, stomps around town, repeating his need to find the wet dark and repeatedly complaining about how he doesn't fit in with human society. He ultimately hijacks a steam train headed for Louisiana, Batman giving chase in the Batmobile he was using at the time, which was either the Golden Age one with the big Batman head on it, or a new version of it. (Amusingly, at one point Batman climbs onto its roof, his huge cape flaring behind him, and it's clear that there's no way that gigantic cape could ever fit in the little car. In fact, there's a couple of great cape panels in this sequence, two of which feature it spreading out like gigantic batwings.)

Swamp Thing finally makes his entrance on the cover of #522, which is still maybe one of my favorite Swamp Thing images. 

The various plants and mushrooms growing out of Swamp Thing's hunched back is one thing, but I think it's the presence of the turtles there that really sells him as not just a plant creature, but a living, breathing, intelligent, ambulatory part of the swamp (Also note the trees before the moon on the cover; that's one of the things I remember trying to draw over and over again). 

In the swamp, Killer Croc seems to have found his sought-after "wet dark", a place where he can find some semblance of peace, but, of course, Batman is in pursuit, and they have a pretty intense fight, at one point leading to Croc getting Batman in a bear hug and attempting to squeeze the life out of him, which, it seems to me anyway, happens every time they fight. 

Then, on a two-page splash on pages 17 and 18 of the story Swamp Thing finally makes his entrance, his broad, hunched back covered in all manner of flora and fauna, a snake wrapped around his forearm like a bracelet, a frog clinging to his triceps and a pair of turtles begin to clamber up his leg. 

Swampy separates the pair with vines, then breathes a handful of weird flowers into Croc, changing him, and the villain walks off peacefully into the swamp. 

Batman continues to argue with Swamp Thing over whether Killer Croc is a criminal who has hurt people and broken laws, and must therefore be dragged back to Gotham to pay for his crimes, or a primordial being who can become part of the natural order of the swamp. 

Batman eventually gets physical, punching Swamp Thing, only to have his hand come out of his back with a "SPLTCH." Swamp Thing holds him like this as they continue to argue, and then a couple of tendrils grow from Swampy's chest, popping in Batman's face ("blutch", "poof"), "natural hallucinogens" that show Batman a tormenting vision of the way Killer Croc sees the world and the Batman himself (basically what we see on the cover of #521), and then quickly passes.

Ultimately, Swamp Thing takes Croc into the "custody" of the swamp and The Green, and Batman wanders off, kinda sorta defeated.

Almost every panel of this issue is a little masterpiece, and it's great fun seeing what Jones does with the swamp setting. I don't think his later (or, as it's collected in this book, earlier) stories depict the swamp or the Swamp Thing in quite the same way.

Thinking about it now, I'm not sure why this was. Surely, Len Wein's 21st century Swamp Thing is more of a plant monster than the elemental/god that Moench and Jones were working with in these Batman issues.

I think part of it may be that in these Batman issues, Jones was just penciling, giving him more time and breathing room to filigree the hell out of every panel, with inker Beatty finishing some of the ornate pencil work. That, and colorist Gregory Wright's work is a bit more to my liking than that of Michelle Madsen, but that may have more to do with the technology employed or the style of the time.

And, of course, I haven't discounted the possibility that I may prefer this art to the later art simply because of nostalgia.

Anyway, this is probably more of a Batman or Killer Croc story than a Swamp Thing one, but it's a nice portrait of Swamp Thing (both in characterization and as a visualization), and it has a killer design for the character this collection is devoted to. 

Swamp Thing: Deja Vu #1 

Next? "Lost Tales Written By Len Wein."

The first of these is described in an unsigned prose piece, detailing how, in 1989, DC commissioned a three-issue, fully painted, prestige format series" by Swamp Thing's creators, Len Wein and Bernie Wrightson. 

Set immediately after Alan Moore's run, it would involve Swamp Thing learning he could travel through time using The Green (which would end up happening in the book anyway). Wein plotted the issues, and Wrightson started drawing pencils for them, but he later stepped away from the project.

According to the piece, 

"I thought it was going to be one of the best stories I'd ever written," said Wein at a 2015 WonderCon panel. "So I wanted to see it in print, and I kept suggesting: 'Use Kelley Jones. This kid. Kelley Jones! I think he'd be perfect for this. But Paul [Levitz] said, 'If Bernie can't do it, it won't get done.'"

With Wein and Wrightson both gone now, the closest we may ever see of the what the project might have looked like is what is included here, some 50-ish pages of Wrightson's rough pencils. 

That said, in her foreword, M. Christine Valada mentions that she's still looking for the script for this series. Perhaps if it is far enough along, there's enough for Jones to draw it after all...perhaps presenting it as a silent story, as DC did with "Spring Awakening!"...?

At any rate, after hearing Wein's story on a panel about the project, it's nice to know that the writer did finally get to work on Swamp Thing with Jones. 

Et cetera

There's plenty of back matter, as well, including the aforementioned covers by Kelley Jones and pages and pages of sketches, which I won't get into here.

Perhaps my favorite bit among all of this is, however, this list, which I shared on Bluesky previously: 

This was apparently part of a proposal for an ongoing Swamp Thing series, which it sounds like would have continued from the miniseries. There's plenty of cool stuff in there, and it's hard not to get excited imagining Jones drawing these characters and wondering how Len Wein would get them into conflict with his Swamp Thing.

I mean not just Bigfoot, but Bigfoot and a Yeti, in two separate stories? Presumably off-brand versions of the Creature From The Black Lagoon and C.H.U.D. (WHAT?!). A/the Chupacabra. And...mysterious 19th century American writer Ambrose Bierce...?! 

The pages that follow the list then feature a dozen or so plot descriptions in various degrees of detail, suggesting how we would have gotten the mummies, at least, and further suggesting a few future DC guest-stars, like The Gentleman Ghost and Klarion, The Witch Boy.

For what it's worth, we have seen Jones draw mummies and an Invisible Man before. He and Moench had Batman and Deadman fight mummies in 1996's Batman #530-532, which featured variant glow-in-the dark covers (in one, you could see a glow-in-the-dark Deadman inside Batman's body, in another you could see the skeletons within the bodies of the mummies). And in 2009-2010, Jones again teamed with Moench for the five-issue miniseries Batman: Unseen, featuring the Dak Knight vs. an invisible man.

Okay, that's all I got on this. Now get off the Internet, go find a copy of the book for yourself, and sit back to enjoy a couple hundred pages worth of Swamp Thing comics...

*Actually, the Cable Swamp Thing uses vines to pull the man's limbs in four different directions while also pulling his head off, so I guess he wasn't drawn-and-quartered so much as...drawn-and-fifthed...?