Justice League vs Godzilla vs Kong

 
 
Justice League vs Godzilla vs Kong

by Brian Buccellato

art by Christian Duce and Tom Derenick

DC Comics

2024

 

 

Increasingly, I think that as a reader of comics, I'm more interested in well-done miniseries than in trying to follow an ongoing storyline. So DC Comics' Justice League vs Godzilla vs Kong seemed like a safe bet for me. Superheroes fighting giant monsters! Heroes acting, you know, heroic, saving the day, protecting the city and the people who live there! That sort of thing. And we do get that, but it's awfully busy, with what feels like way too many characters and too much interpersonal drama.
 
I will grant two good reasons to have such an overstuffed cast list. The first is that when giant monsters attack, having literally dozens of superheroes fighting them does help sell that these things are dangerous and hard to defeat, so it's all hands on deck. Also I guess one fun thing about giant crossovers is maybe getting to see your niche favorite character, even if it's only as an extra in a few panels. But my counterpoint to that would be that with so many heroes and so many supervillains in the mix too, the pacing is quite slow, and few characters actually have anything going on for you to care about. A more focused cast list would've let a clearer story with stronger stakes progress more quickly.
 
The Legion of Doom, which seemingly includes every supervillain of note except the Joker, or at the very least a few per hero, breaks into Superman's Fortress of Solitude as part of Lex Luthor's latest scheme. Whatever they had planned doesn't actually happen though, because Toy Man finds a ruby that grants wishes among Superman's things, which transports them all to Skull Island and transports Skull Island to whatever version of Earth this is supposed to be. 
 
The result is King Kong, Godzilla, and four other giant monster I don't recognize getting unleashed on the cities of DC comics. I would've enjoyed Mothra or another really famous monster; these kind of felt like filler to pad out the story. Kong stays on the island, where both Green Arrow and Gorilla Grodd will try to recruit him. Godzilla attacks Metropolis, a giant bat goes to Gotham, a crab monster attacks the Flash's home, a creature that looks like a woolly mammoth without a trunk (like the pokemon Mamoswine, kind of) attacks the Amazons on Paradise Island, and some big sea monster goes after Atlantis (and has to do battle with a kraken defending the underwater city).
 
Godzilla seemingly kills Superman with its fire breath, but teams of other heroes temporarily hold back the other monsters, who mysteriously retreat before finishing their attacks. Then there's kind of a long lull. The heroes try to revive Superman, the villains try to find Toy Man, and the monsters spend a long time converging on a spot for a final battle.
 
The big fight has a bunch of moments that seem like they're supposed to be Crowning Moments of Awesome (as the TV Tropes website would call them), but they get rushed through so quickly, they seem anticlimactic rather than cool. Lex Luthor builds a Mecha-Godzilla! The League of Assassins resurrects an undead Necro-Godzilla! Five Green Lanterns team up to make a multi-part Voltron-like mecha! King Kong gets recruited to wear a Green Lantern Ring! It should be exciting and fun and badass! But the pacing is wrong, and as I said, there are just too many people on every page.
 
I also disliked how much of what happened is driven by what TV Tropes would call Idiot Plots, where the action is caused by people making shockingly stupid decisions. Toy Man hijacks Luthor's presumably superior plan and then dies immediately from being stepped on by Godzilla (which we don't learn until tge very end, making the other villains' search for him into a pointless shaggy dog story). Superman nearly dies because Shazam shows up midway through his Godzilla fight and summons magic lightning despite Superman telling him not to, which enrages Godzilla and distracts Superman at a crucial moment, then spends the rest of the series moping about his fuck-up. Red Hood shoots the giant bat against Batman's instructions, angering it, and Bat Girl beats him up, much to the other bat heroes' amusement. Gorilla Grodd kills Guy Gardner and all the other Lanterns are just like "oh well, never liked the guy." It's not like, good storytelling, just supposedly capable people behaving incompetently, creating unnecessary problems, and then acting callously toward each other about it. It's annoying. It makes the plot feel pointless and the characters unsympathetic.
 
I still think there could be fun to be had with just King Kong and Godzilla and a core Justice League, telling a more compact story, but boy, this sure isn't it. 

Bad Dream

 
 
Bad Dream
A Dreamer Story

by Nicole Maines

art by Rye Hickman

DC Comics

2024

 

 

Bad Dream is an origin story for the transgender superhero Dreamer, written by the actress who played her in the Supergirl tv series. It's part of DC Comics' series of YA graphic novels, which seems to include more origin stories than ongoing adventures. The version of Dreamer we meet here is very similar to the one on Supergirl, although here she's presented as a high school student rather than a young adult like on the show.
 
Nia Nal and her older sister Maeve are both half human, half alien, and they live in a secret small town where aliens can live on Earth without attracting attention from the broader public. Their father is human, and their mom used to be one of the Seers from the planet Naltor, a kind of psychic matriarchy who use their visions of the future to both protect the planet militarily and police it internally. Their mom had a vision long ago that her daughter would inherit her powers, so Maeve's spent her whole life training to receive dream visions ... but they haven't started yet. Nia is trans, idolizes her big sister, and wishes the other alien teens would stop bullying her.
 
Nia has also started having dreams with strange, prophetic imagery. She's afraid that she's stealing Maeve's powers from her, so she runs away to Metropolis to ... well, she doesn't actually seem to have a plan. She turns off her cellphone and then just wanders around the city drinking coffee and energy drinks to keep from falling asleep.
 
Eventually, she happens to run into Galaxy, an alien teen we met in Galaxy: The Prettiest Star from this same series of YA comics. Galaxy is metaphorically like a trans girl because she was forced to disguise herself as a human boy for most of her life. Galaxy has a Black girlfriend and a Black trans best friend. They're all older teens and recognize that Nia is a kid in trouble, so they bring her to a queer community center that includes a shelter. The trans friend wears a cool space-themed outfit in a ballroom walk-off and wins the night. Nia learns a bit about Black trans and queer culture in the big city and embarrasses herself a bit with her small town ignorance, but eventually befriends Galaxy and her friends enough that she agrees to let the older girls drive her back home.
 
One of the other Seers of Naltor was also in Metropolis. She follows Nia and Galaxy back to the secret town, reveals that (quelle surprise) the psychic leaders of a planetary surveillance state are not actually nice people, and executes Nia's mom for desertion. Nia inherits her mother's full powers in that moment, and uses them to defeat the other Seer. Afterward, we're shown that Nia and Maeve's relationship is now quite strained, and that Nia has become a sometimes superhero.
 
I have a sense that DC intends the graphic novels in this series to serve as entry points for new readers, and maybe acts as self-funding market research to find out which characters spark those readers' imagination. I'm glad that effort seems to include trying out multiple trans and trans-adjacent characters, and I've seen that Galaxy and Dreamer have gotten to appear in some of DC's regular monthly comics too, Galaxy in a Hawkgirl run and Dreamer teaming up with Superboy.

Heroes Reborn

 
 
Heroes Reborn

America's Mightiest Heroes

Marvel Comics

2021

 

 

Heroes Reborn is a Marvel Comics miniseries in which something is wrong with reality, in the tradition of Marvel's Age of Apocalypse and Age of Ultron, or DC's  Flashpoint or The Nail.
 
This time around, someone has changed history to prevent the Avengers from ever forming, and meanwhile, the world, or at least America, is being protected by Marvel's equivalent of the Justice League - Hyperion, Nighthawk, The Blur, Dr Spectrum, and Power Princess.
 
We get one issue of introduction, one issue each for the ersatz DC heroes, and then a couple more issues for Marvel's Avengers to re-form, save the day, and restore the reality where they normally exist. Blade is the first person to realize what's wrong, and he spends a few pages at the end of each issue re-assembling - unthawing Captain America, sobering up Thor, locating the hidden Black Panther, etc.
 
Hyperion spends his issue chasing down and recapturing super criminals who escaped the Negative Zone prison, including a Bizarro-like Hulk. He also rescues Peter Parker, who's like his Jimmy Olsen. Nighthawk investigates a breakout at the asylum, fighting mostly Spider-Man villains, plus Bullseye, led by a Green Goblin who acts like the Joker. The Blur goes on a Dr Strange-esque speendrun through the Dark Dimension while fighting a Scarlet Witch who inherited her brother Quicksilver's super speed. Dr Spectrum and his Rainbow Prism go into space and fight a very Lobo-esque Rocket Raccoon. And Power Princess fights a Thor villain while reminiscing about all the other Thor villain's she's killed.
 
For the most part, these heroes are more disturbing than their DC counterparts, in a way that's probably familiar to anyone who's read or watched an of the dozens of dark, gritty, postmodern superhero deconstructions that've come out over the years. Blur is hyperactive, impatient, and has the memory of a goldfish - his superspeed is like a permanent cocaine high. Hyperion is a Christian nationalist. Dr Spectrum projects amoral American supremacy not only internationally, but into space. Power Princess is just relentlessly bloodthirsty. Nighthawk seems basically okay by comparison.
 
Anyway, it turns out that the world is like this because someone made a deal with Mephisto to change history this way, but fortunately simply re-assembling a group called The Avengers significantly weakens the artificial construct, which is fortunate. To win, the Avengers just have to beat their counterparts in a fight, and even though we've seen a half-dozen issues of Hyperion's crew making mince-meat out of ultra villains who combine the powers of several ordinary Marvel foes, the new, untrained, hastily gathered Avengers win easily due to being the publisher's favorites.
 
As far as Justice League pastiches go, this one is decently fun. It was interesting seeing Marvel characters recast into supporting roles for DC. Reimagining Spider-Man foes as Batman villains was probably the best version of this. Blur's alienation simply due to the nature of his power, rather than because he's an authoritarian, was probably the most interesting critical take. Each issue had its own writers and artists, and James Stokoe's visuals in the Dr Spectrum issue stood out as interesting and unique among the others.

Aquaman: Andromeda

 
Aquaman: Andromeda

by Ram V
art by Christian Ward

DC Comics

2023

 

 

Aquaman: Andromeda collects a 3-issue standalone miniseries from DC's Black Label line of mature comics. Based on the title, I was kind of expecting this comic to be Aquaman ... in spaaace!, but instead we get a mix of horror and scifi in the deep ocean.
 
Aquaman as he's depicted here seems kind of old and tired, and his armor looks encrusted like metal from a long-ago shipwreck. There's no overt tie to other DC continuity; Aquaman is more like a myth than a celebrity. What makes this one mature, I think, is the backstory of one character who committed a realistic war crime during the Bosnian War. There are also a few present day killings that might be too graphic for a regular comic, although 'regular' comics are plenty violent, the causes of death tend to be more fantastical than getting stabbed by a coworker you trusted.
 
So, the setup here is that a team of scientists has been dispatched on the Andromeda - an advanced, futuristic submarine - to go to Point Nemo - the spot on the Pacific furthest from land, where all space programs try to send their returning spacecrafts - to investigate the seafall of an extraterrestrial craft. They're hoping to make first contact with any intelligence onboard, and maybe learn from the alien technology. The supervillian pirate Black Manta wants to steal from both ships. And Aquaman is there to investigate the mystery as well. Almost immediately, a Kraken appears and wrecks the Andromeda's support ship on the surface, before being defeated by Aquaman.
 
After that, the pace slows down as the scientists start to investigate the mysterious, and seemingly empty spacecraft. We get flashbacks from several of them, including the woman who knows of Aquaman as 'the King Under the Sea' from folktales she heard as a child, and the Bosnian War veteran I mentioned earlier. The ship is not empty, of course. I won't spoil what's on it except to say it's something scifi authors have done before, but not often, and Ram V handles it compellingly and well.
 
As crew members start dying, the survivors make desperate plans to save themselves and keep what's on the alien ship from escaping any further. Black Manta is undeterred and wants to steal anyway. Aquaman acts to protect the people still alive and helps with their plan to deal with the threat posed by the ship. I almost think Black Manta was superfluous to this story, although I guess his presence adds even more pressure to an already tense, volatile situation.
 
Ram V's writing is very good. These are competent adult characters dealing with something that overwhelms them, not because they're foolish, but because it's so far outside what they've prepared for. Christian Ward's art is excellent and beautiful. His 'old man Aquaman' looks ancient and alien himself. The contrast between the futuristic submarine, the alien vessel, and the organic, oceanic visuals are great. The fight between Aquaman and the kraken, only a few pages long, is particularly well-done.

A Magical Girl Retires

 

A Magical Girl Retires

by Park Seolyeon

translated by Anton Hur

Harper Via

2024

 

 

I think there's something of a cottage industry of postmodern novels about former kid detectives who are lost and floundering in early adulthood - Joe Meno's The Boy Detective Fails and Dustin Long's Icelander in print, Ed Brubaker and Marcos Martin's Friday comics, and The Venture Bros and Dicktown cartoon shows, to name the ones I'm most aware of.
 
Park Seolyeon's A Magic Girl Retires is kind of like that, but for transforming, Sailor Moon type superheroes. In the length of a novella, Park shows us a young woman becoming a magic girl, meeting the larger community, struggles to understand her place in this world, and ultimately (perhaps unsurprisingly, given the title) decides to retire from the superheroing life.
 
This is a deconstruction of the tropes of magical girl fiction, as well as an infusion of mundane reality into their stories. Our hero's biggest problems are depression, unemployment, and credit card debt. She lost her old job because of the coronavirus pandemic. The magical girls have a labor union, and when they talk about saving the world from a threat that could destroy civilization, they don't mean a monster, they mean climate change.
 

A Magic Girl Retires is told in the first person by an unnamed narrator. She begins the book suicidal. She's pushing 30, has no job and no prospects, and owes 3 million won in debt (about 3000 US$, a deliberately small amount, I think). She's rescued at the last moment by the Clairvoyant Magical Girl, who senses her potential, knows she's in danger, and want to recruit her, believing she might be the long-awaited Magical Girl of Time.
 
Our narrator struggles with self doubt, but she also really wants to do well by her new friend, her new opportunity. She tries her best. She makes a totem, learns to transform. She gets a part-time job at a convenience store to try to pay off some of her debt. And when there's a fight, a real all-hands-on-deck fight, she joins in and does her best to help. But she realizes, being super doesn't solve her problems, and her power in particular comes with new problems of its own.
 
I like what Park's done here. This book is short but economical, using only a few episodic scenes to show us a glimpse of a magical world and invite us to imagine what it might be like to live inside, before turning away and shutting the door.

Superman's Pal Jimmy Olsen

 
 

Superman's Pal Jimmy Olsen

Who Killed Jimmy Olsen?

by Matt Fraction

art by Steve Lieber

DC Comics

2020

 

 

"Superman's Pal Jimmy Olsen: Who Killed Jimmy Olsen?" collects a year-long miniseries that's like, a celebration of Silver Age comic hijinx and shenanigans. After an initial inciting incident where Jimmy gets turned into a giant turtle-man while skydiving from orbit for charity, and thus crashes into and destroys a giant lion statue built by Lex Luthor (see, it's wacky from the very start), Jimmy realizes that someone is trying to kill him, and fakes his own death so he can go into hiding and investigate his own (attempted) murder.

The plot is complex from the start, and picks up complications along the way, like a katarami ball made of chaos.

Jimmy's version of going into hiding is to ask Superman to let him figure this one out for himself, moving to Gotham, and reappearing as Irresponsible Blogger Timmy Olsen, a parody of cruel, click-hungry prank YouTubers. Ostensibly this is because the financially struggling Daily Planet is existentially dependent on Jimmy's video content for revenues, so even when he's 'dead,' he can't in good conscience be off the clock. While there's a lot that's funny in this comic, the Timmy Olsen segments were my favorites, especially when he repeatedly antagonizes Batman, for example, by seeing how many men in Joker costumes he can fit in one restaurant.

Anyway, Jimmy is pretty sure it's Lex Luthor who wants him dead. In a series of flashbacks, we see that the Olsens and Luthors have been enemies since Metropolis was just a trading outpost. They're also the two richest families in the city? But while Jimmy basically just ignores the fact that he's a billionaire, his brother Julian leans into his role as builder, donor, civic booster, font of noblesse oblige, and rival to Lex. We also get flashbacks (these ones blending the art style of Calvin & Hobbes with the story beats of Peanuts) showing the complex sibling dynamics of the lil Olsens that help make sense of their adult relationship.

In Gotham, Jimmy seeks out his sister Janie, an award-winning playwrite, and recruits her to help solve the case. While they're on the lam, they run into Jix, an alien jewel thief whom Jimmy accidentally married during a drunken night in Gorilla City (a city of sentient gorillas) on a previous wacky adventure. Jimmy was supposed to annul the marriage but forgot, which is a problem, because Jix is trying to enter into an arranged marriage / hostage situation with a demonic-looking alien warlord so that his people's conquest of hers will be like, somewhat less awful. But he's mad that he was denied his hostage-bride, so he and his robot army also show up to chase Jimmy and wreak havoc.

Phfew! And then, in the last 1-2 chapters, all the various plotlines are brought together and resolved, including solving Jimmy's (wannabe) murder and fixing the financial solvency of the Daily Planet.

The first half, roughly, of the story is told very nonlinearly, not really for any obvious reason. I might guess that Fraction either decided that a linear telling would be poorly paced, or perhaps he just wanted to jumpstart several plots simultaneously to increase the early excitement. Once the situation reaches a critical mass of complexity, he switches over to linear progression (aside from the childhood and ancestral flashbacks) for the rest of the series.

Each issue is broken into scenes, and each scene gets its own 60s style intro culminating in a character getting declared like, 'Superman's Nemesis, Lex Luthor,' or 'Jimmy Olsen's Coworker, Lois Lane,' and then the scene gets a punny title. There are also a lot of really excellent montage sequences, such as Superman looking back on the kinds of trouble Jimmy has historically gotten himself into, or a series of Timmy Olsen's irresponsible pranks.

Fraction and Lieber really dig deep into the Silver Age toolkit and pull out as many 1960s style plots, jokes, characters, and ideas as the comic can possibly hold. They're not all equally successful, but I admire the spirit. One thing I didn't love was Fraction stringing together longer and longer sequences of nicknames like Jimberly and Jimmifer and so on to call Jimmy. Overall, I would say this will appeal to fans of screwball comedy and anyone looking for an adult homage to the classic, silly Superman storylines of yore, when comics were unambiguously for kids.

Mystik U

 
 

Mystik U 

by Alisa Kwitney

art by Mike Norton

DC Comics

2018

 

 

Mystik U collects a 3-issue miniseries from DC comics that tries to cash in on the popularity of magical boarding schools. Teenage Zatanna gets recruited to a secret college run by Rose Psychic and a bunch of other older-generation DC occult characters, who are trying to prevent the future emergence of some world-ending catastrophe called The Malevolence.
 
Mystik U came out in 2018, a couple years before JK Rowling came out as a raging transphobe. It kind of mashes up a Harry Potter setting with CW-style teen superhero drama with a kind of whodunit mystery, since the teachers are trying to figure out which of their students is destined to transform into The Malevolence in a few years.
 
I was not especially impressed with this one. To me, it kind of feels like a cheap knockoff, or an attempt to cash in on the popularity of HP and JKR without investing much effort into making something with any appeal of its own, beyond just reminding you of the other thing. I sort of wished I could've read a better comic with the same characters, like the excellent miniseries that started DC's The Books of Magic in the 90s.
 
Zatanna is pretty famous for her showgirl costume and the way she uses magic by talking backwards. Her personality here is pretty much just feeling inferior to the other students and frustrated that she can't control her magic yet. We also get underdeveloped teen versions of June Moon / Enchantress and Sargon the Sorcerer, plus a son of supervillain Felix Faust, and healer Pia Morales, who I think is a new character. Mostly they just argue and get crushes on each other - it hardly matters which characters got used in these generic teen drama roles. You could pretty much swap in anyone else and it wouldn't matter.
 
At one point, the Faust boy accidentally kills Zatanna, but she's resurrected, and literally everyone involved treats this as a totally unremarkable incident, which for me was sort of a breaking point in my ability to take this story at all seriously or invest any concern for the outcome in it. If no one making it cares, why should I?
 
I had initially hoped for a showcase for the character Rose Psychic, but that got dashed too. She's an older character - she and Dr Richard Occult somehow share one body in the physical world, with the one who's not present appearing as a reflection in the mirror. Usually Dr Occult is the dominant personality, but he can trade places with Rose when needed. (So Dr Occult is not trans, but does kind of feel like a magical analogy for it.) Aside from Rose and Richard squabbling about whether to nurture the kids to be good or kill them all preemptively, neither actually gets much time on-page, and again, they seemed pretty generic. I might be better off trying to track down some of their original comics.
 
Anyway, if you're really insatiable for magic schools or supernatural teen dramas, you might like this, but otherwise, I don't think it has much to offer.

The New Champion of Shazam!

 

The New Champion of Shazam!

by Josie Campbell

art by Doc Shaner
DC Comics

2023

 

 

The New Champion of Shazam! collects a 4-issue miniseries of comics that reintroduces the character of Mary Marvel as (briefly) the sole wielder of the power of Shazam. This might've made a good start to a new ongoing series, but instead, the 5th comic in here, a single issue from another DC crossover event (Planet Lazarus) undoes the premise by bringing back Billy Batson as the original and primary Shazam.

For awhile, I tried keeping up with DC Comics' main continuity, but I've stopped checking in as much, and basically lost track over the past couple years. In some ways that makes New Champion ideal for someone like me, since it's a fresh start for a character who apparently has been out of circulation for awhile. On the other hand, the set-up to get the series started presumes events I had no knowledge of. Billy Batson is vanished and missing, his foster siblings are no longer able to transform into superheroes, and this state of affairs has prevailed for long enough that they've all moved on creating new civilian lives.

Mary has gotten into Vassar, and wants to figure out who she is now - not as a superhero or sister, but as an independent young woman. She gets very little time to find out, unfortunately, since on move-in day, her roommate's pet rabbit reveals that he's a messenger from the absent Billy, and he bestows her with the magic of Shazam. (In fact, since no one else is sharing it, she's many times more powerful than usual, although since I'm not really clear on her previous strength, that's not a particularly useful distinction!)

Mary defeats the Disaster Master, then returns to her dorm to find police waiting. Her foster parents never made it home from dropping her off at the bus station, so as the only adult foster sibling, she has to leave Vassar, return to Philadelphia, and take over as de facto parent. Understandably, she's both worried and resentful. She enrolls at the local community college, meets a sympathetic teacher, gets in a bunch of arguments with her siblings, then fights a giant flying crocodile and three mysterious jet black figures.

She also slightly embarrasses herself when she's approached by a news crew right after barely surviving the crocodile, getting stagefright, and flying away. Jokes and memes about her blow up on social media, setting up the best fight of the series, with another magic villain named Babel who psychically assaults her with her own negative self-messages, which at the moment are mostly made up of all the hurtful online comments.

The whole online infamy angle is one of the two really good bits of social commentary in here. The other is the fun the comic pokes at the ridiculously self-aggrandizing community college president, who keeps trying to oversell the quality of the school.

Anyway, eventually Mary figures out who's been creating the magical monsters, and kidnapping people (including her foster parents!,) and she's able to save the day all around. Mary embraces being Shazam, her family is reunited and no longer all arguing with each other, the press begins stops making fun of her, presumably she can restart college next semester on better footing, etc.

I sort of wish the volume stopped there, because the miniseries tells a complete story, and you could imagine Mary going off to have other adventures, in the style of Ms Marvel or Squirrel Girl, who also balance superheroics, attending school, and managing relationships. My favorite version of Mary Marvel is the one from DC Bombshells, where she's reimagined as a pious Jewish girl who draws strength from famous biblical women (still spelling out Shazam in acrostic, of course,) and stands alone without a male counterpart. As I mentioned at the beginning, the last issue collected here is from a crossover event, and brings back Billy Batson as the primary hero, thus replacing Mary and undermining what the miniseries had tried to build up.

Wonder Woman: Dead Earth

 
 
Wonder Woman: Dead Earth

by Daniel Warren Johnson

DC Comics

2020

 

 

Wonder Woman: Dead Earth collects a 4-issue miniseries about Wonder Woman waking up from a medically-induced coma into a world that has been ravaged by nuclear war. She discovers a world without heroes, where humanity is on the brink of extinction, where giant monsters haunt the devastated landscape and periodically harry the last surviving remnants of our species.
 
Wonder Woman is discovered in the Bat Cave by some fortunate scavengers. She joins their tribe, and after being forced into a gladiatorial fight with a horribly mutated Cheetah, offers the tribes-people a new hope if they'll follow her and relocate to Themyscira, the hidden Amazon island, where she's certain that conditions will be better.
 
Wonder Woman espouses a philosophy of unconditional love, of using her godlike power to offer forgiveness and second chances to anyone who'll accept them, regardless of their past crimes. Cheetah, for example, resents being held in gladiatorial slavery, but Wonder Woman urges her to choose mutual survival over vengeance. In the aftermath of a war, her philosophy reminds me of Truth and Reconciliation.
 
Interspersed through all this are flashbacks to Wonder Woman's childhood that help to inform how she became the version of the character whom we see here.
 
On Themyscira, Wonder Woman learns the truth about the nuclear war that ended the world, about what happened to Batman and Superman, about how she ended up in her coma, about the origin of the monsters, about who is responsible - who needs forgiveness, or vengeance.
 
Johnson's art style is very different from the usual beautiful and statuesque way that Wonder Woman is usually drawn. Here, she looks like a cave woman. But the style suits the end-of-the-world setting. And with their scars, messy hair, muddy ripped clothes, and decidedly un-made-up faces, the characters in this book look, in their own way, maybe more realistic than most comic characters. Johnson's inks look more like marker than pen, and while I don't know his process, if you told me that he inked freehand without a pencil drawing underneath, I would believe you.

Catwoman: Lonely City

 

Catwoman: Lonely City

by Cliff Chiang

DC Comics

2022

 

 

Catwoman: Lonely City is an excellent superhero comic, one of the best I've read in the past few years. The 'present day' of the comic is set 10 years after a traumatic event that separates it from the main DC comics continuity. Like The Dark Knight Returns and Old Man Logan, this is a comic that follows a protagonist who's come out of retirement to travel through a dystopian near-future world for one last job.

 

On 'Fool's Night,' the Joker arranged for a flash mob of ordinary but aggrieved Gotham citizens to don Halloween clown masks and commit a wave of robberies and assaults all over the city. Meanwhile, Joker himself put on a bomb vest, and committed suicide by blowing himself up, killing Batman and Commissioner Gordon in the process. Catwoman was helping Batman, but was blamed for his death, and spent a decade in prison.

 

Lonely City starts at the end of that decade, with Catwoman released from prison, returning to a Gotham that's been transformed by the city's response to Fool's Night. A reformed Two-Face is now the mayor, and looking for an excuse to re-arrest Catwoman to help his reelection campaign against a wheelchair-using Barbara Gordon. Masks are banned citywide (even on Halloween), everyone's movements and spending are tracked by their G-Buck wristbands, and Bruce Wayne's donated fortune has funded numerous good works ... and some incredibly heavily armed and armored police. Barbara Gordon's campaign promises to reduce the over-policing of the Gotham's communities of color, and inspired by Catwoman's release from prison, protesters wearing illegal cat masks turn up to picket sites of gentrification.

 

For her part, Catwoman wants to break into the Batcave, to try to understand Batman's last words to her before he died in her arms. She needs to practice her gymnastics and get back into shape, (and do so without wrecking her aging knees), and she needs tools and allies, and the funds to pay for both, if she's going to get past the Batcave's elaborate security. It's the last thing of Batman's the city hasn't been able to claim, even after his real name and life story have become common knowledge. And, oh yeah, she needs to avoid getting arrested again before she finishes this final heist.

 

This dynamic, of Catwoman gathering allies and committing smaller crimes to collect the resources she needs for her one last big crime, while trying to stay out of reach of a mayor and police force who know she's guilty but can't prove it, yet, defines much of the action of the book. Early on, she connects with a costume designer to get a new outfit, and tries stealing an abandoned Green Lantern ring to circumvent all the Batcave's defenses at once. When that fails, she reconnects with Killer Croc, the Riddler, and some other familiar faces.

 

Eventually, there's a climactic race to the finish, as Catwoman makes her attempt on the Batcave, and learns the meaning of Batman's last wishes, while Two Face sends the cops en masse to Wayne Manor to catch her in the act. Without spoiling exactly what happens, let me say that Catwoman makes a kind of personal peace with the conflicted emotions that have been driving her throughout the book, and that she's able to make an impactful decision about what to do with Batman's legacy.

 

Lonely City is part of DC's Black Label line of comics for mature audiences. Beyond the violence and swearing, what's most adult here is really the themes - surveillance and control and over-policing, scapegoating the poor and racial minorities for political benefit, and the emotions - regret, mourning, and ultimately acceptance of human mortality. Plus, Catwoman defeats a lot of the police profiling simply by being more analog than the system is prepared for - using cash and a flip phone, staying off social medial and away from electronic banking, which I think you maybe appreciate more if you also used to do the things she still does, because her habits were paused by her time in prison.

Galaxy

 

Galaxy

The Prettiest Star

by Jadzia Axelrod

art by Jess Taylor

DC Comics

2022

 

 

Galaxy: The Prettiest Star is probably one of the better-known of DC's young-adult graphic novels. It got some attention in the press for introducing a new trans character, and was nominated for a GLAAD Media Award. It's not really a superhero story at all, although the idea gets mentioned a couple times, and apparently Galaxy has appeared as a supporting character in some recent Hawkgirl comics.

 

Galaxy is metaphorically like a trans person, but what she literally is in the book is an alien princess who goes into something like witness protection, and is completely biologically transformed into a human boy as a disguise. When the story opens, she's been living as 'Taylor' for 6 years, watched over by a couple guardians who are disguised as her dad and older brother, and accompanied by an adorable talking corgi who records everything she does for security reasons. So she's not actually transgender in the way that I am, but she's living in a metaphor for trans-ness that can only happen in fantasy or scifi.

 

We're told that these disguises were chosen because Earth tv gave the dad guardian the idea that they'd be inconspicuous. Giving Galaxy a boy's body is another security measure. But the logic seems flawed since we're also told that the aliens hunting Galaxy can detect a crystal hidden in her chest, meaning she doesn't really need to appear human, or live in a town near a telescope where no one can use cell phones to avoid appearing on social media. All those measures seem mis-aimed, protecting against the wrong kind of threat. Which is convenient for the narrative, because it means when it's time, Galaxy can shake off all these precautions without consequence, since they never served a functional purpose.

 

Early on, we see Galaxy as Taylor going to school, playing basketball, experiencing something akin to gender dysphoria, and missing her dead parents and her previous life as a beautiful princess. A new girl comes to school from Metropolis, where aliens are common and accepted, and Galaxy gets a crush on her. Kat is Black, queer, has dyed green hair and a prosthetic leg, and no romantic interest in Taylor ... until Galaxy steals her guardian's push-button disguise device and transforms back into her alien body for the first time on Earth. After that, Kat and Galaxy start dating, and then Galaxy accidentally breaks the disguise device, which conveniently leaves her stuck in her alien femme form with no way to go back to looking human.

 

We get a montage of trans pain scenes after that. Galaxy fights with her guardians, gets kicked off the boy's basketball team, gets bullied at school by mean girls in the restroom and a lunchroom where no one wants her at their table, has a fight with her one previous friend, and gets expelled because the school board doesn't want to allow an alien to attend. (So, not even for changing gender.)

 

After all that, Galaxy is sad, argues with Kat, contemplates suicide, considers trying to wreck the school building, then makes up with her family and Kat, and the girls go to the homecoming dance together.

 

Jess Taylor's art is very colorful and has no outlines. It's a style that reminds me of some queer fan-art I've seen, as well as the webcomic Lore Olympus. I particularly like the way they rendered what humans look like through Galaxy's eventual alien super-vision. And it's cool that DC found a trans author and nonbinary illustrator to make their trans-friendly comic.

 

I have a sense that Galaxy is written more for non-trans audiences, to convince them to empathize with Galaxy, because she grew up as a non-trans girl on her home planet, then was forced to into a male body that is literally foreign to her and literally a disguise. She's very meek and polite, she doesn't intentionally cause a fuss. She's unable to stand up to her bullies, for example, and she only starts living as an alien because of an accident that leaves her unable to change back. She doesn't really decide; it just happens. Later she can stand up to her guardian because his security measures really were pointless and excessive, and again, because there's nothing any of them can do to reverse the transformation. 

 

So like, most of the potential points of conflict, or areas where Galaxy could have exercised agency, where it might've been possible for the audience to wonder if she was doing the right thing, have been written in a way that precludes any question or choice or doubt. These are authorial decisions that I suspect are aimed at persuasion, at simplifying a complex reality to an unambiguous metaphor that you can't argue with, so hopefully you just accept.

 

In a pretty short format, Axelrod is trying to tell a complete transition story - from vague dysphoria, to wanting to be a girl, to coming out to one person, experimental cross-dressing alone and with a trusted friend, to suddenly coming out to family and attending school as a girl, to experiencing initial rejection, to arriving at a place of self-acceptance. It's a lot of plot, especially combined with all the alien backstory. 

 

I think if I'd read it when I was a teenager, I probably would've felt Galaxy's story was a kind of wish fulfillment - I too wanted to magically and instantly have a non-trans woman's body, and to have everyone just have to accept it because it was an irreversible fait accompli. Sadly the reality is much slower and less satisfying than that. But maybe as a closeted teen, I'd have appreciated seeing the dream come true for someone. At the time, I didn't know there was a real, non-magical, non science-fictional path to go from being a teenage boy to being an adult woman. 

 

Today, as an adult who cannot possibly still be considered 'young,' what I want is less trans magic and trans metaphor, and more trans reality. But that's not really a fair demand to make of a YA superhero comic. So I hope that Galaxy's intended audience enjoys her origin story.

The Oracle Code

 
 
The Oracle Code

by Marieke Nijkamp

art by Manuel Preitano

DC Comics

2020

 

 

The Oracle Code is the second of DC Comics' all-ages graphic novel series. With the exception of Superman Smashes the Klan, I think that all the comics in this series might be origin stories (and honestly, you could make a strong argument about SSTK). Oracle Code is an origin story for Barbara Gordon as the wheelchair-using hacker Oracle. In the original comics, Barbara was introduced as Batgirl, was shot and paralyzed by the Joker, became Oracle, then got unparalyzed and became Batgirl again. In this version, she's a precocious teen who gets shot by a random nobody because she followed her dad, Police Commissioner Gordon, to a crime scene.

After this brief into, Barbara moves into a creepy and barely ADA-retrofitted residential facility inside a crumbling Victorian mansion to do physical therapy and learn wheelchair skills. Perhaps the most implausible part of the book is the idea that this rat-trap is considered a state-of-the-art facility and not a candidate for getting condemned and knocked over. I guess that's Gotham for you. Initially Babs is angry and tries to isolate herself. She rejects other girls' offers of friendship, misses her programming-buddy from before her injury, tries to rush through her PT, and keeps hurting herself due to over-exertion.

Barbara starts to make one friend, a girl whose parents died in a house fire who walks the halls at night, and tells Babs spooky stories to help her fall asleep. Barbara starts making a couple more friends, gets more comfortable using her chair, and stops fighting with her dad on the phone all the time. Then the girl claims that her brother has vanished from the facility (the director claims the brother died in the fire), and then the girl disappears too (the director claims she finished her therapy).

Obviously this is a mystery, and Barbara enlists her other new friends to help investigate. They use both computer hacking and lock-picking skills to access some hidden parts of the creepy old building where, quelle surprise, there was indeed something sinister going on in the secret areas. Babs doesn't do anything super-heroic. She just investigates, learns the truth, and calls in the police, without wearing a costume or performing acrobatics, as I wished Willow had done in Whistle. 'Oracle' is just a screen name. I don't know if Nijkamp's writing is better than Lockhart's per say, but I like the plot resolution a lot more this time.
 
Mauel Preitano illustrated both Whistle and Oracle Code, and his versatility is pretty impressive. His art in Whistle had a sketchier, rounder, warmer, more energetic quality. The palette had a lot of bright colors, especially sky and accents of orange. Here Preitano's drawings are cleaner, cooler, flatter, more polished. The colors are autumnal, even Halloweeny, with darker oranges and blue-grays. There's a recurring motif of puzzle pieces showing Babs thinking about the mystery. And Preitano also switches styles again to illustrate the bedtime ghost stories as though they're drawn by a teenager in a school notebook.

Whistle

 

Whistle

A New Gotham City Hero

by E Lockhart

art by Manuel Preitano

DC Comics

2021

 

 

A few years ago, one of my coworkers showed me some new Raven and Beast Boy graphic novels she was excited about, that had been announced by DC. Sometime after that, I read the truly excellent Superman Smashes the Klan without realizing it was part of the same series. Between then and now, it seems like DC has put out with about a thousand of these standalone YA comics! I decided to check out a few of them. First up is Whistle.

 

This one has a pretty good set-up, but I think it sacrifices a proper ending for the chance to imagine the lead character maybe having ongoing adventures. It confronts her with a difficult moral choice, but then seems to let her eat her cake and still have it too. And honestly, it might've been more satisfying without her getting powers or putting on a costume.

 

Willow is a poor Jewish kid in an underserved neighborhood in Gotham. She's kind of an activist, showing up at demonstrations with signs to demand better funding for her school. She's very motivated, very hard working, maybe not very popular - a Tracy Flick or Rory Gilmore type character. She makes friends with the new kid at school, an African immigrant, who seems to be a version of Beast Boy, although without any powers (yet?) 

 

Willow's single mom is sick with cancer - and she can't work, doesn't have insurance, can't afford her treatment, and is falling behind on her rent. Willow takes a part-time overnight job cleaning an animal shelter to help out, but you can't imagine it pays enough.

 

Also the neighborhood has a problem of someone making plants grow to cover up buildings and make them unusable, especially churches and community centers.

 

Willow gets a message from her mom's old friend (or boyfriend?), the Riddler. I mean, Willow doesn't know that, but the audience does. He hosts biweekly underground poker games, needs a new event planner because Killer Croc murdered the old one, and he heard Willow's mom was sick, and thought he could help out his old friend who cut off all contact with him by offering her daughter a secret, high-paying, illegal, possibly dangerous job...

 

Willow takes the job, makes friends with Poison Ivy who is a regular at the games, gets a glamorous new wardrobe, gets enough money to pay the rent and cover her mom's hospital bills, starts ignoring her friends and schoolwork, stops having time for activism, starts to feel enchanted by her connection to this cool rich secret poker club. 

 

Willow's mom and friend Garfield (aka Beast Boy) tell her that she's changing and they're worried about her. She slowly realizes that Riddler and Poison Ivy are the ones behind the plant attacks. They're trying to buy up cheap real-estate and gentrify it. It will be good for "the neighborhood," but most people living there now will have to move away.

 

And then Willow gets mauled by Killer Croc. She's with a shelter dog when she's attacked, and for unclear reasons, gains dog-like hearing and sense of smell, the ability to talk to dogs generally, and the ability to understand the one shelter dog. 

 

More importantly, while she's healing, she gets some time to think about what she's doing and who she wants to be. She needs the money her illegal job gives her, but doesn't want to let Riddler and Poison Ivy succeed at their plan. 

 

So this is the important moral choice Willow faces. She wants to be a good person, to protect her neighborhood, but also to keep taking care of her mother. I feel like she tries to have it both ways, and that the book lets her, while acting as though she's made a wholly righteous decision.

 

Willow gets herself in shape and makes a very CW-ready costume, and shows up to stop Poison Ivy from making plants take over the next building on her hit list. They fight, neither Ivy nor Riddler recognize her, Ivy nearly kills Willow with her poison kiss, but then some shelter dogs come to her rescue. Riddler gets away, Ivy gets arrested and released, and Willow congratulates herself for saving the building without doing more than throwing a few punches.

 

She does not however, like, tell anyone the Riddler's plan. Or stop working for him. Or tell him that she thinks what he's doing is wrong. Or stop being friends with him and Ivy. I think she sees herself as a spy in his organization? But she also helps her mom start reconciling with the guy, so like, that's a very deep cover. It's implied that Willow will continue being both a costumed crime fighter ... and a paid member of the Riddler's criminal gang.

 

As I said, I think that trying to single-handedly thwart gentrification by becoming a superhero is the wrong ending for the story Lockhart set up. I recognize this is a superhero comic, so the genre more or less requires it, but Lockhart wrote a character and built up a scenario where it's kind of disappointing that that's how Willow decides to take action.

 

I'd have rather seen Willow stand up to Riddler as herself, and try to get journalists and other activists to oppose him in the press and on the streets. The Willow we saw early on appeared to have real moral courage, enough to do what's right even at some cost to herself. 

 

Keeping her new job and her new friends, avoiding any financial sacrifices or uncomfortable conversations, then getting to feel good about herself by inconveniencing the bad guys without doing more to really stop them - that just feels like wish fulfillment rather than Willow actually doing what's right. I wish she'd been allowed to do better.

Fantastic Four: Full Circle

 
Fantastic Four: Full Circle
by Alex Ross

Abrams Books

2022

 

 

I associate comic creator Alex Ross with two things. The first is his painted comic book art, which is beautiful and distinctive. The second is his fondness for stories that either retell the origins of a comic universe (like Marvels and Justice,) imagine its cataclysmic end (like Earth X or Kingdom Come,) or that remix the old tropes into something new (like Astro City.)

 
So Fantastic Four: Full Circle is a little bit of a departure, although it's still unmistakably Ross's work. The art is more traditional ink illustration, though his use of color is creative and shifts with the different lighting conditions. Only the last page of the book takes place in daylight, so Ross really gets to show off the effects of different sorts of light.

 
The story is seemingly a direct sequel to the F4 issue "This Man, This Monster," where a guy who sort of looks like the Thing kidnaps him, fully adopts his appearance, and tries to replace him, before ultimately sacrificing his life to save Mr Fantastic in his first encounter with the Negative Zone. Fortunately, that issue (newly recolored by Tom Scioli) was included as bonus content in Fantastic Four: Grand Design. I say that's fortunate, because I wouldn't be familiar otherwise, and since this story builds directly off those events, I wouldnt've understood Full Circle as well without reading its inspiration recently.

 
Late at night in the F4 skyscraper, the Thing is making a midnight snack, when the interior of the building is suddenly attacked by thousands of alien bugs, vermin, and creepy crawlies. Human Torch burns them up, and the team discovers that the monsters were pouring out of the dead husk of a man who once kidnapped the Thing, who was last seen falling forever into the Negative Zone. This aggression will not stand, so they put on some new science costumes and cross the dimensional barrier in search of answers.

 
The team sees a lot of weird sights, and Ross clearly has fun with this environment. Ross's showpiece is a blacklight-colored spread of Janus the Negative Man, source of the monstrous incursion. He wants to turn them into vermin-filled husks too, as revenge for some college feud with Mr Fantastic. They defeat, or maybe just escape Janus, and on their way home discover a Negative Earth. 

 
This alt history planet turns out to be home to a super-advanced science civilization, and also the guy who kidnapped the Thing is alive and well here. (Who knows where his corpse husk came from then?) He ended up on Negative Earth after saving Mr Fantastic, and feels like that experience made him a better person. Now he wants to repay the Four by helping them get home safely. They do, just in time for the kids to wake up in the morning and welcome everyone back. And the Thing finally gets to have his snack!

 
Full Circle feels like its meant to be an entry-point for new Fantastic Four readers. You've got an acclaimed author and artist showing off one of the most interesting places the team has traveled, while they go on a self-contained adventure that nonetheless gives them the opportunity to reminisce about a number of their past exploits and old foes. I think it invites you to go delve into the F4's back catalog though, much more than it seems to open the way to any new adventures. You get a lot of signposts showing where they've been, but none suggesting where they might go next.

Supergirl: Woman of Tomorrow

 
Supergirl: Woman of Tomorrow
by Tom King

art by Bilquis Evely
DC Comics

2022

 

 

Supergirl: Woman of Tomorrow is an 8 issue standalone miniseries set in a far distant corner of the DC universe. Like Far Sector, which I read last year, it uses its remote location to tell a story that isn't particularly connected to or concerned with the rest of DC's continuity. While Far Sector drew on the scifi conventions of space opera, Woman of Tomorrow draws far more on the tropes and imagery of sword & planet fiction.

 
The tale is narrated in retrospect by Ruthye, a simple farm girl, who wants revenge on Kern of the Yellow Hills, who murdered her father. Ruthye tries to hire a bounty hunter to use Kern's own sword to kill him, when she runs into Supergirl, who's visiting this planet beneath a red sun so that she can get drunk for her 21st birthday. We learn on the second page that Supergirl will kill Kern, and only at the end do we see exactly how long after the fact the story is being recounted from.

 
This is a young Supergirl. She swears, says 'like' a lot, and is only a few subjective years removed from the destruction of Krypton, which she witnessed firsthand as a teenager. She initially counsels Ruthye to forgo revenge, but then Kern shoots her with several arrows, poisons and nearly kills her dog Krypto, and steals her spaceship. So Supergirl and Ruthye set off together to find Kern and get the antidote for the poison.

 
The pair take the spaceship equivalent of a Greyhound bus to reach the planet the stolen ship went to. They find evidence of a recent ethnic cleansing, and learn that space brigands visited the world, and that Kern has joined them. They follow a trail of planets that experienced recent genocides at the hands of Kern and the brigands. What they see upsets them, greatly.

 
The first time they catch up with the brigands, Kern uses magic to teleport the women to a planet full of dinosaurs and an articial Kryptonite sun. They confront Kern again with the help of Supergirl's horse Comet, and capture him. The brigands come to rescue Kern, and at great cost, Supergirl defeats them. Then, while Ruthye learns that her travels have caused her to want justice instead of revenge, Supergirl decides to end things by killing Kern.

 
In an epilogue, an older Supergirl returns to visit Ruthye after she published her account of their adventures together. We also learn that one key incident recounted earlier was a lie.

 
I liked Woman of Tomorrow a lot. Ruthye is proud, speaks formally, and often complements an action scene with thoughtful commentary on Supergirl's nature. I like her as a narrator. 

 

We also see Supergirl herself greatly tested. She suffers pain, watches the injury and death of her pets, and sees over and over the results of genocidal violence that she was too late to stop. She is almost infinitely patient, shows almost infinite restraint. She tries to help who she can, and to do the right thing. But against foes like the brigands and Kern, we also see her pushed to her limits, and placed in a position where executing her prisoner rather than showing him mercy might, arguably, be the more just decision (and certainly a tempting decision, even if you think it is wrong.)

 
Bilquis Evely's art is beautiful and baroque, and Matheus Lopes's colors are a perfect complement, all pastels and jewel tones and rich shades. I would happily read almost anything Evely illustrated and Lopes colored. Together the communicate the strangeness and alienness of the setting, giving it a fantastical, storybook feeling that's a good match for the tone of the text.

Demon Days

 
Demon Days
by Peach Momoko

Marvel Comics

2023

 

 

Demon Days is a five issue comic miniseries that reimagines several Marvel characters (mostly women, mostly from the X-Men) in a Japanese fantasy story. I would say that the biggest attraction here is probably Momoko's art. She draws in a fluid, expressive manga style, and apparently got famous doing collectible variant covers for Marvel before being given the opportunity to write her own comic.

 
We start with a folktale about Psylocke and her wolfhound Logan coming to a village where the humans and oni are in conflict. She, village elder Jubilee, and oni Red Hulk help rid the village of giant evil snake spirit Venom, creating a truce in the previous conflict. At the end, this is revealed to be a story being read in the present day by Mariko, who we'll follow for the rest of the series.

 
Mariko has strange dreams, and wonders what they mean. Her grandmother tells her maybe it's finally time to learn the truth - that she is descended from oni. Mariko's maid, Black Widow, tells her that she was under orders to kidnap her if she ever remembered the truth, but she's grown too fond of her to do it. Then Nightcrawler teleports in and kidnaps Black Widow.

 
So Mariko sets off to rescue her maid and confront the sinister yokai who wants to capture her. (I think this evil lady is supposed to resemble Emma Frost, but I'm not positive.) She meets Silk (or some other Spider Girl?) who helps her fight off Sabretooth and Mystique.

 
Silk leaves, and immortal wolfhound Logan joins Mariko. She's confronted by Thor and Storm, who owe the evil lady a favor. They reveal the full truth to Mariko, that she and the evil lady are sisters.
Mariko arrives to confront the evil lady, who sics oni Green Hulk on her and Logan. Then Mariko channels the spirit of her mother, who tells the girls that she loves them both and doesn't want them to fight anymore.

 
Again, the very pretty art is probably the main reason to look at this one. Momoko's reimaginings of the characters might also mean more to someone a bit more conversant in Marvel lore than I am. The plot felt weirdly anti-climactic to me, and I feel like I disagree with the premise that Mariko should forgive the sadistic mass-murderer who spent the whole series trying to kill her (and who, we're told, is responsible for countless other deaths) just because, it turns out, they're sisters.

Justice League: Death Metal

 
 
Justice League: Death Metal
DC Comics

2021

 

 

Justice League: Death Metal is the final companion volume to Dark Nights: Death Metal. It tells a single story that expands on something that happens in a couple of panels in the original - after Wonder Woman freed Superman and all the other captured superheroes from evil Darkseid-Batman's prison, Nightwing led a mission to rescue the Legion of Doom and sabotage the antenna that Batman Who Laughs was using to receive 'crisis energy' from the remnants of the multiverse.

 
So, we follow a very motley team of Nightwing, Hawkgirl, Starfire, Cyborg, Detective Chimp, and Lex Luthor as they attempt to save some of the worst supervillains on Earth from being used as parts in an evil machine. They have to fight evil Starro-Batman and evil Martian-Manhunter-Batman along the way, and then immediately fight the villains they rescued. Also, no one trusts Lex Luthor, which seems wise.

 
Nightwing's thoughts provide all the voiceover narration throughout, making this a story that's focused on Dick Grayson's character development at least as much as it is on the rescue mission. It's most similar to the Flash and Green Lantern stories from the first companion volume, and probably belongs up front there, rather than being saved for the end.

The Multiverse Who Laughs

 
 
Dark Nights: Death Metal
The Multiverse Who Laughs

DC Comics

2021

 

 

The Multiverse Who Laughs is another volume of companion material to Dark Nights: Death Metal, and I'm beginning to wish I'd just stop with the original. 

 
The main story was fast-paced, overflowing with ideas, and has a fun sort of energy. These extra stories do sometimes add new ideas, but they're also almost all riffing on something already seen, and their structure as interstitial vignettes makes it difficult to carry much narrative momentum.

 
We get a longer evil Robin-Batmam story, a Lobo vs evil Lobo-Batman story, a Superboy Prime redemption story, and more shorts, including a Watcher-like figure wandering through the conflict on a sightseeing tour, and a Dark Multiverse story where the League of Super Pets get super rabies and kill everyone on their particular Dark Earth.

 
There's one companion volume left, and I'm going to read it, I think, but I'm also reevaluating how much I want to read of these giant crossover events in the future.

 
I really thought one of these volumes was going to expand on what happens to Batman, Superman, and Wonder Woman when they travel to the worlds where the good guys are perpetually losing the Infinite Crisis, Final Crisis, and Crisis on Infinite Earths, because that seemed like the part of the story that would most benefit from a longer retelling. Not least because unless you super remember what happened originally, (which I don't,) it's hard to even understand how the Dark Multiverse versions are different, to say nothing of why. So fingers crossed that that's what's next!

War of the Multiverses

 
Dark Nights: Death Metal
War of the Multiverses

DC Comics
2021

 

 

War of the Multiverses is another companion volume to the main Dark Nights:Death Metal story. There are two issues in here, the first a collection of very short comics about how various heroes spent their last night before the final battle, the second another collection of shorts showing various heroes fighting their evil multiversal counterparts while giant metal Wonder Woman dukes it out with giant evil Batman Who Laughs.

 
I mean no disrespect when I say that some comicbook writing has a very fanfic sensebility to it. You like Silver Age Superman? Here's a comic about his girlfriend Lois Lane, and the mischief she gets up to in between his issues. Here's another comic about his best friend Jimmy Olsen, and the mischief he gets up to. Here's a whole comic of retrocontinuity flasbacks to Superman's childhood adventures as SuperBOY in Kansas. Here's a comic about the time Superboy went 1000 years in the future, in between issues of the other comic. Etc.

 
To say nothing of the content of these stories, I associate fanfic with the urge to 'fill in the setting' by telling new stories that take place in between the major plot events and showing what minor characters were supposedly up to while they were off-camera. (In terms of content, there might be particular kinds of stories that often get slotted into those positions, but let's leave that aside for now.)

 
If this extra material had been interwoven with the main story, maybe it would have made the whole thing seem grander and more epic. Although honestly, there might simply be too much material here for that technique to work, even in an omnibus edition.

 
But collected separately like this, and read afterward, these vignettes feel like fanfic elaborations. Which is not to say I didn't enjoy any of them! They varied a lot in quality. I liked all the various Teen Titans having a low-key party before the big fight, and weirdly, the Penguin fighting his even eviler twins was one of the best battle stories.

The Darkest Knight

 
Dark Nights: Death Metal
The Darkest Knight

DC Comics

2021
 

 

The Darkest Knight is the first volume of supplementary material to accompany the main Dark Nights: Death Metal storyline, which I read last month.

 
We start off with origin stories for a bunch of the evil Batmen from last time - Batman Who Laughs, B-Rex, Batmobeast, the giant evil Gotham City mecha, etc.

 
Then we see longer versions of some plot points that were handled very quickly in the main story. I think I mentioned there was a convoluted plan to save the day? It had three main parts. Each one gets an issue-long story instead of just being declared successful in a single panel.

 
Wonder Woman, Superman, and original Batman would sneak and fight their way into the evil Bat Castle to travel to alternate Earths where three previous DC Crises were still ongoing, to rerout the flow of 'crisis energy' away from the bad guys.

 
Simultaneously, the Green Lantern Corp and some sort of multiversal Justice League would travel to the last few evil Earths left in the collapsing multiverse, and knock out the antennae towers being used to receive and collect crisis energy.

 
Also simultaneously, all the Flashes were on the run from the super-powerful Batman Who Laughs (whose brain was transplanted into the body of Dr Batmanhattan after Wonder Woman killed him with an Invisible Chainsaw, and who has renamed himself The Darkest Knight), so that when the other two missions succeeded  Kid Flash would be able to become the new receiver for all the rerouted crisis energy, and channel it to restart the multiverse.

 
I did warn you it was complicated!
 

The next volume, I think, is going to expand on Batman, Superman, and Wonder Woman's difficult adventures on the Crisis worlds.