Kingdom Came.

As I mentioned the other day, I recently re-read Kingdom Come via a copy of Absolute Kingdom Come, paying the most attention to the copious amounts of supplementary material in the back. While reading through all the names on the two page section marked "Memorial," which was basically a key to the 105 (105!) characters on the covers of the first three issues, I was actually taken aback by how many of these characters were introduced into the mainstream DCU before the 2011 reboot. Several of them were introduced by Ross himself during his collaboration with Geoff Johns on the 2007-launched Justice Society of America (as character creator, cover artist and eventually co-writer), but there were obviously a lot of Kingdom Come fans writing and editing at DC Comics in the last 15 years.

Just looking at the key...

•A female Judomaster II was introduced in 2007's Birds of Prey #100, and she later joined the JSoA

•Magog was introduced to the DCU in the pages of JSoA, eventually earning his own short-lived solo title, and even making the transition into the post-Flashpoint, rebooted New 52 universe in the pages of Superman/Wonder Woman

•Lightning, "Black Lightning's metahuman daughter," was introduced in the pages of JSoA, albeit via a retcon that gave Jefferson Pierce his second adult daughter (Writer Judd Winick had previously retconnd Black Lightning's history to give him an adult daughter who took the name "Thunder"; Black Lightning's retconned origin would include them in Black Lightning: Year One

•Von Bach, Swastika and 666 are among "The Fourth Reich" super-Nazis that mess up a picnic in Columbus, Ohio at the opening of the 2007 Justice Society of America series

•The Thunder of Kingom Come is "a new Johnny Thunder with the mischeivous spirit of the Thunderbolt;" the Jakeem Thunder that Grant Morrison, Howard Porter and John Dell introduced in 1999 JLA arc "Crisis Times Five" has some obvious differences from this Thunder (including having an exterior rather than interior Thunderbolt), but they sure look an awful lot alike

•The Hawkman of Kingdom Come didn't come to the DCU, but his design did, as former Infinity, Inc. character Northwind "evolved" into that design during Johns and company's run on JSA

•Robotman III is the name that Victor Stone, AKA Cyborg takes in Kingdom Come, sometime after his half-robot body was updated to one of golden-colored liquid metal. Cyborg never took that name in the DCU, the second Robotman never stopped using it or died for very long, but he did acquire a golden-colored liquid metal body at the climax of Titans/JLA and kept it through Devin Grayson and company's The Titans ongoing. Johns changed Cy back to a more familiar design in the pages of The Flash, essentially giving Cyborg his George Perez-design, but with the gray metal parts now being colored gold. When Johns relaunched Teen Titans in 2003, Cyborg was back to the grayish metal coloration

•While I've lost track of DC's Starmen over the years, Kingdom Come's Starman VIII–his costume and origin as revealed on this key completely in tact–was a member of the JSoA

•Wesley Dodds's former sidekick Sandy the Golden Boy did indeed dawn the costume of Kingdom Come's Sandman IV (that of Jack Kirby's 1970s Sandman), in the pages of JSA. He didn't keep it long, though, and never really took the name Sandman for very long either, sticking with the one-syllable "Sand" for most of his career

•The red-haired, tornado-powered Red Tornado III was introduced with a different name and cooler costume into the pages of JSoA as Cyclone; she's sadly been MIA since the 2011 reboot

•Atom-Smasher was probably the very first emigree from Kingdom Come to the DCU, and he also stuck around the longest. Here he's described simply as "formerly Nuklon, godson of the original Atom." Nuklon took the name Atom-Smasher in the first story arc of James Robinson, David S. Goyer, Stephen Sadowski and Michael Bair's JSA, although his costume varied somewhat (and for the better). He wore the blue full-head mask that Ross' Atom-Smasher does, but had a more traditional spandex superhero costume than the professional wrestler gear Ross outfitted him with. Atom-Smasher, like most legacy heroes, has also been MIA since the reboot

•The Red Robin name and costume came to the DCU via Jason Todd during the best-ignored Countdown period of DC Comics, and was then adopted by Robin III Tim Drake, after it became clear that Robin IV wasn't going to be killed off any time soon. After the Flashpoint reboot, Tim Drake ditched the Kingdome Come costume, but kept the name. The name has apparently become strong enough that I noticed it was what was used instead of "Robin" in this goofy Batman Unlimited: Animal Instinct direct-to-DVD cartoon I watched (the costume in that looked like a stripped-down, anime-inspired version of Ross' design

•Roy Harper, who first went by Speedy and then by Arsenal, never grew out his goatee or started wearing a red cap, but he began wearing a red version of the Neal Adams-designed Green Arrow costume in Dan Jurgens' Teen Titans way back in 1998. His costume changed (for the worse) a few times since then, but he returned to a red Green Arrow costume in the pages of the Brad Meltzer/Ed Benes Justice League of America, where he also finally took the name Red Arrow. He later returned to "Arsenal" and a different costume, and, since the reboot, has been going by Arsenal, but wearing a costume closer to that of his Red Arrow one

•Zatara II was introduced to the DCU during Johns' Teen Titans run, but rather than being the "son of the late Zatanna, and grandson of the original Zatara," he was the still-alive Zatanna's cosuin.

•Wildcat III is described as "a man-panther with the original's spirit;" a Wildcat with that exact design was introduced by Ross and Johns into their JSoA, although he was now the long-lost son of the original Wildcat, Ted Grant

Those are just the characters from the covers of Kingdom Comes #1-#3, of course, and thus not a complete accounting.

It's also interesting to note that in the years since these covers first appeared on comics shelves other characters with these names have all appeared, but in very, very different forms. Characters like Mr. Terriffic II (all-around good guy Michael Holt, rather than the over-equipped and over-zealous human arsenal of Kingdom Come), Joker's Duaghter II (a crazy lady with a belly shirt and The Joker's flayed-off face worn as a mask over her own, rather than a Jill Thompson-esque Harlequin with cool gadgets), Hourman III (an intelligent machine colony from the 853rd century with vast powers over time and space, rather than a strong guy who can fly), Batwoman II (a mundane human vigilante, rather than a New God fan of Batman's with an amazingly insane costume and a giant flying dog named Ace), Spy Smasher II (a lady who messes with Oracle in Birds of Prey, rather than an "indpendent operative in the post-cold war world"; neither is terribly developed, but their designs are racially different), a new version of Black Condor and The Phantom Lady (Basis updates of the originals; Kingdom Come's Condor wasn't really distinguishable from any previous Black Condors, but its Phantom Lady was an actual phantom) and a new Stars and Stripes (Plucky teenager Courtney Whitmore and her stepfather Stripey in a robot battle-suit code-named S.T.R.I.P.E., rather than the heavily armed, reckless legacy versions of Kingdom Come).

The further adventures of Cathedral

A few years ago, I singled out Cathedral as my favorite character from Alex Ross and Mark Waid's 1996 Kingdom Come series, mentioning that as far as I knew he appeared only in a single, two-panel scene in the first issue (fighting The Whiz, only to be tossed aside by Wonder Woman) and on the cover of the first issue (along with 32 other characters). The key to that cover in one of the trades is where I learned the character's name, as he goes without one in the comic itself, and found a simple five-word description of the character: "Holy terror of the underworld."

I was recently re-reading–well, skimming–Kingdom Come in the form of a well-loved/falling apart library copy of Absolute Kingdom Come. I paid more attention to the copious supplementary material than the story itself, which I've read and re-read so many times before, although I did scan all of the pages for little details, particularly all of the pages with crowd scenes, as the pages in the Absolute version are so large that it's much easier to see background characters.

I learned a little more about Cathedral in this volume. First, there's the above sketch; he appeared with Catwoman II and Manotaur in the section of the sketch gallery marked "The New Breed." Here we get more than five words on Cathedral. Writes Ross, "Instead of dark-clad, cloaked figures roaming around on building rooftops and edifices, I threw together someone who would blend in better."

Sheesh. Look at the detail on the sketch. No wonder Cathedral was relegated to just two panels, which only showed parts of him anyway. He looks like a real pain in the ass to draw; can you imagine him starring in a monthly comic? It's hard to imagine anyone drawing that guy on 20 pages a month...I would assume he would spend a lot of time out of costume or in silhouette.

Anyway, it turns out he does appear in more than two panels, although only in the background. You really have to hunt and/or read the "Keys to the Kingdom" character annotations to follow Cathedral's storyline through Kingdome Come. Apparently he didn't learn his lesson after his encounter with Wonder Woman and The Justice League, and so he ends up in The Gulag with all of the other "bad" super-people (his leg appears in one panel of a Gulag scene).

During the climactic battle scene, which makes a bit less sense every time I read it (Batman decided the best way to de-escalate the fight between The Justice League and the escapees was to attack them all with his own superhero army?), Cathedral is among the active rioters.

He's shown rushing Red Robin in one panel and, a few pages later, is shown being knocked down by Justice Leaguer and original Red Tornado Ma Hunkel, who I did not even realize was in this comic, but who is fantastic; she now wears a full suit of high-tech armor, and has some sort of torso-spinning tornado punch action with which she floors Cathedral.

Catherdal's body is not among those named in the splash page showing the aftermath of the nuclear bomb explosion (which claimed the life of Red Hood, aka Lian Harper, who apparently dies an early death in this continuity too). But he's not shown being tossed into Dr. Fate's cloak/portal or under Green Lantern's forcefield, nor is he shown among the surviving prisoners who Wonder Woman takes with her to Paradise Island for rehabilitation, Golden Age Wonder Woman-style.

So his final fate is undetermined, but fingers crossed he appears in an Alex Ross-written-and-drawn comic book called Alex Ross' The Cathedral at some point.

With her own Astro City analog, Orca, The Whale Woman has finally arrived

I'm not sure how much writer Kurt Busiek, artist Brent Anderson and character designer and cover artist Alex Ross would agree with me, given how reductionist it likely sounds, but the trio's on-again, off-again superhero series Astro City is more-or-less powered by its inspiration from other, older superhero comics, particularly those of DC and Marvel Comics.

As Busiek and Ross did with their seminal Marvel series, the stories quite often focus on superhero characters from the civilian sidelines, teasing out problems and solutions to real-world considerations of genre elements, and comments on aspects of comic book superheroes—and heroic fiction in general. It does so, in large part, by first building a world that is much like the one that likely existed in the creators' imaginations when they were children and young men, a sort of amalgated universe where DC, Marvel, Charlton and Hollywood heroes all share the same space.

Since they don't own the rights to any of these characters, however, they fill Astro City with analogs, some much more direct than others: The Samaritan is Superman, The Confessor and Altar Boy are Batman and Robin, The Gentleman is Captain Marvel, The First Family is The Fantastic Four and so on (Often with key, imaginative differences, sure, but, for the point of this post, I just want to focus on the fact that Astro City is populated with analog versions of some the most popular superhero characters of all time).

The latest iteration of Astro City is being published under DC's Vertigo imprint, and its latest collection was Astro City: Winged Victory, starring the Wonder Woman analog named in the sub-title. It also features a new villain in a minor role: Maneater!

She is one of several female supervillains, including Warmaiden and Jagged Jill, who tell the media that Winged Victory paid them to fight her and take dives, which is all part of a very elaborate, collection-long conspiracy to discredit and destroy Winged Victory.

In the back of the book, we're shown a sketch of Maneater:

And we also get to see some of the design notes:

Maneater is a black woman with a shark-like fin, gray shark-type skin and pointy teeth; she wears something that looks like a surfer's wetsuit, patterned like an orca.

Like an orca, huh...? Aha! Now I know why Maneater looked so familiar!

She looks so much like Orca, The Whale Woman, a minor (very minor) Batman villain introduced by Larry Hama and Scott McDaniel in 2000's Batman #579-#581, during a particularly fruitful and well-organized period for the Batman line of books (At the time, each of the several Batman books had a very distinct tone and style, and dealt with a highlighted, isolated aspect of the character: Hama and McDaniels' Batman book dealt with Batman as superhero).

If you missed that story arc, or her subsequent cameos, here's the deal with Orca: Dr. Grace Balin (Balin! Like baleen! Get it?!) was a marine biologist and social activist whose spine was paralyzed in an accident that cost her the use of her legs. Just as Dr. Kirk Langstrom looked to bats in his development a serum to combat deafness and Dr. Kurt Connors looked to lizards in his development of a serum to help people re-grow lost limbs, Balin develops a serum that can restore her spine, but with the expected side effect of turning her into a half-human, half-animal monster.

Her orca-like strength and endurance make her more than a match for Batman in a fair fight, on land or especially in water, but by the third act, and with the help of a custom-made, action figure-ready SCUBA suit (SCUBA, of course, standing for Self-Contained Underwater Batman Apparatus), he is able to save the day.

And that's pretty much the end of Orca, save for a brief appearance in Last Laugh and a briefer still one getting killed off in "One Year Later" Batman/Detective Comics story arc "Face The Face."

I always kinda liked the character, for a couple of reasons. First, she did not have the typical build and figure of, let's see, every single female supervillain ever. Second, like Killer Croc and Man-Bat (and sometimes Solomon Grundy or Clayface), she fit into the "big, tough, monster" category of Batman villain, of the sort that could give a more powerful superhero someone to fight when they team up with Batman. Third, I kinda like underwater villains, especially in the DC Universe, as poor Aquaman, a long-time favorite character of mine, never seemed to have enough cool villains of his own to fight. Fourth, she was a minor, slightly silly, oft-ridiculed Batman villain, of the sort Batman history is lousy with, and whom attain a sort of underdog status I always enjoy rooting for. Fifth, I just like typing the phrase "Orca, The Whale Woman."

Which, oddly enough, when I Google, I only find used on comics blogs making fun of Orca, like this 20008 one with the inspired title from Mr. Chris Sims (from which I stole one of those scans), or this older-still post on The Absorbascon.

Well, say what you will about Orca, and you will say more about Orca, at the very least, she now has an Astro City analog character based on her, and that's something you can't say about every Batman villain.

Incidentally, unless I missed some appearances—I don't remember her appearing as a Black Lantern during Blackest Night, which, if true, is kinda weird, as they were pretty desperate for dead Batman villains to put into the tie-ins—then Orca analog Maneater has already had one-third as many appearances as her inspiration.

Assuming she was inspired by Orca, and it wasn't just a pure coincidence that Busiek and company produced a villain that looked so much like one who appeared in like five comics. As an Orca advocate, I'm going to continue assuming that Maneater was created in knowing, loving tribute to Orca.

Some of the best DC Comics covers from 2000-2008, according to DC Comics: The 75th Anniversary Poster Book

The second-to-last cover included in DC Comics: The 75th Anniversary Poster Book (which I swear I won’t write any more posts about after this!) is Gary Frank’s cover from Action Comics #863, depicting Frank’s Christopher Reeves-inspired Superman standing among the members of the new old post-Infinite Crisis Legion of Super-Heroes.

It’s a nice enough image, but when I first laid eyes on it while flipping through the book, my initial thought was “What’s that doing here?”

The section of the book devoted to the last ten years is in some ways the most interesting section, because it’s so difficult to see history when you’re in the midst of it.

Picking out the most important, influential images from the ‘40s, ‘50s and ‘60s from the early 21st century was probably a breeze, the biggest challenge being which ones there weren’t room to include. Those covers—heck, those from the ‘80s and perhaps even ‘90s—are far enough away that an editor or compiler can see how they’ve held up over the years, how many homages there have been to them, how the comic under that cover has come to be thought of over the years, what the artist who drew it has gone on to do.

But Action Comics #863…? I don’t know. It doesn’t seem to me like it will be regarded as a necessarily important cover, any more than the story inside will wind up being a classic one, but I suppose it’s too early to tell.

So here are the covers from the 21st century that were included in this visual history of DC Comics (If you have a copy of the book, you may want to whip it out and follow along. If not, I’ll link to the relevant images at comics.org.)


—Dave Johnson’s cover for Detective Comics #745, one of the earlier issues of the post-“No Man’s Land” iteration of the title. At that point, Greg Rucka was writing, Shawn Martinbrough was penciling, the book was colored in single colors approaching a black-and-white effect, and there were back-up stories included, at no additional cost to the cover price. Johnson would hang around until #761, after which point EDILW favorite John McCrea came on as cover artist and Greg Rucka, now teamed with Rick Burchett, Scott McDaniel and Steve Lieber, finished up his Sasha Bordeaux storyline and TEC got swept up in the “Bruce Wayne: Fugitive” crossover story.

Here’s my favorite from Johnson’s run as cover artist: They’re all pretty great though, and Johnson continues to do dynamite cover work, now for DC’s Freedom Fighters title.


—Darwyn Cooke’s Catwoman #2, from the 2002-launched volume of the book, initially written by Ed Brubaker. That title was one of DC’s most visually interesting for a few years there. In the first year, there were four covers by Darwyn Cooke (who penciled the first story arc, his art inked by Mike Allred), five covers by Paul Pope, one by Scott Morse, one by Jeff Parker, followed by a few by J. G. Jones and then Javier Pulido and Cameron Stewart, who were by then doing interiors.

Here's one of Pope's covers, a pretty unusual view of the character, seen in the rain through a car windshield:


—Dave Johnson’s 100 Bullets #33, from a series of Johnson’s covers which featured design work so completely different from that of his TEC covers that it seems like the work of a different artist in many ways.

I have to confess to having decided to trade wait 100 Bullets after the first few issues…and then never actually catching up on it in trade. I hear it’s pretty great though. A glance at the cover gallery makes picking just one to represent all of them seem like an unenviable task.


—Adam Hughes’ cover for Wonder Woman #184, which was no doubt a difficult choice, given the fact that Hughes has drawn roughly one million Wonder Woman covers (Okay, it’s closer to 50, still).

Hughes was something of a controversial choice for Wonder Woman cover artist, given the relentless sexuality of his images. His Wonder Woman had a sense of humor, sure, and she could “act,” but it was her scantily clad body that seemed to be the focus of the majority of the covers.

And I think that’s fine. Wonder Woman is a scantily clad woman after all, and most of Hughes’ depictions of her tended toward the good girl end of the cheesecake spectrum, with relatively few ever approaching exploitation (Even ones like this “mud-wrestling” cover generally winked knowingly at the audience).

I didn’t really care for the way Hughes portrayed Wonder Woman’s boots, which were always baggy, and I had a hard time understanding how they even worked, and I wasn’t crazy about the way he drew her lasso, as a thin little wire whipping about as is possessed of its own life, but there’s no denying that Hughes is a great artist, and his version of Wonder Woman is probably the most consistent and pervasive over the past few decades, on account of how long he was attached tot he character.

When I close my eyes and imagine “Wonder Woman,” it’s a Hughes image that comes most immediately to mind.

Here are two of my favorites:The first one is from a multi-part crossover in which the Wonder women team-up with the Bat Family for a few issues. I like the way it says “Batman’s in this” subtly, without actually surrendering the cover to him, and Hughes just plain rendered the hell out of Wondy’s face there. And the bat’s face too. There’s an amusing one a few issues later, showing a bunch of the side-kick types cowering behind Wonder Woman (I think Scarecrow and/or a Greek god of fear were involved at that point).

I really only like about a third of the second one, and that’s the third featuring Wonder Girl. I like her pose and expression, and the fact that Hughes went to the trouble of making her look different than the other two Wonder women.

Actually, looking at the cover for Wonder Woman #186 longer, Wonder Woman actually looks pretty gross on that cover. Her costume seems about seven sizes too small on top, too…


—Jim Lee’s swinging-flying-kick cover for Batman #608...... which seemed an odd choice, give how much more often I’ve seen this one:Lee later repeated the pose and basic composition on the first issue of his less popular run with Brian Azzarello on Superman:I didn’t realize until I read this particular poster book that the pose was at least inspired by Brian Bolland’s Wonder Woman #72 cover.
I like Lee's work a lot more now than I did in the past; he’s an artist who has only gotten better over the years, but revisiting his cover work for Batman, Superman and Infinite Crisis, I see he’s still not all that much of a cover artist. Oh, he does the superheroes posing superheroically images just fine, but there’s nothing special about his covers.

Check out his Batman run on the cover gallery on comics.org, and it’s dullness becomes accentuated.

The cover artist immediately preceding him was Scott McDaniel who, for all his faults, suffuses his work with a weird, awkward energy that reminds me a bit of Jack Kirby’s work in terms of posing and the feeling of bottled up tension either about to explode or in the act of exploding:
And the cover artist immediately following Lee was Dave Johnson again, doing something fresh, new and exciting with negative space and story title for the Azzarello/Risso “Broken City” story that followed “Hush,” and was all but eclipsed by it (I liked that story, by the way, although it read as if it was only meant to be in some sort of quasi-continuity, more appropriate for Legends of the Dark Knight or Batman Confidential than the flagship title.
(Holy shit, let’s stop and think about this for a minute—Jim Lee and Eduardo Risso were drawing Batman comics just a couple of years ago! Now they stick poor Grant Morrison with guys seemingly at random).


—James Jean’s covers for Fables #18 and Batgirl #45. I would wager that these were included because they are exceptional images created by James Jean moreso than because of the particular individual titles or characters involved… although it’s worth noting that Fables became Vertigo’s post-Sandman, default flagship title.

I would further wager that a fairly large part of Fables’ success is owed to the strength of Jean’s work (I know it’s what first got me to pick up a Fables trade, and what I missed the most when I eventually tired of the series; the covers on the trades seemed to result in more visitors to my house picking up copies and flipping through them then other trades I may have laying around, as well).

Jean did 17 Batgirl covers, coming on to the 2000-launched, Cassandra Cain-starring title right about the time it probably should have been canceled, when it’s original creative team left, their story complete. Around that same time, Jean did just shy of a dozen covers for Green Arrow, another title that had begun flailing and failing creatively.
Jean turned out to be a hell of a superhero cover artists, perhaps because his work is so far removed from the typical superhero cover art.


—J.G. Jones’ cover for Y: The Last Man #16, the Ampersand-doing-Hamlet cover. This popular and highly addictive Vertigo series seemed more visually striking on the inside than on the outside, but that’s a pretty great cover. You can’t go wrong with monkeys or frilly, Shakespeare collars, and this cover has ‘em both. And I love how hard Ampersand is acting in that image. He’s not a monkey pretending to act, he’s a monkey acting.


—Tim Sale’s cover for Detective Comics #792, a rather weak cover from late-ish in Sale’s 20-issue run of covers for the title in 2003 or so (Dark, dark days fro the Batman franchise, which was just about to enter into the “War Games” crossover, which would pretty much unmoor the whole family of books until 2006 or so, when Grant Morrison and Paul Dini would take over the two main Batman books.

I can’t imagine why they chose that particular Sale image over the other 19 or so in that run of covers, or why they chose any of Sale’s covers from that period. If you think “Tim Sale” and “DC Comics,” you probably think of one of the striking covers from one of his two signature Batman series, The Long Halloween Not sure why they chose to highlight Sale’s work on this particular title instead of the much more popular and influential limited series he did with Jeph Loeb, Long Halloween and Dark Victory…



—Darwyn Cooke’s cover for DC: The New Frontier #6, one of six great covers for that series (I really liked the moody Challengers of the Unknown image on the cover of #3 and the cubist renderings of Justice Leaguers around the coiled tentacle on the cover of #5 too). That sixth and final one is probably the best of the lot though, and certainly the most “DC” of the images, with Hal Jordan reaching for his Green Lantern ring and the other six members of the “Big Seven” JLA all throwing their fists in the air.

It’s stylized, it’s artsy and it’s “Hell yeah!”

New Frontier is probably this past decade’s Kingdom Come, in terms of a high-profile, out-of-continuity miniseries that made a star of its artist and influenced the way in which other creators depicted DC’s superheroes.

I just wish it influenced the art in the DC Comics that followed as much as the writers…


—Alex Ross’ Green Lantern #1, speaking of Kingdom Come. I flipped through the stack of Green Lantern comics in my room before typing up this tidbit, and realized that despite all of the great artists who have drawn this book since it launched in 2005, there aren’t really very many great covers.

Ethan Van Sciver did scary versions of Hector Hammond and The Shark on the covers of #4 and #5, but for the most part the covers from the series that stick out in my memory are the unintentionally funny ones: Green Arrow and Green Lantern blissfully about to make out with a couple of Black Mercy monster flowers on Neal Adams’ cover for #8, Green Lantern and Batman about to angrily make-out on the cover of #9, blood puke and so on.

Alex Ross’ cover for Green Lantern #1 may actually be the best one in the series then, as static and uninteresting as it is (although it’s worth noting that it’s actually an incredibly dynamic image for Ross).

As the title neared the end of Blackest Night, and Doug Mahnke started doing the covers, I think we started to see a lot more higher quality images, but this book was assembled before that.


—Dave McKean’s cover for the 2005 Arkham Asylum Anniversary Edition seems like a bit of a cheat, as the book itself is from the late eighties. Nice, scary, evocative image though!


—Paul Pope’s cover for Batman: Year 100 #1, from the fairly incredible, alternate future Batman series from 2006 that I’ve devoted an awful lot of verbiage to before.

It’s worth noting again though that Pope’s cover there was his version of the first appearance of Batman on the cover of Detective Comics #27: Man dressed as bat, legs folded, rope, some pipes. See?


—Frank Quitely’s cover for All-Star Superman #10 is a really weird choice, given the unique strength of the smiling-Superman-resting-on-a-cloud image from All-Star Superman #1:When I think about All-Star Superman, that’s the cover I think of. All of this book’s covers are pretty great though; #6’s featuring Superman and Krypto at Jonathan Kent’s grave and the wacky Bizarro World cover for #8 are particular favorites.


—Gary Frank’s cover for Action Comics #863, which we already discussed a bit. Looking at Frank’s other Superman covers from Action Comics and Superman: Secret Origin, that probably is the best image of his Reeves-inspired Superman, although I’m awfully fond of his quiet cover for #869. The original one, without the big, generic “SODA POP” label photoshopped in, of course.


—Alex Ross’ cover for Batman #679, a chapter of the “Batman R.I.P.” storyline, is the final image in the collection. It’s probably one of the most boring Batman images imaginable. Well, you can imagine a more boring Batman image—say, Batman just cold standing there—but Ross already used that one for a poster.

I generally like Ross’ work, and think he’s a pretty decent cover artist, but he seemed pretty out of his element on this particular storyline. It was chockfull of some pretty crazy ideas—Batman was, if I recall correctly, out of his mind on “weapons-grade” meth, hallucinating a magical negro hobo and an alien parasite version of Bat-Mite, while dressed in a homemade red, yellow and purple Batman of Zur-En-Arrh costume, fighting his way to Arkham Asylum where he would face both The Joker and a guy claiming to be either his father and/or the devil.

And Ross just paints a picture of Batman swooping down from a rooftop, an image that could been the cover for any Batman comic book ever published. Here’s interior artist Tony Daniel’s alternate cover for the very same issue:Imagine how scary a Ross version of that Batman would be, his photorealistic eyes with their eye-lashes all looking crazy at the reader from behind a purple cosplay cowl stitched together in an alley.

Hate the Alex Ross cover, not the Alex Ross

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Here are the original covers for the series:


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

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

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

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


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

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

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

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

Behold—

BABY NAMOR!

That guy was apparently born pissed off at the surface world.

Look into his eyes, and know fear:



This great panel is the greatest panel in Avengers/Invaders #3, drawn by Steve Sadowski, and conceived by Alex Ross and Jim Krueger. In fact, it may be the greatest panel of anything ever.

The only character from Kingdom Come I really want to see more of

I enjoyed Mark Waid and Alex Ross' series Kingdom Come immensely when it was originally released, and it's a pretty rewarding book to re-read every now and then, as each time reveals additional Easter eggs and metaphorical elbows to the ribs regarding obscure bits of DC history.

I know a lot of people have kind of fallen out of love with it over the years, or never really thought it was all it was cracked up to be in the first place, but setting the story itself aside for a moment, at the very least, it was a character design tour de force. Ross did an all-around incredible job costuming his players, and in many cases his versions of decades-old DC heroes looked much better than any previous versions (His Dr. Mid-Nite, Hourman, Starman, Red Tornado I and Dr. Fate in particular).

Ross' version of the DCU was enormously influential, and it seemed like there was a period in which the DCU was consciously adopting elements of it in an almost systematic way (Roy Harper adopted a costume closer to his Kingdom Come one, Cyborg went all liquid gold-skinned, Nuklon changed his name and started dressing more Atom-esque, etc.).

After the Infinite Crisis/52 continuity rejiggering, the Kingdom Come continuity seemed to have been merged with the new DCU. We got a were-cat version of Wildcat, a girl who looked like Red Tornado II and the Kingdom Come Starman in the JSA. A Batman/Talia kid popped up, as did a new Zatara and Plastic Man's son Offspring (From The Kingdom, not Kingdom Come, but close enough). There was a new, female Judomaster in Birds of Prey. Oh, and a bunch of super-Nazis seen in the pages of KC rampaged through the early issues of the relaunched JSoA

What's going on exactly?

Geoff Johns, who wrote the rejiggering, seems to finally be getting around to explaining that with this past week's issue of JSoA, the first chapter of a story entitled "Thy Kingdom Come," which is co-plotted by and featuring some art by Ross. Now we've got Kingdom Come Superman on the main DCU Earth, and, from the looks of upcoming covers and solicits, more Kingdom Come-ers are yet to come throughout this story arc. (At the very least, we can expect to see the KC Thunder, no relation to the Thunder Judd Winick invented in Outsiders).

But there's only one character from Kingdom Come I really want to see much more of at this point, however, and that's this guy, about to impale Whiz Kid:


I think that's his only appearance (I'd have to go through again with a magnifying glasses in the crowd scenes to be sure), but I've always been intrigued by that guy who looks to be a super-strong, humanoid church who talks in a peculiar font of his own.

According to the key in the collected trade version of the series, his name is "The Cathedral," and he's "a holy terror to the underworld." And that's literally all I know about him.

Well, that, and that I'd love to learn more about him.

Here's a headshot, pulled from the key in the back:



Man, I hope he makes an appearance in "Thy Kingdom Come."

Five Random Things, None of Which Really Deserve a Post of Their Own

1.) I’ve been reading a lot about the Punisher online this week. Mike Sterling at Progressive Ruin noted the decline in demand for the Punisher’s first appearance, once a sought after item. Tim O’Neil at The Hurting produced a pair of well-observed, sharply-written essays about the character’s rise in popularity, and inherent problems as a star of sequential superhero fiction. And Chris Sims at The Invincible Super-Blog? That guy’s always got something to say about The Punisher.

So when is somebody going to get around to addressing the Punisher-related subject that I am most interested in reading about?

You know, this:



I’d do it myself, but every time I get to the panel that suggests DC and Marvel editors decided to combine Wonder Woman’s male girlfriend Steve Trevor and Frank Castle into the same person, my brain shortcircuits and I lose consciousness for a few hours, facedown in a longbox full of Amalgam comics.



2.) The Beat has their monthly analysis of DC’s sales figures up for June, and even though I’m no longer reading Countdown, I find myself increasingly (and, admittedly, somewhat morbidly) fascinated in how it performs in the direct market.

Like 52, it’s a rather experimental project for a publisher like DC, albeit one that changed several important factors from the experiment of 52. While that series proved a somewhat surprising success, this one is so far something of a disappointment (and I’m just talking bout the sales here, not in terms of creative success or failure).

So now I find myself wondering if it will prove to be simply less-of-a-success-than-52, or a spectacular failure.

Here’s what The Beat has to say at the moment:

“…the publisher’s supposed big event series of the moment is finding its level relatively quickly. Which is damning with faint praise, of course, because sales aren’t desperately good to begin with for this sort of thing. The three previous issues made the chart again in June with reorders between 1,704 and 2,018 units, in fairness, but that’s due to the fact that June was a rather light month in terms of new releases. 70,000 units may not be a bad number for a book without superstar creators that’s largely starring C-list characters. But the yardstick for Countdown are other event titles, including and especially its predecessor 52. By that standard, Countdown has been a failure….”

But keep in mind, dislike it or hate it, Countdown was still DC’s third best-selling title in June, and in a few months time may be the company’s best-seller (The two ahead of it in June were Justice, which just ended, and JLoA, which only has one more Brad Meltzer-written issue to go, and while I can’t imagine why, his writing currently sells like gangbusters).

I’m pretty curious about how bad the book would have to do to constitute a failure, or to start losing money (I’d say to cancel it, but since it’s counting down to something, presumably Final Crisis, I guess cancellation is impossible).

The two lowest-selling, uncancelled DCU books are All-New Atom and Blue Beetle (DC, please take note next time you assign the name of an unpopular character/brand to an unknown new character to launch a new series. See also the cancelled Firestorm and Aquaman: Sword of Atlantis), which are selling in the mid-teens. Would Countdown have to do that, or is the bar set much, much higher due to the amount of production stress a weekly causes the publisher?

Also worth noting is the fact that Countdown’s latest issue up there still outsold Green Lantern: Sinestro Corps Special by tens of thousands of units. I can’t think of anyone who likes Countdown, save an anonymous poster or three at Newsarama, and I can’t think of anyone who had anything harsh to say about Sinestro Corps beyond it’s not all that new reader friendly, and yet the former is outselling the latter. By a lot.



3.) And speaking of Countdown, check out incoming editor Mike Carlin’s interview with Newsarama’s Matt Brady on the latest issue.

I don’t envy Carlin; he seems to have been brought in to replace Mike Marts almost immediately, although the change was presented as Marts going on to take a better assignment. Brady graciously didn’t push on that at all.

But when Brady sought a little clarification on the wonky timeline of Countdown—events that took hours in “Lightning Saga” taking days in Coutndown, events that took days in Amazons Attack taking weeks in Coutndown, Batman being in three places simultaneously, and so on—Carlin got pretty defensive.

Here’s one:


“MC: It's on the news later in the issue... you really should give things some minute-to-minute time to unfold, no? This is an age old problem in a shared universe, though, why doesn't Superman intervene in every issue of Blue Beetle or Birds of Prey or everywhere in all titles...

“Sometimes when all is said and done, you can piece your year of all DC publications-- and figure a kinda place for everything...or you can just relax and enjoy the comic you're reading!”


And here’s another:


“MC: These stories will criss-cross and meld to the end... at least the threads that don't end suddenly-- and tragically! Here's a way to look at Countdown... it's not 52. 52 covered a lost year— 52 literal weeks. Countdown is several stories that play out in their own time... not a year's worth in the DCU.

“Nothing that happens in the DCU happens in real time... Lois & Clark have known each other for maybe 8 or 9 years in real time-- but they've celebrated twenty Christmas issues since 1986 alone!

“If you think about it too much you will die!”


I’m all for not thinking about things like the passage of time in the DCU as it relates to the passage of time in real life myself, but Carlin seems to miss the point, which pretty much everyone in the comments section makes over and over. Time in the DCU still has to occur sequentially, and events still have to happen in relation to one another.

It’s fine that Countdown, Amazons Attack, Teen Titans and Wonder Woman all deal with the Amazons attack on Washington D.C., and it’s fine that one is a weekly and the others are monthlies. But whatever rate the books are released, the events they chronicle have to match up. It’s the same attack they’re all addressing. Does it take a matter of days or weeks or months?

DC’s done weekly events before, from the Superman books during the “Triangle Years” to virtually every line-wide crossover they’ve ever done, and I’ve never before seen these sorts of problems creeping in. I honestly don’t understand how they’re even happening. It’s not like, “Well, few of our readers remember that one time that one thing happened in that one book, so we’ll contradict it,” but “We have no idea what happened in those other three books, and it looks like we’re contradicting it here—in this book which exists solely to match up all the books in our line to one big cohesive story.”

Also weird: Carlin seems really against editorial boxes, which is something The Brave and the Bold and Action Comics both used this very week, or any other alternative strategy to helping readers sort out when to read what. Marvel publishes checklists—there was one in the back of World War Hulk #2 this week—and during the run-up to Infinite Crisis and during the event itself, DC’s homepage featured a weekly column summarizing events that fed into the mega-story and what books they appeared in, making it easy (or easier, anyway) to follow along. Why not do this with Countdown/Amazons Attack/Sinestro Corps?

I’m afraid I already know the answer—DC’s not so sure of what’s going on when in their universe themselves, and trying to draw a roadmap for readers would only underscore that fact.


4.) I am extremely, perhaps unreasonably, excited about the news that Dynamite Entertainment, Alex Ross and Jim Krueger will be producing a series starring such Golden Age characters as the original Daredevil and The Green Lama.



These are characters I’ve been fascinated with for as long as I’ve been interested in comic books, and yet I’ve never read a single story featuring any of them. Daredevil, who’s apparently being renamed, would always get mentioned in Jack Cole bios, and the Green Lama was among those characters whose name and brief sketch in comic book histories, price guides and encyclopedias would intrigue the hell out of me.

Of course, part of this fascination no doubt extends from the fact that I haven’t been able to read any of their stories, so I don’t know how lame or derivative they might be.

Seeing the historic difficulties companies have had in reintroducing old superheroes to today’s consumers—DC’s inability to ever make their Fawcett, Quality and Charlton acquisitions really fly, and DC/WildStorm’s similar attempt to sell old British heroes in Albion and Thudnerbolt Jaxon makes me wonder if maybe the Direct Market isn’t even interested in superhero comics so much as a dozen or so particular superheroes, whom they already get their fill of.

Still, Alex Ross. If anyone can sell anything in the direct market, it’s Ross.

Finally, there’s the whole legal/public domain side of the project. Interesting that Dyanamite can do what they like with these characters, but not, say, Superman and Mickey Mouse, you know?



5.) Finally, speaking of Golden Age heroes I’ve always been fascinated by but never actually read any stories featuring, here are some others I’d love to read comics starring:


Pat Parker, War Nurse



Catman and Kitten



Green Giant

and, of course,


The Zebra





UPDATE: Well, that was fast! According to Comic Book Resources, Image is also doing a project revolving around Golden Age superhero comics. One of them is Speed Comics, which is where Pat Parker, War Nurse stories appeared. In fact, that looks an awful lot like War Nurse on this image from the upcoming Image series, doesn't it?

Nobody Likes Captain Marvel

Seriously. Women are literally lining up to kiss Superman, and poor Captain Marvel is just standing there in the middle of all these joyous reunions between heroes and their loved ones, his arms folded, trying to look aloof, but you know he's hurting on the inside.

My second favorite part of this panel?
Jean Loring snuggling her tiny little lover Ray Palmer to her face. They sure make a cute couple. I wonder whatever happened to those crazy kids?