Well, what do you know...

DC Comics and Archie Comics—and, more precisely, Dan Jurgens, Ron Marz, Tom King, Dan Parent and about eight other creators—got me to set foot inside a comic shop for the first time in...I don't remember how long...? Probably the early days of Sophie Campbell's Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles run, when I was still struggling to read it monthly, and constantly butting up against the vagaries of direct market and local comic shop ordering and shipping problems. 

How did they manage it? An appeal to nostalgia was certainly a factor, as Zero Hour 30th Anniversary Special #1 paired creators and characters from what might be my favorite decade of the publisher's output for an 80-page tie-in to a favorite crossover story from my youth.  

But, more important than even that, I think, is the fact that, in these two instances at least, the publishers decided to publish individual, standalone comic books, rather than miniseries or series that a consumer could be quite confident would eventually end up in trade collections, which has now become my favorite way to consume comics (In part because it's easier and cheaper, and, in even larger part, because I just have way too many damn comic books in way too many damn long boxes, and I need not add any more to the fantastic comic book midden that is now actively factoring into life choices I make.).

In other words, I had to buy these comic books, as they were sold, rather than waiting for trades to buy or borrow from the library, as, in both cases, they did not seem like they would ever be collected (The former is an 80-page giant, and is practically already a trade, with a spine of its own, while the latter is a simple 20-page gag strip, apparently created so the writer, an Archie fan, could add an Archie comic to his bibliography). (Contrast these with two one-shot specials from IDW Publishing I was extremely excited about, the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles 40th Anniversary Comics Collection and Godzilla's 70th Anniversary, both of which had solicitations for deluxe versions listed on Amazon before the direct market books were even released in comics shops). 

Should comics publishers do this sort of thing more often, then...? I mean, personally, I hope they don't (see that bit about my not wanting to buy any more new comic books to add to my already too-big collection), but I thought it worth observing that one way a publisher could sell more comic books is to focus on publishing comic books rather than chapters for future collections of comics...at least now and then, anyway.

As to what I thought of these comics, I'll have a review of one in my next monthly(-ish) review column on the 6th of the month, and the other will likely appear at Good Comics for Kids in the near-ish future. Can you guess which is which?

Review: Superman and The Justice League of America Vol. 2

As I had previously noted, packaging writer/artist Dan Jurgens' brief 18-ish issue 1992-1993 run on the era's main Justice League book as "Superman and Justice League America" made a lot of sense if you're trying to sell these comics in trade form in 2016...at least until you get to volume two, as Superman dies in the first of the monthly issues collected here (his Justice League encounters Doomsday before Superman does), is mourned in the next one and then is completely absent for the rest of the run.

I was a little surprised by the actual contents of this collection though, as it opens not with Justice League America #66 (the League vs. Doomsday issue that tied into the "Death of Superman" storyline in the Superman books of the time), but with Justice League America Annual #6. That gives us another 58-pages of the Justice League America comics featuring a still-living Superman.

That annual is from the "Eclipso: The Darkness Within" crossover event storyline that ran through all of DC's annuals that year. As with similar events of the time, the relevance of each tie-in varied considerably from instance to instance, but this one is a great deal more relevant than, say, any of the Batman-related ones.

Jurgens is merely credited with "Dark Design," which I suppose could mean either plotting, or lay-outs or both, although it doesn't look like he designed the pages themselves. Dan Mishkin writes, while Dave Cockrum pencils and Jose Marzan Jr. inks. Dr. Bruce Gordon and a few other heroes join Superman and the League at their headquarters–including Wonder Woman and Metamorpho–as they strategize about the threat of Eclipso. This is relatively early in the villain's attack, but he manages to possess Maxima and send her to Nevada to cause destruction on a scale that draws the League there, while he himself stalks and battles Blue Beetle throughout the team's headquarters. In the end, his plan is only advanced a step or so, as he gets another "eclipsed" soldier for his army, but it's pretty remarkable how much action the longer page-count offers. These days, an annual is generally only slightly longer than a regular issues, maybe twice as long if you're lucky, but this is just shy of three times the length of an ordinary issue, allowing the scenes to be drawn out much longer. You sure got a lot more punching and blasting back in the day!

Of course, there's no real resolution to the story, as this was just one of the 20 parts of the storyline, and the collection jumps ahead to JLA #66 from there. I personally missed this annual the first time around, as I was a teenager with little money to waste on comics, cheap as they were, back in 1992. Looking now, I see that I've actually only read about a half-dozen of the 20 discrete chapters of the story. It was designed so one need only read the first and last chapters Eclipso: The Darkness Within #1 and #2, with few of the issues in-between being all that relevant, but there sure was some cool stuff in there, as when pretty much all of the un-eclipsed heroes had to fight an eclipsed Superman. I wouldn't mind reading a collection of this entire storyline, but like similar annual events Armageddon 2001 and Bloodlines, collecting it into trade would prove challenging, based on its size alone.

The next issue is also one that occurs mid-storyline. Doomsday takes on Guy Gardner, Booster Gold, Blue Beetle, Bloodwynd, Maxima, Fire and Ice and has pretty much torn them apart by the time Superman arrives on the last page. And that's that issue (Spoiler alert: Superman and Doomsday kill one another in a brawl that continues all the way into downtown Metropolis. They both get better and come back to life about a year later though).

And then it's time for the "Funeral for a Friend" tie-in issue, where the superhero community convenes at New York City's JLA HQ to mourn Superman, and Oberon passes out the black arm-bands with the S-shield on them. From here on, the collection tells a cohesive ongoing story...albeit a rather rocky one that must have seemed entirely unexpected at the start of Jurgens' run.

In the "Funeral for a Friend" issue, the League takes stock after their battle with Doomsday: Fire is powerless, Ice decides to quit, Booster Gold's costume was destroyed rendering him powerless and Blue Beetle is still in a coma. These characters are still the focus of the issue, but Jurgens lavishes attention on the many guest-stars, each of whom get a few lines about Superman and/or death, and each of whom is introduced in a dramatic action pose. Reading it now, it's actually a bit of a surprise that DC resisted the temptation to just launch a new team of their biggest heroes right then and there. With Superman dead, there was certainly an in-story rationale and motivation for the "old" Justice Leaguers, who the publisher was for whatever reasons resistant to use more than one or two of at a time on a League roster, to form a new, all-star League of the sort we wouldn't get into Grant Morrison, Howard Porter and John Dell's JLA.

The first to arrive? The Flash, Aquaman, Batman and Robin, Green Lantern and Hawkman–that's six right there. They are followed immediately by Starfire and Nightwing, then Green Lantern Alan Scott, The Flash Jay Garrick, Power Girl, Elongated Man, Wonder Woman, Green Arrow and Black Canary.

The actual make-up of the League that follows the Doomsday-damaged one is a little more interesting, and they are formed by the end of the next issue: Maxima, Guy Gardner and Bloodwynd are joined by new recruits Agent Liberty, The Ray, Black Condor and new leader Wonder Woman. They...don't last long. At that point, there are only two story arcs left in Jurgens' run: The fairly epic five-part "Destiny's Hand," and then a two-parter finally resolving the issue of Bloodwynd.

With "Destiny's Hand," Jurgens at least gets to use many of the classic Justice Leaguers that merely cameo-ed in the "Funeral" issue. Classic Justice League villain Doctor Destiny returns, and essentially merges a nightmare version of a fascist, world-ruling, near-future version of the Satellite Era Justice League, with the "real world" of the real Justice League.

And so Jurgens' League finds itself up against evil versions of The Flash (in black!), Hawkman, Martian Manhunter, Green Lantern Hal Jordan, Firestorm, Green Arrow, Black Canary and The Atom. It's a precursor of sorts to the "Justice Lords" episodes of Justice League Unlimited and the video game/comics of Injustice: Gods Among Us, which gives Jurgens the opportunity to draw the Satellite Era league, his League, some classic villains and bring his apparent favorite character The Atom Ray Palmer into the pages of his Justice League America.

The ending of this book, and thus of Jurgens' run, seems pretty abrupt, and some of the characters introduced seem to have barely been there at all. Agent Liberty, for example, has few lines after he's officially recruited to the team. Looking ahead, this was the start of a pretty chaotic period for the franchise. Dan Vado takes over as writer for a little bit, adding a few characters to the extant line-up (Captain Atom and Garrick), then there's the controversial "Judgement Day" crossover story with the other Justice League titles of the day, the "Zero Hour" crossover that introduced Triumph and, finally, Gerard Jones takes over for an almost-two-year run that brings the series to its conclusion, making way for the previously mentioned Morrison, Porter and Dell JLA.

I will be curious to see if what follows gets collected at all and, if so, how (Maybe as Wonder Woman and The Justice League of America...?). The "Judgement Day" and "Zero Hour" are easily collectible as standalone trades (the former can have Mark Waid's name splashed across it, the latter, which is a three-part story and might need paired with other material, can have Christopher Priest and Phil Jimenez's names highlighted), but given that the Vado and Jones runs aren't terribly well remembered as anything other than the stuff between the Giffen/Jones JLI era and the Morrison JLA era, demand is probably limited only to committed fans like me who would rather own trades that back-issues at this point.

They are still a lot better than a bunch of other Justice League comics that have been collected though! Like, almost everything since Identity Crisis, maybe...?

Review: Dark Horse Comics/DC Comics: Superman

This 400-page collection is the latest big, fat, book of crossovers between DC characters and those owned or licensed to Dark Horse Comics. I can't quite figure out how they are organized. For example, this collection includes two Superman/Aliens crossovers, which seem like they could have just as easily appeared in the previously published DC Comics/Dark Horse Comics: Aliens (which did include the Superman/Batman/Aliens/Predator crossover), and the upcoming DC Comics/Dark Horse Comics: Justice League will include two Superman stories. I imagine it has something to do with which publisher technically publishes which collection–note the way the order of which publisher is named varies from book to book–but regardless of the behind-the-scenes organizing principal, these books include a bunch of harder-to-find-then-I'd like crossovers of the past couple decades, many of them quite good comics.

This particular volume features comics from 1995-2002, three of which are in Superman continuity (or in continuity as it existed at the time), with the fourth and final one being an Elseworlds story. Let's take them one at a time, shall we...?

Superman/Aliens by Dan Jurgens, Kevin Nowlan, Gregory Wright and Android Images

This three-issue, 1995 miniseries is among the best of the DC/Dark Horse crossovers, and one of the better inter-publisher crossovers I've ever read. Much of that is due to the skill that went into crafting it, but more still is due to the amount of care that writer/artist Dan Jurgens put into the book.

The Aliens, like the Predators, have become such frequent participants in crossovers due to their extreme flexibility–they're basically just cool monsters to fight–that such comics can often read as extremely lazy. Jurgens, however, brings a real sense of occasion to this story.

He manages to make the story almost as much of an Aliens story as it is a Superman story, and while the superhero is the protagonist of the story, Jurgens carefully sets it up in such a way that the Aliens and their horrifying life-cycle aren't just backdrops to a Superman beat 'em up. Rather, he evokes the sort of lonely setting and the horror/suspense mood that are so prominent in the film franchise, and even uses the single, female protagonist that powered the earlier films...although here she is, of course, teamed-up with Superman.

More remarkably still, not only does Jurgens handicap Superman in such a way that the Aliens pose a real threat to him–most of the story is spent far from Earth, so his solar-based powers are waning like a dying battery throughout, and he must struggle with his refusal to take a life, even the lives of the Aliens–but he instills about as real a sense of danger that can exist in a Superman comic.

At no point did I think Superman was going to die in this comic, but when the near-powerless Superman has an Alien implanted in his no-longer invulnerable chest cavity, I did find myself wondering how exactly he was going to survive (My guess, that he would plunge himself into the sun, burning out the embryo while restoring his own powers, as soon as he returned to the solar system, turned out to be wrong; the reality was much grosser).

Oh, and Jurgens sets this story firmly within Superman's post-Crisis, pre-Flashpoint continuity–inter-company crossover or no, this is canon guys–reflecting not only the status quo of the Super-books circa 1995, but also referencing a handful of previous stories from this continuity. Most of these aren't terribly important, although they are referred to in dialogue and asterisked editorial box, but one does play a big role: Superman's early career execution of the pocket universe Kryptonians, as that was when he swore never to kill again, an oath frequently tested by the Aliens (His first fight with a single Alien is actually kind of funny, as he keeps trying to communicate with it while it tries eating his face.)

Reporters Lois Lane and Clark Kent are covering LexCorp's space-division as they recover an alien probe and take it to their orbiting space-station. It's a distress pod of some kind, asking for help, and Superman recognizes the language it's using as Kryptonian. He insists that he and he alone find and help the people who sent it, with the help of LexCorp, who provides him with the space ship to do it in.

The destination? Argo City, a domed city in deep space (far from a yellow sun) and peopled with too-few Kryptonian-speaking humanoids. Superman loads some injured, unconscious residents into his ship and sends it back to the station, asking them to send it back for him (as otherwise he would be stranded here). Sure, his powers are slowly starting to wane, but how dangerous can the place be...?

Pretty dangerous, it turns out, as its swarming with Aliens, and, worse still, the unconscious people he sent back to the space station, where Lois is, are of course harboring gestating Aliens in their chests. At the end of the first issue, Jurgens provides a pretty big shock for his readers at the time: The blonde teenage girl who speaks Kryptonian and is fighting for her survival on Argo City tells Superman that her name is...wait for it...Kara.

That would have been a pretty big deal in 1995, as that would make her the only other survivor of Krypton in the post-Crisis continuity, it would also make her a new version of the original (read: real) Supergirl. The one in DC Comics at the time was the weird sentient protoplasm from a pocket universe one whose back-story just got more and more confusing until DC just let Jeph Loeb restart Supergirl's origin in Superman/Batman a decade or so after this saw publication).

As the series progresses, we learn whether or not this Kara is the Kara, but, more importantly from the stand-point of making a good Superman/Aliens crossover, Jurgens has effectively split the action into two settings, both evocative of the first two Aliens movies. On the space station, the hatched and escaped Aliens stalk Lois, LexCorp's Dr. Kimble and the rest of the much more expendable cast, while on Argo City, Superman gradually loses all of his powers and must face a series of blows to his confidence and optimism: That he can't just punch out the millions of Aliens, that he sent a ship-full of them towards a space station containing Lois and orbiting Earth, that no ship is coming to retrieve him and, ultimately, that he and Kara both have Aliens gestating in their chests.

As unlikely a pairing as the two multi-media franchises may be–seriously, pause and compare the films Superman and Superman II to Alien and Aliens in your mind for a moment–Jurgens makes them fit naturally, and manages to deliver a story that honors the attributes of Aliens while cutting to the core of what makes Superman such a great, aspirational, noble and heroic character.

You know what else is an unlikely pairing? Jurgens and Kevin Nowlan. Jurgens pencils the book, while Nolan inks it, but based on the results, it looks like Jurgens provided fairly full lay-outs and Nowlan finished them. It's a great collaboration, as it looks at once like the art of Jurgens and the art of Nowlan, two very distinctive, very prolific artists whose work is easily recognizable at a glance.

There are therefore a lot of the familiar lay-outs and heroic poses of Jurgens' Superman comics–having drawn Superman as long as he has, Jurgens' work often suggests the "real" Superman in the way that, say, long-time Batman artist the late Jim Aparo's Batman poses and expressions often seem genuine in a way that those of other artists don't–but here the art is all more detailed and smoother, with thicker, bolder black lines.

I enjoy the work of current Superman artists Doug Mahnke and Patrick Gleason, but honestly, I can't remember the last time I read a Superman comic where I enjoyed the artwork this much.

(I suppose it's also worth mentioning how odd it is to read this story after reading Geoff Johns and Jim Lee's first story arc of Justice League in 2011 and early 2012, the story in which Superman and his League allies so cavalierly kill Parademons without a second thought. This story is a good illustration of why that was so strange to see. Here Superman tries to communicate with an Alien before even striking it, and resolutely refuses to pick up a gun and destroy one even at his most hopeless, because a life is still a life. In Justice League, he was tearing apart Parademons that were, until recently, normal human beings, without even stopping to consider what they were.)

Superman/Aliens II: God War by Chuck Dixon, Jon Bogdanove, Kevin Nowlan and Dave Stewart

As is so often–too often–the case, the sequel is not nearly as good as the original. This 2002 miniseries, which retains only inker Kevin Nowlan from the first Superman/Aliens crossover, is as much a New Gods comic as it is a Superman or Aliens comic...in fact, Superman and the Aliens both seem like guest-stars in a New Gods comic.

Writer Chuck Dixon has Superman visiting New Genesis, just sort of hanging out with other humanoid super-aliens who can fly and are invulnerable and dress as colorfully as he does, when Darkseid launches a horrible attack. Having discovered the Aliens, Jack Kirby's god of evil impregnates a battalion of his warriors and sends them to attack New Genesis, essentially using them as trojan horses carrying the real weapon, the Aliens themselves.

During the course of the battle, which includes Lightray, Barda and Forager but no Mister Miracle, Orion gets an Alien implanted in his chest. Knowing his time is limited, he decided to go straight for Apokolips, with Superman tagging along. Meanwhile, Barda and her forces try to stave off the invasion of the Aliens that Darkseid rained down on them.

It is, in other words, everything the original Superman/Aliens was not. Here the Aliens are just cool-looking, dramatic monsters appearing in a Superman beat 'em up, but Superman is only one of several heroes doing the beating. If one wonders how Orion survived, I'll spoil it for you, although it should be noted that he should be invulnerable enough to survive in a manner more similar to that of Superman in the original. Basically, Darkseid shows mercy on his son, and uses the Omega beams to destroy the growing Alien. His long-term plan, he explains to lackeys like Desaad, is to instill a sense of indebtedness to his biological son, so that Orion may someday side with him over Highfather.

And, in the stinger ending, if not, well, Darkseid still has a hidden vault full of warriors with face-huggers on them, apparently in stasis to pull out when needed.

The only real pleasure I took in this particular story was the art. I like both Jon Bogdanove, a one-time constant presence on the Superman family of books, and Kevin Nowlan alot, although their styles seem even further apart from that of Jurgens and Nowlan.

Weirdly but understandably, Bogdanove seems to have attempted to town down the Bogdanovicity of his pencil work in an attempt to draw more Kirby-esque, and Nowlan followed his lead. The results are...weird. The New Gods characters all look extremely Kirby-esque, with some panels looking like Kirby himself drw them. Superman is a strange mixture of the thick-torsoed Silver Age Superman with flashes of a primal, angry Kirby face and Bogdanove's normal Man of Steel, and the Aliens look like, well, Aliens.

Dixon's Superman was so changed by his first meeting with these creatures, that he doesn't have any of the moral compunctions about seeing them exterminated that he originally had, and, even if he did, he spends much of the time fighting either alongside Barda or Orion, so it's not like it matters; he's not about to fight Orion to the death to stop the dying New God from turning massive Alien hives into pools of acidic blood.

Other than picking apart the various influences and letting one's eyes surf along the curious braiding of various art styles, there is still some pleasure to be had in the artwork. Dixon and company provide a few interesting images, particularly the scene that follows the mass-birthing of the Aliens from Darkseid's invasion troops, where we see a panel in which the just-born, snake-form of the baby Aliens cover the ground like a carpet.

It's a disappointing read, but then, it hardly matters in this particular collection, as it is but one of four stories, and it is sandwiched between two such great ones.

The Superman/Madman Hullabaloo by Mike Allred and Laura Allred

The second Aliens crossover is followed by Madman creator Mike Allred's three-issue, 1997 miniseries in which his signature creation meets the original and greatest superhero.

Allred was one of the greatest superhero comics artists of the time, and he remains as such–if anything, he's gotten better. His style is the sort that no longer seems as sought after by the Big Two as perhaps it should, but he he has a great line, and produces work that is clean, simple, just-flat-enough and classic-looking...more timeless than nostalgic. When I close my eyes and imagine "comic book art," its Allred's style that immediately springs to mind.

While the artist has long since done a great deal of work for both DC and Marvel, this was a rare and early example of Allred drawing non-Madman, non-Allred creations, and it is pretty glorious.

The plot finds Superman and Madman both aiding their respective bearded scientist friends in researching some weird energy at the same time, the result being a sort of cosmic collision in which they pass through one another and then materialize in one another's dimension.

Superman is in Madman's body, with an amalgamated costume (Allred is one of the great costume designers, and would have been up their with Alex Ross and Darwyn Cooke if I were Dan DiDio and I was trying to decide which artist to let redesign the whole DC Universe for The New 52; DiDio, obviously, went with Jim Lee instead), lands in Snap City. Madman, in Superman's considerably handsomer and more powerful body, lands in Metropolis, also with an amalgamated costume (here somewhat resembling a leather jacket-less '90s Superboy, but with more prominent yellow, and a strip of Madman-mask, so we'd recognize him).

While messing around on one another's Earth and meeting one another's supporting cast (Lois Lane and Professor Hamilton both get pretty big roles, while pretty much everyone from the Madman comics of the time show up), they figure out what's going on and how to fix it. Meanwhile, the collision dispersed bits of Superman's powers throughout both universes, so once restored the pair and their pals must track down individuals exhibiting super-strength and suck those powers out of them with a mad science device.

The root of all this madness? Mr. Mxyzptlk (Here pronounced "Mix-Yez-Pittle-Ick" rather than "Mix-Yez-Spit-Lick," as it was pronounced by Gilbert Gottfried on Superman: The Animated Series, which is how I've been pronouncing it since.)

While technically "in continuity," Allred's Superman and Lois are perfectly classic in their look and characterization, so that with only minor alterations to their clothing they could be Bronze Age, Silver Age or maybe even Golden Age Superman and Lois, or from various media. It's amazing what a good handle Allred had on the characters' essence, and the way he's able to boil them down so perfectly.

There's a neat scene where Madman asks Superman about God, and even a bit of a moral as Mxyzptlk challenges Madman to a magic-free challenge that can only be won physically. It's...well, it's pretty great.

The comic ends with a "The End?!" a gag referring to Dr. Flem's use of Madman as a sort of living crash-test dummy, but it's actually kind of disappointing that it did indeed turn out to be the end. At least we've since gotten to see Allred draw much of the DC Universe in his issue of Solo, and Metamorpho in the pages of Wednesday Comics and so many characters from the original Batman TV show on the covers of Batman '66 and...

Superman/Tarzan: Sons of The Jungle by Chuck Dixon, Carlos Meglia and Dave Stewart

The 2001 three-part miniseries Superman/Tarzan: Sons of The Jungle adhered to the popular (to the point of default) formula for Superman Elseworlds stories of the time: What if the rocket that carried baby Superman from the exploding Krypton to the planet Earth landed in some other place or some other time? Here the rocket crashes not only in late 19th Century Africa, but into the pages of Edgar Rice Burroughs' Tarzan origin story.

So just as the mutineers were about to strand Lord Greystoke and his pregnant wife Alice on the coast, they see a fireball from the sky and take it as a sign not to do so, instead taking them to the next port. The fireball was, of course, Superman's baby rocket. And so it is Kal-El rather than Tarzan who is discovered, adopted and raised by the apes, while the-man-who-would-have-been-Tarzan is born in English society, although he becomes a mopey, Byronic figure, aware that something's wrong, that he's not where he's supposed to be, and so he travels the world in a funk, looking for his place.

The characters' stories are too powerful to be altered for long, however, and the original Superman and Tarzan narratives gradually but inexorably reassert themselves. When Greystoke joins a aerial zeppelin expedition of the ruins of a lost city in Africa, an expedition covered by Lois Lane of the Daily Planet and her assistant Jane Porter,
they are shot down by Princess La and her people.

Superman, decked out in a leopard-skin loincloth with a red "S" drawn on his bare chest, comes to the aid of the white-skinned people who fell from the sky. Along the way, Lois falls for this powerful man of action, while Lord Greystoke and Porter ultimately decide to stay behind in Africa, Greystoke finally having found what he was missing there.

So, at the end, Superman becomes Superman (albeit a bit earlier than usual, and thus the costue he wears for a single panel at the end in Metropolis looks much more Flash Gordon than superehro, and Tarzan becomes Tarzan.

Of particular interest is a prose piece entitled "Sons of the Jungle?" written by Robert R. Barrett, identified as "Edgar Rice Burroughs archivist." He recounts the relationships between the two heroes who would eventually both become stars of prose stories, comic strips, comic books, film and television animation, highlighting Superman co-creator and writer Jerry Siegel's overture to Edgar Rice Burroughs in 1934, which included a treatment for a John Carter of Mars adaptation in "cartoon-form," to run alongside the Tarzan Sunday strips. Burroughs, as per policy, never even read the letter. Barrett also address Burroughs' reaction about bringing Tarzan from his jungle setting to the modern, civilized , urban world, which would of course have made him into more of a Superman-like figure, to which Burroughs objected, saying that if Tarzan could not "out-superman Superman...he might suffer by comparison."

As interesting as all this is, I particularly like the paragraph devoted to this comic book series, in which he says that Dixon's "quite...entertaining" story is "interestingly illustrated by the team of Carlos Meglia and Dave Stewart."

"Interesting" is certainly one way to refer to Meglia's art, which is unlike any generally applied to either Superman or Tarzan. Highly cartoony and animated, to the point that the static characters sometimes appear to lurch or launch across the panels, Meglia's arwork is exaggerated as it can be while still being readable. I like it–although I'm not so sure about his obsession with drawing individual strands of hair on a man's arm or chin–but it's certainly not what I would have thought to apply to a crossover of these two characters. I can't help but imagine what a Superman/Tarzan comic drawn by the likes of Joe Kubert circa 2001 might have looked like, for example.

Review: Superman and Justice League of America Vol. 1

I used to have a great deal of sympathy for Dan Jurgens, who took over DC's Justice League franchise–or at least half of it–after Keith Giffen and J. M. DeMatteis' five-year run as its writers. Not only was their run perhaps the most distinct in the history of Justice League comics, but it proved extremely popular for quite a long time, and they expanded the brand into a multi-book franchise, as Justice League International became Justice League America and Justice League Europe (both of which they wrote), and then there were the annuals and even a quarterly. Not only were they going to be a hard act to follow, but Jurgens had the even more unenviable task of following them after their massive 15-part finale "Breakdowns," which revisited and wrapped up just about every aspect of their run. It was pretty much a textbook example of a run.

In 2016, I feel all the more sympathetic for Jurgens, as his run was soon followed by that of Grant Morrison, who completely redefined the Justice League (and DC super-team comics), for years to come. While Jurgens wasn't the only whose run happened to fall between two of the best (and best-loved) runs on a Justice League comic–Dan Vado, Gerard Jones, Christopher Priest Mark Waidand a few others would follow Jurgens on Justice League America, Justice League International, Justice League Task Force and (sigh) Extreme Justice in the years after the Giffen/DeMatteis run but before the Morrison one, he was the first and definitely most prominent. And he is the first of those writers from the tumultuous years between to have his run finally collected into trade paperback, with Superman and Justice League America Vol. 1.*

So, how does it hold up? Well, clearly DC wasn't taking any chances, then or now. They allowed Jurgens to add Superman to the team, and they're titling this series of collections Superman and Justice League America. That might be in order to differentiate it from the other collections of that decade's Justice League comics, collected under the titles Justice League International (the Giffen/DeMatteis run) and JLA (the Morrison run), but more likely is simply meant to advertise Superman's presence and move books (I do like that new hybrid logo).

The collection begins with 1992's Justice League Spectacular #1, a 48-page special by Jurgens, "Gerry" Jones, Ron Randall, Rick Burchett and Randy Elliot that shows the origin of the two new Justice League squads. A bunch of diplomats are visit Disney World analogue Funny Stuff Park, and The Elongated Man and Sue Dibny are along for security. When they are all taken hostage by the new Royal Flush Gang, the remnants of the disbanded JLI–Blue Beetle, Booster Gold, Fire, Ice, Green Lantern Guy Gardner, Power Girl and Metamorpho–try to affect a rescue, but are all felled by the surprisingly effective arsenal of the Gang.

Superman is about to fly down to Florida, only to find Batman lurking atop the Daily Planet building (the first of several oddly daylight appearances by Batman in this volume). Superman says that "With the Justice League disbanded I'm next in line to take on The Royal Flush Gang," which I found amusing, the idea that the superheroes have their own little mental charts about which characters fights which villains, and even a descending order of who should fight said villains if the first choice is unavailable.

Batman is there to try and sell Superman on the idea of not only joining the League, but leading it, and Superman refuses, telling Batman he works better alone, another pretty amusing scene, as we get to see the Dark Knight arguing the virtue of teamwork to Superman (ironically, the "loner" Batman has always worked with partners, and, at this point in post-Crisis, pre-Flashpoint DC history, was much more involved with the Justice League than Superman ever was), and we get to hear some of Superman's super-arrogant thoughts ("I understand Batman's point, but a group would slow me down! How would some of those nonpowered heroes keep up with me?").

Superman doesn't fare much better than the old ex-Leaguers did, and so Ice uses an unconscious Guy's GL ring to try and call for help. Hal Jordan receives her signal, and picks up a rather a random assortment of heroes–The Flash Wally West, Aquaman, Doctor Light and Crimson Fox–before joining the battle.

By page 48, the day is saved, and the characters all agree that there should be a new Justice League, two in fact. Who ends up on which team is determined by a splash page; Superman ends up leading the team that keeps the core of the JLA. Two new characters would join in short order, the Jurgens-created Maxima (from his work on the Superman comics) and the brand-new Bloodwynd, a mysterious sorcerer with one of the most '90s of superhero names and horribly over-accessorized costume (the colors are bold and striking, and the costume might not be so bad were it not for the goofy spandex non-mask that covers much of his head except his face, but then he's got all this jewelry, including a golden, gem-encrusted band around his thigh, for some reason).

Jurgens, perhaps under the influence of Jones in the first chapter, is seems to be hewing rather closely to what came before, not only in terms of the Justice League America cast–which includes Max Lord and Oberon, so that Superman is the only new official addition until a few issues in–but also in the book's tone. Jurgens and Jones aren't as good at the sitcom pitter-patter between characters, but some effort is made to make the characters and their interactions funny (most effectively, perhaps, when Blue Beetle and Booster Gold get in a fight, and Beetle offers a list of long, elaborate mean names, each of which Booster responds to simply with "Jerk!").

Structurally, these first few issues are full of call-backs to the early issues of the Giffen/DeMatteis team, with Lord trying to manufacture an international incident to force the Justice League back together, the involvement of the Royal Flush Gang (who Booster Gold fought upon joining the League for the first time) and a direct homage to the opening of the Giffen/DeMatteis run on the first page of Jurgens' first issue of Justice League America (Guy sitting at a meeting table, with his foot on the table, thinking about how he's going to lead the new team).

Aside from his new additions, Jurgens doesn't mess with any of the characters who were in the book before he arrived too drastically. Fire tries out a few new costumes and Guy's three-issue miniseries that gives him his first post-GL costume and Sinestro's ring occurs off-panel during these issues, but for the most part the characters only get one additional concern or characteristic a piece–Ice is infatuated with Superman, Blue Beetle is suspicious of Bloodwynd, etc. It's not until Vado and other writers take over the various League books that these poor bastards start really feeling the effects of the the prevalent trends of 1990s super-comics, with Booster getting dark and a dumb new costume, Ice going bad and dying and so on. At least in these earliest issues of Jurgens' time on the book–#61-68, so a volume two might be able to finish off his run with #69-#78–the book is pretty carefully calibrated to give a slightly more Jurgens-ized version of what came before.

The writer/artist–Rick Burchett and a few others handle the "finishes" of Jurgens art–also has a great interest in wider Justice League history, finding ways to fit elements of it in wherever he can, and establishing this post-Crisis League as the inheritors, worthy or not, of the original League.

So the very first villain they face is a new version of Gardner Fox and Mike Sekowsky's Weapons Master (who fought the nascent League in a pre-Justice League of America issue of The Brave and the Bold in 1960), and the cover of his first issue of JLA is an homage to 1960's Justice League of America.

Their next major opponent is Starslayer, who directly references his past encounter with the original League, and The Atom Ray Palmer shows up for a few issues, considering joining the Justice League, but ultimately being chased away by Guy (You might try Justice League Europe, Ray; your former colleagues Hal, Arthur and Ralph are all on that Team).

This is Jurgens at perhaps the height of his popularity–the next few issues of the series will feature the League fighting Doomsday and mourning the loss of Superman–and his art is a rather strong selling point. Jurgens' figure work is strong, and he does a particularly fine job on Batman, in whose two appearances, as well as Beetle, who is usually posed in Spider-Man-esque, bug-like postures, and Guy, who he gives a sharp, mean face that conveys the fairly one-dimensional take on the character given here. The women are mostly interchangeable save for their hair and clothes (and Maxima is a head taller than everyone else).

I'm glad DC finally collected these comics, and I sincerely hope they finish off Jurgens' run in a volume 2 and/or 3 (Not sure if they will collect the 1992 annual, part of that summer's "Eclipso: The Darkness Within" crossover, as all Jurgens provided was the cover), although as the series progresses, Superman and Justice League America will seem a less and less apt title.

As I said, the next two issues feature the League fighting (and failing to stop) Doomsday while the eventual killer of Superman rampages towards Metropolis and then this badly hurt League mourning Superman. Then there's an issue introducing a new team to take over while these guys recover–Wonder Woman! Black Condor II! The Ray II! Agent Liberty!. And then Superman is out for the rest of the run, which features the "Destiny's Hand" arc (the League vs. an evil version of the Satellite Era League) and the two-part origin/explanation of Bloodwynd, which you've likely already heard spoiled, whether you read it or not. So Superman and Justice League America Vol. 2 is going to be very light on the Superman, and heavy on the Justice League America.



*But hopefully not the last! Jurgen's JLA was maybe the more important of the two, but the Gerard Jones-written Justice League Europe, which was being published simultaneously, was the better of them. I would hope that Christopher Priest and Mark Waid's run on Justice League Task Force gets considered at some point. After about a year or so as a sort of anthology book with a rotating cast and rotating writers, Waid and Priest stabilized the book to feature a regular cast telling a single, often quite good ongoing storyline. The premise, Martian Manhunter training young heroes The Ray, Gypsy and Mystek, plus Triumph and L-Ron-in-Despero's boy (don't ask), somewhat pre-figured that of the Young Justice TV show (at least broadly).

DC's May 2014 in dismemberments

Dystopian Future Captain Cold (drawn by Ethan Van Sciver) and Dystopian Future Batman (Jesus Merino and Dan Green), The New 52: Futures End FCBD Special Edition #0, May 3rd

Hawkman (Mike McKone), Justice League United #1, May 14th

Power Ring (Doug Mahnke and Scott Hanna), Justice League #30, May 21st

A polar bear (Dan Jurgens and Mark Irwin), The New 52: Futures End #3, May 21st

Frankenstein (Aaron Lopresti and Art Thibert), The New 52: Futures End #4, May 28th

Swamp Thing (Paul Pelletier and Sean Parsons), Aquaman #31, May 28th

Hey, wait a second! If this is The Creeper...

...then who is the yellow-skinned, green-haired guy with the creepy red shawl and boots in this splash page from September 2011's Justice League International #1...?

Review: Justice League International Vol. 1: The Signal Men

Let's have a quick review of the history of Justice League International before discussing JLI Vol. 1: The Signal Men, the trade paperback collecting the first six issues of the new "New 52" JLI title.

"Justice League International" was the name adopted by the Justice League in very early on in writer Keith Giffen and J.M. DeMatteis' post-Crisis On Infinite Earth revamp of the team, in which they transformed a group of DC's B- and C-List cast (plus Batman) into a popular run of multiple titles, one that lasted a good five years before the pair left and other writers, like Dan Jurgens came aboard. This era of the League, which prominently featured characters like Booster Gold, Fire and Ice and Guy Gardner, lasted up until Grant Morrison, Howard Porter and John Dell's JLA launched in 1997.

Many of the characters bounced around, rarely used, until about 2005 or so, when Blue Beetle, Max Lord and Booster Gold became prominent players in the DC Universe's melodrama in event stories like Infinite Crisis and 52 and their many tie-ins and spin-offs. Guy Gardner and Booster Gold ultimately fared best, with the former becoming a player in Geoff Johns' Green Lantern franchise and the latter getting his own monthly book for the first time since the 1980s.

In 2010, DC launched a year-long bi-weekly series entitled Justice League: Generation Lost that re-teamed many of the JLI characters—Booster, Fire, Ice, Captain Atom and legacy versions of Blue Beetle and Rocket Red—and set them in opposition to their friend-gone-bad Max Lord. When the series reached its conclusion, it did so with a promise of an ongoing JLI book, and the groundwork was certainly carefully and thoroughly laid for one: You don't get a much bigger prologue than a 26-issue one.

The title, like a few other projects announced around the time, didn't appear immediately (Think of the long-promised but mysteriously delayed Batwoman ongoing, or the Tomasi/Gleason run on Batman and Robin, or the long-rumored James Robinson-written Justice Society title). Once DC announced it's "New 52" initiative, it became clear what the hold-up was: Sometime after someone decided to launch a JLI ongoing spinning-out of Generation Lost, someone else decided to reboot the entire line of comics, and it made more sense to hold off on a JLI book until it could be launched along with 51 other books as part of "The New 52."

And thus in September 2011, Justice League International #1 saw print, with writer Dan Jurgens and pencil artist Aaron Lopresti attached.

Of all the New 52 titles I've sampled so far, this one seems the most confused in terms of its mission statement. Six of the nine characters were prominent ones in the late-80s/early-90s iteration of the League and Jurgens created and wrote and drew Booster Gold in 1986, and returned to the character in a 2007-2011 series. Jurgens also wrote and drew much of this cast during an early '90s run on Justice League.

If the goal was a fresh new take on the character and/or concept in order to attract and sustain attention and the new readers that attention would hopefully bring, Jurgens was an odd choice for this particular book. (That said, popular creators of the 1990s seemed a popular place for DC's New 52-involved editors to seek talent, as the presence of Scott Lobdell, Rob Liefeld, Fabian Nicieza and Ron Marz indicated—hey, at least two of those dudes are no longer working on any DC books, 15 months later. Huh).

Then there's Jurgens' approach to the plot and his approach to the characters. The former is completely generic.

This is a superhero comic that could just have easily been written in the 1970s, or 1980s, or 1990s as it could at any point in the last twelve years—all it's missing is thought bubbles, Hostess ads and a more reasonable cover price. This one guy who works for the UN wants the UN to have its own Justice League, answerable to it, unlike the other Justice League, which wouldn't really join the New 52U until it's seventh issue (Remember, Justice League writer Geoff Johns started his run on that title with a six-part origin story set five years in the past; JL wouldn't catch up to the status quo of JLI #1 for months).

Because this U.N.-sanctioned superhero team is a U.N. thing (and how many times have you read a comic about a superhero team dealing with the U.N....six? Twelve? Twelve dozen?), its members are supposed to be from different nations. It takes the guy and three U.N. people four pages to select their team: America's Booster Gold, Brazil's Fire, Norway's Ice, Russia's Red Rocket Gavril Ivanovich (introduced in Generation Lost), Britain's Godiva (a minor character whose origins, like those of Fire and Ice, date back to late-seventies Super Friends and who was a part of The Global Guardians that played into Giffen/DeMatteis' JL run), fictional African nation Zambesi's Vixen and China's August General In Iron (one of the Grant Morrison-created Great Ten hero-team). They would also seek out Guy Gardner, who is reluctant to join but eventually concedes. Batman, a member of the "real" Justice League, invites himself.

(Interesting thing about the splash page that begins the comic? In addition to many characters who were appearing in various New 52 books, it also introduced the New 52 versions of Plastic Man, Congorilla, The Creeper, Metamorpho and B'wanna Beast, none of whom seem redesigned in the least.)

The conflict is this. After the team is hastily assembled and Booster Gold appointed leader (because he understands PR, and the JLI is mainly a PR effort), they go looking for a missing research team and find a giant robot that looks like a mildly tweaked version of Jurgen's Armageddon 2001 villain Monarch.

Several more of these robots appear, and they summon a big, tough alien guy that looks like a minor Jack Kirby creation from a throwaway Fantastic Four story arc.

His name is Peraxxus (the second X is silent, I assume) and his plan is to destroy the earth and strip-mine the rubble for valuable minerals he can sell to other aliens: He's basically a cosmic miner, which may explain why his weapon resembles a pick-axe. The JLI split up into teams, investigate the sites of the various giant robots, fight what look a bit like Moleoids, and then fly into space to beat-up Peraxxus. The "real" Justice League is never heard from, despite the fact that the world is ending and one-seventh of the team is standing right next to Booster Gold and the B-team the whole time.

It's just basic superhero comics, with nothing to separate it from any other superhero comic. It's not DC or Jurgens putting their best foot forward. It's just a foot.

As for the characterization, Jurgens goes about it quite strangely. Essentially all of the characters and their relationships remain identical to their pre-New 52 incarnations.

Fire and Ice are still besties (although, for all we know, they just met). No one takes Booster Gold seriously, despite the fact that Batman sees in him something no one else does (Although Batman hasn't teamed up with him extensively as he has in stories from 2006-2010 or so, and he hasn't seen Booster save all of creation*). Guy Gardner and Booster Gold don't get along (although they haven't served on Justice Leagues for years and years; rather, there's an offhand comment about a coupla team-ups). Despite his rough and gruff manner, Guy has a soft spot for Ice, and is in love with her, though the feeling isn't quite mutual (although they haven't served on Justice Leagues for years and years either, nor have they ever been in a relationship; "We had a few dates, Guy," she says. "Don't make more of it than it was").

So basically DC erased all of these characters' past, shared experiences that readers have familiar with, the decades-long history between fans and characters, but continued to present them in the exact same way, replacing that back-story with vague, barely alluded to off-panel events.

I realize that the book is simply trying to square with the approach adopted by the broader DC Universe, but, if that is indeed the case, then perhaps Jurgens could have gone to the trouble of actually reinventing or at least reintroducing these characters? Maybe show us Guy and Ice meeting for the first time, or why Booster and Guy don't get along, or why everyone thinks Booster is a doofus an not a real leader, instead of just telling us that stuff...?

Lopresti's artwork is fine; this book has almost the opposite problem of Demon Knights, as here the art is crisp, clear and easy to read, whereas it's the script that's the problem. It's read-able, obviously, as Jurgens is a pro who has been at this for years, but it's so deeply flawed in conception that it barely matters that it's executed okay.

Take, for example, pages five and seven. The last panel of page 5 shows The Guy and The Woman Who Exists For Him To Have Someone To Talk To walk out of a building to find a crowd chanting, "THIS IS A PUBLIC BUILDING! YOU CAN'T HAVE IT!"

After a one-page digression to a research team disappearing, page seven reveals that the building they are talking about is...The Hall of Justice? What the fuck?

You know the Hall of Justice, right? From the Super Friends cartoon? Brad Meltzer introduced it into the DCU during his excrutiatingly long single story-arc for Justice League of America as the new headquarters of the JLoA.

That was last continuity, though. This is the Hall's very first appearance in the New 52U (I don't rightly know if the New 52 Justice League ever even occupied it; as I said, it would be six more months before Justice League caught up to JLI #1, and I thought the new, five-year-old League had a satellite headquarters.

The crowd sees the building, whatever it is, as special for some reason, a public building that a U.N.-sanctioned sueprhero team should not be allowed to occupy.

Some in the crowd feel so strongly that the building belongs to "the people" that two of them are plotting something. "We came here cuz the U.N. took over the Hall of Justice," a generic-looking white protester tells a generic-looking black protester (they have to look generic so we don't think they are Tea Party members or part of a rightwing fringe group that is afraid the U.N. is going to take over America, otherwise some of DC's readers might get offended, you see. If these guys symbolize anything it's, um, all of DC's readers? "Ignore them," The Guy tells Booster, "They're nothing but a bunch of basement dwellers who spend all day whining on the 'net." And, um, going outside to publicly demonstrate, obviously) .

"It's ours.," the white guy continues, "A symbol! If the people can't have it, no one should."

"Heroes followin' the U.N.'s marching orders?" the black guy says, clenching his fist. "Bunch of sell-outs!"

That night, they return with a bomb and blow up the Hall of Justice.

I honestly have no idea what the fuck this sub-plot is about, as I have no idea what the Hall of Justice is supposed to be in this story. I mean, I know what it is on Super Friends and what it might have been in the old DCU, but in the new one...? I guess it's maybe a monument of some sort, like the Statue of Liberty, or The Lincoln Memorial, and it just happens to look and have the same name as Super Friends HQ for some reason...?

I don't get it. But then, I don't get anything about this title.

Surely some of the New 52 books must be some good, right? So far the only ones I've read and liked have been the ones that mostly ignored the reboot (Green Lantern and Batman comics) or to be so divorced from the DCU they could just as easily be old DUC, New 52 or Elseworlds books (Wonder Woman).

Any suggestions for what to try next...? People seem to like The Flash and the cowboy book, right...?



*Oh, and apparently Booster Gold has seen the Batcave...?

Batman has only been operating for five years now, the GCPD hardly trust him, and he's already let Booster Gold inside the Batcave...?

Quick question for the game-players in the audience

Well, it's been a full two days since I mentioned any PR announcements from either of the Big Two super-comics publishers, so I guess I'm due for another post on the subject, huh? This one's another one from DC, who have been announcing things like crazy all week.

Yesterday their Source blog pointed to another of the pre-arranged exclusive interviews on one of their announcements, this one on the subject of a fifth weekly series, following 52 (hooray!), Countdown (Gah!), Trinity (not bad, not bad) and Wednesday Comics (hooray!).

Strangely, this weekly is in addition to the two 26-part bi-weekly series already announced, Brightest Day and Justice League: Lost Generation.

It's going to be called DC Universe: Legends, and it's going to be based on DC Universe Online, a "massively multiplayer online action-RPG," which I know, um, next to nothing about. So basically it's a weekly series based on DC super-characters, but ones distinct somehow from the DCU versions.

Distinct how? I don't know. The IGN.com interview with Executive Editor Dan DiDio was definitely geared towards people who already knew what DC Universe Online is, exactly.

I don't know whether it will be any good or not—I'm excited in general about DC weekly series, but it will depend as always on who exactly is making it, I suppose. The only creators involved that have been announced so far are writers Dan Jurgens and Tony Bedard, the former of whom did back-ups for 52 and the latter of whom was one of the writers involved with Countdown.

In the IGN interview, DiDio mentioned that Marv Wolfman would be involved at some point, and I guess Jim Lee did initial designs for the characters in the game/community/whatever-it-is.

Anyway, here's my question. What's the difference between the DCU of the comics and the universe/continuity of DC Universe Online. Like, how different are the two, and in what ways? (From what I've seen so far, it seem mostly a matter of costuming and freedom from the month-to-month goings-on of the comics line, like Cassandra Cain being Batgirl instead of Stephanie Brown, Superman being on Earth, Batman not being dead, etc).

Are the two close enough that one will probably be able to read the comic without playing/knowing anything at all about the game? Will one want to be able to read the comic in that case?

If anyone's knowledgeable of DC Universe Online and wants to weigh in, please do!

Man Up, Martian Manhunter! Pt. 1: Doomsday

On paper, the Martian Manhunter is probably the last person in the DC Universe you want to get into a fight with. Seriously, if the Justice League gave you a choice between two doors, with Superman kicking your ass behind one and Martian Manhunter kicking your ass behind the other, you’re going to want to go with Superman.

As J’onn himself recently explained on his blog* in discussin the current Justice League line-up, “I've got all of Superman's cooler powers plus mind-reading plus shapeshifting plus intangibility plus I'm not a monumental d-bag like Geo-Force. Ooo, lava blasts? Martian Vision, bitch."

Now, J’onn’s probably exaggerating a little bit there. I mean, he’s super-fast, almost as fast as Superman, but he can’t tie the Flash in a race like Supes can. And he’s extremely strong and extremely durable, but probably not quite as strong and durable as Superman. But for the most part, he’s like Superman with a head cold, or Superman on two hours of sleep...only with a bunch of other powers too, to compensate for not being able to beat Supes in a hundred-yard dash or juggle as many planets.

Think Superman and Charles Xavier and the Vision and Plastic Man all rolled into one, and that's pretty much Martian Manhunter.

I mean, he’s a guy who once took out Despero one-on-one using only his mental powersand just plain buried Ultraman, the evil Superman doppelganger from a neighboring antimatter universeYou hear him talking smack there? It’s not even a fight, the moment you think maybe you want to fight him, then bam! you’re DDDUUNNNNN, as Ultraman himself put it.

It’s a good thing for the supervillains of the DC Universe then that J’onn is a colossal pussy.

Really, that’s the only explanation I can think of for why a guy with that much power gets taken down constantly. At this point, he’s probably been rescued by Superman more times than Lois Lane. He’s been clobbered by such inferior opponents as Superboy-Prime and Black Adam. He’s been known to spend days at a time in space crying.

You can’t really blame the whole vulnerability-to-fire thing. While this has come and gone from story-to-story, in aggregate it would appear that fire is a psychological weakness of J’onn's, which, when he allows it to get the better of him, causes him to lose concentration on his powers and turn into a puddle of goo, but, when he’s concentrating (or has had his Martian version of Zoloft that day), it doesn’t hurt him any more than laser beams or lightning bolts.

J’onn’s perennial whipping boy status really seems to simply come down to a matter of a lack of confidence on his part. What he seems to need is a coach, someone to grab him by the shoulders, look him in the ruby reds and say, “Man up, Manhunter!”

That’s where Every Day Is Like Wednesday comes in.

For the first installment of our new feature, we’re going to examine an opponent J’onn should have been able to take or, at the very least, not gotten completely, embarrassingly destroyed by in a few panels.

His name? That’s right, Doomsday, the monster that killed Superman. Well, actually, he didn’t really kill-kill Superman; he simply beat Superman really, really, really badly, exhausting almost every ounce of solar energy Superman’s cells had gathered, draining him like a battery and sending him into a death-like state that lasted months.

As was revealed in Superman/Doomsday: Hunter/Prey (Collected in big, fat omnibus collection Superman/Doomsday: The Collected Edition, which I recently fishished reading), the big D was created over the course of centuries of brutal experimentation to be an unkillable killing machine. He has no internal organs and is almost solid throughout. He’s powered by solar energy, can survive any environment and, in the off-chance anything ever kills him, he returns to life, evolved so that he can’t be killed in the same way again.

In other words, Doomsday is one tough customer. In Hunter/Prey, dude shrugs off Darkseid’s Omega Effect (so named because no one shrugs that shit off), and mortally wounds the dark god. Orion’s astroforce doesn’t phase Doomsday, and in a short story we see a Green Lantern empty its ring on Doomsday, to little effect.

Now, given the level of awesomeness that is Doomsday (Superman only ends up defeating him at the end of Superman/Doomsday by having him hurtled forward through time to the absolute end of the universe), it seems logical that Doomsday could probably take J’onn in a fight, right? But at the very least, J’onn should be able to give the gray giant a run for his money. After all, an opponent can’t even punch J’onn if he goes all ghosty on them.The omnibus contained multiple fights between Doomsday and J’onn, and, I’m sorry to report, that J’onn does about as well against him as he did back when he was inadvertently impersonating Bloodwynd (Yeah, J'onn thought he was Bloodwynd for a while...it's a whole thing).

So, not counting that first time when the Manhunter thought he was Bloodwynd, J'onn and Doomsday first faced off in Superman: The Doomsday Wars, by Dan Jurgens and inker Norm Rapmund (also collected in the omnibus). The Watchtower Era JLA is responding a distress call from "the Georgia authorities," and it's a pretty serious line-up that goes to survey the damage. J'onn's there alongside Wonder Woman, Orion, Plastic Man, Green Lantern Kyle Rayner, The Flash (Wally West) and, um, the Huntress.

The Leaguers all split up and investigate, and, before you know it, Huntress and Orion find the rest of the team all laid out flat......except J'onn, who's not only knocked out, but hung up by his cape. Sigh. Oh J'onn...

Now Huntress doesn't realize it yet, but we the readers know that it was Doomsday that just pwned the whole Justice League. Actually, it's Doomsday with Brainiac's brain in him. Or mind. How is this possible, if Doomsday doesn't have any internal organs? I don't know, so let's ignore it. Well, let's first state that if Doomsday doesn't have a brain and/or a mind, then he should be invulnerable to J'onn's telepathy, meaning that J'onn can't give him the old Martain mindfuck that he used to take out Despero, nor can he read his mind to anticipate his moves as he did Ultraman. So maybe that explains why J'onn can't lay a glove on the guy.

Actually, J'onn makes some more excuses...Okay, we know Doomsday must be super, super fast, because he fights Superman hand-to-hand, and Superman's, like, Flash fast. And J'onn says he got nailed before he had a chance to phase. Okay, I'll buy that. Of course, I thinkt he Martian doth protest too much, because he also says he was protecting someone, which is another good excuse for getting beaten up by Doomsday and hung by his own cape...he couldn't phase because he was protecting a bystander, and if he went intangible instead of taking the punch, the bystander woulda been pulped. I'd buy that too. The two excuses don't work in concert, but whatever. This is a Dan Jurgens story, not a Grant Morrison one, so we let little things slide a little.

Okay so now J'onn knows he's up against Doomsday, the monster that killed Superman. He knows just how fast he is and how hard he hits. Now he's ready for him. Time to get back in there and show Doomsday what Martians are made of!Just four panels later, J'onn returns.Oh J'onn...

To be fair, GL, Flash, Orion and Wonder Woman don't do much better. We can assume Wondy's lariat didn't work because Doomsday's invulnerable, being mindless (although he has Brainiac's mind here) and he's invulnerable to GL because he's evolved around Green Lantern rings from his previous encounters with GLs and Guardians. There's no reason why Flash couldn't have pushed him at lightspeed and sent him off-planet though. Anyway, I only mention this to make more excuses for J'onn. Maybe it's not his fault he got taken down so easily here; so did a bunch of other people that should be able to take Doomsday out, if their powers were written as they were being written in JLA and their own titles back then.

Jurgens has the League fold like a a set of lawn furniture before the fury of Doomsday, and so the Brainiac-possessed engine of destruction takes them back to his HQ, putting them all in silly little traps that incapacitate their powers.

I don't know if anyone's pointed this out before, but Superman can kinda be sort of a dick sometimes, huh?

After storming Braniac/Doomsday's city, tearing off his shirt and resucing the League, he tells them that he's teleported Doomsday to the moon, and he's going up there to tackle him head on. When Orion's like, "Yeah, let's go get him," Superman gives him a patronizing..."Alright, fine, but don't come crying to me if you get impaled on a bone shard!" Dick.

The plan is for Superman to assemble a bunch of teleporter tubes and set them up in a loop, so Doomsday is in a state of constant teleportation. To do that, he'll need Orion and Martian Manhunter to buy him some time—one minute, exactly. He doesn't think that the two heroes, each of whom could go 100 rounds with Superman, can do it, but, as Jurgens writes the pair, hes's right.Sigh. Oh J'onn...

At any rate, Superman's plan works, and he saves the day. Yeah, Superman! Why can't you be more like that strange visitor from another world in a fight, J'onn?

J'onn would get another chance to fight Doomsday a few years later, during Lex Luthor's presidency (2001's Superman #175, to be exact). This story was written by Jeph Loeb and, like most Jeph Loeb stories, it doesn't make a whole lot of sense, and it makes much less sense when thought about in the context of previous stories. (This was also around about the time Loeb was either losing his mind, or testing to see just what he could get away with in a comic book script and still get paid for it; this issue, for example, is intercut with quotes from President Luthor's state of the union speech for some reason. Other Loeb-written issues from this period had random speeches from American history used as narration for "Our Worlds At War" chapters.)

Now at some point during the "Our Worlds At War" story, Doomsday was freed from the teleportation loop, skeletonized by Imperiex, brought back to life, and then, in this very issue, given Joker venom. Oh, and he can talk and think now and is, for some reason, really, really weak, to the point where Superman beats him down solo, somethng he's never been able to do before.

J'onn, on the other hand, still can't put up a good showing against the monster. He tries the old Martian mindfuck on Doomsday, and then throws a couple of punches. Now, we've established that Doomsday's probably invulnerable to telepathic attack already, right? Or else how else could he have taken the Manhunter out so easily during Doomsday Wars? Plus, he doesn't have a brain or mind, so telepathy shouldn't work, right?

Well, it doesn't. But this is weird. In the second panel here, J'onn says "Sentient!" Like he's suprrised that Doomsday's sentient. Like he just discovered it when Doomsday started talking to him. But if he didn't think DD possessed any sentience, why was he trying to mess with his mind on the last page?

Oh, and I like how Doomsday breathes fire all of a sudden here. When the hell did he get that power?

J'onn, as always, comports himself with dignity, even in defeat. "Ackkkk!" Sigh. Oh, J'onn....

Luckily, Superman flies in and saves J'onn's ass from Doomsday. Again.

For J'onn's sake, let's hope he never finds himself having to fight Doomsday again, but if he does, what should he do? Other than, of course, manning the fuck up?

Don't worry, J'onn, we're here for you. I say you shapechange to resemble Superman, but lower your mass until your intangible, so that Doomsday will be totally focused on you, but unable to hit you. Then you can lead him away from bystanders and into a trap of some sort you can arrange with your fellow superheroes via telepathy.

If you want to take a more active approach, you can always throw him into space (22,300 will put him in orbit of Earth, right? So that he neither just falls back down or goes hurtling into some other poor planet). Or throw him into the sun. And if you're afraid of grappling with him (hey, I would be too), you can always turn completely invivible, fly at him at top speed, and straight up knock him into space like that.

But most importantly J'onn, and I just can't stress this enough, the first thing you need to do is man up. Or Martian up. Whatever. Just get it together, guy.


*Okay, actually it was Facedowninthegutters.blogspot.com, but click on that link anyway because it’s hilarious. DC oughta get J’onn to write the introduction to “The Tornado’s Path” hardcover collection

Related: Actually Essential Storylines: Martian Manhunter