Batman vs. Grifter, Round 1

Reading the the fight scene between Batman and Grifter in Batman Vol. 3: Ghost Stories the other day inspired me to revisit the first encounter between the two, in 1997's JLA/WildCATS by Grant Morrison, Val Semeiks, Kevin Conrad and Ray Kryssing (which has since been collected along with Morrison, Ed McGuinness and Dexter Vines' 2005 JLA Classified arc in 2007 trade paperback JLA: Ultramarine Corps).

The fight went...a bit differently than it did in the pages of the recent Batman comic:

On some particularly strong panels from The Green Lantern Vols. 1-2

I was honestly a little surprised when Grant Morrison and Liam Sharp were announced as the creative team for the new Green Lantern title, in large part because it seemed like a character/franchise that was somewhat beneath the stature and talent of each (Maybe it's just me, but I've traditionally considered Green Lantern a B- to D-List character/comic, depending on who's bearing the ring and when it'be being published), and nothing I knew about either gentleman's past work necessarily suggested a natural affinity for DC's very 1960s space cop character, Hal Jordan (the least interesting of the...seven Earth-born Green Lanterns, in my opinion). That...really just goes to show that, for as much as I like to play armchair DC Comics editor, I'm not terribly qualified to do it real-life (Of course, I do recognize that if Grant Morrison and Liam Sharp want to do anything together, you let them; were I at DC, I would have greenlit a Morrison/Sharp Infinity, Inc, Primal Force or New Guardians revival, if that's what they wanted to do).

It didn't take too many pages of reading their The Green Lantern (a better title for an Alan Scott book than a Hal Jordan one, you ask me) to realize that the character/concept is actually kinda perfect for them, though. By three pages in, we've seen a self-pitying Green Lantern who is also royalty, a microscopic Green Lantern "super-intelligent all-purpose" virus named Floozle Flem (Floozle Flem doesn't catch you... ...You catch Floozle Flem") and a giant alien spider pirate dressed in like a particularly fancy old-timey Earth pirate.

While I can't say that Morrison had all that much to say about Hal Jordan as a character within the 200+ pages of comics collected in these two volumes, a 12-issue run on a title that was then kinda sorta canceled only to be relaunched as The Green Lantern Season Two, he certainly had things to say about the concept, and he certainly seems to have had a great deal of fun mining the character/franchise's history and setting for cool comics material, which he and Sharp deftly organize into a series of comics that generally contain a single, done-in-one story with a beginning, middle and end (and, as often as not, a particular theme, premise, tone or even genre of its own...something that, I hate to say given the history between the writers, reminded me of Alan Moore's run on the Swamp Thing character) that nevertheless tell an ongoing, overarching story line about various beings' plans to instill order in a chaotic universe.

As he did during his rather messy tenure on Batman and, to a lesser extent, his seminal late-'90s JLA run, Morrison draws inspiration from the character's Silver Age adventures, presenting them as straight-faced as possible, with the greater verisimilitude and more sophisticated storytelling that modern, adult readers have come to expect, rather than what, say, Gardner Fox was writing for kids in the 1960s. This...is a pretty good way to tackle Jordan who, for all of Geoff Johns' valiant efforts to make him more relevant, continues to work best as the mid-twentieth century American idea of a leading man. (Tellingly, this Hal Jordan, like Johns', has all but chucked any remnants of his old, original cast and premise. Characters like Tom and Carol, or his old fighter pilot job, appear and are acknowledged as things from his past, but they are not integral parts of him or his story. Similarly, Green Arrow appears in one 20-page story, but Jordan makes an interesting distinction between himself and the superheroes. He's not a hero, he says, he's a space cop who hangs out with superheroes. Sometimes.)

All the attention on space and aliens also means that Morrison has pretty free rein to use all the magic, fantasy and science fiction he cares to; there's really nothing so weird that it can't be included in a DC Comics' Green Lantern comic with no more justification than "It's an alien" or "That's from a different dimension." And so a Green Lantern who is perfectly humanoid, save for the fact that he has an active volcano for his shoulders, his face appearing in the cloud of smoke and ash that lingers above it? Sure, why not?

In Sharp, Morrison has a partner who can not only draw anything, but he can draw it in a great deal of detail, and no amount of detail, no size of crowd or ornate setting seems to be too much for him to handle. I don't know if Sharp had a three-year head-start on this title or what exactly, but he fills his pages with the number of characters and the amount of details that can look quite uncommon outside of a George Perez or Phil Jimenez comic these days.

And that's important, because Morrison's comics all but live and die on the strength of their artists, as his horribly uneven Batman run so vividly attests; there are issues of that massive, years-long Batman story line that are all but unreadable in their shoddiness, and there are others that are among the better comics of Morrison's career.

Morrison and Sharp's The Green Lantern is therefore not only pretty great, but far greater than I would have imagined, given my relative antipathy toward the character, and the amount of time I have spent reading about various Green Lanterns (but mostly Hal Jordan) during the last 15-20 years. But rather than me trying to restate that for a couple hundred more words, or having just crafted a one-sentence post of "Look, just read it," I thought I'd pull out some particularly noteworthy panels from the first two volumes of the series, Intergalactic Lawman and The Day The Stars Fell.

PAGE 13, PANELS 5-8:

This is by far the dirtiest thing I have ever read in a DC comic book.


PAGE 33, PANEL 5:

Hey look, it's Evil Star! I don't have any firsthand experience with Evil Star, but I always liked the goofy costume and name. He's one of those characters—along with Goldface—that I knew was a Silver Age Green Lantern villain that doesn't get seen all that often. When Geoff Johns turned his attention away from Earth and GL's earthbound rogue's gallery pretty quickly into his run on the relaunched Green Lantern title in 2005, I remember being at least partially disappointed we didn't get to see how Johns would Batman-ize the likes of Evil Star, Goldface, and I don't know, The Invisible Destroyer in the same way that he had The Shark and Hector Hammond (and, later, The Black Hand). I suppose it was ultimately all for the best, given the new characters and concepts Johns introduced into the Green Lantern mythos, but I'm glad to see Morrison making use of the likes of Evil Star.

It's worth noting that Sharp's design barely varies at all from Gil Kane's original one. This Evil Star has a bigger, floppier star on his face, and is missing his cape, but that's about it.


PAGE 43, PANEL 4:

The Blackstars who rescued Evil Star from where the GLC had imprisoned him give him some shit about his name, suggesting it's why people judge him and that it's "almost inviting trouble with the law."

I kinda liked his explanation, even if they remain unconvinced.

Speaking of the Blackstars, there's an explanation for why their leader Controller Mu changed the name from "Darkstars," having to do with the more absolute of "black" vs. "dark," but it's probably also worth noting that it also makes them sound closer to Blackwater, maybe the best-known of the sorts of private security contractors that the team echoes in its earliest appearances in the title.


PAGE 50, PANEL 1:

Controller Mu meets with a trio of Dhorians lead by a Volgar Zo. If the Dhorians look familiar, that's because one member of their species was a pretty early Justice League villain, Kanjar Ro, who first appeared in Gardner Fox and Mike Sekowsky's Justice League of America #3, way back in 1961.

Though Ro's appearance has varied a bit over the decades as he's been reinvented and redesigned in various comics and other media, his pink skin, pointy nose and segmented, insect-like eyes are constants. Here Sharp's designs for Ro's fellow Dhorians are both faithful to Sekowsky's original design for the character, while also bizarrely alien, an effect achieved mostly by exaggerating a feature here or there, putting the leg joints in the "wrong" places, having the eyelids close horizontally instead of vertically, and so on.

Hell, they're even wearing outfits similar to Kanjar Ro's get-up!

Here Sharp proves to be perfectly aligned with Morrison in terms of a basic approach that has served Morrison extremely well both in this title and during his fairly lengthy run on the Batman character—that is, again, taking things pretty much straight from the Silver Age and Bronze Age of DC Comics, the weirder the better, and presenting them matter-of-factly, with just enough of realism to suit the tone of modern, more sophisticated comics storytelling in an age when they are made for adults, rather than children.

So while Morrison has extended the particulars of Kanjar Ro to the people of his planet, including their occupation of slave-trading, and even "The Gamma Gong" and a spaceship resembling a many-oared slave ship, Sharp gives what was a somewhat silly alien design from the 1960s a realistic veneer that makes it viscerally repellent; their six-fingered hands and goat-like gait are truly creepy on the page. We'll see rather a lot of them in the fourth issue of the series.


PAGE 54, PANEL 3:

Look! Look at them all!

The Dhorians have stolen planet Earth, shrunken it to a manageable size, and are now preparing to sell it to the highest bidder. The above image shows some of those attending the auction. It is a single panel on a five-panel page, and yet Sharp has not merely filled it with distinct, individual, wicked-looking alien villains, but he has filled it with name ones: There The Overmaster (from the six-part 1994 Justice League line crossover "Judgement Day"), Mongal (Mongul's daughter, first introduced in an issue of Showcase '95 by Peter Tomasi and Scott Eaton, and seemingly killed off during Geoff Johns' Green Lantern tenure), Steppenwolf (Jack Kirby's Fourth World villain, in his updated New 52 look), a female White Martian (in the look Howard Porter gave their race in the initial story arc of Morrison's own 1997-launched JLA), Grayven (the son of Darkseid introduced in 1996 by Ron Marz and Daryl Banks in their run on Green Lantern), Agamemno (from the Mark Waid-masterminded 2000 event The Silver Age), The Queen Bee (in the design she first appeared in during the 1999 "World War III" arc of Morrison's JLA), what appear to be a trio of aliens conquered by Starro and...11 other characters so distinct-looking that I would not be at all surprised to find out that they too are all pulled from past DC comics, even if I can't place them.

(UPDATE: I asked for help identifying the others on Twitter, and Patrick Carrington responded by pointing me to this post from Jesse Russell's blog, The Shared Universe, which was obviously extremely helpful. He seems to have gotten them all, although I still think the three guys with stars on their faces are Starro conquerees rather than Starlings, based on the fact that they only have one eye apiece. Russell's blog will prove useful later on too, when Morrison and Sharp start throwing alternate Green Lanterns at the reader. I...probably wouldn't have bothered with this post had I known how thoroughly Russell dissected the so much of the series).

This is the sort of panel that makes me love shared-setting comics, though, and DC Comics in particular. A whole huge swathe of DC Comics history is packed into that one single panel, a panel that rewards lingering on, and seems to have been specifically created for no reason other than to impress the hell out of the reader and, perhaps, remind them of all sorts of other cool characters and comics from the publisher's history (Honestly, I bet that if we can figure out who all of these characters are and when and where they first appeared, we could compile a pretty good reading list out of it).

Most of them, I should note, don't actually say or do anything in the pages that follow. Steppenwolf gets a few lines, threatening a trio of Dominators (first introduced in 1989 crossover event Invasion!) not to attempt to out-bid him. They ignore him.

Anyway, this is a glorious panel, and whether Morrison's script mentioned each of those characters by name and asked that Sharp somehow find a way to squeeze them all in, or if Sharp took it upon himself to do so, it demonstrates a mainstream comic artist who not only gives a shit, as one would hope and wish all artists would, but actually, genuinely cares about the comic he's drawing. 

The panel immediately preceding this one, by the way, is less-detailed and filled with cameos, but it  has even more characters in it, showing as it does the crowd of assorted auction-goers from further away. They're much harder to make out, but I suppose one with a magnifying glass could do so; Sharp drew about 100 distinct figures into that practically-impossible-to-see crowd, including Death's Head II and what appears to be a Skrull.


PAGE 70, PANELS 4-6:

A representative of the United States "and everybody else" tells Hal that they are perfectly okay with the Earth being completely destroyed in a thousand years, so long as they get to live the rest of their lives on a stable planet...and that they all get super-powers, to boot!

The basic premise of this issue, the series' fourth, is that this being called "The Shepherd" has bought planet Earth from the Dhorian slavers for "then thousand jilli-stellars," hangs it in his gigantic ship among many other planets, and is ready to take off for his space sanctuary where his planets "may roam free and grow fat in paradise." Hal and the Green Lantern Corps intervene, and Hal gets in a heated argument with The Shepherd, who looks and talks like a stereotypical image of the Christian God, but is actually a monstrous-looking "Terravore," who will eat the Earth when it's ready.

I'm not sure why Hal's so surprised that Earthlings are ready to sacrifice the lives of their descendants for short-term gain; I mean, that's basically exactly how we got into our current, existential crisis with the climate, and we did that without the promise of 1,000-years of paradise and superpowers in the plus column.

Hell, too many people today would sacrifice their grandchildren and children—let alone great-grandchildren and descendants—for short term convenience.

Anyway, this whole issue is fucking brilliant.


PAGE 99, PANEL 3:

Countess Belzebeth, the daughter of cosmic vampire Starbreaker, a Justice League villain introduced in 1972 by Mike Friedrich and Dick Dillin, takes Hal to Vorr, "Planet of vampires." It is apparently a have for all sorts of vampires, including Marvel's Morbius, The Living Vampire, Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt from Interview With The Vampire, and plenty of other cameos.

PAGE 34, PANELS 1-3:

Hal Jordan returns to Earth to crash with his old pal Green Arrow, who encourages him to spend some time with his feet on the ground, hanging out with normal people. It...doesn't go as planned.

After breaking up a weird drug deal involving the selling of souls, they find a warehouse with a giant green arrow stuck in it, a huge, green Robin Hood hat laying outside it, and then, well, what you see above.

The first and only time I encountered a "Xeen Arrow" (and remembered doing so) was in Tom Scioli's incomparably good (and tragically short) Super Powers back-up in the pages of Cave Carson Has a Cybernetic Eye. In presenting Green Arrow's new origin in just 16 panels, Scioli had Queen wearing clothing made of foliage and using a bow and arrow to survive on a "Starfish Island," which was secretly alive (and resembled Starro). In the last few panels of the page, a blue-skinned, purple-garbed alien appeared to Ollie and announced himself as "Xeen Arrow of Dimension Xero," telling him to heed his words:

String your bow to the vibration of the universe. Fight greed in all its forms. Use trick arrows.

Ollie naturally takes Xeen Arrow's advice, and even takes his name and he starts out on his new, super-heroic mission, but his new superhero name gets muddled by the papers, who call him Green Arrow instead.

Googling it later, I see that Xeen Arrow is actually far older than Scioli's use of the name, and the character actually hails from a 1958 issue of Adventure Comics, from back when Green Arrow was basically a Batman clone (In the sequence above, note that Ollie says, "Speedy and me ran into this cat one time! Weird period in both our lives"). That particular issue, it turns out, was collected in the 2001 collection Green Arrow By Jack Kirby (perhaps explaining Scioli's familiarity), which I had read, but just the once, and I apparently forgot about the giant Green Arrow from Dimension Zero. (I should really try to dig that book out of my comics midden though, as I see it also includes "The Green Arrows of The World," which was basically GA's answer to Batman's Club of Heroes, which Morrison reinvented into Batman, Inc. Maybe I'll give it a read and write those and other notable stories from it up in a future post)

At any rate, props to Morrison and Sharp for reintroducing Xeen Arrow...alongside a Xeen Lantern.

This particular issue, entitled "Space Junkies," also emphasizes just how much Morrison and Scioli have in common, in the way they glom on to odd bits of superhero continuity and remix and reinvent it in cool, sometimes crazy ways.


PAGE 46, PANEL 5:

A smiling Sinestro sips tea...? His costume looks off here, too, with the colors reversed. This is the character's first appearance in the series, and we'll find out much later that this is actually "Thal Sinestro of the Anti-Universe," where everything is opposite of our universe. "Good Guy Sinestro," Jordan says when he hears that, to which this particularly charming version of Hal's archenemy replies, "I don't know iv I'd go that far, dear boy. Lovable rogue at best!"

I actually do kinda love this Sinestro, although the last few Sinestros I've encountered have been pretty dull and one-note, including the resurrected version from J.M. DeMattei's run on The Spectre (read during my weeks of quarantine) and the one that has been part of the Luthor's small, five-person Legion of Doom throughout Scott Snyder's Justice League run.


PAGE 68:

After an issue fighting against Abin Sur, the devilish-looking Green Lantern from Morrison's own Multiversity, Hal is greeted by a trio of other multi-dimensional GLs: Flashlight (also of Multiversity), Magic Lantern (from Morrison's Animal Man run) and a Batman-who-is-also a Green Lantern (also also of Multiversity).

At first I suspected the last of these was the Green Lantern of Mike Barr and Jerry Bingham's 1994 Elseworlds book, Batman: In Darkest Knight (the one in which Bruce Wayne becomes Earth's Green Lantern, rather than Hal Jordan), but then I recalled that Barr and Bingham's Batman-as-Green Lantern didn't have ears on his cowl.

Apparently this Bat-Lantern is literally named Bat-Lantern and hails from Earth-32, a world in the Multiverse in which DC characters are amalgamated with one another (It was listed in the Multiversity Guidebook).


PAGE 71, PANELS 1-3:

The other reason I thought that Bat-Lantern might have been Barr and Bingham's character was that Darkest Knight featured a rather clumsy (in the opinion of teenage Caleb) amalgamation of The Joker and Sinestro, which seemed like it went a bit too far in terms of smooshing Batman and Green Lantern together. And here, of course, we see another amalgamation of a Batman and Green Lantern villain, and the mention of yet another.

The Shark is apparently just a humanoid shark dressed like the Penguin, sans umbrella, top-hat and cigarette holder. It's a good look. Like, most anyone looks like pretty cool villain when dressed in a tuxedo with tails and a monocle. As great a visual as that is, I must confess a great deal of curiosity about this "Masked Hand" that the Shark mentions, an combination of Black Mask and Black Hand. I am assuming that The Masked Hand is a villain who wears a tiny little mask, perhaps one that resembles the one Black Mask originally wore, over his hand, which he holds as a sideways fist all the time, and makes it talk by moving the thumb up and down.


PAGE 103, PANEL 4:

This flaming giant appears a few times, battling a powerful team of superheroes, before this page, in which a character refers to him as "Some immense Anti-Matter Titan!"

This appears to be another reinvention of an old Fox/Seksowsky character from Justice League of America, although it's not a connection I made until I read that description of the character. If so, then here's yet another example of a Morrison and Sharp giving a somewhat goofy-looking old character the same treatment they gave the slavers of Kanjar Ro's planet.


PAGE 110, PANEL 5:

I really like this particular Green Lantern, who isn't too terribly green. I don't know who she is, what Earth she hails from or what previous comic or story she appeared in (if, indeed, she did, and isn't original to this comic). You can get another, better look at her on the cover of The Green Lantern #10).

PAGE 112, PANEL 2:

As Hal's adventures with the various Green Lanterns from across the Multiverse comes to a close, we see him flying alongside Bat-Lantern, Magic Lantern, Flashlight, the Tangent Green Lantern, Abin Sur, that cool lady Lantern, an alternate universe Star Sapphire and a whole bunch of other Green Lanterns. I recognize the Green Lanterns from Earth-2, Just Imagine Stan Lee With Dave Gibbons Creating Green Lantern, Batman Beyond, Kingdom Come (I think and...that's all I got for sure. That leaves a Kyle Rayner and two John Stewarts I'm blanking on, and what looks like a caricature of Chinese immigrant from the 19th Century with upsettingly yellow skin, but I hoping that's just the result of the green aura blending in with the flesh-colored coloring of his skin, or even my eyesight starting to go now that I'm in my fourth decade, because otherwise YEESH. He does appear in another cameo earlier in the story, and doesn't look anywhere nearly as yellow, so that's good.


PAGE 123, PANELS 1-4:

I just really like the word "Scorpedoes".

Superman's origin vs. Superman's origin

The first page of 2006's All-Star Superman #1, by Grant Morrison, Frank Quitely, Jamie Grant and Phil Balsman

The first page of 2018's Superman #1, by Brian Michael Bendis, Ivan Reis, Joe Prado, Alex Sinclair and Josh Reed.

The first page of Bendis' first issue of the newly relaunched Superman title--following his contributions to Action Comics #1,000, DC Nation #0 and his six-issue Man of Steel story, includes a recap of Superman's origin and the relevant events leading up to the current story, and I found it revealing just how different it was from Morrison and Quitely's famously succinct retelling of Superman's origin in their All-Star Superman (which one could probably argue was still eight words more than needed).

Only the first half of the first narration box on this first page covers the exact same ground that Morrison and Quitely did, but it takes about 25 words. And that's followed by four more narration boxes. I wanted to draw the comparison not to suggest that Morrison's strategy was superior to that of Bendis', but simply to compare the two, which couldn't be more different, despite telling the same story about the same character at the same point in their respective runs on a Superman book.

Certainly, both are very emblematic of the creators involved--Morrison doing something weird and leaving a lot up to the imagination of the reader, Bendis using a lot of words, so many that they threaten to overwhelm the artwork--but both are equally valid. What was compelling about Morrison's origin at the time was that it was basically unnecessary; he knew that everyone knew Superman's origin, and thus he didn't even really need to tell it at all. I said it was eight words too long because, if you removed Morrison's captions, I think that page reads just about the same, and a reader gets all the necessary information. But maybe even the art is superfluous, because surely anyone reading a comic book, anyone who has ever heard of Superman, knows those basic points of the character.

What I find interesting about Bendis' strategy is the idea that there is no assumption of a reader's familiarity with the character, even on the most basic level, or that a reader might have been aware of recent Superman history (that Jor-El is alive, that Superman has a son), or the story Bendis just got done telling the previous week in Man of Steel.

DC, and/or Bendis himself, seem to think that Bendis' presence on the book will be drawing all kinds of readers who are completely new to the character, perhaps new to comics, which seems to me to be vastly overestimating Bendis' pull. Bendis is, of course, a pretty big deal in comics, and I'm sure that all sorts of people will be reading this issue of Superman who weren't reading the previous few issues, but it's hard to imagine Bendis' arrival bringing in large numbers of people who weren't already reading mainstream, Big Two super-comics that they purchased on a Wednesdayly basis from their local comic shop.

In other words, the audience Bendis is likely to draw is one that is already in the direct market, they just might have been reading Iron Man, Spider-Man, X-Men and New Avengers instead of Superman and Action. In that regard, I think the arrival of Gene Luen Yang to the Superman franchise a few years ago was a much, much bigger deal, and one that was much more likely to attract new readers to Superman, to DC and to the direct market that Bendis moving from Big Company A to Big Company B, but Yang's arrival wasn't treated as so much of an occasion, likely because how notoriously difficult it is for DC (and Marvel) to see comics and their place in the medium and industry from the outside.

Regardless, here are two different ways to kick off Superman runs from two of the more popular and more divergent writing talents in the modern direct market.

Wonder Woman: Earth One Volume One

Giant kangaroo mounts referred to as "kangas." The Purple Healing Ray. The robot plane. The Holliday Girls, and their zaftig leader with the "Woo woo!" catch-phrase. The exclamation "Suffering Sappho!" Bondage as symbol of love. Female superiority over men, and the submission of the latter to the former as the ideal societal construct.

These are among the components–some minor details, others pervasive elements–of William Moulton Marston's Wonder Woman that have sent just about every single person to try their hand at telling a Wonder Woman story in any media since creator Marston's death running and screaming from Wonder Woman's actual origin, the original half-decade or so of her adventures and the author's intent. And these are among the elements that writer Grant Morrison, along with artist Yanick Paquette, embraces in his telling of the Wonder Woman story, in the particular, peculiar format of DC Comics' Earth One line of sequentially published, original graphic novels.

The most remarkable aspect of Morrison's version of Wonder Woman is that the writer, unlike everyone else who has come before, doesn't attempt to reinvent this particular wheel, and he doesn't attempt to fix what was never broken. In essence, Morrison simply reshapes Marston and collaborator H.G. Peter's comics into a style and form more familiar and palpable to modern readers, the result being a fairly perfect packaging of Marston and Peter's Wonder Woman into a sort of ultimate re-mix. It's rather similar to what Morrison already did with Batman during a relatively long 2006-2013 run across a series of Batman titles, and with Superman in his 2005-launched All-Star Superman, although here he actually does less work than he did with either of the other two personalities of DC's so-called "trinity" of characters. With the World's Finest, he cherry-picked from their entire histories; here he sticks to Marston and Peter, with only a few minor tweaks and modifications consistent with the update in time period.

The book is structured in an unusually literary and complete fashion, not only for a comic book series, but when compared to the rest of the Earth One line (so far consisting of three volumes featuring Superman, two featuring Batman and one featuring the Teen Titans). After a 13-page sequence detailing the origins of Hippolyta and the Amazons' break with Man's World–in which she lost her girdle to Hercules*, stole it back, killed the hero and prayed to Aphrodite that they may "retire forever from Man's World"–the remainder of the book is set 3,000 years later in present.

Wonder Woman, dressed in a version of her familiar costume, exits a beautifully-designed "invisible" robot plane on Paradise Island and is bound in chains by Amazons and dragged before her mother for trial. The remainder of the book is told through the trial, with chronological flashbacks telling the origin of Wonder Woman, as she and other players in the drama are called forth to bear witness (the lasso of truth compelling them all to be perfectly honest).

That is not a format we see in superhero comic books, and is almost impossible to imagine in a superhero TV show or movie; I think that's notable because so much of the rest of the Earth One line seems to be written with at least one eye on multi-media adaptation. Writer Geoff Johns' Batman graphic novels read like comics adaptations of a few scripts from a Batman TV show that doesn't actually exist, for example. Morrison, who, unlike Johns has had little experience in writing for TV and/or film, just writes this like a graphic novel. And it's relatively late release all but guarantees that it will have little to no impact on future Wonder Woman movies, which have already cast their stars, something I'll return to in a bit.

In broad strokes, the story will be very familiar. Diana is the somewhat rebellious and adventurous only daughter of Queen Hippolyta, apparently a gift from the goddesses because, like all of the women in the all-female utopia of Paradise Island, Hippolyta can't exactly have a child the old-fashioned way.

One day she discovers United States pilot Steve Trevor, who has somehow crash-landed on the island, and she heals and cares for him, keeping him safe from her sisters (As in Renae de Liz's Legend of Wonder Woman, she does so in secret, keeping him in hiding). She wins a tournament, allowing her to take Steve back to his own world. She suffers an immediate and drastic form of culture shock, but makes fast friends with "Elizabeth" Candy and her sorority sisters from Holliday college (I find it amusing that, of all the stuff from Wonder Woman's Golden Age one might be leery to include, Morrison apparently drew the line at a character named Etta Candy; giant kangaroos? That's cool. But a joke name like Etta Candy? No way).

There is the expected tension between the isolationist Hippolyta and the Amazons and the expansive U.S. military, and between the way a society is supposed to work, "Man's" way or Marston's way.

Marston's Wonder Woman, despite what people have been reading into her since at least 1972, when Gloria Steinem stuck her on the cover of Ms., is not a feminist character, nor was hers originally a feminist story. If we consider "feminism" the ideal default it should be, and keep in mind that it is the belief that women and men are equal and should be treated as such**, then remember Marson wasn't really arguing that in his comics. He was, through Wonder Woman, arguing that women were better than men, at least in many of the most important ways (and please note that there was nothing misandric about Marston's point of view; he didn't think men inferior, he just didn't think they were as awesome as women, particularly his idealized Amazon women, were).

These are subtleties that are generally ignored, and they are ignored because they are pretty out-of-date, pretty particular to Marston and pretty much universally rejected in favor of the idea that men and women are equal, and neither should be master over the other. I don't want to get too deep into this particular rabbit hole, but Marston's brand of feminism, if we want to call it that, involved the loving submission of man to the loving dominance of a loving woman, which could conceivably be seen as a chilvalrous, noble act on the part of the man, who is very active in the act of surrender. Not to inject Christianity into things and further muddle it, but surrendering peacefully is actually a hell of a lot harder than fighting, something Morrison's Superman once alluded to in a throw-away JLA story in which he lectured some pro-active superheroes that not killing is infinitely harder than killing. At any rate, there are some confusing interpersonal politics involved here.

That was, essentially, the Amazon way, and perhaps it was a way that worked on Paradise Island, and could work in a Man's World that all came around to Marston's way of thinking. Wonder Woman herself was a lot more traditional in her views of relationships, being the only Amazon to fall in love with a man and then to pursue him for years, even decades in a weird love triangle reflective of the Clark/Superman/Lois one. Here she is also pro-Steve, and pro-engagement with Man's World. She wants to change it for the better, just as she wants to change aspects of her own, "Woman's World." She's a compromise character, a bridge between the two cultures--and the two modes of relationship between male and female.

The last page of the book, in which Wonder Woman begins her engagement in earnest. The words that precede those on the page above are "Hola! 'Man's World'!" That is her "final" costume, by the way, and her robot plane, Steve Trevor and "Beth" Candy in the background.

Wonder Woman is, at least here, a feminist character, a figure of equality, even if the culture Marston created for her (and so many aspects of his own psychological work and his own comic book work were of a feminism-plus line of thinking).

The other thing that Morrison and Paquette do that Marston and Peter did not, and could not, is make all the kinky undertones of the Golden Age Wonder Woman explicit. You need not read many of those stories to see exactly what it was that gave Frederic Wertham fits, or to refer to Wonder Woman as a veritable recruiting poster for lesbians. I think the tying up can be excused, and be read innocently–at least context-free and in the original texts themselves, until one learns more about Marston himself, anyway–but there's some really weird stuff in there. Like Amazon Christmas, "Diana's Day," a festival in which some of the girls dress up like deer, others dress up as hunters, and they "hunt" for the girls, tie them up, and then skin and eat them.

If you see something vaguely kinky in the above scene, you're not the first adult to do so.

Here that game occurs, at least in the corner of a splash page, but so too does all kind of libidinous behavior, with Amazons dancing topless (their backs turned to the reader, of course) and doing body shots off one another. If Marston and Peter implied kinky, pagan bacchanals and lesbian relationships, Morrison refers to them as such, and Paquette draws them.

Diana's Day = Amazon spring break.

Wonder Woman explicitly refers to Mala, a minor character in the original Wonder Woman stories, as "my lover," a step beyond all the slightly more equivocal reference between the women as "my love" and so on. Etta Beth Candy even uses the L-word when discussing Paradise Island (not the other L-word):

I'm...not sure if this is an improvement or not. There's certainly something to be said for the subtlety of the early 1940s Wonder Woman comics, which may have been borne out of conservatism and bias against homosexuals in general, but may also had a lot to do with the fact that they were comics for little kids. This isn't intended for little kids, and yet it's not a mature readers book, either (The book, unlike DC's serially-published comics, doesn't have any form of rating, but it the Earth One is generally considered to be meant for the YA and book-store reading audience; certainly the adult themes but lack of swearing, nudity and violence would seem to bear that out). Morrison's script is hardly crass or anything (Hercules calls Hippolyta a "bitch," but then, Hercules is a real dick), but I think there's something to be said for having to be slightly sly with such matters.

That, though, seems to be the biggest discernable difference from the original source material, the fact that Morrison can just come out and say words like "lover" and "lesbian" instead of implying them. Well, that and the art, which I've neglected to mention at this point, but is perhaps what makes this such a radical book since, as I've mentioned, Morrison's most radical act is in updating the original Wonder Woman comics rather than reimagining them.

Paquette, like Morrison, apparently paid very close attention to the work of Wonder Woman's creators, and it is evident in his work. One of the many things modern creators always seem to get wrong about Wonder Woman and her milieu is that they insist on grounding it in some sort of mythical, or at least ancient, style, as if the Amazons haven't changed or progressed in any way since they first came to their island, as if their society, culture and science remained perfectly stagnant. But what culture would? Certainly not one as progressive, forward-thinking and presumably more advanced than our own.

Paquette's version of an Amazonian firearm.

The original Paradise Island was as much Buck Rogers as it was sword-and-sandals, and that's evident here. Not only does Paquette draw Wonder Woman's doctor friend in an outfit similar to that of the one she wore in the original Wonder Woman comic, but these Amazons have firearms to play bullets-and-bracelets with a gun that looks so strange that it is apparently one they developed parallel to the firearms developed in Man's World), they have flying hover-bikes shaped vaguely like the shells their chief goddess was said to be born from, and then there's Hippolyta's TV-like magic mirror and the aforementioned robot plane/invisible jet, which is similarly redesigned to look like the sort of airship that might have been developed by a culture completely unfamiliar with Wilbur and Orville Wright.

I really can't overstate what an incredible job Paquete does in taking the craziest ideas present in some of the original comics–rideable kangaroo steeds, for example–and integrating them with a kind of sci-fi fantasy Ancient Greek + 3,000-years aesthetic. I have seen a lot of different versions of Paradise Island over the decades, and this is probably the best-looking one, with almost every single Amazon having her own look, costume and style. His Hippolyta, who here has black hair like her daughter, is probably the all-around coolest-looking Hippolyta I've ever seen, and I like the way that he and Morrison sneak in familiar characters in relatively minor, almost background roles, like Troia (wearing a new version of her old Wonder Girl costume) and Artemis.

Note Troia in the lower right-hand corner; she's in the background of the cover too, and part of a war party sent to Man's World to retrieve Diana.

Of the major divergences from the original story, there are two, the significance of which may strike different readers at different levels of importance.

The first is that Steve Trevor is no longer the blond-haired white guy of the 1940s, but is a black man–Idris Elba, from the looks of Paquette's drawings of him.

Idris Elba, right? Is it just me?

During my first reading, I thought nothing of it. Morrison, Paquette and company decided to "blind cast" a character, who doesn't have anything essential to his character that mandates he be a white guy...certainly not if the story is taking place in 2016 instead of 1941. It seemed like an easy and well-intentioned way to put a person of color into a story that is otherwise just a bunch of white folks; the only other black character with a speaking part is the Robert Kanigher and Don Heck-created Nubia, who is portrayed well in this but is, well, she's still named "Nubia."***

There is, in fact, one thing about a black–or, specifically, an African-American–Steve Trevor that does impact the overall Wonder Woman mega-story, although it took a second reading for the idea to really sink in.

During the trial, Steve is one of the witnesses called forth to testify, and he tells Hippolyta and the assembled Amazons that his "ancestors were enslaved and persecuted by men with too much power."

It's a simple line of dialogue in a panel or two, but it's suggestive in ways that complicate the themes beyond what I'm equipped to address here, and, I imagine, what Morrison intended. First, and less problematically, it occurred to me that with Steve now a black American man rather than a white American man, he shares something in common with women, as he himself points out. He is part of a group that was also hideously mistreated by white men. So Steve Trevor is no longer a representative and a member of those that have and would oppress the Amazons/women in the past, but now he is someone who has likewise been oppressed. Does that matter? Were Steve and Diana paired as representatives of the two world views, and their partnership and kinda sorta romance meant to serve as symbolic bridge between Man's World and Amazonia? Was Golden Age Steve Trevor the embodiment of Man's World, and Diana's ability to win him over emblematic of he eventual success of her mission?

But wait, it gets thornier. Remember that Earth One Steve explicitly mentions the fact that his ancestors were enslaved. How, exactly, does American slavery fit into this idea of bondage and submission? If the book, and Marston's philosophy in general, are pro-bondage and pro-submission, what becomes when we factor in such a repugnant, real-life example of the disastrous negatives of such relationship? (I won't go so far as to say that Marston or Peter were racist, but you need not read many pages of their Wonder Woman comics to see that their comics were racist, regardless of the intent of the creators. Non-white characters are all confined to wince-inducing racial stereotype in the Wonder Woman comics, not simply the Japanese that the characters were at war with, but everyone who wasn't a white American or Amazonian.)

Is Morrison attempting to compare and contrast "bad" enslavement (that which is forced upon the slave out of hatred or a complete lack of empathy) with "good" enslavement (that which is offered and accepted out of love)...? Is it the difference between man-to-man slave/master relationships and man-to-woman and woman-to-woman slave/master relationships? Is the difference simply between the slavery of Man's World and the slavery of the Amazons?

I don't know, and, like I said, I don't think Morrison even intended to go there–if so, I think a little more space would have been spared–but he took us there, even if only in a passing bit of dialogue.

The second big change, which is more significant to the Wonder Woman story, even if it raises fewer questions about its application to our world, is the exact origins of Wonder Woman–that is, how exactly she came to be. The traditional story, that of Marston, is that she was a sort of doll made of clay by Hippolyta, who was distraught that she could not have a daughter of her own, and that the goddesses brought that clay doll to life and imbued it with their blessings. The child then grew up to be Diana.

In rebooting the character's origins for The New 52, writer Brian Azzarello nixed that, and made Wonder Woman the product of a union between a man and woman. Sort of. In his origin, Hippolyta had her baby the old-fashioned way, and the seed was provided by the god Zeus, a well-known knocker-upper of women in myth. That made Diana a demi-god and part of the Olympic family, who dominated Azzarello's run on the title. It also greatly annoyed a lot of Wonder Woman fans for perhaps obvious reasons, but in the sins Azzarello committed against the honor of the Amazons, that was actually pretty minor compared to his explanation of where Amazons babies come from.

At the climax of the trial, Diana gets to question her mother, and asks her of what substance she is made. Hippolyta confesses the story about being a clay figurine brought to life by the goddesses was a lie, a fairy tale told to help keep Diana innocent. In fact, she was the child of Hippolyta and Hercules. She wasn't conceived either in rape or consensual passion though. Morrison has Hippolyta explain:

I took the egg from my womb. And the seed form the loins of the man-god Hercules. Blended in my alembics, seasoned with my fury.

You were my revenge on Hercules, Diana. That his line would yield no sons, only daughters bred to conquer and subdue Man's World. Of my anger you were born.

Your native Amazon vigor combined with the blood of Hercules makes you unbeatable. Yet also proud, rebellious, restless. His blood calls you to Man's World, and to battle.

What are we to make of this? You got me. In a sense, this feels less true-to-myth than her being fathered by noted philadering father of the gods Zeus, even if Hippolyta and Hercules were certainly better positioned within the history of Wonder Woman comics to have made a baby together. The "how" is a little confusing–I would have appreciated Hippolyta saying something about "and through Amazonian science and forbidden magic, I blended them in my alembics."

In essence, it sounds as if Diana was a test-tube baby of sorts (just like Morrison's Robin, Damian Wayne, whose mother Talia al Ghul stole seed from the unwitting Batman to create him****), although how exactly that would work with a Bronze Age man's seed and the sci-fi science of later Amazonia, I don't know.

It does make Wonder Woman fully human, rather than "less than human," as she refers to what she thought of herself due to her clay origins, although I'm not sure that's really that important (Superman's not human, and that's never really been a problem for the character). It also strips her of her unique status among the Amazons; no longer is she the only one born not of the union of man and woman, but she's as human as the rest of them. Ironically, Hippolyta speaks to that particular mingling of blood as what makes Wonder Woman unique, which seems to suggest that this Hercules really was a demi-god, and not just a man, as Hippolyta seems to imply throughout.

It works, but only so long as you don't pick at it, and is a rare example of Morrison trying to "fix" something that wasn't broken. That is the trap that all Wonder Woman creators seem to fall into. It may grasp at Morrison, but for the most part he and Paquette sail on it.

Together they've created the very best standalone graphic novel to feature Wonder Woman, and the one of the best Wonder Woman comics since Marston and Peter's first Wonder Woman comics.



*That's right, "Hercules," not Herakles; like Marston, Morrison doesn't seem to feel a need to prove how smart he is by distinguishing the Roman and Greek spellings. Just last week I was re-reading George Perez and company's "War of The Gods" storyline from 1991-1992, and it actually hinged on a conflict between the Greek and Roman versions of the same pantheon. Marston, meanwhile, had Wonder Woman created by Greek goddesses and battle the Roman war god Mars few issues later.

**Which means, in truth, no one should have be labeled or declare themselves "feminist;" it's everyone else who should be labeled "sexist," as you're either one or the other. It still boggles my mind that there are people, men and women, who resist or refuse to be called "feminist." Personally, I've long assumed–or maybe it's more like hoped–that this was because the people who claim not to be feminist are doing so out of pure ignorance and don't really know or understand what that word means.

***Of course, the decision of "casting" Steve as a black man rather than a white man here doesn't seem like the sort of thing that will have much impact in the pop culture in general, at least, not in the same way that Mark Millar and Bryan Hitch making the Ultimate Nick Fury black lead to Sam Jackson playing the character in all the Marvel movies...and the creation of a new black character with the name appearing in the "real" Marvel comics. In fact, this isn't even like having the New 52 Wally West be black, which I hear lead to his being black on The Flash TV show. Wonder Woman's movie is already in production, and its Steve Trevor is going to be played by white guy Chris Pine. Would that have been different had DC published this book just a few years earlier? I don't know, but possibly.

****Also like Robin Damian Wayne, Morrison's Earth One Wonder Woman wears regular old off-the-rack boots with laces.

Meanwhile...

Today at Robot 6, I have a review of this week's The Multiversity: Guidebook #1, which I discussed just briefly here last night in order to point out one aspect and one revelation.

Last week on Robot 6, I wrote a bit about Norm Breyfogle—one of my favorite Batman artists, one of my favorite artists period and one of the artists who first got me interested in comics—and the current effort to raise $200,000 to help defray the costs of his stroke treatment. They're still less than halfway there, which I find pretty frustrating, as $200,000 is a lot of money...but it's nothing in terms of Batman money. You can give directly by clicking on the previous link, and, I think it's well worth noting that DC has apparently solicited a rather huge Breyfogle-focused collection.

That's welcome news under any circumstances, as, despite the fact that Breyfogle drew hundreds of pages of Batman comics during his time as the regular artists on Batman and Detective, his work isn't too terribly well-represented in DC's extant trade line, He was working in a period prior to the graphics novel boom, but later than the foundational or formational periods of comics that also see a great deal of collections in our current Golden Age of Collections. So his comics work predates the Everything Gets Collected era of superhero comics, as well as the writing-for-the-trade era. Much of his work that is collected--and hasn't gone out of print--then is a chapter of Knightfall here or there, or something along those lines.

Over at Good Comics For Kids, I've had a pair of reviews in the last two weeks: Ted Naifeh's Princess Ugg Vol. 1 and Super Heroes: My First Dictionary (The latter of which I hope to discuss in much greater detail here in the near future).

On a couple of Earths of interest:

Marcus To

The only new comic released today that I've read so far this week is The Multiversity: Guidebook #1, which was a huge surprise in that it contained a story just a few pages shorter than those of the other Multiversity books, contained some 35 extra pages detailing the Map of the Multiverse and these little profiles of 45 of the 52 Earths (seven of them are "Unknown" Earths at this point.

These were surprisingly fun, in large part because of how familiar so many of them were, and that the editors seemed to do a pretty decent job of at least making an attempt to match the settings and characters in each entry with the artist most associated with them.

So, for example, the Vampire Earth derived from Doug Moench/Kelley Jones trilogy of Vampire Batman books is drawn by Kelley Jones (I guess one reason Superman should wear shorts is to give Jones a good idea where to start and stop with his leg muscles).

Or, for another example, Darwyn Cooke draws the Earth assigned to his New Fronteir.

DC doesn't get a lot of the ideal candidates to draw these Earths. Alex Ross doesn't draw Earth-Kingdom Come, Dan Brereton doesn't draw Earth-Thrillkiller, Alcatena doesn't draw Earth-Detective Comics Annual #7, J.H. Williams III doesn't draw Earth-Justice Riders and so on, but there's a fair amount of very good art in this section, and flipping to and from the credits page at the back of the book is one of the many (many, many, many) pleasures the book offers.

The Earth I was probably most surprised to see was Earth-1:

So I guess that explains why those Earth One original graphic novels are all sub-titled "Earth One"—it is the universe within the current iteration of The Multiverse on which they take place. As for the main DCU, the Earth I've been calling "Earth-New 52"...? That's Earth-0, or "New Earth," as it was called post-Identity Crisis.

The entry, illustrated by Batman: Earth One artist Gary Frank, explicitly notes that the various characters all exist in the same world (There's been no indication in the books published so far that this was the case, and all three seemed to stand alone and divorced form one another). Also of interest is the inclusion of Wonder Woman, in the text and in the illustration, as she hasn't been introduced yet. It was announced that Greg Rucka would be working on a Wonder Woman: Earth One book, and then it was announced that Morrison would be doing it instead, but the title of Morrison's original graphic novel about Wonder Woman has since changed its title, losing the "Earth One" sub-title and, one assumes, its designation within the line and, one also assumes, its setting on this Earth. But one shouldn't really assume anything, should one? I, for example, assumed those books were not set on a new Earth-1 (Is it of interest that the parallel worlds that the main DCU of Earth-0 have had the most interaction with so far have been Earth-2 and Earth-3, rather than their closest neighbor, Earth-1...?)

A few thoughts on Batman and Owlman, in light of Batman Vol. 2: City of Owls and Forever Evil

In 1964, the Justice League of America creative team of writer Gardner Fox and artist Mike Sekowsky introduced The Crime Syndicate of America, villainous counterparts to the JLA from the parallel earth of Earth-3, where the events of history were reversed in more-or-less random ways (In Earth-3's version of the Revolutionary War, for example, British colonists declared their independence from America, and so on). Therefore rather than having a team of superheroes, like the League's Earth-1 had, Earth-3 had a supervillains, who were a lot like their Justice League counterparts, but not quite (Ultraman instead of Superman, Superwoman instead of Wonder Woman, and so on).

Batman's opposite number was Owlman, who wore a blue and gray costume somewhat similar to Batman's costume, but instead of a cowl he wore what looked like a toupee made out of an owl's head.

In 1999, writer Grant Morrison and artist Frank Quitely reintroduced a new version of the "Crime Syndicate of Amerika," this one hailing from a parallel earth within the Anti-Matter Universe in their original graphic novel JLA: Earth-2. The team roster was the same, but the characters were a little more thoughtfully designed, tweaked to more closely parallel their JLA counterparts, and some of them were given fuller back stories.

One of these was, of course, Owlman, who was now revealed to be Thomas Wayne Jr., older brother to Bruce Wayne. On their world, Bruce and his mother Martha Wayne were killed in that alley, while Thomas and his father, Thomas Wayne Sr., the police commissioner, survived. Blaming his father for the death of his mother, Thomas grew up to become the criminal mastermind of Gotham City, Owlman, and went to war with his father.

Morrison, who always showed a zeal for in-story allusions and/or Easter eggs, was in fact referencing an old, Crisis On Infinite Earths-rendered apocryphal story from a 1974 issue of World's Finest by Bob Haney, Dick Dillin and Vince Colletta.

In "Wipe The Blood Off My Name!", Batman pursues "The Boomerang Killer," only to discover it is actually his older brother Thomas Wayne Jr, who was severely and permanently brain-damaged in a childhood car accident, and confined to an asylum (I guess it was a very specific type of brain damage, which causes those who suffer from it to eventually grow up to become killers?). Bruce's parents had every intention of telling him about his criminally insane older brother they put in an asylum when he was old enough to understand, of course, but then there was that whole murder in an alley thing.

Fast forward to 2011, when Scott Snyder and Greg Capullo take over the relaunched Batman. Their first year's worth of stories is dedicated to The Court of Owls, a sort of semi-legendary Illuminati pulling the strings behind everything going on in Gotham City, a secret organization so secret that even Batman didn't know they were real. In addition to naming themselves after owls, wearing ceremonial owl masks and using a lot of owl themes in their decor, they also command a small army of elite, undead assassins in owl costumes that they refer to as "Talons."

At the climax, it is revealed that among their more prominent members is mayoral candidate Lincoln March, who Capullo draws to look a lot like Bruce Wayne. And with good reason!

March claims to be Thomas Wayne Jr., Bruce Wayne's younger brother, who was still in Martha Wayne's womb when she was in a terrible car accident. Born early and severely brain-damaged, he was put in the "Willowood Home For Children" (In Haney's story, Thomas Wayne Jr. was in the "Willowood Asylum;" like Morrison then, Snyder was heavily referencing the now non-canonical early '70s story). Feeling abandoned by his parents and older brother, Wayne/March was raised by the Court of Owls to inherit the Wayne empire. That didn't quite work out, nor did his run for mayor, so he ultimately makes a play to seize control of the Court of Owls, even going so far as to give himself the Court's undead-making super-secret super-serum, the one reserved for the virtually un-killable Talons. Then he puts on a fancy new Talon suit; "Something tough and modern," he says of it, " Something to rival the Batman."

While he never goes by that name, Snyder and Capullo's March/Wayne dons a fancy owl costume and essentially becomes an owl man. (As to whether or not he actually is Thomas Wayne Jr., Bruce Wayne and Alfred Pennyworth are certain that he is not, that Bruce's brother actually died from the wounds sustained in that crash, but Bruce says he can't know with 100% certitude until he gets a DNA sample, and March/Wayne disappears during their climactic battle, in the fashion of many supervillains—presumably killed, but with no body discovered).

Then, in 2013, writer Geoff Johns re-introduced the new, New 52 version of The Crime Syndicate, who are once again from Earth-3, a parallel world where many aspects of the DC Universe is "reversed," including the fact that the heroes are villains and the villains are heroes. This Syndicate also has an Owlman, and as Johns reveals in issues of his Justice League of America, the new Owlman of Earth-3 is still Thomas Wayne Jr., now once again Bruce Wayne's older brother.

In Johns' origin story, the two Wayne children—Thomas and Bruce—conspired to kill their own parents, and, on the night when they were shot to death in the alley, Bruce had last-minute, second thoughts, so Thomas Jr., conspiring with Alfred Pennyworth, kills his mother, father and little brother. He then grows up to be Owlman.

So this is strange.

On the "real" Earth of the DC Universe, which I'll call Earth-New 52, there is a heroic Bruce Wayne defending Gotham City as the superhero Batman, and a villainous "Owlman" who is—or at least claims to be and presents a pretty good case for being—Thomas Wayne Jr.

And on Earth-3, the reversed world where good is evil and evil is good, Bruce Wayne was good (well, he was a spoiled brat who considered killing his parents, but he wasn't as evil as his brother), and a villanous Owlman who is really Thomas Wayne Jr.

In that respect, at least, the worlds aren't opposite at all. Thomas Wayne Jr./Owlman is a bad guy on both worlds, just as Bruce Wayne/Batman is a good guy (or at least not a bad guy) on both worlds.

New 52 Vs. DC Super-Pets: Animal Man

Carmine Infantino's Animal Man from the pages of Strange Adventures

Created by writer Dave Wood and artist Carmine Infantino for a one-off feature in 1965's Strange Adventure's #180, Buddy Baker was a man temporarily gifted with the power to borrow the abilities of animals in his vicinity (See Brian Cronin's post on Comics Should Be Good here for a scan-filled history of the character in the Silver Age).

He proved popular enough to return a handful of times, eventually earning a proper superhero name and costume, although he remained an extremely minor, even obscure character until writer Grant Morrison and company's late-eighties revival of the character.

The original costume featured an orange, blue and black color combination, which wasn't exactly popular among superheroes, but that was probably what helped generate it: By the late 1960s, they were running out of color combinations for new superheroes.

In the Superman tradition, Animal Man had the first letter of his name emblazoned on his chest, but it's pretty fully integrated into the design, rather than being a logo that looks hung there. He wore goggles and an unusual, head-hugging half-cowl that allowed his hair to breathe (The goggles were no doubt functional as well as identity-concealing, and it looks like he's got some ear-protection built in).  Note the scale-like texture of the costume, and the shape of his gloves and boots.

Brian Bolland's cover for 1990's Animal Man #19

In 1988, DC awarded Animal Man his own title, by writer Grant Morrison and pencil artist Chas Truog. His costume was little changed, the major innovation being the addition of a leather jacket over his costume. Well, given Animal Man's vegetarianism and support of animal rights, it was more likely a pleather jacket. The material of the costume gradually gave way to your more standard superhero spandex as well.

And that was pretty much what Animal Man looked like from then on, save for a few story-specific costume changes, as when he became a "dark" version of himself near the end of Morrison's run, or when he assumed a chimerical form during Jamie Delano's run and finally quit wearing his costume and grew his hair long and white near the end of the first volume of his series in the mid-1990s. In all of his subsequent appearances, he'd look like the version from the Morrison run, sometimes wearing the jacket and sometimes not.

Steve Pugh's cover for 2012's Animal Man #0

Animal Man earned a second, ongoing series when DC relaunched their line under "The New 52" banner in September 2011. The character saw one of the more drastic character redesigns, keeping only the large A design element and the partial cowl. His colors were now blue and white, he no longer wore goggles and rather than having a glove-like element to his costume, the white arms were more sleeve-like, extending up to his torso.

I personally don't like it much, mostly because of how far divorced it is from the original costume that it makes him look like an entirely different character. He looks rather like an X-Man to me ("A" aside), and while orange, blue and black might not have been the best color combination in the world, Animal Man did sort of own blue and orange, whereas blue and white is a color combination that a lot of super-characters use (particularly villains and characters with cold powers).

I don't think the change makes very good business/character evangelization sense, either (The same goes for most of the New 52 redesigns). I understand the idea of signaling the drastic change by so thoroughly redesigning everything—costume tweaks and changes have long been a way to call attention to an old character or a new storyline—but in this case, Animal Man no longer looks like the character that appears in the critically-acclaimed Grant Morrison-written graphic novels (or any of the other Animal Man trades, or in the collections of 52, which featured him among its cast). Nor does he look like the Animal Man in the DC Nation shorts, Animal Man's only real appearance outside the comics medium.

Personally, I prefer the following design.

Art Baltazar's Animal Man from the DC Super-Pets Character Encyclopedia

Animal Man makes an appearance in the DC Super-Pets Character Encyclopedia, as the "Superhero Owner" of Super-Pet King (a lion).

Baltazar keeps the basic color combo—orange suit, blue A, black accessories—as well as the half-cowl and goggles. He streamlines it quite a bit though, so those amoeba-like tendrils at the borders of the boots and gloves that Infantino gave his costume are gone, replaced by straight edges or triangular shapes.

I especially like the little animal touches he adds, like the big, rounded goggles (suggesting an insect's eyes), the leopard or cheetah-like spots near the gloves and boots, and even the little lines suggesting a paw-like boot. There all just little flourishes, but each signal "new" and "different" without actually radically changing the costume (They're more like adding a yellow circle behind Batman's bat-symbol, or taking that yellow circle away, rather than, say, giving Wonder Woman a pair of black pants or Hawkman a suit of golden armor).

I also really like the torn vest, which replaces the problematic leather/pleather jacket (even if it's fake leather, it looks like leather), and might have different connotations to different viewers. With the vest, Animal Man's got a cool accessory to wear over his costume to signal he's a little more hip than the characters who just wear their spandex costumes.

Maybe the next Animal Man series will see Animal Man wearing a costume more like this than his blue and white, New 52 togs. Not much point in re-dressing the current Animal Man in the cooler, Baltazar-designed costume. From what I've read, the new, New 52 Animal Man isn't a very good comic, and seems to be repeating plot lines from the original series (and Swamp Thing), and doing the sorts of things Morrison parodied and criticized in superhero comics during his Animal Man run, without a trace of irony or understanding.

This is, by the way, Example #1 for why Art Baltazar should be the next person DC calls to redesign all their characters, rather than Jim Lee and company.