Review: Phil Foglio, Hilary Barta and company's Plastic Man

Frank Miller and David Mazzuccheilli's "Batman: Year One". John Byrne's The Man of Steel. George Perez, Len Wein and company's Wonder Woman. All three late '80s comics, published after the 1985-1986 Crisis on Infinite Earths, updated and modernized the origins of the greatest DC Comics heroes, re-presenting their specifics and establishing themes and styles that were meant to influence future portrayals and, indeed, they would do just that...at least until DC decided it wanted another continuity-cleansing Crisis. 

Does the 1988 Plastic Man mini-series written by Phil Foglio, pencilled by Hilary Barta, inked by John Nyberg (and featuring some contributions from Kevin Nowlan and Doug Rice, to be discussed later), deserve to be mentioned among those same seminal comics?

Well, probably not. Heck, DC has never even collected it into a trade paperback, let alone kept it in print as an evergreen introduction to the character, along the lines of Miller and Mazzucchelli's Batman arc. 

But nevertheless, the series did mark Plastic Man's first real starring appearance after the events of Crisis*, it did introduce the character as if he were a brand-new one (ala Perez and company's Wonder Woman) and it did present a new, updated version of his origin and his status quo.

It also established something of a style and tone for the character going forward...that of a B-List hero with a wacky sense of humor, a character who may or may not actually be somewhat insane. (In my recent reading of all of the Plastic Man appearances I could find, only 1991's Action Comics #661 and 1996's Superman #110 and The Power of Shazam! #21 seemed to honor this miniseries' conceit of Plastic Man literally seeing the world in a cartoony way that deviated from reality.) 

It wouldn't be until later in the 1997-2006 JLA series that writers would attempt to tell more serious Plastic Man stories, with Mark Waid briefly exploring his criminal past when the Leaguers find their heroic and civilian identities split apart and Joe Kelly revealing that Plas has and estranged son. 

The 1988 Plastic Man was, again, written by cartoonist Phil Foglio, who would go on to create two more humor-focused miniseries for DC, 1991's Angel and The Ape and 1993's Stanley and his Monster revamps, both of which he would pencil himself. Today he's probably better known for his own series, Girl Genius. 

He was paired with the great Hilary Barta, who spent much of the 1980s as an inker, but was here handling the pencil art, and inked by John Nyberg. In addition to inking, Barta would go on to contribute to Marvel's What The--?!, Image's Stupid, DC's Paradox Press Big Book of... series and Bongo's Simpsons comics; I personally first encountered his work with Alan Moore on America's Best Comics, where he drew the not-entirely-unlike-Plastic Man feature "Splash Brannigan," one installment of which featured a stealth cameo by Plas, disguised as a red carpet.

The creative team also included Kevin Nowlan, who was credited with "Reality Checks", pages in each issue showing the "real world," as opposed to the world as seen by Plastic Man and Woozy Winks; Doug Rice, who the Grand Comics Database says was responsible for some layouts and gags (The fourth issue credits him as "Consultant); and colorist Rick Taylor and letterer Willie Schubert.

The very first page of the series is drawn by Nowlan, in that realistic style; it could not be further apart from that of Barta, which accounts for 21 pages of each issue. It is Nowlan who draws the essential origin story, in which Eel O'Brian and a gang of other criminals are attempting to rob a chemical plant when Eel is shot, some sort of acid gets into his wound and his co-conspirators all abandon him to his fate.

Rather than making it to a swamp, where he is discovered by a kindly holy man who conceals him from the police and tells him he believes there is good in him, as in creator Jack Cole's original, 1941 Plastic Man story (collected most recently in DC Finest: Plastic Man—The Origins of Plastic Man, which I wrote about him this post) Eel simply blacks out, the last panel of Nowlan's page being all-black. 

The next page opens with similarly black panels, filled only with colorful sound-effects (CLANK! rattle CLANK!), Eel's slowly opening eyes, and his own hesitant dialogue bubbles. He finally awakens, to find himself in a garbage can, an unhoused person trying to steal his tie, and everything, himself included, looking quite different, as Barta and Nyberg have now, of course, taken over art duties.

Barta's artwork, which you can see on the cover, is the work of a humor cartoonist more than that of a superhero comic book artist; sure, based on the cover alone, his Plas may seem a somewhat heroic figure, but look at his Woozy and all the other characters on it. That gives one a sense of the look of the book.

Every panel is filled with what Mad magazine's Will Elder used to call "chicken fat," extra, extraneous visual gags built atop visual gags that don't exactly move the plot but add flavor and texture to the proceedings. Most of Barta's panels deserve to be not only read, but paused at and pored over, allowing one to enjoy the detailed characters, caricatures and other funny business in the crowd scenes, backgrounds and foregrounds.

As for his suddenly transformed Eel, Barta's take on the character actually reminded me a bit of the art of Peter Bagge (although Bagge's best-known work, Hate, wasn't yet released at the time that this Plastic Man series was being created). Like a Bagge character, Barta's post-acid Eel was all face, with long, curving, looping, seemingly bone-less limbs; these stretched out of the sleeves and legs of Eel's suit, as he tried to make it out of the alley while being inconspicuous, people fleeing left and right as he walked down the street, screaming about a monster.

He's eventually rejected by his own gang, who also think he's a monster, and then chased by the police, and then the army, all of them shooting to kill. After a disgusting escape through a toilet bowel to the sewer (he emerges from a pipe spitting brown liquid with a "SPLURT" sound effect), he tries to drink his troubles away but is eventually tossed out of a bar on skid row.

Resolving to throw himself off a bridge—which we, of course, know wouldn't actually work—he meets Woozy Winks, who is carrying a fishing pole and asks if he happens to have a spare nightcrawler in his pocket. Eel is shocked that Woozy isn't shocked at his constantly changing appearance, but the newcomer explains that he sees weird stuff like Eel all the time, and that he's pleased to see that Eel is actually real. 

"Usually the really interesting things that I see aren't real!" Woozy says, before explaining that he was happily a resident of an asylum—a sign in front of the building in his flashback says "Arkham Asylum"—"Then something called Reganomics forced them to send me out into the world" and into the streets of New York.

Barta's Woozy is probably the best Woozy I've ever seen, outside of Cole's own hard-to-get-right, jowly version of the character. Barta gives him the green polka dot shirt and now old-timey hat, and the design seems like that of the later, perfected version that Cole used to draw: A big, somewhat pear-shaped head, big eyes, a bulbous nose that looks like it belongs to a Muppet rather than a man, a mouth full of big white cartoony teeth and a round, fat figure that is still capable of many energetic and dynamic poses.

Now under Woozy's wing, Plas tests out the limits of his powers, dons "some sort of circus outfit" (the only garment they treat with the plasticity-granting acid that doesn't dissolve) and decides whether he should use these new abilities for good or ill. 

Faced with this momentous decision, they decide to flip a coin—the very same manner in which the Woozy of the 1940s decided how he would use his own supernatural gift of protection by nature (As in the Cole story, we don't see how the coin flip turns out immediately).

The answer comes when Plastic Man captures his own old gang during an attempted bank heist, after which he's mobbed by the media, and has to pull Woozy away from the open bank vault, his sidekick shouting, "Two out of three! Two out of three!"

Though there are obviously liberties taken with Cole's original origin (and a topical gag about the Reagan administration that now dates the story even more so than the gangster stereotype Eel adhered to), the basic gist remains. Foglio, Barta and company benefited from the hindsight to know where Cole was going with his feature in a way that Cole—who was, of course, making it up as he went along—did not, so their Plastic Man arrives pretty much perfectly formed.  

It's therefore a farily perfect re-telling of Plastic Man's origins, and a comic book that is completely complete on its own (It would slide neatly into any sort of future "Best of" collection of Plastic Man stories). 

There are, of course, three more issues to go.

Each of these is similarly a done-in-one comic that reads just fine on its own, and doesn't require one to have read the previous issue, or have any idea at all what might be going on in the greater DC Universe (although the final issue does have an Invasion logo, and is labeled "Not an Invasion Aftermath Extra!").

In the second issue, Woozy and Plastic are roused by some city cops along with the other unhoused folks sleeping in the park (in their case, Woozy is on hammock made out of Plastic Man tied between two trees). 

They attempt to get a job as bank security guards, but the bank is robbed mid-interview. The thieves are known as The Ooze Brothers, a trio of cartoonish criminal types who have been mutated thanks to their diet of fish from the most polluted of waters. Now living up to their name, they are essentially living ooze in human form. (I would say we're lucky to not have the same environmental problems that America had in the 1980s, but, well, the Captain Planet villains in the Trump administration seem bent on making environmental degradation great again.)

Eventually our heroes succeed, in a way that actually even improves the lives of our villains, and, with the reward money they receive, they are able to secure a rundown office and open up a private detective agency. (There are a few allusions to let us know this book is indeed a DC comic, including mentions of Martian Manhunter, Belle Reeve and Batman in the dialogue; the final issue includes a mention of Booster Gold, a Superman cameo, and Superman rattling off a list of DC heroes who owe him a favor).

If the second issue presented us with a new status quo for Plastic Man and Woozy Winks, the third issue deviates from it. Feeling underappreciated, Woozy joins a cult—a bunch of beautiful women in robes asking him to do so seals the deal for him—and he takes off for California with all of his and Plas' money (which is, of course, in a sack with a dollar sign on it).

As toga-wearing guru Ramalama (whose name is always followed by a "ding dong" sound effect made by the ringing of a nearby bell) reveals his master plan, which involves getting thousands of followers to dance on the San Adreas fault line and thus break California off into the Pacific Ocean, Woozy snaps out of it. He joins Plastic Man and an eccentric old man who claims to be an Atlantean wizard named Arion (Arion VI, not the Arion you are probably thinking of, whom he doesn't the least bit resemble) to save the day. 

There are a lot of jokes about how weird California and Californians are, especially as opposed to the "normal" people of New York, including an in-story explanation for that weirdness. Having never been to California and only ever visited NYC, these jokes didn't really land with me, and I suppose your mileage may vary. They certainly seem old and tired in 2025, but then, this series is 37 years old now. 

The final issue of the series is the one that likely aged the poorest, as its plot revolves around the unhoused, who are referred to throughout variously as winos, bums, street people and bag people. Our heroes first realize something is amiss on the bus ride back to New York from California, as the bus seems completely full of "winos" (There's even a person in the overhead baggage area). 

When they return to the city, it too is filled with the unhoused, and the city mayor no sooner hires Plastic Man and Woozy to figure out what's going on than his honor is kidnapped by a robot. 

The plot that emerges sounds vaguely Douglas Adams-y. See, the Ooblort Space Confederation's welfare department has done such a good job of taking care of all the indigent in their jurisdiction that they've now run out of customers and, if they can't find more indigent to care for by the next budget meeting, they will be shut down.

And so they turned to earth, gathering the poor from all over the country and summoning them to New York City (via voices in their heads; see, they weren't talking to themselves all this time, but with the aliens). To keep the Earthlings in their "natural habitat," the aliens—who look an awful lot like SpongeBob's Patrick Star, although that cartoon was still 11 years in the future—plan to just take the whole island of Manhattan with them into space.

With Plastic Man busy fighting their robots, it's up to Woozy to rally the assembled masses to take on the aliens. While they are unmoved by Woozy's insistence that the disappearance of Manhattan will have deleterious effects on the world economy, when he tells them that the alien ship is full of old shoes, they spring into action, raiding the ship and tearing out everything they can, carrying away vital components in their shopping bags.

It's then that Superman—drawn quite off-model, in order to comport to Plastic Man and Woozy's view of the "real" world—arrives to lend a hand, as apparently when Manhattan is dropped back into place, it's facing the wrong way. (In addition to Superman's appearances, there are off-handed references throughout the series to Martian Manhunter, Batman, Belle Reeve and Booster Gold, letting readers know it's technically set in the DC Universe, although that setting doesn't come into play at all.)

All in all, it's a quite solid series with masterful work by Barta, and one that could really use a collection.

Maybe it will finally get one if James Gunn decides to do a Plastic Man movie in the near future...

*Between the time the last issue of COIE shipped and the first issue of this miniseries, Plastic Man appeared in an issue of DC Comics Presents (which seems to be set in pre-Crisis continuity, as it has Jimmy Olsen becoming Elastic-Lad during its proceedings) and issues of DC Challenge I've read but forgot the contents of (I think that series could use a collection, personally). He also had cameos in the Golden Age-set All-Star Squadron and Young All-Stars, as well as a cameo in Infinity Inc (although I'm not sure if that last one was a flashback to the Golden Age or set in modern times having, never read that one). 

So even the fact of whether he debuted in the new, post-Crisis DC Universe's Golden Age of the 1940s or, like Wonder Woman, was debuting for the first time in the late 1980s seems to be a point of confusion right off the bat for the then-new continuity.

History of the DC Universe, an illustrated prose book published in 1986 and meant to delineate the new, post-Crisis continuity only featured a cameo of Plastic Man, in which he appears in a crowd scene devoted to the All-Star Squadron, which would have meant he was a Golden Ager.  

DC would change that in the next official history of the DC Universe they offered, however, in the timeline that followed the story in Zero Crisis #0, recently collected in DC Finest: Zero Hour: Crisis in Time: Part Two. According to that, Plastic Man debuted "8 Years Ago", during the "New Heroic Age" ushered in by Superman's debut two years previously (Interestingly, according to this timeline, Elongated Man pre-dates Plas in the new continuity by one year).

That was the post-Crisis, pre-Infinite Crisis timeline, though. Who knows what continuity is supposed to be now. Perhaps we'll find out when DC publishes its upcoming New History of the DC Universe...

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.