Early in 2024, when DC and Marvel Comics announced that they were overcoming years of – let’s be frank – hostility with one another to release a pair of omnibus editions of their various crossovers from years past, I was excited. Not only that, but I was hopeful that this would lead to further collaborations between the two of them. Earlier this year, that hope was justified when the publishers released their first new crossover in almost 20 years, a pair of books teaming up Batman and Deadpool. Not only that, but each of those books would have several back-up stories featuring other team-ups, such as Green Lantern/Rocket Raccoon, Captain America/Wonder Woman, and Krypto the Superdog/Jeff the Land Shark. And it was nice.
Nice.
And then stuff started happening.
At first, it was stuff that wasn’t too difficult to see as an expansion of this new era of cooperation. Both Marvel and DC have been in the business of publishing “facsimile editions” of classic comics for a few years now – key issues reprinted in their entirety, including the original advertisements, letter columns, and other features that we don’t usually see when a story is reprinted elsewhere. In this spirit, they announced facsimile editions of the original Spider-Boy one-shot from the classic Amalgam Comics event, with a character that mashed up Spider-Man and Superboy (the Conner Kent version) into one hero. This is going to be followed by a facsimile edition of the first-ever meeting between Marvel and DC characters, 1976’s Superman Vs. the Amazing Spider-Man. And then the big magilla – although still not technically anything shocking – they announced that the two Batman/Deadpool comics would be followed some time in 2026 with two new Superman/Spider-Man events.
Awesome sauce, right?
But it didn’t end there, either.
Last week, totally out of the blue, subscribers to the Marvel Universe app (such as myself) got an email announcing a brand-new digital-only comic book…a crossover between Thor and Shazam! Not only that, but it was written by Al Ewing, who has been helming major books for both Marvel and DC for the past few years, including Thor’s ongoing series and DC’s Absolute Green Lantern, among others. Only minutes later, subscribers to the DC Infinity app (such as myself) ALSO got an e-mail, this time announcing a surprise digital crossover starring the Flash and the Fantastic Four, written by former Flash and current Green Lantern and Aquaman writer Jeremy Adams. Both of them were fun reads, totally unexpected, and available for free even if you didn’t have a subscription to the app.
It was like Christmas in November! Or, like every store in North America calls it, “Late Christmas.”
“What a nice surprise,” I thought to myself. It’s really rare that a comic book publisher these days would even change the color of Spider-Gwen’s shoelaces without putting out a press release about it, so a pair of totally unexpected crossovers was a delightful treat.
Then it really started to get weird.
Because the day after the crossovers dropped, Marvel and DC each sent out ANOTHER email. Marvel’s was a code for their subscribers to get a free 30-day trial of DC Infinity. And DC’s email? You guessed it – a code for 30 free days of Hello Fresh.
No, just kidding. Of course, it was a code for a free trial of the Marvel app. And at this point, I started to get uneasy. You see, Marvel and DC have historically been the two biggest competitors in the comic book game. And while there have always been creators who moved freely between the companies, working for one and then the other or even (such as is the case with Ewing) working for them both at the same time, the higher-ups have had a kind of bitter antagonism for the past few decades. Both Marvel and DC have undergone regime changes since the harshest days of the feud, though, and even the Omnibus editions were evidence that the temperature between them has cooled. Even so, seeing them shamelessly promoting each other is…unsettling. Imagine, for example, that you grew up in a household where your parents were fighting all of the time, and then suddenly without warning, the fighting just STOPPED. In some ways, the quiet would be even more disturbing than the fight.
That’s where comic book fans are at the moment. We’ve gone from “Isn’t it nice that Mom and Dad are being friendly again?” all the way around to “What in the HELL is going on?”
Because maybe it’s just me and the basic state of paranoia that exists hardwired right into my brain, but it feels like there’s more happening behind the scenes than the fans are being made aware of. And sure, it could just be more crossovers like Batman/Deadpool or Superman/Spider-Man. Maybe it will become a new annual event. Maybe even more than annual.
Or maybe it’s something else.
This is the only reasonable reaction.
The good thing is that I talk to a lot of comic nerds (shout out to my homies in the best Comic Book Collecting group on Facebook) so I know I’m not the ONLY one who feels this way. A few people have speculated that one of the publishers, or their parent companies, is considering buying the other one. I don’t really think this is the case, and I sincerely HOPE it isn’t, and for a few reasons. First, I think competition is healthy – putting the two biggest brands under a single umbrella would undercut that dramatically. Also, the odds of Warner Bros purchasing Marvel from Disney – one of Disney’s major cash cows, in a time when Warner Bros itself is on the market for a new owner – is virtually nonexistent. The possibility of the WB selling DC to Disney, on the other hand, feels more plausible, but that would be bad because…I’m going to be frank here…DC is crushing it right now. The comic book line’s sales and critical response are up and the movie and TV production is firing on all cylinders, despite what that one jackass who writes for “Cosmic Book News” is desperately trying to convince people. Handing that brand over to Disney and Marvel – whose works, let’s face it, have kind of been declining the last few years – would not be optimal for anybody.
Seriously, compared to “Cosmic Book News,” this thing is the Encyclopedia Britannica.
Another possibility, one that I would be far more open to, would be some sort of distribution partnership. Much has been made about the chaos behind the scenes of the comic book world with the slow death of Diamond Distribution this year, and seeing Marvel and DC cooperate on a new distribution venture would be not be out of the question and, frankly, would probably be a net benefit for the comic shops, although smaller publishers would justifiably be concerned about the two juggernauts creating a new distribution juggernaut before we’ve even buried the ashes of the old one. There’s also the possibility of the Marvel and DC apps perhaps being offered in a subscription bundle, not unlike many TV and movie streamers these days. As someone who has subscribed to both for quite some time, I wouldn’t hate that.
But what if it’s something else? What if the big thing they’re working on isn’t anything behind-the-scenes, but in the content? DC Studios boss James Gunn – whose rise to prominence came from helming the Guardians of the Galaxy movies for Marvel – has spoken more than once about liking the idea of some sort of crossover movie between the two, and Marvel head Kevin Feige has shown effusive support for Gunn himself.
You might even call this photo the smoking GUNN. Get it? GET IT?
And with both studios embracing the multiverse concept, it wouldn’t be that difficult from a story perspective. Can you imagine David Corenswet and Tom Holland in a Superman/Spider-Man movie? They would sell so many tickets that they’d have to bring in a third crossover character, such as the Count from Sesame Street, to keep track of them all.
BUT – and I hate to put a damper on things – Gunn’s DC Universe consists of exactly one movie and two seasons of television so far. There’s more on the horizon, of course – the Lanterns TV series and the Supergirl and Clayface movies are all on the schedule for 2026 – but I feel like Gunn probably needs more time to really establish his DCU before any sort of crossover becomes a real possibility.
The comics, on the other hand, are already well established. And they’ve played the crossover game many times before. But what if this time it was more than just this guy meets that guy? There have been larger crossovers in the past. DC Vs. Marvel not only pitted their entire universes against each other, but also included the Amalgam mashups. JLA/Avengers, famously, featured every character who had ever been a member of either team (at the time – if they did that these days the ways the rosters have expanded they would need another 16 issues). But these crossovers have almost NEVER been addressed in-canon. There have been only two exceptions that I’m aware of, both from DC. First was a random issue of Green Lantern that had a cameo by Access – a character introduced in DC Vs. Marvel with the power to move between the two universes – which happened to be written by Access’s co-creator Ro Marz. Second, an “egg” holding an embryonic universe that was created in JLA/Avengers later became a McGuffin in a JLA storyline written by that crossover’s writer, Kurt Busiek. References to the “other” universe have always been oblique outside of the crossovers themselves, which is understandable due to things like copyright and reprint considerations.
But what if they could get past all that and tell a story that REALLY impacts the two worlds?
They’ve wanted to do it for some time. In the 80s and 90s, there were infrequent appearances in the Marvel universe of a guy in a suit and glasses named “Clark,” always just for a panel or two, but a definite wink at the camera. Other Marvel multiverse storylines have often made vague references to the DC characters as well. DC has also played that game. In his Hawkman series, Robert Venditti heavily explored the fact that Hawkman is a character who has been reincarnated for thousands of years, not only on Earth but on other worlds such as Krypton. But he also dropped hints that some of Hawkman’s reincarnates may have included certain Marvel characters with “Hawk” in their name, such as Starhawk of the original Guardians of the Galaxy.
This is from an issue of Thor. Can you believe he’s using GLASSES as a disguise? What a dork.
Then there’s the big enchilada, Geoff Johns and Gary Frank’s Doomsday Clock, the series which brought the world of Watchmen into direct conflict with the DC Universe. In that story Dr. Manhattan, who lives outside of linear time and can see the past, present, and future as if it’s all happening now, looked ahead to an event he called the “Secret Crisis” happening in 2030. In that crisis, he foresaw Superman fighting Thor (as a character from Norse mythology, anyone is allowed to use the name “Thor” without a copyright issue, so long as they don’t have a picture of the Marvel version of the character), as well as a “green behemoth” who would sacrifice his own life to save Superman, a clear reference to the Hulk. By the way, the Hulk’s comic book, at the moment, is written by Phillip Kennedy Johnson, who is currently writing a miniseries at DC Comics about a character bouncing around in time…dang it, who is that again? Oh yeah…it’s Superman. In fact, the book is called Adventures of Superman: House of El, and it’s tying off plot threads leftover from Johnson’s run on the main Superman comics from a few years ago.
It’s prophecy, people!
Now Dr. M told us that the Secret Crisis would happen in 2030 and I don’t know that they would be making plans today for an event that wouldn’t see publication for another five years, but one of the major reveals of Doomsday Clock was an explanation of the elastic nature of time in the DC Universe, so skirting the exact date wouldn’t really be a problem. And both Marvel and DC are currently playing with the multiverse in various stories. So…y’know.
All of this, of course, is circumstantial evidence. None of it would hold up in court. But as far as pure speculation goes, I find it all AWFULLY interesting. Would it be possible, in this new spirit of cooperation between the two publishers, for them to go forth with a story that actually brings the two universes together in a way that is indisputably canonical? To tell a story that has actual weight and impact on the heroes of two worlds going forward? Would they actually kill the Hulk to save Superman? (I know they won’t kill the Hulk PERMANENTLY, this is comic book spiritualism, where Heaven is easier to escape than a prison in New Orleans. But that’s not the point.)
Ongoing comic books, especially the “Big Two,” exist in a state of what some writers call a “perpetual second act.” What that means is that although there are ongoing stories and things can change, at some point or another there’ll be another reset, because corporate characters like Superman, Spider-Man, Batman, or the X-Men are too valuable to ever take off the table. If the characters were allowed to truly have a “third act,” that would be the END of their story, and nobody REALLY wants that. With that mindset, is there any reason that the next “second act” couldn’t be a story that involves the two largest mythologies in American culture coming together for an event that would have lasting repercussions for them both? It’s worth noting that the original plans for DC Vs. Marvel included having She-Hulk and the Martian Manhunter stranded in each other’s universe for about a year after the crossover ended, but the lawyers at the time told them not to do it. A character swap right now sounds somewhat less impossible.
Is this what Marvel and DC are planning? Are they doing it right under our noses? Is the call coming from inside the house?
Maybe not.
But it’s sure a lot of fun to think about.
Blake M. Petit is a writer, teacher, and dad from Ama, Louisiana. His most recent writing project is the superhero adventure series Other People’s Heroes: Little Stars, volume one of which is now available on Amazon. You can subscribe to his newsletter by clicking right here. He’s also started putting his LitReel videos on TikTok. His own “permanent second act” involves a constant reset of where his son hid the remote control after watching YouTube.
After the chaos of the last couple of weeks, I wanted to stabilize things a little bit, so it’s time for another theme week. He’s called the fastest man alive, but he’s often been forced to defend that title against the Man of Steel, so for the next seven days I’m going to put my attention on the competitions between Superman and the scarlet speedster himself. Yes, it’s Superman Vs. the Flash Week!
(Superman versus the) FLASH! (Bum bum bum bum bum) AAAH-AAAAAH!!!
Okay, I think I should make one thing clear here: in a straight-up foot race between Superman and the Flash, the Flash should win every time. Whether we’re talking about Barry Allen or Wally West, it doesn’t matter. The Flash’s entire job description is the fact that there’s nobody faster than him, and if you take that away it diminishes the character. Even Superman shouldn’t be allowed to do that.
That said, there have been many stories over the years that pit them against each other, and some of them are an awful lot of fun.
Wed., Feb. 12
Comics:Superman #199, Flash #175
Literally, the starting line for this whole thing.
Notes: The first-ever Superman/Flash race, at least as far as I can tell, is Superman #199 from 1967. The United Nations recruit Superman and Flash to race for one another to raise funds for charity, a basic enough premise that reasonably pits the two of them against each other without some sort of contrived misunderstanding, which I greatly appreciate. Unfortunately, a pair of major crime syndicates also bet a fortune on the outcome of the race, one on Superman and one on the Flash, and so they both hatch schemes to make sure their chosen hero is the winner. After uncovering the schemes and beating the gangsters, Superman and Flash conspire to end the race in a precise tie so that neither crime syndicate can cash in on their winnings and, conveniently, so that DC Comics doesn’t have to definitively answer the question of which of the two men is the faster.
What I find funny about this story is that, even though the story is contrived in such a way that the race ends in a tie, writer Jim Shooter almost seems to do so grudgingly. There are several times that we see the Flash doing things that seem to demonstrate that, as far as foot speed goes, he’s superior. As they race across the ocean, Flash is running on top of the water, whereas Superman has to swim at superspeed. Similarly, Supes has to burrow through sand dunes and climb over pyramids in the desert, while the Flash is simply vibrating right through them. At one point, Flash even employs a super-speed trick to rescue Superman from a random chunk of Kryptonite vomited up by a volcano without Superman even noticing. The only times Superman has an advantage is when his invulnerability or other non-speed powers give him an edge – in freezing cold, diving down a waterfall, or maintaining his balance across a frozen lake. Every task shows that the Flash’s super-speed tricks are superior, even if the story itself has to skirt the issue at the end. This would be a running theme through future competitions between Superman and Barry Allen.
It’s covers like this, Superman. Covers like this are why some people call you a jerk.
Only a few months later, they got together for a rematch in Flash #175. It starts when the two heroes wind up muscling in on each other’s territory, each of them getting an emergency alert from the other on their Justice League signal devices that their teammate denies sending out. When the JLA assembles, it turns out the signal was sent by a pair of aliens Superman and Batman have encountered before. The aliens had placed a wager on the first race and, as it ended in a tie, insist on a rematch. Instead of lapping the Earth this time, though, they’re going to force the heroes to race across the Milky Way. Oh, and just in case they need a little added incentive, they promise to annihilate Central City if the Flash loses and Metropolis if Superman is the loser. So as sports commissioners, they’re still slightly less evil than Roger Goodell.
The aliens throw lots of traps and obstacles in front of our heroes, each of whom independently finds evidence that the race isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. But it’s the Silver Age, so neither of them ever thinks to just TELL his teammate that the race is a fake, they make vague statements about things being “off” until they beat the aliens on the last two pages, with the race once again not having any definitive winner.
As snarky as I sound, I actually did enjoy this issue. It was a pretty decent follow-up to the first race, and it gets bonus points for the last panel, where Flash and Superman look directly at the reader and invite them to go back to the finish line on Page 21 and decide for themselves who they think won. You can’t get away with stuff like that these days.
Thur., Feb. 13
Comics: World’s Finest Comics #198-199
“Okay, we’re ACTUALLY gonna declare a winner this time, right? No more cop-outs?
Notes: Three years after the first two races, DC decided to try it again. Although World’s Finest has, historically, been the Superman/Batman team-up book, there was a period in which it was a Superman team-up title, with Superman as the anchor and different guest-stars for each issue, so it was here that they staged the next installment in this saga. And THIS time, the cover of issue #198 proclaims, “There MUST be a winner!”
Race #3 has the wildest conceit yet – the Guardians of the Universe (the little blue guys who sponsor the Green Lantern Corps) have detected an incursion of “Arachronids,” faster-than-light lifeforms that are disrupting space and time. The only way to save the universe is for two people to race in a path opposite that of the Arachronids, and the only ones speedy enough to do the job are Superman and the Flash. (This is in the days before the “Flash Family,” of course, there was only Barry and Wally West as Kid Flash. If this were to happen today there are roughly a dozen speedsters more qualified than Superman to handle this deal.) Anyway, the Guardians provide the Flash with an amulet that will allow him to race in space and he suggests – since we never actually settled the question of who’s faster – why not make this another race?
Things are going swimmingly until the Arachronids destroy a sun, knocking our heroes off-track on a planet where the sunlight keeps shifting from yellow to red, which negates Superman’s powers. Oh, and did I mention that the time-disruptions have chucked Jimmy Olsen back to ancient Rome, where he’s about to get executed by a firing squad of archers?
Part two of the story reveals the truth: the Arachronids were created by General Zod and a group of Phantom Zone escapees, and they’ve got Superman and the Flash captured on a planet that straddles the line between dimensions. They wind up on a world where the red sun is draining Superman’s powers and the Flash has his swiftness curtailed when the baddies steal the amulet given to him by the Guardians, leaving them to crawl towards the device that’s causing all the chaos. WHO WILL MAKE IT FIRST?
This is the first time I’ve read this particular two-parter and, I’ve gotta say, I really enjoyed it. It’s a different angle on the Superman/Flash race, one that’s apart from the usual “racing for charity” conceit or the other various contrivances that have pit them against one another. No, this time it’s a totally original contrivance, and I appreciate that. I also appreciate the fact that they TECHNICALLY declare a winner of the race this time (it’s the Flash, spoiler alert), but they do so on a world where both heroes are virtually powerless and are literally crawling towards their destination, so the question as to who’s really faster when they’re at normal power is still left up in the air. I’m sure that was the mandate at the time. I’m glad that they eventually got over that mandate, though, as some of the later stories we’re going to get around to reading will demonstrate.
Other Comics:Jenny Sparks #6 (Superman appearance), Black Lightning Vol. 4 #3 (Steel II appearance), The Question: All Along the Watchtower #3 (Superman Cameo), Superman’s Girl Friend, Lois Lane #10
Fri., Feb. 14
Comics: DC Comics Presents #1-2
“Barry? Clark. Hey, wanna be the first guest in my new team-up book? Noooo…not a race this time…I wouldn’t do that to you…”
Notes: Eventually, World’s Finest went back to being a Superman/Batman book, and while Batman had his own team-up series (The Brave and the Bold), Superman was given his own with DC Comics Presents. In the first two issues of this series, published in 1978, we got the next installment of the friendly rivalry between Superman and the Flash – and, in fact, I’m pretty sure this was the last such story before Barry’s death in Crisis on Infinite Earths. (If I’m wrong, by all means, correct me in the comments.)
This time around, our heroes are captured by a pair of warring alien races, one of whom has sent an agent forward in time to go through the “cosmic curtain” that separates the end of the timeline to the beginning. (Time, you see, is evidently a giant loop, but their time machines only go FORWARD, so they have to take the long way around, as if they were flying across Europe and Asia to get to California from Florida. Flat-timers hate this issue.) Since the Flash “won” the previous race, they send him to help their agent in the future, with the consequence for failure being the destruction of Earth. The other aliens, though, force Superman’s hand by telling him that if their enemy succeeds in changing time, Krypton will explode SOONER than it was supposed to, and Superman will never exist.
The major difference between this two-parter and the previous three races between Superman and the Flash is that the race is across time, rather than space, and it’s a significant enough change to really make this one stand out. Superman’s actions seem a bit out of character, of course – he’s risking the destruction of Earth to save his own life, a task even the VILLAINS are surprised to see him willingly take. Naturally, it turns out to all be part of the plan.
This one, unlike the other three races we’ve seen, doesn’t even really try to address the issue of who “wins.” Once Superman’s plan is unveiled, the heroes work together (as it should be) to thwart BOTH sects of warring aliens and fix all the timey-wimey chaos before anyone is killed, especially Jimmy Olsen. The conclusion, then, is satisfying, but leaves the central question essentially unanswered. In fact, the first time we get anything resembling a true answer, it would have to come from Barry’s protege, Wally West, another 12 years later.
Other Comics:Superman’s Pal, Jimmy Olsen #135, Justice League of America #16, Action Comics #372
Podcast: DC Studios Showcase Episode 1 (Discussion of documentary film Super/Man: The Christopher Reeve Story)
Valentine’s Day Stuff: Today is, in case you forgot, Valentine’s Day. (And if you DID forget, this isn’t going to be posted until February 19th, so you are SERIOUSLY out of luck.) But I couldn’t let the day pass without noting my darling wife, Erin, and how she indulged my quest for the Year of Superman today.
Pictured: Love. And personal hygiene products.
She got me the McFarlane Toys Super Powers Fleischer-style Superman, a figure I’ve been hunting for ever since I found out it existed, but have been resisting paying eBay prices. If I won the lottery, I would build an entire toy display room in my palatial mansion, and one full wall would be dedicated to a collection of Super Powers figures, Marvel Secret Wars figures, and figures from comparable toy lines like the Archie Mighty Crusaders and Defenders of the Earth series of my youth. She also got me a set of the new Superman-branded Old Spice body wash and deodorant, which I first saw in an ad a week or two ago where it was being promoted along with Batman-branded products, prompting me to ask her, “Who do you think smells better? Superman or Batman? I bet Batman sweats a lot.”
And yet, she’s been married to me for over 10 years now. Get you one who understands you like mine understands me, friends.
Sat., Feb. 15
Comic Books: Adventures of Superman #463, Flash Vol. 2 #53
“On your marks! Get se–wait a second, haven’t we done this before?”
Notes: The next time the Man of Steel and the Scarlet Speedster would face off against one another wouldn’t come until 1990, at which point both of them had experienced some drastic changes. Superman had gone through the post-Crisis John Byrne reboot, whereas Barry Allen had died in Crisis on Infinite Earths and been replaced by his protege, former Kid Flash Wally West. Like a lot of Superman history, it’s unclear if any of the previous races with Barry were canon to Superman at this time, but the story makes it quite clear that it’s the first time he’s faced off against Wally, at least, and it’s a distinction that Superman takes pretty seriously.
This story involves our old pal from the Fifth Dimension, Mr. Mxyzptlk, who shows up on Earth this time restructuring Mount Rushmore to include his own face. The Flash happens to get there first and, when Mxy finds out that he’s supposedly the “fastest man alive,” he decides to put that claim to a test. If Superman can beat the Flash in a race around the world, he says, he’ll pop out of our dimension for the usual 90 days. Superman notes, rather dismissively, that Wally hasn’t been the Flash that long and strongly implies that beating KID Flash won’t be too difficult, and Wally does his best impression of Michael Jordan in that meme. The race is on.
From here out, the story is actually pretty straightforward. Unlike most of the races we don’t have to deal with any shady stipulations, misdirects for the reader, or bad guys trying to fix the outcome of the race, except for your typical Mxy shenanigans. There is a nice little scene I’d forgotten about, where Mxyzptlk tries to offer Lex Luthor a hunk of red Kryptonite but Lex turns him down, which actually makes this story a stealth prequel to the Krisis of the Krimson Kryptonite story we read last month. But as far as the actual RACE goes, it’s pretty cut and dried, with both heroes putting the pedal to the metal until, in the final stretch, Wally reaches out and beats Superman by a nose.
Totally saving the day! As it turns out, Mxy had learned about deception from Lex in a previous visit and so he was trying it out. Although he SAID he was only going to leave Earth if Superman won, he had always REALLY planned to leave if the FLASH won. It never occurs to him to simply lie again, which is actually kind of a silly, charming hat to put on this dude in his silly, charming hat.
This was the first Superman/Flash race I ever read, and as such it’s always held a place of esteem in my personal pantheon of Superman stories, but I think it’s important to note which versions of the characters we’re looking at. Superman was only a few years post-Byrne, an era in which his power had been scaled down dramatically to make him less “godlike.” Over the years his powers would slowly creep up in strength again until today he’s more powerful than ever before, but as Supermen go, the one in this story was relatively slow. However, this was also early in Wally’s tenure as the Flash, a period during which he was much slower than Barry ever was. When Mark Waid took over Wally’s series a few years later he established that Wally had a subconscious fear of overshadowing his predecessor and had a self-imposed mental block limiting his speed. Once he got over that, he became the fastest Flash there ever was. The point is that if you took the current versions of either Superman OR the Flash and popped them into the race during this era, either of them could smoke the two characters we watched race today.
This time it’s a METAPHORICAL race! The greatest kind of race there is!
I also read issue #53 of Wally’s first solo title, a story which was NOT actually a race, despite what the cover promised. In this one, Jimmy Olsen has gotten himself captured by some South American warlord (because that’s what Jimmy Olsen DOES) and Superman decides to recruit the only person alive faster than him (as established in the previous race) to help find Jimmy before he’s unalived. This is a typical superhero team-up story: good, not special, but enjoyable. I think the most interesting thing about it, the thing that gives it a spot of interest in superhero history, is that this happens to be the issue in which Wally’s pal the Pied Piper (former villain, now reformed) comes out to him as gay. I don’t know if this is the FIRST openly gay character in mainstream comics, but he’s certainly ONE of the first, and while it’s no big deal in today’s comic book landscape, for 1991 it was a pretty surprising revelation. There ya go, ya learned something today.
Sun., Feb. 16
Comic Book:DC First: Superman/Flash #1
Big Good Vs. Big Good.
Notes: I’ve got a sick kid to take care of this afternoon and, as a parent, that has to take precedence over pretty much everything. But in-between far too frequent trips to the bathroom and a larger-than-average number of baths, I made it a point to squeeze in the next story in the Superman/Flash pantheon. This time we leap ahead to 2002 for DC First: Superman/Flash. This was a series of one-shots DC did that showed the first meetings between various characters – but as Superman’s first races between Barry Allen and Wally West were already pretty well documented, for this special they did something a little different and very cool: they showed Superman’s first race with Jay Garrick, the original Golden Age Flash.
This issue reads more as a special issue of the then-current Flash run. It’s written by Geoff Johns, who was writing that book at the time, and it deals with subplots involving Pied Piper and Jay’s wife, Joan, with Superman’s involvement coming in coincidentally. Wally and Jay head to Metropolis to a bookshop where they’ve sourced a rare book as a gift for Joan, only to run afoul of the old Flash rogue Abra Kadabra. The faux wizard of the 64th century casts a spell that begins causing Wally to age rapidly, then tells Superman and Jay they can save him if they can catch him in a race – with the caveat that whoever touches Wally first will take the curse upon themselves. What you’ve got, then, is perhaps the greatest conceit for a Superman/Flash race of them all. They aren’t racing for charity, they aren’t racing for ego, they aren’t even racing with the fate of the world at stake. They are literally racing one another for the RIGHT TO SACRIFICE THEMSELVES TO SAVE WALLY. There is no better motivation for these two heroes.
I know I read this book when it first came out. It’s in my collection, and I was an avid reader of both the Superman comics (duh) and Flash, so I am 100 percent certain I read it. But it came out 23 years ago, and I didn’t really remember the story at all until I sat down to read it this afternoon, and it honestly blew me away. Even though it’s more of a Flash story than a Superman story, it really exemplifies the values of Superman in a way that a lot of these other races failed to do. It may be my favorite read for this week to date.
Mon., Feb. 17
Comics: Flash: Rebirth #3, Superman #709
This issue, as far as I’m concerned, is the final word on the whole thing.
Notes: I actually struggled with whether to include this issue of Flash: Rebirth from 2009 in my Year of Superman reading. It’s the middle of a storyline, and Superman’s appearance is barely a cameo, but that one sequence in which he appears is significant enough that I felt it warranted inclusion. Barry Allen, having returned from the dead in the terribly inaccurately named Final Crisis event, is being transformed into a new Black Flash, essentially the spirit of death for speedsters such as himself. To protect Wally, his grandson Bart, and everyone else he loves, he decides he’s going to rush back into the Speed Force before the transformation can happen, and Superman takes off after him. At this point, the League had gone through its share of recent tragedies, and both Aquaman and the Martian Manhunter were dead (they got better), so Clark isn’t about to let Barry die again.
This leads to one of my favorite pages that Geoff Johns ever wrote, as the two of them are racing each other up the Daily Planet building and Superman says, “I’ve raced you before, Barry. I even won some of those races.”*
Barry simply says, “Those were for charity, Clark.”
And then he leaves him in the dust.
Like I keep saying, the Flash SHOULD be faster than Superman. This issue is the best evidence of that ever.
(*By the way, despite what he says, I don’t actually recall Superman ever winning one of those races. There were a few ties, but every time a victor was declared it was the guy in red. I’m going to assume, from the way Clark talks, that there may have been other charity races off-panel that we didn’t get to watch. And now that I’ve said it, it’s going to manifest in the universe as a seven-part time-travel crossover event, coming this fall.)
“You’re GROUNDED young man! That means no disrupting the time stream! Just do your homework and straight to bed!”
The final Superman/Flash face-off I could find in comics came in Superman #709 from 2011, part of J. Michael Straczynski’s “Grounded” storyline. In this arc, Superman decides he needs to reconnect with the ordinary people he is sworn to protect, so he commits himself to walk across the United States. It’s an interesting concept, to be certain, and Straczynski is an excellent writer, but the general consensus on this storyline is that it sort of fell flat. I think the problem is that it went on for far too long (who wants an entire year of Superman just…walking?) and even Straczynski himself seemed to lose interest in it, as evidenced by the fact that he bowed out before the story was over and it was completed by Chris Roberson.
The “race” part of this issue is over fairly quickly. While walking through Boulder, Colorado, the entire town is suddenly transformed into a Kryptonian city. Superman soon figures out that the transformation is the work of the Flash, who has been overtaken by a Kryptonian artifact and he needs Superman to set him free. After he does so, they have a cup of coffee and talk about legacy. This is what I mean, by the way, when I say that the “Grounded” story went on too long. The story of this issue is perfectly fine, in and of itself, but when you read it in the context of the entire year-long storyline, it was too much of the same thing over and over: Superman walking somewhere, doubting himself, having a significant encounter with various characters (both new and previously established) and coming to a peaceful resolution. That’s great ONCE, but do you really want to read it twelve issues in a row?
The most interesting thing to me about this issue is that it happens concurrently with that month’s issue of Superboy, in which the Kid of Steel races KID Flash for the first time, and which Clark and Barry catch a glimpse of on a diner television. I’ll take a look at that issue tomorrow when I look at the few races I could find between members of the Superman and Flash families other than the patriarchs.
TV Episode: Superman: The Animated Series, Season Two, Episode 4, “Speed Demons”
“Loved you on Wings, by the way.”
Notes: That’s all the comic book Superman/Flash races I could find, but there’s still this episode of Superman: The Animated Series, the first appearance of the Flash in the DC Animated Universe. In this episode he’s voiced by Charlie Schlatter, although Michael Rosenbaum would take over the character for the Justice League cartoons. (Tim Daly would be replaced as Superman by George Newburn too. I guess not everyone can be Kevin Conroy and Mark Hamill.) In this episode, Superman and the Flash are pitted against each other in, as per their first-ever encounter, a charity race. This time the rules are a bit more sensible for the two of them: the winner will be the first to complete 100 laps around the globe. Of course, just like many of their races in the comics, there’s a catch – the arm bands they’re wearing to track their progress are, in truth, using them to build up ionic energy to power a plot by the Weather Wizard. (Weather Wizard, by the way, was voiced by the late Miguel Ferrer in a delightfully dastardly way.)
This episode never makes it clear which Flash we’re watching, Barry or Wally. In terms of attitude and personality, it’s definitely influenced by the early days of Wally’s solo title. He’s slick, he’s cocky, and he relentlessly flirts with Lois Lane, none of which are things you could ever imagine Barry doing. It takes plenty of cues from the classic comics, though, such as the race itself being derailed halfway through when Superman and the Flash catch wind (rimshot) of the Weather Wizard’s plan and call it off to get around to some good ol’ fashioned thwartin’. It’s easy to forget that the Batman cartoon almost never had guest-stars from outside the Batman family, so this was one of the first times we really started to see an animated universe begin to form in the Paul Dini/Bruce Timm era. It was a real delight to revisit this episode again.
There is ONE other Superman/Flash race that I haven’t covered here, but for what I consider a good reason. It’s part of Tom King’s Superman: Up in the Sky series, which is a magnificent comic in its own right, and I intend to cover it in its entirety at some point this year. Plus, looking at the issue with the race on its own wouldn’t really make a ton of sense, absent of the context. I’m bringing it up here mainly so that nobody thinks I forgot about it.
Tues., Feb. 18
Comics:Superboy Vol. 4 #5, Supergirl: The Fastest Women Alive #1
“I don’t know why Barry and Clark always make such a big deal about this.”
Notes: I had one day left in “Superman Vs. The Flash Week,” but I had run out of actual Superman/Flash races, so I decided to close it out with a pair of comics featuring other members of the respective Super- and Flash-Families strapping on their jogging shoes to see who’s swiftest. First was Superboy Vol. 4 #5 from 2011, the first ever Superboy/Kid Flash race (this Kid Flash being Bart Allen, Barry’s grandson, who previously had gone by “Impulse” and since has retaken that name). In this era, Superboy was living in Smallville, and his presence had rocked the town with a few supervillain attacks that resulted in some pretty major damage. This time around, the race is scheduled to raise money to rebuild the town. As the two old friends zip across the globe, though, Bart can tell that Conner Kent’s mind is elsewhere.
This issue is part of Jeff Lemire’s run on the title, a tenure that was cut tragically short by the New 52 reboot later that year. Lemire was doing a great job at grounding Superboy in a way that this version of the character so rarely is, giving him a home and a family in Smallville to contend with, and making his adventures a mix of the cosmic and the mundane, something Lemire is exceptionally good at. (And if you don’t believe me, check out his series Black Hammer.) Despite the race being a backdrop, the mundane part is the focus of the issue, with nary a supervillain plot or alien invader to disrupt things. Instead, in the midst of a race across the globe, Conner just confides in his friend about his pain over his recent breakup with Wonder Girl.
The ending of the race is a cop-out, which we’ve all come to expect, but this may be the biggest one yet. (Spoiler: somehow, Krypto crosses the finish line first and everyone accepts it, even though it feels as legit as Harry Potter’s name being tossed in the Goblet of Fire.) Still, if you’re thinking of reading this book, the Lemire run is extremely worthy of your time – it’s just that this issue, by itself, may not be quite so satisfying without the context of the rest of the run.
Finally, we’ve got the bizarre little one-shot Supergirl: The Fastest Women Alive, a special comic from 2019 presented by Snickers. Very, very much by Snickers. There is Snickers branding on nearly every page, and even the captions that tell you where the racers are at the moment are branded in the Snickers logo font. The message, just in case you missed it, is: Snickers.
Did we mention it’s presented by Snickers?
For the first half of the issue, though, this is actually a decent enough race between Supergirl and Jesse Quick. It uses most of the tropes of the previous races, such as it being a charity race, Supergirl not being allowed to fly, and so forth. The turn comes halfway through, though, when the racers discover that the Parasite has attacked the arena where the race began and will end, and he’s already got Superman and the Flash on the ropes. The lightning ladies rush back to save the day, but how can they possibly get the energy they need to overload and defeat the energy-sucking Parasite?
HOW CAN THEY FIND THE NECESSARY ENERGY?
SNICKERS? GOT A SUGGESTION?
This story is a full-issue equivalent of the delightfully goofy old Hostess comic book ads, only way less subtle.
I kinda love it.
And thus, friends, concludes Superman Vs. The Flash week. My feelings haven’t really changed, I must say. In any contest of speed between a Super of any stripe and a Flash by any name, the Flashes should always be the ones to come out on top. Sorry, Superman, but it’s their whole entire deal. You can’t really compete.
But this week has proven it’s fun to watch you try anyway.
Here we are, my friends, 100 Fridays later. In the first week of January 2023, I was thinking of how much I missed the days of writing for Comixtreme and recording my podcast, and I wanted to find a regular way to get my voice back out there in the world. How could I do it? I asked myself. How can I reach out and gift humanity with my invaluable thoughts, insights,and trademark witticisms, in this era where the world clearly needs me more than ever before?
Then I remembered I had a blog that I was barely using, and maybe it would be a nice little challenge for me to find something – once a week, just find SOMETHING – that I liked enough to write a few paragraphs about.
And of course, it has become the global phenomenon and world-altering sensation you see before you today.
As I approached the 100th installment of the column hundreds of voracious readers have called “on the internet somewhere,” I tried really hard to decide what to write about. What, in the enormous global marketplace of popular culture that I had made my home, was worthy of dedicating the landmark 100th column to? Star Trek? Stephen King? Superman? Bluey? I feel like I’ve kind of talked about those various topics…well, “extensively” seems in some ways to be too mild a term, but we’ll roll with that right now. No, I needed something a little bit different.
Then I remembered an idea I’d had some time ago, but that I had pushed aside. Something I thought needed to percolate a little more. Something that the world would HAVE to sit up and take notice of. And it seemed perfect. So this week, ladies and gentlemen, allow me to explain to you what exactly I would do if I were in charge of comic books.
You all know I’m a comic book geek, and I have been since I was a small child. Not to discount my love of movies, TV, or novels…I’m a fan of storytelling in general. But comics are in many ways my medium of choice. I’m a regular Wednesday visitor at my local comic shop, I know all the members of the Legion of Super-Heroes, and I can tell you – in order – every publisher that has ever had the Star Trek license. (Gold Key, Marvel, DC, Malibu but only Deep Space Nine, back to Marvel, Wildstorm – which was by then a DC imprint – and currently IDW. Sorry, ladies. I’m taken.)
As much as I love comic books, though, there are certain practices in the industry that I’m not a fan of, certain things that I think could be done better. In this era, where there’s so much competition for the attention of an audience coming from virtually every region of our culture, it’s imperative that comic book publishers find ways to draw in new readers and retain existing ones. Ways to make the sometimes complex mythologies of American comic books a little less of a roadblock, and make the space a little more welcoming. For the 100th Geek Punditry, guys, here are some rules that would be implemented if I were King of Comics.
Numbering
As most people know, comic book series are numbered, and for many decades the numbering convention was simple. You started with issue #1, proceeded to #2, and so forth. You just put the numbers in order. Seemed like a simple idea. But at some point things started to get a little more convoluted. After World War II, many of the existing superhero comics had been cancelled. But in the 50s, looking for a new hit after public favor turned against things like horror comics, DC decided to bring back some of their defunct characters with a new incarnation. A new Flash was created – Barry Allen – and after a few tryout issues in the pages of Showcase, they gave him his own title. Barry took over the numbering of the Golden Age Flash, Jay Garrick, and his first issue was #104. Here’s where it gets confusing: they then did they same thing with Green Lantern. But in this case the new guy – Hal Jordan – did NOT pick up from Alan Scott’s title with issue #39, but instead got his own first issue, Green Lantern Vol. 2 #1.
Make it make sense.
It would not be the last time this happened. In the 80s they gave new first issues to Superman, Wonder Woman, and The Flash, and in those cases, the lapse in publishing between the previous volume and the new was not nearly as long as it had been in the silver age. Then in the 90s, Marvel did it with four of their flagship titles at once – Avengers, Fantastic Four, Iron Man, and Captain America – as part of a new initiative where the titles were essentially farmed out to Jim Lee and Rob Liefeld and set in a different world than the “regular” Marvel Universe. When the books were brought back to the “regular” Universe a year later, they were given a THIRD first issue…and then all hell broke loose.
Since then, virtually every comic book published by Marvel or DC Comics has been canceled and relaunched with a new first issue, most of them multiple times. Batman, at last count, is on its conservative third volume. Superman is at six. Punisher – if I’m counting correctly – has recently concluded volume FOURTEEN. The longest running comic book at either publisher that has not been restarted at least ONCE? Looney Tunes, which recently celebrated issue #281. (It should be noted, though, that even this is the fourth volume of Looney Tunes, having been published by various other companies before Warner Bros. wholly absorbed DC Comics.)
Winner of the gold medal in “not starting over for no reason.”
The conventional wisdom seems to be that a new first issue will bring in higher sales numbers than issue #482, and that might be true. But increasingly, it has proven that a tenth issue #7 does NOT have appreciably more readers than issue #489 would have. In other words, the restarting game gives a short-term sales bump, but does nothing to retain readers, which is what the goal should be.
Anyway, to appease fans (such as myself) who prefer maintaining the original numbering rather than the constant restarts, Marvel and DC have begun featuring “legacy numbers” on the covers of their books – in other words, what issue would this be had the book never been restarted? Which is why the recent Superman Vol. 6 #20 also bears a little symbol indicating that the “Legacy Number” of this issue is #863.
Only long-time Superman fans will understand what I mean when I say “at least it’s in a triangle.”
Confused yet?
Making it even more confusing is the way that many series have changed titles over the years, and trying to figure out which is which. Thor started as Journey Into Mystery, one of Marvel’s assorted sci-fi titles. But after he made his debut, Thor quickly took over the comic book, and the title was changed from Journey into Mystery to The Mighty Thor with issue #126 When calculating the Thor legacy numbers, the original JIM numbers seem to count, but JIM itself has been re-started several times over the years. Journey Into Mystery Vol. 2 does NOT count, apparently, as it ran concurrently with Mighty Thor. And let’s not forget that the current series carrying the Legacy Number is actually called Immortal Thor, which has the same legacy numbers as did previous volumes like Mighty Thor, King Thor, Thor: God of Thunder, or the (at last count) six different series that have just been called Thor.
According to the legacy numbers, these are all issues of the same title.
Then there’s the fact that it’s inconsistently applied, especially at DC. Superman (on Volume 6), Batman (Volume 3), Flash (Volume 6), and Green Arrow (Volume 7)all have Legacy Numbers on their covers. Nightwing (Volume 4), Harley Quinn (Volume 4), and Titans (Volume 4)do not, and I can see no particular reason why.
It’s an absolute mess. True story: when the Captain Marvel movie came out in 2018 my wife – who is a geek but not as big a geek as I am – was interested in reading some of the comics to learn more about the character, but after several attempts to figure out which volume to start with, she gave up. If the plan here is to get MORE readers, it’s failing miserably.
So how do we fix this problem?
Here’s what I would make the standard rule: first of all, the Legacy Numbers should be mandatory for any series that continues the title or star of a previous series. The editors would need to get together right away, decide which books count towards the “legacy” and then stick with it from then on.
Second, I would have them stop with the constant relaunches. If a character is returning after ten years away…okay, a new first issue might be justified. If we’re going back to issue #1 because there’s a new inker, it’s not. It’s become a common practice to start over with a new first issue any time there’s a change of creative team, especially when there’s a new writer. It’s too much. So here’s the rule: there must be a minimum of three years since the previous volume before a new first issue is justified. If the final issue of Captain Dudeman was #47 and it came out eighteen months ago, then you either have to start with Captain Dudeman #48 or you have to change the title.
That second stipulation, I think, would start to get used very frequently. One of the reasons that the renumbering has gotten so rampant is that every time a new writer is brought onto a series they want to make their own mark – which is fair. But in so doing, they often want a clean slate, a sort of “back-to-basics” approach for the character, which has resulted in several books in the last few years where the first issue shows the heroes in a wholly different situation than they were in when the previous volume ended, and then it’s not until several issues later that the reasons for the change are actually explained. Sometimes it works (Fantastic Four and Daredevil both did this effectively in their most recent relaunches) and sometimes it doesn’t (the current run of Amazing Spider-Man should be studied by scholars as a cautionary example of what NEVER to do).
I don’t want to take away a writer’s ability to tell the stories they way they see fit, that’s not what this is about. But if the plan is to tell a totally different story, changing the title of the series is a good way to reduce confusion. Telling somebody “You have to read Green Lantern – but not that one, or that one, or that one…” is a recipe for the kind of bafflement that drove my wife away. But saying “Green Lantern: Emerald Champions is a great series” is a HELL of a lot easier for the casual reader to comprehend. You can keep the legacy numbers that way, but having a subtitle or supertitle (that’s when you preface the main title with something else, such as Peter Parker, the Spectacular Spider-Man) makes it a lot easier to differentiate one run from another.
What this really boils down to is that I never again want to see a comic book called Fantastic Four #1. When I was a kid, owning that book would have been a gold mine. Now I’ve got six different books called that, and it’s ridiculous.
Cover Confusion
The way the comics industry handles its covers is also an issue, and there are two primary problems I want to tackle. First, let’s talk about pin-up covers. This isn’t as bad as it once was, but for a while there in the 00s and 10s, there was an awful trend of comic books having generic pictures of the main character or characters on the cover, something that may be a fabulous piece of art but doesn’t tell the reader anything about the story between the pages. The argument at the time, I believe, was that they wanted every issue to be an accessible first issue for a new reader. While that may be a noble goal, that doesn’t make a damned bit of sense. Anybody who picks up a comic because they like the picture of Spider-Man on the cover is going to have a hard time keeping up if they open up the comic and run into “Revenge of the Return of the Colonoscopy of the Sinister Six: Part Five of Seventeen.” Congratulations – you sold that one issue…but they aren’t coming back.
“Wow, great cover!” “Thanks!” “What’s the story about?” “What the hell is a story?”
Pin-up art is fine, but a great comic book cover should tell a story. Think about some of the all-time most memorable covers: Amazing Spider-Man #129 features the webspinner dangling in front of the faces of his friends, agonizing over which of them was going to die in that issue. Green Lantern (Vol. 3) #49 shows a power-mad Hal Jordan brandishing a set of rings stolen from his fallen comrades, a look of pure chaos in his eyes. Wolverine: Blood Hunt #2 shows the ol’ Canucklehead on a motorcycle with a French vampire babe being chased by a mob of vampire stormtroopers while fleeing an explosion that is also being escaped by an overhead passenger jet.
If just that description isn’t enough to make you pick up the book and look inside, I don’t think you actually like comic books.
Now THAT’S art.
These days it’s better, although many variant covers still have what I call the Pinup Problem. So here’s going to be the rule for this one: cover art MUST be relevant to the story inside. That doesn’t mean it has to be a depiction of an actual SCENE from the story. Thematic covers, like the above Amazing Spider-Man #129, are fine. Covers promising a twist or a mystery, anything like that is just dandy, provided it has SOMETHING to do with the story. The only exceptions, the only time a simple pin-up is acceptable, are when it’s the first issue of a series (and presumably a good jumping-on point anyway), if it’s the introduction of a new character, or for certain milestone issues, such as an issue number that ends in a double zero.
Now that we’ve cleaned THAT little problem up, let’s talk about the REAL issue: variant covers.
There’s debate over when, exactly, variant covers became a thing, although most people seem to agree that the first mainstream example of printing copies of the same book with two different covers was probably Man of Steel #1 in 1986, the John Byrne relaunch of the entire Superman mythos. That was an instance where it was novel and interesting and fun. People made an effort to buy both covers to make their collection “complete.” It was really cool.
You could get with this, or — alternatively — hear me out on this one…you could get with THAT.
But like so many good things, it got overdone. It didn’t happen overnight, mind you. It was quite some time before having two covers became a regular practice, and even longer before it reached the heights it has today. Even as late as ten years ago, having multiple covers was still more of an exception than a rule. But the rules have changed and HOW.
If you pick up any random issue of a new comic from a mainstream publisher today, odds are that you will have between two and five covers to choose from. First issues are frequently more. For the first issue of this summer’s Uncanny X-Men relaunch, League of Comic Geeks (the website I use to track my own collection) lists 32 separate cover variants. And even THAT is chump change compared to the most recent relaunch of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles from IDW Publishing, which currently stands at –
Are you sitting down? Are you sitting down in the sewer?
If you are the sort of person who feels the need to get every available cover and you’re a Ninja Turtles fan, I hope you can still afford your insulin.
I’M SAYING IT’S KIND OF A LOT.
The reason they do this, of course, is because people continue to BUY them. And when there are stories every other day about some comic shop or another closing down or a publisher being unable to pay its creators, I can’t fault them for looking for ways to increase revenue. But the problem is that this simply bleeds money out of the existing fans until they get fed up and walk away entirely. And like the renumbering problem, this doesn’t do anything to actually get NEW fans into reading, which is what the long-term goal should be.
This is not to say that I hate variants in their entirety. I rather like them when they do something CLEVER with them, such as what I call “theme” months, where all the variants have a different trend. For instance, DC recently did a run of variants covers that were mock-ups of the packaging of the old Super Powers action figures. (I should point out that other publishers, including Marvel, have been doing action figure variants for a long time, but this was the first time I recall them being used as a monthly theme.) In October, there were a series of variants by artist Kelley Jones showing the DC heroes as kids in Halloween costumes. Marvel did a series not long ago of variant “homage” covers based on some of their old vampire comics, and another run that showed their characters facing off against Godzilla. That kind of stuff doesn’t really bother me, except for the fact that they add to the preposterous number of variants on the shelf.
I don’t know art, but I know what I hate. And I don’t hate this.
I also really like the “sketch” covers that have become popular in recent years. These are blank covers printed on a different cardstock that fans can use to draw their own artwork or have an artist draw something for them. They’re popular for commissions at comic book conventions and events like Free Comic Book Day, and I don’t think the blanks really cause a lot of confusion on the racks compared to the 30-plus X-Men covers.
The worst part, I think, is that so many of these “variants” are barely worthy of being considered a separate cover. You commission a piece of art from an artist and you’ve got a cover. Print it with no logo or trade dress and it’s a “virgin” variant. Print it without colors and it’s a “sketch” variant. Print it with metallic ink and it’s a “foil” variant. You can crank out a dozen different covers with one sketch and people will continue to buy them. It’s insane.
I recognize that there are a lot of people who LIKE these variants, even if they aren’t MY thing. So in my capacity as the benevolent overlord of comic books, I don’t want to ban them entirely. Here are the restrictions I’ll put in place:
A standard issue of a comic book shall have no more than three covers: the “main” cover, a variant cover, and a “theme” variant for that month.
First issues will be limited to five covers, including the theme cover.
Milestone issues, such as anniversaries, will be allowed extra variants consisting of no more than one-tenth of the number of issues the book has run. For instance, the 50th issue will be allowed 5 variants, the 100th issue will be allowed 10 variants, and so on.
Retailer-exclusive variants will not count against the total. These are covers commissioned by – and only available from – specific retailers, such as an individual comic shop, store chain, or online retailer.
There will be no restrictions on “sketch” covers, nor will they count against the number of variants allowed.
See? I can be as flexible as the next guy, provided the next guy isn’t Plastic Man.
Anyway, there we have it, guys. Comic books are fixed!
Well…okay, maybe not. There are still plenty of other things in the world of my favorite medium that need to be addressed. Other problems to solve, other fires to put out…but I’ve already gone on for nearly 3500 words, which is pretty massive for one of these Geek Punditry columns. So I think it’s time to put this topic aside, at least for now.
But that’s okay. After all, I’ve got to save something to write about when Geek Punditry #200 rolls around.
Blake M. Petit is a writer, teacher, and dad from Ama, Louisiana. His most recent writing project is the superhero adventure series Other People’s Heroes: Little Stars, volume one of which is now available on Amazon. You can subscribe to his newsletter by clicking right here. He’s also started putting his LitReel videos on TikTok. His goal to take over all of social media after it has started to slide towards irrelevance continues.
It’s time for part two of Playing Favorites with Summer, folks! In case you missed part one, when I do a “Playing Favorites” column I ask my pals on social media to suggest categories related to a given topic, then I share what I think are the best examples of each from the worlds of movies, TV, books, and comic books. In part one of “Playing Favorites With Summer,” I talked about my favorite summer road trip movies, coming of age movies, and beach movies, as well as some of the best summer reads for students. Let’s delve into part two, shall we?
Baseball Movies
Lew Beitz wanted to know what I think are some of the best baseball movies out there. Although baseball season starts in the spring and ends in the fall, almost any great baseball movie will also qualify as a summertime movie, since that’s when most of the season falls and, frankly, we’ve all pretty much decided that baseball is the official sport of summer. Last week I mentioned The Sandlot when I was writing about coming-of-age movies, so let’s just take that one as a given.
Beyond that, there are plenty of great baseball movies out there. A League of Their Own is one that frequently comes up, for example. Penny Marshall directed this 1992 film loosely based on the real story of the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League, a women’s baseball league that was founded during World War II, as too many of the male baseball players had joined the fight against the Axis powers to put on a baseball season. The league folded in 1954 because AAGPBL was far too unwieldy an acronym to compete with MLB, but the league still has its legacy today, by which I mean this movie. The film stars Geena Davis, Lori Petty, Rosie O’Donnell, and Madonna as members of the Rockford Peaches, with Tom Hanks doing a great turn as a washed-up coach trying to redeem himself with the girls’ team. There’s something about sports movies that lends itself really well to the “dramedy,” that hybrid film too serious to call a pure comedy but too funny to be called a drama, and A League of Their Own is one of the all-time great examples of that.
It’s a shame Jeter never wore that uniform.
If you want something more dramatic, there are a pair of numeric “true stories” well worth watching. 42 is the story of Jackie Robinson, the man who famously broke the color barrier by becoming the first African American to play major league baseball. The late Chadwick Boseman is phenomenal as Robinson, bringing the same sort of strength and dignity that defined not only his most famous role as Marvel’s the Black Panther, but also defined the man himself. Also well worth watching is 61*, directed by Billy Crystal, about the year that Roger Maris (Barry Pepper) and Mickey Mantle (Thomas Jane) raced one another in an effort to beat Babe Ruth’s single-season home run record. Crystal’s love of baseball is legendary, and he really puts every bit of that love on the screen in this film.
You know what makes a great baseball movie, right? Math.
But my all-time favorite baseball movie, one that I have never grown even the slightest bit tired of, is the 1989 fantasy film Field of Dreams. Kevin Costner plays an Iowa farmer who is persuaded by a mysterious voice to turn his cornfield into a baseball diamond. Although it seems crazy to risk his livelihood in such a fashion, once the diamond is finished, it becomes populated by the spirits of lost baseball players, miraculously brought back into the game. It’s a beautiful story, with great performances by Amy Madigan, Burt Lancaster, Ray Liotta and James Earl Jones. However, I would be remiss not to point out that this movie is, at its heart, a story about a father and a son. That didn’t quite resonate with me when I was 12 years old. But like a lot of other stories that I’ve revisited since my own child was born, it hits differently now. I hope I don’t sound like a broken record with this kind of thing, but there’s an emotional component to parent/child stories that I don’t know that anyone can quite understand if they aren’t a parent themselves. I know I didn’t get it before 2017. I get it now, and it makes the movie all the better for it.
If you show it on HBO 492 times a month in the early 90s, we will watch it.
Summer Annual Crossovers
Cameron James asked me what some of my favorite comic book “summer annual crossover events” were. Here’s a quick history lesson, for those of you who aren’t comic book fans. Comics, historically, have come out once a month, twelve times a year. Fairly early on, though, publishers started releasing giant sized special issues once a year, hence “Annual.” In the early days, these were often reprints of popular stories, but later they started to produce original stories, bigger stories. The first Amazing Spider-Man Annual, for example, was the issue where his greatest enemies first banded together as the Sinister Six.
For a time in the late 80s and early 90s, Marvel and DC Comics both observed a tradition of using those annual editions – traditionally published throughout the summer – for a special crossover event, with one story that threaded throughout all of them. Marvel started this in 1988 with a storyline called The Evolutionary War, but I’ve always found their BEST summer annual storyline to be 1989’s Atlantis Attacks. In this story, a despotic ruler takes over the undersea kingdom of Atlantis and plans a war against the surface world – at first in secret, but later openly – as part of a master plan to resurrect the ancient Egyptian serpent god Set. The story serves as a sequel to several older Marvel stories in which Set had played a part, and in addition to the main story each issue had a back-up feature re-telling the story of Set with art by Mark Bagley, who would later become one of my favorite Spider-Man artists of all time. The story itself was really good, and the back-ups gave a lot of interesting insight into classic Marvel history that was pretty cool for a 12-year-old Blake who hadn’t been born yet when a lot of those stories were told.
The funny thing is that the world nearly ended because a bunch of people were fighting over a hat.
Since imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, DC followed suit in 1991 with their first – and, as it turned out best – annual event, Armageddon 2001. In a not-too-distant future, Matthew Ryder lives in a world controlled by a fascist dictator named Monarch who has shaped the world into his own Orwellian version of perfection. Nobody knows who Monarch is, although rumors persist that he was once one of Earth’s superheroes, before he killed the rest of them back in the year 2001. Ryder subjects himself to a time-travel experiment, gaining powers and taking the name Waverider. He travels back to the “present” of 1991, ten years before the rise of Monarch, to read the futures of DC’s heroes and stop the Monarch’s reign before it can happen.
He’s a 10 but he doesn’t use his power to see the future to tell you the Powerball numbers.
The practical result of this was that each issue told a story of a possible future for the hero, freeing the writers up to do wild stories free of the consequences of continuity. Like any crossover with lots of different writers taking part, the individual stories can be hit and miss, but I’ve always had a great affinity for certain ones in this crossover: the Flash retired and in the witness protection program, Batman incarcerated in Arkham Asylum, and Superman becoming President of the United States. The story was great, but the ending was derailed because somehow the identity of Monarch was leaked early. Fans found out that Monarch was going to be revealed as Captain Atom in the final issue of the story, and DC balked. It’s funny, since these days comic book publishers release spoilers to their OWN stories months in advance, but back in 1991 that was considered serious enough that they changed the ending, instead revealing Monarch to be Hank Hall, aka Hawk. The rationale here seemed to be that, since the comic Hawk starred in (Hawk and Dove) was being canceled anyway, no one would be upset. The problem, though, was that since Hawk wasn’t as popular as Captain Atom, it felt anticlimactic – not to mention confusing, since in the future that Waverider observed, Hawk was one of the few heroes shown to actively fight AGAINST Monarch, seeming to make it IMPOSSIBLE for him to be the despot. Every time I look back at that series I wonder what the original ending would have looked like.
The summer annual crossovers only lasted a few more years after that, although both DC and Marvel have brought them back every so often. With the modern compulsion to relaunch and renumber their titles every year and a half, though, it’s gotten pretty confusing to keep track of them all, and it’s just one of many things I’m going to fix when they all come to their senses and put me in charge of comics.
Summer Comedies
And finally, my wife Erin asked me to chime in with the best summer comedies. I knew I would have to save this for last because a lot of the best summer comedies also fall into one of the other categories that I’ve already covered. So let’s take it as a given that National Lampoon’s Vacation, Back to the Beach, The Sandlot, and A League of Their Own all belong on this list.
That said, let’s get to some of the great summer comedies that haven’t already been covered in one of the other categories, shall we? And let’s start with the greatest summer comedy of all time, perhaps the greatest movie ever made, perhaps the yardstick against which all cinema – past, present, and future – shall invariably be measured.
Project ALF.
The real Project ALF are the friends we made along the way.
My favorite summer comedy is, like many of the other movies on this list, a film that has been near and dear to me since my childhood: 1987’s Ernest Goes to Camp. I unironically and unapologetically love this movie. Jim Varney’s “Ernest” character, created originally as an ad pitchman that was hired out to assorted companies for regional commercials across much of the south (I remember him originally as a spokesman for the Louisiana Gas Service Company) has his first great adventure as a handyman at a summer camp who gets his shot at a dream job of being a camp counselor for a group of troubled young boys. The film has a lot of the staples of 80s comedy: the “slobs versus snobs” mentality, the bad guy is an evil land developer, and there’s a startling lack of supervision for the children in this story…but at the same time, Jim Varney is charming and endearing as the most iconic goofball with a heart of gold since Gomer Pyle. The world just didn’t deserve a star as bright as his, did it?
If he had been the counselor at Crystal Lake, Jason wouldn’t have stood a chance.
Ernest has achieved a nice sort of renaissance in recent years. People sincerely love many of his movies (especially the Christmas and Halloween films), the camp where the movie was filmed hosts an annual Ernest Day celebration every summer, and a documentary about Jim Varney and Ernest is in the works. When the temperatures soar and school lets out, this is a movie that I have to return to just as surely as I watch him save Christmas in December and see him Scared Stupid in October.
Summer camp, of course, serves as the setting for a lot of great comedies, such as Meatballs (the beginning of what I think of as the Bill Murray Summer Trilogy along with Caddyshack and What About Bob?), and last year’s indie darling Theater Camp, all of which are summer comedies I greatly enjoy. Of course, in the interest of fairness, I should point out that summer camps are also a popular setting for horror movies, like Sleepaway Camp, the Friday the 13th series, and the truly gruesome Wet Hot American Summer.
Moving away from camp, though, let’s take a look at some other great summer comedies. When Erin proposed that I write about this category, she specifically asked if I’d ever seen the John Cusack movie One Crazy Summer. I told her that, no, I hadn’t. She acted shocked. I told her, “Yeah, well, you still haven’t seen The Rocketeer.” And she said, “Yes I have!” And I shot back, “No, you fell asleep while I was watching The Rocketeer, that doesn’t count.” And there’s your little glimpse into married life for this week, kids.
But Erin, you’ll be happy to know that I DID watch your precious One Crazy Summer in preparation for this column, and I found it to be…okay. In this 1986 comedy, Cusack plays “Hoops” McCann, a fallen high school basketball star who takes off after graduation with his pal George (Joel Murray, meaning we’ve pulled off the Murray Hat Trick if you count Brian Doyle-Murray’s appearance in National Lampoon’sVacation) to spend the summer on Nantucket Island. Hoops winds up getting involved in the efforts of a local girl (Demi Moore) to save a family home from some land developers, because in the 80s a full 87 percent of movie villains were land developers (as opposed to a mere 79 percent of villains in real life).
Am I the only one who thought the sun in this poster was supposed to look like Jack Nicholson?
Like I said, I thought the movie was okay, and I imagine that I would have much warmer feelings for it if I had seen it in its intended context (that being 1986). The thing is, it doesn’t quite seem to know what it wants to be. There are moments, especially during the Bobcat Goldthwait antics, where it seems to be treading the line with the kind of surrealist slapstick we get in movies like Airplane! or History of the World Part I, but if that’s the intention it doesn’t quite go far ENOUGH. If you’re going for surreal comedy, it kind of needs to be over-the-top to land. In One Crazy Summer, though, the first real hint that it may be that kind of humor is when George denies being lazy just before the camera pulls pack to reveal a dead Christmas tree strapped to the roof of his car (this is in June, remember), then it’s several minutes before we get anything else that feels like that brand of comedy (some girls making faces at George’s sister who get stuck that way). If you’re trying to party with the Zuckers or Mel Brooks, you’ve gotta go all-in, and with all due respect to the great Savage Steve Holland, he doesn’t quite reach that peak.
Okay, this column is already getting super long, so let me throw out two more summer comedies that couldn’t be more different than each other. The first is a movie that STARTS as a summer camp film before leaving the camp for other family summer activities, the 1961 Disney classic The Parent Trap. Haley Mills plays a pair of identical girls who happen to meet at summer camp and figure out that they’re twin sisters, separated by their parents when they divorced years ago, and hatch a scheme to force them back together. The sheer cruelty of doing that to a pair of siblings aside, this is a movie I DID grow up watching over and over again, and it’s always held a warm place in my heart. Aside from growing up with a crush on Haley Mills despite the fact that she was some three decades too old for me, the movie features Maureen O’Hara at her loveliest as their mother, while Brian Keith does his best John Wayne impression. I am aware of the Lindsay Lohan remake, and while it has its good points, this is one of those times that nothing will ever conquer the original.
Sassy sister films.
And finally, let’s bounce ahead to 2010 for the Alan Tudyk/Tyler Labine comedy Tucker and Dale Versus Evil. Tudyk and Labine play a pair of good-hearted rednecks on a camping trip who run into a pack of college kids on their own vacation. The guys in the college group, showing a shocking lack of genre awareness, mistakenly believe that Tucker and Dale are Wrong Turn-style psycho killers and go on the offensive, only to find themselves on the wrong side of the fight. The movie is kind of a horror/comedy, with Tudyk and Labine giving hilarious performances in a movie that upends the “Killer Hillbilly” subgenre of horror by turning the usual victims into the bad guys. Both of our stars are so sweet and charming that it’s incomprehensible anybody could think of them as dangerous, and you quickly find yourself rooting for the snobs to get their goofishly gory comeuppance. I dearly love this movie and, frankly, I don’t think it’s too late to give us a sequel. Tucker and Dale Save Christmas, anybody?
There are so many great summer movies out there. While writing this column, I wound up putting together a Letterboxd list (because that’s what I do), and I would welcome anyone to fill in any omissions I may have. Summer is long, my friends, and there’s plenty of time to spend indulging in the greats of cinema and comics while we wait for the chill of autumn to hit the air. Have a great summer, and I’ll see you next time when, once again, I decide it’s time to Play Favorites.
Blake M. Petit is a writer, teacher, and dad from Ama, Louisiana. His most recent writing project is the superhero adventure series Other People’s Heroes: Little Stars, volume one of which is now available on Amazon. You can subscribe to his newsletter by clicking right here. In response to his wife’s unspoken question, no, he hasn’t watched Better Off Dead yet, but he’ll try to get to it soon. Erin seemed to have a crush on young John Cusack that rivals Blake’s fondness for Haley Mills.
It’s time once again for PLAYING FAVORITES! It’s that semi-regular Geek Punditry mini-column in which I throw out a topic to you, my friends in the world of social media, and ask you to suggest different categories in which I discuss what I consider to be the best of the best. This time around, the topic is superheroes. Born in the pages of American comic books, but with roots in pulp magazines, myth, and thousands of other sources, the superhero is considered to be the modern mythology, with pantheons not only in comics, but in movies, TV, video games, and pretty much every other media you can name. And I am, it cannot be understated, a fan of the superhero. So what, then, are some of my favorites?
Legacy Heroes
Sandy Brophy is going to kick things off for us by asking for my favorite legacy heroes. A “legacy” hero, for those of you who may not have been reading comic books since you were six years old, is the term used when a superhero’s name and identity is passed on from one person to another. For example, in the early days of comics, the Flash was a college student by the name of Jay Garrick. After superheroes fell out of favor and stopped being published for a while, they were resurrected in the 1950’s with the creation of a brand-new Flash, this time a police scientist named Barry Allen. Barry was the Flash for a long time before dying in Crisis on Infinite Earths (it took longer than usual, but eventually he got better), and his nephew/sidekick Wally West, aka Kid Flash, took over as the new Flash.
And so on, and so on, and so on.
This also, by the way, is my answer to Sandy’s question. The Flash is undoubtedly my favorite legacy hero in comics. By the time I started reading comics Wally was the main Flash, and even decades later he’s still the one I feel is most compelling. He was young when he became the Flash, and thanks to the magic of comic book time I eventually caught up with him at the same time he was being written by Mark Waid, who turned him into a fully fleshed-out and wonderfully realized character in his own right. He got married, had kids, and he grew and matured. He was also – as Waid said – the first sidekick to “fulfill the promise,” in other words, to take over for his mentor. He’s also still, to the best of my recollection, the ONLY one to do so on a permanent basis. It’s true that Dick Grayson (the original Robin) became Batman for a while, and Captain America’s sidekick Bucky took up the shield when Steve Rogers was temporarily dead, but both of them reverted back to their other adult IDs (Nightwing and the Winter Soldier, respectively) when the original came back. Not so Wally. Barry returned and Wally stuck around, and although there’s been a lot of timey-wimey nonsense and attempts to sort of push him to the side, he’s bounced back. Wally is, again, the primary Flash, even in a world where Jay and Barry exist, and the nominal head of the Flash family. And he’s just the best.
There are other good legacy heroes, don’t get me wrong. I enjoy the Jaime Reyes version of the Blue Beetle (although my heart will always belong to Ted Kord, himself the second Blue Beetle following Dan Garrett), and there are few who will argue that Kamala Khan hasn’t done more with the Ms. Marvel title than either of her predecessors, but Wally West is the ultimate legacy hero in my book.
Superhero Logos
My buddy Owen Marshall wants to know what some of my favorite superhero LOGOS are – those titles that splash across the cover of a comic book to (hopefully) let you know what you’re about to read. I’ll talk about what I think makes a good logo in general, then get into specifics. I think a great logo is something that stands out in a way that evokes the hero in question. The Superman logo, for instance, is relatively simple – his name, slightly curved, with drop letters that give it a sense of weight, of solidity. Any time you see that logo you think that somebody could just grab it off the cover – and, in fact, there have been many covers where that very thing has happened.
You can’t beat a classic.
Spider-Man’s original logo is great for similar reasons. It’s solid, but it’s also easy to partner up with a web in the background to help get across the idea that you’re dealing with a wallcrawler. And, like Superman, it’s a short enough logo that it’s very easy to add an adjective to the title (as in the AMAZING Spider-Man, the SPECTACULAR Spider-Man), but just as easy to drop a subtitle underneath (Spider-Man: Renew Your Vows). There have been many attempts over the years to create a new Spider-Man logo, but frankly, there’s never been one I like as much as the original, and it seems it’s never anything but a matter of time before they return to it.
Yeah, that’s the stuff.
The Avengers also have a fantastic logo. They’ve had several, of course, but I’m specifically talking about the most famous version, the one that Marvel Studios used for the basis of its movie design. It’s clean and bold, and the arrow in the letter “A” gives it a sense of forward motion that sort of plants the idea that these are heroes who are about to go out and DO something.
The arrow is in case you forget and try reading it right-to-left.
Green Lantern has had a great many logos over the years, many of which actually include a lantern, but my favorite doesn’t. I like the logo that premiered in 2005 with Green Lantern: Rebirth and which remained the primary version of the logo until just a few years ago. This version has that tilt to one side and a cool roundness to it that…okay, just hear me out on this…it makes me think of classic cars from the 50s. Smooth, sleek, fast…and those are words that apply to Green Lantern, especially the Hal Jordan version.
And it’s all spacey and stuff.
I could probably spend an entire month just going through different logos, but I’m just going to cap it off here by saying that there are hundreds of awesome logos and if you want to read more about them I highly recommend the blog of comic book letterer and designer Todd Klein, who frequently makes posts where he discusses the design and history of comic’s greatest (and worst) logos, which is like drinking mother’s milk to a nerd like me.
Superhero TV (pre-2000)
My old friend Patrick Slagle wants to know my favorite superhero live action TV shows. Well that’s easy! There have been SO many to choose from – Stargirl was great, and I was deeply enamored of Legends of Tomorrow, and then there was–
Oh, wait.
He specified shows from BEFORE the year 2000. Well. That makes it a lot more difficult. We’ve been in a superhero renaissance in the last decade or so, guys, with such an abundance of shows that even I haven’t gotten around to watching them all yet. (Peacemaker, for example, is still warming my “to-watch” list.) But if I’m going to restrict myself to the cultural wasteland that was 1999 and earlier, I guess there’s only the obvious choice.
Project: ALF.
If I don’t do this at least once in every Playing Favorites column the Don said he was gonna break my thumbs.
The superhero shows of my formative years…let’s be honest guys, they weren’t that great. The two most fundamental ones are probably the Bill Bixby/Lou Ferrigno Incredible Hulk and Lynda Carter as Wonder Woman. And while those are both good shows, neither of them were series I would watch on repeat, the sort of thing that makes a TV series worm its way into my psyche and become a part of the vast tapestry that is your friendly neighborhood Geek Pundit. And the truth is, a lot of the other shows of that era don’t hold up. Look at the 70s Amazing Spider-Man or Shazam! shows and try to convince me that these are fundamental pieces of Americana. The Greatest American Hero is a show I know I used to watch, plus it’s got the most earwormy theme song in superhero history, but I couldn’t relate the plot of a single episode after the pilot. It got better later, with the surprisingly decent Superboy TV series (mostly after Gerard Christopher took over the role from John Newton) and the “fun but fluffy” era of Lois and Clark: The New Adventures of Superman.
There are some wild swings in quality happening in this picture.
If I have to pick (and I do, it’s my damn game), I guess I’m going to have to give props to the two shows that I think launched the genre on TV: George Reeves in The Adventures of Superman and the Adam West/Burt Ward Batman show from 1966. I’ve always had a complicated relationship with the West/Ward era. When I hit those peak teenage years of arrogance and knowitallitude that most of us go through, I began to actively dislike that show, blaming it for people treating comic books as childish and infantile for decades after it was off the air and tarnishing the reputation of the caped crusader. Fortunately as I got older, I got over myself, thus disqualifying myself from ever running for elected office, but at the same time getting a sense of perspective. Sure, it wasn’t MY Batman, but I learned to appreciate it for what it was. I’ve softened to the show now. I even watch the reruns on MeTV Saturday nights between Svengoolie and Star Trek.
There’s no school like the old school.
George Reeves, though, I’ve always appreciated. He was the Curt Swan Superman come to life – square-jawed, barrel-chested, friend to all the innocent. But at the same time, he had a wicked sense of humor, showing clear joy whenever he got to take down a bad guy and taking a sly sort of pleasure any time he thwarted Lois Lane’s attempts to one-up him. I love the Reeves Superman and I don’t think he gets the respect he deserves. DC has launched a series of comics featuring the Christopher Reeve Superman as Superman ‘78, and that’s great. I love ‘em. But am I really the only person who would pick up a comic book called The Adventures of Superman ‘52?
Superhero Animals
I really like Marvel’s Scarlet Witch. She’s had several costumes over the years, but the best is the one George Perez whipped up for her for the Heroes Return era. It was red, naturally, which helps you identify her via color-coding, but the design also drew on the character’s Romani heritage, with a rare long skirt and robes that make you think of a fortune teller. All of that builds together and links her to her mystical roots. I’m fairly certain that if I didn’t know who the Avengers were and someone asked me which one I thought was the Scarlet Witch, I’d say, “Well, gotta be the woman in red, and not the tiger girl in the bikini.”
Jim MacQuarrie asked for my favorite Super-Animal, while Lew Beitz wants to know my favorite Super-PET. These two categories are close enough that I’ll talk about them together. They’re not EXACTLY the same, but there’s plenty of overlap. The way I look at it, we can divide super-animals into two categories: the ones that serves as an animal sidekick to the main hero, such as Krypto the Superdog, and those that are distinct heroes in their own right, like Hoppy the Marvel Bunny. The former are characters in established universes, while the latter usually exist in a Disney-esque universe where there are no humans at all, but instead races of anthropomorphic animals running the show.
As far as super-pets go, the Superman family has the deepest – and weirdest – bench to draw from. Krypto the Superdog and Beppo the Supermonkey are both animals from Krypton who made their way to Earth and gained powers like Superman and Supergirl. Supergirl also has a cat named Streaky who gains and loses his powers on a rotating basis thanks to exposure to something called X-Kryptonite (it was the 50s, it was safe to give something a name like that because there was no internet). Then there was Supergirl’s horse, Comet, who was actually a centaur from ancient Greece named Biron that was cursed and trapped in the form of a full horse. He hung around for a couple of thousand years before he met Supergirl and started to assist her on her missions, fell in love with her, and learned he could briefly become human when an actual comet passed close to Earth, allowing him to date Supergirl without telling her who he really –
Stop looking at me like that, I’m not making this up.
Superman is surprisingly indiscriminate about who he gives a cape to.
Anyway, Krypto is kind of the gold standard of super-pets, but there are a few others outside of the Super-Family worth mentioning. Wonder Woman’s kangaroo, Kanga, for instance. Ace the Bat-Hound, who Batman gives a mask to cover the bat-shaped patch of fur on his face and thus protect his secret identity. Chameleon Boy’s pet Proty who, like Chameleon Boy, is a shapeshifter, and fully sapient, and who can and did occasionally impersonate full grown adults, which makes you ask where the hell the Legion of Super-Heroes gets off treating him like a pet. And of course Damian Wayne, the current Robin, has Bat-Cow.
The only superhero who’s a source of 50 percent of the food groups.
Then there are the other types of Super-Animals: anthropomorphic heroes in their own right. Everyone who has heard me talk for five minutes will know that my favorite of these is Captain Carrot and his Amazing Zoo Crew. Created by Roy Thomas and Scott Shaw!, this 80s phenomenon was about a group of superhero animals who got powers from meteors that fell to (their version of) Earth. After meeting a dimension-hopping Superman, they were inspired to become heroes in their own right. The art is cartoony and the premise is silly, but what I’ve always loved about Captain Carrot and company is that their stories – at least in the 80s – weren’t played like cartoons. The plots were straight out of the pages of Golden and Silver Age comics, facing giant monsters and villains with cold-rays and all kinds of classic tropes. They were funny, sure, but not at the expense of the characters, as many of the modern writers who have tried to use Captain Carrot have forgotten. When I say I want a revival of the old-school Captain Carrot, I say it unironically and with love.
By contrast, there’s perhaps the most famous super-animal of the day, thanks to his starring role in an Academy Award-winning motion picture. I refer, of course, to Peter Porker, the Spectacular Spider-Ham. Spider-Ham’s comic hit JUST when I stared reading comics in earnest, and I devoured it. In this hilarious take on the Spider-Man story, Peter was the pet spider of mad scientist May Porker, who accidentally irradiated herself and bit him. The spider turned into a pig while maintaining his spider-powers. When May recovered from the radiation, her memory was erased and she thought she was just a kindly old lady and Peter was her nephew.
Move over, “The Boys,” the REAL heroes are back in town.
I’m not making this up either, but I wish I could take credit for it. The early Spider-Ham comics were a lot of fun, then he disappeared for decades before experiencing a renaissance in recent years. Like Captain Carrot, his modern adventures are sillier and more “cartoony” than the earlier ones, but UNlike Captain Carrot, the cartoony interpretation fits better, and has made him a better character.
My favorite Spider-Ham story, though, is not from the comics and not from the cartoons, but from the mouth of his creator, Tom DeFalco, when I met him at a convention a few years ago. He was signing reprints of the first appearance of Spider-Ham and his other great Spider character, Spider-Girl. I bought them both and told him how much I loved Spider-Ham when I was a kid, and he told how surprised he was when Marvel Comics sent him an invitation to the premiere of Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse. He didn’t understand why he was getting an invitation, and someone said, “It’s probably because Spider-Ham is in it.” And DeFalco, shocked, exclaimed, “SPIDER-HAM is in a MOVIE?”
Timeless.
Favorite Superhero Costumes
My wife Erin, who always cuts the line because nobody else who submits questions has ever made lasagna for me, wants to know what my favorite superhero costumes are, both male and female. I think it was Alex Ross who said that the test of a good superhero costume is whether you could identify the character based just on the name, even if you knew nothing about them. Batman, for example. Green Lantern. Captain America. The 90s was an era where this consistently failed, especially in the X-Men comics and those later characters created by former X-artists. If you showed someone who knows nothing about comics pictures of Gambit, Cable, Maverick, Shatterstar, and Deadpool, then asked them to match the names to the pictures, any correct answers would happen purely because of the law of averages.
But anyway, when I read Ross’s definition, he also used that definition to argue that the greatest superhero costume of all time belongs to Spider-Man. It’s hard to argue with him. Nobody who saw a lineup of the Marvel Comics all-stars would have any difficulty telling that this guy is Spider-Man and not, for example, Wonder Man. And while that’s true of MOST of Spider-Man’s assorted costumes over the years, the original is still my favorite. The black costume is cool-looking, but the ol’ red-and-blues have a brighter, more optimistic tone that suits Spider-Man better. Spider-Man is a hard luck hero, to be sure, but he should never be a depressing, brooding character like Daredevil. (Are you listening, current Marvel editorial?) He’s the guy who should never give up and always finds it in himself to do the right thing, and the red and blue color scheme says that better than any of his other assorted looks.
I don’t even blame him for admiring his own reflection.
Using the same metric, I also think the Rocketeer has a phenomenal costume. He is literally a human rocket, with a rocket pack strapped to his back and a helmet that evokes the speed and energy of the burgeoning space age. The rest of the outfit, though, with the brown bomber jacket and the jodhpur pants brings in the idea of his aviator background and grounds him in the World War II era where he belongs.
This picture makes me want to make swooshy noises.
Honorable mention goes to the Flash, Green Lantern (Hal Jordan costume, although I have a soft spot for the one John Stewart wore in the Justice League cartoon) and Marvel’s Nova.
Erin also asked about my favorite female costumes, which I find is a little harder to do going by Alex Ross’s metric. Too many female costumes are designed more for titillation rather than actually identifying the character. And even those that DO clearly identify them often do so via a logo or symbol that marks them, such as Wonder Woman.
I think “Morgan” was the screenwriter of Doctor Strange and the Multiverse of Madness.
Harley Quinn is another one that is pretty obvious, at least in her original costume. The red-and-black color scheme, white makeup, and bangled headpiece brings up the notion of a Harlequin, which of course is the inspiration for the character. She’s changed her look several times over the past few years, and while some of her looks have been pretty good, none of them draw their inspiration from her roots the way her first look does. On the other hand, they’ve come up with a pretty solid justification for her changing her look – once she got over the Joker and dumped his homicidal ass, she doesn’t want to wear the costume that identifies her as his sidekick anymore.
Let’s face it, I could have posted a picture of a random duck here and you still could have pictured Harley’s get-up.
Then there’s Supergirl. She’s had a lot of costumes, the most iconic look being the basic Superman outfit, only with bare legs and a skirt. That’s not her best look, though. For me, my favorite Supergirl costume came from the 1970s, when she wore a loose blouse with a small S-shield over her heart rather than the full-size shield most superfolks wear. I love that look – it still clearly marks her as a member of the Super-family, but it’s very different from anything any of the others wear. Being loose instead of skintight like most superhero costumes, it’s got a freeing quality that speaks to a lighter version of the character in a period where she was working to get out of her more famous cousin’s shadow. It’s such a great look and I never stop wishing they would bring it back.
What can I say? She’s got the look.
That’s about it for this week, guys, but there are plenty of other questions I haven’t gotten to yet. So be sure to come by next week for Playing Favorites With Superheroes Part Two, and if you have a suggestion that I haven’t covered, go ahead and drop in in the comments. Up, up, and away!
Blake M. Petit is a writer, teacher, and dad from Ama, Louisiana. His most recent writing project is the superhero adventure series Other People’s Heroes: Little Stars, now complete on Amazon’s Kindle Vella platform. He realizes he talks about the Superman family a lot whenever he gets on to a superhero discussion, but let’s be honest, people. It’s either gonna be this or Star Trek.
Multiverses are big these days. What was once a relatively niche science fiction concept has become popularized by things like the Spider-Verse movies, Best Picture winner Everything Everywhere All At Once, and about seven thousand fanfics where the guy from the Avatar: The Last Airbender cartoon meets and beats up his counterpart from the live action movie. So it’s odd to think that one of the first fictional worlds to use the multiverse as a major concept once attempted to do away with it because it was deemed too confusing. DC Comics introduced its multiverse in 1961 with Flash #123, in which writer Gardner Fox had the Flash of that time period (Barry Allen) meet the Flash of the 1940s (Jay Garrick). The problem was it had been established earlier that, in Barry’s world, Jay Garrick was considered a fictional character that Barry had read about as a child. The fix was to declare Jay’s world an alternate universe, an “Earth-2,” even though he had been around first. Fox was even slick enough to write himself into the story, claiming that the writer “Gardner Fox” had some sort of telepathic link to the other world and didn’t realize the stories he was conjuring that he believed to be pure fiction were, in fact, reporting on actual events from Earth-2. It was a wild, crazy concept for the time, and it started an avalanche.
“How long do you think we can keep this up?” “Oh, I’d say at least 60 years.”
It wasn’t too long before the Silver Age Green Lantern, Hal Jordan, met his own Earth-2 counterpart, Alan Scott. Heroes who had been continuously published since the Golden Age and were not replaced by other characters (predominantly Superman, Batman, and Wonder Woman) discovered that they had almost identical doppelgangers on Earth-2, and eventually the Earth-1 Justice League of America met the Earth-2 Justice Society for an annual get-together.
And once there are two universes. why not more? Earth-3 had villainous versions of the heroes: Superman became the evil Ultraman, Batman the crafty Owlman, Green Lantern the kinda lame and poorly-named Power Ring, and so forth. Then DC started adding worlds that included the characters they’d purchased from other defunct publishers: the heroes of Charlton Comics inhabited Earth-4, the Shazam! Family of Fawcett Comics fame was from Earth-S, and the heroes of Quality Comics were shifted off into Earth-X – a world where the Nazis won World War II!
“Not gonna lie to you, Sam, this is kind of awkward.”
By the 80s, though, DC felt that things had gotten unwieldy, so writer Marv Wolfman gave us Crisis on Infinite Earths, their first mega-crossover event, in which all but one Earth was destroyed and the surviving heroes of many different worlds came to reside there. Both Green Lanterns and Flashes, otherworldly heroes like Plastic Man, the Blue Beetle, and Captain Marvel, and many more populated this “new” DC Universe. For the most part, I think this has worked to DC’s benefit over the years – it’s easier to build a cohesive world if all your main characters inhabit the same universe. Were it not for this, we never would have had the Blue Beetle/Booster Gold friendship, the Flash family wouldn’t have developed into the legacy it currently is, and people would have forgotten about Peacemaker long before John Cena showed up to actually make him interesting for a change. Despite that, though, I have always disagreed with the fundamental thesis that led to the writing of Crisis in the first place – that a multiverse storyline was too complicated for the casual reader. And if anything, the proliferation of multiverse stories in recent years, I think, has proven me to be correct.
What’s more, I think even many of the writers at DC Comics felt the same way, because it wasn’t too long before they started to branch out again and tell stories that didn’t fall into the canon of the one and only DC Universe. Just three years after Crisis ended, DC published Gotham By Gaslight, a one-shot story by Brian Augustyn and Mike Mignola, which featured a Victorian Batman doing battle with Jack the Ripper. The book was a hit, and the idea of telling stories of DC heroes in different worlds came back. Batman: Holy Terror by Alan Brennert and Norm Breyfogle, showed an alternate history in which the British Empire never fell out of favor and the colonies in North America are run by an oppressive government. In this version, Batman becomes a sort of Guy Fawkes-esque character, rebelling against British rule. This book was labeled an “Elseworlds” title, and the name became the brand under which DC stories from outside the continuity took place for the next decade and a half.
Original slogan:” Elseworlds-Because there can’t be too many different versions of Batman.”
Over the years we got some magnificent books, each casting the heroes of the DC Universe in different scenarios. In Superman: Speeding Bullets, Kal-El of Krypton crashed not in Kansas, but in Gotham City, where he was raised by Thomas and Martha Wayne. Batman: In Darkest Night showed us a world where Abin Sur crashed in Gotham City instead of Coast City (a LOT of alien spacecraft touch ground in Gotham in Elseworlds) and thus Bruce Wayne became Earth’s Green Lantern instead of Hal Jordan. Justice Riders casts the Justice League in a western yarn and The Golden Age tells a bittersweet ending to the saga of the Justice Society. Even crossovers with other companies occasionally bore the Elseworlds brand – Batman met both Marvel’s Captain America and Tarzan (published, at the time, through Dark Horse Comics) in Elseworlds stories.
Perhaps the high point of the imprint came in 1996, when Mark Waid and Alex Ross published their four-issue masterwork Kingdom Come. Set a few decades in the future, this is a DC Universe that has been disintegrating ever since Superman left humanity behind following the tragic death of his wife, Lois Lane, and the brutal murder of her killer, the Joker, before he could face justice. In his absence, the world has been overrun by a new breed of metahuman, heroes in name only, more interested in fighting each other than protecting the human race. In this story the Spectre takes a minister named Norman McCay on an Ebenezer Scrooge-type tour of this world as Superman is called back to action following a catastrophic event that pushes the entire Earth to the edge of annihilation. The story is largely a response to the sort of over-muscled, over-gunned, over-pouched heroes that were so popular in the 90s, and despite having a distinct dystopian flavor, it is ultimately one of the most beautiful and powerfully optimistic stories comics have ever produced.
You’re probably expecting some kind of joke here, but this is just straight-up one of the greatest comic book series ever made.
DC quietly pushed the Elseworlds brand aside in 2003, the argument being that it had become overused and was starting to grow stale. It’s hard to argue with that, too, especially when you start counting the number of Elseworlds that basically boiled down to “Kal-El landed somewhere other than Smallville, Kansas.” (Off the top of my head, we’ve got Superman: Red Son, Superman: The Dark Side, Superman: True Brit, JLA: The Nail, The Superman Monster, and even another Dark Horse collaboration, Superman/Tarzan: Sons of the Jungle, all of which hinge on that same basic point.) As the multiverse was slowly creeping back into the “real” DC Comics, Elseworlds was placed…well…elsewhere. It came back briefly in 2010 for a three-issue Superman miniseries, Last Family of Krypton (this time little Kal-El’s parents escaped Krypton with him), and the name was used for an Arrowverse crossover event on TV, but other than that, it’s been gone for a long time.
“Okay, so you’re kind of over Batman Elseworlds. How about 37 Superman Elseworlds that all have the same starting point?”
Or has it?
DC is not using the name anymore, no, but they certainly are using the same basic concept. There are a lot of DC books being published that feature versions of the DC heroes in different worlds. Sean Phillips’s Batman: White Knight and its various sequels and spinoffs are set in a world where the Joker goes sane. Since that series premiered in 2017, it’s built a small universe of its own. There’s also the world of DCEased, a universe in which Darkseid succeeds in gaining the Anti-Life Equation, unleashing a memetic virus that transforms its victims into a sort of techno-undead creature, but don’t you dare call them zombies. Jurassic League was a miniseries that re-cast the Justice League as anthropomorphic dinosaurs, because why the hell not? Dark Knights of Steel features a medieval world where Jor-El, Lara, and Kal-El came to Earth together and live in a sort of fantasy setting surrounded by analogues of the other DC heroes and villains. And then there’s the cleverly-named DC Versus Vampires, which is about the signing of the Magna Carta.
Pictured: Pope Innocent III and King John.
Kidding. No, it’s exactly what it says on the wrapper.
The thing about these books is that none of them are self-contained. Most Elseworlds, back in the day, ran anywhere from one to four issues, but that was typically where it ended. White Knight and DCEased both had multiple series and one-shots. Vampires and Steel each ran for 12 issues plus spin-offs. And each of these worlds has been designated a number in the new, current, DC Multiverse. They are Elseworlds in all but name – in fact, in a more literal sense than many of the older (forgotten) Elseworlds books, as they are actually other worlds in the DC Multiverse. Many of the other Elseworlds of the past have been “imported” into the new DC Multiverse as well, especially the much-loved and highly-inspirational Kingdom Come, which has crossed over and interacted with the “Main” DC Universe on many occasions, including in Waid’s current run on Batman/Superman: World’s Finest.
Since DC has once again embraced the concept, what I (and, I suspect, many of the fans who were reading comics in the 90s) would like is for them to once again embrace the brand. Bring back Elseworlds. When these books are reprinted, give them the label. When the inevitable sequels come out, give them the label. If anything, the label will only help. While it may be clear that Jurassic League isn’t the “real” DC Universe, a casual fan picking up DC Versus Vampires might be concerned about why Hal Jordan is doing his best Dracula impression in this series but it doesn’t seem to be affecting the regular monthly Green Lantern title. Having a specific brand would alleviate that problem.
The only difference between these and an Elseworlds is the label.
And since the current philosophy at DC seems to be “every story happened SOMEWHERE in the Multiverse,” I say they should run with it. Don’t just put the Elseworlds LABEL on the book, plop a NUMBER in it as well. When they print the Dark Knights of Steel omnibus, give it an Elseworlds logo with a little mark signifying that this is Earth-118. Instead of reprinting Kingdom Come under the “mature readers” Black Label imprint (where it is woefully misplaced), give it back the Elseworlds mark and label it as Earth-22. There are two more miniseries coming out this year set on Earth-789, the world shared by the Christopher Reeve Superman and Michael Keaton Batman movies – give THOSE the Elseworlds labels too!
It exists, it has fans, and it has a clear purpose now that’s more than just a grab bag of weird. It’s true that the label was overused in the 90s, but the solution to that isn’t to never use it again, it’s just to use it sparingly. There’s no fan of the books that currently exist that would be turned off by an Elseworlds label, and there are many fans who may be more inclined to pick them up if they saw that familiar, beloved brand again. If nothing else, I think, it’s worth the try. Nothing in comics ever really dies – Superman can come back from Doomsday, Barry Allen can come back from the Speed Force…let’s let the Elseworlds brand have its time back from the dead.
Blake M. Petit is a writer, teacher, and dad from Ama, Louisiana. His current writing project is the superhero adventure series Other People’s Heroes: Little Stars, a new episode of which is available every Wednesday on Amazon’s Kindle Vella platform. Fingers crossed for the Elseworlds miniseries set on Earth-26, home of Captain Carrot. By now you should know he’s not joking.
There are a lot of comic books published every month. Like, at least four of them. And for someone who has been reading comics since childhood, there are times where the sheer volume of books being published can get overwhelming, even if you don’t read X-Men titles. The two biggest publishers, Marvel and DC, each have an intricate universe that carries on a complex interwoven meta-narrative that has run continuously, in one form or another, for decades, somehow subsisting even before variant covers were invented. And if you’re the sort of person who has things like a job or a family, or who enjoys eating food, there simply isn’t enough time to read everything that’s being published.
Fortunately, both Marvel and DC have in recent years launched online subscription services, where you can read a substantial portion of their respective libraries, with more books added each week. I’m a comic book collector, I can’t imagine a future where I didn’t want to get printed comics, but I consider myself a reader even more than a collector. And there’s a definite comfort to knowing that I don’t have to get all 1,124 books published a month (that’s 10,419 covers) in case there’s something I might want to read later. For books that I’m not enthusiastic about, things that I would be reading just to fill in a gap, it’s great to know that I can always go to the app a few months after release and it’ll be waiting there.
The best part about this system, though, is that when you go back and look at the stuff you missed, sometimes you find a gem that you may not have otherwise read at all. Since I’ve started reading these comics digitally, I’ve stumbled on several titles that I passed on in print, but really came to enjoy after the fact. So this week, for your edification, I’m going to share four comic series from the last few years that I didn’t read when they came out, but I’m sorry I slept on now.
Duo (DC/Milestone Comics)
Milestone Media, which has published through DC on and off for 30 years now, came back in 2021 in a big way, and while a lot of attention was given to the return of characters like Static, Icon, and Hardware, less attention was given to some of the new properties released in that universe. Duo, from writer Greg Pak and artists Khoi Pham and Scott Williams, focuses on David Kim and Kelly Sandborne, an engaged couple whose research in nanotechnology is on the verge of a breakthrough. With the right funding, David and Kelly believe they could revolutionize medicine: healing injuries, combating disease, even reversing the aging process itself. When they approach an investor to take their work to the next level, instead they find themselves under attack. Kelly is thought to be killed, but David soon discovers that she’s been saved by the nanobots the only way they could: transplanting her consciousness into his own mind. Now, sharing one body and immense power, David and Kelly have to stop her killers and find a way to separate.
Duo is a really great book. It takes elements from one of the old-school Milestone comics, Xombi, but also incorporates concepts and themes that feel more like the Starhawk/Aleta body-sharing dynamic from the old Guardians of the Galaxy or Valiant’s original Second Life of Doctor Mirage, about a married couple in which the husband was a literal ghost. The character beats between the two of them are great, with some surprisingly funny moments even turning up at Kelly’s memorial service, and the book deftly deals with the troubles of having the person you love literally living inside your mind. We don’t get a real grasp of what the villains are up to until the third issue, but the character building and questions raised by the story are more than compelling enough to pull us in even before that point. Modern Milestone is doing a lot of interesting stuff, but I’m surprised to discover that this book is my favorite of the pack.
Aquaman and the Flash: Voidsong (DC Comics)
Ah, the miniseries. When the concept first really came to prominence in the 1980s, a comic book miniseries felt like an event, like something special. Now it almost feels inconsequential, with “ongoing” titles being relaunched every twelve minutes and proper miniseries feeling somewhat inconsequential. The idea of a miniseries starring the Flash and Aquaman facing an alien invasion felt like the sort of book that would never be referenced again, never have a serious impact on that “meta-narrative” I mentioned before, and therefore would be easy to skip. And I was wrong to feel that way.
The above description of the series, written by Jackson Lanzing and Collin Kelly and with art by Vasco Georgiev, is technically correct, but despite what Futurama would have us believe, that’s not always the best kind of correct. As the story goes, an invasion fleet immobilizes the entire planet with a sort of harmonic weapon (the titular “Voidsong”) that affects everyone except for the Flash and Aquaman – who were both insulated from the sound for Comic Book Reasons – leaving those two heroes as the only ones who can save the world. The great thing about this is that Aquaman and the Flash are not a traditional team-up pair. Sure, they’ve both been members of the Justice League since the very beginning, but when time comes for the heroes to pair off you’re more likely to see the Flash pal around with Green Lantern, while Aquaman hangs out with Wonder Woman or the Martian Manhunter. You almost never see these two, specifically, in a story together, and the story neatly moves from an early personality clash to a more respectful relationship in a very entertaining fashion. If you skipped this book because it wouldn’t “count,” I hear ya, but I’m telling you that we all missed out.
Daredevil by Chip Zdarsky (Marvel Comics)
Among Stan Lee’s Silver Age creations for Marvel Comics, Daredevil is probably the one I’ve read the least. It’s not that I dislike the character, but an awful lot of writers over the years have taken the approach that Daredevil is the hero that absolutely can never be allowed a single moment of joy. A lot of the modern runs on his book have had him suffer one tragedy after another without ever even a hope of peace or happiness. Years ago, when I was sent Marvel comics to review for the late, lamented Comixtreme website, I reached a point where I started to dread any new issue of Daredevil not because the book wasn’t good, but because I knew it would be so bleak I would need a shower afterwards.
Fortunately, Marvel seems to have decided that Spider-Manis now the character that will never be allowed anything resembling happiness, cheer, or entertainment, so Daredevil has lightened up a little bit. Chip Zdarsky, who is one of the more interesting writers working in mainstream comics today (under duress, it sometimes seems), took over the series in 2018. His version, admittedly, isn’t all rainbows and puppy dogs: early in the series, Daredevil accidentally kills a young man in the commission of a crime and eventually turns himself in to the police, getting sent to jail still wearing his mask. It’s a ridiculous concept, the masked hero in maximum security with a bunch of criminals, but once you accept the sheer lunacy behind it the story is fascinating. Zdarsky’s interpretation of Daredevil feels very in-character but, despite the dark inciting incident, manages to avoid the utter hopelessness so many writers have brought to the title.
Zdarsky’s run on the book went for 36 issues before it was restarted with a new #1 because it was a Wednesday. The current volume is on issue 11 and I don’t know how much longer it’s going to go, but I’m certainly along for the ride.
The Nice House on the Lake (DC/Black Label)
DC’s Black Label imprint is…well, I’ll be honest, it’s a mess. It was originally announced as a place for more “mature” versions of traditional DC heroes (“mature” here is being used in its traditional Latin definition, “more likely to drop an F-bomb”). The stories were also said to be out of continuity, except for the ones that aren’t. And sometimes they’re oversized and sometimes they’re not, sometimes they have characters formerly published by Vertigoand sometimes they have characters related to Batman. That’s about 90 percent of the time, actually. But sometimes they have absolutely nothing to do with established DC characters whatsoever. If you asked me to define what exactly the Black Label comics are supposed to be, the only consistent answer I could give you would be “something I would not give my eight-year-old nephew.”
Fortunately, it doesn’t matter what Black Label is, James Tynion IV and Alvaro Martinez Bueno’s The Nice House on the Lake is the gem in the crown. In this sci-fi/horror series (which I should stress has absolutely nothing to do with the DC Universe), ten people are invited for a week-long vacation by their mutual friend Walter at a…well, at a nice house on a lake. The cast is a very eclectic mix of people from Walter’s life – friends from high school, friends from college, friends from later. Some of the characters have a history with each other, others are nearly strangers, with Walter being the only link between them all. Before they can even settle into their vacation getaway, though–
Ah hell, I don’t want to tell you anything else, because this is a book built on mystery and surprise. There’s so much going on here, and almost all of it is built on character, which is fantastic. It’s a wild comic that takes a horrific turn at the end of the first issue, at which point it becomes virtually impossible to predict where things are going from one minute to the next. The book ends with a sequel hook, and I desperately hope that DC (or Black Label or whatever) is already well into working on the next volume, because while this series does come to a relatively definitive conclusion, there’s plenty more to explore and I can’t wait to do it. I won’t be sleeping on the sequel.
Blake M. Petit is a writer, teacher, and dad from Ama, Louisiana. His current writing project is the superhero adventure series Other People’s Heroes: Little Stars, a new episode of which is available every Wednesday on Amazon’s Kindle Vella platform. There are, of course, other books he slept on besides these. For example, if you didn’t read Justice League Vs. the Legion of Super-Heroes, you can consider yourself one of the lucky ones.
Blake M. Petit 