Cartoonish hijinks, a rain of men, and an origin of all magic?
Adventures of Superman 441, Doom Patrol 9, Martian Manhunter 2, Secret Origins 27, Swamp Thing 73, The Weird 3
We close out the month of February 1988 with a batch of titles that are a little bit all over the place. Let’s dive in and see what’s happening with this assortment of titles!
Adventures of Superman #441 by John Byrne, Jerry Ordway, and Dennis Janke
This issue brings back Mr. Mxyzptlk for his second go-around post-Crisis while also focusing on some of the subplots that have been built over the last few months.
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With ninety days passed since his last defeat, Mxy decides to visit Hollywood the second time around. This time spelling his name backward won’t work. Instead, Superman must convince him to paint his face blue.
Before any of that can happen, Superman has to fight a knock-off Big Boy mascot as well as several thinly-altered Saturday morning cartoon characters. He even spends a few panels as a cartoon himself after Mxy changes the entire world into Toon Town.
Ultimately, things come down to a pseudo-Wheel of Fortune set. Mxy takes over, but Superman works with the makeup artist. Mxy stops her before she applies blue makeup. He grabs her other makeup and puts it on himself. But this was Superman’s plan all along, as he exposes it to certain lights that turn the imp’s face blue. Mxy is grumpy but disappears for another ninety days (which at this point seems to imply about nine to eleven months between appearances in real-time.)
The issue checks in with Lois Lane as she investigates Luthor, Cat Grant as she contemplates a potential relationship with Jimmy Olsen, Milton Fine as he lives in terror of Brainiac’s return to his mind, and a figure that appears to be Metallo, making his first appearance since Superman #2 a year and a half earlier. We also hear from the strange visitor at the Antarctic research center whose memories are in shambles but distinctly remembers that she is called Supergirl.
Byrne seems to use Adventures to focus on more subplots which is an apt use of Ordway’s talents. (His art on Cat’s son Adam is certainly better than Byrne, who never could draw children particularly well.) While this issue doesn’t do anything particularly special or insightful, it’s a darn good issue.
Doom Patrol #9 by Paul Kupperberg, Erik Larsen, and Gary Martin; Steve Miller, Randy DuBurke, and Joe Alidetta
The new issue opens with the team at home as Larry suffers from severe depression and a bed-bound Arani grows frustrated that the search for Niles has stalled. She’s angry that the team has done any superhero work at all, as in her mind, their sole purpose is finding her husband.
The team seems ready to focus only on their own problems before they catch sight of an attack by an army of plastic men on military facilities. We learn this army stole nuclear warheads. Cliff Steele recognizes them immediately as the servitors of the Doom Patrol’s old foe Garguax.
The team work with the government to guard another facility. This draws the attention of Garguax who wants the Doom Patrol dead. They fight off the small army, but the numbers are too great for the team. Though they destroy large chunks of the army, the androids still steal the warheads.
The team returns home, forced to wait for Garguax to make the next move.
The issue also features the third DC Bonus Book, focused on Celsius. Arani laments her inability to find Niles when she meets an old woman named Ellen. Ellen just recently lost her husband and plans for today to be her final day. Despite being wheelchair-bound, she’s making her way around to all the sights she wants to see one last time in Kansas City.
Ellen and Arani visit a park, a popular restaurant, and a Kansas City Royals baseball game where Ellen even gets a signed home run ball. They see a fire on their way to a fountain which is Ellen’s final destination. The old woman forces Arani to help and actually interact with humanity. Celsius uses her powers to build an ice slide to free people at the top of the building.
She talks to the rest of the people in the area in the aftermath and it seems clear she has even fewer people skills than we’ve thought from her appearances in the main book. Ellen recognizes a need for Arani to get in touch with reality and forces her on it.
They reach the fountain and Ellen gifts Arani the baseball and tells her to give it to a friend. With that, Ellen passes. Taking her words to heart, Arani returns to headquarters and gifts the ball to Cliff.
While this is Steve Miller’s only work for DC Comics, he had already co-created Rust at Now Comics. That book involved a reluctant superhero with acidic blood and skin like rusty metal, so it’s perhaps a bit of a surprise that he’s not writing Cliff here. But the series often took a more serious look at life with superpowers in the vein of Paul Chadwick’s Concrete, and we see a bit of that in this story. Now pretty quickly pushed him off the character and as far as I can tell Miller would not write him again until 1992 with an Adventure series featuring art from future superstars Phil Hester and Ande Parks. When that series ended, so it appears did his work in the comics field.
Randy DuBurke’s art shows a clear influence from Paul Gulacy. It would continue to do so as he moved over to Action Comics Weekly for the Black Canary strip. He had fairly regular work over the next five years, but I suspect he was also an artist who struggled with a monthly schedule. In later years, he became a children’s book illustrator and seems to have moved into painting more than pencils and inks.
Inker Joe Alidetta left comics after this one and only issue. If he had any independent credits at all, I cannot locate them.
This comic also had a first-time colorist in Elizabeth Kessler. As I mentioned when we covered the Secret Origins issue drawn by her then-husband, she wouldn’t survive the year as he brutally murdered her in an incredibly dark bit of comic book history.
The Celsius backup is an interesting juxtaposition against the main story as it seems to be a far more mature tale more akin to Grant Morrison’s upcoming run than what Kupperberg and Larsen are doing on the title. It’s actually a bit sad as it makes me wonder what the growing Vertigo line might have done with Celsius. Alas, we will never know.
Martian Manhunter #2 by J.M. DeMatteis and Mark Badger
I’ve never been the biggest fan of Mark Badger’s work in comics. I’ve always found his storytelling to be a bit off and mixed with his Sienkiewicz-esque visuals, his stories can often be a bit confusing.
Fortunately, things are made easier with this book because not all that much happens. J’Onn flies around the world trying to avoid the phantom who we finally learn is H’Ronmeer, Martian god of light and life. The god continues to show J’Onn visions from his past. J’Onn resists the visions, even as H’Ronmeer presents them as his true reality.
The Justice League finally catch up with the Martian Manhunter and take him to the Roman embassy. Mister Miracle sets up a device to try to stabilize J’Onn’s mental state, but the rest of the team is disabled one by one, proving H’Ronmeer is far more than a figment of J’Onn’s imagination.
The book ends with H’Ronmeer confronting Mister Miracle. Perhaps because of his origins on New Genesis, Scott seems to accept H’Ronmeer’s presence as necessary. He steps aside for H’Ronmeer to take J’Onn.
Martian Manhunter hops to his own defense, screaming that Scott has betrayed him. He punches H’Ronmeer and flies away, crashing again far away in Colorado, by a strange shack. A human emerges to find him, apparently Doctor Erdel, the apparently still living man that brought J’Onn to Earth. Their reunion is short lived as H’Ronmeer appears again as the issue ends.
It’s incredibly hard to judge this book so far as it mostly seems like a showcase for Badger’s art at this point. DeMatteis seems to be building toward something but what it is we’ve yet to see. Like Forever People, his pacing feels way off here and it certainly has negatively affected my opinion of the limited series so far. We will see if the creative team can stick the landing over the next two months.
Secret Origins #27 by Roy Thomas, “Ehrich Weiss”, Robert Loren Fleming, Tom Artis, P. Craig Russell, Grant Miehm, and Fred Fredericks
While previous issues split the book into two or more stories, this issue instead integrates everything together into a more or less cohesive narrative. But it also is a narrative that feels like it’s derailed by editorial mid-story.
The book actually covers three origins with the unadvertised Doctor Mist’s past taking up the first third of the book. Zatanna is summoned to a historic castle (wearing her new costume as seen on the cover underneath a raincoat) only to walk directly into a trap. She sees a bound Doctor Mist, mostly naked, and a mystery villain is threatening both her and “Nommo” as the stranger calls Mist. He forces Nommo to tell his history.
We learn that Nommo once ruled an ancient magical kingdom and oversaw the “flame of life” in an age of prosperity. Felix Faust attacks him and tries to take the flame, but Nommo pulls in the flame and uses it to banish Faust to another dimension. Unfortunately, his actions decimate his entire kingdom and as punishment, he’s forced to walk the world unable to die.
Nommo sets out to use the centuries to lead to a renaissance of magic, helping various historical figures and characters from DC history gain knowledge of magic. This leads us up until the forties and Zatara’s origin, as well as a switch of art from Tom Artis and P. Craig Russell to Grant Miehm and Fred Fredericks.
Zatara is a reluctant stage musician who is gifted actual spell books by a mysterious bookstore owner who is actually a barely disguised Doctor Mist. He uses them to learn his backward magic and become a hero just as World War II begins.
Artis and Russell are back for the final third of the series. Zatanna’s messy origin is linked to Justice League of America issues and that means it’s a mess of appearances with the team. She learns under her father and meets other mystics including John Constantine (who as presented here doesn’t meet her until after she’s joined the JLA.)
This leads to a final battle between Zatanna and the mystery villain: Felix Faust. In the process we learn that a lot of what we heard might all be a fabrication on Nommo’s part, thereby making all the changes to the mystical history of the DCU only possibilities rather than facts. It makes the tale seem almost inconsequential.
It’s saved by the art. Artis and Miehm are both young artists at this point, but the choice of inkers for both increases their already prodigious talents. With Russell, Tom Artis has a Arthur Adams-like flare while the tight inks of Fredericks give Miehm the right old-school look to make his work shine.
While Ambush Bug scripter Robert Loren Fleming provides the script for this story as well, the plots are attributed to an Ehrich Weiss (for the main story) and Roy Thomas (for the Zatara segment.) Ehrich Weiss is the real name of Harry Houdini, but I’ve seen no distinct proof of who was using the alias here. I’ve seen Roy Thomas (again) and Randy Lofficier together as the likely culprits with the alias in place after so much of their script was re-edited to contradict the history presented.
Interestingly, much of the structure of this story was lifted for back story in the final season of Young Justice, with Arion, Nabu, and Vandal Savage playing roles in the history of magic in that version of the DCU. Outside of that adaptation and a few mentions in Who’s Who Update ’88, this version of DC’s magical history would never be mentioned again.
Swamp Thing #73 by Rick Veitch and Alfredo Alcala
Rick Veitch is an incredible writer and artist. He has a solid handle on the weirdness of writing Swamp Thing, but even I think he’s stretched out the Sprout storyline far longer than he should. As Constantine continues to worry about a massive ecological disaster because of it, this feels like it should be the center of a line-wide event as it rips across the entire DC Universe. Instead, no other hero ever really takes note of man-eating vegetation sprouting everywhere.
As Swamp Thing travels through the green, his astral form is attacked by a “dragon” elemental. That is according to the text at least, as it ends up looking a lot more like a tyrannosaurus rex than any dragon.
His meddling in the Sprout’s journey has pulled the events closer to his home and everything seems to be converging on Houma. Wild Thing’s endless drive is taking him there while events around Chester Williams start to take on a familiar tone, even as Constantine continues his investigation.
Chester avoids being hit by a car before it explodes, manages to put out a fire on his stovetop, and barely escapes accidentally burning alive on his sofa all in a matter of hours. Constantine finds him after this and tells Chester that he’s meant to be the next Swamp Thing. Abby tries to stop it, but Chester thinks that he might be okay with it.
That changes when the swamp elemental appears with the Sprout. It takes on the form of a t-rex and seems poised to engulf Chester in its fire breath. Alec takes control of the form though and stops the elemental from killing again. He leaves the Sprout with Abby in order to get far enough away and to force a separation between himself and the dragon.
The fact that we still have several months ahead before Sprout finally finds a home makes me shake my head in disbelief. We are already nine issues deep into the storyline and it feels like Veitch has a set length of time he wants to fill without necessarily having full-fledged stories to tell every month. We will see if things can improve as we head toward 75 and 76 and the conclusion to the Sprout’s final host.
The Weird #3 by Jim Starlin, Bernie Wrightson, and Dan Green
This entire issue is built around a confrontation between The Weird and Jason Morgan, the man who first made contact with the Macrolatts. His body has been transformed into a half-crystalline structure as he seeks to continue the ritual that will open the barrier between the Macrolatts’ dimension and Earth.
The Weird and Jason fight inside a massive square energy field that takes up the entire floor of Morgan’s former apartment building. They seem to be evenly matched, but Jason manages to trap The Weird inside a second solid light construct.
Jason summons two Macrolatts to the Earth, but his power transfer allows the Weird to escape. The Macrolatts fly away as Weird once again battles Jason. Well aware that Jason will just keep making bridges unless he’s permanently stopped, Weird breaks his neck.
This brings down the barrier. An invisible Martian Manhunter subdues the Weird, but the Macrolatts have already found new immensely powerful host forms: Superman and Infinity Inc.’s Nuklon. Our story cuts off with their arrival.
The Weird walks a line between an event book and a story of a new creation and his odd history. Perhaps it’s due to the talents of the writer and art team that it still manages to work as a slightly oddball narrative. While The Weird seems unlikely to win an award, it feels like a solid step before Starlin moves into a true event comic later in the year: Cosmic Odyssey.
Everything this week was readable even if the comics didn’t give us any truly spectacular stories. The eclectic group of artists on these titles is what really makes them shine as DC carves out a short period of time where they feel like the place for the best artists in comics. Of course, Marvel has already started to poach their artists with Todd McFarlane and that trend will intensify over the next few months as the company fails to do anything to keep young talents around.
That wraps up February of 1988. Bonus subscribers should stay tuned for our look at the Wild Dog limited series this weekend before we kick off March next week.