Bookshelf #14

This week's bookshelf is my Fantagraphics shelf...or, to be more precise, my Fantagraphics-books-that-aren't-Disney-collections shelf, as those are currently all stuffed onto another bookshelf entirely.  

To the right are, obviously, the various Peanuts collections, including three volumes of The Complete Peanuts, four of the little gift book-esque books that Fanta released following 2012's similarly-sized  Charlie Brown's Christmas Stocking and Snoopy vs. The Red Baron, which, as the title suggests, is a collection of the strips featuring the World War I flying ace's many battles against his archenemy.

There are also a pair of non-Fanta Peanuts books, both from Boom's Kaboom! imprint, which has (or at least had) the license to produce new Peanuts comic books. 

The first of these is 2018's Peanuts Dell Archive, collecting stories from the comics books of the 1950s and 1960s by Chales Schulz and others. These are obviously not Peanuts at its best, but they are certainly interesting, seeing some of the earliest non-Schulz Peanuts work, as well as seeing the characters feature in stories that are longer than even the Sunday strips of the newspaper could allow. \

The other is 2015's Peanuts: A Tribue to Charles M. Schulz, a 65th anniversary celebration of the strip, the characters and the man by a wide variety of other artists, including Patrick McDonnel, Mo Willems, Lincoln Pierce, Evan Dorkin, Roger Langridge, Paul Pope, Stan Sakai and others. Again, not great, but interesting...even fascinating, as seeing characters so associated with a single artist's vision translated into the styles of others can often be. (Unfortunately, this book is really wide and juts an inch or so over the edge of the bookshelf, so it mildly irritates me every time I look at it.)

If you're curious why I don't have more Peanuts on my shelf, I do have more volumes of The Complete Peanuts upstairs on another bookshelf (As I've mentioned previously, although I've been living in my current home for a little over a year now, I have not attempted the arduous task of reorganizing all my bookshelves into something that might make more sense). I don't have as many as I would like though; as with Fanta's Carl Barks and other Disney library collections, I wish I would have bought each new volume as they came out and thus had a complete collection, rather than putting doing so off and then falling hopelessly behind. Maybe one day. 

On the left you'll find more-or-less random books from Fanta, including works from Julia Gfrorer, Jason, Lucy Knisley, Benjamin Marra, Katie Skelly, Steven Weissman and a few others. The majority of these books are by the late Richard Sala though, who is one of my all-time favorite artists. These include The Bloody Cardinal, Delphine, The Hidden, In a Glass Grotesquely, Mad Night, Poison Flowers & Pandemonium and Violenzia & Other Deadly Amusements. That's not everything—Phantoms in the Attic is shelved elsewhere due to its large size, and Peculia, the first work of his I had read, is upstairs with the older comics. 

Considering this shelf now, I think this might be the most reviewed of my bookshelves. That is, the majority of these books are ones I ended up reviewing professionally (that is, somewhere other than my blog). This, I suppose, says something about Fantagraphics: They make great books worthy of discussion and recommendation, and for a more general audience than the floppy publishers of the direct market. 

An extremely belated review of All of The Marvels

All of The Marvels (Penguin Press; 2021) Despite practically vibrating with excitement as I read it and eager to talk to somebody about it as soon as I finished, I wasn't entirely sure if I should write about Douglas Wolk's All of the Marvels or not. 

As readers of this blog know, I generally write about everything I read or experience, especially if it's a comic book or somehow comics-related, something that, at this point, is less a vocation or a hobby and more of a habit—and, perhaps, not even necessarily a good habit.

This book, despite my initial understanding of it, turns out to be a work of literary criticism that attempts to reckon with the half-million page, 60-year mega-saga of Marvel's inter-connected comic book stories that, in Wolk's framing, are telling a single story, the biggest one ever told. As I read, I quickly realized that Wolk's book wasn't an argument for that way of looking at Marvel Comics, nor a detailing of the mad experience of reading their comics in a way that no one was ever meant to read them, nor a history of any kind (although various chapters address all of those things).

Rather, this was Wolk writing about the comics themselves (at least thousands of the tens of thousands he read), which, of course, meant that writing about All of the Marvels would mean that I would be writing about someone writing about people writing comics (And by "writing comics," I guess I actually mean creating them). 

Obviously, the book should and has been reviewed in various places, but I felt a little weird about doing so myself, as criticism of criticism seemed like a weird, more academic sort of ouroboros writing than any I've ever really engaged in before. 

Still, be it a bad habit or not, I'm going to proceed, urged on by, if nothing else, a desire to let any of my readers who haven't already read All of the Marvels know exactly what it is, and to recommend that they take the time to read it. 

Instead of a more formally organized piece, I'm just going to share a few random things about the book below, and I'll try my hardest to be brief (Which isn't easy for me, given the limitless space of the Internet and my lack of an editor). 

•So what took me so long to read this particular book, aside from the usual forces of procrastination, too many comics competing for my attention and my tendency to prioritize reading stuff I can get paid to write about versus reading stuff for fun...?

Well, two things. 

First, as you can tell by scanning any month or so of EDILW, I'm a DC Comics partisan (Though I read a handful of Marvel comics earlier and a stack of trades later, my time as a Marvel reader was basically 2000-2015 or so, and my familiarity with the publisher's 20th century comics limited to what I was drawn to in the Essential collections, which tended to be the 1970s monstrous superhero stuff, as opposed to the more straightforward superhero stuff). 

This book's claim that the stories of the Marvel Universe shared setting represented the biggest story ever told felt immediately, obviously wrong to me. Because, obviously, the DC Universe is far, far older, however one wishes to date the creation of the two settings. (By the debut of the character or feature these settings would grow out of? Superman debuted in 1938, the Fantastic Four in 1961...and, if one would prefer to start the Marvel Universe back to the debut of the original Human Torch, that's still a year after Superman. By the point at which the characters began crossing over on a regular basis? DC's Justice League of America debuted in in 1960...not only is that about a year earlier than the FF, but Stan Lee has repeatedly explained that he creation of the FF was in direct response to the success of DC's JLoA...I just recently read a version of his telling of this story in his introduction to the 2008 trade paperback collection of JLA/Avengers).  

I've heard the argument made (not by Wolk, but by others), that the DC mega-saga doesn't really "count" in the way that the Marvel mega-saga does because of DC's occasional attempts to reboot their own story, most dramatically in what we call the post-Crisis period of 1986 or so and the New 52 publishing initiative of 2011 (and probably a good half a dozen other times as well). But of course, those reboots are themselves part of the story, as each follows some big cosmic event where god-like entities meddle with the fabric of time and space, rewriting the fictional reality. There's never been a hard DC reboot that wasn't the result of a story; in those examples I just mentioned, these were Crisis on Infinite Earths (there had to be a crisis for there to be a post-Crisis, naturally) and Flashpoint, respectively. 

That said, Wolk addresses the existence of the DC Universe almost immediately in his book:

That sense of shared experience, of seeing dozens of historical threads and dozens of creators' separate contributions being woven together, is a particular joy of following the Marvel Universe (with a capital U), as both the company and the readers like to call it. The Marvel story is not the first or only one that works like that—DC Comics, Marvel's largest competitor, and other comics publishers have adopted the "universe" template too—but it's the largest of its kind.

A footnote then explains that DC was "slow to integrate" their comics into a coherent fictional world, and mentions the reboots. I am not necessarily convinced by this argument, and there are better ones to be made, like the fact that, since 1961, Marvel has been more deliberate about their shared setting, or that it's smaller, tighter-knit group of creators gave it a more distinct vision, or that Marvel's current pop culture cache makes it the more important universe at this point. That said, Wolk's book isn't really written for people like me, and I think that paragraph and attached footnote does the job of explaining why he wrote a book about Marvel's super-story rather than DC's. 

Also, I confess that, when I first heard about the book, I kind of assumed it was one of what I usually think of as "stunt memoirs," where a writer does something rather crazy for a year or so and then writes about the experience. Think A.J. Jacobs' 2007 The Year of Living Biblically and its ilk. 

I thought this, of course, because reading all of Marvel's comics is insane...maybe even more so than trying to follow the various laws of the Bible literally in the modern world. Wolk notes that, when he would talk about the project with others, more than one person brought up Bob Burden's Flaming Carrot character, whose origin involved reading 5,000 comics in a single sitting to win a bet and going crazy in the process.

•So if it's not what I assumed, what is All of the Marvels? Well, after a few chapters explaining what makes Marvel Comics such an unusual and worthy epic, the particulars of Wolk's methodology and pre-answering questions readers not already steeped in the comics medium and superhero genre might have, the book takes shape.

Wolk breaks out various threads of the overarching Marvel story and devotes a chapter to each. Within  those chapters he details their salient aspects, major themes, cultural significance, impact on the publisher and industry and medium. He does so with a keen eye and imaginative (but convincing, even compelling) readings that make a sort of sense of these improvised mega-stories that were never intended to make sense.

So, for example, in his chapter on Spider-Man, he defines its particular literary mode ("It's a bildungsroman, the story of how a youth becomes an adult"), and makes sense of it as a repeating cycle, in which Spider-Man Peter Parker achieves a form of adulthood or resolution to his lifelong conflicts, only to be knocked down again and have to start all over (And yes, Wolk does reference the Itsy-Bitsy Spider here). 

One might think of the real, true story of Spider-Man ending with, say Steve Ditko's departure from Amazing Spider-Man, or perhaps Stan Lee's, but Wolk manages to make it all make sense as a cohesive story, up until where he left off reading it (I should note that the Spider-Man story did reboot itself in the manner of any post-Crisis DC comic in the "Brand New Day" period, discarding a swathe of its own continuity). 

In addition to Spider-Man, which is the second such chapter of the book, Wolk tackles, in order, The Fantastic Four, Master of Kung Fu, The X-Men, Thor, Black Panther, the "Dark Reign" period, Jonathan Hickman's Avengers/New Avengers/Secret Wars storyline and, finally, Ms. Marvel Kamala Khan and The Unbeatable Squirrel Girl. 

Why those particular threads of the Marvel story? It seems to be a mixture of their importance to the overall narrative and what Wolk liked the best or thought the best-made. (He admits as much in the chapter on Master of Kung Fu). Pop cultural significance doesn't seem to have had much to do with it. (You'll note the lack of Marvel Cinematic Universe important comics and characters like Iron Man, Captain America or The Guardians of the Galaxy, for example, or Deadpool or, most notably, The Avengers, who are only represented in that one specific writer's particular iteration of them.) 

The Hulk is perhaps the most conspicuous in his absence, given how long the character has been around and how relatively popular he has been at various points. One supposes that, had Wolk a bigger page count, we might have seen chapters on The Hulk or Daredevil.

In between those chapters are shorter interludes, devoted to such things as Lee, Kirby and Ditko and their working relationships or timelines of monsters, U.S. presidents and pop music in Marvel Comics. One particularly interesting such interlude temporarily reorients the entire Marvel saga around a single character, Linda Carter, who first appeared in 1961's Linda Carter, Student Nurse by Stan Lee and Al Hartley, and would go on to star in 1972's Night Nurse and, later, appear as a superhero ally in the 21st century. 

The book ends with a 23-page appendix entitled "Marvel Comics: A Summary," which essentially summarizes the entirety of the Marvel mega-saga. It's basically a smart comics critic's all-prose version of the old Marvel Saga, or, perhaps, Mark Waid and Javier Rodriguez's 2019 History of the Marvel Universe. It's great. 

•One extremely useful term Wolk uses throughout, which I have been struggling not to use myself as I wrote about his book until I could get to this point, is "sequence." He uses it instead of "title" or "series" or "story" or "run," words we might see and use much more often when discussing superhero comics, all words which tend to fall short when taking a very long view of a narrative like Wolk does throughout the book.

For example, Brian Michael Bendis' work on Spider-Man in the Ultimate line (which would eventually become the Ultimate Universe). It spanned multiple titles and series, and, though one could look at it as a single story, it is, obviously, composed of hundreds of individual stories. The term "sequence" is a more precise one than any of those others to describe that unit of a long Bendis-directed Spider-Man narrative.

It's especially useful when talking about, say, long-lived characters like The Fantastic Four and Spider-Man or narratives that are otherwise hard to define (like Hickman's multi-book Avengers/New Avengers/Secret Wars, or the not-really-even-a-story-per se "Dark Reign" status quo). 

•Wolk is very, very nice to the creators he writes about. Given the date of publication, he was writing before a few of those mentioned were revealed to be bad people (Warren Ellis) or actual monsters (Neil Gaiman), but, even beyond that, I was impressed with how kind he was to the work of many creators, never referring to anyone as a hack (at least, not anyone he names).

Some examples? During the "Dark Reign" chapter, he mentions Alex Maleev's use of photo reference to create Secret Invasion: Dark Reign #1. He writes in a footnote that, "He apparently uses photographic models for most of his characters, which is why Namor, whose facial features are usually drawn as not exactly human, looks really wrong for most of this issue."

That instead of, say, pointing out that Namor looks like Phil Collins doing very poor Namor cosplay, or comparing and contrasting "good" use of models, like that of Alex Ross, to Maleev's use of them. (Looking at those panels again, I think I see more Robert DeNiro than Phil Collins in at least one of them...)

In that same chapter, he talks about the virtues of Mike Deodato's art, and even reprints a four-panel sequence of his Norman Osborn, who looks like Tommy Lee Jones with some sort of weird virtual reality hairstyle super-imposed onto his head (That is because, of course, Deodato was giving Osborn the hair style Ditko originally designed him with, a hair style that no one has anymore and, in fact, no one under the age of 70 is likely to have seen in real life). He talks no shit about Deodato there at all!

Or, in discussing "One More Day", the controversial storyline in which Spider-Man sold his marriage to the devil in exchange for a continuity reboot, a footnote simply reads, "As far as I can tell, nobody, including the creators, likes 'One More Day.' [J. Michael] Straczynski briefly intended to have his name removed from it." 

He didn't even use the words "dumb" or "stupid" when talking about that story...!

•As I often do when reading prose, I thought in the back of my mind a bit about my own writing while reading this. I suppose I did so more than usual, given this was writing about comics.

One thing that struck me is the fact that I, and, I think, most of the people who write about comics regularly online, tend to concentrate on comics as single units (either single issues or, in my case now, trade paperback collections), and to write about them as they're coming out.

This makes sense, of course. Timeliness has always been an important factor in what gets written about, and at least part of the point of a review is to help guide a work's potential audience, to either encourage them to read or watch or play something (if it's good), or to warn them away from doing so (if it's bad).

Certainly, my focus on EDILW has long been on covering new comics (even if, in some cases, they are just new to me), something I imagine comes from the fact that I started writing for newspapers, with film reviews accounting for much of my writing. 

Wolk's book, though, offers a pretty strong argument for waiting a few years (or decades) before writing about monthly comics, as such a long-view allows one to see things in them that one can't if they're occupied with covering them as they whiz by every week or month or year. 

I know some folks do cover comics in this way, of course (Tegan O'Neil comes to mind, for example), but it seems a relative rarity.

Of course, the vast majority of comics criticism takes place on the Internet (I think there's still a little in magazines and newspapers, at least those few magazines and newspapers that still exist), which certainly lends it to dealing with what's most timely, rather than, say, what was coming out in 1965. 

Perhaps the best way to look at 20 or 30 or 40 or 50-year-old comics are in books like Wolk's (Um, are there other books like Wolk's...?), but it certainly gave me something to think about in terms of comics criticism.

John McCrea's Ragman in 1999's Day of Judgment Secret Files and Origins #1

As I happen to have read a few Ragman appearances lately and discussed the way the character was drawn by Kelley Jones and Michael Golden, I thought it might be worthwhile to linger on the way he appears in "The Destiny Dilemma", the lead story in 1999's Day of Judgment Secret Files and Origins special. The story was written by Scott Beatty and, more relevant to our discussion here, drawn by John McCrea (Andew Chiu shares the "inkers" credit with McCrea, and Tom McGraw handled the colors, although I should probably note here that I'm not sure they were reproduced 100% faithfully by the library scanner I used for this post). 

McCrea hails from Ireland, and his earliest work was in the British comics industry, including work on Judge Dredd and related characters in the early '90s. It was on one such story that he first collaborated with Irish writer Garth Ennis, with whom he would develop a long and fruitful partnership.

By the year this story was published, McCrea had collaborated with Ennis on 18 issues of the writer's 1993-1995 run on The Demon, and the pair were about four years into their five-year run on Hitman, which I still think is both one of the best comics DC has ever published and one of my favorite comics they have ever published. Ennis and McCrea had also published a four-issue mini-series from Caliber Press called Dicks. 

What all of those comics have in common, aside from McCrea and Ennis, was that they were all rather unique genre stories, ones that celebrated their genres while simultaneously taking the piss out of them. The DC work, at least, was delicately balanced, so that those comics were full of serious character work and parodic comedy elements. A single issue of, say, Hitman might have heart-wrenching drama, gut-busting gags and superior action telling, while also managing to riff on superhero comics tropes and one or more of Ennis' favorite oddball films. (Dicks, on the other hand...well, let's just say I wouldn't use the words "delicately balanced" to describe it.)

So, this story was interesting not just because it was an opportunity to get an extra 22 pages of McCrea's art, but also because it gave us American readers a then-rare opportunity to see McCrea drawing a script from someone other than Ennis (he would go on to do plenty of great work without Ennis in the 21st century, of course) and because here McCrea was drawing a DC super-comic that was completely straight, with no real humor elements to it.

He, of course, knocked it out of the park. 

As bad as that scan of two-page spread above is, what with the line down the middle of image, distorting Madame Xanadu's lovely face, you can see how good his art is here. We're going to concentrate on Ragman in this post, of course, but do note his massive, intimidating version of Blue Devil, and the menace and mystery of his Phantom Stranger, a single white dot on his shadowed face for an eye, and even the hint of menace about Zatanna's half-shaded face, a bit of visual foreshadowing for a twist I will soon spoil. (Oh, and while it's not quite apparent here, he also draws Sentinel, who by this time had lost his unnatural youth and vitality to resume something closer to his biological age of a man in his seventies, as an old man. Sure, this Alan is still handsome and stands up quite straight, but he also has a visible paunch and wrinkles, and his muscles weren't straining to break out of his costume.)

That double-page splash accounts for pages two and three of the story. Sentinel Alan Scott has awoken in a field and he soon stumbles upon the so-called Sentinels of Magic: Doctor Occult, Ragman, Madame Xanadu, Zatanna, Blue Devil, The Phantom Stranger, Faust and the new Doctor Fate, Hector Hall. It's a rather weird group, full of vastly different characters designed by different artists from comics throughout DC's history, but I think it's worth noting that even among a group of such unusual figures, McCrea's Ragman still stands out as particularly strange.

He certainly looks the scariest of the bunch, about as tall as Blue Devil, but thin and awkward looking, seemingly all hood and cloak, with only shadow where his face or much of his body might be. One thing I really like about McCrea's take on Ragman is that, in many of the images, it looks as if Ragman might be all suit and no body; that is, in many panels he looks like a living suit of rags, rather than a living person wearing a suit of living rags. You can see it here in his exaggerated thin-ness, the length of his limbs, and the way his gloves look far too big for his hands (Speaking of thin, check out Zatanna's legs; her ankles look like they belong to a bird rather than a woman. Certainly, McCrea's art has a cartooniness to it, even in this, a serious story). 

These heroes have been gathered for a mysterious purpose, but standing in their midst is the Spear of Destiny, the legendary weapon that once pierced the side of the dying, crucified Jesus, was passed down from conqueror to conqueror and, in the DC Universe, was used by Hitler to keep America's superheroes at bay during World War II and is now both cursed and the only weapon capable of hurting The Spectre.

As The Spectre had just gone on a rampage that threatened the world and the afterlife and then received a new, perhaps unreliable host, these heroes have to decide what they should do with the spear. 

During their discussion, Ragman's rags—which, remember, are each evil souls and their job is to seek out more evil souls to add to their number—are pulled towards the spear.

Our heroes decide on a course of action, and they begin to unite their magics to deal with the spear. Note Ragman's huge, melodramatic gesture there. 

There is a complication, though. That's not really Zatanna, but a villain who took her form to infiltrate the group. Alan Scott identifies the villain as The Wizard. There's an interesting bit where The Wizard essentially rips out the Zatanna shape, a rather weird bit of imagery, given that The Wizard is apparently a bit bigger than that super-skinny Zatanna McCrea had drawn. 

The villain uses the spear to battle the heroes for a bit, but ultimately Faust, whose lack of soul makes him immune to the spear's curse, snatches it from him, Blue Devil punches him out and then Ragman's rags go into action:

Here, Ragman's rags suck The Wizard bodily into his suit, as opposed to how this very process is shown playing out in the later Day of Vengeance, wherein Ragman sucks the soul out of a victim's body, leaving a desiccated corpse behind.

Now, how does this square with 2005 JLA arc "Crisis of Conscience", in which The Wizard is very much not a rag in Ragman's suit of souls? (And I think he had some JSA-related appearances between these this story and "Crisis of Conscience" as well?). Don't ask me; I am not a DC Comics editor. 

Anyway, with The Wizard finally dealt with, the heroes continue with their plan, using their magics to bind the spear and throw it into the sun, where it can only be retrieved if all seven of them gather again and agree to do so.

Then they all put their hands together like a high school sports team right before a game as Alan shouts "Sentinels of Magic!" (as seen in the previous post on Day of Judgment), and that's about the last we see of McCrea's Ragman, aside from his very distinct silhouette as he walks toward a glowing portal created by Doctor Fate. 

In the last four panels, we see The Spectre Hal Jordan debrief with The Phantom Stranger, and Hal explains that he had gathered the Sentinels here to give his friend Alan the means to destroy him, if need be, as a fail-safe. 

Revisiting 1999's Day of Judgment

The 2005 Countdown to Infinite Crisis-branded miniseries Day of Vengeance that we discussed the other day was preceded by the five-issue Day of Judgment event series back in 1999, which also centered on the threat of a rampaging Spectre...and the title of which Day of Vengeance was apparently meant to echo. 

I just re-read it. Unable to find a copy of the 2013 collection of it in the library, I was forced to pull the single issues from one of my long boxes; luckily it was fairly easy to find among my fairly disorganized collection. 

I found it a very pleasant reminder that DC's crossover events don't have to be about cosmic goings-on to rewrite, reboot or rejigger their continuity; that's just a choice the publisher seems to keep making. Over and over and over again.

This one was written by Geoff Johns, fairly early in his career in comics. By the time the first issue of Day of Judgment hit the stands, he was only a few issues into his Stars and S.T.R.I.P.E. (the fourth issue of which was a Day of Judgment crossover) and he hadn't yet replaced James Robinson as David Goyer's JSA co-writer. (I guess DC is a little quicker to hand their iconic heroes over to a new writer if said writer was already working in Hollywood, as Johns was...?).

I am curious about just how much of the plot was conceived by Johns himself and what points editorial may have mandated, as one of the big things to occur in the series is that the dead Hal Jordan, a character Johns has long since demonstrated a love for, is rescued from Purgatory and becomes the new host of The Spectre. 

Although this didn't quite bring Hal back to life, it did put him back in circulation and allow for him to continue the redemption arc that DC had started with 1996's Final Night. Still, it would be Johns himself who would decouple Hal and The Spectre a few years later, in 2004's Green Lantern: Rebirth, so it doesn't seem like Hal-as-The Spectre was a concept that Johns loved or anything.

For this series, Johns was paired with artist Matt Smith, who had previously done a little work for DC, including issues of Sandman Mystery Theater, Starman and the short-lived 1996 reboot of Marv Wolfman's Night Force. The comics he drew just prior to Day of Judgment were Lobster Johnson and Abe Sapien back-ups in Mike Mignola's Hellboy: Box Full of Evil, which might help explain just how Mignola-esque the art in Day of Judgment looks. (I've tried to include a bit more art than I usually do in my reviews, as Smith isn't as popular an artist as many of those I write about here; do note that the colors might be slightly off).

Smith's figures are thick and somewhat squat, and the imagery simple yet bold. Working with inker Steve Mitchell and layout artist Chris Jones, Day of Judgment reads a lot like Mike Mignola drawing a script intended for Howard Porter. I would say it answers the question of what a DC crossover series drawn by Mignola might look like but, of course, we already got one of those in 1988's Cosmic Odyssey.

But artwork evocative of the Mike Mignola of the late '90s is pretty much perfect for comic set partially in Hell and is full of demons and devils, including Jack Kirby's Etrigan, The Demon and the by that point increasingly Hellboy-esque Blue Devil. 

The story, told across five weekly issues that kicked off with an over-sized 29-page #1, is fairly simple. The conflict imperils the Earth—and Hell and, to a certain degree, perhaps even Heaven itself—and facing it involves various configurations of superheroes to form ad hoc teams and perform different missions. 

It also moves the DC Universe story forward a bit—brining back Hal, giving The Spectre a new host, and seemingly priming a magic super-team book that never actually materialized at the time—and it provides a very easy way to tie any and all other DC books into it, and to do so without derailing them all that dramatically.

So, remember Asmodel? The rebel angel and leader of the Bull Host who planned to overthrow Heaven and invaded Earth in an attempt to get to Zauriel in the pages of 1997's JLA #7-8? We open with him in Hell, where he was consigned at the end of 1998's not-very-good miniseries JLA: Paradise Lost, written by a young up-and-comer named Mark Millar. 

After Neron gloats over him for a bit, Asmodel receives a visitor in the form of Etrigan, who has big plans for Asmodel. First, Etrigan frees him from his bonds, then he summons the then host-less Spectre (Jim Corrigan and The Spectre were split from one another in 1998's The Spectre #62), and then he performs a bit of magic he says he learned from Merlin, which bonds Asmodel to The Spectre, making the new host of The Spectre a bad guy!

The new Spectre, distinguished from the old one by being a solid green-ish blue in color rather than a white-skinned dude with bits of a green costume, wastes no time. First, he sucks up all the hellfire in Hell, literally making it a cold day in Hell. Second, he freezes Neron solid in a block of ice. And, third, he invades Earth, an army of demons behind him. 

(These demons, by the way, are mostly generic in appearance, with horns and batwings. We'll later learn Hell is more or less emptied out, with devils, demons and even the dead rising all over the Earth. This, then, is what gives the heroes something to do in their own books that tie-in to the crossover: Fight the legions of Hell or any specific underworld threat that particular book's writer might want to use).

The Spectre, Etrigan and their demon horde make their beachhead in New York City. Meanwhile, Martian Manhunter J'onn J'onnz calls out the JLA and their reserves, members of other super-teams show up to rumble (Damage and Argent from the Titans, the just-formed JSA) and Zatanna spends an issue gathering a group of magical characters that will introduce themselves as "The Sentinels of Magic" on the last page of the first issue.

The Sentinels manage to drain much of The Spectre's energy and temporarily trap it in Madame Xanadu's crystal ball, giving the assembled heroes time to split up and take on a couple of different missions to save the day.

The JLA's resident angel Zauriel leads Sentinel Alan Scott, Wonder Woman, Mister Miracle and Supergirl to Heaven, teleported there by Raven (whose demonic nature forces her to flee immediately). Their job is to bring Jim Corrigan back to Earth in order to reclaim The Spectre, but, after some 50 years of avenging the murdered dead and finally knowing peace, he no longer wants the gig. The angel Michael instead directs the heroes to Purgatory where, as you probably know, they'll find Hal Jordan among a small group of fallen heroes, heroes who, Zauriel explains, are all there "due to their own mistakes, their own shortcomings." (There are a few panels outside the gates of Heaven where Alan meets a handful of dead members of the Justice Society, but no one seems to think to ask if, say, the original Mister Terrific or Hourman might want to come back to Earth and be the new host of The Spectre). 

Meanwhile, Zatanna, Superman, Green Lantern Kyle Rayner, Firestorm, The Atom, Faust and Deadman-in-Enchantress' body go to Hell, where they hope to rekindle the flames, drawing back the army of demons (Interestingly, Kyle and Firestorm just there a few years ago, in the pages of Underworld Unleashed, but no one mentions this). 

And, finally, Batman sends Captain Marvel, Starfire and S.T.R.I.P.E. into space, in order to recover The Spear of Destiny, the only known weapon that can hurt The Spectre (The last Spectre, the one bonded with Corrigan, had deposited the dangerous artifact there, out of the reach of most of humanity, during Ostrander and Mandrake's Spectre run).

Despite unexpected events—which, in Hell, means the resurrection of Blue Devil and the murder of Enchantress—the three missions are more or less successful.

At the climax, The Spectre is wounded, and both Neron and the dead Hal Jordan, having changed his form so that he's wearing his old Green Lantern costume rather than the Parallax get-up he wore in Purgatory, enter into The Spectre's body, where they wrestle with Asmodel over control of the Spectre-Force. 

That, which is described as a parasite and, as drawn by Smith, appears as a green-cloaked skeleton whose ribs stab into Asmodel, listens to the three as they each make their appeal for why they should be the new host. Halfway through his pitch, Jordan breaks down in tears, confessing his crimes. 

"I don't deserve power," he says. "I deserve punishment."

At this, The Spectre seems to perk up. "You believe you deserve punishment?" it says. "THEN FACE YOUR PENANCE!" 

And so Asmodel and Neron are both ejected from The Spectre's towering form, each of them prone and bound, while The Spectre has taken on a new shape to accommodate its new host, an interestingly hybridized costume mixing elements of The Spectre's with that of Hal's Green Lantern costume, including a domino mask under the hood and a blazing ring of green fire on his chest where the GL Corps symbol used to be. 

In the last few pages of the series, everything is set more or less right. Corrigan's soul briefly returns to Earth to bless Jordan's new mission, which Jordan indicates will not be about vengeance, Corrigan saying that The Presence (that is, God) approves of Hal Jordan-as-The Spectre. The Sentinels of Magic, which now seems to include Blue Devil and the new Doctor Fate Hector Hall, again announce their name and mission, and return to their daily lives. Asmodel is not returned to Hell, but taken to Heaven, where he is the sole inmate in The Silver City's first prison. And Neron returns to Hell, where he is punished for this whole fuck-up, demoted from an infernal Prince down to a rhyming demon, which, apparently, is why Etrigan kicked this mad plot off in the fist place: He just wanted to mess with Neron. 

(Having spent so much time with DC's devils and demons of late, I was interested to see that, in this short passage, a human-sized Neron is shackled in front of a huge, skeletal demon on a throne, one with enormous horns and batwings. This character is never named but is presumably meant to be DC's answer to "The Devil" or "Satan", although, to my knowledge, DC never really had a direct analogue to the devil/Satan before, just Lucifer and a sort of court of sub-devils...?).

In addition to its various tie-in issues in ongoing series—of which there were 14 issues, plus a Batman: Judgment Day special—DC also published a Day of Judgment Secret Files and Origins special. The Secret Files and Origins specials were fairly common in the late '90s, and contained a full-length comic book story, the "Secret Files" pages that paired a pin-up like image of a character or team with stats and short paragraphs of prose about the character (essentially an abbreviated, '90s answer to a Who's Who entry), plus some shorter features.

In this case, the features were mostly epilogues. 

The main story was written by Scott Beatty and drawn by Hitman's John McCrea (I remember it being a great pleasure to see him draw so many different super-characters here originally, and it was just as much of a pleasure to revisit it in 2025; we'll take a closer look at this story in a few days). In it, the new Spectre secretly, magically gathers the Sentinels of Magic in a field around the Spear of Destiny, explaining at the end to The Phantom Stranger that he had essentially convened them as a sort of jury to judge him, while handing them a weapon with which they could take him down if they so decided. 

There were also a couple of short, two-page stories: One by Mark Millar and Yanick Paquette in which Madame Xanadu does a tarot reading for Blue Devil, another by Millar and Phil Winslade following Zatanna over the course of a date and one by Geoff Johns and a Jason Orfalas following Faust—the son of Justice League bad guy Felix Faust, the "white sheep" of his family introduced in the 1993-1995 Outsiders series—and what his actions in Hell mean for June Moon. 

This was obviously pretty early in both Johns' and Millar's comics careers, but still, reading the issue in 2025, it's strange to think of these future superstars basically taking any writing job they could get like this.

Some other thoughts...

•As mentioned above, Zatanna puts together another ad hoc super-team of magic-based characters in the series, and they are repeatedly referred to by the name "Sentinels of Magic." 

The first issue ends with a splash depicting her with The Phantom Stranger, Deadman, Ragman, Doctor Occult, Sentinel, Raven, Madame Xanadu and Faust and declaring, "You might call us-- --The Sentinels of Magic!", those last words in a big, colorful, almost logo-like font. 

The scene repeats itself on the first page of the second issue, with captions naming the members of the roll call. 

Near the end of the fifth issue, the team—now missing Raven and The Stranger, but with Blue Devil and the newest Doctor Fate added to their line-up—all pose in one panel, while Zatanna tells the other superheroes, "The Sentinels of Magic will be on center stage whenever you need us." 

And in Secret Files special, the Sentinels star in the main story, wherein they all put their hands together like a sport team before a big game, and Alan declares them "Sentinels of Magic!" ("Oh well...guess it beats 'Justice League Europe'," Blue Devil says in the next panel). That's the image above, drawn by McCrea.

And, finally, the team gets a two-page "secret file" entry following the story.

I now find myself curious if DC was perhaps planning a Sentinels of Magic series following Day of Judgment and, if they were, why they ultimately decided against it. As I said in the post about this crossover's kinda sorta sequel Day of Vengeance the other day, DC seemed to have been flirting with a magical super-team since at least 1995's (excellent) Underworld Unleashed one-shot special Abyss—Hell's Sentinel #1. 

That was the first time I had personally encountered such a grouping, anyway. (That one, like this one, included Sentinel Alan Scott, presenting him as something of a bridge between the world of superheroes and the supernatural.) Looking back, though, Alan Moore and company's 1986 Swamp Thing #50 gathered together many of DC's magical characters for an assault on Hell and a sort of seance, and, in writer Neil Gaiman's 1990 mini-series The Books of Magic, new character Timothy Hunter is introduced to DC's various magical characters by what John Constantine jokingly refers to as "The Trenchcoat Brigade," a quartet of magic characters who got a Vertigo mini-series under that name in 1999.

While the Sentinels of Magic never got a book of their own, Day of Vengeance introduced the Shadowpact (whose number included the Sentinels' Blue Devil and Ragman), and that team would go on to star in a 25-issue ongoing series. And then the magical super-team concept reemerged in 2011 in the Justice League Dark, which lasted 72 issues across two volumes. 

•I kind of love how catty Zauriel is throughout the series regarding the belief systems of other superheroes, especially considering that theirs are just as concretely real as his, as has been repeatedly demonstrated throughout DC history. 

When Wonder Woman volunteers to go with Zauriel's team, for example, she notes, "I've been to Olympus...I've some experience with the divine." 

"Hmph," Zauriel says, "I'd hardly call Olympus divine..." 

When they reach Heaven's gate, Mister Miracle refers to himself as "a New God". You can see Zauriel's reply above. "A new god?" he says, "Unlikely, Mr. Miracle." (He does have a smile on his face while saying this, though.) 

•Whether or not it's a good idea to give Hal Jordan, a guy who had, in addition to murdering a bunch of his Green Lantern Corps colleagues later went on to unmake all of time and space, (temporarily) killing uncountable billions in the process, almost unparalleled, god-like powers seems to be an issue that is rather under-discussed in this series.

Alan Scott is Hal's cheerleader throughout, noting that he is the only person other than Jim Corrigan he knows with the willpower to control The Spectre. (Alan doesn't mention that he had fought Hal repeatedly since his heel turn, including in 1994's Guy Gardner: Warrior arc "Emerald Fallout" arc and Zero Hour, nor that the only reason so many of Alan's old JSoA colleagues were in Heaven to greet him at all is because Hal's henchman Extant killed them during Zero Hour.) 

Batman is a skeptic. Most of the other heroes don't even get to voice an opinion on the matter, let alone discuss it (Johns does have Wonder Woman put her hand on Alan's shoulder in Purgatory and ask him if it's "wise" to try to give Hal control of The Spectre's powers, given that Hal "couldn't even control himself".)

I've got to say, I'm with Batman here. Interestingly, while Batman's take seems the more reasonable of the two in this book, over the years of writing Hal, Johns would continue to present Batman as doubting Hal, but, gradually, it seems like Johns would present Batman as too cynical and judgmental about Hal. 

In the penultimate issue, we get as close to an argument between heroes regarding this course of action that we get in this series (above). 

I have to admit, I found sarcastic Batman pretty funny in that exchange. 

•Reviewing the list of tie-in issues, I see that I had bought and read eight of the 15 that DC published. These were all books I was already reading regularly—Anarky, Aquaman, Hourman, JLA, Martian Manhunter, Stars and S.T.R.I.P.E., Titans and Young Justice—plus Supergirl, which I only bought because the cover so prominently featured Zauriel, a favorite character of mine.

My memories of most of these comics are pretty dim at this point, which probably doesn't speak well of their quality. I do remember the Anarky issue pretty well, as it was an extremely unlikely team-up with The Haunted Tank (and I'm pretty sure it was my first exposure to that weird concept, as I don't think I had yet read Gath Ennis's 1994 "Haunted Glory" arc of The Demon at that point). And the Hourman issue was basically a Snapper Carr solo story, in which he teaches a stray demon about free will. And the Martian Manhunter issue pit the hero against undead versions of past Leaguers who had died in the line of duty. 

•As for the big change that this event story wrought within the DC Universe, making Hal Jordan the new host of The Spectre? Well, that state of affairs lasted almost exactly five years, which seems a respectable amount of time. At the very least, DC seems to have given Hal-as-The Spectre a healthy chance of succeeding, before reverting Hal back to his pre-"Emerald Twilight" status quo as a Green Lantern, relying on a retcon to excuse his fall from grace and heel turn. 

DC launched a new volume of The Spectre starring the Hal Jordan version of the character in 2001, and it ran 27 issues before being cancelled in 2003 (For context, the three previous Spectre ongoings had lasted 10 issues, 31 issues and 62 issues). That series was written by J.M. DeMatteis and drawn first by Ryan Sook and then by Norm Breyfogle (with a handful of fill-in artists coming and doing during both artists' runs). I appreciated what DeMatteis was trying to do with the character and concept, particularly the effort to have Hal trying to remake The Spectre into a Spirit of Redemption instead of a Spirit of Vengeance, but I didn't much care for the series. Of course, I mostly only read the Breyfogle issues, and those only because I was a fan of Norm Breyfogle's. 

This Spectre also shared a DeMatteis-written mini-series with the JLA, 2003's not very good JLA/The Spectre: Soul War (I'll write about that in the near-ish future), and he had some notable appearances during big doings in the DCU, like playing a key role in the resurrection of Oliver Queen in the pages of the 2001 Green Arrow series and cameoing in JLA/Avengers (Hal would get much more time in that mini-series as Green Lantern though, able to appear as part of some time-travelling shenanigans). (Oh, and he also appeared in one scene in 2004's Identity Crisis, telling Green Arrow that he was "working on" being brough back to life...)

I'm sure there were others.

Anyway, Hal's career as The Spectre ended in the aforementioned 2004 Green Lantern: Rebirth mini-series, restoring Hal Jordan to his original form and, seven years later, The Spectre would return to his original form too, character development and ongoing narrative be damned, with the New 52's Spectre once again bonded to Jim Corrigan. 

Bookshelf #13

This week's bookshelf is my IDW shelf...although, if you look closely, you'll pretty immediately realize there are a lot of comics on there that aren't from IDW too. 

To the left are my Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles collections, the vast majority of which are from IDW. There are the first nine trade collections of writer Tom Waltz's run on the 2011-launched title ("Volume Five" of the Turtles' adventures), which is how long I stuck with it before I accepted that this particular reimagining just wasn't for me (Other fans obviously loved it, though, as Waltz kept writing the title for 64 issues after the last issue collected in Vol. 9). There are also all nine trade collections devoted to Sophie Campbell's run, which IDW relabeled as Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Reborn for the trades. (These were much more my speed, but then, Campbell has been one of my favorite artists since I first encountered her work in 2006).

And there are some of the mini-series that spun out of IDW's main TMNT series, including Turtles in Time, Black, White & Green, Bebop & Rocksteady Destroy Everything and The Last Ronin. Oh, and some crossovers, featuring Batman, the Ghostbusters, the Power Rangers and the latest Usagi Yojimo pairing with Stan Sakai's Usagi Yojimbo (2023's Wherewhen, written and drawn by Sakai himself). 

Then there are IDW collections of older TMNT comics, like the two volumes of the Image Comics series ("Volume Three"), rebranded as Urban Legends and Usagi Yojimbo/Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: The Complete Collection, which collected every Usagi/TMNT crossover between 1987 and 2017 (and the title of which was rendered inexact by the later release of Wherewhen). 

This shelf obviously seemed like the best place to put my other TMNT books then, like Mirage Studios' The Collected Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Vols. 1, 2, 3 and 5, The Collected Tales of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and Challenges (a Michael Dooley original graphic novel).

Oh, and Bodycount (Kevin Eastman and Simon Bisley's crazy Raphael/Casey Jones team-up). It was originally published serially by Image Comics and was finally collected in 2018, not by Image nor IDW, but by Top Shelf (which was, by that point, an imprint of IDW, I guess). 

I also stuck a handful of books from Mirage artists with the Turtles stuff. From Kevin Eastman, there's Fistful of Blood and Underwhere (both new collections of older material, repackaged and republished by IDW) and Kevin Eastman's Totally Twisted Tales (an anthology collection of short Eastman/Bisley collaborations published by Clover Press). And from Jim Lawson there's The Collected Paleo Tales of the Late Cretaceous, Dragonfly and the crowd-funded Box City Wallops (Of Lawson's three books here, Paleo is the best; a must-read for anyone who loves dinosaurs and comics). 

To the right are a random assortment of other IDW trades. While Godzilla comics are the best represented, there's also the first volume of Jem and The Holograms (which is where I left off on the series; volume 2 is still on my to-read pile), Saved By The Bell, Tom Scioli's Go-Bots, IDW's repackaging of some old G.I. Joe and G.I. Joe/Transformers comics and, of course, all three volumes of Roger Langridge-written Popeye, which was an all-around incredible comic series. Oh, and IDW's gorgeous collection of Mike Mignola, John Nyberg and Roy Thomas' adaptation of Francis Ford Coppola's Bram Stoker's Dracula, originally published by Topps way back in 1992. 

Finally, on the far right is more non-IDW stuff, which I had originally put there due to the size of the books. Now that this shelf is full, I guess these should be moved whenever I get around to reorganizing all these shelves. 

These are five Street Angel books and Ronald Wimberly's excellent riff on Romeo and Juliet, Prince of Cats, all from Image (The publisher, as we saw before, didn't get its own shelf among these bookshelves, which were filled during my time in Mentor, roughly 2012-2024). 

While not everything on this shelf is necessarily a great comic—I remember being pretty underwhelmed by Mars Attacks IDW and Mars Attacks: Classics Obliterated, for example—there are a lot of great ones on it. 

An extremely belated book review of Betty and Veronica: The Leading Ladies of Riverdale

Betty and Veronica: The Leading Ladies of Riverdale (Rowman & Littlefield, 2020) After writing a series of histories on the most prominent female comic book characters—2014's Wonder Woman Unbound, 2016's Investigating Lois Lane and 2017's The Many Lives of Catwoman—author Tim Hanley next turned his attention to the Archie Comics' Betty Cooper and Veronica Lodge. Originally published in 2020, it was presumably a pretty timely book, as the characters were probably at or near the zenith of their popularity and overall pop cultural reach, thanks to the success of the TV show Riverdale.  

A book on the history of these characters necessarily means it will also be a book on Archie Comics, their creators, their comics and their other characters (and, to a lesser degree, to the comics industry itself, given that the publisher has been around since the Golden Age). Which led to a question that hovered in the back of my mind the entire time I was reading the book: Why center the book on Betty and Veronica in particular, rather than the publisher's biggest star (and namesake), Archie Andrews himself...?

I suppose part of the answer is obvious. Female comic book characters are the "beat" that Hanley has established for himself through his past work (And were one making a list of the most prominent female comics characters, Betty and Veronica would almost definitely be the next to follow those Hanley has already covered).

Another part? Betty and Veronica are just a bit more interesting than the character of Archie Andrews (who has become increasingly dull and anodyne as the decades rolled on), or any of the other, often one-dimensional male characters in the franchise, like Jughead or Reggie. 

Archie, as Hanely notes, wasn't that unique of a character when he debuted in 1941, teenage boys and their lives already being a source of fascination and popular entertainment, most prominently in the Andy Hardy film series (which started in 1937) and its imitators. These included other teen comedy comic strips, even one at MLJ, the Golden Age name of the publisher before it became Archie Comics. 

Additionally, although the world of Riverdale seemed to revolve around Archie, what made up that world, exactly? Chiefly, it was Betty and Veronica, and I think the argument could be rather convincingly made that the reason for the longevity and success of what we now think of as Archie Comics can be attributed to those two characters, and their unique relationship to one another.

Certainly a great deal of credit belongs to the men—and they were all men—who created Archie, Betty, Veronica, their gang and the world of Riverdale. Hanley spends some time on untangling who did what in the first chapter of the book, "The Men Behind the Girls," but, despite certain claims and the "official" version, it seemed to actually be a team effort, with contributions from publisher and editor John L. Goldwater, editor Henry Shorten, writer Vic Bloom and artist-turned-writer/artist Bob Montana...with perhaps those last two deserving the most credit, at least in Hanley's account. 

What they created together obviously had mass appeal and stood the test of time, surviving several collapses of the comics industry and proving incredible, maybe even endlessly adaptable to trends, take-offs, crossovers and mass-media adaptations. And, of course, their teen comedy outlasted all the others, to the point that when we think of that particular comics genre at all today, we think of Archie Comics. 

But there was also something special about Betty and Veronica. While Hanley notes that the former was something of a familiar type in pop culture at the time, the boy-crazy bobbysoxer, as a wealthy socialite and debutante-to-be, Veronica was already something of an anachronism by the time she was introduced, adding something unique to the strip. Their rivalry over Archie—who, at the outset, was certainly no prize, being neither good-looking, nor particularly smart, funny, noble or gifted—led to a particularly potent formula that, once employed, seemed to power so much of the publisher's increasingly Archie-centric output. 

Though the portrayals of the two girls would gradually change over the decades, making one seem more appealing to Archie (and/or readers) more so than the other in certain eras, their rivalry would endure, even after they eventually also became the best of friends. It was a unique relationship, and I found myself wondering if they were the first, or at least the earliest, most prominent, instance of what would eventually come to be known as "frenemies."

Oh, and they were also hot. That seems to have helped ensure they stick around in the strip, as well as to help the comics gain and maintain their popularity. That they were (almost) always portrayed as sexually attractive, even after the Montana-inspired, more realistic take gave way to the more cartoony, Dan DeCarlo style, may seem more than a little weird to say out loud in 2025, when the line between teenager and adult is so much more bright and solid than it was in the 1940s (Remember, young women married much, much earlier in the era). 

But the middle-aged men who created and chronicled their adventures for the majority of their existence, being men, seemed to take special delight in drawing the girls, and even since their Golden Age beginnings, the artists would regularly put them in short, tight-fitting sports gear as often as possible and, as time went on, would put them in bathing suits as often as possible. (Their beauty wasn't strictly, exclusively for the male gaze, of course; they were also often drawn in glamours, highly fashionable wardrobes, particularly in the pre-digest years). 

Hanley discusses this at some length in his chapter "The Clone Wars," where he notes the vast difference between the design of Archie's male characters and their female ones. The male characters, of course, look nothing alike, not in the lines they are drawn in, or the shapes of their figures; if you were shown silhouettes of Archie, Reggie, Jughead, Dilton or Moose, you would instantly know who was who. Not so with the girls, who have the exact same figures, the exact same faces, and are mainly distinguishable by the style and/or color of their hair (Pretty much no matter who was drawing them). This wasn't just the case with Betty and Veronica, but all the youngwomen of Riverdale, save for outliers like Big Ethel, whose size and shape was itself meant to be read as a joke.

Hanley himself eventually offers an answer for the focus on the girls over Archie in his conclusion, writing:

It's not easy to be a teenage girl. It never has been, ever since teenagers were "invented" in the mid-1940s. Society constantly devalues young women, pulling off the bizarre feat of simultaneously infantilizing and sexualizing them. Mentally, they're treated like children, their opinions and emotions dismissed and ignored. Physically, they're objectified by adult men who should know better yet leer and harass them with near impunity. Our world is not constructed for teenage girls to thrive. These years are a gauntlet they have to survive.

Betty and Vernoica are familiar with this gauntlet. 

He goes on to write that despite the fact that most of their 80 years have been defined by middle-aged men, writing and drawing them in comedic narratives that often sought to define them as love interests and sexual objects, compelling counter-narratives also evolved, sometimes by happenstance, sometimes through market demand and sometimes by deliberate contributions from creators. 

Their friendship, and their support for one another against the patriarchy and the expectations of a male-centric Riverdale (and world) gave them an inspirational power: "Despite their spats, their friendship was ultimately more important than any boy, any dress, or any dates," Hanley concludes. "That Betty and Veronica returned to it again and again showed generations of young female readers that even if society devalues them, they should still value each other." 

The book, written in Hanely's highly readable, inviting and always reasonable sounding prose, follows the history of the characters from the founding of MLJ in 1939 to the third season of Riverdale, where Lili Reinhart's Betty and Camila Mendes' Veronica seem to represent highly evolved, "final" versions of the characters, invoking all of their strengths and virtues—and that of their friendship—in a show that Hanley calls "ludicrous"...though not as an insult (Not being much of a TV person, I've never watched the show, but everything I've ever heard about it sounds completely bonkers; indeed, just what Hanely writes about here seems like so much, from organized crime to biker gangs to cults to a serial killer based on an old MLJ hero, and that was just the third season; how batshit did things get by the seventh and final season?).

That means Hanley book about Betty and Veronica doesn't just cover the evolution of the North American comics industry, and Archie's survival of its many challenges (Helped along by the teen comedy genre being spared during the post-war superhero crash, Goldwater's role in crafting and easily adhering to the Comics Code Authority that spelled doom for then-popular comics genres like crime and horror and their embrace of the digest format as the comic book market contracted into adult male-centric specialty shops). Nor does it just cover the publisher's embrace of certain trends, which weren't always as applicable to the publisher's works (like that of the event-ification trend following DC's "Death of Superman" story).

No, the book also, obviously, follows the broad shifts in the depiction and characterization of the girls over the years, including at least one extremely weird detour that had perhaps unintended effects, like  the vilification of Veronica (That would be born-again Christian cartoonist Al Hartley's use of the characters as tools of evangelical Christianity, not strictly limited to the licensed Spire Comics, as I always thought, but also, oddly, within the pages of Archie Comics proper for a bit). 

And, of course, the book also covers the various attempts at mass media adaptation for Archie and the gang (and other Archie Comics characters like Josie and Sabrina, The Teenage Witch), which, over the decades, meant both successes and failures. You're probably familiar with all of the former, like The Monkees-esque pop music career of The Archies, the Saturday morning cartoons, that weird 1990 NBC Sunday night movie about the characters' high school reunion and, of course, Riverdale. But there were also a few radio shows, and plenty of failures, like a few other attempts at live-action television, one at a reality show and, of course, there were Hollywood hopes, of which only 2001's (excellent, for the record) Josie and The Pussycats ever came to fruition.

Thorough without ever becoming overwhelming and insightful while avoiding rabbit holes, Hanley's Betty and Veronica is really a must-read, not simply for those interested in the sociological underpinnings of female comics characters, but for fans of Betty and Veronica, Archie Comics or, indeed, comics in general.

(I just regret I waited some five and a half years to finally pluck it off my dusty to-read pile. Sorry, Tim Hanley!)

(Also, as is always the case with such histories, if one does come to them as late as I did here, I find that one may be curious about what the author would make of later updates in the subject matter. For example, I mentioned wondering what Hanley might have made of the later seasons of Riverdale, as I assume the show just got crazier and more outlandish as it went on, as is always the case of such television melodramas and, um, a lot of comic book series. Where Hanley leaves off with the comics, they are still sort of leaning into the Afterlife with Archie and Riverdale-inspired contrast between the publisher's decades-long squeaky clean image and more violent, scary or just plain unlikely subject matter, as seen in the likes of Vampironica, Jughead: The Hunger, Betty & Veronica: Vixens, Archie vs. Predator and so on, a contrast seemingly first exploited in 1994's Archie Meets the Punisher which, remarkably, is not currently available from Marvel and/or Archie. I do find myself wondering if the publisher's relative success in the direct market and trade paperback market with these efforts, as well as their 2015 "reboot", came at the cost of success in the post-Raina Telgemeier's Baby Sitter's Club world of original graphic novels produced for children, a world I spend a lot of time in as a contributor to Good Comics for Kids. Archie has produced a few works for this market, 2020's Betty & Veronica: The Bond of Friendship by Jamie Lee Rotante and Brittney Williams comes most immediately to mind, but, for the most part, the publisher doesn't seem to have made a priority of this apparently lucrative market, which would seem to be a natural audience for them, given their long appeal to young readers, boys and girls alike. They do have plenty of digests and collections in print, of course, but I read so many original graphic novels for and about middle-schoolers and teens that I'm surprised that Archie doesn't more actively chase such readers; I mean, even DC Comics seems to produce more material for this market than Archie does. I wonder if, had Hanley's book come out in 2025, if there would have been a chapter on this emergent market, and Archie Comics' efforts, or lack thereof, to introduce them to their eternal teenage characters...)

The Spectre in the DC Universe Pt. 1

As previously mentioned, the Spectre by John Ostrander and Tom Mandrake Omnibus contains commentary on each issue by Ostrander. In discussing issue #21, he addresses something that I had often thought about, back in 1992 when I first read an issue of the series, and again last month while reading through the first half of the series in the omnibus.

Ostrander:

I've sometimes been asked why The Specte wasn't part of Vertigo, which was an imprint of DC known mostly for its supernatural/mystical titles and its blue-ribbon creators. The answer, if memory serves, is because we preceded it. Karen Berger, the line's senior editor, was not our editor. We were in a different editorial group. Sometimes it's that simple. 

Ostrander's memory does indeed serve. Vertigo launched in January of 1993, the month that Spectre #4 hit stands. Of course, it's the different editor thing that probably actually kept Spectre from getting a Vertigo logo on its cover, as the mature readers imprint's initial offerings—Animal Man, Doom Patrol, Hellblazer, Sandman, Shade, The Changing Man and Swamp Thing*—were all in-progress series. The oldest of these was Swamp Thing, with #129 being the first Vertigo-branded issue, and the youngest was Shade, which was already on issue #33 the month Vertigo launched. 

Even as a teenager, I thought The Spectre to be an awfully Vertigo-ish book, one that sort of straddled the border between that line of comics and DC's main superhero line. Certainly, Ostrander and Mandrake's book was written and drawn as well as anything Berger was editing back then, the storytelling was as sophisticated and the subject matter as mature as what one might have found in Animal Man or Swamp Thing at the time. And, of course, the book's basic premise felt very Vertiginous, if that's the right word to use for it (It's not). 

That is, it was a comic starring an old DC-owned character being reinvented, specifically as a horror comic involving the occult, mysticism and quasi-religious content (Indeed, as we'll see, The Spectre shared multiple characters and settings that appeared in those half-dozen Berger books, and some later Vertigo books). 

Thinking about it now, I'm not sure how much different Ostrander and Mandrake's Spectre might have been if it was a Vertigo book. 

I guess the characters would probably swear (One of them, police lieutenant Nate Kane, has a charming habit of saying "Balzac!" like a swear word). 

And Mandrake would be able to draw nipples on the various topless ladies who appear in these stories (Madame Xanadu, for example, performs a ritual stripped to the waist at one point. One demon is drawn as a naked woman from the waist up and a snake from the waist down. And when we see human souls, they are always naked. Mandrake uses tricks of light and posing to make sure that a strand of hair falls just so over a woman's breast, for example, or that shadows fall over them to offer a degree of concealment).

Oh, and maybe we would be less likely to see Superman playing a substantial role in one of the stories, I guess...?

Maybe the characters gathered at the funeral that Jim Corrigan/The Spectre threw for himself in 1998's The Spectre #62, the last issue of the series wouldn't have included electric Superman, hook-handed Aquaman and the Martian Manhunter. (The image above is from that issue, by the way, and is thus not actually included in the first omnibus, but it seemed like a good one to use for this post, given all the DCU characters in it). 

Swearing and nudity aside, I think The Spectre actually benefits from being set in the mainstream DCU. Given the character's long history—he debuted in 1940, was a founding member of comics' first super-team the Justice Society of America in the pages of All-Star Comics, and starred in a pair of ongoing series, one in the 1960s and another in the1980s—he's entwined in the history of the DC Universe in a way that, say, Animal Man and Swamp Thing aren't. And it's not like Jack Kirby's 1970's Sandman was on the Justice League, or Steve Ditko's Shade was wrestling the Anti-Monitor in Crisis on Infinite Earths. 

Of course, being a Vertigo book didn't necessarily preclude the appearances of superhero characters from throughout the broader DC line of comics. The wall around the imprint was also rather porous and, of course, the original Vertigo books all started out as ones presumably set in the DCU (Which can be disconcerting to later readers, who might pick up a Vertigo-branded collection and find Dream of The Endless visiting JLI headquarters and meeting Martian Manhunter, or Richard Case drawing Booster Gold and Blue Beetle in the pages of Doom Patrol). 

I wanted to explore the book as a book within the DC line, specifically how it interacted with the wider DC Universe setting, how it pulled guest-stars and supporting cast members from DC comics history and even featured some of what we now think of Vertigo characters...and reflecting aspects of the Vertigo books back into the DCU.

MADAME XANADU

In The Spectre #2, "Crimes of Passion", Siegel-Baley General Hospitals' staff social worker Amy Beitermann is trying to learn more about Jim Corrigan, who she briefly met at the hospital—and then witnessed him getting repeatedly shot in a drive-by shooting, the bullets all passing harmlessly through him. 

Her policeman friend Nate Kane tells her that Corrigan was a detective "who went goofy some time back...left the force and became a private detective--psychic or psycho investigator--or some such." When she looks for Corrigan at his old office, we see an exterior of a building, its sign reading "Corrigan Detective Agency 5th Floor, Madame Xandadu 1st Floor."

While Corrigan isn't there, and his dusty office seemingly abandoned, Amy has a brief encounter with Madame Xanadu, who will be something of an off-and-on supporting character in the book for a while.

She was originally created by David Michelinie and Michael William Kaluta in 1978 for Doorway to Nightmare...and was based on a nameless "host" character that Kaluta had previously drawn in Forbidden Tales of Dark Mansion. She was a beautiful, mysterious woman who ran a magic shop where she would give tarot readings...and inevitably get mixed up in an occult adventure in each story. Her exact origins and powers were never delineated.

Writer Doug Moench would make extensive use of her as a supporting character in the pages of the second Spectre ongoing (the 1987-1989 series), where she served as something of a spiritual advisor to Corrigan...and the lover of The Spectre.

Ostrander refers to this period in his stories involving her, and she plays a curious role here, not quite a villain, in the traditional comic book sense, but certainly an adversary. At one point, she will strip Corrigan of The Spectre powers and take them as her own, hoping to change the world for the better, but finding her goal frustrated by The Spectre-Force's need to avenge the murdered dead and punish the guilty. 

She will later predict the inevitable violent death of Amy but take steps to try to avert it. She will also join others in an attempt to free The Spectre from the influence of Eclipso when the villain possesses him and, as the omnibus nears its conclusion, join The Spectre and his allies in Hell, where they fight against Azmodus (More on both Eclipso and Azmodus in a bit).

While her original comics appearances might have been vague on the matter, Ostrander details Xanadu's long—immortally long—life, her origins and the full extent of her considerable sorcerous powers. I'm not sure how these map to Moench's version of the character, as his 31-issue volume of The Spectre hasn't been collected (But seems a decent candidate for a couple of DC Finest volumes, DC!)

DEADMAN

In The Spectre #5, "A Rage in Hell," a carful of kidnappers are caught in a deadly car crash, which spells doom for their victim: They have secreted a little boy in a grave with an air tube until their ransom was met, although a rainstorm is now threatening to drown him. The only people who could reveal his location are now all dead. 

Amy has recently met and befriended Corrigan, however, learning that he is actually The Spectre. She and Kane prevail on Corrigan to get the information needed to save the boy's life, by entering one of the kidnappers' bodies and interrogating his soul in the afterlife.

The Spectre first visits "the land of the recently departed," which Mandrake draws as a sort of desolate wasteland punctuated by large rock outcroppings, through which a massive crowd of people are walking toward the reader. Sitting atop one of those outcroppings in the foreground, we see Deadman sitting cross-legged, his head resting in his hand as if he's bored. 

While the character is far enough away that it's hard to see any details, Mandrake seems to draw a version of the character that hues to his original Carmine Infantino design, rather than the rotting corpse look that Kelley Jones gave him in 1989's Deadman: Love After Death miniseries. If there's a big "D" on his red costume, it's obscured.

The Spectre doesn't acknowledge Boston Brand, whose presence is completely unremarked upon. It's apparently just a little cameo for the readers.

SHATHAN

In that same issue, The Spectre leaves "the land of the recently departed" for Hell, where he calls forth the "LORD OF LIES!" and is answered by a huge, red, horned figure: "Who so calls upon Shathan The Eternal?" 

Now, "Shathan" sounds like an overly careful, rather comic book-y way to use the devil in a comic book story without actually saying the name "Satan", similar to Marvel re-naming their Satan "Mephisto" or DC pitting Superman against a "Lord Satanus", but don't blame Ostrander for adding a couple of H's to "Satan"—the character was actually the creation of Gardner Fox and Murphy Anderson in 1966's Showcase #61.

That Shatan looked like a pretty generic, if a little stout and somewhat under-dressed, devil figure (You can see him bonking The Spectre on the head with the planet earth of the issue's cover). In Fox's story, Shathan comes from the alternate dimension of Dis, where everything is composed as "psycho-matter", the same stuff that The Spectre was made of.

Fox avoided using the word "Hell", but given how obviously the character's design was inspired by a traditional, cartoony conception of the devil, and that "Dis" is the name that Dante gave a city in The Inferno's Hell, it doesn't take much of a leap of the imagination to reorient Shathan into a devil from Hell (The DC Universe's version of Hell, which had emerged by that point in the early '90s, was a plane of existence ruled by a sort of high court of various warring and scheming chieftains, each of these devils vying to be Hell's ultimate ruler; this vision accounts nicely for the fact that books as various as, say, Superman, The Demon and The Sandman might have different takes on Hell, or use different stand-ins for Satan/The Devil. Ostrande and Mandrake will show us a sort of council of devils before this volume ends).

Ostrander even accounts for Mandrake's rather radical redesign of the character, which sports a massive, more animalistic pair of horns, a face full of fangs and gnarled limbs terminating in long claws: "We have fought before and since then I have been able to reconstitute only this miserable form."

If you want to read of that fight, and The Spectre's first fight with Shathan's servant Azmodus from Showcase #60 (Azmodus is our next entry on this list), they have been collected in September's DC Finest: The Spectre: The Wrath of The Spectre and 2020's The Spectre: The Wrath of The Spectre Omnibus and, if you can still find it, 2012's Showcase Presents: The Spectre.

Here, The Spectre and Shathan fight in Hell, a brutal battle involving size-changing and shape-changing but ultimately ends with The Spectre plunging his fist into Shathan's chest and pulling out his "heart", the soul of the recently dead kidnapper that The Spectre had descended to Hell in search of in the first place.

AZMODUS

In The Spectre #8, Shathan is being tortured by much smaller, lesser devils, and reflects on "the cycle" he is subject to: "You are great, you are brought low. You rule, you are ruled." But, in the next panel, he mentions that his "familiar" Azmodus had escaped from Hell when The Spectre last departed, and that "He will grow strong, create misery, feed me."

This is kinda sorta the role that Azmodus played in those old Showcase issue. Introduced as an evil opposite of The Spectre, he too rather resembled a sort of cartoon devil, oddly dressed in yellow (You can see him on this cover).

In Showcase #61, the issue after the one in which The Spectre defeated Azmodus, we see Shathan growing strong by making deals with various mortals, exchanging favors for their shadows.

In Ostrander and Mandrake's Spectre, Azmodus will be the one buying shadows from mortals. He too has a rather radical redesign, losing the yellow suit, boots and cape, but still appearing to keep the spirit of the design, being somewhat generically diabolical. 

Mandrake's take looks mostly human, albeit with pointy ears and pointy teeth. He's dressed head-to-toe in red, wears a cape and has big, billowing, rather theatrical-looking sleeves. 

He will play a major role in this half of the series, fighting The Spectre on another plane not unlike the battle he had with him in that long ago Showcase story (This he does to keep The Spectre busy while Amy is imperiled in the real world by a human killer). Later, we will learn of Azmodus' origins and relationship to The Spectre, and, as this collection nears its final pages, The Spectre has a climactic battle with Azmodus in Hell. 

FATHER RICHARD CRAEMER 

After the serial killer called The Reaver attacks and then impersonates the priest at the Church of the Holy Sepulcher in order to commit his latest murders, the church receives a new priest in The Spectre #13, "Righteousness": Father Richard Cramer. 

I actually didn't recognize him upon his first introduction, not even when, in the next issue, "Wrath of God", he recognizes The Phantom Stranger, the most mysterious of DC's heroes, explaining to him that, "My previous assignment was as chaplain at Belle Reve prison, where they incarcerate a number of criminal metahumans...They also keep extensive files on the subject."

Though Ostrander pretty much spells it out in that dialogue, it wasn't until I was reading his notes later that I realized this priest is the same one who appeared in Ostrander's 1987-1992 Suicide Squad, one of the handful of civilian support staff that filled out the books large and ever-changing cast. 

In this title, Craemer first meets Corrigan when the latter comes to church for confession, during which Craemer brings up a civil war in the fictional Balkan country of Vlatava as an example that no human being can realistically expect to avenge "the blood of the innocent slain", given just how much innocent blood is so regularly spilled around the world.

Unfortunately, Corrigan seems to take that as a challenge and flies off to judge all of Vlatava. 

Craemer will later talk Corrigan/The Spectre down when he seems poised to erase all of humanity from the face of the Earth, after which point he becomes Corrigan's spiritual advisor and friend. 

Craemer appears as a close ally and confidant of the title character throughout the rest of the series. 

COUNT VERTIGO

Did Vlatava sound familiar to you? There's good reason. That's the country that the supervillain Count Vertigo hails from, and, as a member of its royal lineage, sometimes rules or fights to rule. Originally created by Gerry Conway, Trevor Von Eeden and Vince Colletta, he played a significant role in Ostrander's previously mentioned Suicide Squad and is now primarily known as a Green Arrow villain. 

In "Righteousness", we will learn that he leads one side of a brutal civil war against Muslim opposition, a conflict seemingly somewhat inspired by the then-ongoing Bosnian war. The Spectre, currently suffering from a devastating grief, visits the country to avenge its dead.

He and Vertigo briefly fight, but Vertigo's powers to disorient and unbalance his foes has little effect on The Spectre ("I know good from evil," he says, grabbing Vertigo by the throat, "That is enough.) 

Ultimately, The Spectre judges the entire nation guilty of a centuries-long conflict that has killed countless innocents, and he inflicts his vengeance upon it, killing, as will be made clear in later dialogue, every man, woman and child in Vlatava, sparing only two people: Count Vertigo and the general leading the opposition forces.

"You both wanted this land," The Spectre says, "It is now yours. That is your punishment."

THE PHANTOM STRANGER

DC's ever mysterious figure, whose origins and roles seem to regularly shift, even on the rare occasions where a writer seeks to define them, appears before Craemer in issue #14, "Wrath of God." 

As is often the case, The Stranger seems to know more than any mortal should about what is going on, speaking of The Spectre's state of mind and future intentions, but just where he gets his information and who exactly he is doesn't get discussed at all—not in the issues collected in this omnibus volume, anyway, despite Ostrander's work of building a consistent mythology of various DC supernatural characters from decades' worth of disparate stories within the book.

This issue, by the way, is one of the handful that the prolific Mandrake did not pencil and ink himself. Instead, guest-artist Joe Phillips draws it. 

Phillips' version of The Stranger seems a bit closer to that of the Vertigo Stranger, which had then just recently appeared in 1993's Vertigo Visions: The Phantom Stranger #1, by Alisa Kwitney and Guy Davis. Rather than a cape, fancy suit and medallion, he merely wears a big blue trenchcoat that completely obscures whatever he might be wearing underneath in shadow. He also wears white gloves and the familiar hat, shading his eyes, which appear blank and white beneath it.

Most notably, there's a glare of white light that emanates from his upper chest.

His role in the series is to, first, explain some of the history and nature of The Spectre to Craemer, whose mention of Vlatava seems to have set The Spectre on his current path of contemplating the judgement of nations and even the world, and then gather a handful of magic-users to try to confront The Spectre in order to save the world.

ECLIPSO

When The Phantom Stranger tells Craemer of the history of The Spectre, he starts with this: "There are many sides to the almighty--many names by which God is called...Even his wrath has a name and, in the beginning, it was what became known as Eclipso!"

Four panels, including one splash page, are devoted to Eclipso's role as God's spirit of wrath. In that splash, Phillips draws a giant Eclipso standing knee-deep in stormy, wave-filled waters, a huge wooden boat looking tiny next to his form in the lower righthand corner.

It was Eclipso, The Stranger says, who, "in the name of God," flooded the Earth during the time of Noah. (I am here reminded of a footnote in Douglas Wolk's All of The Marvels, made in reference to Loki escaping where he was when the Norse myths left off to enter into the greater Marvel Comics story.  "As we soon learn, every body of mythology is literally true within the Marvel Universe," Wolk writes. "The traditional stories told in our world about immortal gods, especially those who take human form, are simply how somebody on Earth-616 has documented interesting events." The same seems to be true of the DC Universe.)

Eclipso "overreached himself" though, and would not forgive as God did, so he was ultimately "banished into a prison, one that should have lasted for all time, save for the perfidy of man."

It's been a while since I read 1992's Keith Giffen and Robert Loren Fleming-written Eclipso: The Darkness Within (another good candidate for DC Finest collections!), and I've only read a few issues of the 1992-1994 ongoing Eclipso title that followed it (a trade of which I would also totally buy and read), but I believe it was there that the minor Silver Age villain was promoted to a dangerous, demonic entity.

I think Ostrander was the one who integrated the character into The Spectre's history though, making Eclipso his precursor as an avatar of divine vengeance. Please correct me if I'm wrong, though.

NABU

The Stranger's history of The Spectre continues through the Old Testament, and soon another familiar DC comics character appears.

"Not all of the pharaoh's court were ill-disposed to the descendants of Joseph and his brothers," The Stranger narrates. "One who counseled prudence was the court magician Nabu."

Nabu was originally created by Garner Fox and Howard Sherman as the magician mentor who gifted Kent Nelson the various magical items that made up his Doctor Fate costume. He was later revealed to be a cosmic Lord of Order, and, over the years, he was gradually integrated into the ancient history of the evolving DC Universe setting.

Here, Phillips draws him as a quite buff Caucasian-looking man with white hair and a white beard. He battles the then host-less Spectre-Force when it comes to claim the life of the pharaoh, avenging his culling of the Hebrews. Phillips draws this hostl-less Spectre-Force as a sort of Grim Reaper figure in a green cloak, with an emaciated, bony body, and a skull for a head.

Afterwards, Nabu becomes advisor to the new pharaoh, the one from the Book of Exodus and, indeed, he's on hand when Moses and Aaron do their staff-to-snake trick (Nabu is one of the magicians who similarly transforms a staff into a snake, although Moses' snake devours his). 

At the climax of the story of the plagues—"a battle of wonders--of terrors"—it is The Spectre-Force that moves among Egypt like a mist, claiming the lives of every first-born son. Nabu again challenges it, this time wearing the helm of Fate, and he is again defeated, as "the force the Spectre represented was the force that created the Lords of Order".

SUICIDE SQUAD'S AMBAN AND THE HAYOTH 

In The Spectre #15, "Old Blood", the title character visits the Middle East, intent on claiming the life of Kemal Saad, "Head of the Legion of Palestine," who is in Cairo for peace talks with Israel, despite being considered a terrorist by the Israeli government for his past actions. 

At the behest of Israel, Saad has super-powered security watching over him: The Hayoth, an Israeli super-team that Ostrander had created in 1990 as part of his Suicide Squad run. They are led by Ramban, a Kabbalistic combat magician, and their number here includes Golem and Judith. 

The Spectre makes short work of Golem but has considerably more trouble with Ramban. ("I am a student of The Kabbalah, and the power I invoke is the power that created you," he tells The Spectre at one point).

Ramban will continue to play a supporting role throughout the series. In fact, he's one of the characters pictured in that crowd scene from the final issue at the top of the post.

DOCTOR FATE

The Stranger begins to gather allies to oppose The Spectre, should the latter decide to really go through with doing to the rest of the world what he had already done to Vlatava. The first of these is Doctor Fate who, in 1993, was still Inza Nelson, not her husband Kent.

"The Spectre has gone mad," The Stranger tells the Nelsons. "He is trying to decide if he will destroy the world for its wickedness. I am recruiting beings of power to oppose him if we must."

Inza transforms, saying "Then Doctor Fate will join you," in the character's particular dialogue bubble style, and she then asks who else The Stranger will recruit as they leave Fate's door-less tower in Salem, Massachusetts.

"A drunkard, a demon, a sorceress, and a woman who does not die," he replies, rattling off a list of suggestive possibilities that will be realized in the next few issues.

JOHN CONSTANTINE

By the month that this issue was published, Constantine's home book Hellblazer was on issue #73, and had borne a Vertigo logo on its cover for 11 issues. I was more than a little surprised to see what was by then a Vertigo character in a DCU book.

He's not here long, however, only appearing in four panels. We see him lying in a pool of some sickly-colored liquid—Alcohol? Vomit? Piss?—in New York City.

Fate squats next to the prone figure, asking incredulously, "This is Constantine?"

"He's worse off than I thought--and totally useless for our purposes," The Stranger says. "We'll have to do without him." 

They leave without Constantine seeming to have ever been aware that the were there; in the last panel to feature him, the pool of liquid is colored red, and now looks to be blood. (For what it's worth, Constantine was, at this point, in the "Damnation's Flame" arc of his own book, by writer Garth Ennis and artist Steve Dillon.)

ETRIGAN, THE DEMON

If Constantine proved to be "the drunkard" on The Phantom Stranger's list of recruits, you've probably already guessed who "the demon" was.

The Stranger and Fate find Jason Blood in Gotham City, and The Stranger can barely say hello before Blood cuts him off. 

"You never need me," he says. "You need him."

A short spell later, and a smoking, leering Etrigan crouches before the pair, leveling a lascivious threat at the Doctor while licking his lips: 

And so I walk the world again, a Stranger greets me fair.

With a Fate so sweet that I intend...

...to strip the Doctor bare!

Mandrake draws an amusingly worried reaction on Fate's helmed "face", but the Stranger changes the subject immediately.

"Actually, we've come to settle a question," he tells Etrigan. "Who is stronger, The Demon or...The Spectre?"

Though well aware that The Stranger is attempting to manipulate him into aiding him against The Spectre, appealing to Etrigan's pride, the Demon aggrees to join their ad hoc super-team: "I'll come; I'll come. It sounds like fun!"

Let's here pause a moment to praise Mandrake's version of Etrigan. 

One of the many appealing aspects of this series is seeing Mandrake draw so many different DC characters, and his Etrigan is a particularly great one. He's a hulking brute of a figure, muscled to the point that it approaches deformity in some panels, The Demon seemingly hunching under the weight of his own triceps muscles. Mandrake also gives him a bestial face that suggests a compromise between Jack Kirby's original design and that given to him by Stephen Bissette in the pages of Swamp Thing. 

His expressions, meanwhile, are mostly a series of leers and grins, exposing his fangs and tongue, suggesting writer Alan Grant's "mad" version of the character.

Mandrake draws him in a few issues here, and will briefly return to the character when he guest-stars in an issue of he and Ostrander's later Martian Manhunter ongoing (Which I hope DC gets around to collecting after a second omnibus collecting the rest of their Spectre; I have every issue in singles, but I wouldn't mind a more readable collection or three on my bookshelves). 

Based on how good Mandrake's Etrigan is, I hope that DC will eventually commission a story of some length starring the character in the future, perhaps with Ostrander writing.

If you're wondering what The Demon was up to at the time this issue hit the shelves, writer Garth Ennis and artist John McCrea (who draws another of my favorite versions of Etrigan) were four issues into their short run on The Demon (Specifically, "Hell's Hitman" part two, guest-starring Tommy Monaghan).

ZATANNA

And "the sorceress"...? That would be on-again, off-again Justice Leaguer Zatanna. Here The Phantom Stranger and team meet her in The Spectre #16, "Call For Blood," the issue in which the incredibly intersting art team of penciller Jim Aparo and inker Kelley Jones spell Mandrake.

She's in a San Francisco office, wearing a pink business suit. The Stranger tells her "You have recently come to a full understanding of your heritage and power", asking her, "Will you join that power with ours?"

She takes a wand from her desk drawer and holds it aloft, saying "Excuse me while I change." 

Then she stands before them, wearing tight blue pants and boots, a blue vest with a very long collar, and various bits of jewelry, including a big, golden-colored "Z" for a belt buckle. 

This is the costume she wore in the then just recently completed four-issue Zatanna mini-series by writer Lee Marrs and artist Esteban Maroto. I never read it, but quite clearly remember seeing house ads for it, given Maroto's gorgeous artwork. 

She briefly summarizes the changes of that story to Fate, and Etrigan is not a fan: "No backwards spells? No fishnet hose?! I hate it when a tradition goes!"

Not to worry, Etrigan. This particular phase of Zatanna's career would prove short-lived, and she'd be back in fishnets and speaking her spells backwards before too long.

I was amused by the pair's exchanges here, though. When Zatanna calls out his "doggerel", Etrigan replies:

True, my verse is barren, but the reason I will tell.

Shakespeare went to Heaven; critics go to Hell.

Bad news, fellow comics critics!

NAIAD

This extremely powerful water elemental is an original creation of John Ostrander and Tom Mandrake's...but not for this book. Rather, they had created her near the end of their Firestorm run. 

A Japanese protestor who was set afire by men working for an oil company, she was reborn by Gaia, the spirit of Earth, as a being composed of water and who was able to control water. 

Here she awakens on a mission of vengeance not too far removed from that of The Spectre's, ultimately targeting Japan. 

The Spectre, who has just recently been talked from using his powers in pursuit of a vengeance that would incur millions of lives, opposes her...as does another DCU guest-star we'll get to in a moment.

She is eventually convinced to relent.

THE JUSTICE SOCIETY OF AMERICA 

Though The Phantom Stranger and his team, and Father Craemer, Rambala and Madame Xanadu, were eventually able to purge The Spectre of Eclipso's influence and talk Corrigan/The Spectre out of judging the entirety of the world's population, the danger The Spectre poses has convinced the United States government to seek some sort of anti-Spectre countermeasure. 

Then-president Bill Clinton enlists the aid of one of his old professors, Nicodemus Hazzard, to research the issue.

Hazzard first turns to The Spectre's old allies in the JSA. 

The series' twentieth issue, entitled "Strange Friends", follows Hazzard as he meets the aged members of the JSA in the present, their stories of their relationship with The Spectre during the 1940s composing flashbacks where they often appear in costume.

Over the course of these 22 pages, all drawn by guest artist John Ridgway, Hazzard meets with and interviews Johnny Thunder, The Flash Jay Garrick, Wildcat Ted Grant, Hawkman and Hawkwoman Carter and Shiera Hall and Sandman Wesley Dodds. 

They all appear young and in costume in the flashbacks, as do a handful of other heroes, who only have brief cameos (Green Lantern Alan Scott, Doctor Fate, Starman, The Atom, Liberty Belle, Johnny Quick, and Johnny Thunder's Thunderbolt).

It is Hazzard's talk with Dodds, about the Spear of Destiny and dreams, that leads to Hazzard consulting another familiar character, one I was even more surprised to see here than Constantine. He appears in the last few panels of this particular issue.

LUCIEN THE LIBRARIAN

Unable to learn more about the spear from any books or databases on Earth, Hazzard turns to a search of "non-ordinary reality."

To do so, he falls asleep, albeit a more guided sort of sleep than most of us experience each night. His goal is to reach The Dreaming, the realm of Dream/Morpheus/The Sandman from Gaiman's Sandman. Specifically, he's looking for Dream's library, stocked with an infinite number of books that only exist there, each tome one an author has only dreamt of actually writing.

Hazzard ends up finding a book on the history of the Spear of Destiny that he himself wrote, albeit in his dreams, rather than reality, and this provides him with the information he needs.

As I said, I was quite surprised to see a character from The Sandman in the pages of The Spectre...but then I learned from Ostrander's notes on the issue that Gaiman didn't actually create Lucien for The Sandman. Rather, Lucien was one of several relatively obscure "host" characters from 1970s DC Comics that Gaiman had repurposed (like Cain, Able and Eve).

In fact, Lucien hosted the short-lived1975 horror series Tales of Ghost Castle, where he lived in an abandoned Transylvanian castle with a substantial library. I'm not sure who created the character, but looking at the credits for the first issue, writer Paul Levitz and artists Nestor Redondo seem to be responsible for his first appearance and would thus be the most likely to be responsible for creating him.

KOBRA, NIGHTSHADE, SARGE STEEL

According to Hazzard's research, after the end of World War II, the Spear of Destiny passed from the hands of Adolf Hitler to a Soviet collector for decades.

Sometime in the 1980s, the cult of Kobra found it, and their leader planned to use it as Hitler had, to "neutralize or control the metahumans in a bid to take over the world." The Spectre confronted the colorful, snake-themed supervillain/cult leader/terrorist, who wounded him with the spear during their confrontation. 

Nightshade, a portal-generating superheroine and "an American intelligence agent", arrived on scene to snag the Spear, which she delivered to Sarge Steel. 

Kobra, by the way, was originally created by Jack Kirby and Steve Sherman in the late 1970s, and then drastically reconfigured by Martin Pasko and Pablo Marcos before the first issue of the short-lived Kobra was released. The character has been a sort of all-purpose villain ever since, fighting various heroes, including Batman and the Outsiders, The Flash, the Suicide Squad and JSA.

Nightshade was originally created by David Kaler and Steve Ditko for Charlton Comics, and she was therefore acquired with the rest of the publisher's characters and integrated into the DCU. Ostrander used her in his Suicide Squad. 

Similarly, Sarge Steel began as a Chalton character, created by Pat Masulli, and upon being imported into the DCU he played a role in Ostrander's Suicide Squad and has been a government and/or intelligence official in one capacity or another ever since.

SUPERMAN

When Hazzard finally finds the spear, which had been languishing in a government warehouse in Washington, D.C. (Maybe the same one that the Ark of the Covenant ended up in at the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark...?), he and President Clinton put it in Superman's hands and point him at Japan, where The Spectre is fighting Naiad (The government thinks the two entities might be allies in attempting to destroy the country, though).

Superman promises to do "whatever is necessary" and seems to use it to kill The Spectre and Naiad...before embarking on a campaign to take over the world, fighting and/or killing many of his former allies. 

This heel turn is the influence of a curse upon the spear, which it apparently acquired while in the hands of Hitler, whose evil was so potent that it permanently altered the spear. 

In reality, Superman's short, one-issue campaign to make himself King of the World is all a vision of a possible future that The Spectre shows him, during the course of which Superman is eventually able to renounce the spear. He is thus able to give up the spear before taking any lives (The Spectre ultimately summons debris to encase the spear in an orb of rock with the face of a skull and hurl it into orbit, where it would remain until 1999's Day of Judgment). 

BATMAN AND COMPANY

In Superman's vision, during which he sees what might happen if he fell to the Spear of Destiny's influence, Mandrake fills various panels with Superman battling his fellow heroes. Thus Spectre #22, "Spear of Destiny: Conclusion" is fairly full of DCU cameos.

In four consecutive panels, Superman fights and defeats Captain Atom, Wonder Woman, Bloodwynd and Metamorpho (while Lois and Jonathan and Martha Kent are in various states of shock and mourning alongside the righthand side of the page).

On the next page, we hear a newscast say, "The last of the metahumans opposing Superman have fallen in a savage battle", and we see Superman standing with the Spear held aloft over his head in the background, the foreground littered with a prone Power Girl and Doctor Fate, while Robin Tim Drake holds his head and Martian Manhunter is on his hands and knees.

Rushing at Superman are The Flash and the then all-black clad Hawkman (A character whom Ted Grant had earlier referred to as "this punk in Chicago", as opposed to the real Hawkman). 

Finally, Superman is confronted by the only "masked hero still unaccounted for."

This is, of course, Batman. Ostrander doesn't give the Dark Knight any lines. He simply appears behind Superman. 

As Mandrake draws him here, his left arm is bare, a bandage around his bicep. He's wearing some sort of targeting monocle of the sort Deadshot wore over one eye, he's got a bandolier slung across his chest and he's pointing a long gun at Superman, which Superman surmises contains the kryptonite he had previously given Batman, in case he had ever lost control like this and needed to be taken down.

It is at this point, with his friend there to execute him, that Superman instructs Batman to shoot him—"I deserve it"—and throws down the spear. 

LUCIFER AND COMPANY

Finally, The Spectre #25 opens, the captions on the first page tell us, in Hell, circa 150 A.D. A group of devil figures are gathered around a table, and in the background is a humanoid shape half-wrapped in a pair of enormous, bat-like wings. 

"Behold the enemy!" he says, showing the assembled an image of the then Spectre, the first time in which the Spectre-Force had been bonded to the human soul. That human is named Caraka, and his version of The Spectre is distinguishable from that of Corrigan's by having a neat little mustache and four arms.

This speaker, it is revealed, is Lucifer, who appears as an exceptionally handsome angel, only with wings that resemble those of a bat rather than those of a bird. While obviously a long-lived literary character, DC Comics had developed their own version of him and their own history of him.

This version of Lucifer seems to be that which Gaiman and various artists had used in The Sandman. After ruling over Hell since creation, in the 1990s he decides to retire to Earth, closing up shop and handing the key to Hell over to Dream of The Endless (In the 1990-1991 story arc "Season of Mists"). From there, he went on to star in his own ongoing series by Mike Carey and Peter Gross, which ran 75 issues between 2000-2006, and, a decade later, a second series that only lasted 19 issues). 

In attendance at his meeting? 

First, there's Beelzebub, who, like Lucifer, exists in the real world, or at least does so in classic demonology and literature. The DC Comics version is always depicted as a fly, usually a huge one, as Mandrake draws him here. He was part of the triumvirate with Lucifer that ruled Hell in Sandman, and he has had various appearances in comics, both from Vertigo and the DCU: Hellblazer, Kid Eternity, Swamp Thing, The Demon, even Supergirl (during Peter David's run, which involved angels and devils) and Batman (in a Doug Moench/Kelley Jones issue wherein The Joker summons Etrigan from Hell, and the Clown Prince of Crime eats the archfiend, who appears as a regularly-sized fly).

Then there's Shathan, who we are already familiar with, as he has come and gone throughout the series so far (By the way, he's the only of these characters aside from Lucifer to have any lines during the short, two-page meeting).

Then we see Blaze, the demon daughter of the Wizard Shazam introduced into the Superman books by Roger Stern and Bob McLeod in 1990. 

And, finally, there's Belial, who, like Beelzebub is a "real" demon, and thus has apparently appeared in various comics over the years, but the version here is that which appeared in The Demon comics, first in Matt Wagner's 1987 mini-series and then much more extensively in the 1990-1995 ongoing series launched and primarily written by Alan Grant. Mandrake draws him as he appeared in The Demon, looking much like his son Etrigan, only with far longer, straighter horns and somewhat bigger ears. 

It's only a rather brief scene in which these fiends appear, but it is a welcome orientation of this story in the DC Universe, honoring the emergent mythology of the decade, and suggesting that books as various as Action Comics, The Sandman, The Demon and The Spectre all take place in the same shared setting and are part of some massive, never-ending storyline. 

Next: We wait for The Spectre by John Ostrander and Tom Mandrake Omnibus Vol. 2, I guess. 

*Looking at that first class of Vertigo books, I'm struck by how they are mostly reimaginings of relatively obscure superhero IP. There's Arnold Drake, Bob Haney and Bruno Permiani's 1963 Doom Patrol, Dave Wood and Camine Infantino's 1965 Animal Man, Len Wein and Berine Wrightson's 1971 Swamp Thing, Joe Simon and Jack Kirby's 1974 The Sandman (itself a radical reinvention of the Golden Age character created by Gardner Fox and Bert Christman) and Steve Ditko's 1977 Shade, The Changing Man. The only new-ish character to star in one of those books was Alan Moore, Stephen Bissette and John Totleben's John Constantine, who spun out of their Swamp Thing to star in the Jamie DeLano-written Hellblazer.