Dark Nights: Metal (2017-2018)

Dark Nights: Metal (2017-2018): written by Scott Snyder with James Tynion IV; illustrated by Greg Capullo, Mikel Janin, Alvaro Martinez, Jonathan Glapion, Raul Fernandez, and others: Metal writer Scott Snyder notes in his foreword that he wanted this Event Series to be a big event like the ones he remembered enjoying in his youth. And Snyder does manage lots of cosmic melodrama, dire moments, and seemingly doomed heroic final stands.

Metal may have the oddest set-up for a cosmic event comic ever. In the months prior to Metal, Batman had been investigating the origins of the weird metals of the DC Universe. That would include the resurrectional Electrum of his enemy The Court of Owls, the strange Nth metal of Hawkman's mace and wings, and even the protean shapeshifting of Plastic Man himself.

Against all advice, Batman -- who has probably been the cause of and solution to all of the Justice League's problems more than any other hero -- pursues his quest to the point of fulfilling an ancient prophecy that he thought he was working to forestall. Hoo ha!

To not give anything away, Batman's successful failure allows a whole lot of bad things to invade the DC Universe. It will be up to Batman, Superman, Wonder Woman, and all Earth's other heroes to rescue the multiverse from Batman's mistake. 

Snyder proves to have a strain of cosmic goofiness in him that I was not aware of. Metal evokes the original craziness of DC's 1950's and 1960's Silver Age while also playing at the edges of metafictionality as do the cosmic DC Comics of Grant Morrison. This is a story that is very explicitly about Story. Bringing Daniel, the 'new' Lord of Dreams (well, new since the conclusion of Neil Gaiman's Sandman back in 1995) into the fray serves to make the whole Story emphasis very, very emphatic.

It's not much of a stretch to note that essentially the DC Multiverse comes under fire from a whole lot of misguided pro revisionism and creepy fan fiction. I kid you not. 

It all works, somehow. Greg Capullo, who partnered with Snyder on a lengthy Batman run, channels his days drawing cosmic melodrama on Todd Macfarlane's Spawn to good effect. Things get a bit crowded with characters, not really a problem because that too is a nod to George Perez's meticulous, overcrowded work on the Nexus of all DC Comics Event Series, Crisis On Infinite Earths. Capullo does a nice job with all the punching and the kicking, the weird character designs for the invading villains, and the endless leagues of heroes and villains he must draw. 

Metal certainly isn't perfect. Like most Event Series, a number of story points briefly touched upon in the main narrative require the purchase of other comics in which those points are fleshed out more fully. Things get a little rushed at the end, to the extent that some confusion sets in as to who is doing what where, and what the heck is happening in some of the action sequences. This is not a problem peculiar to Metal. But in all, this is an enjoyable superhero comic that could probably be read by someone who's not fluent in the 80 year history of DC superheroes. Recommended.

Grant Morrison's Doom Patrol Volume 3

Robotman talks to Crazy Jane

Doom Patrol Vol 3 (1992-93/Collected 2017): written by Grant Morrison; illustrated by Richard Case, Scott Hanna, Stan Woch, Ken Steacy, Philip Bond, and others: Grant Morrison's great run on Doom Patrol rolls to its conclusion. Credit to primary penciller Richard Case, too, for a straightforward cartooning style that made the weirdness weirder, in the tradition of Steve Ditko on Dr. Strange.

The Brotherhood of Dada is up first, taking their Magic Bus across America in order to get Mr. Nobody elected President. Then the interlocking arc of The Doom Patrol's Real Enemy and The Candlemaker finishes Morrison's run with horror, humour, and an emotional coda that still brings manly tears from my eyes. All this and The Empire of Chairs!

A bonus here is the ridiculous Doom Force Special being reprinted here, a rare one-off that I missed at the time, and every time after until now. Morrison parodies the Marvel Mutant Madness of the early 1990's, something relevant to anyone who's seen Deadpool 2 and its use of X-Force. Morrison takes the piss on Marvel's mutants, to the extent that it's a bit shocking that he would become a writer of X-Men in 2001. What are the special powers of X-Force? THEY'RE NOT MUTANTS!!!!

As weird as Morrison can be, he wears his heart on his sleeve when it comes to Cliff 'Robotman' Steele's heroic effort to save a world that, as a doctor says to Cliff, "he doesn't believe is worth saving." 

And when it comes to Crazy Jane and Cliff's quest to find her in a multiverse of awful Earths. And when it comes to Danny the Street's efforts to create a world of magic and mystery for all the outcasts and 'losers' to live, safe from the horrors of the late Bush years. Read them all and see why I say Highly Recommended.

Review of Volume 1
Review of Volume 2

Doom Patrol

Grant Morrison's Doom Patrol Volume 2 (1990-1991/ Collected 2016): written by Grant Morrison; illustrated by Richard Case, Vince Giarrano, Malcolm Jones III, Mike Dringenberg, Doug Hazlewood, Steve Yeowell, and others: Grant Morrison's early foray into American superhero comics after about a decade writing for UK publications remains its brazen, pomo self all these years later. C-List early 1960's DC superhero team The Doom Patrol offered Morrison the chance to play fast-and-loose with superhero conventions for both comic and dramatic effect. 

Original Doom Patrol member Cliff "Robot-man" Steele remains mostly unchanged, except for his professed level of angst about being a brain in a robot body. And team leader The Chief is still here, wheelchair-bound and pre-emptory as ever. Tempest remains from the brief late-1970's revival of Doom Patrol, but he mostly confines himself to being team medic. Negative Man is now a hermaphroditic hybrid of man, woman, and negative-energy being that calls itself Rebis. Little Dorothy struggles to control her ability to make her dreams becomes true, or at least solid. And Crazy Jane juggles 64 personalities, all of them with different superpowers. But she's integrating them!

This volume introduces Charles Atlas-comic-strip-based superhero Flex Mentallo ("The Man of Muscle Mystery!"), a creation of satiric wonder invested with a poignance based on the ephemeral nature of childhood dreams and visions. A loose plot thread from Paul Kupperberg's previous run on the title is tied up in weird, space-opera fashion. 

The Sex Men, the Men from NOWHERE, the Shadowy Mr. Evans, and the Brotherhood of Dada threaten our heroes. The Chief goes solo against The Beard-Killer in Morrison's hilarious parody of macho comic-book heroes like Wolverine and the Punisher and the sadistic macho monologues of pretty much any hero written by Frank Miller. The volume ends on a bit of a cliffhanger -- the Brotherhood of Dada shows up, but the battle awaits in the first couple of issues collected in Volume 3. Onwards, Absurdist Soldiers. Highly recommended.

Continuity

DC Comics Classics Library: Justice League of America by George Perez Volume 1 (1980-84/ Collected 2009): written by Gerry Conway; penciled by George Perez; inked by Frank McLaughlin and John Beatty: The big flaw with DC's quickly cancelled DC Comics Classics Library was their ridiculously high price for what was often less than 200 pages of reprints. This volume is a pretty good case in point. 

George Perez drew fewer than 12 issues of the Justice League of America back in the early 1980's. That should be one reprint volume. Nope. The DC Comics Classics Library broke that up into two volumes, padding this first one with Perez JLA postcards from the mid-1980's. The quality of the reprints is fine, though. And I bought this one for about 70%-off Canadian. So I can't complain about my deal. 

Gerry Conway's scripts are cosmic and very much Marvelesque in the amount of bickering among JLA members. Perez's artwork is already detailed as Hell and extremely strong in the characterization and action departments. He also assays a very nice two-page spread of Metron of the New Gods and some other nice visuals in locations that include the planet Apokolips, the JLA satellite, and Siberia. 

Perez's introduction notes that he didn't think either of the inkers assigned to him were a good fit. He's right, though neither John Beatty nor Frank McLaughlin is terribly misapplied. At least DC didn't assign Vince Colletta to ink him. It's an enjoyable, too-short voyage into superhero adventure. We even get a continuity-heavy explanation of super-android Red Tornado's secret origin. Bonus. Recommended.

Adventures of Superman: Jose Luis Garcia- Lopez (1975-1981/ Collected 2013): written by Martin Pasko, Gerry Conway, Elliot S. Maggin, David Michelinie, Len Wein, and Denny O'Neil; illustrated by : Jose Luis Garcia- Lopez with inking on some stories by Vince Colletta, Bob Oksner, Frank Springer, Dan Adkins, Steve Mitchell, Joe Giella, and Dick Giordano: 

Jose Luis Garcia- Lopez became the marketing face of Superman for a long time beginning in the early 1980's -- if it's a paper plate or place mat or bag of French fries with Superman artwork on it released between about 1980 and 1995, the artwork is probably by Jose Luis Garcia- Lopez. He also did a nice job on the early 1980's Batman/Hulk team-up.

Jose Luis Garcia- Lopez is also one of a handful of the finest Superman artists of the 1970's and 1980's. There's a fluidity, grace, and lightness to his superhero work that's a rare treat. He didn't always get the best inkers (he was really best inked by himself), but his work still comes through. Collecting stories from his early days as a recurring Superman artist, this volume also collects the enjoyable, rare Superman vs. Wonder Woman tabloid-sized comic from the late 1970's. 

There are a lot of other stand-outs here, including a three-parter in which writer Gerry Conway really tried to Marvelize Superman (for awhile, the Man of Steel even believes he's really a mutant) and a nifty two-part team-up with the Flash. Through it all, Jose Luis Garcia- Lopez draws everything with grace and precision and a balletic approach to action. Highly recommended.

Batman, Inc. Volume 1: Demon Star (2012-2013/ Collected 2013): written by Grant Morrison and Chris Burnham; illustrated by Chris Burnham and Frazer Irving: Confusingly, this is really the second volume of Grant Morrison's Batman, Inc., but the first after the Flashpoint line-wide reboot of DC Comics back in 2011-2012. As the whole magilla is one storyline, this is not a beginning but rather a middle. And Batman, Inc. actually involved an overarching story that went all the way back to Morrison talking over the writing reins on Batman in 2006. This lovely fellow explains the seven years of the Bat here . In short, Batman, Inc. is really the end of a seven-year Batman story. Hoo ha!

If you're going to read the whole Morrison Batman run, then you're going to have to read this volume. By this time, the zany pomo Scotsman seemed to be running out of serious steam: this whole volume feels like about two issues stretched out to interminable length. It's still enjoyable enough, I guess, and Chris Burnham's art is mostly swell in its occasionally odd melding of Frank Quitely and Geof Darrow. 

That the overall arc straddles Flashpoint requires one not to dwell on the absurd continuity ramifications of this: Flashpoint said that what appeared to be about 15 years of the Batman when the previous continuity ended was now five years. But Morrison kept everything -- every previous Robin, every Batman imitator in a foreign country -- for that new five years. So don't think about it. It's too absurdly crowded to imagine. And DC's new, ultra-successful Rebirth reboot scrambles all that up anyway. Lightly recommended, but don't read it until you've read the previous volumes of Morrison's Batman.

The Disparate Four

Deadline (2002): written by Bill Roseman; illustrated by Guy Davis: Slight, interesting take on Marvel's New York as seen by an up-and-coming reporter. Major heroes like the Human Torch and Spider-man cameo, though the journalist's interactions are primarily with low-level heroes and villains. Roseman does a nice job of keeping things human-scale here, and Guy Davis is always a pleasure as an artist. Lightly recommended.

Terra Obscura (2003-2005/ Collected 2006): written by Peter Hogan and Alan Moore; illustrated by Yanick Paquette and Karl Story: Spinning off from Alan Moore's Tom Strong series, Terra Obscura revisits the alternate Earth inhabited by Tom Strange and a group of super-heroes. Moore co-plotted the series with writer Peter Hogan. It's a fun, slightly revisionist take on super-heroes who tend to resemble their DC Comics brethren moreso than those from Marvel. Strange, like Strong, is a sort of amalgam of Doc Savage and Superman. Yanick Paquette and Karl Story supply some lovely visuals throughout. This isn't revisionism in the mode of Watchmen, but more Alan Moore's version of Astro City. Recommended.

Wonder Woman: Earth-One Volume 1 (2016): written by Grant Morrison; illustrated by Yanick Paquette: If nothing else, Grant Morrison and Yanick Paquette give us the gayest, bustiest Wonder Woman of all time. Allowed to give the Wonder Woman of DC's Earth-One universe her own distinctive origin, Morrison turns to the mythology and weird 1930's super-science that made the original Wonder Woman so strange, along with all that bondage and submission invested in Wonder Woman's world by original creator William Moulton Marston (and possibly his wife and their live-in, female lover). It's fun and weird and curiously thin. Recommended.

Speak of the Devil (2008): written and illustrated by Gilbert Hernandez: Blistering noir about a star gym student turned serial Peeping Tom. And she's a girl. And I really didn't expect any of the plot twists that come with this graphic (very graphic) novel. Gilbert Hernandez (Palomar) is in fine form as both writer and artist. He's got one of a handful of the cleanest, most expressive cartooning lines of his generation. Highly recommended.

The Morrison Effect

Doom Patrol Book One (Collects issues 19-34 of Doom Patrol Volume 2 1989-1990, 1992, 2004/ Collected 2016): written by Grant Morrison; illustrated by Richard Case, Doug Braithwaite, Scott Hanna, John Nyberg, Carlos Garzon, Simon Bisley, and Brian Bolland: DC's Doom Patrol was weird even when it was supposed to be a straightforward superhero team book in the 1960's. Revived in the 1980's, it really did become straightforward until, facing low sales, DC elected to hand the keys to the car to Scottish writer Grant Morrison in 1989. Morrison had already invaded the U.S. with Animal Man and Arkham Asylum. But Doom Patrol would soon become his weirdest 'mainstream' superhero work.

This new reprint volume collects the first third of Morrison's writing stint. It starts with a bang. A Borgesian bang, to be exact, as Morrison riffs on Jorge Luis Borges' strange story "Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius." An imaginary world is in the process of invading the Earth, and the Doom Patrol gets together to face it, reluctantly. 

While the wheelchair-bound genius The Chief, a.k.a Niles Caulder, and Cliff Steele, a human brain in the body of Robotman, remain from the first iteration of the Doom Patrol, Morrison adds new member Crazy Jane -- a survivor of childhood sexual abuse who now has at least 64 multiple personalities, all of them with superpowers -- and a modified old one, Negative Man, now renamed Rebis and consisting of an amalgam of a man, a woman, and a 'negative energy being.' Josh, a.k.a. Tempest, comes along from the second iteration of the Doom Patrol, but only if he gets to be the team's medical officer and isn't expected to play superhero on a regular basis. Dorothy Spinner, a holdover from the issues just before Morrison takes over, also functions as an occasional member of the team, with her occasionally erratic, reality-shaping powers.

Having survived the threat of the Scissormen and the invading, fictional world, the Doom Patrol moves into the Justice League's original, abandoned HQ on Rhode Island. But their work is never done. A creature calling itself Red Jack (a Star Trek: TOS reference) kidnaps a comatose former member of the Doom Patrol and takes her to his strange pocket universe. Dorothy's powers go haywire. 

There's more! The former Brotherhood of Evil reunites under the new leadership of Mr. Nobody and sucks all of Paris into a magical, reality-bending painting.  Crazy Jane retreats inside her own mind, forcing Cliff to take a telepathic voyage into the wonders and horrors of her fractured psyche. The Cult of the Unwritten Book threatens all of reality with erasure. 

And The Brain and Monsieur Mallah, charter members of the Brotherhood of Evil, invade Doom Patrol HQ in order to secure Cliff's new and improved robot body for The Brain. The Brain is an evil, disembodied brain living in a jar. Monsieur Mallah is the super-intelligent, beret-and-bandolier-wearing gorilla he trained from birth to be his evil sidekick. And those last two are holdovers from the original, 'normal' rogue's gallery of the 1960's Doom Patrol! Somewhat fittingly, the last issue reprinted here has a title taken from a Smiths song.

Hoo boy. Fractured, self-mocking, postmodern, often poignant fun for the discerning superhero fan. And this volume is as normal as Morrison's run on the title gets! Handling most of the pencilling duties, Richard Case offers a seemingly straightforward, crisp art style that makes even the weirdest moments seem (mostly) plausible. And Morrison and Case keep things straightforward when it comes to page lay-out: there's no need to push the boundaries of lay-out. The weirdness is all inside the panels, so it's best one doesn't get too lost. And remember: 'dada' is French slang for 'hobbyhorse.' Highly recommended.

Batman: Gothic (Deluxe Edition) (1990/ Collected 2015): written by Grant Morrison; illustrated by Klaus Janson: Writer Grant Morrison's second major foray into the world of Batman (after 1989's Arkham Asylum) take the Dark Knight into a literary hellscape of nods to Faustus, Don Giovanni, Lord Byron's Manfred, Fritz Lang's M., Lewis's The Monk, Melmoth the Wanderer, and a host of other horrific antecedents. There's even an exquisitely detailed, Rube Goldbergesque death trap for Batman to escape.

Batman faces an enemy from his past -- his past as a schoolboy at a private school, that is, in the days before Bruce Wayne's parents were murdered and Bruce's journey towards Batman began. But the enemy threatens Gotham's major mobsters as well, whom this old enemy hunts for revenge. Klaus Janson supplies lots of moodiness and doom as artist. It's one of Batman's most nightmarish adventures, even with the typical splash of Morrisonian postmodernism. This would make a terrific Batman movie, live-action or animated. Come on, DC! Highly recommended.

Some Call It Sleep

Doktor Sleepless Volume 1: Engines of Desire (2008): written by Warren Ellis; illustrated by Ivan Rodriguez: Interesting near-future dystopia from Warren Ellis that gets better and weirder as it goes. 'Doktor Sleepless' (re)names himself and takes up arms against normalcy in a weird, small city somewhere in America. Strange new cults and fads dominate the post-millennial streets. 

The Great Old Ones seem to be in play. And an angel seems to have arrived in town on a hallucinatory wind. Ivan Rodriguez seems a bit bland and mainstream to be drawing this book, though that may be the point -- a tension between the art and the story mimicking the tension between consensus reality and le massif. Certainly worth reading. Recommended.

Annihilator (2015): written by Grant Morrison; illustrated by Fraser Irving: A self-reflexive, genre-mashing superhero story written by Grant Morrison? It must be Wednesday. This is another fun Morrison romp in which a writer and his creation hang out together. Well, go on the run together. But the created may have created the story that the creator now tells to save the created. Or something like that. 

If you like Morrisson, you'll like this. If you hate Morrison, you'll hate this. If you've never heard of Morrisson, this isn't a bad jumping-on point. It may be a bit wacky, but it's straightforward in its own way and isn't part of any larger superhero universe. Fraser Irving continues to grow as an artist, though his distortions of the human form sometimes make it difficult to recognize specific characters. Recommended.

Larry Marder's Beanworld Volume 1 (1981-1995/ Collected 1995): written and illustrated by Larry Marder: Reprinting stories from the early-to-mid 1980's, this volume has been supplanted by newer, larger reprint volumes. You should buy them. Larry Marder's Beanworld is a fantasy creation almost sui generis. There are a few things -- mostly old comic strips -- that it vaguely resembles in art style or writing, things that include Krazy Kat and the E.C. Segar Popeye from the 1920's and 1930's.

But it's also pretty much its own weird, half-funny, half-serious cartoon about a bunch of sentient, bipedal beans getting up to adventures on, um, Beanworld. A labour of love years in development by Marder when it debuted as an Eclipse Comic in 1981, Beanworld is one of the great comic-book achievements to come out of the 1980's in any genre, on any continent. It's strange, charming, funny, enthralling... and a fine piece of fantasy world-building. Highly recommended.

Madwoman of the Sacred Heart (1992-1998/ English edition 2011): written by Alejandro Jodorowsky; illustrated by Moebius; English translation by Natacha Ruck and Ken Grobe: Deeply odd graphic novel from long-time collaborators Alejandro Jodorowsky and Moebius. Sometimes stilted, sometimes passionate, sometimes grotesque. Moebius' art moves from realism through to a cartoony style at the end that resembles that of Tintin's Herge. 

Jodorowsky's writing rampages around from mysticism to erotica to body horror and shame, from androgynous Messiahs to high-living prophets and back again. A 60-year-old French philosopher-academic turns out to be the destined father of the new John the Baptist. Or that's what a sexy, nubile young female student of his believes. 

Indeed, she believes it so much she has sex with him in a confessional booth and then has a tattoo inscribed just above her pubic region indicating that her vagina belongs to the professor. And that's just in the first 20 pages or so of this ~200-page graphic novel. There's a lot more loopy, portentous and sometimes pretentious dialogue and monologue action than there is the sexy sex, though, so don't get too hot and bothered. Not for anyone easily offended, but recommended nonetheless.

When the Sun Rose Black Over the Last City

Zenith: Phase Three (1989/Collected 2014): written by Grant Morrison; illustrated by Steve Yeowell and others; character design by Brendan McCarthy: And now the 1989 show, in which Grant Morrison and Steve Yeowell take the piss out of every Crisis and Secret War and Company-wide Crossover Event ever seen in the mainstream superhero comics of DC and Marvel. 

Phase Three is at once almost howlingly funny in its take on crossovers -- for the most part, all the heroes from different realities spend most of their time confused about what they're doing, who they're fighting, and who they're fighting with. And artist Steve Yeowell abets the foggy satire of super-hero armageddons with his sketchiest, sparsest, most evocative and suggestive artwork yet.

The Many-Angled Ones, the Great Old Ones, the Lloigor, have launched a major assault on all the alternative realities of Earth. Only a mighty army of superheroes can stop them! Super-jerk Zenith and super-conservative Peter St. John get drafted for the battle because of course they do. But nothing is really as it seems, and by the end of things, the true enemies of the universe will stand revealed. Or will they? Yes, they will. Maybe.

Morrison and Yeowell do a tremendous job here of juggling meta-commentary, satire, and abject horror. The Lloigor are truly horrible, and they're depicted in ways that almost certainly intentionally recall Kid Miracleman's devastation of London in Alan Moore's Miracleman. But they're also horribly comical and, frankly, not that bright. It all holds together as a satiric epic of horror right up to the bombastic climax, the terrible revelation, and the sudden reversal.

Throughout, Zenith remains his familiar unpleasant self, contrasting the various heroes who take this sort of thing seriously, or who've experienced actual tragedy. A certain number of minor characters are either old British comics characters or homages to same, but knowing who they are isn't integral to enjoying the book. Highly recommended.

Zenith: Phase Four (1990, 1992, 2000/Collected 2014): written by Grant Morrison; illustrated by Steve Yeowell and others; character design by Brendan McCarthy: And so, after the revelations in Zenith: Phase Three about the origins of the Many-Angled Ones and their plans for Earth, we come to the end. 

Can telepathic Conservative super-knob Peter St. John and self-absorbed super-pop-star Zenith save the world from a host of nigh-omnipotent alien gods? Or will the Sun turn black and all of creation fall?

Narrated for large stretches by the aging British creator of the British superhero program, Zenith: Phase Four alternates between dystopian horror and flashes of satire as embodied in the eponymous Zenith. Peter St. John has his own plans for humanity, but they apparently don't involve killing everybody. Not so the Many-Angled Ones, Lovecraft's Great Old Ones. Neither so the rest of Earth's super-heroes, who have a plan of their own that doesn't involve the survival of non-super-heroic humanity.

The result is a superhero comic book that trades in cosmic horror and bits of absurd humour on the way to its denouement. There's still enough mystery left at the end to fuel a Phase Five, but that doesn't seem to be in the offing. A coda from the year 2000, eight years after Phase Four ended, is a rare mis-step from writer Grant Morrison, a sour piece that can be ignored given its meta-commentary on the series as a whole. 

But otherwise, Phase Four is a triumph of revisionist superheroics and weird visionary horror. There's a damned city at the end of things that's quite a triumph of horrific imaginings. And there's Zenith, too self-absorbed to rule the world, and Peter St. John, whose plans remain mysterious right up to the end. And as the creator of the superheroes muses, superheroes in the real world -- or any idealized concept -- becomes horrors almost beyond imagining. Most of the time. Highly recommended.

When the Nazis Summoned Yog-Sothoth...

Zenith: Phase One (1987/Collected 2014): written by Grant Morrison; illustrated by Steve Yeowell and others; character design by Brendan McCarthy:  Grant Morrison and Steve Yeowell's revisionist, satiric, epic superhero narrative started in the pages of England's 2000 AD comics magazine in 1987. In a way, it brings to a close the first decade of the revisionist superhero epic that began with Alan Moore's Marvelman/Miracleman and V for Vendetta and crested commercially and influentially with Moore and Dave Gibbons' Watchmen (1986-87) and Frank Miller's The Dark Knight Returns (1986). 

This first 'Phase' introduces us to the British superhero Zenith, a self-absorbed pop star and celebrity with a vast array of super-powers, few of them tapped. He looks like Morrissey in a super-hero suit and acts like Justin Bieber. He's also the world's only practicing super-hero in 1987, all the others having vanished or mysteriously lost their powers decades earlier.

Pretty soon, though, Zenith will actually have to act in some sort of superheroic fashion. The Many-Angled Ones, Lovecraftian alien-gods from outside Earth's space-time, are coming. They tried to manifest themselves on Earth's plane of existence during World War Two. Now, thanks to the on-going efforts of the Nazi Cult of the Black Sun, one of them is back -- and it's inhabiting the body of a Nazi superhuman known as Masterman.

These aren't simply Lovecraftian homages, either. These are Iot Sotok (ie. Yog-Sothoth) and Cthulhu and Nyarlathotep and many others. They seem to be the real deal. And who better to fight super-gods than supermen?

Well, Zenith really only fights when he's forced to. And he will be forced to. Along the way, secrets will be revealed, a nefarious plan by the superhumans of the 1960's alluded to, and alliances made between Zenith and super-telepath Peter St. John. St. John was once the groovy hippy super-hero Mandala. Now he's the buttoned-down Conservative superhero in Margaret Thatcher's cabinet. Ha! But St. John has his own plans, and none of them involve bowing to hyper-dimensional sadists.

Phase One is the Zenith volume that hews most closely to the relatively serious superheroic revisionism of earlier books, especially Moore and company's Miracleman and V for Vendetta. But Morrison's puckish, punkish sensibilities leak through, especially in the often annoying, non-altruistic character of Zenith. Steve Yeowell's art evolves over the course of the volume, beginning with strong resemblances to Brian Bolland and ending as something more like his mature, more expressionistic style. Highly recommended.

Zenith: Phase Two (1988/Collected 2014): written by Grant Morrison; illustrated by Steve Yeowell and others; character design by Brendan McCarthy: Phase Two of Zenith takes us on a tour of pre-fab superhero Zenith's past and assorted nefarious but still mysterious plans for the future as hatched by various bodies. A nuclear threat to London by a bored British billionaire is the most normal thing going on here. 

This is really a bridge volume, one that fills in blanks and fleshes out major characters. Conservative super-telepath Peter St. John certainly gets the most development -- he may be terrible, but his first-person thoughts suggest that he isn't super-terrible. Zenith, meanwhile, remains a knob who nonetheless must save everything again, almost despite himself. Steve Yeowell's art, always clean, continues to move towards a new sparseness. Recommended.

Two if by Morrison

Vimanarama: written by Grant Morrison; illustrated by Philip Bond (2005/ This edition 2016): 18ish Ali is about to meet his arranged bride Sofia in London, England. But then Ali's baby nephew crawls off, down, and into a strange underworld that's opened up beneath Ali's brother's convenience store. 

Ali and Sofia pursue. The baby accidentally opens the gates to an ancient prison, releasing Ull-Shattan and the Fire-born. The dark creatures steal a bunch of UFO-like ships stored in the underworld and start attacking London. Ali and Sofia manage to summon the Ultra-Hadeen. The battle is on!

Well, it's sort of weird but not without precedent. Morrison and Bond's Ultra-Hadeen are god-like superheroes who resemble figures from various religions, led by the Hinduish Ben Rama. They're not gods -- they're more in the line of Jack Kirby's Eternals or New Gods, powerful beings who we once took for gods, long ago.

Vimanarama (oh, look it up) is a clever, Kirbyesque action-romp that centres itself on the growing love between Ali and Sofia (look 'Sofia' up too while you're at it). Philip Bond does a terrific job delineating both the otherworldly and the mundane. He's one of the best when it comes to cartoonish but realistic humans, which makes the out-sized attributes of the Ultra-hadeen 'pop' even more by comparison. 

I'd like the story to be a bit longer. Moreover, I think Morrison goes a bit astray when the satiric ultra-violence of the Fire-born takes centre stage for a few pages: it really stops the joyful weirdness of the narrative absolutely coldly and unpleasantly. One satiro-violent scene in particular seems like it arrived from another Morrison comic -- perhaps The Invisibles. It's jarring to say the least, but thankfully soon passes. Recommended.

Kill Your Boyfriend: written by Grant Morrison; illustrated by Philip Bond (1994/ This edition 2016): Kill Your Boyfriend came out at almost the same time as Natural Born Killers. And they're certainly similar. One of Grant Morrison's rare non-superhero, non-fantasy comics sets two young London lovers on a kill-crazy spree across England. Along the way, gobs and gobbets of satire and social commentary fill the page, along with a fair amount of bloodshed and some PG-13 sex. 

Philip Bond's witty, humanistic cartooning helps keep things light, as does Morrison's relentless, anarchic characterization and commentary. It's certainly better written than Natural Born Killers, and both use as their foundation Terence Malick's distinctly non-funny, elegaic tale of Charles Starkweather, Badlands. Not for everyone, but recommended for those who like their satire bloody and colourful.

Gods and Things

The Tale of One Bad Rat: written and illustrated by Bryan Talbot (1994-95/This edition 2010): Writer-artist Bryan Talbot's tale of abuse and recovery as filtered through a young woman's interest in both Beatrix Potter's life and work is a lovely, tough comic that actually appeals to people who don't normally read comics. As the afterword to this new(ish) edition notes, the book now shows up a lot in middle schools and high schools and counselling centres. 

It isn't a boring pamphlet, however, but a sad and funny bildungsroman (and, indeed, a kunstlerroman) about teen-aged Helen's efforts to deal with the trauma of her sexual abuse at her father's hands. She runs away, first to London, England and then elsewhere as she pursues her vision of Beatrix Potter's life and works all the way to the Lake District where Potter (a pen-name) wrote her famous and influential children's books.

Helen's accompanied by her pet rat for the journey. The demonization of the rat in Western culture resonates with Helen's own experiences as an abused and otherwise unwanted child. Helen also grows towards having her own artistic voice to express her pain and anguish, at first by copying and recopying Potter's illustrations from memory. Gradually, Helen begins to draw new material of her own.

The Tale of One Bad Rat is a moving graphic novel, beautifully illustrated throughout by Talbot whether the scene is a vista in the Lake District or a grimy London house where various runaways are squatting. Highly recommended.

Nameless: written by Grant Morrison; illustrated by Chris Burnham and Nathan Fairbairn (2015): Grant Morrison and Chris Burnham forge a weird, somewhat non-linear journey into neo-Lovecraftiana in this six-issue Image Comics miniseries. Surprises are part of the package, so we'll stick with a bare plot description: something ancient and terrible is falling to Earth inside an asteroid, and only the eponymous Nameless and a crew of private astronauts can stop it. 

Nothing is really that simple, of course, as the graphic novel bounces off everything from Mayan mythology to the Arthur Machen horror story "The Black Seal" on the way to an apocalyptic climax.

Why Nameless is literally Nameless (or, as he notes, 'Nameless is a name!') is only one of the mysteries that may or may not be answered by the bulk of the miniseries. Morrison plays with narrative unreliability here, while artist Burnham does a nice job of illustrating moments of extreme grue, normal city streets, and the occasional squirmy Lovecraftian God-thing. The ending is tricky, like everything else, so pay close attention to what's happening in the concluding panels. Recommended.

Born Kree

Marvel Boy: written by Grant Morrison; illustrated by J.G. Jones (2000-2001; collected 2012): One of superhero-comics super-writer Grant Morrison's projects from his relatively brief stint at Marvel Comics in the early oughts, Marvel Boy seems like a perfect example of how Morrison was always more suited to DC Comics and to his own creations than he was to Marvel. 

Marvel Boy is a lot of fun. But it's fun in the post-modern, DC-Silver-Age manner that Morrison made his own, with breathless plotting, weird events, alternate universes, and an anti-Establishment vibe. There's none of the angsty characterization that made Marvel Marvel. There's barely any characterization at all. And in the beginning of the NuMarvel era of 'decompressed storytelling,' Marvel Boy is instead as dense as neutronium.

'Marvel Boy' was the name of a Marvel Comics hero in the 1950's -- a time when Marvel wasn't even called Marvel yet. He's never called that in this miniseries. He's the last survivor of a super-powered Kree diplomatic team. But they're not the alien Kree who've been around since the 1960's in the Marvel universe. They're from an alternate universe where the Kree seem to be a lot more helpful to other alien races. 

His crew killed, his ship crippled -- all by a new trillionaire super-villain who seems to be wearing a really old set of Iron Man armor. Weird new things continue to happen. SHIELD disastrously deploys genetically engineered superheroes created specifically for the United Nations. An escapee from the Kree ship's prison threatens all life on Earth, forcing 'Marvel Boy' to save the planet: but the escapee is an intelligent idea, a living corporation. How do you punch that? And so on, and so forth.  It feels like a great DC Comics miniseries in which the postmodern and the gonzo, hyper-caffeinated Silver Age collide as they so often do in Morrison's 'mainstream' superhero work. 

The art by a relatively young J.G. Jones is very good (he and Morrison would later and very successfully collaborate on DC's Final Crisis). Jones may occasionally have the over-rendering tendencies of modern superhero artists, but he's also got a real sense of page design and an old-school, Neal Adams/ John Buscema hyper-realism to his pencils. He's one of a handful of contemporary superhero artists who can handle the bombast and the epic ridiculousness of a superhero epic such as Marvel Boy. Only 'Marvel Boy' himself remains somewhat inert, a character always in motion without there being much interesting about his character other than his stubborn refusal to give up, give in, or drop dead. Recommended.

Satan's Six!

Satan's Six: written by Tony Isabella, Batton Lash, and Kurt Busiek; illustrated by Jack Kirby, John Cleary, Armando Gil, Steve Ditko, and others (1993): From the dark days of the 1990's collector's boom in American comic books comes this oddity. Topps, the sports card people, published comic books for a time in the 1990's because everyone else was doing it. They also created collector's card series tied into the comic books they published. 

And round it went until the industry collapsed into a black hole.

Satan's Six comes from the Topps Kirbyverse line, which consisted of titles and characters created and owned by comics legend Jack Kirby. Kirby wasn't drawing or writing anything at the time, only a few years before his death, mainly because of problems with his eyesight. However, other creators extrapolated entire series from various sketches, uncompleted stories, and the occasional Kirby-owned character who'd actually been published (Silver Star, for one). The results were uneven but generally fun. The Kirbyverse wasn't the grim and gritty place that much of mainstream American comics had become in the early 1990's.

Kirby supplies eight pages and a cover in the course of this four-issue miniseries, with a Who's Who of comic-book artists inking his work, including Todd "Spawn" Macfarlane and Frank "Dark Knight" Miller. I always love seeing Kirby's art regardless of its provenance, so these nine total pages make me happy. Satan's Six are six souls confined to Limbo who've been tapped by Satan to round up souls on Earth who should be in Hell. However, none of this is played seriously -- Satan's Six: The super-team is tremendously incompetent.

The rest of the comic book, all of it written by veteran scribe Tony "Black Lightning" Isabella, is a bit more uneven. Isabella's writing is fine, surprisingly funny, and maybe a bit too Meta at points. Penciller John Cleary strives for jagged, grotesque, cartoony style that seems to be heavily influenced by Todd Macfarlane's distorted grotesques in Spawn, though Macfarlane always set those grotesques off against his more conventionally, quasi-realistically rendered characters. Cleary's pretty much all-cartoony here. One gets used to it after awhile, though his story-telling sense in terms of coherent panel-to-panel flow is still clearly a work in progress. Still and all, I've read a tonne of early 1990's comic books I didn't enjoy as much as this one. Recommended.

Nexus: Space Opera: written by Mike Baron; illustrated by Steve Rude, Gary Martin, Al Milgrom, and Bob Wiacek (2008-2009; collected 2009): For more than 30 years, Nexus has been the crown jewel of its creators' careers -- those being the estimable comic-book careers of writer Mike Baron and artist Steve Rude. 

The bulk of Nexus came out in the 1980's. This was a time when science fiction and space opera flourished in American comics, mainly thanks to the rise of a number of new comics publishers that included Capital, First, Eclipse, Comico, and Dark Horse. Nexus stood at the top of the great science fiction titles that graced the comics world thanks to this explosion in publishing, perhaps only equaled at the time by Howard Chaykin's terrific American Flagg! and John Ostrander and Tim Truman's Grimjack.

Since the second on-going Nexus series ended in the early 1990's, getting a Nexus fix has involved long waits and at least two different publishers (Dark Horse and a brief time as the only publication of artist Steve Rude's creator-owned RudeDude Comics). Space Opera came out from RudeDude Comics in 2008-2009 and was collected in 2009. 

Rude and Baron are in vintage form for much of the miniseries. Is it worth reading for someone new to Nexus? Maybe. I can't really judge that. But it's great to see most of the major characters of the Nexus universe back in action. Nexus himself, born Horatio Hellpop, still tries to act as the conscience of humanity by executing murderers and tyrants with the help of his telekinetic FuskionKasting powers. He's still married to Sundra Peale, former spy for EarthGov. The imminent arrival of their first child drives the plot of Space Opera.

That's because the homicidal, genocidal, and extremely rapey Elvonics, religious fanatics with an Elvis obsession, have a prophecy that the Son of Nexus will destroy their god Elvon. So they launch a series of escalating attacks on Nexus's home planet of Ylum, a libertarian-democratic haven for refugees from across the galaxy. But there are assassins hired by someone else as well. And Ylum also continues to seek full recognition from the United Worlds.

So things are complicated, wiggy, action-packed, and occasionally satiric. Perhaps one long-time character or two will die. Perhaps a long-dead character or two will return from the dead. Perhaps not. It's all great fun, marred only by an insufficient number of pages over the course of the concluding chapter. A massive space battle involving Nexus and the Elvonic Warfleet ends almost perfunctorily, which is a shame. But there are enough good things for the series to be Recommended.

Doctor Solar: Man of the Atom Archives Volume 3: written by Paul S. Newman; illustrated by Frank Bolle; covers by George Wilson; Introduction by Mike Baron (1966-68/ Collected 2014): The strange 1960's adventures of Western Publishing's Doctor Solar, a one-man race of atomic supermen, continue here. Capable of a whole host of energy-based feats, Solar has to deal with arch-nemesis Nuro and his hilariously named henchman Uzbek (!!! -- is a crossover with SCTV's Hey Giorgi imminent?) on several occasions. 

Solar also splits into millions of microscopic selves to battle bacterial space invaders, takes on an evil robot doppelganger, threatens the world with his own terrible nightmares that become real because his radiation is 'out of balance,' and fights a giant lava monster from the Earth's core. 

The interior art by Frank Bolle isn't flashy, but his characters are indeed full of character and his matter-of-fact, low-key, realistic cartooning makes many of the weird events seem even weirder. Writer Paul S. Newman, who literally wrote thousands of comic-book stories, keeps things moving along and often shows a flair for super-scientific strangeness that's the equal of anything DC Comics writers invented during their Silver Age of the 1950's and 1960's. And boy, cover artist George Wilson is swell -- his paintings are an artistic delight from issue to issue. Recommended.

Batman Incorporated Volume 2: written by Grant Morrison and others; illustrated by Chris Burnham and others (2013/Collected 2014): Writer Grant Morrison concludes a Batman epic that spanned seven years, several Bat-titles, dozens of artist (including the excellent Chris Burnham on most of the art herein)  and at least one company-wide DC Comics reboot. 

Batman's Batman Incorporated (a Bruce Wayne company!) brings together masked crime-fighters from around the globe to defeat the equally globe-spanning Leviathan organization. The climax is crowded and occasionally hyperviolent and features at least one endless combat sequence too many. Maybe two. 

The tangential stories included after the main narrative are quite a bit jollier, as writers mostly other than Morrison tell stand-alone tales of such Batman Incorporated agents as El Gaucho, Red Raven, The Knight, and the Japanese Bat-man. And Bat-cow! 

There's absolutely no point to reading this compilation unless you've at least read the earlier Batman Incorporated volumes. Even then, a number of plot developments cast all the way back to the beginning of Morrison's tenure on Batman in 2006. The whole run is one seven-year, 100-issue story. The whole is superior to this part, though not to some of the arcs contained within it. Recommended, but not on its own.

Grimjack: The Manx Cat: written by John Ostrander; illustrated by Tim Truman (2011): This prequel to the 1980's science-fiction comic book Grimjack explains the significance of several elements in that series. John Ostrander's writes as pungent a science-fantasy swashbucker as ever, and original artist Tim Truman is in fine, grim, and occasionally grotesque form. This would certainly work as a gateway to the original series. 

This time around, there's more than a hint of Michael Moorcock's Eternal Champion to protagonist John 'Grimjack' Gaunt as he tries to stop an invasion of alien gods that he himself has inadvertently set in motion by stealing the 'Manx Cat' of the title. Like the Maltese Falcon, the statue of the Manx Cat is something that dreams are made on. Only literally and to increasingly dire consequence. 

Very solid science fiction/ science fantasy. Truman's art only disappoints on the way, way too digitally composed cover of the compilation -- thankfully, it's all pen and ink inside, or at least looks that way. Recommended.

Global Frequency Volume 2: Detonation Radio: written by Warren Ellis; illustrated by Lee Bermejo, Gene Ha, Simon Bisley, Chris Sprouse, Tomm Coker, and Jason Pearson; covers by Brian Wood. (2003-2004/ Collected 2004): The second half of Global Frequency by Warren Ellis and a relay team of 13 artists isn't quite as weird and wonderful as the first, but it's still both an enjoyable read and a great concept. 1001 operatives across the planet work for Global Frequency, a massive, private organization that rescues the Earth from problems the normal authorities can't handle. The threats are a bit more prosaic this time around and the artists a bit more uneven. Still, this is a nifty Mission: Impossible for a crowd-sourced age. Recommended.

Spawn Fun

Spawn Origins 3: Written by Grant Morrison, Todd McFarlane, Andrew Grossberg, and Tom Orzechowski; illustrated by Todd McFarlane and Greg Capullo (1994/ This collection 2009): Oh, remainders. The six-issue compilations of Todd McFarlane's reluctant hero Spawn continue here with only one issue actually written and illustrated by Todd McFarlane. I guess the Dreaded Deadline Doom was upon him. Grant Morrison writes a three-parter that is about as bland as anything Morrison has ever written. This despite the ridiculous Anti-Spawn, some angels on a space station, and a portion of Hell that's erupted onto an American armed forces firing range. 

Greg Capullo is already a capable penciller, though, somewhat more realistically inclined than McFarlane but still capable of some magical lunacy. The two-parter penned by Tom Orzechowski and Andrew Grossberg is more fun, introducing as it does Houdini (yes, that one), Master of the Mystic Arts, in a team-up with Spawn to stop a nuclear detonation in the heart of Manhattan. As a piece of superhero entertainment, superior to most of the stuff from DC and Marvel at the time. Recommended.

Spawn Origins 4: written by Todd McFarlane; illustrated by Todd McFarlane and Marc Silvestri (1994-95; This collection 2010): Spawn creator/writer/artist Todd McFarlane returns to full writing and art duties for five of the six issues reprinted here. Marc Silvestri, one of McFarlane's contemporaries when they were at Marvel, draws the sixth issue in a grittier, less cartoony style than McFarlane. Spawn battles various problems caused for him by Hell, the Mob, and demonic antagonist Violator. Some of the people who knew Spawn's alter ego, assassinated Black Op Al Simmons, finally start to clue in about who Spawn is, while comic-relief cops Sam and Twitch also start to realize that Spawn is on their side. Recommended.

We Must Imagine That Sisyphus Is Lex Luthor

What If? Classic Volume 7:  written by Peter Gillis, Alan Zelenetz, and Mark Gruenwald; illustrated by Butch Guice, Marc Silvestri, Ron Frenz, Sal Buscema, Ron Wilson, Kelley Jones, Dave Simons, Joe Sinnott, Sam Grainger, Mel Candido, Ian Akin, Brian Garvey, Sam de la Rosa, Mark Gruenwald, Jack Abel, and Bill Sienkiewicz (1983-84; Collected 2014): This collection of the final issues of Marvel's first run of What if? is a blast. Peter Gillis writes all but two of the stories included herein, and while he may have been a young writer at the time, he was already a very good one.

What if? spun stories off from (mostly) major events in the Marvel Universe while also serving as a showcase in many issues for up-and-coming artists. Early work from artists Butch Guice, Kelley Jones, Marc Silvestri, and Ron Frenz appears here, and it's generally quite good. Indeed, Guice's work really shines in a sometimes over-rendered way on the first (and best) story in the volume, "What if Doctor Strange never became Master of the Mystic Arts?", written by Gillis. This isn't just a great What if?, it's a great Doctor Strange story.

The other two stand-outs, also written by Gillis, involve Captain America not being thawed out until the (then) present day of the Marvel Universe, and the terrible effects of Sue 'Invisible Woman' Richards dying in childbirth. Both stories are quite grim without slipping into the occasional death-for-death's-sake nihilism that was always the Achilles Heel of the What if? series, as both end on a note of hope and redemption. Unfortunately, an overly complicated set-up for a story about the Hulk "going berserk" leads into just such a work of grim pointlessness, but it's the only real failure in this volume. Recommended.

JLA Deluxe Volume 4 : written by Grant Morrison; illustrated by Howard Porter, John Dell, Mark Pajarillo, Drew Garaci, Frank Quitely, Ed McGuinness, and Dexter Vines 4 (1999-2000, 2004-2005; collected 2010): Grant Morrison's late 1990's run on JLA (Justice League of America) ends in this over-sized volume which also includes Morrison and artist Frank Quitely's terrific JLA: Earth-2 graphic novel from the same time period and a JLA three-parter from 2005 that ties up a couple of loose ends from Morrison's JLA run while also serving as a prologue to his excellent and somewhat wiggy Seven Soldiers of Victory miniseries.

The JLA's final arc is World War Three, the culmination of a plot set in motion in the non-Morrison-penned JLA: Midsummer's Nightmare story that immediately preceded Morrison's relaunch of JLA in the mid-1990's. An ancient super-weapon capable of destroying the galaxy is on its way to Earth, and the super-heroes of Earth are the only people who can stop it. However, the weapon -- Mageddon, a "weapon created to kill gods!" -- sows chaos and war in advance of its arrival. It's also controlling a number of people on Earth who've been charged with destroying the JLA before Mageddon even arrives.

So we fight, on land, in the sea, in the air, and in space. Morrison's greatest contribution to the relaunched JLA was a commitment to epic menaces that only a group composed of Earth's greatest heroes (Superman, Wonder Woman, Martian Manhunter, Flash, Green Lantern, Aquaman, and Batman at the team's core and dozens of other heroes at various times during Morrison's run, from Catwoman to Plastic Man) could possibly defeat.

This time, even all the heroes of Earth may not be enough. But before it's all over Morrison and the pleasingly craggy regular JLA penciller Howard Porter will give readers an epic inversion of the usual 'small elite group of heroes saves poor old defenseless humanity' scene that almost always plays out at the end of any superhero story on the page or in the movies. 

Of the other two stories included here, JLA: Earth-2 is a delight. Frank Quitely's weirdly pleasing gallery of gods and grotesques is always fun to look at. Morrison riffs with obvious Silver Agey glee on long-time JLA foes The Crime Syndicate of Amerika, fun-house-mirror versions of the JLA from an alternate, anti-matter universe where Good is Evil and Evil is Good. It's far and away the most satisfying story about the Syndicate since writer Gardner Fox and artist Mike Sekowsky introduced them in Justice League of America back in the mid-1960's. It even spares a melancholy moment for an anti-matter Lex Luthor who is that alternate Earth's only hero as Wonder Woman contemplates his Sisyphean, never-ending failure against the forces of Evil.

Morrison's three-part story from 2005 with artist Ed McGuinness isn't the same sort of success: there's an unpleasantness about the Geoff-Johns-reimagined Gorilla Grodd, now a super-gorilla who actually eats brains rather than telepathically draining them, that pollutes every Grodd appearance since he became a carnivore. Oh Grodd, what have they done to you? Overall, though, highly recommended.

Epic

The Korvac Saga: written by Roger Stern, Jim Shooter, Bill Mantlo, and David Micheline; illustrated by George Perez, David Wenzel, Sal Buscema, Klaus Janson, Pablo Marcos, and many others (1977-78; collected 2011): Enjoyable, sometimes absurdly wordy 1970's Avengers epic that introduced the nigh-omnipotent and nigh-omniscient Michael Korvac to the 20th century. A man-machine hybrid from the 31st century, where he was an enemy of the original Guardians of the Galaxy (the ones without a raccoon or a talking tree in their ranks), Korvac would give the Avengers fits. 

And it may have all been in a good cause, as Korvac has reformed by the time he gets to the 20th century (and has absorbed all the knowledge in Galactus' computer banks). He just wants to make the universe a better place. Or maybe he wants to eliminate all free will. As knowledge is power in this story-line, Korvac is seemingly all-powerful. A surprisingly equivocal ending to the epic is somewhat undone by an odd epilogue added nearly 20 years later for an earlier reprint edition than this. 

As seems to have been the case with The Avengers for long stretches of their history, a regular artist is hard to come by, and the art on the book varies wildly: George Perez is great, Sal Buscema is perfectly fine, and David Wenzel seems to have been dropped into the deep end without warning. Occasionally shaggy but highly enjoyable. The inclusion of the apocalyptic early 1980's What If? story that pondered a different ending to the saga would have welcome. Recommended.

Multiversity: written by Grant Morrison; illustrated by Ivan Reis, Frank Quitely, Chris Sprouse, Cam Stewart, Jim Lee, and others (2014-2015): From the metafictional mind of Grant Morrison comes the DC miniseries Multiversity, a multiverse-spanning adventure with an Ultimate Villain who may be a nigh-omnipotent Hollywood Executive charged with turning fun superhero comics into dreary but popular superhero movies. I'm not kidding.

DC's then-ostensibly-52-universe-large Multiverse (and by 'then, I mean, 'from about 2006 to just last month') comes under attack from a mysterious group of hyper-powerful monsters who call themselves the Gentry. And they want to Gentrify all the universes of the multiverse. They are not fun. Instead, they bring madness, despair, and destruction to the universes they attack.

And so called into action is Nix Uotan, last of the Multiverse-defending Monitors, and his trusty partner Stubbs the Talking Chimpanzee. Worlds will live. Worlds will die. Specifically, Morrison's thinly veiled version of Marvel's Ultimate Universe will die, to have all but one of its heroes resurrected by the Gentry to fight against the forces of Good.

Morrison creates an unusual structure for this 9-issue comic-book epic. The main storyline starts in Multiversity #1, is touched upon midway through the overall narrative in the Multiversity Handbook, and concludes with Multiversity #2. Along the way, we get six comic books set in six different universes under siege by terrible forces. These single issues tie into the overall storyline, but they also stand alone. 

In them we see a world of super-heroes conquered by super-Nazis; the world of Shazam's original Captain Marvel; a riff on Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons' Watchmen involving the original Charlton Comics superheroes whom Watchmen was originally supposed to involve; a pulpy world protected by Doc Fate and the Society of Superheroes; a world of disaffected, millennial offspring of the original superheroes; and our world, a world protected by a superhero who is himself a comic book. Not a comic-book hero. A comic book. Ultra Comics.

Yes, comic books. They also allow for communication between multiverses. And they may carry a thought-virus that is destroying the Multiverse, thanks to the nefarious Gentry and their terrible hidden master. Or they may also carry the key to defeating the Gentry. 

And so superheroes from dozens of Earths must team up to beat back the invasion. But not everyone is what she or he or it seems. And I'd also say that the redesign of Captain Carrot is sort of awful. Now drawn as the world's tallest and most muscly super-rabbit, his cartoony charms have been subsumed by the contemporary, non-cartoony super-marketplace. Or is this too part of the commentary on the pollution of superhero comics by the modern multi-media-platform marketplace? I don't know. But it was fun getting there in yet another cosmic-comic Grant Morrison extravaganzapalooza. 

And kudos to the artists on the various chapters. The different worlds are well-matched with their artists. Chris Sprouse's pulp world of Doc Fate and Cam Stewart's Captain Marvel and friends are especially pleasing and refreshingly, suitably Old School. Ivan Reis does solid work on the frame tale, with its army of superheroes from dozens of different realities. Though I'm still not happy with that weirdly muscled, 8-foot-tall Captain Carrot. Highly recommended.