Rescuing Strays – Grant Morrison’s Action Comics Vol Three

by Jack Meldrum

Volume Three: At The End of Days

Okay.

I need a minute. Let me just compose myself.

Volume Three of Morrison's Action Comics run is a transcendent and almost flawless piece of comics. And I love it. It makes the previous two volumes better by virtue of their leading into it. It feels like a magic spell, some sort of occult incantation designed to transform the mind and reshape the soul.

It being Morrison, it might be just that.

End of Days opens on one of the best single issues I've ever read  - a story about a boy and his dog, and ghosts, and Halloween. It features the wickedly cool Dr. Xa-Du, a Kryptonian scientist with the ethical integrity of wet string, who makes himself real outside the Phantom Zone with pure willpower. He's another living idea, of course, just like so many of the foes we meet in Action. The story itself is a tear-jerkingly sweet little tale, a critical interlude in the mind-bending space opera we're stepping into. Xa-Du is poached by the Little Man for his Anti-Superman Army and Krypto joins the Superman cast and I cried and cried when the little dog gets carried to the sun by his loving master.

It just amps up from there. In the mind of the five-dimensional Ms. Nyxly, we see Superman save astronauts on Mars and we meet the Little Man for real, as the legitimately terrifying, 5D satanic monster Vyndyktvx. The Little Man really is the devil.

After that, it's nothing but flawless, pitch-perfect comics. Soaring, sweeping emotion. Meta-fictional madness. A tight, dense, mythical story where Superman, in the end, fights his own extradimensional doppelganger, Superdoom – himself just another tool of the cackling Vyndyktvx. We meet our Mxzptlk, a charmingly corny old bloke, and we see everything Morrison put into play in the past two volumes collide in a cross-time war against the sun-god.

Vyndyktvx is one of Morrison's finest creations, a master plotter without a conscience, hamstrung by his own addiction to complexity. He appears, in fleeting, as a heinous tentacled beast, and more often as a many-faced, multi-armed thing. He's truly incredible. Employed as the power behind every plot in the run, Vyndyktvx crosses time and space to stack the deck against his self-declared nemesis, and Morrison and his cabal of artists make him... unfathomable.

Constantly, this last volume reminds us of what Morrison has said since issue one: that Superman has power as an idea, a concept, a myth. In the end, the very end, that's all that matters – the vast, cross-time madness of Vyndyktvx's scheme, a scheme we met as far back as that first page, that we first saw in those crazy encounters with the Legion of Superheroes, collapses with nothing more than one word (not that I'm telling you what it is), because we believed in Superman. He stops doomsday, banishes the devil.

Grant Morrison is one of the best comics writers who ever lived. He's not the best, but he's my favourite, and this run manifests his everything. This is a story about stories, one where the sanctity of ideals is what wins the day. One where dimensions bend at the whims of a monster but where it's us, in ourselves, inspired by one man, who can change everything.

It's a wild, deranged, hyper-intelligent drug trip of a story, a life-changing exploration of everything Superman was and is. It dives deep into the power of the written and spoken word, the unbreakable power of the human soul, the potency of belief and faith. It's everything I ever wanted in a comic. Everything I ever wanted from Superman. And I want you all to read it. To join in, to be there at the end of days, to add your name to the moment where we banish the devil, together with a boy and his dog.

Jack Meldrum has no words. Murdlem Kcaj believes in Superman.

Rescuing Strays – Grant Morrison’s Action Comics Vol Two

by Jack Meldrum

Volume Two: Bulletproof

Having spent Volume One redefining the myth of Superman, Morrison then proceeds to reinvent the myth of Clark Kent. On top of that, he recreates a long-forgotten character and starts to stack the cards for his grand finale.

Bulletproof is probably the weaker of the three volumes. As second acts so often are, there's a bit of a sense of wheel-spinning – even when the final instalment reveals just how much this one mattered, there's still an odd, wandering feel in places. But it is still very good, especially in the places where it escapes the three-part Forgotten Superman story and focuses on what are, essentially, massive metatextual middle-fingers to DC corporate/heartwarming and ingenious dissections of what Superman is.

In the opening salvo of these surreal trips into Morrison’s meta-myth, we meet Calvin Ellis, President of America in Earth-23. This charming, charismatic man of colour (and blatant Barack Obama parallel) is also the Superman of Earth-23, and his story is a brief interlude in the narrative of these volumes as much as it is a high point in the themes. Ellis fights a paranoid, drug-addled Lex Luthor and then encounters a musical meta-machine that summons the awesome Superdoom, a monstrous Superman dreamed up in a universe where Clark Kent, Jimmy Olsen and Lois Lane created a Tulpa-device to teach children.

It is very hard to talk about Superdoom without becoming a little sketchy – Morrison's work is dense and florid – but he's a Superman perverted by malignant businessmen, a tool of a fascistic society created by the still-present, still-enigmatic Little Man and employed to hunt down dissidents. He's been modified incessantly by a committee to be as marketable and effective as possible. He's a murderous psychopath, hopping from universe to universe in these bizarre cross-dimensional cubes that, somehow, every Lex Luthor dreams up.

He's the most effective parody/satire/commentary on DC's approach to Superman in particular that it's a miracle they let the run continue.

The following series of stories involves a three-part story with three distinct ideas. We see Clark Kent die, replaced by 'Johnny Clark', as our protagonist wrestles with the reality of being a living ideal. We meet Captain Comet, or Adam, the 'Forgotten Superman' who enlisted with an alien army to fight... something. Something ominous. And we have further development of the Anti-Superman Army, the nefarious team run by the Little Man. This story is a little too ponderous, and and perhaps a little too fast – nothing quite hits the mark in the story itself. But it's still so bursting with smart, potent ideas that it deserves reading.

Much better are the 'backup' stories. We have more exploration of Superman-as-concept and myth, more consequences to his presence. And there's the wonderful The Boy Who Stole Superman's Cape, from DC's Zero Month, which features all of the themes in the volume explored in perfect harmony with a sweet, charming little tale.

And at the very end, we meet Ms. Nyxly – Clark's landlady – properly. Which means we meet Nyxlygsptlnz, Princess of the Fifth Dimension... and the whole story kicks into high gear.

Jack Meldrum was President on Earth-10, once. He quit when he found how the hours worked out.

Rescuing Strays – Grant Morrison’s Action Comics Vol One

by Jack Meldrum

A little while back, the final volume of Grant Morrison’s Action Comics dropped. I bought it, instantly. I'd had it pre-ordered for months. I'd read every issue digitally at least a dozen times each. I'd cried during it more than I did even for All-Star.

Grant Morrison’s Action Comics run is my favourite thing in comics, ever, so far. I think it's wonderful. And magical. Mythical. Mind-bending, transcendent wizardry.

And now that you can have it all, I'm going to try to sell you on it.

Volume One: The Men of Steel

Morrison’s run doesn't begin with a hackneyed origin story. It doesn't even have his previous take, that glorious one-page, four-panel recap from All-Star Superman. It begins with police storming the mansion of new character Glen Glenmorgan, ready to stop... Superman? Superman clad in jeans and a t-shirt, grinning like a kid.

From the word go, Morrison steeps the story in Superman history. But not in a slavish or detrimental manner. Morrison takes the germ of that first Action Comics issue, way back in '38, and reinvents it. Here's a rougher, leaner, cruder Superman, a Superman who throws abusive husbands into the river and jumps of rooftops to shake information from oozing, corrupt businessmen. He's just a kid, but one helluva kid – a kid with all the morals and decency Superman has always had. You can see, in this dangerous, intelligent, wild young boy, the makings of that shining paragon.

And Morrison just goes on shooting. We have Lex Luthor as a slimy soda-chugging brain-for-hire, playing every party against each other with his 'Gemini' alias. We have the recurring figure of the Little Man, a bizarre dwarf who seems to be playing parties we can't even see. We get Brainiac, Metallo, the Legion of Superheroes, and it's all completely wild. Huge, comics-perfect action ensues. Morrison and Rags Morales slam Krypton-sized metaphors into single panels, like when Superman is KO'd by a speeding bullet-train. Or when he stands, god-sized before a shrunken Metropolis, and they hold their candles to him. Or when the Legion of Superheroes – involved in a curious time-travel plot that is the secret story behind this run – extract Kryptonite from the Anti-Superman Army, in their fortress in Superman's brain.

There's a profound rejection of anything 'easy' here. Nobody is a writ-large archetype or a cutout. Glenmorgan, wicked as he may be, is also a man of faith, led astray by the devil in the form of the Little Man (who, we'll learn, is very much a Faustian figure). And so on. And so forth. But always coming out in this first volume is how powerful Superman is as not just a mere superhuman, but as a beacon of hope, and an ideal made manifest. He fights super-metaphors in his super-foes.

And as the run goes on, we'll learn just how crucial those super-metaphors are. Because Morrison’s run, at the core, is not about Superman as a character – even though he handles him very, very well. It's about Superman as an idea. And about how powerful those ideas are.

Jack Meldrum knew how powerful Superman was as an idea, but he didn't know why kids love Cinnamon Toast Crunch

The Watcher - Captain America: The Winter Soldier

by Jack Meldrum

Oh.

Wow.

Captain America: The Winter Soldier is fantastic. Not merely 'good for the genre' or 'good but-flawed', but out and out tremendous. It's the best MARVEL movie ever made, by any studio. It's so good I genuinely believe it deserves Oscar nods for screenplay and director. It's a turning point for superhero movies and modern blockbusters, a rousing, earth-shattering film without a single bad scene or awkward moment. At all.

Captain America: The Winter Soldier has totally redefined what a superhero movie is. When we look back in a decade, we'll mark at as the point where 'superhero' stopped being a genre and started being a form – a method and style of making any kind of movie, where character and action are irrevocably intertwined and everything exists in this kind of hyper-real, impossible state that you believe in wholeheartedly. It's a sublime political thriller in the vein of The Manchurian Candidate, and it has the best action I've seen in a Hollywood film in my short life – easily the best in a decade at least. It's a tense, chilling film about trust and conspiracies where a man flies around on a jetpack wing suit.

Everything works. From a wonderful opening scene that introduces us (and Captain America, still played note-perfect by Chris Evans) to Anthony Mackie's scene-stealing Falcon to the gut-busting mid-film twist to the fantastic final action sequence, The Winter Soldier is a testament to how the most important part of a movie is the screenplay. There's not a wasted line or a superfluous scene. Action happens because it should, not because someone worried we might be bored. Characters behave like real, complex human beings who just happen to have superpowers and deep moral codes.

And – SPOILER ALERT – there's one of the most shocking, nauseating twists you can imagine in any movie, revealed during a terse conversation with a man who lives inside a gigantic tape-reel IBM computer. For real. It's one of the best scenes in the movie and you don't question it for a second.

The eponymous Winter Soldier is also one of the best things in a very, very good movie. Sebastian Stan has perhaps thirty words in the whole thing but he acts the pants off it. He's chilling and menacing and goddamn relentless and there's never a doubt that he really would kill you, right now, if he was asked to. Despite the soaring unreality of the film, it's totally compelling, to an extent where several times I questioned how this movie even existed. It's that potent.

I can't even tell you about my favourite scene – one totally overflowing with cleverness and unbelievable use of multiple story threads – because it's pure spoiler and you deserve to see it untainted. But you do absolutely deserve to see it. The Winter Soldier is one of the best movies of the year so far, quite possibly the best superhero movie ever made. Unlike The Dark Knight, it's dark without being morose, and it's smart without being smug. It's a fantastically watchable, shockingly well-handled film that mines the source material for every bit of good stuff it can and then creates a transcendent movie experience.

This one's gonna go far.

Jack Meldrum tried to upload himself to his pocket calculator. It's still trying to compute his ego.

The Watcher Retrospective - Captain America: The First Avenger

by Jack Meldrum

As of writing it's been just over 24 hours since I saw Captain America – The First Avenger in cinemas for the first time. Not that it was the first time I saw it, as I've had the movie on DVD since roughly six months after it first came out.

But seeing it on-screen reminded me just how good this film is. 

The ultimate strength of Captain America is that it fully embraces the message delivered by Doctor Abraham Erskine – that a 'weak man knows the value of strength' and that, to steal a quote from Disney's Hercules, 'the strength of a hero is the strength of his heart'. It's an absolutely unironic celebration of goodness, of honesty, of courage and idealism. There's no jingoistic nonsense because Steve Rogers (played to perfection by Chris Evans) is not a jingoistic man. He's not even a patriot, if one considers how patriotism so often plays out. He's a man who believes wholeheartedly in the values his country is supposed to be about. And the movie believes in him in the same way.

Joe Johnston (who also did the sublime Rocketeer and the really underrated Jurassic Park 3) opens the film with the present-day discovery of the frozen Cap and then uses the prolonged flashback that is the rest of the picture as justification for montage after montage – an approach that delivers surprisingly effective results. It's the Second World War as we know it in movies, not necessarily as it was, and because the Captain is such an impossibly fictional character, it works. Johnston's clichéd beats aren't clichés, because he's using them to absolute best effect – embracing the impossible nature of the material and selling it to us as he knows we'll understand.

Hugo Weaving is the standout, though. His Red Skull - a man so evil the Nazis said 'maybe he's a bit much, ja?' - is a glowering menace and somehow totally believable, even when he's fondling the Cosmic Cube and shooting laser beams at Hitler's cronies. Toby Jones' Armin Zola is equally terrific, with a curious amoral/moral bent that suggests he's not totally comfortable with the Asgardian-derived superweapons he's asked to churn out. Skull and Zola form the backbone of the film's narrative and structure, driving the plot forward with their sinister 'kill everyone, remake the world' super-scheme. Their sublime construction and performance means that any time the film's jovial WWII stuff feels a little flabby, we cut right back to these tight, taut interactions between man and monster and it all feels fine.

The movie is, frankly, an impossibility – made less so now by the presence of the totally incredible sequel, but still something so honest and heartfelt it's unbelievable it dropped in the cynical year of 2011. It's a film I never expected to work, and yet it does, and it does it by kneecapping cynicism from the word go and going out of its way to treat what it does as what it is. It's silly, stupendous stuff.

So when I say the sequel is a total masterpiece, you know where I'm coming from.

Jack Meldrum volunteered for the super-soldier programme, but they said he was too super already. 

The Mane Event - X-Men: Battle of the Atom

Sigh.

I wanted to like Battle of the Atom, I really did. In fact for the first four issues, I loved it, thought it was a stellar, exciting crossover that didn't feel like a crossover as much as it did a brilliant miniseries that'd impact all the orbiting X-Books for the better. And they were already pretty great!

So what happened?

I don't know. It just kinda peters out after the fifth chapter (Wolverine and the X-Men #36) introduces the 'big twist', which is that the entire thing is really more of an incidental struggle between a future faction of the Brotherhood – here led by a kind-of-boring evil Xavier Jr. and the initially-interesting but eventually really boring Xorn II (the future incarnation of the Jean Grey brought back from the past), and the X-Men of the future. It should feel huge and explosive and really tense, but then there are so many twists without impact, so many 'surprise' characters, that it feels bloated.

The biggest problem with Battle of the Atom is a thematic one – it's about time travel, through-and-through. X-Men stories aren't about time travel, though. They're about prejudice, hate and fear, finding strength in bonds of fraternity and overcoming your struggles to forge a better future. Atom chooses a recurring element (which my inner cynic says was motivated by the upcoming Days of Future Past movie) of the grand X-Saga and makes it consume the entire thing, and the end result is really rather negligible. Atom's lasting legacy is some new stray bad guys including Evil Xavier and the amusingly-designed future Beast (forever named 'Goatman Beast' from now on) and the awful Raze, son of Wolverine and Mystique. Besides that, the only major shake-up is the insane moving of the Original X-Men to the side of Cyclops, mutant terrorist. That could easily have happened sans crossover.

Atom has its highlights, of course. Some of the action is ballsy stuff, and some of the future characters are fascinating, like Wiccan, Sorcerer Supreme and Quentin Quire, jerkass host of the Phoenix – so of course, none of them get any exposure, as the middle issues and even the finale devolve into lots and lots of padding. Even the final fight feels stuffed to bursting with nothing in particular, which is baffling.

Battle of the Atom isn't confusing or overwrought. It's clearly got a well-defined beginning, middle and end, with satisfying story beats dispersed throughout. But taken as a whole, it's dull, it's flabby, and it's not very fun to read past the first handful of issues. Maybe in six months, when the impact and fallout become clear, it'll feel more important – but right now, in the immediate aftermath, it feels like a missed opportunity.

At least Sentinel-X was cool.

Jack Meldrum wonders if anyone ever got their jetpacks in the future. Probably not.

Rescuing Strays - Batman/Superman #1-4

Jack Meldrum introduces a new column, looking at recent comic book stories you may have overlooked or missed out on. We kick off this first instalment with a look at the New 52 Batman/Superman title.

Right now, the Grek Pak-penned Batman/Superman is kicking off a... difficult-looking arc with art by the contentious Brett Booth, but I'm sticking through it. My reasoning? The first four issues (with art from Jae Lee, Yildiray Cinar and Ben Oliver) are sublime.

It's no secret that Pak is a ludicrously talented writer - the man who brought us the near-flawless Planet Hulk - and one who generally goes about kicking bottom. He's a smart, stylish writer and Batman/Superman's début arc demonstrates that with style and flair to spare. It's just perfect comics, and the thing that gives it strength is the setting – B/S spends four issues in the past of the New 52 and most of that time on Earth-2, which lets Pak and the art team go hog-wild with big, nutty ideas.

If the New 52 has failed to tap into anything, it's the five years between Superman's origin and the present, and it's there that Pak and company kick off. This is a tale of the hotheaded t-shirt Superman and a grungy, paranoid Batman; it constantly emphasises both their differences and their shared youth. They're strong personalities, especially when backed by Jae Lee's elegant, eloquent art, which flawlessly uses lines of sight and motion with innovative layouts (including several pieces designed to create the heroes logos, which never failed to get me smiling) to draw out Clark Kent's raw heroic angst and Bruce Wayne's cold detachment.

It's the central premise, though, that makes these first four issues (plus a kind of coda in the very weird but enjoyable Villain's Month Darkseid issue) a treat – the brash youthful heroes paired up with and against their older, stronger selves from Earth-2. Lee handles most of these sequences with a fantastic eye for design, backed by June Chung's peerless colours. The characters are never indistinguishable, with differences not just in costume but word choice, body language and the tones and highlights of their colours. Pak's refreshing tweak on the archetypal butting-heads that new teammates have (where Clark and Bruce-Prime are at odds with each other, then in alliance with their doubles, then allied against them as their youth and impudence clashes with the smoother older heroes) is just the right kind of stuff. It's big fun.

No, really, it's so much fun. Wonder Woman slices a plane in half while riding a pegasus. I'm not kidding when I say that's my favourite comics moment of 2013, because it's the kind of ballsy action that works perfectly in the medium. And I would be remiss to not mention the deliciously entertaining Kaiyo, the ostensible villain of the piece. She's a fantastic creation, apparently an addition to the New Gods, and she's terrific – a moody, snarky teenager who serves as a living Boom Tube. Good times.

Batman/Superman #1-4 is a cracking story with a lot to offer. Seek it out in floppies or trade – it's well worth it. Wonder Woman slices a plane in half while riding a pegasus!

Jack Meldrum is still really excited by Wonder Woman slicing a plane in half while riding a pegasus, and he wants you all to know.

Supermythical - Superman

Well, here we go.

I'm Jack, and I read a lot of stuff. I mean, a huge amount. Comic books, classical literature, modern classics, pulps – you name it, I've at least dabbled, and that's come with a big, broad understanding of mythology, storytelling and character archetypes, and even how some of those characters revolve around or represent us.

Welcome to Supermythical, which is where I – with the backing of the marvellous folks at Proud Lion – take a close reading of where some of the characters in superhero comics relate to older stories. It's about tying our modern mythologies to the classical ones, exploring how they reflect and reinterpret ancient concepts. If you're really lucky, I'll even share personal experience on how some of them have affected me.

And we're going to start with Superman. Because if I'm going to talk about superheroes and comics as mythology, I have to start at the beginning.

Superman.

Daunting, that. Superman, created in the 1930's by Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, represents the genesis of the superhero and thus the root of their pantheon. He's the biggest and brightest. Batman might sell more t-shirts but Superman is infinitely more recognisable and, if we're honest, more appreciable as a character and a concept.

He's a sun god.

That's really all there is to it, on a basic meta-myth scale; he's powered by sunlight, he flies, he has more strength and capacity for survival than any average Joe. He's a Zeus, a Vishnu, a two-for-the-price-of-one Thor/Odin combo. He came first, he is the Alpha. There's really no one as powerful as he is conceptually – but what matters is his concept.

Superman represents something much, much more than most superhero constructs ever could. He's a perfect, honed personification of the idea of a sun god; he's not just great and powerful, he's endlessly benevolent. He represents the light inside of us all, and does it while absorbing the light beyond us all. He channels that universal energy into good deeds and a flawless soul in a way that can reduce grown adults to fits of tears, and sometimes becomes even more literal in the process, like when All-Star's take on the Big Blue Boyscout becomes one with the Sun itself. But on the flipside, this ascended, perfect character is also a very human dream made flesh – specifically, he's the American Dream, and even more specifically, the Immigrant's Dream.

Superman falls to Earth from a dead world, like endless men and women fleeing the worst places on Earth. Like them, he has nothing (he's a boy, a baby, a tabular rasa, but also comes sans heritage and history) but endless potential. Unlike them that endless potential is literal, realised in his own flesh and blood, and he grows strong of spirit and embraces his home as they might also hope to. The most furious patriots are often first or second generation – without our roots we tend to embrace what surrounds us with gusto – and Clark Kent is (as Waid's Birthright puts forward so eloquently) a product of the American heartland, a rural lad. He comes from an environment where your hard work really does equal bread on the table and the respect of your peers, and he emblazons that, perfectly. The purpose of the Clark/Superman division is not, as some would suggest, to make Superman more human, but less – it deliberately divorces the god from the man, and it does it to show that Superman/Clark (who I will always say is the 'real' identity) has a moral core even without his powers.

That's what the character is really about. Superman's position in the Super-Pantheon is to represent the good in all of us. 'Do good to others and any man can be a Superman' was written on the moon in the Pre-Crisis DCU and it's the truth. He's a humanist character, the ultimate anti-nihilist, a living and breathing force of good. Clark might represent how Super-values can be held by anyone, but Superman exists to show how those good ideas, that spark of kindness, can be drawn out. He thinks to do good and so good happens, he works hard and so good things happen, he is good and so he is loved. He's that dream of making your own way and it making things better made flesh.

His villains represent this, too. The best Superman villains are all antithetical to him – your Luthors and Zods, Parasites and Mxyzptlks. Lex Luthor is a normal man with endless potential – less than Superman, the inherent physical god – but he allows greed and bitter emotions to make him the worst of humankind. He lies, he cheats, he kills and he actively tries to murder the best person alive. Even without his powers, Superman would be a good man. Luthor could be, but chooses not to. He chooses himself over others and actively lies (especially in more recent stories) about his intent, even internally. Zod abuses his power. Parasite consumes the strength of others for his betterment. Mxyzptlk, a literal god, goofs off and plays tricks.

Superman, then, is the top of the tree. On the Super-Heroic Pantheon, he's the Sun God and the Spirit of Man. His stories should represent his position as a selfless, good-natured person of great power – they can and should be fun, imbued with his own warmth, or serious, and powered by observing it. They should be about truth, justice, and the heart of the American dream.

Jack Meldrum cannot leap tall buildings in a single bound, but he can eat a whole bag of Haribo in one sitting.

STUDY MATERIAL:

• Grant Morisson's All-Star Superman
• Morisson's Action Comics Vol 1-3
• Mark Waid's Birthright
• Alan Moore's 'For the Man who has Everything'
• Elliot S! Maggin's Last Son of Krypton and Miracle Monday
• Kurt Busiek's Superman: Secret Identity
• Superman The Animated Series
• Alan Moore's 'Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow?'
• John Byrne's 'Man of Steel'
• Man of Steel
• Superman/Superman II
• Superman – Secret Origin
• The Dark Knight Returns
• Smallville

The Mane Event - Villains' Month, a retrospective

September 2013. The two year anniversary of the New 52. It brought us Villains' Month and a lot of stress and headaches for comic retailers, disappointment and frustration for comic fans, and a large jump in revenue for DC. I'm glad to see the back of it frankly, but now the dust has settled it's time to look past all the cover nonsense and ask a question that was often overlooked in all the kerfuffle.

Were any of the stories any good?

Matt Puddy and I are joined by our newest recruit, Jack Meldrum, as we delve into some of the best and the worst of Villains' Month.

Green Lantern #23.1 Relic

reviewed by Matt Puddy

Relic is a brand new villain who poses a great threat - he understands how all the rings and light works and intends to take it all away. Without stripping away the threat the Relic poses, Robert Venditti shows him to be a man of science who survived the destruction of the universe that came before the current one. He's on a mission to save this universe from the end that his fell to. It becomes clear that the Corps are using a power source which isn’t as unlimited as they think. Although this is a purely historic issue, it does also give context to the new Lights Out arc within the Green Lantern titles. The legendary Rags Morales has provided the artwork which includes the imagining of the former Lightsmiths and their war. All in all this makes for a well rounded issue that fans should definitely pick up.

Justice League #23.1: Darkseid

reviewed by Jack Meldrum

Darkseid #1 is one of the most unique comics I've ever picked up. It straddles multitudes of descriptors, evades easy pinning. At once artistically gorgeous, narratively engaging, character driven, mythic and bizarre, conflicted, self-conscious and flaccid, Darkseid is perhaps best put in that most unhelpful-but-succinct category – it's really, really weird. Greg Pak delivers the origin story for the all-new, all-shoulderpads Darkseid, and to my surprise, for a good 2/3 of the book it's really something. That's not a knock on Pak (I love his work) or DC, it's a comment on how difficult it appears to be to write the Lord of Apokolips well – but Pak pulls it off, mostly. Wrapped around gorgeous art by Siqueira and Diaz that lends the story a magisterial, earth-shaking quality, Pak tells us how Darkseid came to be – namely, he murdered his gods with a scythe and stole their stuff. Unfortunately, the book wobbles shortly after the delightful Kaiyo (currently messing stuff up in Pak's stellar Batman/Superman) escapes Apokolips and we start to get answers to questions floating around since that first Justice League arc.

Detective Comics #23.2 Harley Quinn

reviewed by Matt Puddy

Opening with a 3D cover that takes full advantage of Harley’s large... mallet... for impact, Matt Kindt story explores Harley’s backstory and mental state. The issue opens with her now free of the Suicide Squad and not sure what to do next. Looking back on her life, she reviews who she is, from her family and upbringing through to her 'rebirth' complete with almost self-induced schizophrenia. The writing is clever enough to make her sound completely self-aware, displaying the intelligence that earned her a doctorate, whilst also opening the door to her psychotic streak. The art is riddled with gratuitous male gaze though and the origin of some parts of her hideous current New 52 outfit will surely enrage some readers and does nothing to diminish the allegations of misogyny levelled at DC in recent years. A mixed bag and a wasted issue really. Roll on Harley's new ongoing series from Amanda Conner.

Green Lantern #23.3 Black Hand

reviewed by Matt Puddy

Of all of the Green Lantern villains Black Hand has to be one of the creepiest. After the Blackest Night arc, William Hand became the avatar of the Black Lanterns and essentially an immortal adversary through the power of the black ring. His command over the undead means that he also controls an ever expanding army too. As such a formidable foe it was unsurprising that he made it onto the list of characters to get their own issue. The story, by Charles Soule, shows the Hand’s re-re-re-birth (?) into this world again and he then finds his way to a well known port of call - the grave of Hal Jordan’s father. There was one moment when I was impressed at the creativity on display, finding a new way to use Black Hand's powers and kill a police officer using the recent vaccination he had. Artistically the issue is similar to Charlie Adlard’s work on The Walking Dead, but cleaner and fills the page more to bulk it out. An outstanding issue that stands on its own.

Batman: The Dark Knight #23.4 Joker's Daughter

reviewed by Ben Fardon

The concept of the Joker's Daughter predates the New 52 by some way, but it's a character that's rarely been showcased like this before. There was plenty of speculation as to her identity prior to the issue's release. Pre-New 52 she was Duela Dent, with a complicated backstory that varied depending on whether you were reading pre-Crisis On Infinite Earths or not. Here, many readers wondered if she'd turn out to be Harper Row, a character from Scott Snyder's Batman run who may be set to be the new Robin. Could she have created an undercover alias for herself, infiltrating the Gotham underworld in a manner akin to the Zero Year pre-Batman Bruce Wayne posing as a member of the Red Hood gang? Sadly not. This is a seemingly simplified version of the original Joker's Daughter. But let's not do Ann Nocenti any disservice, because I quite enjoyed this issue! Duela is the disturbed daughter of a wealthy Gotham couple, with subtle hints that it is indeed Mr & Mrs Harvey Dent. A pretty girl whose obsession with all things ugly leads her to scar herself, she is an outcast wandering the sewers with a mangy cat, until - quite by chance - she finds the Joker's discarded face floating in the effluent after the events of the Death Of The Family. This macabre mask of infamous flesh gives her a newfound resolve and she sets about uniting the criminal denizens of the Gotham Underground into a matriarchal society. It's superb fun and provides the origin for a story set to continue in Nocenti's excellent run on Catwoman.

Ben Fardon, Matt Puddy and Jack Meldrum have successfully completed their first team-up, neatly sidestepping the initial tedious infighting that usually characterises such fare.