DC Finest: Crisis on Infinite Earths, Part Two by Marv Wolfman, Roy Thomas, Alan Moore, George Pérez, et al.

DC Finest: Events: Crisis on Infinite Earths, Part Two

Collection published: 2026
Contents originally published: 1985-99
Acquired: August 2026
Read: September 2026

Writers: Paul Kupperburg, Roy Thomas with Dann Thomas, Marv Wolfman, Alan Moore, Mindy Newell, Gerry Conway, Cary Bates, Tony Isabella & Alan Gold

Pencillers: Rick Hoberg, Todd McFarlane with Mike Hernandez & Ron Harris, Eduardo Barreto, Stephen Bissette, Stan Woch, Don Heck with Pablo Marcos, Paul Ryan, George Pérez, Mike Clark, Mike Harris, Arvell Jones, Tim Burgard, Curt Swan, Richard Howell

Inkers: Dave Hunt, Steve Montano, Romeo Tanghal, Tony DeZuniga, Randall, John Totleben, Alfredo Alcala, Don Heck & Pablo Marcos, Bob McLeod, Jerry Ordway, Vince Colletta, Tim Burgard, Al Williamson, Murphy Anderson, Dick Giordano & Richard Howell
Letterers: Gaspar, David Cody Weiss, Bob Lappan, John Costanza, Helen Vesik, Güsto
Colorists: Gene D'Angelo, Adrienne Roy, Tony Tollin, Tatjana Wood, Shelly Eiber, Nansi Hoolahan, Tom McCraw, Carl Gafford

The original Crisis on Infinite Earths miniseries was twelve issues long; this DC Finest compilation, the second of fourth, collects just one issue! Other than issue #5, the book is filled with tie-ins. This is presumably because the editors have attempted to create a reading order here, and at this point where at the point of Crisis where what's mostly going on is big storms. It is very easy to set tie-ins during this point in time, because you just have to say "big storms are happening" and then do your own story, so many writers obviously took that approach.

Still, my complaint would be that more than a couple issues ought to have been placed elsewhere. The two New Teen Titans issues included here explicitly overlap with events as late as Crisis #9, so I don't know why they're in this volume; the second of the two Wonder Woman issues clearly goes at a point where the heroes know about the Anti-Monitor, which hasn't happened as of Crisis #5.

In this issue, Clark Kent seems to be gainfully employed as a reporter, even though later in the book, we find out he's been fired.
from DC Comics Presents #86 (script by Paul Kupperberg, art by Rick Hoberg & Dave Hunt)

Other than that, though, the sequencing struck me as being fairly well done. Unlike other tie-in writers, who just went, "ooh there are storms," Roy Thomas was very careful about showing how his issues overlapped and dovetailed with Crisis, and the issues of All-Star Squadron and Infinity, Inc. included here all either lead into, overlap with, or follow on from Crisis #5, and their placement here reflects that; similarly, Swamp Thing #46 and Legends of the DC Universe: Crisis on Infinite Earths #1 are placed in relationship to Crisis #5. (I appreciate the inclusion of the Legends of the DCU issue, which was actually published thirteen years later; DC Finest is a mostly publication order endeavor, but they are willing to bend from that occasionally when it makes sense.) There are still some unavoidable problems—for example, in Superman #413, Superman is suffering from an issue he was not seen to be experiencing in DC Comics Presents #86—but I suspect there's no way around this!

This invasion seems to happen off-panel between issues even though #329 seems to pick up right from #328.
from Wonder Woman vol. 1 #329 (script by Gerry Conway, art by Don Heck)

Anyway, how are the actual stories? As you might guess of a random hodgepodge of tie-in issues, they're very much a mixed bag. I'll review them by clusters of character and theme here.

The answer is a bit cheesy, but in the way that a good Superman story ought to be cheesy.
from Superman vol. 1 #413 (script by Cary Bates, art by Curt Swan & Al Williamson)

There are three Superman-centric issues: DC Comics Presents #86 (a Supergirl team-up), Superman #413, and DCCP #95 (a Hawkman team-up). The first of these is fine; decent team-up superheroics, though nothing special. The second, though, is a proper great Superman story, and I really enjoyed it. Lex Luthor is causing Superman to hallucinate; this has causes Clark to be fired from his job because he's reported on things that haven't actually happen. Here it goes so far that Lex is able to convince Superman the Earth has been destroyed. Yet Superman is still able to triumph thanks to really thoughtful twist by writer Cary Bates that shows he really understands the character. It has little to do with the Crisis except that Lex disappears in a weird vortex (leading into Crisis #6 according to a footnote), but I was glad to get to read it because I liked it so much. On the other hand, I thought DCCP #95 was wretched. It's much more of a Hawkman story than a Superman one, and it ends so suddenly I thought I'd skipped a page.

I don't know who these guys are but I'm sure they're real people.
from The New Teen Titans vol. 2 #13 (script by Marv Wolfman, art by Eduardo Barreto & Romeo Tanghal)

The New Teen Titans issues here are, as I said, misplaced; they are also very much invested in the ongoing drama of that series and thus pretty hard to follow on their own. My favorite part was when Cyborg gets into a fight and smashes into the offices of DC Comics, where we see artist Eduardo Barreto being berated for turning in his pages late! 

There's just something weird about seeing the Alan Moore universe collide with the Marv Wolfman universe.
from Swamp Thing vol. 2 #46 (script by Alan Moore, art by Stephen Bissette & John Totleben)

The three Swamp Thing issues are dense and complicated, of course, being by Alan Moore, and I suspect I wasn't in the right mindset to appreciate them; they'd probably read much better in a Swamp Thing collection than they do here. The second doesn't seem to have anything at all to do with the Crisis, but the first and third do, and I suppose it would be weird to skip over the middle one. I was surprised how much the third issue was very much interested in and responding to the details of the Crisis; post-Vertigo, this kind of series would have a clear aesthetic division from the DC universe, but that hasn't happened yet. I was also surprised that Alan Moore is not only credited, he gets his name on the collection cover! Over at Marvel and Doctor Who Magazine, they're only crediting his work-for-hire material to "The Original Writer" and pretending his stories spontaneously generated themselves.

And they all lived happily ever after... until Wonder Woman was regressed to primordial goo and her entire history erased.
from Wonder Woman vol. 1 #329 (script by Gerry Conway, art by Don Heck)

Like New Teen Titans, the Wonder Woman issues are hard to read without the original context; there are a lot of recurring characters to keep track of. There's also a weird thing where an entire invasion of the underworld by the Anti-Monitor happens between issues, but the second issue kind of acts like you already know about this. But I did like that this put a button on the pre-Crisis Wonder Woman, resolving her conflicts with her mother and even marrying her off to Steve Trevor!

Caleb Mozzocco should have included this one on his list!
from Infinity, Inc. vol 1 #22 (script by Roy & Dann Thomas, art by Mike Clark & Tony DeZuniga)

I am a fan of both All-Star Squadron and Infinity Inc., Roy Thomas's two 1980s Earth-Two series, but I struggled with a lot of the issues included here. Some of the Infinity, Inc. issues work fairly well when they are about character drama, particularly the secret histories of Alan Scott, Jade, and Obsidian; there's also some decent stuff about Rick Tyler, the new Hourman, and Beth Chapel, the new Doctor Midnight. (Geoff Johns would go on to use Rick in JSA volume 1 and Justice Society of America volume 3, and he would also appear in JSA Classified and JSA All-Stars, but of course Beth would be killed off and replaced by a white man.) But it's also pretty clear that even though he was working very hard to tie into Crisis, Thomas struggled to give the characters interesting things to do: there are a lot of very boring, very generic fights, particularly in the All-Star issues, and the Shanghaied into Hyperspace! interludes are particularly dull. Although it's one of these Roy Thomas issues that has one of my favorite tiny details in the whole book, a quick meeting between Elongated Man and Plastic Man that occurs in the background.

Every time Marv revisits the Crisis, he metafictionally complains about how comics have gotten too grim.
from Legends of the DC Universe: Crisis on Infinite Earths #1 (script by Marv Wolfman, art by Paul Ryan & Bob McLeod)

Finally we have the two actual Crisis issues: the original's #5 and the Legends of the DCU tie-in. The latter I had read before, and it is pretty decent. Paul Ryan and Bob McLeod do a good George Pérez pastiche, and it's interesting to see a late 1990's DC sensibility applied to the mid-1980s. (The "Earth-D" focused on here is much more diverse.) Crisis #5 itself is pretty forgettable; lots of exposition and then some pointless fights. 

Are the Writers Upset about Substack's Pangram Integration Just the Ones Using AI to Write?

A point that I came across in writing my previous post about the false-positive rate of the Pangram AI detection software was that the blogging platform Substack recently integrated Pangram, with the position that while using AI to write is fine, undisclosed AI writing is not. (This seems like a reasonable position to me, to be honest.) Many Substack writers are now outraged, claiming their purely human-written and -polished prose is getting flagged by Pangram as AI-written.

This made me remember when, a few months ago, a facebook friend shared an essay on Tolkien by the Substack writer Genny Harrison, and reading it immediately tripped my internal AI detector:

"Not because the claim was obviously absurd, but because it was obviously compressed."

"That question is not radical. It is basic historiography."

"Recognizing that possibility is not an attack on Tolkien. It is what historical reading looks like."

"Tolkien is more than an author. He is a formative experience."

"it is no longer a myth. It has become a shrine."

"Middle-earth is not a crime scene. It is an inheritance."

If you've spent any time reading AI-generated prose, it couldn't be any more obvious. And indeed, if you copy a chunk of it into Pangram, it scores it as 100% AI-generated.

I was curious if she admitted to AI use or not, so I searched Harrison's facebook profile to see if she mentioned it, and found a post where she decried the integration of Substack's AI detector: 

The classifier is also only as reliable as the moment its labels were collected. Models change constantly. Humanizer tools exist for the sole purpose of defeating detection, and many of them work well enough to make the entire exercise resemble airport security for adjectives.

Think about who that leaves. The person running an essay mill through a laundering tool walks through clean. The writer most likely to be flagged is the one with a consistent voice, careful structure, and a habit of revising until the sentences behave.

That is the familiar genius of automated enforcement. The sophisticated learn how to evade it. The honest remain available for inspection.

Again, if you've read a lot of LLM-generated stuff, this sounds exactly like it. And indeed, well, I leave you to guess what the Pangram result is. One might note with a careful read of Harrison's piece that she never actually says, "I do not use AI to write my posts." She says she puts a lot of work into them, she frets about a lot of harms that AI detection might do in the abstract. I feel like this non-denial is pretty telling.

 

(One also notes that Harrison claims of Pangram's training data, "Someone wrote all of it. Somebody's novels, somebody's blog posts, somebody's dissertation, somebody's newsletter about mushrooms, all of it harvested and processed into a classifier that now stands at the door of my essay, deciding whether I am real. The exact grievance the anti-machine crowd has been shouting for three years, that these systems were built out of human labor nobody agreed to donate, applies with full force to the referee they just installed. They did not defeat the thing they hate. They gave it a badge and a percentage sign." This in fact totally untrue. Pangram states its datasets of human writing are "commercially licensed," which they actually paid for it, they didn't just rip it off the Internet as so many LLM creators did.)

 

a robot writing
(image courtesy NBC News)

Jump over to the Substack subreddit, and the posters there are outraged. Someone created a post called "Running list of Pangram’s 'AI Detection' errors and other related Substack errors." The comments are filled with people saying they didn't use AI, they've never even read anything written by AI, yet somehow their posts are being flagged!

 

But... can we trust them? I mean, Genny Harrison very strongly implies she doesn't use AI, enough that I would feel free to call her purposefully dishonest, and yet her essays score very highly. Anyone on Reddit can say, "oh, AI detectors are so unreliable," but what proves that they didn't use an LLM? Hence why the Pangram tests I covered in my previous post used pre-2022 material as a control when calibrating Pangram.

 

My favorite commenter on that reddit posts is the one who says,

I've got an open offer for anyone reading this. If you can find a piece of pre-2022 writing, with an accompanying web.archive.org link proving it's pre-AI writing, that is at least 100 words in length, and which Pangram flags as AI-generated, I will donate $100 to the charity of your choice. Everyone says they're getting tons of false positives, so this should be pretty easy, but for some reason every time I've posted this offer before, nobody has been able to do it. 

As far as I could tell, no one ever took them up on this offer.

 

Case closed?

 

Well, maybe not. In the course of researching this post, I came across another Substack post by the blogger Freddie deBoer (I read his work occasionally maybe a decade ago): "I Wouldn't Say Pangram is Broken, But I Would Say That It's Brittle." DeBoer says a reader accused him of using LLM to write part of one post, and linked to a Pangram result; deBoer actually paid for a Pangram account so he could mess around with it a bit and was able to reproduce this result. I am familiar enough with deBoer to believe that he is telling the truth when he says he did not use AI.

 

His post is worth reading in full, but points out the issues Pangram has with 1) very short texts, and 2) texts that switch back and forth between AI- and LLM-generated writing. One of the cofounders of Pangram actually pops up in the comments to concede Pangram needs to be better about handling these things. So though it seems that while Pangram might be very good... it also has its vulnerabilities. I do think, going by deBoer's post, that the frequency with which Pangram rates even longer texts as either 0% or 100% is a bit suspect, never in between, and the fact that it doesn't better foreground its confidence probability is also something that could use some improvement.

 

If you want to know, incidentally, I put a chunk of my previous post about Pangram into Pangram, and it said I am 100% human. 

Star Trek: The Destiny Era: Coda: Oblivion's Gate

July 2387 / 2373, Borg timeline / Intertime / Sept. 1966
There are times that there's a disconnect between what a book says it's about and what it's actually about. Usually, I feel like this happens when the mechanics of the plot haven't been designed to emphasize the themes. Two examples that spring to mind are the third Mistborn book by Brandon Sanderson, The Hero of Ages, and the second Raybearer book by Jordan Ifueko, Redemptor. The former book is supposedly about how to use political power appropriately and trying to stop the end of the world... but unfortunately, most of the book is actually about the main characters standing in a cave trying to get through a door. So though one is told the fate of the world is at stake, it doesn't really feel like it. Similarly, in the latter book, the characters have a stated urgent goal of preventing the spirits of children from being carried off but the way they need to accomplish this is by assembling a ruling council, and that ends up feeling like a distraction from the other goal, and disrupts the urgency of it.

Star Trek: Coda, Book III: Oblivion's Gate
by David Mack

Published: 2021
Acquired: December 2021
Read: August 2025

I think that Oblivion's Gate suffers from a similar problem. In an interview with Paul Semel, David Mack says that "the entire novel is a rumination on what it means to find a 'good' death, a quietus with significance, and an exhortation to remember to live while one can, and not merely exist." (He also goes on to say that it "is meant as a sort of rebuttal to the pervasive hopeless nihilism of Thomas Ligotti’s The Conspiracy Against The Human Race.") But when you read the book, it is mostly a succession of action sequences, the stakes of many of which feel quite arbitrary. It feels like a step back that much of the book is about fighting the Borg—Mack himself was the one who wrote the book that put an end to them, after all—and what does scene after scene on an alternate 2373 have to do with it?

If the book is about "find[ing] a 'good' death" and "liv[ing] while one can," then the plot needs to reflect that more. Which is to say, I think there needed to be more of a conflict about this concept. But the book actually dispenses with this conflict pretty quickly. All the characters look at the temporal evidence (more on that later), decide they need to die, and then they just do it. On the one hand, I guess this is admirable in a Star Trekky, aspirational sense. But on the other hand, it means the book gets very little drama out of the idea of finding a good death. If the book wants to be about the fact that sometimes there's nothing you can do other than die for the sake of someone else, then I think there needs to be characters who don't believe this, but come to.

This, to me, is the real problem of the Admiral Riker plotline, which began back at the beginning of book II and continues for a distressingly long period of time in this one. From a narrative standpoint, it's boring, and it's difficult to believe that all of the other characters let it go on so long. In Star Trek, people are always standing up against commanding officers who have gone crazy; I just don't buy that Troi and Vale and Sarai would put up with Riker's antics for long,* and it's just dull to read chapter after chapter of them going along with what is very obviously the wrong choice. But beyond this—what if Riker and Picard had a real conflict about what was the right decision to make, instead of Riker's opposition coming from him having a technobabble spacetime insanity? And thus the trajectory of the book was about one of them convincing the other of a necessity of finding a good death? Then the book's plot would be married to its themes.

The beginning of the book has to pile on a lot of technobabble about how the Borg caused the timeline divergence that created the "First Splinter"... and I found this all quite tough to take in, because it's so transparently setting up the stakes of the book in a very specific way, and ultimately comes across as too complicated to really buy into. Star Trek time travel (Christopher L. Bennett's best efforts aside) has quite arbitrary rules. Having all your characters decide to die on the basis of them is a risky choice, because if the reader doesn't believe in those rules, then everything that follows on from them will also fail to convince. Ultimately, I wonder if the trilogy's idea that timeline after timeline was falling to the Devidians was too much, and if a simpler arrangement would have been easier to buy: perhaps just both the "Prime Timeline" and the First Splinter are seemingly doomed to die, and the First Splinter characters realize they can save the other but not themselves. I don't know; it's not necessarily good criticism to say how you would have done it when you're not the writer. But I do know that how the stakes were set up here ultimately didn't work.

Readers of this series of posts will know that I was ultimately not a huge fan of many of the directions taken in the novels post-Destiny. Or perhaps to put it more accurately, the lack of direction; it seems to me that the later novels of the so-called "novelverse" lacked the clear character threads that pervaded (especially) the early Deep Space Nine relaunch and early Titan novels, instead lurching (like a "Big Two" superhero comic book) from big event to big event. 

But I feel like even if you were a big fan of everything the novels did from Typhon Pact onward, it would be hard to be fan of the way Coda wrapped it all up. What makes the novelverse appeal is the sense you're reading an enormous tapestry, one big story that moves forward. But what Coda does is cut this tapestry off. To the extent that there was one big story in the novels, we don't get to see it wrap up. Instead everything just blows up. The problem is, that without this trilogy, it would be much the same; if the last Destiny-era book had just been Collateral Damage, I don't think it would really be any different from what we got here. Why do we need a book to say that we're not going to get a resolution to, say, the Endalla storyline when we already know that we're not going to get a resolution to the Endalla storyline? If we were going to go back to the novelverse for one last spin, then I feel like that last spin needs to do something other than just arbitrarily cut everything off, because arbitrarily being cut off is what we had without this trilogy.

Moreover, I found the trilogy as a whole, and Oblivion's Gate in particular, chose its emphases weirdly. If the goal is to provide one last hurrah to the novels, why is so much of what the novels built up over twenty years since Avatar largely ignored? Why is so much time spent on things that the novels rarely dealt with? Across all three books, we have a lot of time spent on Wesley Crusher, a character largely absent from this era of Star Trek, book III of Cold Equations aside. Too much of this book in particular is spent on the mirror universe, always one of the weakest elements of the Destiny era. I feel like those wanting a wrapup to the books didn't want to know what happened to mirror Saavik or mirror K'Ehleyr.

On the flip side, many elements integral to the success of the Destiny-era fiction are 1) poorly done by, 2) reduced to cameos, or 3) not here at all. If you were a fan of Titan, you get to experience six hundred pages of them standing around like chumps while Riker goes crazy. If you were a fan of S.C.E./Corps of Engineers, you get one chapter of them which largely seems to be a joke about Tev's obnoxious pedantry. If you were a fan of DTI, you get a returning appearance by a character who ought not to have actually made one. If you were a fan of the Deep Space Nine relaunch, you get one last hurrah for the tv characters, but little that draws on the books (aside from the touching Quark/Ro scenes in the previous book). Why does the last-ever book about Kira mostly involve her standing there doing nothing while the mirror Ezri does nothing? If you were a fan of New Frontier (the series that really began the novelverse in any meaningful sense, I would argue), you just get a mention of the mirror Calhoun. I haven't read any Voyager books after Full Circle, but was there really nothing for them but small appearances by Tom Paris and B'Elanna Torres?

Ultimately, The Ashes of Tomorrow managed to get enough emotion out of the deaths of some of the characters to kind of get away with it despite the flaws baked into the design of this trilogy. But Oblivion's Gate doesn't have this, so you're ultimately just left with the metafictional necessity of it all—which honestly, can just never be satisfying. 

This is really driven home by the misjudged coda to Coda, where Benny Russell finishes writing Oblivion's Gate and then turns over a page and begins writing The Last Best Hope. Leaving aside that you could never convince me the same person could somehow write a David Mack novel and an Una McCormack one... why would Benny Russell do this? Why would he kill off every character and then just start writing adventures for them in an alternate continuity? 

There's clearly no narrative reason at all. The reason this all happened isn't because anyone thought it would make for a good story; the reason this all happened is because of the perils of franchise storytelling. But Benny's not subject to that, so it makes little sense. The only reason to tell the story of Coda is because a big tv show had to be made, and the novels have to tie into that. 

Possibly in some other timeline, there's a version of Coda that makes this worth; god knows that franchise fiction has often managed to get genuinely heartfelt stories out of what were clearly nonnarrative choices. (The obvious inspiration for this series, Crisis on Infinite Earths, is a great example of this.) But that didn't happen here.

On its own terms as a story, Coda ultimately has no reason to exist.

Stephanie Chaves-Jacobsen as Kadohata
(photomanip by Columbia clipper, I think)

Continuity Notes:

• The Defiant is in this book a lot... but did either book II or III of Coda even mention any of the various DS9/Defiant crew that David R. George III created for his post-Destiny novels? I get it, no one thinks those characters were more boring than I do, but it is kind of weird to totally exclude them from a novelverse wrapup.
• One notes that Mack makes sure to establish that the Borg can exist independent of the specific origin he ascribed to them in the Destiny trilogy.
• Totally random cameo from the mirror Kadohata. Why not, I guess.

Other Notes:

• I found this book's seeming claim that K'Ehleyr was the real love of Worf's life honestly kind of weird. They had a nice fling, I guess... and then she systematically kept information from him for years! Why not the woman he actually built a life with? Surely that's what love really is. Spending so much time on this plot was another thing that felt misjudged about the emphases of this novel.
• I thought the scene where René goads all the mirror universe characters into dying for no reason very improbable. Look, I know people in the mirror universe are kind of dumb in general, but one kid calls you a coward, and that's it, you sacrifice your lives pointlessly to prove him wrong?
• I also really hated making Wesley inadvertantly responsible for the Devidians via a bootstrap paradox. First, those kind of things are often dramatically inert; it means people take action for no other reason than that the plot requires them to take action. And second, why put all this on Wesley's screwup?
• I don't really get what was up with the "René gets old" subplot now that we've got to the end of the trilogy. Like, what did it add? It has been suggested to me that this is "because otherwise we have to read how a little kid dies," but of course the Rikers' daughter Natasha does die, and so does—more implicitly—the Siskos' daughter Rebecca. It thus occurs to me that if Coda were going to do weird time shit with a captain character's kid, surely it ought to have been the captain character's kid who already had weird time shit going on? Though that would have required the people writing this series to engage with David R. George's DS9 novels, though, which clearly was not a priority.

I read Destiny-era Star Trek books in batches of five every few months. Next up in sequence: The End of This Day's Business by Eleta Preloc

 * On p. 215, Sarai finally reaches the conclusion that Riker "most definitely is not 'all right.'" I actually sighed out loud at this.

"Starman" by Gerry Conway, Mike Vosburg, and Mike Royer

A long time ago, I didn't read superhero comics. It's hard to believe, I know! But compared to many of my interests, I came to them relatively late, not until I was in college. One of my gateways was a blog called, I think, Comics 101 by Scott Tipton (later a writer for IDW's Star Trek and Doctor Who comics). Tipton would do deep dives on different comics characters—his history of Green Arrow was responsible, for example, for my deep and abiding interest in the character. I feel like you can find this stuff all over the Internet these days, but back then it was much rarer.

One of Scott's favorite ever comics was James Robinson's Starman, which he did a multi-part deep dive on, and he made it sound so good and so much to my taste, than when DC released the six-volume Starman Omnibus set a couple years later, I blind-bought the entire run as it came out. These days, the giant hardcover omnibus that reprints everything in order is a common format, but back then it was brand new; in fact, I am pretty sure that Starman was only DC's second foray into it, following the Jack Kirby's Fourth World Omnibus. If you read Reddit's "OmnibusCollectors" sub, you will see lots of people who blind buy stuff they don't actually like based on hype, but I like to think I am actually very good at it, and I loved the run; I even got my wife to read it, and she enjoyed it too. My reviews of it from the time are all posted here on this blog.

One of the things that Robinson was very good at was pulling strands of the DC universe together. Though Robinson's Starman, Jack Knight, was the son of the original Starman, Ted Knight, DC had actually published several unrelated Starman characters between the two. Robinson didn't ignore these, but worked them into his story. I've long been curious about the original appearances of those Starmen: Mikaal Tomas, Prince Gavyn, and Will Payton. So my next comics project is to read the back issues about those other Starman characters, and then reread the James Robinson run, with both those original stories, not to mention twenty years of further comics reading, to inform my understanding. (For example, Starman is heavily connected to the Justice Society mythos, something I knew little about when I originally read it, but now know far too much about!)

Back when I added them to my list of things to check out, the stories of Mikaal and Gavyn were both uncollected, and though they have been collected since, I've still elected to pick up their original publications, since the collected editions in question have a lot of other material that makes them more expensive than just picking up the back issues. The fourth Starman, Will Payton, has never been collected at all. (I do wonder if this will all get collected in a "DC Finest" someday and how it will be handled if so. A DC Finest is typically 500-650 pages long... all of the 1970s Starman content totals less than 150 pages. Would they collect it alongside either the end of Golden Age run, or the beginning of the late 1980s run? It will be a weird collection either way.)

---

So the first post–Golden Age Starman revival was in the pages of DC's 1st Issue Special, a thirteen-issue series where every issue was the "first issue" of a potential run. In most cases, however, the hypothetical run never materialized, and Starman was no exception. Until James Robinson brought him back two decades later, this remained the only outing for this version of Starman.

This Starman is Mikaal Tomas, who is a blue-skinned alien from space. (The lettercol implies he could be from the same planet as Shadow Lass of the Legion of Super-Heroes.) It's the 1970s, and disco and David Bowie are popular, so he wears a shirt with a plunging neckline and a gold medallion. I feel like I often hear this version of the character referred to somewhat dismissively as the "disco Starman"...

...but that must be by people who have not actually read the comic, who have just seen pictures of the character, because this is excellent. Seriously, this isn't high art, but I thought it was masterfully put together. The creative team here is an all-star one: Gerry Conway (Steel, the Indestructible Man, Sun Devils), Mike Vosburg (Starfire), and Mike Royer (Fourth World, Kamandi) were all probably at their heights when they assembled to do this.

If only you didn't suck, Mikaal!

Basically, in eighteen pages, this story does exactly what a good first issue ought to do. Efficiently and effectively, Gerry and the Mikes give us a clear premise and a number of drivers of future conflict. Mikaal comes from a planet whose inhabitants intend to invade the Earth; both he and his girlfriend think this is wrong... but only his girlfriend is willing to do anything about it, and she dies in the attempt. This spurs him to travel to Earth to try to protect its people, only his spaceship crash lands, injuring him. He is rescued by a grocery store owner; meanwhile, a pair of cops investigate his crashed ship, and one of them dies... and then he's followed to Earth! 

So we already have a clear cast of characters with some interesting dynamics, especially the cop who thinks that Mikaal's the bad guy. The action is clear and sharp, the exposition is efficient and not heavy handed at all, it ends on an excellent cliffhanger. I get why this was never followed up on (1st Issue Special was cancelled one issue later, and the Wikipedia page on the series quotes an interview with Conway that does a good job of explaining of why it never really worked as a "tryout" book anyway), but it's a shame. I flew through this issue, and I loved reading it.

Presumably this guy and his beef with Mikaal are never heard from again.

I'll be curious to see how much of it James Robinson actually draws on when he brings back Mikaal; I don't remember much beyond the bare fact of his existence!

(Incidentally, there's no indication this is set in the DC universe: the humans in the story certainly don't act like people who are used to superheroes and aliens flying around. Robinson would place the story specifically in the 1970s, not on DC's sliding timescale, so this actually works out, as it's set in the relatively superhero-light period between the retirement of the JSA and the emergence of the JLA.)

"Starman" originally appeared in issue #12 of 1st Issue Special (Mar. 1976). The story was written/edited by Gerry Conway and illustrated by Mike Vosburg & Mike Royer. 

This is the first in a series of posts about Starman. The next covers Adventure Comics #467-78.

Reading Roundup Year in Review 2025/26

I first started tracking my reading when I went away to college in 2007. Thus, my "reading year" starts about the same time the school year does, and so every September, I crunch the numbers on last year's reading.

Last year, I was distressed to note that I'd fallen a bit below my post-pandemic average of 134 books per year... this year I am happy to note that I had my best year since 2016/17! (I spent that school year commuting via bus, so I got a lot of reading done... on the other hand, my audiobook and podcast listening fell off a lot.) The only other year to beat this year is 2012/13, when I read for my Ph.D. exams.

The key to success is, of course, read more comic books.

SERIES/GENRE/AUTHOR	# OF BOOKS	BOOKS/ MONTH	% OF ALL BOOKS
Star Trek*	31	2.6	16.2%
Doctor Who†	15	1.3	7.9%
Star Wars*	16	1.3	8.4%
Planet of the Apes	1	0.1	0.5%
Media Tie-In Subtotal	63	5.3	33.0%
Oz / L. Frank Baum	14	1.2	7.3%
Naomi Novik	3	0.3	1.6%
Lois McMaster Bujold	2	0.2	1.0%
Nnedi Okorafor*	2	0.2	1.0%
Ursula K. Le Guin*	2	0.2	1.0%
Other Science Fiction & Fantasy	27	2.3	14.1%
General SF&F Subtotal	50	4.2	26.2%
Justice League	7	0.6	3.7%
Supergirl	4	0.3	2.1%
Legion of Super-Heroes	3	0.3	1.6%
The Sandman†	2	0.2	1.0%
Other DC Universe Comics	13	1.1	6.8%
Black Panther	13	1.1	6.8%
Other Marvel Universe Comics	3	0.3	1.6%
Avatar: The Last Airbender	2	0.2	1.0%
Other Comics	6	0.5	3.1%
Comics Subtotal	53	4.4	27.7%
Victorian Literature	2	0.2	1.0%
Other Literature	10	0.8	5.2%
General Literature Subtotal	12	1.0	6.3%
Penguin History of Britain	3	0.3	1.6%
Other Nonfiction	10	0.8	5.2%
Nonfiction Subtotal	13	1.1	6.8%

* Comic books relating to series or authors that are predominantly not comics I don't count under my "Comics" category, but under the main designation.
† Nonfiction about a particular author or series is included with that series, not the "Nonfiction" category.

It wasn't just comics, though; my tie-in reading was in general up this year, as I worked through a bunch of Star Trek and Star Wars books I got like a decade ago but never got around to. (In Star Wars, I have not yet gotten up to the Disney era still!) I can read a 300-page Star Trek book much faster than a 300-page original novel.

(One notes that there are previous years where the total doesn't add up to 100%. Apparently I made some data entry errors, but I am too lazy to track them down; I'm sure this is good enough.) 

This was Star Trek's best year since 2007/08, and Star Wars's best since 2013/14; I had gone five years with no Star Wars books at all. My combined comics went from 9.7% last year to 27.8% this year.

It might look like my general sf&f reading went down, but that's only in terms of share; in raw numbers, it actually went from 47 to 50! I just read more other stuff this year. 

Those are stats I crunch myself (with the help of ChatGPT); here are ones I used LibraryThing to generate. I make different choices between how I enter books on LibraryThing vs. in my personal files, so the total number of books will be slightly different.

Here's their breakdowns by author. (Note that these are about authors, not books by authors, if you see the distinction.) First, what countries did my authors originate from:

My U.S. share is a tad bigger than previous years, I'm guessing because of all the tie-ins I read. My U.K. share is substantially smaller. My nine "others" were one each from Croatia, India, New Zealand, Mexico, Ghana, the Netherlands, Ukraine, and Israel, plus one "not set." (I am a bit skeptical of some of these identifications; Michel Faber, for example, hasn't lived in the Netherlands since he was seven, and has published every single one of his books since moving to the U.K., in English. Is he really a Netherlands author? I feel like some Thingamabarians just want excuses to pick "interesting" countries.)

Most of my books were by living authors, which is normal.

Men always dominate my reading, but this is their highest year since I started doing these graphs, in 2020/21. Again, it's probably all the tie-ins and comics I was reading. I actually read more women authors this year than last (it went from 33 to 39, which actually ties my previous record); I just read more more male authors this year too (from 56 to 87).

One statistic I enjoy a lot on LibraryThing is a breakdown of what you read by pages. This is imperfect: I only enter page counts for paginated books, and many comics and ebooks have no page numbers, and of course page numbers don't perfectly correspond to word counts. Also, multi-author books like anthologies and comic book collections can only be attributed to one person. But still, I find it interesting. Here's my top authors by pages read: 

Keith Giffen did not write all of the two (very large) comic collections where he is first credited author, so once you remove him, David Mack is my favorite author two years running! Joey Cavalieri and Jack Kirby are the other two dubious inclusions in the top ten; Cavalieri wrote just one issue in a 1,438-page collection, but it's the first one, so my method of cataloguing on LT gives him credit for the whole volume. Kirby wrote more of the Panther's Prey Omnibus, but not even a majority of it, I don't think.

The highest-placed author to get on the chart through just a single book is Ada Palmer. She beats out John Jackson Miller, who wrote four!

My tagging on books gives you a sense of genre and series and other attributes: 

Science fiction dominates, of course; lots of comics there, too, and if all comic collections were paginated, it would be even higher.

Finally, here's how many book are on my "To be read" list:

I've sort of plateaued recently. Hopefully I can get it down. At least I haven't crossed the dreaded 700 Barrier!

You can compare this to previous years if you're interested: 2007/08, 2008/09, 2009/10, 2011/12, 2012/13, 2014/15, 2015/16, 2016/17, 2017/18, 2018/19, 2019/20, 2020/21, 2021/22, 2022/23, 2023/24, 2025/25. (I didn't do ones for 2010/11 and 2013/14.)

Noir Quarterly (anthology, 1994–95)

In order to read one of the Maze Agency prose stories, I picked up the first and only issue of Noir: The Illustrated Crime Fiction Quarterly from Alpha Productions. This actually was not very easy to do: one of those old comics that not so much expensive as unavailable!Published at the comics size, it was mostly made up of detective prose stories with just one comics story, plus a couple nonfiction features. Despite the subtitle and the grand ambitions of editor Christopher Mills (who also edited The Detectives one-shot from Alpha, in which a short Maze Agency comics story appeared), it only lasted one issue. 

Mills later revived the concept under the slightly different title of Noir Quarterly at CFD... though as he admits in a retrospective on his blog, the publication frequency was "way-too-optimistic." There are no Maze Agency stories in those issues, but look—I like collecting interesting and unusual comics, and if tacking two more issues of something onto my order can get me a complete set, then I'll do it. Plus those two issues had beautiful femme fatale–themed covers! (They're both by Brian Stelfreeze, who much much later would be the first artist on Ta-Nehisi Coates's Black Panther run.)

All three issues have similar contents, though not always in the same proportions: predominantly, there are illustrated prose stories, with a couple comics. Most of the material is new, but sometimes there's archival material; one of the comics in Noir Quarterly #1 is from 1955, for example, and a few of the prose stories are reprints, though Mills says he prioritized reprinting stuff that was otherwise uncollected. There are also nonfiction features: book reviews, movie reviews, interviews, and retrospectives on some topic of interest to the audience, like old movies or comics.

from Noir Quarterly #1
(script by Ron Fortier, art by Gary Kato & Steve Crompton)

Like any anthology, the prose stories are hit-or-miss, but there definitely was enough good stuff here to make it all worth reading. Though I was drawn to the series by The Maze Agency, I would say the majority of the prose stories are not detective fiction. Ones I particularly liked included "Surrogate" by Ed Gorman (illustrated by Richard Pace, from Noir vol. 1 #1), where a lawyer confronts the teenager who might be responsible for the death of his own son; "The Love Rack" by Max Allan Collins (illustrated by Blackhawk's Rick Burchett, from Noir vol. 1 #1), a gritty story about a private eye who gets caught in political conspiracy; "A Fine Officer" by C. J. Henderson (illustrated by Michael Harris, from Noir Quarterly #1), where a detective becomes caught in a gang civil war; and "They're Gonna Kill You after a While" by Ron Goulart (from Noir #2), about a detective investigating the disappearance of an actor who once played a Saint-like character in a series of films. This last story was illustrated by Brian Michael Bendis of all people; I had no idea he was also an illustrator! Of the ones I liked, only this last one was a mystery.

I don't read much "noir"; having gotten this sampling, I think what I don't like are ones that seem a bit... gratuitous. I don't mind cynicism, but sometimes it moves over into crassness. I didn't care for "Fool's Gold" by William Marden (illustrated by Darren Goodhart, from Noir vol. 1 #1), which goes on a long time for a mediocre ending, during which you have to read a lot about men ogling a teenage girl. Particularly bad, I thought, were two stories from Noir #2: "Granny Gumption Solves a Murder" by C. J. Henderson & Charles Hoffman (illustrated by Michael Harris) and "The Wallow" by Ardath Mayhar (illustrated by Delfin Barral). The former has a decent joke at its core, about Miss Marple–type characters, but then gets nasty; the latter is pretty obvious from its very beginning but takes a long time to get there.

from Noir: The Illustrated Crime Fiction Quarterly #1
(script by Nicola Cuti, art by Joe Staton)

The amount of comics content varies heavily. Nicola Cuti and Joe Staton's Michael Mauser character appears in both Noir vol. 1 #1 and vol. 2 #2 (he also appeared in the Detectives one-shot). I like the Joe Staton art, of course, but I think the first story suffered from the fact that I have read no other stories about the character than these three: when his brother popped up as part of a solution to a mystery, it was a bit jarring as there was no previous hint he had a brother! But I would read more about this guy. That's the only comics story in vol. 1 #1, but Noir Quarterly #2 has two: a mediocre Johnny Dynamite reprint from 1955, plus a new story by Ron Fortier with art by Gary Kato & Steve Crompton. This same team also supply one of Noir #2's three comic stories, and Ron Fortier scripts another story for issue #2 with art by Randy Buccini & Byron Peneranda. I don't think any of these are high art, but I do think everyone involved very much understood the assignment, and I enjoyed all of them. My favorite was probably the one in Noir Quarterly #1, "Blood Red Lips," about a dangerous femme fatale with a twist.

I did find the nonfiction features pretty interesting, though there were too many of them in Noir #2. This is a whole world I don't know very much, and since I will probably never have enough time in my life to delve into more deeply, I appreciate how other people can give me access. The book reviews were usually interesting enough, but things I particularly enjoyed included the interview with Mickey Spillane by Mills from Noir Quarterly #1 (I've never read any of his work, but he seems fascinating) and the overview of The Saint and Falcon films by Ed Gorman from Noir #2 (what a weird production history... though my guess more interesting to read about than to watch the actual films).

Overall, this was a decent package, though I did find Mills's editorial voice a bit grating at times. Not always great work here, but distinctive and interesting, a nice teaser into a wider world I am unlikely to delve more into, to be honest, but I am glad I tracked down and read it all!

Noir: The Illustrated Crime Fiction Quarterly vol. 1 originally appeared in one issue (Winter 1994). The stories were written Ed Gorman, Wendi Lee, Mike W. Barr, Nicola Cuti, William Marden, and Max Allan Collins, and illustrated by Richard Pace, Terry Beatty, Rick Magyar, Joe Staton, Darren Goodhart, and Rick Burchett, with nonfiction features by Jeff Gelb, Eric Davidson, and Christopher Mills. The series was edited by Christopher Mills.

Noir [Quarterly] vol. 2* originally appeared in two issues (Apr.-Fall 1995). The stories were written by Joe Gill,† William F. Nolan, Robert J. Randisi, William Marden, Ron Fortier, C. J. Henderson (with Charles Hoffman), Nicola Cuti, Ardath Mayhar, and Ron Goulart, and illustrated by Bill Molno & Vince Alascia,† Rick Burchett, Flint Henry, Bob Cram, Jr., Gary Kato & Steve Crompton, Michael Harris, Joe Staton, Mike Harris, Delfin Barral, Brian Michael Bendis, and Randy Buccini & Byron Peneranda, with nonfiction features by Ron Fortier, Christopher Mills, Eric Davidson, Jonathan Anger, Bill Spangler, James Chambers, and Ed Gorman. The series was edited by Christopher Mills. 

* The first issue was titled Noir Quarterly, the second just Noir.

† The Johnny Dynamite story "The Fixer's Mob" (a reprint from 1955) is not credited in the issue; credits courtesy the Grand Comics Database.